Colin Harvey – author

Those of you awake and paying attention may have noticed I’ve been quieter than usual on the bloggage front. That’s partly due to my workload in general –at the moment I’m juggling time-sensitive projects  – and partly because I suffered a tech fail earlier this week.

 What makes it worse is that it’s the second time in a month that it’s happened.

 I have three computers that I use at various times.  For financial stuff and files that need printing, I use a desktop Packard Bell that’s done me reasonable service.  Which is more than can be said for the netbook that I use when on the move and at home for some university work – many of you will have heard my swearing before when it decides to get temperamental.  The Tosh’s tendency to randomly lock up or simply go back to different screens has encouraged me to hang onto my trusty Sony Vaio laptop, despite it’s being literally held together with sellotape.

Because I switch machines, I back up about once a week onto a USB, although sometimes that lapses to once a fortnight.  (You can tell where this is going, can’t you?)

 About a month ago my desktop mysteriously failed to re-boot. Fortunately, this is the machine with least permanent files on, although it did have a decade’s worth of photos that Kate had downloaded.  Nonetheless, we asked our local PC shop to take a look at it.

Sharp intake of breath. “Looks like your hard drive’s become corrupted.”

 New hard drive installed, but the old one was a write-off – none of the data on it could be recovered.  And I’m only now realizing how much submission history and how many financial files were on that machine, and how rarely I had ever backed it up. I’ve had to re-input this year’s spreadsheet for the accountant, and I literally have no history aside from the hard-copy files sent through for previous year’s returns. 

Nor have I any idea who I’ve submitted which stories to. It’s a bit like having very limited amnesia.

 Still, I’ve sort of gotten used to that. Until three days ago…

 More tomorrow

This morning a friend of mine sent me a link to a review at Diabolical Plots.  They reviewed the stories posted on Daily Science Fiction‘s website throughout the magazine’s first month, last September.

Amazingly, he picked my story Chameleon as the best of the month. I’m staggered because as I said in an earlier post, the story virtually wrote itself, and I don’t feel that anything that easy to write could be that good. Which just goes to show the discontinuity between what’s in my head, and what’s in a typical reader’s.

And secondly, he damns with faint praise Mary Robinette Kowal’s brilliant American Changeling, which was not only my favourite story in September, but in any month.

Nonetheless, it’s interesting to compare opinions, and to get the insight that many review sites won’t review DSF because ‘there’s too much to review.’ Hopefully Diablical Plots doesn’t feel that way, and will produce a review of October and subsequent month’s contents, because an awful lot of new, upcoming and talented writers are publishing new there — and it’s free to read.

You can read the full article here. If you’re familiar with the magazine, you might like to compare your picks with Frank’s. If you’re not, go and see for yourself.

It’s that time of year again when people start to look back, peaking around about December 30th when it’s hard to find a TV programme that isn’t a retrospective (which is a good reason to watch DVDs, or better still to turn the box off).

SF is no exceptions to this, and a couple of sites have already started, running their ‘best of/ the following are eligable for’ lists, while the ToC for Rich Horton’s Years Best has already popped up at SFSignal, which also carries Jonathan Strahan’s ToC. Interesting that they have at least two overlaps, Peter Watts and Elizabeth Hand, while Neil Gaiman has different entries in the two collections.

I already have a heavy reading list, and adding in the reading I’ve already done for the Nebula means that I’m almost ready to cry mercy. I’ve already read a lot of the contenders due to reviewing Asimovs and F & SF for Suite101, but there are a lot of other worthy works and authors out there.

At some point by the 30th, I shall endeavour to post my own list, but meanwhile, what do you think are the best stories and novels of the year?

With all the frantic goings-on yesterday, what with cheese-buying, Clarke-posting and interviewing (and here’s a hint — if you’re going to pick a venue to be interviewed in, avoid Bath City Centre in the Christmas run up) I completely forgot to mention that my entry on the Angry Robot Advent calendar was up.

Now, where did those Icelandic elves get to….?

I’ve just got back from Bath where I was interviewed by journalist Tom Skyes for The Bristol Review of Books, then bought lots of stinky cheese from Paxton & Whitfield, the local emporium in the street next to the one where I’m pictured supervising the film shoot last month (yes, it really was as cold as I look).

I meant to post this blog before I left, but my machine had other ideas. Or rather the phone line had other ideas, since both of my machines were displaying the same problem, notably taking up to eight minutes to cross three screens. I have a feeling that the problem is more to do with available bandwidth on the phone line, since some low graphics screens update almost instantly, whereas others (notably bloody Yahoo with its endless rounds of graphics-heavy ads) take forever.  I literally took most of the day to get Blogger to respond for yesterday‘s blog. Anyone else getting the same problem?

On a more interesting note, the Clarke Awards are a quarter of a century old this year, and there’s a fairly lively debate going on over at Torque Control, the blog for Vector (the critical journal of the BSFA). I’ve already thrown in my two penn’orth, but if you have any thoughts, ideas, etc, head on over here to make them — the more debate, the better. Should the Clarke Awards stay UK/British-centric, or go international?

Back tomorrow with more witterings.

We journeyed back this afternoon with sunshine strobing between high hedges, making the drive difficult but enjoyable. Apart from the temperature, it could have been a late spring or even early summer day.

It was actually a glorious day all round — families and dogs out on the beach in the sunshine. It’s been a great twenty-four hours in which to re-charge my batteries, ready to rundown to the end of term.

Back to work tomorrow, the last Monday for four weeks and for the last time this year.

We’ll be heading south in a little while, so I’m racing to get this done before we go — I’m never quite sure how good internet reception will be down there. We were due to go down next weekend, but Kate’s been getting a little stressed about the whole Christmas thing; part of that is worrying about whether we can get down there before Christmas to drop the family presents off, or whether we’ll get snowed in.  If we head down this weekend, the whole issue becomes moot.

And I can afford to take a weekend away, since I finished the revision of Ultramassive yesterday, and am reasonably on top of university work. In fact, I’ve been using the worksheet to control my workload rather than it controlling me, to establish where I’m neglecting key particular chunks of work. I find it far more helpful to look at work at a strategic level than simply scribbling down tasks piecemeal.

It’ll be nice to have a break from the routine, and (maybe) go for a walk along the beach. Weather permitting, of course; that’s always the caveat at this time of year. Although it’s generally warmer along the south coast, it also tends to be wetter.  Pictures like this one -taken last February- are the exception, rather than the norm.

Back tomorrow for the last week of term. Wow! Where has the time gone?

One of the reasons why I’ve been realtively quiet lately is due to workload, as I’ve mentioned several times in posts elsewhere. This week particularly seems to be the week of the interview.

First of all, I’ve been interviewed in some depth by Irish magazine Albedo One in an e-mail interview (e-view?) which is on-going. Because of the magazine’s lead times, it’ll be some time before it sees the light of day.

However, an interview I gave Canadian fan Jessica Strider is now on-line. Jessica works for the World’s Greatest Bookstore, who have made me the Featured Author for December, and the interview has been typed up and posted in-store, but it’s now available on-line as well.

And sometime soon, I’ll be in the Angry Robot podcast for December. More on that nearer the time.

I’m spending a lot of time –so much time– analyzing and writing about the spreadsheet that I started to monitor my hours.

I spent a little under four hours a day on average on writing stories, blogging, reviewing and on ‘others.’ That excludes blogs and creative writing exercises for uni, such as the film blogs. So I wrote the first part of a horror piece in November, but because it was specifically for genre, I didn’t count it in this part.

I spent about three hours a day on specific uni work, and another hour a day reading.  That shouldn’t be work, but when it becomes the basis for other items, such as reviews, or is part of a set text, then it can’t be ignored.

Interestingly (at least to me!) was the revelation of how little actual fiction writing that I do, at least when the novel is at revision stage. As little as forty minutes a day, but it’s the crucial forty minutes — get that novel revision done, and I settle down; defer it, and I get twitchy.

There is also a reason for doing the revision in small, daily chunks; it allows my subconscious time to process, and enables me to really focus on the text in front of me. A friend of mine attempted a novel crit in one go and said;

Equally interesting is the split of academic subjects within a three hour day, but I’ll continue that over on the Film Making Mumblings blog, for those who are interested.

So what’s the point of all this navel-gazing?

The reason for all this analysis is that with such a scattered and diverse set of tasks to occupy me, it would be very easy to neglect one aspect of my work.  This way, if I’m spending too little time -say- networking (as if), I can rectify it.

I know that there’s a danger of going overboard on this, but I’ve decided to keep the sheet going, for that last reason. I just have to ensure that it doesn’t become an end in itself.

No blog yesterday, as it was Monday, although I did post a Film Making Mumblings which I’ll link to here.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was keeping a spreadsheet of the hours that I was working, and what activities I was allocating the time to; the categories were the four uni subjects that I’m studying, (Writer’s Workshop aka Core, Genre, Feature Journalism and Film Making, plus writing, blogging, reading and other. As it’s the end of the month today, I’ve begun to reflect on the results. I’ll post an analysis -probably tomorrow- but one of the things that’s come out of it is how hard it is to allocate time to a job that’s as complex as being a writer.

For example, your hard drive goes and you have to get a new one. Is that work? I think so. But where do you put it? In the end, I put it under ‘other.’ The problem is that I also put the time I spent at cons and meetings such as the BSFA interview under other as well, and as a result, a third of my time is spent under other. Perhaps if I do it again, I’ll put a column in for ‘networking.’

I have one activity that doesn’t count as work, which is to take the afternoon off, and to attend Kate’s choral performance of various pieces of music such as ‘Hiawatha’s Wedding March’ and ‘Oklahoma.’  The event is at The United Reformed Church in Bath, just over Poulteney Bridge at 3.45pm. Tea and cakes will be served by my fair hand.

Meanwhile, I’m December’s Featured Author in The World’s Biggest Bookstore in Toronto.  There’ll be an interview going up at some point, and I’ll link to it, but in the meantime here’s a rather nice shot of the gondola end with Winter Song and Damage Time  on.

And I continue to paddle frantically below the waterline on stuff that I can’t yet talk about; as soon as I can, I’ll stop with the mystery.