Colin Harvey – author

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

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

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

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

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

Back tomorrow with more witterings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something significant happened at 12.27 today; at about the same time as I was submitting my first assignment, in Feature Journalism, the thermometer rose to freezing point. It’s the first time in I’m not sure how many days that it’s shown positive.  It’s still bitterly cold, but at least now I can leave off tipping boiling water into the bird bath. (No, we’re not parboiling the local sparrows — within a few minutes it’s barely above freezing again, but at least it’s drinkable)

Kate took some pictures yesterday, which will illustrate our wintry world far better than I can.

And in the same way as there’s a sense that the world is thawing gradually, so I’ve finally started to feel as if I’m getting on top of things, for the first time in quite a while.

Partly that’s because I’m about two days away from finishing the revision of Ultramassive.  I have one more pass to do a light edit of certain passages, but I’ve used the time freed up from working at the BEH to target this.

And, as I blogged yesterday, Film is done and dusted for a few days. It’s now onto the nice part, the concept stages leading to a screenplay.  And tomorrow night our core lecture will take the form of a screening of the Swedish version of Let the Right One In. Must remember to pick up the popcorn on the way in…

Time to see what other people are doing on their blogs:                                                    

Gareth L Powell writes about a new anthology —2020 Visions— that’s out now. Stories by David Gerrold, Ernest Hogan, Mary Robinette Kowal and of course Gareth himself. I’ll have to check that one out.

Frederik Pohl is writing about his marriage to Judith Merrill, and is busily engaged in a verbal war with Kornbluth bigrapher Mark Rich over ‘hateful libels and lies,’ which is rather sad, so I’m going to move swiftly along.

Meanwhile, Charlie’s Diary has a terrific picture of Edinburgh in the snow, but has moved on with an updated post  about Utopia.

Eugene Byrne offers us his historical joke of the week.

Luc Reid examines at what point a habit forms.

And finally, James Maxey discusses abolishing the minimum wage in the USA.

Just like the picture of our deceptively cute dog, whose looks disguise an occasionally evil nature, the world outside looks lovely from in here, but appearances can deceive. It’s what Icelanders call ‘window weather.’

It’s nice for twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours, but the bitter weather that’s mantled much of Northern Europe for almost ten days  is starting to become a pain. Yesterday the temperature climbed above freezing for only the second day in the last eight or nine days.  Which should be good, except that it’s not going to last, but instead will snap cold again.

The problem is that the ground is so treacherous –despite salt and grit on the roads, though not the pavements– that it’s making any kind of going out extremely problematic. I fell last winter in a frozen field and had problems with my back for weeks, long after my bruised wrists had healed.  And it’s made me reluctant to repeat the experience.

I’m not the only one who feels like this. Several of my classmates didn’t make it into lectures last week. Given that some of them face two, even three hour journeys with the possibility of the campus being closed when they get there, I don’t blame them at all. But several of them –like me– are starting to get cabin fever after so long being cooped up, creating a Hobson’s Choice between stir craziness and accidents outside.

What makes it so tricky is that yesterday, as the temperature climbs, so rain falls, as was the case yesterday. But as the skies clear it freezes overnight, as it did last night. So walking Alice today is going to be especially tricky. But it needs to be done — I have the usual early Monday morning start, and she can’t be left alone for six hours without being walked; it gives her a chance to perform her ablutions.  And according to the forecast, it’s not going to be any better tomorrow…

So that’s the weather around here. How is with you, wherever you are?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forget Jim Kelly‘s assertion that April is the cruellest month. It’s November, Jim, but not as we know it.

Last year my dipping a toe in the water of NaNoWriMo almost broke me (writing a novel in a month is one thing, writing it while doing a full-time course is another) but at least I proved to myself that it is possible, and that the quality isn’t necessarily awful.

This year it was the film project and working at the BEH for four or five weeks. That latter part was the back-breaker. I did an eleven hour day yesterday, but aside from three hours spent going in and out of Bath -during which time I worked on the bus anyway- I didn’t need to change gear in the same way.

My spreadsheet tells me that over the thirty days of November I worked for two hundred and forty hours – and a few tenths. Add in the forty-two hours spent in and travelling to and from the BEH, and that comes to a whisker over two hundred and eighty two hours. On a weekly basis, that amounts to a sixty-six hour week.

That’s do-able for a week. Maybe two. But toward the end of the month I began to struggle to remember what day it was, for the first several minutes of each day. I made no end of mistakes on tasks, and struggled to hold even simple conversations with people. I learned what my upper limit was, at least on a long-term basis.

I’ll break down the constituencies of those two hundred and forty hours tomorrow, and end this with the thought that next year, I’m going to try and keep November free.

Honest.