Colin Harvey – author

A late arrival to the Dark Spires team of contributors, former Death Ray  editor and SFX columnist Guy Haley has had quite a lot to say for himself lately, and rightly so.  A few days after we thrashed out the last few edits to ‘Outside,’ his disturbing paean to post-industrial Swindon for the anthology, he launched his blog. (I especially liked the page on that beast of a cat of his — somehow I suspect that Tourette’s Dog may have met her match.)

Among his first half-dozen posts came the news that he had sold a pair of intriguing-sounding novels about a team of 22nd century detectives, Richards and Klein to Angry Robot Books. I particularly liked Guy’s take on the future, that —like the past, [it] is a foreign country, not an alien world.  And that irrespective of technology, people will still have the same emotions as now. That mirrors my own feelings about it, although I suspect we articulate them in very different ways.

The next day he posted about Dark Spires, announcing his sale, plus some general thoughts of his and mine on the anthology.  What struck me this morning is that while there are an equal mix of SF and fantasy stories in the anthology, and while half of said fantasy stories (and one of the SF stories for that matter) slide some way into varying shades of darkness  –thereby re-igniting the old dark fantasy vs horror debate– his is the only out and out horror story in the anthology. And it’s penned by an SF writer. There’s versatility for you.

We need to keep a wary eye on this Haley chap, or at the rate he’s been going, he’ll be taking over the world before you know it…

Earlier this week, Salon Futura ran the Table of Contents for the Dark Spires anthology.  It’s not quite finalized, as the running order of the last few stories needs to be ironed out (I’ve blogged before about the importance of the order of stories).

But while they thrashed out here is the interim Table of Contents for Dark Spires:

• Sarah Singleton: “The Preacher”
• John Hawkes-Reed: “Pump House Farm”
• Adam Colston: “Cobalt Blue”
• Joanne Hall: “Corpse Flight”
• Colin Harvey: “Spindizzy”
• Eugene Byrne: “Spunkies”
• Christina Lake: “The Sleeper Stone”
• Guy Haley: “Outside”
• Liz Williams: “Milk”
• Roz Clarke: “Last Flight To West Bay”
• Gareth L. Powell: “Entropic Angel”

I’ll talk more about the the anthology nearer the launch date of November 6th.

Well, here we are and it’s the 31st of August.

To celebrate the official US release of Winter Song (yes, really! Have I mentioned it already?) the lovely, intelligent and charming Sharon Reamer has updated an interview with me that orinally ran in Allegory magazine a full twelve months ago.  There’s plenty more where that one came from!

In fact, I’m not quite sure whether it’s actually in the shops, or just means that it’s officially in a warehouse in Omaha, or Oregon, or…

And this morning I finished the wip. 613 words over, but that’s not bad for a 105,000 word novel. It’ll be put to one side now, while I think about re-writes for a month.

Finally, but equally importantly, I wrapped the last of Kate’s presents yesterday.

All done and on target — a nice red letter day!

Last year one of my tutors opened hr class with the immortal line (delivered in a Louisiana drawl) “I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately.”

To paraphrase her, I’ve been thinking about age a lot lately. I’m exactly three months from my birthday, which will see me enter another decade. There’s a lot of unemployment in most countries, and despite the fact that ageism is theoretically illegal in the UK, most employers still have a residual favouritism toward employing younger workers, using code phrases such as ‘energetic.’  (I don’t know whether this is the case in the US as well.) Even assuming that I graduate, unless I unearth a best-seller in the next two years, I face a gap of eight to thirteen years when I graduate when I will probably need some kind of salaried position to supplement the erratic earnings of writing SF.

You’d assume that self-employed writers would be immune to such trends, but there are worrying signs with the recession squeezing publishers on all fronts.

Established writers running into problems selling their new novels is a phenomenon that’s been rumbling away for years. John Brunner found his career stalled in 1983 after a period away; before his death in 2000, Keith Roberts railed against the difficulty of selling his new works.  Both of those authors, however, had the reputation of being ‘difficult.’

More recently, Norman Spinrad has vociferously expressed his frustration at being unable to find a US publisher for his latest novel. Spinrad is two years short of celebrating 50 years in SF, has an enthusiastic French following, and has been a multiple Hugo and Nebula finalist — but significantly, never a winner. Spinrad is 70 next month.

James Gunn expressed similar frustration -but with considerably more dignity- a few months ago in an interview with Albedo One. This is a man who was made a Grand Master by SFWA three years ago, but he can’t sell his new novel in the US. Gunn is 87 years old.

It’s eminently possible that their problems have nothing to do with age, but more to do with their work being of insufficient interest to readers to hit break-even numbers in these commercially constrained times. But it would be interesting to know the average age of those editors who turned them down. Even more interestingly, how much of a factor is the likely length of their career? (Publishers are less and less interested in single-book deals, but rather in multi-book deals)  

We’ll never know, of course. But I feel a wholly illogical indignation on their behalf — these are giants of my youth, and deserve a little respect.  

But there’s no arguing with the cold logic of the marketplace, and I’m in no position to really complain, since I sold my break-out novel at 48.

I’ve posted the final part of the blog post about editing over at Suite101. I hope that it’s helpful in understanding the thought processes that accompany assembling an anthology.

And on other news, I passed the two-thirds mark on Ultramassive.

I’ve posted the second of  what is now three parts on editing over at Suite101, detailing what I do with a submission when I receive it.

One unexpected side effect of spending so much time on less than a dozen submissions is that I’m finding it a real battle writing my 1500 words each day. I have enormous admiration for those writers who can work on one book in the morning, and then focus on another in the afternoon.  My next task is work out how I can mentally multi-task.

More tomorrow on editing, though.

Yesterday’s marathon working on Dark Spires left me with a killer migraine this morning, but also part one of a two-part blog over at Suite101 about editing. I’ll consider the migraine a reasonable price if readers like what comes out of the edits.

Over at Suite101.

I’ve been having a bit of a reading splurge on Ngaio Marsh recently; partly that’s because I seem to have overdosed on SF, and partly I’ve been looking at culling some of the contents of my book shelves. 

Given that I haven’t read most of them for fifteen or more years, Marsh seemed to be an obvious choice, and a few of her earlier, slighter stories have indeed ended up on amazon.

But some have yielded little gems of underwriting which my younger self didn’t really appreciate. A lot of the stories are far more worldly than contemporaries such as Christie or Allingham, and the characters more finely drawn.  I’m finding myself reluctant to sell too many of them.

Damn – I’ll have to look for another author to cull….

It’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m trying to justify watching football on the tv by writing a blog — after all, if I’m writing a blog, it’s not really goofing off is it?

I’ve spent the morning writing my daily 1400 words, which I finished by about 12 o’clock, before settling down with Henning Mankell’s Firewall, which may or may not be his last Kurt Wallender novel. For those of you who only know the dyspeptic, diabetic detective by the anaemic BBC adaptations featuring Kenneth Branagh, which are not a patch on the original Swedish episodes often shown on BBC4, the cycle of ten or a dozen novels are perhaps the most grounded narratives in the detective genre. At the risk of sounding pretentious, they chart the moral disintegration of Swedish society in the 1990s through the brutal and often irrational murders that Wallander has to investigate.

Before Firewall, I read Sidetracked, which justifiably won the Crime Writer’s Assosciation’s Gold Dagger Award for Best Novel. Mankell interweaves real world events with the storyline by featuring Sweden’s matches in the 1994 World Cup as part of the sub-plot and setting. It’s part of a complex set of plot threads that at times sidetrack the reader as effectively as they do Wallander’s investigation.  

Reading Mankell teaches one that it’s the little touches that give a narrative its sense of reality. Years ago, Brian Aldiss began to work himself, his friends and family into the narrative, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. I’m tempted to try the same technique in future, maybe featuring a writer who blogs during the 2010 World Cup as part of the sub-plot….

But for now it’s back to the real World Cup. I’ll finish Firewall between the two matches.