Colin Harvey – author

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?

  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.

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.

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.

I’ve posted the first of an occasional series at Suite101, examining why stories fail. SF is a literature driven by ideas, but an idea without a plot is not a story. Plot grows from character, just as in the best stories, plot drives character.

I’ve held back from this sort of article for some time, because I still think of myself as a journeyman, but I’m slowly accepting that I’m further along the road that journey takes, than many others.

This morning’s blog is a straight list of the 2009 Nebula Award finalists. However, I couldn’t resist posting links to the stories I trumpeted when they first came out, which makes me look profoundly perspicacious. Of course, that ignores the finalists I initially rubbished, as well as all the other stories I backed which never made the final… 🙂

I promised a blog post on Thursday about that evening’s murder mystery event, and despite struggling to sum the evening up –that’s the difference from real life, which is nowhere near as neat and tidy as fiction– I’ve duly posted a few thoughts over at suite101.

Over at Suite I’ve posted a follow-up to my Tuesday post on persistence. Read it there.