The Autumn edition of the Bristol Review of Books is out now, available free in Bristol galleries, museums, bookshops, cafes and Oxfam bookshops.

The Bristol Review of Books showcases literature and arts in the Bristol area, with incisive reviews, comment, features, interviews and new poetry and fiction.

The Autumn edition features a review of my novel The Recollection, and a short interview with me, written by Colin Harvey, who sadly passed away shortly after completing the article.

An obituary for Colin is also included in this issue.

This week sees both the launch of my novel The Recollection on Thursday evening, and the funeral of my friend and fellow writer, Colin Harvey, on Friday morning.

Without Colin, I may never have finished writing The Recollection. In April 2010, I had started writing the novel and was trying to get an agent interested in representing it; but at Eastercon, I had a meeting in the bar with an agent who advised me to abandon the book altogether. He didn’t like it, and told me to give up on it and concentrate instead on writing something that would give him a “hard-on”.

That meeting knocked my confidence. I knew The Recollection was the sort of book I’d always wanted to write; but now here I was being told it was a waste of time. Luckily, I’d travelled to the convention with Colin, and as we made our way back along the M4 to Bristol, we discussed the situation, and he helped me put it all in perspective. He said that if I believed in the book, I should keep working on it; and thanks to his encouragement, I regained my resolve and my enthusiasm for the project.

Three months later, the novel sold to Solaris Books (without the help of an agent) and the rest, as they say, is history.

The book launch for The Recollection takes place from 6pm this Thursday 25th August, at the Forbidden Planet Megastore in Bristol. I want the launch to be an optimistic and happy occasion – as I’m sure would Colin, were he here. So on Thursday, I’m going to be positive and forward-looking. I am very proud of this book and I fully intend to enjoy launching it.

I will say my thanks and my goodbyes to my friend the following morning, at his funeral.

Colin Harvey, the editor of the forthcoming Dark Spires anthology, has been posting snippets of the stories it contains on his blog, including this excerpt from my story, ‘Entropic Angel’:

For four days it snowed. On the fifth day, the angel came. As light dawned, the Reverend Christina Pike saw it squatting like a gargoyle on the tallest of the village’s wind turbines, its shoulders hunched over and its radiant face raised to the sky.

An hour later, that turbine failed. A few minutes later, the  one next to it did likewise. Watching through binoculars from the window of the vicarage, she said: “It’s an angel all right.”

Around her, the hastily-convened members of the village council muttered to one another. They knew what lay in store. They’d seen the lights dim around the Estuary as each of the other towns fell in turn to the depredations of the angelic host. With their own eyes, they’d watched civilisation sputter like a dying candle.

They’d spoken to refugees and army deserters and knew things were bad all over, that without power they were doomed to freeze, and there was nothing that could be done to save them.

Pike lowered her binoculars.

“Maybe I could talk to it?” she suggested, but the council leader, a retired colonel, shook his head.

“Far too dangerous vicar, I won’t hear of it.”

And so Pike stayed by the window watching helplessly as, one by one over the course of the day, all the turbines on the wind farm slowed and screeched to a halt, until by sunset nothing moved, and stripped of their electricity the houses of the village fell into darkness and silence.

Dark Spires will be released this weekend from Wizard’s Tower Press.

A few days ago, I made the following comment on Twitter:

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.

Now author Colin Harvey has used it as the jumping off point to discuss his method for staying focussed while working on a novel.

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 … 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.

Read Colin’s full article here.

In this week’s guest post, Angry Robot author Colin Harvey talks about the necessity of making yourself attractive to an editor.

Generating Heat
By Colin Harvey

A few weeks before the end of last term, our script lecturer gave a talk on The Business of Scriptwriting. Much of his lecture could be applied just as easily to SF as to the film business, so with some slight amendments I’ve adapted it for this blog.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Colin Harvey On Generating Heat”

The second annual BristolCon convention will be held on 6th November this year.

This is a great little convention for science fiction and fantasy fans, and is especially convenient for those in central and South West England, and South Wales.

Guests for BristolCon 2010 include Paul Cornell, Joe Abercrombie, Colin Harvey, Alastair Reynolds, Juliet E McKenna, Eugene Byrne, and others.

Tickets are available at the special price of £15 until midnight tonight, after which they rise to £20.

I’ve bought mine. To book yours, click here.

This afternoon, Colin Harvey and I co-presented the 5pm creative writing lecture at Bath Spa University. There were around 20-30 students in attendance. I read a brand new short story called The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns, which seemed to go over well, and did a brief question and answer session. I also shared with the students the following five pieces of writing advice:

Continue reading “Creative Writing Lecture”

Colin Harvey reviews Silversands for Suite 101:

Silversands is a worthy addition to any devoted SF reader’s library.

Read the full review here

Some time ago, Colin Harvey wrote a review of my short story collection The Last Reef for the Internet Review of Science Fiction. Now that the IROSF has ceased publication, Colin has posted the review on his own website.

This is my favourite part:

Powell shares with Clarke and Stapleton a sense of humanity’s insignificance in the universe … but Powell is as reminiscent of J.G. Ballard as of Clarke — from the moment when the narrator embraces his infected wife in ‘A Necklace of Ivy,’ to the rising waters and fleets of refugee container ships of ‘Flotsam,’ echoing Ballard’s The Drowned World and his visions of drained swimming pools and abandoned Cape Canaveral … But unlike Ballard, whose protagonists were cold, damaged men, Powell’s heroes turn and face their catastrophes prompted by love or a sense of what’s right — duty, to use an unfashionable word. At their best Powell’s stories fuse the traditional ideas driven British-fiction with detailed characterization, and action.

To read the full review, click here.