Colin Harvey – author

Those of you on Facebook, LJ and other fora may have noticed updates for some of my book pages on the website yesterday. They were generated by my adding links to The Book Depository.

Partly this is to generate a little additional revenue, since I get a 5% commission where customers buy through the link –as well as royalties– but partly it’s also a little dig at Amazon. I missed a trick in that I’m not an Amazon affiliate, so any time you click on the ‘buy from Amazon’ link, I got the royalty on sales of new titles, but no commission.

However, I’ve held back at becoming an associate. I’m sure I’m not the only author tired of their recent bully-boy tactics; in removing the ‘buy buttons’ from our titles as a negotiating tactic with our publishers, it smacks of the way totalitarian regimes have parked their tanks alongside neighbours’ borders over the course of the last century or so prior to making demands or invading. 

So this is my little protest. It won’t amount to a hill of beans, but it makes me feel better.

Oh, and today’s review is Anne Fine’s classic Goggle Eyes, or The War Against Goggle Eyes as it was published in the USA. Part of my new reading regime….

When I started writing about the differences between novels and short stories, I envisaged it as one blog post, but as so happens with writing, it turned into a trilogy, despite my best efforts to keep each post as lean as possible.  Here is the last part of the post, with thanks to Sheila Crosby, Jim Hawkins and Gareth L Powell for offering their thoughts along the way.

As often happens when I write blog posts, they have a habit of growing beanstalk-like, from small seeds to vast behemoths that block out the sun.

This second part on the differences arising from the different lengths takes up a post to itself. Of course, there are some who might say I need to practice honing my prose, but hey, I’m a novelist — I like to hold up each point and look at it from every side…

I drew a certain amount of flak for last week’s post for suggesting that writing short stories was no better a preparation for writing novels than any other form of wordsmithery, such as journalism or scriptwriting.

Some of it was very useful in outlining this week’s post over at Suite101 following up on what some of the differences are. Unfortunately I ran out of available space,* so I’ve had to break it into installments.

* Suite has an official word limit of 300 words; it’s possible to go a little over, but not to post something the length of what this was turning into…

Last week I blogged about a couple of live cases involving members of the SF community and getting in and out of the US. In the last few days the situation has become clearer, although no happier for those involved. More about it at the usual venue.

This morning’s post over at Suite101 is on the subject of books-that-were-submitted-by-publishers-and-considered-by-the-judges lists…or long lists, as I prefer to call them.

This week’s regular –ie, SF– review is up at Suite101.

For my Creative Writing Workshop, I need to write some YA or children’s fiction (it’s that or performance poetry…and I think I’d prefer root canal surgery sans anaesthetic to standing in front of an audience reciting pp). 

Acutely aware that my knowledge of YA and kid-litt is almost forty years out of date, I followed Mimi’s advice and went down to Mr B’s in Bath, where I purchased a couple of titles.  I was also hugely reassured that lot of books that I read all those years ago are still available and even recommended.

One of the new titles that I bought was Joshua Doder’s A Dog Called Grk, which is quite simply wonderful.

So, if you’re curious as to why I’m reviewing children’s fiction, that’s the reason. (You may have put it down to increasing eccentricity, in which case you may not be too wrong, either <g>)

If you have a 9 – 12 child, go and buy it for them. If you don’t have children, but you like dogs, buy it anyway.  Actually, just buy it.

Today’s post at Suite101 is the -with hindsight– rather clunkily titled* ‘Making the change from short stories to novels’ which is actually more about putting to bed one of the recurring myths of SF, that writing short stories is a step on the ladder to writing novels. It was inspired by some excellent research by writer  Jim C Hines on the subject of first novel sales.  Research that’s well worth checking out.

* Sadly, however, by the time I’d read the title aloud and realized how clunky it was, it was too late to change it without scrapping the whole post.  And isn’t one of the joys of blogging supposed to be that it’s spontaneous? Clunky titles and all!

As I observed over at Suite101, there is a certain degree of smugness in the air at Newton Park. Everyone’s turned in their assignments and the Easter holidays are looming. But my poetry tutor had to go and burst the bubble yesterday with a sharp verbal pinprick that didn’t immediately register…more here.