Colin Harvey – author

OK, so it’s a year late, but I finally got around to reviewing one of the best of the Nebula Awards series in quite some time. Here it is. Meanwhile, I’m still pondering how I approach multiple blogs and still keep them interesting. More on that later this week.

I posted the usual blog entry over at suite101, but I’m acutely conscious that if I’m not careful, this blog becomes no more than a daily re-direct. It was something that I was already aware of before a friend made a comment yesterday, but it made it more important that I give it some thought. (Oh no, more thinking required…)

I’ll follow it up on Monday, although it won’t be posted at suite.

I noted over at Suite101 that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this week. What I don’t say in the blog is how suspicious we are as a society, and as individuals, of people who think a lot. We’re so obsessed with productivity, and things, that we mistrust people who stare into space without actually doing something. I actually once had a Management Accountant tell me that anything that couldn’t be measured was worthless. Indeed, our whole society seems predicated  on providing ways of avoiding thinking — be it TV, radio, the internet, etc, etc…

Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

It’s been a day for remembering things almost too late.

I intended to post a chapter or two from Damage Time on the blog, and as we were walking Alice along the seafront at Clevedon, I slapped my hand to my forehead in best Homer Simpson fashion as I thought of it. Fortunately we got home at a reasonable hour, so here‘s Chapter 2. It’s short enough to be squeezable in at Suite101, unlike most of them — so why not scatter chapters across the cyberverse in best Hansel and Gretel mode?

But before that, I’d had another doh! moment as I went to clip Alice’s lead on her collar, only to realize with a sinking feeling, that she didn’t have her collar on…so faced with a choice of a fifteen-mile return journey to fetch it, or some lateral thinking, we turned her lead into an impromptu choke-er, string.

It seems that the amnesia running through the novel may be catching. Or perhaps the novel is my way of coming to terms with my Emmenthal-like memory.

Chapter 3 is here, by the way.

Grr! The plan was to take this week off, but we can’t go out today as we’re waiting for a delivery of kitchen tiles.  And we can’t even sit outside as the workman have turned up to re-lay a water pipe outside our front gate. Cue a tractor- mounted pneumatic drill, and the smell of scorching pavement wafting across the graden.

Oh well, nothing else for it but to tidy up one of those reviews I almost finished before Eastercon. In this case, it’s a play, as we went to see Noel Coward’s Present Laughter recently.

At least the workmen should be finished by tomorrow…

If he’s running to time, Gareth will be here in 30-40 minutes, and then we’ll be off to not-so-sunny Heathrow for the madness that is Eastercon, held again in the Hotel Non-Euclidean, aka the Radisson (people who’ve stayed there and emerged will understand the reference).

Details of the programme are at Suite101.

Hopefully the onslaught of spam (about 100 spam posts a day) will abate while I’m away — touch wood, they seem to have slackened off already.

  As I noted over at Suite101, it’s exactly four weeks until the publication of Damage Time.

  Each week I’ll post an extract from the novel, starting today.

  It’s an exciting time, and a very, very busy month.

First of all there’s Eastercon to attend.

 More on that tomorrow.

The judges have released their shortlist for the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and a fine list it is.

A lot of what I’ve been writing lately is intended less as Words of Wisdom than as the electronic equivalent of me thinking aloud. This has the benefit of enabling me to argue with myself as I grope toward understanding of the genre I work in. The latest musing is just how separate (or inter-connected) the short fiction and novel markets are.

After a couple of recent ventures into Children’s Lit I’ve gone back to genre, with a review of Lavie Tidhar’s wonderful The Bookman at Suite101.