David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

No word count in this writing post, because the last couple of weeks has been spent on tasks other than creating new words of prose.

One of the biggies was that I edited my story “Teaching the Pig,” which was critiqued some time ago, and submitted it. This story was generally well-received by my crit group, but I felt it was still lacking something and the critiques were pulling it in all different directions. I finally decided that what it really needed was to take the aliens out and make it a solidly Earth-based story. (The aliens were offstage anyway, and removing them only cut about 200 words, but if the main character is backed by an Earth-based organization rather than benevolent aliens it makes his motivations a bit more suspect.) I didn’t really want to cut the aliens, as the “alien-imposed benevolent dictatorship” angle was the original starting point for the story, but in the end I decided that they were a distraction from the fundamental story of protagonist vs. antagonist and they had to go.

Looking over the critiques this story received, I’m realizing how my own critiques have changed over the years. Many of these crits are focused on small logic or worldbuilding issues, exactly the sort of thing I would have picked at myself ten or even five years ago. But now my focus has broadened… I’m much more prepared to excuse technical errors, even physics errors which would have once thrown me out of the story, as long as the story works. I’d like to think that I’m now “seeing the big picture” rather than “getting soft in my old age.”

The other thing I spent a chunk of time on was writing a pitch for a short story. (This is not normally done for short stories, but this is a special case.) I’m extremely pleased and excited to have this opportunity, and also rather frightened by the thought of participating in such a significant and long-running project. I don’t know if this particular idea will be accepted; the editor likes it but there are some changes that need to be made. I also plan on pitching a few more ideas and I have reasonable hope that one or more of them will eventually be accepted, but I don’t yet know which one(s). Sorry to be so vague, but I’ll provide more details when they’re nailed down (might be a couple of months), and when I do it’ll be a very squee-worthy announcement.

I’ve been sticking to my goal of writing at least 500 words per day (including notes/outlines, or at least one hour of editing) since the beginning of the year. This has generated four new short stories, of which two are already in submission, one critiqued and awaiting edit, and one currently in critique. I’ve also gotten off my duff and resubmitted some rejected stories, and submitted some reprints to audio markets. The end result is that my number of outstanding submissions has more than doubled since the beginning of the year, which should lead to more short story sales this year than last.

One of the audio submissions has already resulted in not only a sale, but a publication. “Babel Probe” appeared on the Drabblecast podcast this week and the response on the Drabblecast message board has been phenomenal (“Kick ass piece of short fiction,” “my favorite fiction podcast episode ever,” “I’ve heard the bulk of the episodes from most of the other story podcasts … hands down the best production of the best story,” “That was freaking awesome. No, seriously. I am considering pulling my subscriptions from a few podcasts that I listen to because I think the short audio fiction thing just peaked. It can only get worse”). All praise is due to the producer of The Drabblecast, Norm Sherman, who performs the story with voices, music, and sound effects that are absolutely perfect. It gave me chills, seriously. Go listen, and put some money in his tip jar.

I’ve also been writing my talk at the Library of Congress (“How The Future Predicts Science Fiction,” noon on April 9, free and open to the public), which I really should be working on right now.

Additional writing-related stuff:

• I received galley proofs and a cover flat for my story “Aggro Radius” in Gamer Fantastic (it comes out in July).
• I was invited to participate in a Science Fiction Panel on Thursday, Apr 16 from 6 to 8 at the Mt. Hood Community College Library, part of National Library Week.
• I won free books in a drawing at SF Signal.

Okay, back to work!

The other day, the folks at Drabblecast (http://www.drabblecast.org) asked if I had any stories under 2500 words. I sent them a few, and then the day before yesterday I received a surprise email: they were doing a podcast with a song relating to Ancient Near Eastern civilization, and could they possibly buy “Babel Probe” right away? They sent me a contract, I sent it back, and the podcast is available TODAY.

It is a most excellent audio performance of the story, with music and sound effects and everything, and you can hear it here or download it from iTunes. FREE!

This is the story for which thepussinboots drew this awesome picture (click to embiggen):

Yesterday was Kate’s birthday. I made her pancakes and fresh-squeezed OJ for breakfast, and bought her a KitchenAid mixer (which I am assured is the only acceptable kitchen appliance to give as a gift to a significant other). She’s been faunching after one for years… I just hope we can find a good place to store it.

In the evening we had a small party, attended by people from all our different communities of friends (writers, fans, square dancers, and, um, Sam and Rory, who are friends via fan Kate Schaefer but are not members of any of the above). We ate pecan pie from the recipe Mary Robinette Kowal had used in Chattanooga, which was tres yum, and played games including jelly-bean relay, charades, and a variant of “telephone” or “exquisite corpse” in which players alternately wrote phrases and drew pictures based on the previous picture/phrase without seeing any of the ones before that. The one that made birthday pie come out of Kate’s nose is shown below (click to embiggen, and again to embiggen again).

The text, in case you can’t read it, goes as follows:

1. Kate is glad to have a birthday party
2. Robespierre celebrates the guillotining of a Conehead
3. Bastille day for coneheads
4. Some monks assault the castle; others juggle; some lose their heads

As I believe I mentioned earlier, I will be giving a talk at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. My topic is “How the Future Predicts Science Fiction” and the event is free and open to the public. I’ll also be signing and selling copies of Space Magic. Tell all your DC-area friends!

When: Thu Apr 9, 12-1pm
Where: 101 Independence Ave, SE, Washington DC, 20540 ; Madison Building, LM-139 (map)
For more info: Contact Colleen Cahill ccah@loc.gov or Nate Evans natev@loc.gov.
Google Calendar entry

Word count: 6062 | Since last entry: 3201

So I was plugging away on the end-of-the-world story, 500-600 words a day, when the editor of the anthology for which it’s being written posted a blog post reminding about the deadline (May 31) and that he expects a lot of stories to come in right at the deadline. And he’s already accepted several stories, so the competition’s getting tighter all the time.

Given this prod, I decided that getting the story in for the next critique group meeting, rather than the one three weeks after that, would be a Very Good Thing. So I put the pedal to the metal.

I wrote until late last night, then all this morning. I finished the first draft at 1:15 or so and sent it to the group for critique next week. Go me.

I finished just in time to rush off to the theatre for The Importance of Being Earnest, an excellent production. After which we had to hustle to get to writing friend Camille’s Book Swap and Cocktail Party, which was full of fun people and awesomeness. And books. We brought five boxes of books and came away with one… unfortunately, the boxes we brought were ones that Kate had brought back from her parents’ place, so we are actually net +1 box instead of -4.

In the middle of the awesomeness my phone rang. It was square dance friends Bo and Don, asking “aren’t we getting together for dinner tonight?” Turns out they had it on their calendar but we didn’t… not sure how that happened, but we decided not to spurn the opportunity for a nice dinner with friends, so we said hasty goodbyes and scurried off to Del Inti on Alberta for a fabulous Peruvian dinner and excellent mojitos.

After that we watched the Battlestar Galactica finale, which I found fairly satisfying though it had way too many endings and dragged a bit in the second half. I know that others had big problems with it… perhaps reading those (while avoiding spoilers) lowered my expectations to the degree that I could enjoy it.

That was my Saturday. Not too shabby.

Word count: 2861 | Since last entry: 2861

Worked with the organizer today. Got the dining room table whipped back into shape, and worked on sorting and properly storing my old convention badges. I got rid of all the old program books and progress reports a few decluttering sessions ago, but decided that I wanted to keep one memento from each convention, and as badges are pretty small that’s what I kept. I had them all pinned to strips of fabric on the wall, but we ran out of wall a while ago and the rest just got thrown into a box. Today I learned that “a while ago” was actually 1995. Where does the time go?

After considering several storage options, I wound up getting a bunch of postcard-sized plastic envelopes and cardboard boxes from The 2 Buds, which specializes in storage solutions for postcard collectors. Each badge goes in an envelope, backed up with a blank postcard with the convention name and date, then they all line up neatly in the box. It worked well and we got through all of the badges on the wall (1975-1995). Based on the number of envelopes left in the package, that was about 90 conventions. Wow. Lotta memories there. I’ll try to put in an hour a day on sorting and storing the badges in the box (1995-present); I figure it’ll take about a week at that rate.

Apart from that…

Got the vampire story finished and in the mail. Managed to slim it down from 8400 words to 6900 without losing its heart or flavor. I’m now working on a new story, a “cosy catastrophe” in which everyone dies (and I mean everyone) but the ending is still, I hope, reasonably happy.

I have a short essay in the latest “Mind Meld” at SF Signal. This one’s about taboos in SF.

I will be giving a talk at the Library of Congress at noon on April 9, part of their “What If…” series. More details as I have them.

Spent the entire day yesterday upgrading the iMac to OS X Leopard. The OS install itself went quickly and cleanly, but backing everything up (twice!), migrating in all the files from the backup after the install, and downloading two years’ worth of updates took about ten hours.

After the upgrade, everything seems to be working except two obscure utilities: ClickBook and TiVoDecode Manager.

ClickBook is essential to the production of Bento, and didn’t even launch under Leopard 1.5.6. I bought an upgrade to a new 4.0 version, which works, but has some problems with the 4-up layout we use. (It lays out each page in the order 3, 4, 1, 2 instead of 1, 2, 3, 4 as you’d expect.) I’ve sent in a support ticket.

I’ve been using TiVoDecode Manager 2.1 to archive The Amazing Race to DVD. Unfortunately neither 2.1 nor the Leopard-specific 3.0 version works on my computer, and from what I’ve gleaned online I’m not the only one. I even tried using 2.1 on another Mac, still running Tiger, and it failed there too (!?). Searching around online I found a number of alternatives, including iTiVo, which is based on the TiVoDecode Manager code base but is under extremely active development. So far it seems to be the best replacement, though I’m still trying to find a combination of parameter settings that does exactly what I want.

The TiVo thing took up the entire afternoon and well into the evening and, well, early morning as well, because each download-and-decode attempt takes one or two hours. I did manage to get in some writing time, though; one must have one’s priorities.

Apart from those two problems I’m generally quite impressed with Leopard. Time Machine has already saved my bacon once; I accidentally deleted a whole directory of files and was able to immediately recover all but the newest one (and that one can easily be reproduced). Leopard FTW!