Colin Harvey and I met in August 2009, under the fearsome gaze of an angry robot. In fact, the robot wasn’t all that angry – more cranky, and quite cute. It was Worldcon, that annual gathering of geek, and this particular party was on an upper floor of the Delta Hotel in Old Montreal. Angry Robot Books was launching some novels, and I arrived at the festivities before my friends did. I sat alone for a few moments, sipping a tepid and tangy white wine from a delicate plastic cup. But then one of the Angry Robot authors introduced himself – Colin Harvey, from between-Bristol-and-Bath – and I wasn’t alone any more.
There was much jollity, that night. Months later, via email, our conversations remained witty (well, they did!), but they were also threaded through with a quiet sort of seriousness – about day jobs and night jobs, school, family, cats and dogs, Sunday dinners – and about how to write, in and around all these other things.
Colin died on August 15, at 50, of a stroke.
He asked me, early in our correspondence, for a 300-word piece about teaching creative writing; he wanted to feature it on his blog. I assured him for months that I’d get it to him, but I never did. The emails had slowed by mid-2010, thanks to various forms of chaos on our respective sides of the Atlantic. But I knew he was still there. You expect this of certain people – that they’re continuing, more or less as you are. Only now he’s stopped. And I reel with selfish, helpless, dizzy thoughts: It’s not fair He was so young He had loads more books to write Why didn’t I get him those 300 words and why does this matter so much to me now?
I went back through our emails, of course – at first just to hear his voice again, and then, this morning, in search of a Snapshot of Colin Harvey’s Wonderfulness that I could share. There were many contenders. This one won.
We found a baby hedgehog at the weekend. He got dubbed Spike (of course). He ate a whole load of chicken, made Alice [the blue rowan cocker spaniel] very jealous, and got so restive — having recovered from whatever ailed him in the first place — that we had to let him go Saturday night. And then he was gone.
And I miss him.
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