New novel takes readers around the world
Scott Harvey says writing was the fun part. Doing the work to get it finally published, not so much
Scott Harvey chose familiar ground for the setting of his first novel.
A Niagara Falls resident, Harvey is a psychology professor at SUNY Buffalo State College. That’s where the book starts, with a 19-year-old university student living in Buffalo. From there, the story travels. In the opening chapter of “Savagely Noble,” Scott writes the student has no idea how he started life, other than at 18 months “I was discovered all alone, wrapped in a pale blue towel, in the emergency room of a small hospital in Port Blair, India.”
“He embarks on a journey to the other side of the world, to find who his biological parents are and his native homeland,” says Harvey, in an interview.
“Along the way, he meets some really interesting characters who make him question some really fundamental assumptions about who he is and where he is going.”
Harvey has written and published short stories in the past. It took about three years to finish “Savagely Noble,” finding time to write when he wasn’t teaching or with his family.
“I really, honestly enjoyed the writing process and the editing process,” he says, adding “it’s certainly been a bit of a learning experience with how the publishing process works.”
What he learned is that being a new author is a tough haul. He figures he submitted his 180page novel to 40 publishers in several countries.
One, in England, offered him a “contributory contract” through which he would share the cost of publishing.
“Then I eventually signed a publishing deal with a small publisher in Australia, actually, and then they went out of business about a month before my book was to be released,” Harvey says.
At that point, he decided to self- publish through Amazon.ca and have more control over the process. The book is available now.
Short stories are a good place for an author to start, he says, but he had been wanting to write something longer for a while.
“When I read an article that I came across about this isolated tribe that essentially lives the way humans did 60,000 years ago — the most uncontacted tribe on earth still — I had a story that came to mind that I thought was quite novel,” says Harvey, 37, who has taught for just more than 10 years.
With COVID-19 bad here and even worse in Buffalo, he’s been teaching all his classes remotely while also home-schooling his son, so his writing time has been limited.
Still, Harvey says, he hopes his next work will be a collection of short stories. He has several finished.
“As for another larger work like this one, that’s well off in the horizon, I assume.”