Author Colin Harvey on Writing Blind Faith

Colin, tell me a bit about your family. Your adoring public would like to know! Also include any info you would like people to know including URL to your website if you have one.

I've been married to Kate for just over 20 years. We live just outside Bristol in the UK with our black Cocker Spaniel called Alice, but lost Chloe --my first dog, a Springer Spaniel-- earlier this year.

My website is at http://www.geocities.com/colin_harvey

Do you have insight to share to help others writing find success in getting a book published?

By learning what editors and publishers want, and what they want --they've told me-- is reliability. If they say they want a manuscript by Christmas, they don't want it in January or February.

Tell me about any workshops you offer?

I don't at the moment, but maybe I ought to.

What inspired you to write Blind Faith? How long will we wait for the next book?

I wrote a story about three years ago called 'The Bloodhound,' about a PI who can smell people's sins. I woke up with a line running through my head: "Murder smells of black pepper..." It seemed obvious that there would be others with senses affected in the same way, although Frances and The Bloodhound will never meet.

The next novel is due out next year, but it's very, very different. More on that below.

How do you develop your plots and characters? Do you use any set formula?

For characters, I try to make them composites of two or three people, so maybe physically they look like one person but have the characteristics of another. I plot them ruthlessly, building a crisis in at regular points.

How do you come up with ideas for your writings and why do you feel you choose some over others?

Idea generation is the easy part -- it's just a case of collecting ideas, grouping them in logical combinations, and hurling them together to create a fission reaction like a nuclear bomb. Why I choose some over others is down to what interests me at any one time.

How much time do you devote to marketing your book and what kind of marketing do you recommend?

I'm probably the last person that you should ask! Marketing is something I don't think I'm very good at. I blog -mostly reviews- for Suite101 and give on-line interviews, as well as attending local cons. But I'm sure that I could do better, if I could only separate the things that work from the things that don't.

What are your current projects?

A big SF novel called Winter Song about a man who crash lands on a planet settled by Icelandic settlers, filled with hard SF concepts like genetic engineering, terraforming, pantropy and nanotechnology and Artificial Intelligences. Oh, and a crashed space ship: the Winter Song...

What advice would you give to writers just starting out?

Apart from writing every day, finish what you start. I know too many authors who have several novels, all of them unfinished.

Interview with Colin Harvey Author of Vengeance

Tell me a bit about your family. Your adoring public would like to know! Also include any info you would like people to know including URL to your website if you have one.

I've been married to Kate for just over 20 years. We live just outside Bristol in the UK with our black Cocker Spaniel called Alice, but lost Chloe --my first dog, a Springer Spaniel-- earlier this year. My RPG (Rent / Rate Paying Gig, aka day job) is at the Bristol Eye Hospital, where I'm part of the glamourously named Destruction Team in their Medical Records Department. It's sufficiently surreal to ensure that one day I'm going to write a story about it....

My website is at http://www.geocities.com/colin_harvey

When did you consider yourself a writer? You know what I mean—the time when you realized that you crossed the line from “want to be a writer” to “I am a writer”.

I think that it was when I placed a couple of stories and an article in fairly quick succession back in mid-2001; up until then I'd been hovering on the edge of being a writer. I'd actually considered giving up, I was so dispirited.

I kept writing despite the rejection letters through sheer bloody-mindedness --no-one remembers the authors who didn't sell; "Oh yeah, that Colin Harvey, he'd a been a great author, if he'd only persevered." No one's ever going to say that.

Do you feel you have more than one voice in your writing?

I'm getting better at differentiating individual character's voices, but I still have some way to go! I consider writing to be a process of on-going evolution.

What kept you writing while getting rejection letters or struggling with writer’s block?

That's actually two questions!

I suffered writer's block for almost twenty years -- I could start stories, but couldn't finish them. I write instinctively and it was only when I learned about how stories are put together, what you would call 'plot' that I managed to finish them. That was a big step for me.

I've already mentioned how I almost gave up. What gave me momentum was an editor bought an article, and I realized that while my fiction wasn't selling, while I was learning, I could place non-fiction much more easily. Non-fiction can be a lifeline to novice writers.

Do you use certain tricks that help prevent you from straying from your goal?

No -- tricks can backfire. I keep one very simple point in mind -- I have to deliver a manuscript by a certain date. The only way that I can do that is to knuckle down and work

What inspired you to write Vengeance? How long will we wait for the next book?

Part of it was a simple desire to learn how to write a novel. Part of it was a fascination with the way we apply labels. So a book with 'wizards' in is perceived very differently from a book with 'aliens' in. What happens if you start with one set of labels, and gradually introduce the other set?

What are your current projects?

One of my three projects for 2009 is Displacement, a collection of short stories built around the title novella, which is a near(-ish) future murder mystery -- a sort of CSI: Vancouver mixed with The Day of the Triffids. It's about 25,000 words long, so it has all the challenges of a short story at half-novel length. Whether it's one of the best stories I've written is really something for my publisher to say....

What advice would you give to writers just starting out?

Write. Write every day. It only needs to be one hour daily -- it's better to have a small amount every day than a huge burst of writing followed by nothing for days or weeks. But write every day: If you write just five hundred words in that hour each day, at the end of seven months you'll have a 100,000 word novel.