Colin Harvey – author

During WWII, the period of comparative peace during the winter of 1939 – 40, before outright fighting broke out was known as The Phoney War.  That’s now, here in Bristol…

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.

During the Just as the British and French were completely unprepared for the German onslaught in the spring and summer of 1940, 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…

I’m still in shock from the news that Killers has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award.

OK, so it may only be one nomination, which is all that’s needed to get it onto the long list, but the fact remains that someone likes it enough to nominate it. For a small press outfit publishing an anthology edited by a relatively new author this is a huge plus. Not just for the publicity, but also for the sense of vindication.  The real honour goes to the writers who made the book, of course.

It doesn’t matter if I don’t win, or get onto the final ballot. It’s a cliche, but being nominated really is an honour.

I may be the last person in the world to come to the table, but I’ve bitten the bullet and joined Twitter.

Although I’ll admit to being off-put by the 140 character limit, most of my reluctance to do it had nothing to do with Twitter itself, but was a symptom of a wider manifestation.

I have a finite amount of time, unless I’m to give up the day job (unlikely at the moment) or to stop writing, which is the whole point of blogging for me — I have the anthology Future Bristol to promote– so I have to ration that time.

I’m already on LJ, Facebook, MySpace, WordPress, LinkedIn, and GoodReads, as well various forums such as Interzone‘s, EPIC, and multiple other groups. Admittedly I can import LJ into WordPress, but until I work out how to transfer more of the posts, I have a significant duplication of work.

But that said, so many people recommended it that I felt I had to join up, and so far I’m finding Twitter to be less work than I envisaged, so maybe my reluctance was misplaced.

Time will tell.

Lyndon Perry has just posted his review for Future Bristol over at The Fix.

It’s terrific.
 
Woot!

Given that all kinds of wierdness is hitting the net today, from Alan Shearer being made manager of Newcastle United to SF sales increasing during a time of recession, I’ve decided not to post anything.

You wouldn’t believe me anyway.

Last night’s meeting of the Bristol SF & Fantasy Society pulled an unprecedented 15 attendees. Scary — we hit double figures and beyond!

And there’s talk of an event in September. More details to follow.

And today the actual copies of Future Bristol arrived. Yippee!

In about two and a half hours I’m off to Dublin for Phoenix Con VI, so I’ll go quiet for a couple of days, unless I’m one of the people lucky enough to get wi-fi access. I’m looking forward to it — despite the fact that the slavedrivers have put me on four panels and a ‘meet the author’ session.

My day job is in a hospital  working about fifteen hours a week. It’s a balancing act between how few hours I can do to keep our finances ticking over while not slowing up work on the next novel.

At least that’s the theory.

In practice my employers will go to extraordinary lengths to delay paying their staff.

For a three day week, I have to complete no less than twenty-seven data entries on a time-sheet; my name, NI number, employee number, and for each day the date, start time, end time, break, total hours worked, and location. On top of that my boss has to complete four more entries for each day worked.

If any of them are omitted or filled in incorrectly in any way, my pay for that week is delayed while the query is resolved. Furthermore, the complexities of our National Insurance scheme mean that if I get two weeks pay in one week, and none in the other, rather than pay in both weeks, I lose about £10.50 per time. Furthermore, if anyone else makes an error, or there delays because of the internal post, I again lose out. 

Then they decided to cut all lines of communication apart from a web form that can only be filled in on the employer’s intranet site.

On at three occasions this year my pay has been delayed because of my own errors — but on another four occasions it’s been delayed by someone else’s mistake or procedural change.

That means that fifteen per cent of my pay has been delayed by a week.

Sometimes I feel that I’d be better off doing the lottery. Sometimes when I get paid, it feels as if I’ve won the lottery.

As I sat on the bus on the way home tonight, I toyed with what music I wanted to listen to while I worked. I decided that since it had been years since I’d listened to the Don’t Look Back album from Boston, I’d like to hear it again. It’s over thirty years old now, but it’s a great side one especially. 

Unfortunately I only have it on vinyl, so  I decided to download it from Napster.

Half an hour later I wrote a disgusted note to them, got the album down from the attic, and cleared the clutter off the turntable.

While the album was playing I caught up on correspondence, and then decided to see what my teenage heroes were up to nowadays.

And as vocalist Brad Delp launched into A Man I’ll Never Be, came the TZ  moment — bearing in mind that I’d not listened to the album in years– as Delp sang "I can’t get any stronger/ I can’t climb any higher / You’ll never know just how hard I’ve tried," I read the awful newsof his suicide two years ago.

I know that it’s pure coincidence, I know that there’s no significance to it, but I’ve never felt so weirded out.

I shot across and had that damned album off the turntable before you could say "Tom Sholtz."

Hopefully things will return to normal the next time I get out an old album.