David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Editing hours: 2.4 | Since last entry: 1.4 | Percent complete: 7% I have picked up two NaNoEdMo buddies, pollyc and deedop. Much appreciated, and there’s always room for more. Packed for Potlatch, SF convention in San Francisco, tonight. Also continued the new scene with Clarity moving toward the UN… about 500 new words. But it’s the hours that count this month, not the words. Clarity must not whine. Must not whine. Must not whine. And neither will I. I will edit on the plane tomorrow, I will edit on the plane coming back, and I will steal an hour or two for editing each day during the convention as well. This is my NaNoEdMo pledge, and if you are going to be at Potlatch I’d appreciate it if you’d hold me to it.

Editing hours: 1.0 | Since last entry: 1.0 | Percent complete: 7% Tonight I printed out the unicorn story and stuck it in an envelope, watched Lost (Hurley rocks!), and updated my website with the excellent Locus review of “Tk’Tk’Tk” — and still got in an hour of editing. And so NaNoEdMo gets under way! Most of tonight’s work was new text, moving Clarity from the Manhattan Platform toward the UN. To make it more difficult for her I decided to make it rain. Hard. This involved adding rain to the Jason chapter, later in the book, that takes place on the same day. Which made me realize that I have to coordinate the two chapters hour by hour. I wound up writing a detailed timeline of the day, and changing the times of some of Jason’s events to make it all work. Fortunately, this is the only day in the whole novel that has to coordinate this tightly. The “percent complete” figure above represents the fact that I am currently editing page 15 of 221. There’s a certain amount of hopping back and forth, but I plan on going through the novel in order and on any given day there’s going to be a focus, or locus, of editing, so I hope that tracking the position of this locus through the book will be some kind of indicator of progress. We’ll see if this idea actually holds water.

Editing hours: 0.0 | Since last entry: 0.0 March is National Novel Editing Month (no, really, it’s true: see http://www.nanoedmo.org/), and it couldn’t come at a better time for me. I really need a kick-start. So I am going to tackle the NaNoEdMo challenge: 50 hours of editing on my novel during the month. With any luck that will be sufficient to complete the darn thing and send it on its way. Since NaNoEdMo works on hours of editing rather than word count, each participant needs a “buddy” to verify their editing hours. I’m looking for one or more buddies, and offering the same in return. Anyone want someone to help goad them into editing? Anyway… today being the first day of NaNoEdMo, I kicked it off by… not editing on my novel at all. But I did do editing! I revised the unicorn story (if my edits meet with my co-author’s approval I’ll get it in the mail tomorrow) and I edited my galley proofs for Greenberg anthology Gateways. (In the whole story there was just one misplaced comma. How did that get in there?) However, I won’t count those 3 or 4 editing hours because they were not on my novel. So I go into the month already 1.6 hours behind the desired daily average. Oh well. In other writing news… since my last journal entry, “The Last McDougal’s” sold to Asimov’s and reprint “At the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of Uncle Teco’s Homebrew Gravitics Club” (which originally appeared in the OryCon 25 program book) was accepted by the non-paying website Infinity Plus. “The Last McDougal’s” is my twentieth sale! Also, my story “Tk’tk’tk” in the current (March 2005) issue of Asimov’s got a good review in the Internet Review of Science Fiction and (I’m told, but haven’t seen it yet) another good review in Locus. Asimov’s is also offering the first part of the story as a teaser on their website right now. Yoicks, and away!