Colin Harvey – author

What’s that bright light poking through the clouds? Why, I do believe it may be the sun…

Perfect timing — I’ve written my daily ration of words, answered some e-mails, and I’ve posted the first of a two part piece on Interzone over at Suite101.  More on that subject tomorrow.

But now I’m going to take myself off to the garden, and read some of this year’s Hugo nominees…

It’s been a productive morning — I’m now 20% of the way through Ultramassive, 21000 words in, and I’ve critiqued a short story for Critters to keep membership of that that particular group ticking over.  Plus the review of Black Static 17 is posted.

So now –since it’s 23c in the shade and it feels criminal to be inddors on such a nice day, I’m going to sit under a tree and catch up on some z’s for an hour. There have to be some benefits to being a writer, after all….

SF writer and journalist Gareth L Powell made this timely comment:  Just as you climb a mountain one step at a time,
you have to keep putting one word after another if you want to write a book.

He’s quite right. Writing a novel is also like batting to save a cricket match. One ball at a time, one over at a time, one seesion at a time. Looking too far ahead spells disaster. But the novelist, having to be all-seeing and all-powerful, sometmes has no option but to look up from the detail. 

I used to compare writing a novel to an impressionist painting, but there’s a better metaphor, I’ve now realized. A novel is like a picture made up of 100,000 pixels, with each representing a pixel. Miss out a thousand words, and you have a picture with a hole in its whole.

And today I looked up and was paralyzed, as if my wall had been put on its side and was Everest-high.

I had fallen behind from my (admittedly) self-imposed target of 1400 words a day by the end of August. I had had to work in the morning, whereas I like to write before the day’s smorgasbord of irritations, distractions and events can fill my head and push out all thoughts of Terraformers and Pantropists.

Worse, when I awoke this morning, I realized that my chapter outline wasn’t going to work — so not only was I 600 words behind, but I had no idea how to write my 1400 for today, let alone catch up the backlog.

The answer? Stare harder at the pixels. What’s missing? Some necessary detail on motivation. Why is the hero a mercenary? Why has the heroine come to do her duty on a world that doesn’t like her? How do I show that the hero is gengineered? Through conflict, of course. There’s another mini-scene. One word at a time. One sentence at a time. One day at a time.

When you feel that awful sense that you’re going to fall and/or fail, stare hard at the detail and fill those pixels in.

There’s a fascinating guest blog on the Angry Robot website from Harry Markov about the increasing fragmentation of speculative fiction. What’s interesting, and perhaps unique to SF is the amount of time that genre readers spend analyzing and debating what it is that they’re actually reading. That said, while what much of Markov has to say is interesting, I’m not sure that I buy into ‘SF is dying,’ particularly as he produces no supporting argument for such a sweeping assertion. 

I may be biased, of course, since I write SF. Two thousand more words of it written this morning to make up for yesterday’s relatively unproductive day. I’m back on track again.

Monday was a day of unexpected changes, which is why I’ve not blogged much for the last few days.

In the morning I started on the wip, which calls for 1400 words a day, if I’m to have the first draft finished by August Bank Holiday; it’s not quite as brutal a daily rate as Black Death, which called for 2000 words a day for a month, but it eats up a fair chunk of every day.

So far so good, since I’m bang on target at the moment with 8400 words written.

But then in the afternoon I took a call from the Bank Office in Bristol, asking if I could work at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. Since we need to keep ticking over until the autumn, of course I said yes.

But it means that my day is now writing the wip from 7 to 11 every weekday, then off to work at the Trauma Clinic, not getting home until 7pm. And it’s draining work, telling patients that their clinic has had to be cancelled at less than 24 hours notice –they are often understandably distressed– and by the time I get home and have cooked dinner, I’m sinply exhausted.

So for the moment blogs and reviews will become weekend events, unless I get a little more time and/or energy.

I was relieved this morning when I looked to learn that I have 0 (as in nought) new spam comments on the blog. It was getting a bit worrying when it hit 50 a day (yes, that was fifty). I don’t think I have an overly fierce spam filter, since most of the comments seemed to be in Cyrillic, but if you’ve posted a genuine comment and it hasn’t appeared, drop me a line.

I’m 850 words into a short-short story at the moment, and have a novel synopsis and third chapter to revise, but my main work today is to work on the links page, following up on my updating of my bibliography page. So I’d best get on.

Oh yes, and I’ll be at the Bristol SF&FS meeting tonight, and the BSFA meeting in London on Wednesday. If I don’t see you at one, maybe I’ll see you at the other…?

That damned buzzsaw guitar of Keith Richard keeps running through my head.  You know the one — that intros the Stones The Last Time?

Because this is the last, the very last time I should be going into Newton Park for over four months, all being well.  Next week I start a 3-week holiday before going back to work at one of the hospitals in Bristol; sadly, we’re at least a month, ideally two from my being able to take the summer off and write literally full-time. Maybe that’ll happen next year.

So what have I learned?

As I told Carrie Etter when she asked me that question, the thing that I’ve learned is how to really, really think about things. I’m not talking about the odd bit of neuron-firing that we all substitute for thought, but the brain-stretching stuff like; how can we believe anything what the mass-media tell us when each information provider has an agenda of their own? How do I generate ‘heat’ for my writing career? When was the time I was I most happy in childhood? Can I write a sonnet to order?

I don’t have the answers to any of those, apart from the last one, which is yes, although unsurprisingly it wasn’t very good.

Sadly, by the time I go back, the leaves will be starting to go brown. But in the meantime, here comes summer…

I’ve just posted what may be either a one-off experiment, or the first of an occasional series at Suite101, in which I make my debut as an interviewer.

Black Static reviewer Peter Tennant is my first victim, and he did a series of fairly mundane questions proud, with some interesting and at times controversial answers (I may agree with Pete that Wembley should have been burned down, but not for his reasons!).

In the interest of full disclosure, most of the questions were adapted –or just pinched outright– from Angry Robot’s Lee Harris & Marc Gascoigne.

If you have a book or story coming out or if you have something to say in general about the genre, and you’re interested in being interviewed drop me a line, and we’ll see if this idea has legs.

This morning Kate asked me over breakfast what I was going to be doing with myself today. There was no hint of checking up, or suggestion that I was going to be playing World of Warcraft until my eyeballs fell out (that comes later) but there was still that sense that non-writers simply can’t visualize what writers actually DO.

The answer –of course– is that we dream with our eyes open.

But the result would be supremely tedious should anyone have fitted cctv to my office (aka the small settee). I just sit here and bang away on keys, and every fifty minutes or so get up and move around to relieve any stress on my back.

I like quiet to work in, so all you can hear from here are distant traffic noises, a periodic clang of the gate followed by the dog going ballistic at the postman, veg deliverer, or other unfortunate.  And that’s it — one day some enterprising burglar is going to get the shock of his life because he thinks an empty house has been left unlocked…

But that’s the difficulty for people who make things, or who work in an office where productivity is judged by how many files you move, or how many orders you process, or how many customers you serve. There is no tangible way of measuring a writer’s productivity. George Alec Effinger once spent all day writing four words. And at the end of the day, he deleted those four words.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of accountability, I may post some of the results of that banging away on keyboard tomorrow, or maybe later in the week, depending on how I feel. Or maybe I won’t. Because I know what I’ve done, and how important it is, and you can’t always measure it.

I thought I ought to start getting back toward at least a semi-regular blog.  Even though this morning’s lie-in to a decadent 7.30, plus (food) shopping and fitting the new TV rather rather blew that out of the water, I’m determined to say a few words about yesterday, which was hectic and hinged around two very different experiences of lectures.

The day was terrific but exhausting; Ashley Pharoah gave the 9am script lecture, then I spent the day with friends before heading back to uni to give the 5pm guest lecture with Gareth L Powell.

In the morning Pharoah talked about the bizaare genesis of Life on Mars, the rare pleasure of actually ending a series ( Spin-off Ashes to Ashes finishes on the 21st) rather than handing it over to someone else, as Russell T Davies did with Doctor Who, or just having it axed by the network.  He also talked about his agent, and the fact that scripwriters cost their agencies an average of £10,000 per client. I’m sure that that’s less for literary agencies, and perhaps comes down the more clients an agency has, although conversely, the less they can do for an individual client, but it’s an interesting insight into the pressures on an agent. That’s something that most writers rarely think about.

Co-hosting the 5pm lecture with Gareth was a very, very different experience.  

In actual terms there were only about 30 people there (Gareth estimated 20 to 30, I thought 30 to 40, so let’s go with the middle figure) but the shape of the auditorium, which rises away from one makes even that low number pretty formidable. I suspect that not all of the audience were SF fans, since attendance is theoretically mandatory — though it was the end of the academic year – so I wanted to give them a flavour of proper SF. Gareth went for a lighter approach, and read a short story which went down well, while I read an extract from Winter Song which is perhaps -with hindsight- a little tech heavy, although perfect for a con. There’s a moral there; think about the nature of your audience. But it showed them just how diverse SF is. 

Gareth gave them some very tips on writing, which you can read about here, while I talked a little about a typical day, and both of us fielded the ‘where did that story come from?’ which is still a good question to ask.

The whole experience  was pretty draining, and offered an insight how it feels to be a lecturer. Some of the questions were tough ones to answer on the hoof, and there were several occasions when I wished afterwards that I’d just had a few more seconds to think before answering — but I felt that I had to keep one eye on the time.

It would be profoundly interesting to go back in a year’s time and repeat the experience, to see whether the experience feels any less overwhelming, and whether any of the students have gotten into SF and/or fantasy.