Genre Chick Interview: Colin Harvey

Today the Month of Writers Blog Festival brings you an interview by SF author and fellow Codexian Colin Harvey!

Colin is yet another of my friends who hails from across the pond in the UK — a place where the superpower he’s chosen would come in very, very handy.

Cheers, mate!

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Mac or PC?
PC! I can’t cope with Macs.

Coffee or Tea?
I have one cup of coffee between 9 and 10. The rest of the day I drink tea – and worse, after lunch it’s decaffeinated! (What a wuss, eh?) Trouble is, if I have any caffeine after about 2pm, I can’t sleep…

Travel the World or Travel Outer Space?
Why can’t I do both? <g>

Fantasy or Science Fiction?
SF most of the time. But good fantasy, like Lankhmar, or Jack Vance, or Lucius Shepherd can grab me.

Music or Silence (while you write)?
Silence, please!

What weird food do you like?
If I like it, it’s not weird…I love spicy food, Indian or Chinese or Thai. That may be weird to some people, I guess. …oh, and I have been known to eat onion bhajis for breakfast…

What is one of your most irrational fears?
Having my blood pressure taken.  I don’t  know why, but the moment that belt goes around my arm, my heart rate goes through the roof.  My doctor doesn’t know what my resting blood pressure is,  because they can never get me to relax enough to take it while that belt’s on.

Will you be watching the Royal Wedding? Why or why not?
I did watch it because it was that or watch the tumbleweed blow down the street, and the weather was horrible, so we couldn’t go out.

How many novels/short stories/screenplays/poems/etc have you published?
Six novels, about thirty short stories, and I’m editing my fourth anthology.

How much do you write every day?
If I’m in novel mode, about a thousand words a day.

How much do you WISH you could write every day?
About ten thousand words…

What are you working on now?
I’m editing Transtories, an anthology from Irish publisher Aeon Press; stories from Aliette de Bodard, Lawrence M. Schoen, Tomas L. Martin, Jay Caselberg and a truly international  –no interstellar- cast… and I’m here blogging

If you could write like one author, who would it be?
Roger Zelazny.  Wish I could’ve met him.

If you could be one superhero, or have one superpower, who/what would it be?
I’d have the power not to fall over after about three or four pints of beer… 🙂

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done?
I drove across a cold weather desert in Northern Iceland about four years ago. Around every corner seemed to be a drop of several hundred metres (yards to you), and at the bottom of each drop was an overturned lorry, rusting away…

What’s the coolest thing you’re about to do?
Watch the Doctor Who pirate episode. Or apply for an MA in Creative Writing. You choose.

Name three things on your List of Things to Do Before You Die.
Go to Mars. Buy and renovate Concorde and fly on it across the Atlantic. Win multiple Hugo and Nebula awards!

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Colin Harvey lives with his wife between Bristol and Bath in the UK, in a small cottage with an enormous garden where his cocker spaniel bullies the wildlife. Colin’s most recent novel is Damage Time, published by Angry Robot Books in late 2010, and his most recent book is Dark Spires, an anthology of “Speculative Fiction from Hardy Country” published by Wizard’s Tower Press. His short fiction has appeared in Albedo One, Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Interzone and many anthologies. His website is at http://www.colin-harvey.com