Colin Harvey's Blog

Posted by Colin Harvey

The official objective for the National Noverl Writing Month is 50,000 words for the month. That's an average of 1667 words per day.

However, there are 10 days in November when I will have much less time because I have to work, or have full days at uni (or both), so I'm aiming for half-quantities on those full days.

I'm aiming for 60,000 words for the month for my work in progress to go with the the 4,000 words already written, so for each of those 'full' days I'll be looking to write 1200 words, which is a challenging target, but for each day at weekends and when I have short days at university, I'll be looking to write 2,400 words on each of those days.

And this weekend I've just about managed to write 2400 words per day for the last couple of days.

On the downside, it's ripped the heart out of the day, which at this time of year is pretty short. By the time we get home from walking the dog it's close to mid-day, and 4 or 5 hours writing means that it's nearly dark by the time I've finished.

But at least it's done. Time to go and live in the real world for a couple of hours.

Even if it is a rather dark real world.

Posted by Colin Harvey

There's a nice review of Winter Song at Cheryl Morgan's website, which you can link to from here.

It was Cheryl who flagged the next salvoes in the on-going Booker saga that I mentioned on Thursday.

Cheryl won the Hugo this year for Best Fan Writer based on her blogging, and John Scalzi won last year -- based on his blogging-- and it occured to me; when was the last time a Hugo was awarded to a Fan Writer based on dead tree writing? 2007? 2006? 2005?

And I've had the revised US timings for my novels announced at the Angry Robot site. Winter Song will be published in May 2010, and Damage Time in June. This could be a good thing as it makes it worthwhile me popping over in June for con or book signings -- uni timings permitting.

And finally, my debut collection Displacement has been published, with an original novella, novelette and short story, as well as two reprints.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Back on track with NaNoWriMo -- 2648 words written today, vs a target of 2400.

Meanwhile, if you're bored with reading NaNoWriMo (and who would blame you, if you're not into the minutae of word counts), back in September, Kim Stanley Robinson fired the opening salvoes in an interesting little debate about the Booker Prize. You can read it here.

And in a couple of days I'll post a link to another site or two showing how it developed.

Enjoy!

Posted by Colin Harvey

Yes, it's well after 8.30 and I've only just passed 1000 words. Actually, that feel like a major achievement compared to just a few hours ago.

This is one of two Wednesdays in November when I go in early with Mimi, so there's no opportunity to work before leaving home; that's followed by four hours of lectures and tutorials before a two hour tutorial in the afternoon. Tonight I went to a meeting of the Creative Society on site as well, so that 1000 words seems like a major achievement.

Meanwhile, over at Angry Robot, editor Lee Harris has some thoughts of his own on NaNoWriMo...

Posted by Colin Harvey

That's the lecture I've just attended.

It finished 40 minutes early, which allowed me a chance to blog, since it's pissed me off so badly I just *had* to get it out of my system.

This week's guest lecturer admitted up-front that she's inclined to rant, and promptly showed us that yes, she is...

The downside of ranting is that it alienates your audience and undermines your authority -- it's why politicians are drilled in not losing their cool until they resemble blocks of Emmenthal-- and as one of the implicit enemy(!) after a while my ears ached with the mosquito whine of outrage.

Actually, I --as a man-- wasn't being criticized; rather, it was 'the media,' that amorphous entity that we were warned as Media Communications students to avoid generalizing about in the first week. Clearly there's a 'Do as we say, not as we do' policy at work here.

Third, it's easy to rant. I felt like putting my hand up and asking "What would you change?" But that might only have encouraged her to go on for even longer.

But where I got really pissed off was when she dismissed the Dove team's use of 'real women' in their ads as tokenism. "What, they pick a size sixteen, and claims it makes them representative?'

Full disclosure: I worked for Unilever, so I have an insight that she doesn't, and as I was involved --however distantly-- I'm clearly biased.

But no, they didn't pick a size sixteen. The team deliberately picked larger models, including apple and pear shaped ones, as well as older and black women. Yes, they were mostly ex-agency, but by the time they auditioned they were off the books as too old, too large, too...

The point was that they were deliberately picked as non-size zero (so surely this muppet should have appluded, not criticized them?) and to be as wide-ranging a sub-set as possible.

If her impression of the Dove Real Women campaign was so horribly wide of the mark, what other misleading bollocks did she talk for 80 minutes?

Posted by Colin Harvey

Today has been a day of pure slog; 58 large plastic boxes of notes to be moved two floors mean that my hands hurt and I struggled to stay awake on the bus (that you didn't hear anything like an atomic explosion meant that I didn't wake up in Radstock or somewhere equally far from home.

The six hours in the BEH were bracketed by 2708 words toward the wip. Since I didn't register in time, I can't keep calling it NaNoWriMo, even though that would be a much easier label to hang on it than wip.

Add that to the 2567 words I wrote yesterday, and I'm tired but happy. I'm ahead of the game for the time being, although other days may not be so profitable.

I might even make it onto Facebook sometime tonight.

So I'm going to keep this short and sweet, and have something to eat before I keel over!

Posted by Colin Harvey

November 1st marks the start of NaNoWriMo. It's a date I've had in my calendar for some time, and I've been watching it's approach with increasing trepidation.

For the unitiated (and *where* have you been?) NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. The challenge is to write a complete novel of 50,000 words between the 1st and the 30th of November. That's not a full novel at commercial length for adults of course, so much as a rough first draft, and it's best approached after creating a detailed synopsis. As such, can it provide an excellent framework which can be revised to final draft status.

And it's a daunting prospect, even for an experienced author.

That's close to 1700 words per day, for 30 consecutive days.

I won't actually be formally taking the challenge, as I've written some 4000 words already, but the effects will be roughly the same.

Long blog posts will dwindle to almost nothing, and will probably mostly be simple word counts, or links to other posts. And I'll only be responding to urgent messages, for which I apologize in advance. If I manage to get on top of the word count --and there are complicating factors which I won't go into here-- then that might change.

Right, I'm off; time to get started.

Posted by Colin Harvey

One of the concepts is most misunderstood by the layman is that of originality. Over and over again, people complain that a record sounds like another one, or a film claims to be a 'reimagining,' or...

With the ease of access to material on the internet, this lack of understanding has led to an explosion of plagiarism. Every module at university has carried a huge warning about it. But conversely, there are such fears of being accused of it that some writers and students refuse to read others writer's work.

Plagiarism is a very specific problem and according to The Collins Concise English Dictionary (1962) its definition is "the appropriation and giving out as one's own the writings, inventions or ideas of another."

The way to avoid accusations varies according to the source work:

Inventions are protected by patents.

Writing is protected by ensuring that quotations are limited to two hundred and fifty words or less, and credit given to the source work and author.

But how does the writer avoid appropriating an idea? This is where 're-imaginings' and sampling can confuse the issue, especially as there are almost no truly original ideas under the sun. But in each instance, there are small but significant changes made to the principal work.

In The Memory of Whiteness (1985), Kim Stanley Robinson refers to clinamen, a term coined by the Roman philosopher Lucretius:

"[T]he swerve in atoms that makes change in the universe possible." (p.77)

That 'swerve in the atoms' was the smallest change that the philosopher Epicurus could comprehend in his 'atomistic doctrine.' It is all that's needed to change an idea.

An example is that of dragons -- creatures of myth. By contrast, alien planets are achetypally Science Fictional. Until the 1960s, no one had fused the idea of dragons as an extra-terrestrial creature. Then Anne McCaffrey wrote 'Weyr Search' and sequels, and the rest is history.

In 1990 Allen M. Steele published the novella 'Trembling Earth,' in which a wildlife park in the Okenofee Swamp was filled with dinosaurs which attacked unwary tourists. The same year Michael Crichton's monumental bestseller Jurassic Park appeared.

Its plot similarities are remarkable, but Crichton expanded the science and characterization twelvefold, and in so doing, changing the setting and plot and characters, Crichton made a clinamen which probably took him three or more magnitudes ahead of Steele.

The key change to make a work original, even where it has been done before is to put one's own stamp on it, be it a summation of an academic theory, or a short story. Where it isn't possible to make a change, cite the source material.

Simple, really.

Posted by Colin Harvey

This month's SFX magazine carries a nice review of Winter Song, with Andrew Osmond praising 'a believably harsh tale of survival in bleak and unforgiving elements' and 'two characters who upend the old cliches.' He's less enthusiastic about other aspects of the book, but Winter Song still scored 3.5 out of 5, which is better than a kick in the head. And I'm on the page facing the new Stephen King, which is probably about as close as I'm ever likely to get to The Man.

Something struck me about this and the Eric Brown review in the Guardian. SFX has ten times the readership of genre hard-core magazines like Interzone, but how many of those extra ninety per cent are actual book readers, or are they all solely interested in TV programmes like Doctor Who or Heroes?

And in turn The Guardian has ten times as many readers again, but how many of them are remotely interested in SF? The Guardian does at least take SF semi-seriously, unlike stodgier broadsheets such --say-- The Daily Telegraph, but I'm unlikely to learn what kind of halo effect that bigger readership has.

But whatever the numbers of the readership, I'll take those nice reviews wherever they come from.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Good news: I spoke to Student Finance England.

Bad news: Oh, it's coming -- the bad news, that is...

A caveat here: I've not yet spoken to the same person twice, and I've not had the same story twice, but this one had the ring of truth.

Yes, I've had my loans, thank you. But not my grant.

Let me see....she muttered. Ah yes, Colin, you pressed the wrong button. So although we've got all your paperwork on file, but we can't going to do anything about it. You pressed the 'I want to be assessed on the data I've provided' button, rather than the 'I'd like to be means-tested for further payment' button. Easily done. Lots of people do it, actually. So you need to print out a paper application form, and send it with the covering letter explaining what happened.

I'm afraid that although you sent your supporting evidence four months ago, you will have to join at the back of the queue, and no, we couldn't have written to you advising you of the error as we do not initiate responses.

So although I qualify for grants, they won't be coming through for some time --assuming I haven't made another 'error' this time-- and the loan only covered October's bills. We'll muddle through somehow, but it makes it even more imperative that I put in as many hours as possible at the Eye Hospital. But how Kafka-esque is it that pressing a wrong button can send you into serious, serious debt?

I'm not as badly off as some, either.

I spoke to a friend yesterday, a single mother who because she was late with her application (and I'm guessing that a brain hemorrage hospitalizing her for two months might count as mitigating circumstances) has not even had the loan. And the Uni have just taken a thousand pounds from her account for tuition fees. A friend has loaned her the next month's rent money, but beyond that she faces the very real possibility that she and her two teenage daughters will be made homeless.

And there is no-one at Student Finance England that she can talk to who can make a decision. The decision makers are entirely removed from the people their decisions affect.

Ah, Franz, you knew not of what you wrote...

Posted by Colin Harvey

Last week one of my tutors suggested that students enter their short stories into competitions, and named some likely targets. I recognized one of them, and queried that they charged an entry fee.

Her response was illuminating: "I'd expect students to spend money on competitions as they would on textbooks. Many reputable magazines charge an entry fee for competitions."

I've heard it said that there are two kinds of students. Those who are there to learn, and those who are there to show off how much they know. I'm one of the first group, so I kept quiet, and resisted the urge to point out that many places run competitions for which there is no entry fee. But I have major reservations about paying money to enter a competition.

Apart from the on-going mantra of SFWA, HWA and every other writer's organization I've encountered (Money flows to the author. Money flows to the author. Repeat after me --money flows to the author...). One of the reasons is simple pragmatism; why pay money to submit a story when there are so many venues that are free to enter? And if the author is desperate enough to gamble, many of those free-to-enter markets pay for stories. Money should flow to the author wherever possible, not vice versa.

The second reason is that while many of the fee-charging markets are reputable, some are not. Unless a magazine is auditable, how does a competitor know how much of that fee is the cost of running the competition, and how much is pure profit.?

There certain competitions I would advocate entering:

1. Where the prize money is above the market average (ie Zoetrope)

2. Where there is no entrance fee (ie Writers of the Future)

3. Where the contest is so high profile that it carries significant prestige -- as the two above do.

If costs need to be covered, let the competition do as ralan has done and make public the costs involved -- let's have as near to full public disclosure as we can. If Strange Horizons and critters and ralan can do it, so can everyone.

That, or don't charge a fee.

Posted by Colin Harvey

An announcement at the TTA Press website tells me that The Fix is temporarily unavailable. This is a major blow, since The Fix is the only webzine that I'm aware of that's totally dedicated to short fiction. Given that most of the short fiction published is either in the monthly magazines such as Asimovs or Fantasy & Science Fiction, or published by the small press, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out that it's the smaller players in the spec-fic field who are disproportionately affected by this hiatus.

Let's hope that Andy is able to return to normal service. Here's a reminder of happier times at The Fix, their review of Future Bristol, now re-posted at Lyn's website.

Posted by Colin Harvey

We went to see George Bernard Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession last night. I'm not a great fan of GBS --a typically pompous, portentous Victorian-- but that's probably a reflection of how much society's changed since the play's first performance in 1893. The eponymous profession is prostitution, but you'd have struggled to tell that from the dialogue. It sounded more as if she was guilty of running a chain of hotels.

But whatever the play's drawbacks it wasn't helped by the incident to one poor woman about twenty feet away in the row in front of us.

A man stood up, people began whispering and talking, and then he climbed over the seats to get to the exit (the Theatre Royal has very few exits, so people have to shuffle along -- or in the case of an emergency do what he did). An usher appeared, and the woman began crying out, to a soundtrack of whispers and "sshh!" from several irate people around us. I was trying to focus on the play, but when there's more going on in the audience than on-stage, it's hard to concentrate.

The woman had suffered a stroke and needed to be taken to hospital. What haunts me --as someone so scared of heights that even the prospect of looking straight down the three floors (or about thirty feet) is a challenge-- is the image of the woman being lifted like a parcel by those around her over the side rail at the edge of the seats toward the exit.

Bad enough to suffer the shock and terror of a stroke, but to find oneself being lifted bodily in the darkness when there is a sheer drop nearby must be absolutely terrifying. I only hope that someone was whispering reassurances as they did it, and that she was able to understand what they were doing and why.

Of course the play's the thing --or is it that the show must go on?-- and the actors seemed oblivious of the whispers in the darkness overhead. But I shall rarely think of GBS again without remembering that poor woman.

Posted by Colin Harvey

On Thursday I posted a blog to the effect that with travel included, I was working an average of 49 hours a week. I ended the ost by musing that I'd need to work out how I was going to find time to write.

That I'm writing this gives you part of the answer of course: As I type these words, Kate is setting the table for breakfast, pouring orange juice, clattering cutlery. Normally I'd do that, but hers is the unfussy, demonstrative nature that just gets on with things, and if she does it, it gives me a few more minutes to write this.

The other factor is that amongst that 49 hours were some areas that could be multi-purposed. I have gaps between lectures totalling 3 or 4 hours, depending on which week it is, when even before I knew how much time I'd need I was heading for the library, to post blogs, read or write. On the journey into Bristol, I have maybe 30 minutes when I can do the same, and on the journey to uni, a further 20 minutes.

Those two factors alone give me back 6 hours of my 49. There are a further couple of tricks which verge on the dark arts: At the hospital I don't have a pc, but I can take a pen and a piece of scrap paper -- as Doctor Who said to The Master in Last of the Time Lords-- "You can't stop us thinking." Quite right. Since some of my assignments involve scribbling poems which come in short bursts, that's an ideal time to write them. It's dull, repetitive work more suited to an automaton, but paradoxically it frees me up to think.

Lastly, there's the Thursday evening plenary lecture. I don't mind attending lectures then, even seminars, but I draw the line at silent Russian film screenings on a dark night. That slot might be reclaimed, giving me 4 extra hours a fortnight.

So in total, I think that I'm probably closer to 39 hours a week off the clock than 49. That might not sound much, but as someone who's homing in on his 49th birthday, I can tell you now that the difference between 39 and 49 is a lot more than it seems.

Not that it's going to be easy if I do NaNoWriMo, but whether I do NaNoWriMo at all will depend on discussions with my tutor over the next week.

Posted by Colin Harvey

The one thing I learned this week isn't something that's taught by any of my courses.

It's to make sure I read the labels on parcels beyond checking the surname, since there are two Harveys in the house.

I've ordered so many books for my course that when a big parcel turned up with the Amazon logo all over it, despite thinking "I'm sure I've had everything I ordered," I grabbed a knife and hacked open the tape sealing it.

And came face to face with the books I'd told Kate I'd like for my birthday. Oh crap, I thought. Yes, the label did say 'Mrs K Harvey' when I looked at it. That'll teach me.

Printed material seems to have it in for me on other fronts, too: There's no review this week, I'm afraid.

One of my monthly review magazines stubbornly refused to print the bottom six lines on each page of the electronic file, no matter how much I varied the print instructions. After wasting one hundred and ten sheets of paper, I decided not to bother. Instead I read a novel. After a wonderful opening three hundred and fifteen pages, it fell apart so badly in the last eighth that I decided life was too short to spend it writing a negative review.

Despite managing to read Jason Sanford's magnificent novella 'Sublimating Angels' last night, the full review of Interzone was never going to be ready in time. Given that next week is Halloween, it's a no-brainer -- I have to promote Black Static to next in the queue. I suspect that if I don't, I'll have even more trouble with books...

Posted by Colin Harvey

On Monday I blogged about course choices, and the issues it caused over timetabling.

The reason for that is that I have a 60 minute lecture and a 2-hour tutorial each week in each of my core subjects, Creative Writing and Media Communications. So far so good. However, I also have to take two electives, which in my case are Poetry and Introduction to Scriptwriting. These also require me to take a 60-minute lecture and a 2-hour tutorial, but on alternating weeks. I also have an additional fortnightly 2-hour lecture in Creative Writing.

So this week my hours are:

Tuesday 11 - 1, and 3 - 5pm

Wednesday 9 - 1, and 3 - 5pm.

Last week and next week I have a more 'stretched' week:

Monday 4 - 6pm

Tuesday 11 - 1, and 3 - 5pm

Wednesday 9 - 11, and 12 - 1pm

Thursday 9 - 10, and 5 - 7pm.

In fact I need to leave an hour before the module starts, and get home an hour after it finishes. So my true times this week are:

Tuesday 10am - 6pm

Wednesday 8am - 6pm.

and:

Monday 3 - 7pm

Tuesday 10am -- 6pm (with these times, there's no point in going home and back so I stay on campus)

Wednesday 8am - 1pm

Thursday 8 - 11am, and 4 to 8pm.

The good thing about taking the bus is that although it takes longer, I can do a little work on it (if my brain hasn't packed up on the way home!). The bad news is that one week my seminars and tutorials alone account for 18 hours, and the next 24 -- before I've done any reading or tackled any assignments, which add another 12 hours or so.

Add to that the 2 days a week that I'm working at the hospital, adding another 16 hours a week with journey times. So an average of 49 hours are off the clock before I've started blogging. I'm now asking myself how on earth I'm going to write the next novel.

I'll let you know when I work it out...

Posted by Colin Harvey

Yesterday seemed to turn into a day dominated by TTA Press.

My copy of Interzone was clearly caught in the industrial dispute between postmen and the Post Office; when it became clear that that was the case, editor Andy Cox kindly sent me a replacement copy of 224 (He's a good guy like that).

And on the same day, my copy of Black Static 13 arrived from the same publisher. So from having little reading material, I now have lots. But I like it like that.

And on the same day Andy asked me for a short bio to accompany 'The Killing Streets,' which is scheduled for Interzone 225.

Some days are good days....

Posted by Colin Harvey

When I bought my new Toshiba netbook a few weeks ago, I learned quickly that while 1 gig of RAM is adequate most of the time, there are occasions --such as when AVG is doing its daily sweep and Adobe are downloading upgrades-- that it's not quite enough memory. So I duly bought a 2 gigabyte Memory Extension Module from Toshiba.

It had no instructions, so after a week of trying to get through via phones and e-mails, I finally managed to speak to a human being. He kindly navigated me to the correct e-dress, which I'd never have found without his help --the website is as navigable as a mangrove swamp. I downloaded it, and on Sunday night fitted the new module.

The netbook didn't work.

I re-fitted the original chip. That didn't work either.

Good job I saved the assignments to the USB, I thought, plugging said USB into the old laptop. Otherwise I'd be up shit creek without a paddle, since non-submission is an automatic failure.

Only I hadn't saved them!!!!

I'd saved an earlier set of files which omitted last week's work.

Cue a frantic evening trying to get the netbook working before giving up for fear of damaging the pins beyond repair. Faced with the possibility of having to re-write a 400 word short story from scratch, re-doing my work plan for the year and unable to access the lecture slides by Tuesday morning, I spent a sleepless Sunday night and anxious anxious Monday before managing to get the netbook to the local PC guy after work.

It then took him all of about 30 seconds to get it working again, leaving me rather sheepish. I hadn't plugged the chip in quite enough.

In future, I'll save assignments to both USB and the other laptop. Lesson learned.

Posted by Colin Harvey

This last week I've finally started to settle into a routine.

I'm taking a BA in Creative Writing and Media Communications at Bath Spa University. In the first year those subjects account for only two thirds of the marks. To complete the year, I also have to study two electives, for which I've selected Poetry and Introduction to Scriptwriting.

Even if I never write another poem or script, they will --hopefully- make me a better writer in that in one, every word has to count and has to be weighed for its contribution to the whole, while in the other anything that can't be seen or heard by the final audience must be eliminated. Both different approaches will give me a new perspective on prose. At least that's the theory.

Choosing the electives was the major factor in the timetable uncertainty that stressed me out so badly two weeks ago -- not only me; several students admitted that with no money coming through because many grants have been delayed, and further major uncertainty about what they would be doing, they came close to walking out.

The result of the timetabling is that I have alternate weeks.

The first week of teaching, which was actually Week 2 of the courses, but Week 7 of the Academic Year (so guess which weeks were shown on the timetable) saw me taking my 'even' (or is that 'odd'?) weeks' lessons. It's that pattern that I'll be following this weekend, with the additional complication that I've started work back at the BEH on Mondays and Fridays.

I'm now starting to realize the implications of that, which I'll go into on another day.

Posted by Colin Harvey

With my work-load at the moment I'm having to skip reviews of some of my reading pile, but one book at least warrants a blog post.

Despite the fact that I occasionally dip a toe in the piranha-infested waters of horror, I'm not a great fan of the stuff. I'll read books by friends like Lee Thomas (who now I think of it has been very quiet lately -- go check his page out) who is a terrific writer in any genre, or by Gary Fry, Paul Meloy or Jonathan Maberry. But generally speaking I shy away from horror novels.

Especially ones with zombies in.

My friends know that mention of word 'zombie' generally produces the same reaction from me as 'dragons' in fantasy, or 'Singularity' in SF -- a rearing back of the head, followed by a curled lip, and a spitting noise. There are enough zombie books already -- we don't need any more.

So you can imagine my deep, deep joy when Hodder got in touch and asked me whether I'd be prepared to take a look at a novel by new writer A.E. Moorat, Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter. Hmm, Queen Victoria fighting zombies, holding a severed head on the cover. Just what the world needs.

But actually, it's pretty good, if at times barking mad -- think Buffy crossed with Wilkie Collins (no way is it Jane Austen, that's for sure).

Three things won me over.

First of all, Moorat is a journalist writing under a pseudonym so he (? I think it's a he) knows how to tell a story, and QV:DH doesn't hang around.

Secondly, Moorat knows his history, or is plausible enough to convince an educated layman like me that he does.

Finally, there's the humour, blacker than a coal cellar at midnight and Moorat's obvious glee at some of the things he puts the characters through is curiously endearing, if demented (Perkins the manservant fighting his urge to eat his master with stiff upper-lip fortitude is worth the read alone)

Go find a copy, and push back your chair. Just make sure your back is to the wall...

Posted by Colin Harvey

Two more reviews for Winter Song, one at Mark Chitty’s excellent Walker of Worlds blog; meanwhile Speculative Fiction Examiner’s insightful Josh Vogt has reviewed it here.

Josh’s review was so thought-provoking that it kick-started an article for Crossed Genres to appear in December. All I have to do now is finish it…

And by the time it appears, I hope to be able to answer a question that both Josh and Eric Brown in the Guardian posed. You'll have to read the reviews and do your own critical analysis to see what common questions they posed. :)

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Yesterday I did some quick and dirty math to calculate a cost per mile for private transport; it came to about £0.40 per mile.

To travel into Bristol using the local (private) bus company, who effectively only cover Bristol and Keynsham, costs £2 for a return journey of 12 miles. That’s £0.17 per mile, and is one of the reasons why their buses are packed.

First Bus also cover that route at £3.90, or £0.33 per mile. First would argue that they have unprofitable routes to subsidize, so let’s accept that temporarily. They run every land route that I’ll llok at from now on. The cost to Bath from Keynsham is £5.70 return for 18 miles, about £0.32 per mile. But my journey to uni is 10.6 miles, there and back. Cost = £8, or £0.75 per mile.

Let’s assume that I had to go to London tomorrow, but I’d had no opportunity to pre-book. The cheapest fare is £54 for a 240 mile round trip. That’s £0.225 per mile, but doesn’t guarantee me a seat – and at busy times, journeys can be standing room only, for two hours. First class is £127 and upwards -- £0.53 per mile.

Finally, it costs £636 to fly the 6486 miles from London to Montreal and back. Not even £0.10 per mile. Yes, expensive in absolute terms, but when you consider that, is it any surprise that air travel numbers aren’t declining?

The point of all these numbers is to show that while transport providers make a profit, transport costs are almost always higher per mile than in a car.

Add to that the point that people need at least eighteen inches of personal space, which they can get in a car. But on public transport you’re lucky to get one inch of personal space….

I’ll wrap this up tomorrow, I promise.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

After almost a quarter of a century of working in Bristol City centre, I've not only changed careers, but changed location as well. And it's brought me bumping up against the issue that is transport in the UK.

Last week saw me have to go to campus twice in one day. It brought into sharp relief just how isolated the campus was. Incidentally, I had finally accepted that I really, really dislike driving -- I have a licence, so in an emergency I can do it, but I found it really unpleasant.

On Tuesday morning the bus was half an hour late and turned up with the next scheduled service following right behind....

And on Saturday I was late for my train, having been unavoidably held up getting across London from the Angel. But it didn't matter. I had a ticket, so I'd get the next train. What I hadn't read was the small print on the ticket. Instead of saying the usual "valid after 4 o'clock" it actually said "valid at 4 o'clock."

"I'm sorry sir, this ticket isn't valid," Jobsworth said in a tone that said he wasn't sorry at all. "It's a £76 fare, I'm afraid."

"What?" I replied.

He relented and charged me a mere £24.50 on top of the £17.50 I'd already paid (each way) by pre-booking. I'm not quite sure why a 4.30pm train on a Saturday (and yes, the timetables do note the day of the week) should be so much more more expensive than a 4pm train. What do all these journeys have in common?

Among many other things, First Group Ltd.

They are the company who run buses throughout the region, train journeys to many regions, and with Stagecoach (other company) anhave carved up the country into a duopoly of transport providers making a profit out of providing a so-called transport infrastructure, while being subsidized on unprofitable routes by local government. That's you and me, by the way.

More on this tomorrow.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

I have two laptops at the moment, neither one of which is working at optimum levels; it's left my original blog post for today --written on the bus on the way home from Uni-- stranded on the other machine. So I'll post it another day instead, changing the 'yesterday' to whatever day it was. (Yes, the days really are blurring into one another that badly!)

And you'll have to wait another day for the follow-up to the post on 'How Much Do You Want To Be A Writer?' which clearly touched some nerves/chords/whatever. If I haven't got back to you yet, apologies; I will when I've cleared the back-log....

Meanwhile, I've had another review for Winter Song, to go with the nice Eric Brown one in the Guardian last Saturday.

And on the subject of Saturday (how lame a link was that? --- no, that was another rhetorical question...), a quick reminder that I'll be joining the Angry Robot gang for a mass session at Forbidden Planet from 12.30 to 2pm. More on that here.

Right, now to go and shout at that recalcitrant bloody laptop...

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

I'm into my second week at University, and yesterday I really really wondered why I'd given up paid employment to do this.

The IT system that BSU uses has error messages so lacking in meaning (they boil down to "you can't log on but we're not going to explain why") that I was left to puzzle it out for myself over the weekend why I couldn't access my timetable. Without a timetable the student literally cannot function -- it really is as important as that.

I was awake at 3.30am racking my brains, and by the time it was daybreak I was exhausted, but had an answer. I dashed off emergency messages from my home PC to my lecturers. The replies all said, "You need to see Student Admin." So taking a chance that I wasn't missing a lecture I caught the bus in -cost £5.70-- and found scenes of utter chaos.

There were hundreds of people trying to access their timetables while at the same time fully a third of the PCs weren't working. All communication except lectures is via PC, so perhaps ensuring all machines are available might be considered a priority, but BSU consider it much more important that they spend the money on widening the driveway...

It emerged afterwards that no-one could access the timetable until 11am on Monday, but posting a message on places like the student portal hadn't occurred to Student Admin. Nonetheless, I managed to snaffle a printed copy of my timetable (and saw that I'd been allocated a module I had less than zero interest in, while I'd been bumped off one I actively wanted to do. So all that milling around choosing modules last week was basically a waste of time).

Back at the Library I noticed a piece of paper -- a single piece-- on a desk giving detailed instructions on how to access the timetable. None of our presentations --including the one on IT-- had mentioned that to access the timetable, we needed to preface our ID with 'Academic\' and without it, we would be locked out.

I wrote a mail asking for a change of module, and having done everything I needed to do by 11 o'clock, I saw that I had nothing until 4 o'clock. So rather than sitting around, despite the cost, I went home again. When I came back at 4, I learned that the lecture I had come for only took place on alternate weeks -- starting next week....again, the information was on the timetable, but no one had though to explain what the little numbers in the bottom right corner were.

I hadn't realized until now that students are expected to learn by osmosis. So I'm going to practice my osmosizing and take (several more) deep breaths at the thought that one sheet of paper cost me £11.40, several wasted hours, and about ten years off my life due to raised blood pressure.

Posted by Colin Harvey

On returning home last night, I was delighted to learn that no less than four of the stories in the Killers anthology that I edited last year have been selected for Honourable Mentions in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year Volume 1, due for publication in about ten days from now.

For the record, the stories are

Eugie Foster -- "Beautiful Summer."

Colin Harvey -- "Just Another Day."

Philip J. Lees -- "Virtual Analysis."

Lee Thomas -- "The Good and Gone."

Congratulations to Eugie, Philip and Lee, and my thanks again to all the writers who made Killers such a success.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Squeee!

...oops, sorry. Didn't realize you were there. (Pulls self together...)

It's the big day today!

The first review is already out. I'm sure it won't be the last -- actually, I know it won't, because the Guardian are reviewing it on Saturday. Meanwhile, read here for what Mark has to say.

Posted by Colin Harvey

It's one of those long (two hours plus) periods between induction lectures, so I'm where I've spent most of my free time in the last two days - in the library. It seems like an opportune time to blog.

Good news this morning -- it seems that the loveley, lovely, lovely people at Student Finance England haven't lost my paperwork after all. So I'm not going to have to re-start the process of getting my grant three months after I sent off Kate's P60 and our marriage certificate.

The process of how one is paid, and how much it involves sometimes seems to require a Cray Supercomputer. But if you're sad enough to want to know, read on:--

Every British Student gets two loans, one for tuition (which in my case is paid direct to the University so I can't even remember how much it is, I'm so uninterested in it). But I also get a Maintenence Loan of £3500.

Both of these loans have to be re-paid once I start earning £15000, at the rate of 9% of my earnings.

I clearly can't live on that --in fact I can't work out how even young students can, given that the Uni charges them £92 per week, or £2944 per year excluding food-- but because of my age and circumstances, I also qualify for a grant of £2900, and a bursary of £1200, bringing my net income to £7600 per academic year. It's not much, but it's net of all deductions which makes it's gross value about £8200, and as long as I keep working 16 hours a week, I also qualify for assistance from HMRC, which brings in another £625 a year, or £900 before tax. I can work for three months next summer, so I can top up my equivalent of £9100 with three months earnings that way. Which leaves the writing to pay for con attendance and direct costs, such as internet, phone and power.

At least, that's the theory.

More on how the theory translates into reality at a later date.

Posted by Colin Harvey

It was a good con. What made it even better, and which I forgot to mention at the time (and the list of thank you's made the blog eough of an epic) was that I won a prize.

I never win prizes.

But I won a prize!!

The competition was 'Guess the Weight of the Hugo.' I put my one pound entry fee in and said 4.05kg (Cheryl wanted it exact to avoid a tie) and lo and behold, the weight was 3.6kg. The next nearest was 50g further away from me, and had already gone, so I couldn't even give my prize away.

For the record, the prize was a copy of...

Slights by Kaaron Warren

Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

The Book of Secrets by Chris Roberson

Nekropolis by Tim Waggoner

Kell's Legend by Andy Remic

Angel of Death by J. Robert King

Yep, that's right. I won the Angry Robot set. Not that there's anything wrong with such a fine set of titles, but I'm sure I heard some muttered comments of 'fix!' and besides, I already have some of them.

So I'll get Rem to sign his at Forbidden Planet on October 10th, and the whole set -- plus my ARC of Winter Song-- will go into the charity auction at either Micrcon in Exeter, or Phoenix-Con in Dublin, depending which one happens first. There! Can't say fairer than that, can we? (That was a rhetorical question, btw, a concept that seems to have passed some of my more literal-minded readers by).

Back to school later on today, so I'd better wrap up now.

Only two days to launch....

Posted by Colin Harvey

This morning I'm getting ready to take my place in the educational system as an, ahem, 'mature' student.

It really came home to me on Saturday how focused I've been on delivering Damage Time, and then on launching Winter Song, when Kate said to me after a brief conversation with Lee Harris (my editor at Angry Robot), "Haven't you told him (Lee) that you're going back to Uni?"

Er, no, it turns out. I was sure I had, but apart from a brief mention on the blog some time ago, I haven't mentioned it to anyone on-line.

So I'm going off to Bath Spa University this morning to register, meet my course tutor and pick up things like library passwords and student cards. I'll be taking a BA in Creative Writing & Media Communications.

I applied two years ago when I was first made redundant by Unilever, even before I was taken on by the NHS and I was trying to get work as a freelancer. The BBC is one of the big opportunities for magazine writers, but certainly for in-house jobs they demand degrees. Since I've always wanted to do something like this, simply because I love writing in all its forms, I applied to do a degree at nearby BSU (oh, we do like our acronyms don't we?) .

And I got in.

Once I had established I could get some -if not all-- of the funding I needed (more on that on another occasion) I then had to decide when Angry Robot offered me a deal whether to pull out of the application or stay in. I'd already deferred it by one year, so I couldn't do it again.

The life of a freelance writer is precarious. Deals can dry up as abruptly as they appear, and it seemed to me that if I can use some of the material I'm writing for Angry Robot as course-work, there's no reason why I can't actually pursue the degree while writing.

The course offers me exposure to a number of writing elements that I would otherwise have no exposure to, such as scriptwriting, will (heopefully) allow me to network with a number of potential employers as a freelancer or as staff.

I'm hoping that I may even be able to put in a few hours a week at the BEH. If I'm honest, I miss the girls -- but don't tell them that. They'll think I'm getting soft.

More on this will follow, but I have to make my packed lunch and slip it into my satchel. :)

Posted by Colin Harvey

Cons always flash by, but Bristolcon was especially short and sweet.

Even coming from only a few miles away, we almost didn't make it in time: Bristol's notorious traffic was gridlocked, and it was only as we entered the hotel that we realized that with the student's returning for the new term, literally tens of thousands of extra cars would be pouring into the city centre. Others weren't so lucky, and attendees trickled through the door on a regular basis, culminating in a timetable re-schedule due to guest Charles Butler's lateness.

Kate and I did a little last-minute goody-bag stuffing, having found some chapbooks in the attic the day before, then we had an all too short chat with GoH Alastair Reynolds, who's a very nice guy, and Paul Cornell signed Kate's programme for our nephew Josh, who's a massive Dr. Who fan. Since my editor at Angry Robot is also a British Fantasy Society luminary, Lee and I dived out for a quick ten or fifteen minute interview for the forthcoming BFS book of interviews with SF writers.

Then we took the last panel --"Fantasy and SF – where is the dividing line? (And Does Anybody Care?)," in the company of Juliet McKenna and Eugene Byrne, who of whom showed themselves to be erudite, intelligent and witty panellists. In fact, what I had feared was an almost mined-out topic proved to be so interesting that with the audience participation we had to wind it up prematurely to avoid running over. Then I read from the opening chapter to Winter Song before grabbing some dinner.

It was a terrific afternoon and evening, and it was really good to meet Amanda again (sorry we didn't get a chance to chat properly!) and Nick Waller. The toss-up for the longest journey was fought out between Lee -who travelled down from York- and Chris Lake and Sue, who travelled all the way up from Falmouth.

It was also great to see Neil Beynon and Gemma -who ducked over from Aberdare-- and John and Pat Hawkes-Reed, Nick Walters, Jim Mortimore, Gareth L Powell, Andy Bigwood and the rest of the Future Bristol Massive, as well as Gareth's wife Becky and his brother Huw, also a writer. Hopefully Simon Gurr will make it to the next meeting in the King William on the 26th!

Finally, massive kudos are due to Cheryl Morgan, Meg and Jo Hall and her cohorts, and Philppa for making the whole thing happen.

Okay, so that was a longer list than an acceptance speech on Oscar night, but unlike Eastercon with its 1000-odd members, every single person on that list was important. They gave their time, energy and money to make it such a great little con.

Here's looking forward to next year.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Six days to Winter Song's release, and one day to the con.

I survived what felt like a car crash of an interview with Original FM; not their fault but I ran late due to heavy traffic, and when I got into the interview itself, my brain took a holiday. Kate said it wasn't too bad, but I was acutely aware of wasting precious seconds on fripperies. One gets so little time that every moment is precious.

But on the positive side, Jo tells me that the books to be given away have arrived. Hurrah!

No blog tomorrow, but maybe I'll treat y'all to a review...

Posted by Colin Harvey

Some time ago Sharon K. Reamer, the Assistant Editor of Allegory took time out of her hectic schedule to interview me. You can see the results here.

Since the interview the North American paperback release of all AR's 2009 UK list has been put back to early 2010 but I forgot to tell Allegory in time, so it never got corrected. Bad bad me.

But if you live in the US or Canada and you're impatient --and remember, according to the ads now, "impatience is a virtue, impatience gets thing done" [Oh, how I would so like to smack the twat who dreamt that campaign up]-- you can still get the books electronically, or in the words of my agent "You can order the book from Book Depository UK, in US dollars, with FREE shipping for £6.83. It will come in a handy package from the Royal Mail in about five days. " Bad bad Jenny. :)

Posted by Colin Harvey

Only three days to go.

I've now got my ARC of Winter Song, so even if the free copies of the book don't arrive in time for the launch at Bristolcon, I've still got something to read from! It feels strange holding a printed copy after it's been an idea only for so long.

Because the book isn't being launched until October 1st, getting it from the printers to the con by the 26th was always going to be tight. But if they don't arrive in time, we'll take names and addresses of those interested and --assuming we have enough copies-- will post them out after the con.

Jo tells me that everything else is in place, so turn up, have a few drinks and stop by for a chat!

In other news, I'm back on Original FM's Breakfast Show on Friday to talk up both the con and the book.

See you at the con, I hope!

Posted by Colin Harvey

My Fantasycon was sadly truncated by being on holiday in Wales on the Friday, and needing to be home for Sunday afternoon to allow me to catch-up.

Still, even a few hours with friends and colleagues was worth the cross-country trek, and besides shring (or even sharing!) a curry with Rob, Sharon and Derek, I got back in time to witness the unscripted --or rather semi-scripted-- chaos that is the British Fantasy Awards presentation.

Angry Robot sponsored the award for Best Cover Art, while AR Editor Lee Harris and his Hub co-editor Alasdair Stuart gave a brilliant speech as they presented the Best Anthology Award.

The full awards list is:

Highlights of the con were Sharon's boots; catching up with Marc and Lee, and Andy Remic as well as Kim Lakin-Smith, Sam Stone, Raven Dane and Paul Meloy; putting the fear of God into Saxon Bullock, even if only momentarily; and meeting Carole Johnstone and her sister (Lauren?) and catching up with James from Worldcon.

Lowlights were seeing Paul score 0 from 3 on the awards -and I'm convinced that having two stories on one ballot worked against him-- and not having enough time to catch up with Ian Whates and Mike Shevdon.

Still, there's always next time....

Posted by Colin Harvey

As a literary agent, one of the perks of my job is that I get to travel to several writers conferences each year. As I write this, I'm about to head off to the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Conference and I'm smack in the middle of my usual routine--sheer panic.

Here's a trade secret: literary agents are just as nervous about meeting new writers, as the writers are about meeting them. Agents want to make a good impression on the conference attendees, since all of them are prospective clients. It's like an entire weekend-long job interview for the agent, where you're getting judged not only on your demeanor, but on the quality of your conversation.

Ostensibly, I'm invited to these conferences to share my experience as a publishing industry professional; to drop pithy bits of wisdom into the ears of hungry writers who have paid large sums of money to attend. But I'm also invited to take pitches, which are private appointments where a writer has ten minutes to tell me why I should represent their book.

Many writers find the process of pitches to be excruciatingly painful--it's a very difficult thing to briefly summarize a novel and convince someone to read it. I don't find them quite as painful as the writers, but I've come to realize that they're the main source of my conference anxiety. Here I am, face to face with someone who may be a really great person. . .and their book isn't the right one for me to represent. And I have to crush their dreams in person when I say "No".

I've had writers visibly shake in front of me. I've had writers beg me to read their books. I've had writers approach me with wonderful book ideas that are in genres that I don't represent at all. I have to say "No" to all of them.

Publishing is a tough business, particularly during this recession. It's hard for writers to find agents; hard for agents to sell books; and hard for publishers to find people to buy books. We're all on this crazy rollercoaster together, working to bring great books to new readers. So for this conference, when I say "No", it will still mean "No", but it will also mean: "Don't give up. I know how you feel. Keep writing because one day things will get better. If the first novel or the fifteenth novel doesn't sell, don't stop writing them, if it's something you truly love to do."

I'll still have to crush dreams in person, but maybe I'll get to meet some new friends, too. I'll get to have cupcakes with a crowd of writers who talk to me on Twitter. I'll get to complain about the state of publishing with my fellow agents and editors. And even though it will still feel like a weekend-long job interview, it's for a job that I love to do.

Posted by Colin Harvey

This morning is our last one here for nine days. The next time we wake up in our own bed, Kate will be going back to work, and the mornings will be darker for about twenty minutes later. It'll also be the beginning of a frenetic period as I'm headed off to Bath Spa University as a mature student, and all that week I'll be having refresher driving lessons.

But in the meantime, we leave for Fishguard in about an hours time, taking the motorway across the Severn Bridge and into Wales to Swansea, then onto progressively narrower roads until heading north at Haverfordwest.

We come back on Saturday, but Kate will drop me at Bristol Parkway, from where I'll train it to Nottingham for the first of three events in four Saturdays to promote the launch of Winter Song.

On a personal note, it'll be good to catch up with Rob, Sharon and Paul, as well as --of course-- Marc and Lee at Angry Robot.

I'll see you in Nottingham on the 19th, Bristol on the 26th or at Forbidden Planet in London on the 10th of October - or here on about the 21st or 22nd September.

Have fun - I intend to!

Posted by Colin Harvey

Jed Hartman, the fiction editor at Strange Horizons once told me that the writers who editors prize most are the reliable ones. The young Robert Silverberg built an entire career for almost a decade on being a writer who could dig editors out of a hole by filling an unexpected gap in a contents page.

I've never edited a magazine so I have no idea of the tedium that must be involved in wading through four hundred, five hundred, a thousand submissions a month. God knows I wouldn't want to do it, and have enormous admiration for editors like van Gelder and Sheila Williams, who month in month out, year in year out produce fine issues time after time. So a writer who can deliver on a regular basis must be a jewel among authors for an editor. The temptation to take a story from them and delegate slushpile-reading to an intern must be unbelievably intense.

But as a reader, I'm not hugely happy at seeing the same names on the contents list every issue. If I don't rate a writer and they are one of six names every month, I'm far more likely to give up on a magazine than if they are only an occasional visitor to the contents list.

I've been repeatedly critical .of Gordon van Gelder, both in the reviews and in discussions with other fans. Last year Robert Reed appeared in six consecutive issues, and while Reed generates ideas and writes sound stories, I often find his prose cold.

But on a whim, I went through this year's contents lists of both Asimovs and F&SF, and tallied up how many serial contributors they carried, and what I found was an object lesson in how inaccurate assumptions can prove to be.

I ignored reprints, and looked at percentages, rather than absolute numbers, since screening out the reprints lowers the number of original stories F&SF can carry.

Asimovs has carried 66 stories so far this year (I don't have the Decmber issue) compared to 64 in F&SF. The latter carried more novelets than short stories, but Asimov's has a novella almost every issue. Of Asimov's 66 stories, 48 --73%-- are by 'one-shot' authors, who may return in January 2010, may even become next year's serial contributors; or who may never appear again. Only 27% are by serial contributors.

What of F&SF?

Their stats are astonishingly, almost identical. They have a fractionally lower number of one-shot contributors with 45 (70%), but that doesn't tell the whole story.

Asimov's 18 'repeat' contributions come from 6 authors; so Nancy Kress, Damien Broderick and 4 other authors are averaging 3 stories a year. F&SF's 19 'repeat' contributions come from 8 different authors. Only Albert E. Cowdrey and Robert Reed have appeared more than twice, with 4 and 3 appearances each.

If anything more 'out-of-field' contributions appear in van Gelder's pages; Sheila Williams preferring to take stories from up-and-coming authors. Both strategies work for their various editors.

These remarkable similarities don't mean an awful lot, except that it's dangerous to make assumptions without checking one's facts first.

I'll be more careful next time.

Posted by Colin Harvey

I've been overwhelmed by people contacting me after my blog post on Sunday, in which I described what Aliette de Bodard diagnosed as 'post-novel ennui.' I also warned that for a few days my blogs might even make less sense than usual -- a warning that should have applied to that blog itself!

I wrote that 'I was given some news on Friday of a personal nature.'

What I should have said was 'of a confidential nature.'

My apologies to anyone who read more into that than I intended. Several of the people present at the Friday night discussions are on Facebook or other networks, and I need to be aware that any confidences that I reveal could get back to those present. A good way to lose friends is to gossip on public fora, and I learned in Unilever that anything one writes on the net can eventually find its way into the public domain.

So at the risk of infuriating you all, I'm going to remain frustratingly cryptic about the news that rocked me. I have managed to start to come to terms with it by fictionalising some of it, a process that always helps me find an emotional equilibrium.

I was going to write that you can be reassured that I'm not ill, but that was something else that emerged after I had blogged. Monday morning I work up dehydrated, with a headache and a mouthful of ulcers. But clearer headed than I had been for days. I'm on the mend now, but for about 24 to 48 hours I felt a little off-colour. So apologies if that post about making no sense made er, no sense...

And for all of you wrote to me offering support, thank you very much indeed. I'm touched more than I can say.

Posted by Colin Harvey

In a week when the BBC is showing a dramatization of the fall of Lehmann Brothers, the investment bank that had a bigger GDP than Pakistan, and the G-20 summit investigates bankers' bonus payments, the issue of what banks actually DO is suddenly centre-stage again.

I'm as baffled anyone why we have to pay have our own resources 'managed' for us. It seems perilously close to a sophisticated form of protection racket to me. I tried reading Robert Peston's 'Who Runs Britain?' but after a stunning autobiographical opening, Peston's narrative bogs down fatally in a quagmire of detail leaving me little the wiser beyond that the rich have got enormously richer under Brown, and that basically he's handed them a printing press, so it's no longer effectively the government running Britain (or -by implication- America or any other political state; the super-rich are a virtual state in themselves).

So I'm enormously grateful to Roger Bootle, over at the Daily Telegraph for identifying both what bankers actually do, and what -admittedly only in his opinion-- is wrong with the financial sector.

Bootle lists six points including the mosts telling, that the banks effectively operate a cartel in setting the prices, and that bankers have so much money that the raising of charges to what are punitive levels to most people have no impact on any bankers who have to pay for themselves.

[The head of the Financial Services Authority, Lord] Turner has been heavily criticised for his suggestion that much of what goes on in financial markets is "socially useless". But...he is partly right. The problem is that the rest of what goes on in the City is socially vital, namely the provision of finance to households and businesses. Moreover...it is not easy to separate one from the other.

It's certainly a more considered reaction than the head of the CBI, who seems intent on accusing anyone critical of bankers as being motivated by 'income envy.'

Posted by Colin Harvey

I've been fairly remiss with my blogging since Kate's birthday, and sending Damage Time into Angry Robot.

Part of that is because I worked two full days --on Wednesday and Friday, and followed that with drinks after work on Friday. On top of that we've had guests since Thursday, so it's been incredibly difficult to get any quality time at the keyboard. What little time I've had left after answering correspondence has been spent reading F&SF for the next review. I've not posted any reviews for a week, and that is partly adding to the boiling stew of what passes for thought at the moment. I hate being behind schedule.

I think part of the reason I'm finding it so hard to concentrate is because I've been focused on the novel for so long that without it I'm anchorless. But I'm not yet ready to start on the next one.

It's also partly because I'm supposed to be on holiday for heaven's sake, and my subconscious is saying no! You should be outside! Or doing something trivial and pointless (like this blog...)

And the last part is because I was given some news on Friday of a personal nature, so I can't say much about it, except that two days on I'm still trying to assimilate it, and it's made me question my own judgement in a way that's not entirely comfortable.

I'm sure that given a another couple of days I'll be back to normal, but in the meantime, don't be too surprised if the next blogs and reviews make even less sense than they normally do...

Posted by Colin Harvey

It's Mrs H's birthday -- she's 22 again, so much dog-walking, lunching at a pub and general lazing around.

Especially as I delivered Damage Time this morning.

Right, that's me done. I wish all days were this short...

Posted by Colin Harvey

I've had some interesting discussions lately with Gareth L Powell and Jason Sanford, the latter whose stories dominated the 2008 Interzone Readers Poll. "The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain" has justifiably been selected by Hartwell & Cramer for their latest Year's Best.

The conversation has been about whether there has been a new trend in SF, or simply the extension of an old one, the New Weird, typified in such novels as Perdido Street Station. Jason believes that New Weird really only covers fantasy, whereas the new trend is much more about SF.

Actually, what spawned this post was the discussion over Jason's use of the term 'Sci-Fi' in the discussions about 'Sci-Fi Strange.' Some readers took him to task. You can see Jason's further comments through the link to the subject, but it's caused me to examine and admit to my own motives.

I personally abhor all the variations on Sci-Fi. The most recent example I've encountered of its use as a perjorative came from an odious little tick at a talk I gave to the Keynsham reading group a couple of years ago. His lip visibly curled as he asked why I wrote "all that sci-fi stuff." It simply reinforced my views on the abbreviation and its (mis-)use.

And I don't buy into the theory that people will think 'SF' is necessarily an abbreviation for San Francisco. Depending on the context, I think that it's very unlikely that people will think one is reading a city.

I actually prefer 'spec-fic,' since I prefer good fantasy to bad SF, but apparently some people believe that 'speculative' is a synonym for 'not commissioned.'

And the reality is that oddly enough, I didn't actually mind Jason's coining the particular term. Whether the adherents of 'SF' like it or not, the abominable label is gaining currency. My own publisher described Winter Song as 'Rock hard sci-fi adventure,' while my own job description for Suite101 is Featured Writer for Sci-Fi and Fantasy.

So there seems little alternative but to suck it up, to use an American phrase. Get over it.

Because ultimately the labels we use are secondary to the subject matter. Whether writers like Gareth, Jason, Paolo Bacigalupi and Ted Chiang are writing SF or sci-fi is irrelevant; it's the language, the stories that count.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Poor Alice. Our little blue roan cocker spaniel has gotten used to being an only dog since Chloe died last year.

Last week we found a baby hedgehog lying in the hedgerow in broad daylight, so we took him home and rang the British Hedgehog Preservation Society for advice. On their suggestion we fed him some cooked chicken breast, and water with sugar and salt to drink. We named him Spike (of course). His eating what Alice considers her chicken made Alice very jealous. Later on he clambered out his box and did a runner across the graden, but had o hold onto him until it was dark enough to let him out. And then he was gone.

No sooner has Alice recovered from the shock of some spiny interloper eating her chicken than Kate's sister calls in a panic; their regular dog-sitter has let them down -- can we take Phoebe, their dog? No problem, Kate tells them. So this weekend Alice has to suffer the indignity of a younger, cuter dog continually presenting us with her ball to be thrown for her to chase. Alice promptly retires, muttering, to a darkened corner from which to scowl out at the world.

And as if that weren't bad enough, next weekend Kate's parents will be coming to stay with their dog Meg. Not only is Meg every bit as bouncy as Phoebe, but she isn't scared of Alice, so will pester her mercilessly, for all Alice's growling. For 48 hours, we will have three dogs in the house.

Poor Alice. It's enough to make an old dog pack her bags and head for the animal shelter, herself...

Posted by Colin Harvey

It's just after mid-day, and I feel as if I've done a full day's work already!

We were up at 5.15 so I could get down to the Original FM Studios. This all came about because while I was away on holiday about a month ago, Gareth got in touch with the Bristol Evening Post to give Future Bristol a little push. They duly ran the story, which led to Original FM inviting me onto their Breakfast Show.

So I did a little 6-minute spot with the lovely Roz Hutchings, who somehow manages to get up every day at some truly unearthly hour to do her job, and still manages to be alert -unlike me-- and is a truly professional presenter. She made me feel welcome, and relaxed.

If I can work out how to upload the MP3 to Facebook, LJ or Wordpress of the interview, I'll happily share it, so if you're a tech-wizard get in touch. Or if you're not but you're interested, drop me a line via e-mail, and I'll send it to you as an attachment.

I'm hoping to go back in a few weeks to about the forthcoming Bristolcon, and the official launch of Winter Song, but that's a few weeks away.

Meanwhile, since it's late, I should catch a little nap...

Posted by Colin Harvey

A few weeks ago Angry Robot sent me a dictaphone on which to record the opening chapter of Winter Song for the website.

Great, I thought. How hard can reading from a page be?

Bloody difficult, actually.

For starters remind me never to let Lee talk me through brain surgery. His "It's easy to use. Simply ensure the button on the side isn't pointing to 'hold' and then press the record button" omits the nine hundred other buttons, including the one that erases everything you've just read...

Then there's Alice's tendency to bark at the sound of a car door slamming three miles away. Not sure how much Lee can clean the tape up, so I'm erring on the side of caution. OK, so that limits when I can 'perform' to when Kate was walking Alice, but that's okay.

But then there are the grand-children visiting next door, screaming their bloody heads off. OK. Slam window shut.

So how is it that all of a sudden my throat feels like it's full of gravel?

Not to mention getting tongue-tied. And while I'm at it, I must remember in future to write in short, simple non-alliterative sentences.

Never mind. I'm sure that when I eventually get this finished, you'll be able to click on the site, and it'll all be worth it.

Just ignore the throat-clearing, the stumbling, the dog barking and the children next door screaming!

Posted by Colin Harvey

Yesterday at the Kennington Oval in London, one of those rare events happened, and at the moment it's too early to say whether cricketer Stuart Broad has just ascended to the next level of ability on a permanant basis, in which case he will soon be world class, or whether -as I suspect- he briefly transcended his own limitations.

Cricket is much more similar to baseball than many people realize. In both a bowler (pitcher) must try to get a batsman (hitter) out by bamboozling him with a ball bowled (pitched) at him. In both the batsman has to try to hit it. Of course there are differences, but the basics are the same.

What Broad achieved was to change the course of not just a game, but perhaps even an entire sporting summer. The Ashes are for cricket fans the world over the equivalent of the Superbowl or the Stanley Cup, and suddenly people who have no interest in sport are talking cricket. Major sporting success can lift an entire nation and, raise productivity.

At the point Broad came onto bowl, the Australians were progressing serely toward a major first innings lead, and retaining The Ashes. Broad suddenly found the ability to make the bowl move first one way and then the other in the same delivery. By taking the top five Australian batsmen's wickets in the space of an hour, Broad not only ripped out the heart of their innings, he induced the panic which allowed the other England bowlers to clean up. Commentators were comparing it to two previous occasions, in 1961 and 1981. Such a spell of bowling happens that infrequently.

And to put it in context for SF fans, it was as if a fairly minor veteran writer suddenly produced a major seminal work. Two comparisons are Frank Herbert, who never before or after produced anything as visionary, as ground-breaking or as acclaimed as the original Dune. But let's hope Broad's sudden emergence is more akin to Vernor Vinge's after he wrote A Fire Upon The Deep, and became --after almost thirty years- a major writer.

Now that I've finished recording the opening chapter of Winter Song for the Angry Robot website, I'm going to go and listen to what happens today.

Posted by Colin Harvey

The road down into Keynsham from Queen Charlton (and therefore from South West Bristol) takes a long sweeping right hand curve before dropping steeply down towards Keynsham. Drivers coming from Bristol have to slow down sharply from 60 to 40, and then soon after to 30mph. Conversely, drivers leaving Keynsham have to accelerate hard to get up that long incline, then suddenly find themselves suddenly accelerating.

The walk through the fields takes you to a gate, and then to walk back into Keynsham, it's necessary to cross the road to avoid walking (without a pavement or verge) with your back to the traffic. It's always busy, especially during rush hour, and with the mornings closing in, it's becoming especially so.

Yesterday morning was nothing unusual; I had to cross the road to walk for a hundred yards, before crossing back again, so I looked right, saw a white van, but a good distance away. Look left, the traffic coming up the hill had an unusually large gap. Looked right again; the white van was still far enough away that it was safe, but I gave a little kick off as I marched Alice across.

A good thing I did. Maybe that kick was some subconscious reaction to a sound. As I crossed the white line in the middle of the road, I heard a whoosh behind me, and a dark van passed by, perhaps 3 feet away. Had I been a couple of seconds slower, or not taken that kick, he would have plowed into me at somewhere between 30 and 60 mph.

There was no horn, so I assumed he had no more registered my presence than I had his. I think that in the gloom, and with the sweeping bend, his car -which had no lights on-- had simply blended into the high hedges that border the road.

I looked. Twice. But I never saw him.

Only afterwards did it sink in how close he'd been.

If you drive a dark car early in the morning, or late in the evening, put your lights on. Please.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Those of you travel a lot know that returning from a trip is in some ways harder than actually going on it.

There's all the things that you've ignored in the last few days beforehand ("I'll do it when I get back.") There's the distraction of the trip itself. And then there's the fact that the world doesn't stop, and while you're digging yourself out from under that mountain of paperwork, other people keep adding to it.

Blogging a week in arrears has allowed me to catch up on Damage Time, and to recover the part of the file that was corrupted en route. I've almost caught up on crits for the group -- I should finish the last one tomorrow. I've even managed to keep in touch with some of the new friends from Worldcon.

But the observant among you may have noticed that the reviews have been conspicuously absent.

Part of that is because I've found it hard to read, which is unusual for me -- normally I'm a voracious devourer of books (just as well, really, for a reviewer!). Part of it is finding the time to write them.

But the reviews should resume tomorrow, and will come comparatively thick and fast between now and the end of the month.

By contrast, the blog posts will thin out a little, although con season approaches, and for the first time in many years, there'll be a con in Bristol. So expect more about that, and whatever else catches my eye.

Until then.

Posted by Colin Harvey

It's a testament to the beneficial properties of Worldcon that even faced with a fourteen or fifteen-hour journey, I was as chilled as chilled could be in the taxi to Dorval Airport .

Even finding that the US had changed their documentary requirements didn't faze me, but two hours delay on the runway at JFK, two hyper-active Dutch Barbies blocking me from the aisle all night while they took endless flash-lit shots of themselves, and by the time I hit London to find the Heathrow Express one-way fare more expensive than my tickets to and from London and Bristol, and I was my usual cranky self.

I fell asleep on the settee at about 7.30 pm, then crawled off to bed, where I awoke at half past midnight and couldn't get back to sleep. Posted some stuff at 2am, then finally crawled back to bed. Still falling asleep in chairs.

Back to the positives. I had a blast. An absolute blast. To anyone asking "Should I go to Worldcon?" the answer is yes - even if you can't afford it, find the money somehow.

I have clarity on forward plans. I'm back on track with the novel, and the artwork is up here. North American publication of Winter Song has --together with the rest of the Angry Robot range-- been delayed until February 2010

But you can still get it from Book Depository UK, in US dollars, with FREE shipping for £6.84. It will come in a handy package from the Royal Mail in about five days. My agent orders all the UK editions of books that she wants that way, and you can get Winter Song in time for this holiday season. You'll notice the link points to Book Depository for you.

Actually writing this blog over the last week has been a weird experience, re-reading and editing scribbled and hastily typed notes a week after the event - it's allowed me to relive a fantastic few days after the events would have faded, but living in parallax has made it harder to adjust to the 'real' world -- whatever that is.

Posted by Colin Harvey

It's odd, but whereas on the last day of most cons I can't wait to be on my way (nothing personal, I just hate sitting around waiting to leave), with Worldcons I always feel an overwhelming sadness at having to leave at all. My friend Teri suggests it may because with each con we know more people, and we spend longer here than at most cons, so it becomes more like home.

Rise late and breakfast with Teri before heading for the SFWA table in the dealer's room for another signing session. Astonishingly, clear all but one of the books and meet again the lovely Carmel and Wade from the Angry Robot party (I hope I've remembered their names correctly), while Carol Pinchefsky takes lots of pictures while moaning how much I move as she's taking them.

Catch up briefly with Joe and Gay Haldeman, who in fronting the Rising Stars 101 panels last year proved so inspirational. Those panels were probably the final part of the jigsaw in getting me to pro status and I wish that they'd been run again this year, but I understand that they eat up a colossal amount of energy and time. Maybe next year - and if I go, I'd be happy to help out on the panels.

In all the excitement, I didn't mention Cheryl Morgan winning Best Fan Hugo, and in a year when Cheryl fought tooth and nail to help keep the Hugo for Best Semi-Prozine on next year's ballot, and secure deserved exposure for magazines like Interzone, Albedo One and Clarkesworld, that she should win seemed somehow fitting.

Say goodbye to Lee and Carol, and Matt and Tom, Teri and too many other people who I don't want to say goodbye to, and head off to the airport.

It seems like cheap symbolism that after five days of sunshine, when the plane took off from Dorval it should be raining, but it really was.

Real life has no sense of cliche.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Panel day. And on a slightly less narcissistic note, Hugo day.

I meet with Marco and talk about the detail on Winter Song, artwork concepts for Damage Time, and forward plans for the next couple of years. Run into Caitlin in the restaurant corridor, but saying goodbye when we go would mean interrupting her dessert, and somehow for all Caitlin's slim physique, I sense that coming between A Woman and Her Dessert is not a good idea...

Onto the first panel, on Is Climate Change Storyable? A hideously ugly word, but an interesting concept. Sadly the panel itself is marred by sub-standard moderating and two panelists who refuse to allow anyone else to interrupt their pontificating -- one of them the moderator himself. But Mark L. van Name -- who I'd read in a Dozois Year's Best years ago-- proved to be a thoughtful and erudite speaker, and the audience didn't seem to notice any tension, so that passed off okay. Speaking to Mark afterwards, he was philosophical, and hewould have been amused to know that soon after someone sought me out to complain that the two of us hadn't spoken as much as she would have liked!

A quick solitary dinner before meeting up with Laurence Schoen and the rest of the Codex crew. Sit with Elaine Isaak, but Matt and I have a 10 pm panel with Leah Bobet, so we all sneak out just as Neil Gaiman accepts a thoroughly deserved Best Novel Hugo for The Graveyard Book. That was about the only correct call that I made all evening. Aliette missed out on the Campbell, which was sad, especially by three votes - 158 to the winner's 161. Doctor Who lost out to Joss Whedon. I wonder how much having two episodes cannibalized its votes? Other Hugos went to Nancy Kress - her first in seventeen years, Elizabeth Bear for the second consecutive year, and Ted Chiang.

The panel --ironically dubbed Young Turks, ironic since neither Matt nor I will see our 40th birthdays again-- is a revelation; we expected maybe one or two people, but over a dozen turn up to hear Matt, Leah and I talk about hints to help aspiring writers break through to that critical first sale. We make it as informal as we can, and with some really nice questions from Tom Crossfield it seems to me that we've provided some of them with food for thought. I certainly found it useful. It's nice to know that some people put panels ahead of parties. Not that I'm one of them, judging by previous nights. In fact, I nearly crash the parties again, but with a night flight next day, I display rare common sense and duck out

Posted by Colin Harvey

A second Codex breakfast at the same venue, although there are fewer of us, I catch up with the affable Lawrence Schoen, who sold his books through the same SLF table as I did last year, and I also meet Eric James Stone, Tom Crossfield and Keffi Kehrli for the first time.

More mooching:

I'm acutely aware that I'm not going to any panels, but having sat in the audience for 17 of them last year on the Rising Stars thread, and sat on the panels for 4 more I figure that I'm allowed a pass on this year's so instead I meet some more people at the SFWA desk, and progress to the autographing session at 1.30pm.

I decide to take some books I've brought along anyway, even though no one will come.

Surprise! People come!

The Albedo One boys turn up, and we arrange dinner. Ben Jeapes -who I met on the Stroll with the Stars walk the day before- also arrives, and realizes that I'm the same Colin Harvey who edited Future Bristol. It turns out that he's just reviewed it for Vector. Happy coincidence.

And nicest of all, Sandy Kydd and her partner Bart R. Leib, both of whom I met last year have been looking for me. They've started a lovely cross-genre magazine, which though small looks gorgeous. I wish them well.

Off to lunch with my agent, who I've not really had a chance to talk to much, but Jenny is full of drive and purpose and by the end of the meal I'm happy that we have a great set of plans.

I sit around for some of the afternoon with the multi-talented Elaine Isaak, fellow Swimming Kangaroo author and Codex-ian, and who came over for Eastercon, then successfully find and purchase Kate's Peanut Butter ("Come home with 2kgs of peanut butter -- or don't come home.")

Dinner with the Albedo One team, and then attend my only panel as an audience member on the small press and what they offer that the big boys don't. I may cover that in a separate blog, as it was fascinating, and space precludesit.

The parties start slowly with Dave Murphy and I ambling from room to room before I meet up with Kaaren and her supporters and the Angry Robot team again. Lee Harris turns out to have a budding future as a replacement for Stephen Fry on QI (so what did Britain give the world in each decade from the 50s to the 90s, and what did North America provide? And which was more significant?).

And apparently Lee looks about 30. Boy, don't some people wear thick beer goggles.....

Posted by Colin Harvey

The Codex Writers Group have arranged a group breakfast today and tomorrow, but without wi-fi I have to guess which branch of Eggspectations is the venue. I guess at the Rue St Jacques branch, but on arrival I'm met with blank stares by the waiters when I ask about a booking, so sit on my own. Cheryl Morgan takes the table next to me, and while waiting for her breakfast partner arrive, we chat about Bristolcon, and the possibility of making this year's event a pilot for a full-scale con.

As I'm about to leave, I see the Codex-ians sitting at the back. Damn.

After that I go for a Stroll with the Stars (the only day of four that I actually make it) and meet my fellow Angry Robot-eers Lauren Beukes and Kaaron Warren. We amble around Montreal Old Town continuing a fine tradition started all the way back at Denvention.

Because I was away on holiday until the Sunday before traveling out, I was only able to read the manuscripts for the critique session on the flight out. Spend the morning typing up the comments for the session, since even I can't read my own handwritten comments.The session itself is good and hopefully the three writers got much food for thought out of it.

Spend the afternoon mooching before heading for the Angry Robot launch party.

Which I suspect may go down in Worldcon folklore - including the moment Hotel Security arrived to close it down, before re-locating it to the party floor. If anything, that only added to the fun - especially when a Klingon stomped up to the robot, which yelled "Uh-oh! Klingons!" and whoop-whooped a la classic Trek alarm. When left alone, the robot amused itself by humming the opening bars of TOS theme tune.

My only concern is what that bugger Harris got on video...just the thought of what idiocies I may have uttered to the robot while he was filming us makes me break out in a cold sweat....

I see the artwork for Winter Song as a cover properly for the first time. Wow. It looks completely different with text on. Even without the text it was good, but now it's staggering.

Kaaron Warren brings half of Australia as moral support, But Lauren Beukes needed no reinforcements. Aliette de Bodard came from supporting TL Morganfield, who narrowly missed out on the Sideways Award, which was won by another Robot-eer, Chris Roberson.

Too many people to name check everyone, but visitors include the New York crew of Matt Kressel, D. Mercutio Rivera and Alaya Dawn Johnson, Paul Cornell, Jonathan Strahan and Darryl Gregory and the lovely Caitlin Sweet, both from Canada.

I have no idea what time it finished, which is always the mark of a damn good party...

Posted by Colin Harvey

Pre-registration makes collecting my hard-copy programming stuff easy, and before you can say "Palais de Congres," which is the name of the vast barn-like structure that we rattle around in like peas in a tumble-dryer, I'm off and running. Or rather, mooching, a slow, semi-aimless stroll, often accompanied by perusing of documents or thousand-yard-stare into space.

Mooch into Dave Murphy and the rest of the splendid Albedo One team and make vague arrangements to meet later, but spend most of the morning orienting myself. Within a few days the place will feel as comfortable as an old pair of jeans, but right now it's more like new shoes, all awkwardness and friction in odd spots.

By mid-day find the SFWA table in dealers room and learn that I am not booked to do a solid seven hour stint as I feared, but I stick around anyway, because it's nice to have somewhere to anchor. Matt Rotundo from the Codex group also loiters and gloats because he's sold two t-shirts at $15 each. I resist the urge to point out that it's quality not quantity that counts, and my solitary sale of an SFWA Bulletin for $5 will help some aspiring writer develop and is therefore much more significant.

Mid-afternoon I sidle off for a quick cup of coffee with Aliette de Bodard and TL Morganfield. Lovely to see Aliette -who is having a fantastic year- again, and Traci seems very nice.

Back in the Dealer's Room catch up with Sharon Lee and Steve Miller who was on the same panel as me last year, and meet Steven H. Silver, who has traveled widely has a vast store of reminiscences.

Escape at 6pm for dinner with Jenny and my fellow clients. I'm stunned to discover that the husband of one lived only a few miles away from me in the UK before re-locating to New York.

Crash the Tor Party, and with the Albedo One team and Matt hog one corner, while Neil Gaiman and seven or eight acolytes lock themselves in a washroom for a suspiciously long time. Ventured out of the party with a bunch of New Yorkers -Matt Kressel, D. Mercutio Rivera and Alaya Dawn Johnson. I suspect the latter thought I was a stalker until she realized I was the judge of the SLF Travel Grant which she won-- but when they talk of hitting the bars at 12.30 am, retire gracefully to bed.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Another internet free day today.

After my night at the Countryside Hotel, up early and off to London City Airport. The hotel night manager offers to get me a cab, but I've already booked it. At Stratford Tube Station I find that the DLR isn't the shortest route to London City Airport, but I get a nice view of the new Olympic Stadium and Millenium Dome en route.

London City Airport is a madhouse, and the self-service machine stubbornly refuses to play, but a helpful attendant sends me to the baggage drop-off and they sort me out. The airport itself is okay, and allows one to watch the planes taking off, unlike the miserable bastards at Heathrow who want to bore people into buying more stuff.

The flight to Geneva is punctuated by either the guy in front or behind me emitting the most sulpherous farts throughout the entire flight. Unless it's the women sitting next to me...who probably think that it's me...

On the ground at Geneva I've already been warned that the flight is delayed by 1 hour 45, which means that I have 2 and 1/2 hours in a building site dotted with the occasional Swiss watch shop.

At take-off time I learn that there's going to be another 1/2 hour delay...which turns into an hour when a passenger fails to appear but their luggage has to be off-loaded (huh?). And then the captain announces that there'll be a further delay while they take on more fuel. Presumably some has evaporated while we sit on the runway.

Finally take off 3 hours 15 late. The stewardesses are as charming as Air Canada stewardesses always are, which is to say about as welcoming as concentration camp guards. They seem to have an aversion to distributing more than a few drops of water and by the end of the flight I have a pounding headache and dehydration induced cramp (one request for water took 3 attempts and 40 minutes to yield water).

Still, I watch films. Watchmen is great, but the soundtrack is 3 seconds out, and the sound of a fist hitting a jaw before we see the blow is disconcerting. When that finishes I decide to watch She's Not That Into You, which is surprisingly good. Unfortunately, 10 minutes before the end, the crew decides to stop the film and reset all the sets. There isn't enough time to watch it all again. Maybe I'll rent the video.

At this rate it'll be another 12 years before I fly Air Canada again.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

As I type this, I'm sitting at Montreal Dorval Airport, waiting to board the flight to New York, where I'll catch the BA flight to Heathrow. Worldcon is over, and I'm as sad as I always am.

I've had no internet access for the last week -- my laptop stubbornly refused to connect in either the hotel (via dial-up in the bedroom or wi-fi in the reception) or in the convention centre.

But in some ways it's been a blessing in disguise. It's allowed me to actually do things and soak up the atmosphere without having to sit typing for ages. It's curiously liberating to be free of outside distractions, and above all it's allowed me time to think, while in the company of people with whom I share a passion, and who in turn spark off ideas.

But rather than not blog at all, I'm going to post a week behind, rather like the Nebula Awards anthologies are the Year's Best a year after all the other Year's Best.

So more will come later, and then on a daily basis.

Posted by Colin Harvey

...this is my timetable for Worldcon.

Thursday:

Staffing the SFWA table in the Dealer's Room 12:00 - 19:00

Friday:

2-147 13:00 2hr D-Royer Creative Writing

création; Writing Workshop K; David D. Levine, Jenny Rae Rappaport, Colin Harvey

Critique session for previously submitted manuscripts

Saturday:

3-157S 13:30 30min Autographs

Peadar Ó Guilín, Jean-Pierre Guillet, Karen Haber, Colin Harvey, John Helfers, Laurel Anne Hill

Sunday:

4-236 15:30 1hr 30min

P-518A Literature in English

Is Climate Change Storyable?

Colin Harvey, Doug Fratz, Geoffrey A. Landis, Mark L. Van Name

If there’s one thing clear about climate change, it’s that we won’t fix it instantly or simply. How easy, then, is it to write SF

stories making sense of the problem and describing solutions? Do you have to set the camera to fast forward?

4-362 22:00 1hr

P-522B Creative Writing/Écriture et création

Young Turks

Colin Harvey, Derwin Mak, Leah Bobet, Matthew Rotundo, Maura McHugh,

Peter Atwood

Writers who’ve recently begun selling stories and novels talk about how they’ve arrived on their particular beachhead.

I'll also be attending as many as I can of the 9 am walks, as it's a nice way to meet new people, to get vaguely fit, and see some of Montreal. And I'll be at some of the parties as well. Feel free to stop by and say Hi!

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

A call for writers has gone out from Anticipation, the 67the World Science Fiction Convention.

The Writers Workshops at Anticipation are small session workshops for either experienced or beginning writers based on manuscripts submitted in advance. These workshops provide Anticipation members the opportunity to have their manuscripts evaluated by selling writers and industry professionals who enjoy helping them grow as writers. Many of these professionals have taught at residency workshops, such as Clarion, or in creative writing programs.

Among the moderators, writers, and experienced professionals who have agreed to give two hours of their time to the writing workshops are:.

* Laura Anne Gilman

* Richard Chwedyk

* P. C. Hodgell

* Nancy Kress

* David D. Levine

* John A. Pitts

* Karin Lowachee

* Eileen Gunn

* Jean Lorrah, Ph.D.

* Delia Sherman

* Tony Pi

* Lawrence Schoen

* Mike Shepherd Moscoe

* Colin Harvey

* Catherynne Valente

* Mindy Klasky

* Elizabeth Bear

* Jody Lynn Nye

* Mary Robinette Kowal

* Victoria Janssen

* Jay Lake

* Geoff Ryman

* Elissa Malcohn

* Larry Hodges

If you're interested, you can Email Oz Whiston at writers-workshop AT anticipationsf DOT ca. Read this first for the full terms and conditions.

Posted by Colin Harvey

'Here' being Bristol.

I'm not sure what the title of the Buffalo Springfield track is that opens with that line, but it seems appropriate.

First we had Future Bristol, which was launched at Eastercon. At about the same time, The Cafe of Ideas launched in Bath.

Then someone decided to organize a convention.

And now, there's this remarkable structure under construction at Spike Island in Bristol. The plan is to raise it barn-style in Victoria Park in Bristol a week next Saturday --25th July- and then to hold various events such as this one, which I got an invite to.

It's a discussion forum 'How to Prosper during the Coming Bad Years.' The invite said:

There's a feeling that even if the literary establishment don't rate SF, that the rest of the world are ignoring those critics and have accepted that SF is part of the zeitgeist -- and that if they're looking for answers to the issues concerning the world today, the answers more likely lie with SF than with -say- historical or romantic fiction.

I'm still not sure what's happening around here, but be sure that I'll be posting more about this between now and September. So watch this space...

Posted by Colin Harvey

I'm in danger of getting a social life.

Last week-end Kate and I went out three days on the spin, first to a hospital BBQ, then for dinner on the Saturday night, and finally the Keynsham Music Festival, which had some pretty good local acts on - one did a fine set of Cream, Hendrix and early Fleetwood Mac numbers.

And then on Wednesday, I popped up to London for the Harper Collins Author's Garden Party, which was held at the V & A Museum.

I say popped up, but with connections, it's about a three-hour journey each way. On the way, I dived into Paddington Stations Smiths to take a quick peek at the shelves for Angry Robot titles, and there was Kaaren Warren's Slights on sale, although sadly there was no sign of Lauren Beukes' Moxyland.

What really impressed me about Slights -aside from the quality of the writing-- was the production, and the little sidebars along the lines of "If you like this, you'll like" various titles.

Then to the Hoop and Toy to meet up with the Angry Robot team, and a couple of fellow authors. Blimey, does Mike Shevdon know his history (that was a rhetorical question by the way -- the answer is, yes he does, with a vengeance) while Andy Remic who'd I met at Eastercon is still every bit as colourful in person as his axe-wielding pic would suggest. I'm looking forward to catching up with their work when it comes out.

From there we made tracks to the Garden Party itself, which -due to the iffy weather- was held indoors. I managed to get within five yards of Alan Whicker, although I didn't recognize anyone else out of the literally hundreds of people, and to have a chat with an author of 'family-drama fiction,' which I guess used to be called Aga Sagas. She almost managed to conceal her look of total panic at being trapped with one of those, you know, sci-fi writers.

Sadly I had to make tracks just as the evening was getting interesting, before the photographers

began snapping Rem in a tux -- yes, I am the invisible writer. Shame I had to go so early-- still, there's always next year...

Posted by Colin Harvey

So I've been moved again in the day job, and this time the desk doesn't even have a pc; it's as if whatever few little things make this most dreary of mind-melting jobs even remotely bearable has to be stripped out piece by piece, until there's only hour after hour after hour after unrelenting hour of ripping sheets of paper out of the files, and removing staples and cutting mounting cards up for optical disking.

Oddly enough the removal of the pc may actually prove beneficial in the long run. They can't stop me thinking, and I've had time ro do nothing bu think. What I became acutely conscious of was how much there was to do when I finally get home. I've mentioned before the battles I have in balancing writing versus promoting, and that I have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Goodreads and WordPress.

It was when I sat down and itemized the forums (fora?) on which I need to keep a presence that I thought OMG. I joined SFWA a week ago -it's a career must- which adds another forum to HWA, BFS, BSFA, Suite101, Codex and...this list seems endless. It's actually nine different forums.

I managed the profile aspect by rigging posts to Twitter to (automatically) forward to Facebook, and for Wordpress to (manually) import from LiveJournal. But even that takes time,and all I'm doing there is posting the address of the latest Suite101 blogs. The downside to Fora / forums (whatever they are) is that those lead to actual discussions.

If I spend just 10 minutes a forum, I'll need to devote 90 minutes. That doesn't include Facebook, LJ, etc.

There has to be a way of managing this without dropping out of forums, but I'm buggered if I can see how. What I may do is pick the brains of more experienced writers on SFWA and elsewhere.

Any thoughts and/or suggestions apart from 'drop some of them' will be much appreciated.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Happy Independance Day, USA.

As I was thinking about the weekend -and presumably the tennis buffs will be happy at an all-American women's final, but not much else of note is happening- it struck me that there isn't a lot of science fiction about The Big Day.

You can read Alternate American Civil War fiction from Ward Moore's Bring The Jubilee to Harry Turtledove's many alternate historiesuntil your toes curl up, but Charles Coleman Finlay's fiction apart, I can't think of much SF about the revolution, especially of the rigorous alternate history variety. Let me know if any spring to your mind.

It's seems as if it's unthinkable, yet while it might have been Britain's Vietnam, a long-distance war against a highly motivated and well-marshalled guerilla insurgency, American independance was considerably less inevitable than the Nazi defeat in WWII, and plenty of writers from Dick to Deighton are prepared to play in that fictional sandpit.

So what might have happened? Assuming that the British didn't hold onto the colony, they might yet have influenced the shape of the future Union, from assassinating (I know, a very un-British way of doing things!) the leading lights of the Union, to persuading the South to stay allied to the King, at least until Wilberforce and abolition might have provoked the South to a different path.

The French of course had considerable influence -- might the US have allied more closely to the Francophone world? Quelle Horreur! I hear you cry. The Golden Arches of MacDonalds selling baguettes...

Had the Union been a looser federation, Mexico might yet have exerted greater influence in the 19th century over the shape of the USA - Texico, or Neuva Mexico, perhaps.

These are the obvious ones. I'd be interested to hear other suggestions about Fourth of Julys that never happened.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

It's back to that odd time when there's a huge amount going on behind the scenes, but nothing yet to show for it.

I've had two lots of artwork to look at and to comment upon. Chris Moore has sent through revised artwork for Winter Song, which I hope to be able to share with you soon, and Andy Bigwood has done the same for Displacement, my first collection, which will be out in November. I guess I need to talk about that some more, but I think that I'll leave that for another occasion.

Meanwhile, I'm about three-quarters of the way through the revision of Damage Time, and also polishing up the chapter or two which will go in the back of Winter Song.

And in the next day or two my application to join SFWA goes in. If it's agreed, it'll be the fulifilment of an ambition I've held for over thirty years. Hugo voting is due on the 3rd, and I have to fill in application to the Arts Council. More on that another time.

And as if assorted form-filling and artworks weren't enough, I'm just starting to think about the next book. I can't talk too much about it now because it's still very nebulous.

Meanwhile, I'm watching the Angry Robot launch with great interest, because in three months I'll be where Kaaron Warren and Lauren Beukes are now. Which is more than a little scary. Good luck to both of them.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Sometime in the next few weeks I'll be reviewing Dragonseed, a novel by James Maxey.

James is giving away 25 copies of his book to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Here is what James has to say:

I've set up a modest goal of raising $300 through this promotion. This means I need to average contributions of $6, which is less than you'd pay for the book on Amazon. However, I'll send you a book for a contribution in any amount, even if it's just a buck. Spend a buck, get a book, save some breasts. Who's with me?

Learn how to get one here. And don't worry about the book being the conclusion to a trilogy. It's a damn fine read, as I'll be making clear in the review, and stands alone better than most concluding volumes - James works in the back story with admirable smoothness and precision.

So hurry along, get a free book and make a difference. And feel free to re-post this.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

There are two words that strike fear into almost every writer's heart: Writer's Block.

The inability to create, to deliver a completed ms. on time is literally the equivalent of a disability. If you couldn't walk to your job, or couldn't see your keyboard, wouldn't you be considered disabled?

I was blocked for nineteen years after attending a workshop that --with hindsight-- I was too young to cope with. After the workshop I knew that there were things I didn't know, but didn't know how to learn them. Didn't even know what questions to ask, or who to ask them of.

These were pre-internet days; growing up in rural Devon, then moving around, it was years before I had a stable enough environment to turn my attention back to questions such as "What is plot? Character arc?" For years, I was unable to finish a story - in fact, after a couple of years of being blocked, I no longer even started them. What was the point in starting a new piece when I had a half-dozen unfinished ones?

For months at a time, I wouldn't even be able to think of writing. But every couple of years, I would awake with an image in my mind that I yearned to be able to put on paper,so I'd start another one - and duly run into a mental brick wall, be it a few hundred words in, or close to the end.

For nineteen years I was a writer unable to write. Until one day in 1997, the people in the office where I worked were given bad news. More on that next time.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Worse, I have no access to e-mail or the internet, except at break times, and unable to access my laptop, I've no recourse but to think. It's amazing how much you can do when you have no distractions, and nothing to occupy your mind.

Yesterday, I started to think about the next book. Armed only with a pen and scraps of paper, I scribbled down potential characters, events and plot points, in between wielding the staple remover and the scissors. During my breaks I fired off questions to the crit group.

Posted by Colin Harvey

My friend Sharon asked this morning why there are so few British literary agents with a web presence, which got me to thinking....actually, I think the real question is, why are there so many American ones?

There are five times as many people in the US as in the UK, so logically there should be five times as many literary agents, which does seem to be the case. When magazines like Vector list British agents, they are usually in clumps of about ten or a dozen, often the same agents. But to substantiate Sharon's question, many of them will only take hard-copy submissions, and even finding out that simple fact is often tricky. British literary agents do seem to be harder to find on the web.

Partly this has to do with trending. Britain tends to be now where the US was between two to five years ago, although the gap is narrowing as the world shrinks. And at a time when much of the US was already on-line, then new Prime Minister Tony Blair was promising in 1997 that every household should have internet access.

Which is another reason why US agents are so much more web-present; their telecoms industry is far more cut-throat than the UK's, with its lingering legacy of Post Office Telecoms, and 'free-market' competitors intent on keeping prices as high as possible. In the US local calls are free, so web access costs are minimal.

Then there's geography. The US is far more spread out, and with three different time zones, it's hardly surprising that first e-mail and then the internet caught on so quickly . New York and Boiston are near-neighbours in terms US but are only fifty miles closer than Bristol and Leeds, which exist at 'opposite ends' of the UK.

Not only is it far easier to see everyone one needs to in the UK, there are also far fewer cons; in the US no agent can attend all the cons each year, so a higher-profile web presence is essential. And being that much closer, they're much easier to attend.

Population; trending; telecoms; geography; workload. Five reasons why British Literary Agents may have a lower web presence than many American ones. Which is grossly unfair to the good ones, like the Zeno Agency, Mic Cheetham and John Jarrold ....

We Brits work on quality, not quantity...

Posted by Colin Harvey

I'm a member of both the Horror Writers Association, whose view of books is if-it's-not-on-paper-it's-not-real, and the Electronic Published Internet Connection who are equally adamant that we're only a week/ month/year away from consigning tree-books to the dustbin of history.

The truth is more complicated.

Sight is not the only sense we use when we read books, although it's the main one. Touch isn't something that e-book manufacturers have yet been able to replicate, but judging by this little gizmo that wonderful aroma that hits you when you open the wrapper containing the new Interzone may soon be available to e-book readers. Which leaves how they feel as the last challenge to e-book manufacturers.

So there's little doubt that e-books are not going to go away, that if anything their functionality is getting closer to that of traditional books. But what IS going to happen to paper books? Oddly enough, what may be our best pointer to their future may be shown by what happened in the soap industry.

Fifteen years ago bar soaps were declining, replaced by Liquid Hand Wash. And studies showed that European women preferred showers to baths. Many new houses were being built with only showers, so manufacturers like Unilever and P&G decided that Bath Gel would soon be as obsolete as bar soap, and that Shower Gel and LHW could share a common formulation.

Further studies showed this was an over-simplification; while women shower for cleanliness, they also bathe in the evening, particularly after a stressful day, or as an indulgence (with a glass of wine, or scented candles). So those same manufacturers began developing separate variants for bath ranges. Meanwhile bar soap sales stabilized, and bath gel sales started growing back.

Over-simplification is dangerous, as is that assuming a line upwards or downwards will continue indefinitely. I often read pdf downloads for reviewing, but always buy tree-books for holiday-reading, so my reading habits have diversified. Ten years ago I'd never have dreamed that would happen.

I suspect that in future some books will only be available electronically, especially as transport can account for 20% of a book's cost, working against marginal sellers. There will still be mass-market print-runs for bestsellers, or Print-On-Demand for single copies for those willing to pay the higher unit price (unit costs are much lower for offset print runs of 100+ copies than for PODs) for mid-list books.

So I don't believe for one moment that traditional books doomed; but nor are e-books guaranteed to failure. The world is big enough and complex enough to hold both.

Posted by Colin Harvey

As I mentioned a day or two ago, I've been a little erratic on the blogging, partly through blog-fatigue (yes, it does use up energy...) and partly because the stuff I mentioned in an earlier post became still more time-consuming on Sunday, albeit with a good outcome.

On the work front, I'm trying to keep the momentum going on Damage Time, having reached exactly the mid-point of the project, half-way through the revision (I write and revise each novel three times -- the first draft, the revision and the final polish). As I'd reached a tricky section this meant spending a little longer on the book than on previous days.

After their lousy service over Easter, I've also been shopping around for a new credit card to replace my Barclaycard, and after a lot of comparisons Virgin's seems to tick most of the boxes. The rest of the time was spent finally working out a route for Worldcon:

It now looks as if I'll be going outward from London City Airport with Swissair via Zurich, and coming back with American Airlines to JFK, then with BA to Heathrow. Assuming all the seats haven't gone on the outward leg by the time the new card arrives!

All the shopping around has probably saved me about £200, but it's been worth it as without it I probably wouldn't have got to Worldcon. But it also took up so much time that -unfortunately- something had to give; in this case the blog.

On the plus side, I can add Switzerland to my list of countries visited, even if it is only the airport!

Posted by Colin Harvey

I'm actually writing this early on a Tuesday morning, because of said ten-hour stint and falling asleep in the arm-chair with Ashes to Ashes was on, but it'll probably be date-lined Monday as it's still night in Vancouver, from where this goes on-line.

Blogs as Time Machines....there's an idea.

Anyway (he says, getting back to the subject at hand) I've been a little erratic the last couple of days, partly because of workload, partly because, well to be honest, I'd run out of things to say. I don't want to be one of those people who posts every day for the sake of it.

The conventional wisdom is that if you don't post every day, readers will lose interest, but I'd be interested to know what you think, rather than the opinion of know-it-all pundits. As a reader, do you get blog fatigue? Are you more or less interested in blogs that are alternate days, rather than every day? (Assuming no drop in quality of course -- assume that the blogs posted every other day are no better or worse than the daily ones...)

Or don't you care, as long as it's interesting?

I'll talk more about the other reason I've missed a couple of days next time. Partly it's because of another ten-hour stint in the day job, but there are other reasons as well.

But overall, it's meant that something has had to give, and for the last couple of days it's been the blogging.

Arrivederci.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Ever since reading about Hope Mirrlees' 1926 fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist in the Curiosities section of F&SF back in 2000, I've had a hankering to give it a try, and finally found a copy of it in the Bath branch of Oxfam on Thursday.

Bear in mind that this is pretty much pre-genre; Amazing Stories was launched in the same year as it was published -in 1926-- and even the venerable Weird Tales was only three years old at the time.

Lud-in-the-Mist predates the three major fantasy influences of the twentieth century, Tolkein, Robert E. Howard, and Mervyn Peake, the last of which is probably closest to Mirrlees, although her setting is more pastoral than baroque.

The language is rich and the images are striking, yet I'm struggling to get into it, and the reason is that it refuses to bend and buckle to fit the standard narrative of the modern speculative-fiction novel. The first twenty or so pages are a travelogue outlining the setting for the novel, and only gradually does it ease into the main plot.

SF and crime are the most vibrant forms of fiction beacuse with their pulp origins they have plots, unlike most literary fiction which eschews narrative for contemplation, and which by contrast appears stagnant. Add to that the ideas inherent within SF and you have the reason for the success of the best SF novels, in that they combine ideas, characterization and actual narrative tension.

Lud-in-the-Mist presents a vision of what spec-fic might have been like had Hugo Gernsback stayed in Luxembourg, and for all the literati's up-tilted noses, I'm not sure that it would have been better. But it's also an interesting experience to realize that we are as much trained as readers as writers to 'fit' into the shape of the modern narrative, and heaven forfend the novelist who dares to break that mould.

Posted by Colin Harvey

After the celebrations of our 21st Anniversary yesterday, when we cruised up-river to Bathampton where we had lunch, trawled around Bath, and then came home to dinner at the Old Manor House, today has been a return to normality.

Actually, although I caught up on yesterday's writing back-log, what shocked me today was long I spent doing paperwork.

At least 90 minutes today were spent digging out the last bits of paperwork (share purchase and sale certificates and tax vouchers) so that my Accountants could do the tax return. That one was self-inflicted, but I had already spent close to an entire day breaking the back of it.

Another hour was spent switching Direct Debits from my 'old' bank account at Nationwide to Lloyds. In theory, it could be done on-line, but as I discovered, it isn't possible with Orange's website, nor is it with Scottish Power's website unless I give up paper bills, which the taxman is unhappy about. So with the hideously slow responses, following prompts down to dead-ends and then calling two out of three service providers, that was another 60-odd minutes down the pan.

Then there was the 45 minutes flapping around the Amazon Author's Page finding out that although they've set it up, it isn't connected to my books, and indeed I seem to have a 'ghost' authors page. Ah well, I guess that they'll sort it out in a week or four.

On the plus side, I got some crucial things done today, and of course these things have to be done, but I'm not sure why they seem to need to take so long. Slow responses from web pages, blind alleys and mutiple choice phone indices on one side, plus a need to deforest the amazon to satisfy authority on the other. They all add up to 3.25 hours spent doing things that have to be done, but which isn't writing.

Tomorrow I will write more. I will. I will.

Posted by Colin Harvey

I'm delighted to learn that the hyper-talented Chris Moore is going to be providing the cover for Winter Song. If you're unfamiliar with his work, it can be found here.

I can't wait to see what he comes up with!

Posted by Colin Harvey

Nice review of Future Bristol in Interzone 222.

Andy Hedgecock cites: "three exceptionally good stories, four that are solidly entertyaining and two that didn't work for me at all."

The three are Liz Williams' 'Isambard's Kingdom,' and in common with earlier reviews, Joanne Hall's 'Pirates of the Cumberland Basin,' and Jim Mortimore's 'The Sun in the Bone House,' which Andy describes as "an astonishingly ambitious psycho-geographical cum archeological investigation of Bristol from the Anglo-Saxon era to the far future."

There are distinct trends to the reviews on the Hall and the Mortimore, all overwhelmingly positive, but each review has picked a different third outstanding story.

It's good to get such a positive review from such a demanding market.

And today the mailman bought a cheque from Denvention 3 refunding my membership fees for last year's Worldcon. With me finishing work in the BEH for five days, it's been a splendid Tuesday!

Posted by Colin Harvey

We awoke early this morning, as we often do at this time of year. It's rare that we even sleep until six o'clock, even at weekends, but this morning it didn't matter. The sun was rising and it was such a lovely morning that we decided to walk Alice early.

So by eight o'clock we were at Ashton Court, the eight hundred and fifty acre estate left in perpetuity to the people of the city of Bristol, but now under the aegis of Bath & North East Somerset (don't try to work it out, it'll only make your head hurt) walking Alice along the trails and through the ancient woodland at the heart of the estate. The wild-flower meadows are a riot of green shot through with yellow buttercups and the purple pin-pricks of wild orchids. Skylarks hover and sing

Tomorrow is June. Summer's here.

This for me is the high-point of the year, when plants are still green and not yet parched and drooping, but there's real heat in the day, but dry heat, not the baking clagginess of August.

We live what to many African and Asian people would seem a near-paradisical life; we have food, shelter and despite the witterings of our media -safety. We can complain about our governments without fear of being tortured.

Despite that, most days are full of grumbles, the after-effects of being sandpapered by everyday life. Most days are a constant battle --for everyone-- of getting things done, of being somewhere at a certain time, of rushing and pushing and shoving.

Not today. Today is a day just to celebrate being alive.

Normal grumbling will resume tomorrow.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Kate and I had free tickets for the cinema that had to be used, so we went to see Angels & Demons on Thursday afternoon. I'm not a huge Dan Brown fan --I got to page 76of TDVC before giving up— but Kate had been let down by her friend, so faced with my Dearly Beloved missing out, I bit the bullet and volunteered it as our freebie.

Actually, it wasn't as bad as I'd feared.

The reviews have --as far I've read-- generally portrayed a preposterous plot, wooden acting, and a lack of credibility with Robert Langham (Tom Hanks) as knowing too much.

In reverse order, well, duh, he’s an expert. That’s what experts are called in for – to know things. Had they called in a bricklayer, there might have been grounds for complaint. I suspect that this is just a backlash to the ‘Omnipotent CSIs’ scenario, where lab rats regularly display what is an unbelievable breadth of knowledge. But I don’t think that Ron Howard is guilty on that charge.

Nor was the acting that bad. Tom Hanks won’t win an Oscar, and the female eye-candy was, well, female eye-candy. But it’s an action film, not Philadelphia, and even if action films demand the same standard of acting as ‘proper’ films Stellen Skarsgard and Pierluigi Franco were competent, and Ewen MacGregor stole the show.

The plot was intricate, generally answering any “Hang on!” moments within a couple of scenes, and managed to genuinely surprise me on several occasions.

I think that the main problem with Angels & Demons is that it’s fallen foul of a couple of completely separate groups, both of whom have their own agendas. Maybe I’ll write more about that some time, but I think that that’s enough on A & D, at least for the moment.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Kate and I had free tickets for the cinema that had to be used up by yesterday afternoon, so we went to see Angels & Demons.

Until literally the actual minute the film started, the theatre was empty. By the time the credits had rolled, we were almost into double figures -- although not quite. But bear in mind that this is one of the summer blockbusters, it's half-term and it's a 12A certificate so teenagers can see it.

I know there were lost of good reasons why this was so; it was hot, it was 4.50pm, the film had religious elements (more on that next time) and didn't have eye-candy like Hugh Jackman, but only adenoidal old Tom Hanks and, despite the obligatory token Euro-female had as much sex appeal as a priest's cassock.

But if ever there was an argument against multiplexes, this was it. A movie theatre 95 - 98% empty for a summer blockbuster in school holidays, while 'indie' films can't get a showing for love nor money. Maybe it's about time movie distributors re-thought their strategy? They'll no doubt argue economies of scale, efficencies, yadda yadda. I don't buy it. This can't be good for business, and if it's not good for them, they'll just retreat further into medocrity.

More on the film tomorrow.

Posted by Colin Harvey

I'll freely admit to being a little biased here. Kris Dikeman is a good friend of mine, so I was delighted to hear that she'd been nominated for The sixth annual Million Writers Award, which this year features the following prizes:

• Overall winner: $500
• Runner-up: $200
• Honorable mention (third place): $100

The top ten stories of the year are:

• "The Whale Hunter" by Steinur Bell (Agni)
• "Intertropical Convergence Zone" by Nadia Bulkin (ChiZine)
• "No Bullets in the House" by Geronimo Madrid (Drunken Boat)
• "Fuckbuddy" by Roderic Crooks (Eyeshot)
• "The Fisherman's Wife" by Jenny Williams (LitNImage)
• "Every Earth is Fit for Burial" by Cyn Kitchen (Menda City Review)
• "Interview With A Moron" by Elizabeth Stuckey-French (Narrative Magazine)
• "The Tale of Junko and Sayuri" by Peter S. Beagle (OSC's Intergalactic Medicine Show)
• "Grief Mongers" by Sefi Atta (Per Contra Fiction)
• "Nine Sundays in a Row" by Kris Dikeman (Strange Horizons)

Kris is currently languishing in sixth, just behind Peter S. Beagle, who doesn't need the money anyway(!) so go ahead and read her story, and if you like it, vote for it.

Oh, you can vote for it here.

OK, that's my bit of drum-beating on behalf of Kris done for the day. She now owes me sixteen beers, or is that seventeen...?

Posted by Colin Harvey

I subscribe to Science News Online, which keeps me abreast of some of the latest developments - invaluable when you're a science-fiction writer. Today's summary included a fascinating item on the Census of Marine Life, an attempt to map the predations of the ocean over history, titled 'Ocean's Gazillion,' which claims that "the upper layer of the ceans has lost perhaps 85 to 90 per cent of the mammals, big fish and other fisheries species that swam there several hundred years ago."

The problem that I have with this approach is the lack of rigour. It's based on old ship's logs, tax journals and other documents. Ship's logs are not noted for their detailed accuracy, as anyone who has read reports of Atlantis and other lost wonders of the world will know.

I look forward to seeing more on this though. It may develop...

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

On Saturday night Kate and I decided on a whim to visit the Roman Baths at Bath (Spa), the setting for one of the largest leisure and religious complexes in Roman Britain.

Since its discovery, archeologists have patiently excavated the site, room by room, layer by layer. The site was occupied for over three hundred years, and gradually grew in size; businessmen held meetings there vying to surpass each other with the number of slaves oiling and massaging their bodies, and scraping their skin clean after immersion in the saunas; petitioners offered sacrifices to the gods and wrote elaborate cursabout those that they thought had wronged them; families picnicked and couples flirted,sometimes perhaps making love in the alcoves set back from the baths, for mixed nude bathing was customary, and one noted effect of warm baths and saunas is to raise the libido.

Now open to the public, the baths are an eerie sight in the evening, with wraiths of steam hanging just above the surface of the water, while ghostly holograms haunt the corners. We borrowed audio-guides that hung around our necks, easily operated and providing as much or as little information as we wanted, but the hands-free set-up wasnecessary given the uneven floor in places, and studied the mosaics, the fragments of wall murals recovered, and listened to the sounds of a vibrant community brought back to life almost two millenia after its heyday.

To anyone who wants inspiration for fantasy settings, I'd urge you to visit places like Bath Spa, Borgarnes in Western Iceland -- anywhere that recreates a long-vanished world as such sites do. I find that they provide far better inspiration than reading the latest best-selling tome recycling Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. Look for your inspiration in the real world, with all its attendant strangeness -- there'll be such sites in every country in the world.

It was an enjoyable, stimulating and above all educational evening, and I want to go again. Now, to start plotting that fantasy...

Posted by Colin Harvey

I've had a problem with my teeth to the extent where I barely slept on Sunday night.

Monday morning I spent the time between writing and going to work trying to find an NHS dentist who would see me. I had no more success than I had for the previous eight months.

In the UK the NHS is supposedly free to all. But since the Thatcher government loosened the rules, it's nearly impossible to see a dentist as an NHS patient. Most dentists will (understandably) take on as few NHS and as many private patients --which earn them more-- as they can. Furthermore, dentists still charge for a consultation, although not as much as to private patients. But a simple scale-and-polish cost would cost me a day's earnings, so having major work done is a nightmare scenario: I'd have to delay the next novel to give me time to work the extra hours to pay for it, which has implications for my Working Tax Credits Allowance, costing me still more.

Finally, having exhausted other possibilities, I visited the Bristol Dental Hospital, next to where I work, where the work is done by dental students. But the outcome can be a gamble. There are two options --pain relief, or losing the tooth with the tidying up to be done elsewhere.

I queued at eight o'clock because the BDH only has a limited number of students each day, and luckily I got in.

The student who saw me gave me a thorough check-up, then squirted cold spray onto a tool to replicate the symptoms (hot and cold drinks were making me jump to the ceiling). Finding no obvious signs of decay she sent me for an x-ray.

The x-ray showed that there was no decay, so she called in her supervisor. Two hours later they concluded that my gum had eroded, leaving the tooth's nerve endings exposed. They prescribed pain relief in the form of a heavy-fluoride toothpaste to desensitize the gums. At £3.60 a 75ml tube, it may be the most expensive toothpaste I've ever used, but at least I didn't lose any teeth, for which I'm profoundly grateful.

But what's the point of a health service that makes pain relief a lottery, yet will prescribe Viagra on demand, or perform surgery to remove man-boobs on the overweight who don't want to exercise?

Posted by Colin Harvey

I’ve been thinking a lot about short fiction, and the way we consume it. While my first love will always be the novel, I keep returning to the short form, not least because I publish a short-story online every week over at Hub Magazine.

These days, of course, short-story collections in print are the province of A-list authors (whose readers will devour their every word) and independent publishers (who often print fewer than 100 copies of the titles on their list).

Short-stories – particularly SF and horror fiction – used to be regarded as the perfect entry point for new genre readers. When did we lose the love?

Several years ago I discovered the joy of eBooks, and of reading electronically. Through sites such as Fictionwise, and EReader, I bought the occasional novel, quite a few novellas, and hundreds of short-stories, all to be read on my phone – when you can pay as little as 50 cents for a fix of your favourite style of fiction, that’s gotta be worth it, right?

Sites like Hub, and EscapePod, and review sites such as The Fix show that there is still a significant interest in short fiction, though admittedly the market for professional authors has significantly reduced in size – when there is so much great free fiction available online, why pay for it? When did we lose the love? I don’t think we did.

These days, the internet has become the main repository for short fiction, and the short story is often demoted to the status of “marketing tool” – give away a short-story to promote your novel. There is nothing inherently wrong with this – it’s a perfectly valid way of keeping the art-form alive, and of continuing to ease new readers into the genre. Even as a publisher of an electronic magazine, however, I long for the days when I could call into my local bookshop and pick up a new anthology, but I guess I’ll have to remain content with the various annual “Best Of” collections.

I’d better run – there are some short-stories on the internet, and they’re not going to download themselves….

Posted by Colin Harvey

John Varley dominated SF from 1975 to 1981. He won a Nebula and two Hugos, twenty nominations and about two dozen appearances in the various Year's Best collections. Then he seemed to go away, only intermittently reappearing. Bedazzled by him as a teenager, by my early twenties I'd grown to view Varley as a Heinlein-wannabe of superficial brilliance whose characterization was fairly uniform.

But with 'Retrograde Summer' reprinted in F&SF, it seemed like a good time to make his acqaintance again.

Some stories, like his 1976 'Overdrawn at the Memory Bank' (in which a vacationing office worker becomes trapped in a cybernetic holiday and must survive until his bureaucratically misplaced body can be found) have become almost museum pieces in the light of the faster slicker cyberpunk movement.

The complexity of the Eight Worlds scenario feels contrived, and with its echoes of grooming 'The Pusher' induces a certain queasiness which isn't entirely allayed by the reasons for the narrator's behaviour.

However, 'Options' is a revelation, examining in depth a woman's desire to change sex, and resolving many of the questions arising from reading the Eight World stories.

'Air Raid' is still probably one of the best SF stories of all time, a time-travelling mid-air rescue mission with a relentless pace that only slackens in that despairing last half-page.

Lastly, 'The Persistence of Vision' --in which a traveller stumbles across a commune of the deaf-blind in

remote New Mexico-- has held up better than any other seventies view of the near-future. With its examination of 'disability' from a completely open-minded point of view and one of the great final images in SF, is even better than I remember.

It would be good to see some new fiction from Varley but in the absence of that, there are a handful of stories that are genuine classics.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Readers with long memories will notice that I quite often title these posts after 'old' stories. It's partly my Inner Fan-Boy's way of paying homage to the eight-foot-tall giants of my youth. One such was the post on alternate futures, that I dubbed -with some irony- The Way the Future Was.

The irony was that it was in honour of Frederik Pohl's autobiography, published thirty years ago, and as far as I knew both out-of-print and long unrecognized by most people. So it seemed safe to pinch the title, which was singularly appropriate.

But last night I staggered in from a ten-hour stint at the BEH, too tired to do much of anything (I think I even forgot to post the new blog link up on Twitter, LiveJournal etc), but too wired to relax. So while Kate watched Gardener's World on TV, I surfed the Net.

And there, on David Langford's excellent Ansible, was a link to Frederik Pohl's Blog.

So in his ninetieth year, this friend of the eighteen-year-old Isaac Asimov has with the aid of a support team embraced the blogosphere. I can now re-read posts about Cyril M. Kornbluth and others that I last read as an eighteen-year-old in Leeds, and what's more read new ones, about his latest great-grandson Max, the latest addition to his dynasty.

My God, that's wonderful. But I wish now that I hadn't used his title for that other post, because it would have been far, far more appropriate to this one. Instead I've nicked his postings title -- I hope that he doesn't mind.

I'd love to have a career that stretches across over seventy years, and still have the trenchant wit that Mr. Pohl (Fred seems too familiar, somehow) brings to his post on his diet of Ensure Plus, and other items, like Hubbert's Peak. Long may his continue yet.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Lately, prompted by the nostalgia-fest that marks F&SF's 60th year, I've been thinking a lot about the history of SF.

Pundits like to talk about decades and years as if they are discrete entities, as if 'The Golden Age,' or 'New Wave' or Cyberpunk were physical entities. That got me thinking, what gives a year a specific quality? Is it possible to define it?

Much of our view of a year comes from the various Year's Best anthologies, the latest being edited by Jonathan Strahan and Rich Horton, who have been editing for the last four or five years. David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer are releasing their fourteenth volume, while Gardner Dozois celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of a series that started with the now long-defunct Bluejay Books. Before that Terry Carr, Don Wollheim, Harrison and Aldiss, Judith Merrill, and Dikty and Bleiler all published their choices.

But novels are equally important; with its burgeoning awareness of ecology and politics, Dune is archetypally a 1960s novel, while it's hard to think of brand-named driven Neuromancer with its cyberspace battles being written in any decade but the 1980s. More difficult to think of the novel that defines the 2000s - perhaps Gaiman's American Gods?

Theny there are the awards, major and minor. Whether the reader looks at the BSFA or the American-dominated Hugo and Nebulas, the stories that win the awards and those who write them are those that are remembered.

Much of the definition of Campbell's Golden Age comes from the SFWA's selection for their Science Fiction Hall of Fame, when almost every 1940s story came from Astounding. 1967 will forever be defined for some older readers by the publication of Harlan Ellison's colossal Dangerous Visions anthology. By the 1970s, anthologies dominated the field, yet a decade later the magazines that many written off had fought back.

All of these things, writers and stories, novels and awards, anthologies and magazines, are what give any particular year its shape.

And just as they give a year its shape, so conversely some writers are particularly associated with a decade or epoch.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Amazon's move into the e-reader field with Kindle is noteworthy, but the market leader -certainly for the smaller presses in the US and even medium-sized British publishers - continues to be Fictionwise. Their strength was implicitly recognized when Barnes & Noble bought the business for US$15 million a couple of months ago.

So it's really frustrating when it takes six weeks for a new book to be listed, but I'm pleased to say that Future Bristol is now available to Fictionwise subscribers, whose club members save even more on the book's discounted US$3.49 price.

It's good news for The Future Bristol Massive <g> as Marc Gascoigne at Angry Robot dubbed the team, and good news for readers as well. It's a big stretch in these straightened times to ask readers to pay fifteen dollars on what may appear to be a book of only limited relevance to them, although as Keri Horea's review for Suite101 makes clear that isn't the case, but three to four dollars makes it a lot less of a gamble.

Thanks, Fictionwise. Although it's agonizing to have to wait six weeks, the wait's been worth it. Let's hope B&N give you some help to reduce the delay between paper and -ebook publication..

Posted by Colin Harvey

On Sunday I received an e-mail from Ticonderoga Publications, a small Australian outfit who publish new titles by --among others-- American writers Lewis Shiner and Steven Utley, as well as by local authors such as Stephen Dedman and Sean Williams.

Their publications include a couple of original anthologies, including one extrapolating from existing Australian legislation. That calls for detailed knowledge unlikely to be known to those outside the country, and therefore favours local writers -- that kind of unstated protectionism is clever and positive.

But as I opined in a review of Best Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror for The Fix, Australian-only anthologies based solely on residence or birth work against the very writers they're ostensibly looking to develop; magazines like Interzone are criticized for not giving preference to British writers, yet like all affirmative action such policies promote mediocrity. Better to make local writers compete against outsiders and raise the standards. In the case of Interzone, it's clearly working -- the magazine improves issue by issue, driven by the need for contributors to raise their game if they want to get in.

I'm aware that in writing this, I'm risking allegations of hypocrisy; after all, I've just edited an anthology of local stories. But in my case, had I not had such brilliant stories to choose from, I was quite prepared to go outside the region and call for subs from further afield.

Note to Ticonderoga; make 'em fight for their places -- don't give writers a slot on where they come from.

Posted by Colin Harvey

This week's guest blog was supposed to come to you from Mark Eller, author of Traitor.

There was one slight problem; (embarrassed cough). I forgot in all the mayhem of tax returns and racing to finish drafts and crits --to ask him if he wanted to contribute...

So for today, I'm going to pretend to be Mark Eller, and talk to you about The Write Stuff. It's re-posted from Mark's Facebook message asking me to get the word out, so I don't feel to bad about being Virtual Mark.

Virtual Mark says:

There's a new reality show coming up in June called The Write Stuff that is being produced by the C.W. Network. It features 14 contestants looking for a book contract/marketing campaign. I'm enthusiastic about this because the general public really has no idea of everything we have involved in this writing gig.

So, I am trying to get authors to blog, write about, push, or include a promo on their podcasts for The Write Stuff. Cyrus Webb, the host, is aware that I am doing this. Cyrus also does the Conversations Live radio show.

Also, The Write Stuff has a praise page where you can leave your photo and a bit of praise for the show. Even though the show airs in June, it's not too late to get on board!

Posted by Colin Harvey

Today is my last day before starting to revise Damage Time, and I've been using the time to go through the paperwork for my tax return. My paperwork is such a godawful sprawl -despite my best efforts to keep it under control-- that I feel I need a weekend when I'm not preoccupied with working out the latest complexity in a story or novel to have enough focus to be able to tackle it.

It turned out to be as well that I did; checking that I've got every sodding receipt to send off to the accountant has taken most of a day that's grown progressively sunnier as it's worn on, and to be honest, I begrudge spending a lovely day like this going through reams of grubby bits of paper with 'A&P - Bristol SF & F Soc.' scribbled in the corner, or wondering what the hell I've done with February's mobile bill from Orange.

But it's got to be done because to paraphrase the truism, next to death, the only inevitable thing is taxation. Once it's finished it's out of the way for another year, and I can get on with the important things in life -- that is, anything else.

Posted by Colin Harvey

On Thursday I finished the first draft of Damage Time, a day ahead of schedule. I then posted the weekly review, and having decided to take the weekend off before starting the revision, suddenly all my deadlines were met....

My next job was to print the stories from F&SF for next week’s review (which will be out of order –Asimovs isn’t on sale until next week) to start reading on Thursday evening. But then the printer jammed.

With no review material for 24 hours until the printer could be fixed, I had the luxury of an evening free. I could read any story I wanted....

Looking around for something in hard-copy, I picked out 'Surfacing,' Walter Jon Williams' fine novella in Gardner Dozois' 1988 Year's Best.

'Surfacing' takes place on an oceanic colony world, where an emotionally volatile young scientist called Anthony is studying the Deep Dwellers –or Leviathans as they’re usually known-- when a beautiful young woman who shares his interest walks into his life. But Philana is as emotionally disturbed as Anthony, and he becomes locked in a battle of wills with a quasi-immortal alien over her fate.

I loved ‘Surfacing,’ but I last read it twenty years ago, when I was younger and more impressionable. Recent years have been strewn with the disappointment of re-reading old favorites, only to find them pallid shadows of my memories.

Incredibly 'Surfacing' was better than I remembered. The first time around I hadn't fully appreciated the wonderful symmetry between plot and sub-plot, with the surfacing of Anthony’s feeling for Philana mirroring the Leviathan’s rise from the deeps.

Sometimes -despite what Tom Wolfe says -- you can go back, even finding things that you failed to recognize the first time.

And on checking his website, I learned that Williams is still writing, although predominantly novels. But perhaps he'll surface in Asimovs again some day.

Posted by Colin Harvey

I've been roboticized!

Posted by Colin Harvey

In lieu of toadys' blog post, which didn't get written because I instead finished chapter 74 of the draft Damage Time (2 more to go...) and then moved loads of boxes of files at the Eye Hospital, here's a link to another of my favourite Blogs -that of Mike Brotherton, author of Spider Star and Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Wyoming. A man of many talents...

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Back in November, I posted a blog featuring a number of mini-reviews, on the grounds that I don't have time to review everything.

Well, the backlog's been building up again and with my in-laws visiting, it seems a good time for a quick blog featuring some more bits and pieces of reviews.

Department of Old and Out of Print:

Greybeard by Brian Aldiss meanders through its narrative in as roundabout a fashion as the chapter titles (places along the River Thames) would suggest. The story of mankind reduced to sterility by the side-effects of nuclear testing, its internal chronology is sometimes wonky, it's one of those alternate futures I like to refer to, and its so bleak that it made me almost suicidal at times, yet there's something grandiloquent about Aldiss that makes me recommend it, although it's really one for the completists.

Department of Conflicted Loyalties:

Larian Wills has Evil Reflection out from Swimming Kangaroo Books. It's not as good as 13 Souls which was a storming narrative, but this saga of Sara and her dream lover is short and spare, and well worth a read for those into paranormal romance.

Department of Small Press:

Jupiter, edited by Ian Redmond has reached its 24th issue, no mean feat for an independant press out of the UK. Made up of 56 A5 pages, its focus is on the old-school British SF content rather than the presentation, but with authors from around the world including Gareth D Jones, Gustavo Bondoni and David Conyers it's well worth spending a few pounds on a good old-fashioned, unpretentious SF magazine. Keep the issues coming, Ian Redman.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Yesterday I elaborated on the second of the three thoughts that spun out of the Black Static 10 review, that it is a capsule, rather than anlytical review. A capsule review is 400 - 600 words long, and Suite101's reviews are written from third person point of view.

Their brevity --especially if reviewing an anthology like Dozois's Year's Best, of up to 30 stories --enforces a sometimes enjoyable discipline, but occasionally the constraints are stifling.

Brevity is only one of those constraints, if the reviewer cares about what they write. Another, and it's one that I'm encountering more and more as my circle of acqauntances grows, is that of knowing the author being reviewed. It's hard to write damning comments about someone you may have drunk with the week before, but it has to be done -- readers trust the reviewer to be honest.

But oddly, tempering one's praise of a really good story written by a friend or acquaintance can be even harder. Gushing can make the reviewer look amateurish, if it's not in context.

So in search of brevity and to avoid hype, I described 'Vic' as outstanding, when there was so much more I wanted to say. I loved the unexpected sense of joy mixed with foreboding which -because you know that a Black Static story isn't going to end well-- made its finale all the harder to bear. That end was only the pay-off for the spadework laid throughout the story, not what makes it special. The other thing was that all too often the stories feature the protagonist-as-victim. Not so Vic, who fought back, however briefly.

Every reader reacts differently to a story, depending on their experiences. I read two or three stories a year that provoke a punch-in-the-gut reaction, but I've felt nothing as strong as 'Vic' for about five years. (It was 'Sergeant Chip,' btw).

Not everyone will love 'Vic' the way I did. It's too small, too intimate, and for many it won't have enough blood. That's what makes Black Static such a great magazine -- often it includes stories that some in theory shouldn't 'fit' in it.

I didn't have the space to say all that in the review, which the joy of being able to blog about it.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Yesterday I wrote how while reviewing Black Static 10 I had a number of thoughts, and changed my mind about not posting a blog. I mentioned three reasons, and only covered one of them.

The second has to do with a wonderful post that I found while writing the review.

Before I post the link to it, I need to remind you about capsule reviews, such as those published by Suite101, and analytical reviews, such as those I write for Strange Horizons. Analytical reviews can run from 750 words upwards, sometimes passing over 2000 words, even approaching the size of a thesis, and are usually written from a first-person point of view.

Capsule reviews run to 300-600 words and are usually, although not always written from a third-person point of view.

Most capsule reviews can do little more than tell you a llittle of the story, and what works and doesn't for the reviewer.

They tend to be the province of the Synopsist, one of many types of reviewers spoofed -- by Peter Tennant, in a review of Thomas Ligotti's My Work Is Not Yet Done that reflects the structure of the story. It's wonderful article that deserves as wide exposure as possible.

Pete does omit out the type of reviewer that I dub The Incomprehensablist (and long-term SF readers will know who I mean) who is prone to using words that exist in no earthly dictionary.

That led to the thought that there is now such a plethora of review sites, that perhaps there's a niche for reviewing the reveiewers. Anyone want to step up?.

As for the last thing that occured to me as I wrote the review, I'll cover that later, as I'm running out of time and space.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Another week, another review, and like last week, I wasn't planning on blogging today -- I've too much on, and don't want to blog when I haven't much to say.

Three things changed my mind.

A little while ago I received a mail from another writer about my review of his latest book. He wasn't taking me to task, but wrote a note saying that he had the impression that it wasn't my 'cup of tea.' (that I didn't like it) The note left me slightly bemused, as I thought I'd been reasonably complimentary about his book.

I gave it some thought, and while I'm not sure how the difference in perception arose, I can think of a couple of possible reasons.

First, I'm a Brit. You can add to my natural reserve a dislike of hyperbole. Calling every story junk or a masterpiece leaves no room for genuine masterpieces and junk, and demeans those stories that I do praise. So I mostly limit my pronouncements to 'recommended' and even 'highly recommended.' My correspondent is American, and perhaps mistook my reserve for dislike.

Second, the review in question was --unlike the capsule reviews for Suite101, which are 400 to 600 words and strictly third person-- an analytical review of nearly 1500 words. In such reviews, the writer is expected to examine in as much detail what didn't work for them as what did, and even to 'spoil' the work if the conclusion throws up points of interest. These analytical reviews are probably aimed more at scholars and aspiring writers than the general reader.

They're not easy for those fans and writers used to capsule reviews to understand, and leave many scratching their heads in bemusement.

I'll cover the other reasons tomorrow, both of which are specifically to do with the Black Static 10 review.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Re-reading Greg Bear's Eon over the last week, it struck me as how alien Bear's 2005 felt.

As I alluded to in the review, Eon was written at a time when the world felt as if was at times on the brink of a nuclear abyss, and Eon's contemporaries are John Badham's film War Games, which --until it pulled some fictional rabbits out of hats-- felt as grim a film as was ever made, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Two Tribes.

None of them could know just how close to collapse the Soviet Union was, nor that even before the book was published the Russians would appoint a young reformer who would change the political landscape beyond recognition.

It's easy to mock such prophecies, but we should stop seeing science fictional visions of futures as 'wrong guesses,' or something to be derided - after all, how much better would we do at predicting the future?

SF's history is strewn with wrong guesses. Perhaps the wildest is Rober A. Heinlein's 'The Roads Must Roll' which featured an America covered by moving beltways; in James Blish's magnificent Cities in Flight the cities' fly by slide rule, without more than a hint of a computer; and of course no one saw the internet coming, or the cellphone.

So what?

One of the most popular sub-genres is that of the alternate universe. All of the stories above simply feature alternate futures, where computers or cellphones were never invented. SF is a literature of reflection, rather than prophecy, and these stories are simply reflections at a different angle.

But it's still a little chilling that to think that in Bear's alternate universe of Eon, Colin Harvey was either vaporized in the wave of fire that swept the world four years ago, or died in the nuclear winter that followed. His is a ghost separated from me by the thinnest of membranes.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Largely given over to a link to today's review, on Greg Bear's classic Eon, which I've just re-read after oh, about twenty years. That's one of the nice things about getting older. As well as finding new material to read, you can also re-acquaint yourself with old friends.

I wasn't actually going to post a blog announcing it, but my good friend Kosmo mentioned that he often posts links to odd little snippets, and then I saw this one a few days ago, and even as I was deciding not to post a blog, I thought that I ought to share.

I link the idea of getting something for nothing, and then universe taking its revenge in a sneaky, subtle sort of way.

Posted by Colin Harvey

When I first received the news on Monday that Swimming Kangaroo Books were taking a time-out, I was deeply shocked.

Ironically, it's come at a time when SK were finally winning wider recognition for their vision and commitment to quality publishing.

My relationship with SK is far closer than that between most authors and their publishers. Dindy is as much a friend as my publisher, something that's difficult for others to understand, but which very much follows on from the tradition at Unilever, where as a Business Development Manager, I often worked with the same distributors for fifteen, even twenty years. In some ways, some of them became like family. Which, I suspect in the cold, devious, even paranoid world of the UK Trade that now permeates that concern, probably cost us our careers.

As an author, I'm largely unaffected. I have two novels contracted to Angry Robot Books, and my collection Displacement has already entered the production queue at SK, and I have an agent looking to shop any future books around.

I had feared that something like this would happen given the state of the trade, so I'm not surprised, but I had had a vestigial hope that SK would always be there, selfishly in case I had a book that didn't 'fit' anywhere else, and because I genuinely want them to do well, with or without my presence on new lists.

But all this is jumping the gun.

It's a time-out, not a closure of the business. In eight months time the economy may well have picked up, and/or the pernicious returns issue may well have been resolved -- although I'm deeply cynical about booksellers and their short-sighted desire to kill as many golden geese as possible-- but why not be positive? Being positive is why the US electorate chose Obama.

It may well be that having had their workload eased, SK can re-evaluate their strategy and return to open submissions.

I'm looking forward to seeing them back again.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Following on from yesterdays blog, I promised an insight into what an editor actually does. As both editor of the anthology Future Bristol and one of the contributors I had a dual perspective of the process of editing an anthology.

There are actually two -even three if you count non-fiction-- types of editor. Book editors within a publisher have a different remit to that of a magazine or anthology.

Within a publisher an editor's role will be that of champion. They must talk up the book to the sales force, argue with Marketing Directors over whether it fits the company strategy, and provide an interface between author and publisher. They may assign the actual line, copy or content editing to specialists in those fields.

A magazine or anthology editor will have a vision. They may express it through magazine guidelines at market guides, or they may allow previously published editions to speak for them. In the case of Future Bristol, I simply said, "I want stories set in Bristol, set in the future."

When the stories come in, there is the scary moment of Will I have nine different versions of the same story?

Fortunately, in my case the answer was no.

But there are wide variations in the amount of work still to be done. In some cases, only one or two lines may need changing, where a word or a paragraph is not quite right. In others, whole rewrites may be needed -- at times the editor is making suggestions, guiding the author --even acting as uncredited collaborator. There are as many variations as writers.

Sometimes a story is well written, but does not fit the editor's vision. An author submitted a story for Killers that overlapped in setting with another story, and in theme with yet another; for Future Bristol I received one submission where the future was only token, the nature of the cataclysm left unspecified, and the characters didn't speculate. When the author refused to make changes, I had no option but to reject it as not fitting the book -- it would have distorted the final work.

Which brings me onto the last duty of magazine / anthology editor. The order of the stories in the final work is as crucial as the order of the paragraphs in the story. Different editors have different ideas, but the result is rarely random.

Posted by Colin Harvey

An alert for 'Future Bristol' led me to visit the Guardian Books Blog, which contained this interesting article.

Equally interesting were some of the comments below the blog, which initially irritated me enough to consider pasting a rebuttal there. But I feel that it would be inappropriate to post lengthy comments on the page, so what follows is my response .

Further thought led me to realize that the comments echoed many of own early perceptions, and that as well as responding to them in this post, it was probably worth me going through the process of what a magazine or anthology editor actually does, which will follow tomorrow.

To compare visionary editors like John W. Campbell, Gardner Dozois or Ellen Datlow to an accountant as one person does is both deeply insulting and inaccurate. No accountant has ever exercised any influence of note on Hollywood. Contrast this with the history of SF.

Isaac Asimov freely admitted that Campbell threw out ideas like buckshot. Nightfall -voted the best story of all time by SFWA- was directly inspired by Campbell quoting Emerson, and instructing Asimov to make metaphor literal. There were other magazines that ran through the 1940s, but it's Campbell's Astounding that is the basis for the Golden Age of SF from 1939 to 1950, and the proportion of writers that Campbell moulded and influenced is staggering.

Similarly, Dozois had very definite and specific ideas for what he wanted in Asimovs, and the flowering of a second golden age from 1985 to 1990 coincided with his tenure. Dozois was a frequent instructor at courses like Clarion, from which many of the major writers of the last forty years have sprung.

A good editor is invisible. The reader will only notice them when something goes wrong, and the correspondent's second error was to confuse process with content. What you the reader see in a magazine is the polished result of the editor's work.

What that work is, I will go through tomorrow.

Posted by Colin Harvey

It was just before Easter --when a lovely bag of goodies turned up-- that I thought I ought to blog about the BSFA.

The British Science Fiction Association's website puts it quite cogently:

Every year a band of volunteers issues three different periodicals; Matrix, the BSFA's News and Media magazine, Vector, the critical journal, in which readers can find articles on alternate history, the works of Nevil Shute and other lost masters, and twice a year mailings include Focus, a magazine for aspiring writers.

Recently members have also had a couple of bonus publications. This time a special booklet was included, which carried all four BSFA short fiction nominees. Two of these also appeared in Gardner Dozois's Year's Best SF, so there's no sign of parochialism in the selection.

In addition, members also received a Postscripts sampler. Postscripts appears quarterly in hardback, and carries original stories by writers of the stature of Stephen Baxter, Stephen King, Joe Hill, Gene Wolfe and Ray Bradbury. These all appear in the sampler, which is available only to BSFA members.

All this in addition to regular meetings in London - not bad for 50 pence a week. Annual membership is just £26 (US$40). SF needs organizations like the BSFA to maintain its shape and its sense of identity.

Go on, join. You know it makes sense.

You know you want to.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Tomorrow's blog will be the weekly review -- hopefully I'll be back on Friday, wi-fi at Eastercon permitting.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Today I had the great pleasure of signing a contract for two novels with Angry Robot Books, the new division of HarperCollins.

Winter Song will be published in October 2009 in the UK, and at an as yet unspecified date in the US and electronically. It's the story of an ordinary man -that is, ordinary by thirtieth-century standards- who is ambushed in a remote star-system and crash-lands on a 'lost' colony. He has to get home past alien wildlife and unfriendly colonists, unaware that the planet holds a huge secret.

Damage Time is scheduled for May 2010 publication, and is set in a near-future New York, where memories can be copied and sold for entertainment. But there's a darker trade which leads to a policeman being framed for murder, and when that fails to put him off, he's attacked and stripped of his memories.

It's a huge step up for me, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

I've just realized with mounting horror that in exactly one calendar week we will be approaching the end of the Launch Party for Future Bristol.

Just as the British and French were completely unprepared for the German onslaught, though, I've been caught by how close the party is, and how unprepared I am.

Yes, sure, the stock is ordered, the drinks and food have been paid for, the raffle tickets purchased and a helpful dealer lined up to actually stock the books.

But I haven't told any of the team that, and as well I have a few hours to write to another panel.

I've been lulled, you see. This morning the sun was shining, my in-laws were up and we were walking the dogs around Ashton Court, an 850 acre estate on the edge of Bristol that's given over to nature trails, cyclists, dog walkers and horse riders. We have visitors because tonight Kate will be singing in a performance of Mozart's Requiem in Bathwick, and they've come to listen to her, with me and about fifty other people on the far side of Bath.

So by the time we get home, I need to have come up with a set of five questions for authors of varying technical background about Cutting Edge Crime, about which I know very little, and to have worked out all the details with the team - if only to give them time to prepare!

Heigh ho. Best I get on with it and stop whinging...

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

It's been another lovely sunny day, although that's due to end soon, and it's a real pleasure being able to take the laptop out into the garden while Kate reads. If I sit with my back to the sun, I can keep working without losing the laptop's screen in the sun.

Today I've written the obligatory 000 words, thereby passing the midpoint of Damage Time, finished reading --and written the review for-- The Interpreter by Brian Aldiss, written most of a capsule article on Brian Aldiss, and read --and written the review for, as well-- most of Interzone 221.

It's back to work in the bowels of the Eye Hospital tomorrow, which is one of the reasons why I want to get ahead.

Another reason is that I'm in Dublin next weekend for P-Con VI. I'm on some interesting panels:-

13:00 Sat - Room 2 - Money in SF

How does it work, and how much is a Credit worth in Euro anyway?

16:00 Sat - Room 2 - High Priests and Priestesses of Love

An agony aunt response to questions of love supplied, anonymously, by Convention members.

14:00 Sun - Room 2 - The End of the World as We Know it?

Are we about to enter the standard issue dystopia that sf has been warning us about (fluctuating oil prices, economic collapse, global warming etc.)?

15:00 Sun - Room 2 - Genre fiction magazines

Genre fiction magazines are finding it more difficult to survive. What are the options for survival, or are they a "dead horse"?

If anyone has any thoughts on these topics, do share...

Posted by Colin Harvey

Best Novel (639 Ballots Cast)

Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Morrow/Atlantic)

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins/Bloomsbury)

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen/HarperVoyager)

Saturn's Children by Charles Stross (Ace/Orbit)

Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (Tor)

Best Novella (337 Ballots Cast)

"The Erdmann Nexus" by Nancy Kress (Asimov's Oct/Nov 2008)

"The Political Prisoner" by Charles Coleman Finlay (F&SF Aug 2008)

"The Tear" by Ian McDonald (Galactic Empires)

"True Names" by Benjamin Rosenbaum & Cory Doctorow (Fast Forward 2)

"Truth" by Robert Reed (Asimov's Oct/Nov 2008)

Best Novelette (373 Ballots Cast)

"Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders" by Mike Resnick (Asimov's Jan 2008)

"The Gambler" by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2)

"Pride and Prometheus" by John Kessel (F&SF Jan 2008)

"The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" by James Alan Gardner (Asimov's Feb 2008)

"Shoggoths in Bloom" by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov's Mar 2008)

Best Short Story (448 Ballots Cast)

"26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" by Kij Johnson (Asimov's Jul 2008)

"Article of Faith" by Mike Resnick (Baen's Universe Oct 2008)

"Evil Robot Monkey" by Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of New SF Volume 2)

"Exhalation" by Ted Chiang (Eclipse 2)

"From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled" by Michael Swanwick (Asimov's Feb 2008)

Both Neal Stephenson and Neil Gaiman have won before in their category of best novel, as have Nancy Kress and Robert Reed in the novella category, while Mike Resnick has won before in both novellette and short story, as has Michael Swanwick.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

On the last blogpost, I mentioned the number of nominations that several writers had had, with a promise of more to follow.

Astonishingly, Mary Rosenblum, who made her debut almost twenty years ago in Asimov's has never been nominated before. Nor has David J. Schwartz, who should feel optimistic. Of the twenty-three first time winners who have walked off with the Nebula for Best novel, forteen have never been nominated before. But nine have, so neither Terry Pratchett, Cory Doctorow nor Ian McDonald should despair. Jack McDevitt has a harder task; to be only the ninth writer to win a second Nebula for Best Novel. One of those eight previous repeat winners is Ursula K. LeGuin, who should she win for a fourth time at Novel length --in what is her seventeenth appearance in all categories-- would set an all time record.

At novella length, twenty-three of the previous winners have been first-Nebula winners, which does not bode well for Gregory Benford or Catherine Asaro. Of Vera Nazarian, Kelley Eskridge and Charles Coleman Finlay, all have been nominated once or twice before.

In the novellette category, that only nine of the previous winners have been first-time nominees does not bode well for Johanna Sinisalo; should she win, she would be the first translated work to carry off a Nebula. The other previous winners have been split almost equally between repeat winners, and first winners previously nominated, so there are no clear trends.

Similar trends prevail in the short story, where only eight of the first time winners have also been first-time nominees, which tends to weigh slightly against Mike Allen and Gwyneth Jones, but none of the other nominees are statistically clearfavourites.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

I wasn't able to stay the whole length of Micrcocon last weekend, but I did manage to make Saturday, which is more than can be said for GoH Jasper Fforde, who unfortuantely hurt his back just prior to the con. Commiserations, Jasper.

One of the more interesting panel items was given by author Mark Leyland, whose books Slate Mountain and Cloud Forest both appeared in the 1990s. Mark outlined the difference between a protagonist and a hero (in the classical sense), which is a person prepared to take up arms in pursuit of something that they believe in, but which has become so inextricably linked that the two have become synonymous.

In the afternoon author Christina Lake and Fan Doug Bell gave a lecture on 'writing the future' in which they outlined a history of that aspect of SF. SF is often conflated with futurism, at which point the futures that have not come to pass are highlighted as failures. Doug posited the idea that futures that never materialized, such as Brave New World, should be seen, not as failures but as alternative futures, an idea that I am embrace.

Veteran Fan Steve Green gave a film-show and tallked of his life in Fandom (Fans, we decided, were distinct from fans in that the latter consume the SF field, whether as viewers or readers, whereas Fans want to communicate and pass on their thoughts).

In all, an interesting and thought-provoking day, and well worth the time.

Posted by Colin Harvey

It seems incredible that Microcon has come around again. It's two weeks earlier than last year, but it's time to pack the bag and head 90 miles South-West and gather in the pub and then head for the curry house.

Regulars like Richard Freeman, crypto-zoologist and author Nick Walters will be there again, as will Jasper Fforde, who I met two years ago, and Mark Leyland, who's organizing the crit session. Fortunately I have this year off from presenting, so I can sit and the audience and just relax. Yay!

Because Sunday morning is entirely given over to the crit session, that means that I'll be back tomorrow night, so time lost on Damage Time will be kept to a minimum (like many authors, I find it hard to write during cons). Which is good, as I'm finally starting to get into it, and want to keep delays to a minimum.

While I'm here, I might as well upload some photos from last weekend's walk in the glorious and wonderfully unseasonal sunshine. I got loads of thinking done, and now have a plan for tackling a particularly awkward anthology. More on that some other time. There's Future Bristol to come first.

Back soon!

Posted by Colin Harvey

I have an unwritten rule about writing reviews. While they're in progress I revise and tweak and polish them mercilessly -- just as I do with fiction. Sometimes all that polishing leaves them so glistening that the reader can see their face in the prose. Sometimes it doesn't quite work out. Sometimes it can be one word that throws the whole thing.

But my unwritten rule is once it's published, it's published.

That doesn't apply to factual errors. If I misspell an author's name or attribute an award to them that they don't have, then that will be altered. But what if I sit back for a few days and then think, Hang on, that's not quite right. What then?

What prompted this was my recent review of J.F. Lewis' excellent Staked.

I concluded with "it's a good enough book that even the author's ending it effectively in mid-scene with the over-used cliff-hanger is almost forgivable."

Something troubled me, and I eventually realized that it was the word 'cliffhanger.'

Staked doesn't end with a cliffhanger at all. (At this point, you may want to look away, not-so-gentle reader if you don't want to know the result) It ends with the protagonist blown to smithereens, which in some ways is no cliffhanger. He's dead. How much less of a cliffhanger can you get? Of course the fact that he's dead already may not make that such an impossible barrier to a sequel, which I think is where I drew that conclusion from. ReVamped could start a la Quantum of Solace some twenty seconds later. We'll find out at a later date, no doubt.

But considering that Lewis concludes his emotional arc with Eric recognizing his feelings for Marilyn, and that the plot arc of the werewolf attacks have been resolved and the mastermind unmasked, it's an entirely satisfactory ending. It's simply that it leaves the reader literally in mid-air. So I'm still unsure whether my first impressions were right or wrong. I think it's open-ended, rather than a cliffhanger. We need a new word for this.

But whatever happens, I'm not changing the article.

Posted by Colin Harvey

James Van Pelt: How Music Begins (Asimov's, Sep07)

So...14 short stories, of which Suite readers will be familiar with only one. But for me that one - the Johnson-- ranks with the Nestvold as the stand out story. None of novellettes have been reviewed here, although I've read the Sinisalo (it's brilliant, but disturbing) but among the novellas the Coleman will be familiar. Among the novels, well I'm biased but the Pratchett is his best yet.

Posted by Colin Harvey

All yesterday I felt guilty, and ill-at-ease. I wasn't working on Damage Time, the next novel, and I should have been.

Part of that is the fact that my subconscious, like many other writer's, is trained; if I don't write at certain times, I start to feel edgy.

Part of it is that I was aware that I should have been writing. Instead I spent the day revising anthology proposals for my agent, trawling around for research to support those proposals, part of which included a visit to the excellent ISFdB to look at contributors to New Worlds magazine between 1964 and 1969, and part to Nielsen database, to see whether I could purchase sales data.

(By the way, check out the stunning New Worlds cover)

I kept thinking how easily I was distracted, and feeling guilty at my own inability to focus, even though I was working.

But oddly enough, as I lay beneath the covers, several ideas for improvements to the detailed outline of Damage Time presented themselves, almost as if my psyche was presenting with a thank-you present for giving it the day off from outlining.

Who says dodging work doesn't pay?

Until next time.

Colin

Posted by Colin Harvey

I learned yesterday that Realms of Fantasy is to close with its April issue.

The Big Three SF and fantasy magazines are Analog, Asimovs and Fantasy & Science Fiction. It was sometimes said that RoF was very much the Fourth Man, overlooked and comparatively unloved. Maybe that was because of its fiction policy, which one fellow author at Swimming Kangaroo Books complained very strongly about.

Posted by Colin Harvey

I've now finished my crash course in Kunstlerism. Back in 2005 Kim Stanley Robinson led a panel on 'Living Through The Next Fifty Years' at Worldcon which profoundly influenced me. A writer quoted repeatedly was James Howard Kunstler, who has written several seminal works on the way we live and its likely outcome, one of which I've already mentioned. On Sunday night I finished The Long Emergency, in which Kunstler tackles several onrushing apocalypses; the exhaustion of our world's oil reserves, climate change, and the resurgance of diseases recently thought extinct.

He's so persuasive that it's easy to over-quote him, and I wondered whether in some retrograded future there'll be a religion in which he's venerated as the prophet, if his ideas of a more localized world where our descendants have regained lost crafts comes to pass.

I urge anyone who has a real interest in our future to seek out his works and read them, even if you disagree with him. I found myself buying in completely into his conclusions as I was reading, but then as I put the book down and mulled over each chapter, would think hang on a minute...

My differences from him may arise from living in a more geographically compact country than the US, and that the book is edited in such a way that it gives the impression of a world rushing over a precipice. It won't feel like that of course, which is the perspective I'm studying it from.

On a lighter note, the Bristol SF Group had its sort-of-monthly meeting last night. I left early, physically exhausted from shunting about fifteen thousand files around the eye hospital (no exaggeration, either) but despite being much sober than most months, still managed to lose my hat on the bus. It's annoying because --as I discovered walking home from my stop-- it's too cold not to have a hat, and secondly, it was a present, and I hate losing or in any way having to dispose of presents, which is perhaps more revealing than I'd like.

Until next time.

Colin

Posted by Colin Harvey

I finally caught up on some much needed sleep last week-end, and by limiting myself to three afternoons at the hospital, am now in much better shape than the last time I blogged. <br> The main reason for reverting to only three afternoons is that I've now (finally) begun work on Damaged, the next novel.

Much of the last week has been spent on working and re-working the synopsis and first few chapters, but it's also been spent immersing myself in research. Climate change affecting Arizona, land at risk from rising water levels, and the deities of Zoroatronism -- just three of the topics I've skipped over.

But the bulk of the research so far is Howard Kunstler's superb dissection of the decline of American civic architecture since 1920, and the catylst for its fall, the rise of the American automotive industry.

The Geography of Nowhere portrays the history of American civic architecture since the early days of the Pilgrim Fathers, when if a settler didn't like where they lived, they could move on. It moves through the French influence of early post-Independance USA, the over-reliance on neo-classicism and the resulting backlash of Modernism. This may sound as dry as dust, but Kuntsler also portrays individual communities, and their rise and inevitable decline.

Atlantic City and Woodstock, Disneyworld and Los Angeles, Detroit and Portland (Oregon) are analyzed, and the lessons learned as set out by Kuntsler are that an over-reliance on zoning and building regulations that are anathema to people have resulted in a landscape that will, when the oil runs out, be uninhabitable. It's a chilling and often depressing book.

Next up is Beyond Hubbard's Peak, which is about the alternatives to oil that we might have to choose when it starts to run out.

Posted by Colin Harvey

The human brain is a curious organ. You would think that if you work hard, you'll sleep well, right?

Not neccesarily.

It seems that if I stop work by about 8pm, I can sleep reasonably well.

But stupidly, last night I got caught up in planning a couple of new anthologies and worked through until about 9.45. I should have exercised greater self-discipline, but parts of the jigsaw that are the proposals gradually started to take form and I got caught up in the process.

As night follows day, after I'd gone to bed and read until about 11pm as normal, I awoke at 4am and couldn't get back to sleep. The result is a day lost to tiredness and inability to form coherent sentences.

I was going to review Theodore Sturgeon's 1966 collection Starshine, but it's a bit of a mixed bag in any event. At his best Sturgeon was a master wordsmith, but while this collection has a couple of gems in 'Derm Fool' and 'How to Kill Aunty,' it also has a couple of outright duds in 'The pOd in the Barrier' and 'The World Well Lost.' Based on this collection, Sturgeon had trouble writing believable SF set in space. But give him a domestic setting, and his prose shone.

Given such an in-and-out set, a full review isn't going to happen.

Self-discipline takes many forms. Sometimes it means stopping when you'd rather go on, closing the lid on the laptop when all your instincts are to press on.

Posted by Colin Harvey

After seventeen consecutive days of sub-zero temperatures and deep penetrating hoar-frost, the weather finally seems to be warming up. It's finally climbed above zero, and for a few brief hours, the sun shone; we were actually able to spend a little while out in the garden.

The water in the bird bath --which is about two or three inches deep-- was still frozen solid, so to give the birds something to drink, I boiled a kettle and poured the water over the ice in the bath; it didn't thaw it completely, but it did help a little.

By the greatest of ironies, just as the weather's warming, the redwings have arrived. These thrush-like birds arrive each January and swarming over the bushes, strip the plants of berries --particularly the bright red berries of the pyrocantha (firethorn).

They'll be gone in a few days, leaving the bushes ravaged. It'll take considerably longer for the ground to thaw, but in a few days the rock-hard ground will be swamp-like.

Posted by Colin Harvey

Posted by Colin Harvey

Colin