David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

So here I am at Buena Vista University (which, by the way, they pronounce “byoona” rather than “bwayna”… apparently this has something to do with the Spanish-American War) in Storm Lake, Iowa. BVU is small and in the middle of nowhere but very well endowed; the campus is saturated with wifi and every student gets a laptop and, this year, an iPad as well. Walking past students’ screens at breakfast, I see: Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Microsoft Word, Facebook. The school also makes up for its location with an extensive travel program. Most students travel somewhere like New York each year, and my host Inez is going to Korea. And, of course, they paid to bring me out here to speak.

Nonetheless, it is the middle of Iowa. The coffee I got this morning was so pale and weak I literally thought I’d gotten tea by accident. I mean, if there were text on the bottom of the cup you would have had no difficulty reading it. Inez took me out for Mexican last night; it was actually quite good, but as we were preparing to leave the gal at the next table asked me what I’d had. “Arroz con pollo,” I said. She blinked and asked me what that was in English.

The school mascot is the beaver, which apparently most of the visiting lecturers find hilarious. As I’m from Oregon, the Beaver State, it’s not funny but it is a bit distracting.

I got a lot of writing done on the plane yesterday: 1684 words for the day, total of 5363. Just the siege and aftermath to go. Unfortunately, the editor asked for 3000-5000 words, so once I’m done I’ll have some cutting to do. More writing this morning, as I don’t have any obligations today until lunchtime.

And that’s the news from Storm Lake, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the students are jesus christ, was I ever that young?

At the airport oh-God-early for a flight to Omaha via Denver, followed by a two-hour drive to exciting Storm Lake, Iowa, home of Buena Vista University. My Clarion West classmate Inez Schaechterle is a professor in the English department there, and she’s invited me to come out for a few days to deliver the annual Stolee Lecture (I’ll be reading my story “The Tale of the Golden Eagle”) and speak to several English classes. All expenses paid, and an honorarium besides, so yay.

I’ve been working on a short story which is something in the steampunk direction. I expect to finish it before I return home, possibly even today.

Otherwise there’s not really much to report. Kate and I have been hither-and-yonning a lot, and yesterday was the first day in two weeks we were in the same place at the same time. Now I’m off again, but I’ll be back on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday it’s a 24-hour fast and other fun stuff in preparation for a colonoscopy Thursday. No worries, it’s just a standard screening, but it’s a royal pain; what with the prep and the sedation it affects most of a week. Feh.

Stick around, the fun never stops around here.

You can hear me in a panel discussion about YA science fiction in this month’s Salon Futura podcast.

In other news, the brand new Mac Mini I bought to replace the one that died two weeks ago has, itself, died. It went roaring, like a Klingon, as its fan revved up to top speed when it crashed and never came back. Several attempts to revive it proved futile… it wouldn’t even give the usual startup bong. Took it back to the shop and got a new one in exchange. Was dismayed to find the backup I’d made as soon as I got the previous new system all set up could not be restored. But I also had a Time Machine backup, which did restore just fine. So after one full day of cussing at technology I’m right back where I was. Yay?

I will be presenting my Mars talk at the April meeting of the Portland Science Fiction Society, free and open to the public. If you’re in Portland, please come along! This might be your last chance to see it!

Saturday, April 9th, 2011
Meeting starts 2:30pm, talk at 3:30pm
Concordia University Library
http://www.cu-portland.edu/documents/campus_map.pdf
2811 NE Holman Street
Portland, OR
Room GRW108

David D. Levine is a science fiction writer who’s sold over 40 short stories to all the major markets, including Asimov’s and Analog. He’s won a Hugo Award, been nominated for the Nebula, and won or been shortlisted for many other awards as well as appearing in numerous Year’s Best anthologies. He retired in 2007 after a 25-year career as a technical writer, software engineer, and user interface designer for Tektronix, Intel, and McAfee and now spends his days writing, traveling, and getting into trouble.

David’s talk, profusely illustrated with photographs, has been presented at the Worldcon, the Nebula Awards, Clarion West, the Mars Society’s annual conference, Powell’s Technical Books, and Google and has received many rave reviews. You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! You might even learn something!

My story “Trust” (of which even the editor who bought it says “Warning: Disturbing”) has been published as the story-of-the-day at Daily Science Fiction. It will remain on the front page until Monday, and will be available in the archive indefinitely at http://dailysciencefiction.com/story/david-d-levine/trust.

I hope you find it interesting and thought-provoking.

Also: Just got the galleys of my Locus interview, which should be published in the May issue. SQUEE!

Yesterday I wrote 266 new words and called it a draft. There’s a lot of denouement that I thought I’d have that isn’t in there — maybe I’m just tired, and sick of this draft — but it’s a kind of conclusion anyway and I typed THE END before the end of March, as I had resolved. YA SF novel The Loneliest Girl on Mars is in the can!

I was a lot happier with my other two first drafts; I’m keenly aware of the problems with this one. Maybe this just indicates how much I’ve learned over the course of writing three novels. I need to go through my notes file and all the notes embedded in the manuscript and collect together a big master list of all the changes I want to make when I rewrite.

But! It is done. 68,922 words, 338 manuscript pages, in just less than a year (I started outlining on April 11 last year and started drafting on April 24… note that I took the month+ we were in Australia almost completely off). That’s not to mention 29,215 words of notes and outline. It goes in the drawer for a bit now — two to six weeks, I guess — while I do research for the next novel and write one or two short stories. And then it’s a couple weeks or a month of revision before going to beta readers. May or may not get it in the mail by the end of June as originally scheduled, but there’s nobody but me who cares about that deadline.

Yay me.

Yesterday was also Kate’s birthday. I fixed up the Squeezebox so she could listen to Internet radio again (she was very excited about that), and I also bought her a primrose and a ranunculus plant. We had lunch with our friend Michael and spent the afternoon at the Portland Archives.

And today I received my contributor’s copies of the June Analog, including my novelette “Citizen-Astronaut” (which won second prize in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest) and my Biolog and photo. Reading over the story, I feel I ought to mention that although it was inspired by my experiences in Utah, this story is fiction and none of the awful things that happen to my protagonist in the story actually happened to me at MDRS. In particular, I must point out that my entire MDRS crew and the fine volunteers at the Mars Society were a lot nicer and more cooperative than the people in the story who give my protagonist so many problems, and we didn’t have to face nearly the same level of equipment failure that my protagonist does.

Even though his name is Gary Shu.

Word count: 68818 | Since last entry: 4088

Last weekend we spent a lovely four days at a cozy little rustic shack on the Olympic Peninsula in Union, Washington. This place was an amazing McMansion with seven bedrooms, dual ovens, dual microwaves, four refrigerators including a wine fridge, three fireplaces, five gigantic televisions, pool table, foosball, heated tile floors throughout, and more light switches than God. A little overwhelming, perhaps, and yet not completely without taste. If only the owners had not taken down all of the art when they turned it into a rental…

The occasion was the thirtieth wedding anniversary of our friends Paul and Debbie, to which they’d also invited our friends Marc and Patty, John and Ruth, Malinda, and Judy (none of whom, curiously, are on LiveJournal or Twitter). We spent the weekend eating, chatting, playing games (including a variant on Apples to Apples in which you select your noun card before the adjective card you’re trying to match is revealed, then have to explain why it’s a match!), watching videos, and just generally hanging out. Very relaxing. The weather was generally too rainy for outdoor activities but the view of the Olympics was occasionally very impressive.

I only did a few hundred words of writing, but this novel is very very very close to a finished draft. I might even write THE END before the end of March, as I promised myself I would at the beginning of the year.

When we returned home, I found that the TiVo was stuck on “powering up” and I had to pull the power plug a couple of times before I could get it to wake all the way up. Then, while we were watching The Amazing Race (and, by the way, the current season — in which all the teams are returning former contestants — is the best I can recall, with unexpected twists and some truly devious challenges), I noticed that the clock on the music player powered by the server in the attic had stopped. Turns out that the hard drive on the server, a 2006 Mac Mini, had Died The Death. I suspect that there may have been a power fluctuation while we were gone.

After trying all of the usual things to bring the hard disk back from the dead, I decided that the old Mini had accumulated enough hardware problems in recent years that it was better to replace it completely. So off to the Mac Store I went, and by 3:00 the next day the new server was up and running in its place.

Let me take a moment here to reflect on the importance of backups. This is actually the second time this year I’ve suffered a catastrophic hard disk failure, and neither one was more than an expensive inconvenience. New hardware, restore backup, done. Instead of enjoying my music right now I might be cursing and trying to re-create my music library, or still moaning about all of the writing and email and other stuff I’d lost back in January. In this case, the computer actually died in the middle of a backup, causing the backup to be unusable, but because I’m paranoid there was an older backup available as well.

There are a lot of alternatives for backing up your computer. Pick one and use it. (I clone each computer’s hard drive to a bootable external disk on a monthly basis, and use Time Machine for incremental backups on the main computer.) Check your backups every once in a while to be sure they’re good.

You know how they say you should only floss the teeth you want to keep? The same is true for backing up your data.