David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

So I went down to the Apple Store today and I dropped a couple thousand bucks on a new iBook and a new iPod and all the associated software and accessories, including AppleCare for both because I know a lot of people who’ve had problems with their iBooks. Got it home, started it up, installed Tiger (which came in the box, but not preinstalled), got it talking to my Windows Wi-Fi network. Most impressive when it printed a test document. Tried playing a CD and a DVD. Way cool. Stopped, had dinner. Lovely carrot curry. After dinner, looked for compiler. Ah, it’s not installed by default. Inserted the Tiger startup disk, clicked on the “About XTools.pdf”. Disk whirred and ground for a few minutes and finally bombed out with error -36. Ejected disk, inspected, reinserted. This time it whirred and ground for a few minutes, then simply ejected the disk. Tried a couple more times and never got it to accept the disk, except for the time it whirred and ground and then decided to keep the disk without it appearing on the desktop — nor would pressing the eject key convince it to let go. Restarted and held down the trackpad button, which made it spit out the disk, but it still won’t mount. Same behavior seen with three different factory-fresh disks — Tiger, Office, and the diagnostic disk from the AppleCare package. Naturally, it waited until after 8pm Central time to do this. And I’m not going to be able to take it in for service tomorrow. Grr.

Put my novel manuscript in the mail today! Yay! Now I will take at least a week off from writing. After that it’s short stories for the rest of the year, though I may also do some research for novel #2, a fantasy set in an alternate WWII. Also, my short story “At the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of Uncle Teco’s Homebrew Gravitics Club,” which originally appeared in the OryCon 25 program book, has been posted at Infinity Plus. You can read it here (for free!): http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/uncleteco.htm We have started getting a box of organic veggies delivered to our door every week again. Dinner tonight was a pizza with spinach, fresh mozarella, and caramelized onions, made from a recipe that came with the veggies, on pizza dough from Trader Joe’s. Simple and very, very good.

Editing hours: 69.5 | Since last entry: 6.9 | Percent complete: 100% Final manuscript word count: 124,247
Final manuscript page count: 584
Synopsis word count: 3460 It took me over an hour to browbeat Microsoft Word into formatting it properly (why, oh why, doesn’t find and replace with paragraph styles impose all of the style’s font settings?) and over five hours to bash out the synopsis. On the synopsis, what I intended to do was a light edit on the synopsis I’d written for the Lupton contest last year. What I wound up doing was just sitting down and telling the whole story from the beginning, one paragraph per chapter, trying to get in as much emotion as possible without running too long or losing any important plot points. What this banzai first draft lacks in panache, I hope, it makes up in verve. I’m not as concerned about the synopsis as I would be if I weren’t sending out a complete manuscript at this point. I looked at the manuscript occasionally while writing the synopsis, but mostly I just re-told the story from memory. In some cases I simplified, combined, or omitted incidents to make it smoother; in a few cases I admit that I wrote what I wanted to have happen in a scene instead of what’s actually on the page. It’s a lot like the synopsis of Les Miserables in the booklet of the CD of the musical of the novel… it bears a resemblance to the original in the same way that a postage stamp bears a resemblance to an enormous painting like “Whistler’s Mother” or “Sunday on La Grande Jatte.” But, with luck, I’ve captured the flavor of the original — the same shampoo in a smaller bottle. And so Remembrance Day is done… by which I mean I am letting it go, rather than that I feel I’m really finished with it. I would still like to rewrite a couple key scenes near the end, where Jason reveals all to Sienna and, for some inexplicable reason, she doesn’t kill him. I would still like to raise Jason’s fanatacism in the months leading up to Remembrance Day, to make him kill with his eyes open instead of by accident. Clarity’s chapters still need more description. The aliens should still be more alien. Nonetheless, it goes in the mail tomorrow morning. And I’m not going to touch it again unless I get an editor saying they will buy it if I make certain changes, or it’s many years from now and I’ve decided to revise this old trunked novel based on what I’ve learned from the many bestsellers since. And so to bed.

Editing hours: 62.6 | Since last entry: 5.0 | Percent complete: 100% Blew off a square dance to get in three hours of editing tonight, on top of scattered half-hours throughout the week. The total of 5.0 is really just a guess. I completed my editing pass tonight! And many of my readers will be pleased to note that I put Flea in the penultimate sentence. He just appears — he doesn’t have any lines — but at least they will know he’s alive and free. Damn him for being such an appealing character. I never meant for him to be as important as some people found him. (Though I’m glad they like him.) Having completed the editing pass, I went through my to-do list checking things off. There’s lots of to-do items undone, but they’re all either too small to worry about or too big to do anything about. But in the same folder I found a few pages of comments from my first readers that I said I would do something about “later.” So I’m going through those now. I’ll finish those up, edit the cover letter, and do a real quick pass on the synopsis this weekend. Should have the package ready to go in the mail Monday. I am so ready to be done with this novel.

Editing hours: 57.6 | Since last entry: 2.5 | Percent complete: 98% Back from my annual spring trip to Palm Springs. Had a grrreat time; deepened some existing friendships and made a few new ones. Very relaxing too, with weather sunny but not too hot. Editing time above is an approximation — the total of half an hour here and half an hour there in various airports and airplanes. Most of my airplane time was spent critiquing, novels for my crit group and short stories for Wiscon (which is only four weeks away, yay!!) I spent a bunch of the editing time going back and re-polishing Jason and Sienna’s last scene together, but also amped up the emotion at the first appearance of the Vaccinator and addressed a few nitpicky details (such as, how can Jason sign to Clarity when his arms are being held by the guards?). Left off editing at a key point where the Green Hills soldiers let Jason bring the Infector with him onto Raptor’s flagship — that’s implausible. I have a better and more dramatic alternative in mind but I simply ran out of time to write it. I will almost certainly complete this final editing pass this week. Then I have to revise the cover letter and synopsis — the cover letter’s in good shape, but the synopsis could easily take weeks of work. However, since the first couple of people I’m going to send the novel to have requested the whole manuscript it’s not as critical as it might be. I’m just going to power through it and put the package in the mail as soon as I can.

Editing hours: 55.1 | Since last entry: 0.7 | Percent complete: 92% After two nights of rich dinners and fine conversations with my friend the Lioness and those who came out of the woodwork to visit her during the Portland stop on her Great North American Railroad Expotition, it’s back to the editing. Unfortunately, today was a real pisser at work — running non-stop from 8am until 6:30pm, with interruptions to the interruptions and a nasty commute home to round it all off — so I only had a little editing time tonight. Still, I was able to find a proper finish for Sienna’s father’s watch, which had become a significant symbol of Jason and Sienna’s relationship. I had never been happy with the way it just vanished at the end. The worst part of my work day was that a project I had thought was complete popped up again, like one of those movie villains that would not die. I really, really don’t have time for this, especially since if I touch it at all I’m sure it’ll turn into a complete tarbaby, so I was really stressed out during the meeting. After the meeting was over I got some “feedback” on my “attitude,” but I think I took that remarkably well under the circumstances. With any luck we’ll find a way to put this thing back to bed in fairly short order… but I’m not getting my hopes up.

Editing hours: 54.4 | Since last entry: 4.6 | Percent complete: 92% Finished up the last Jason chapter this weekend, focusing on amping up the emotion in Jason and Clarity’s meeting (the first time they meet face to face, except in flashback, in the whole book) and when Jason convinces Sienna to hand over Raptor’s password. The latter changed from a simple financial transaction to a brutal 500-word scene in which Jason uses his education and imagination to bludgeon Sienna into doing the right thing. One Clarity chapter to go, and the epilogue. We’ll have a house guest this week so I might not get to them before the end of the month. But I’m so close to the end I can taste it. I see I just passed 50 editing hours, so NaNoEdMo is officially over — I guess this is March 55th. I think I have about 3-5 hours of editing work left, plus some time to revise the cover letter and synopsis. Also… this weekend we went to Portland’s first annual Wordstock Festival, a free event with readings and workshops and lots of book dealers and publishers. It was a treat, and I hope it was enough of a success that they’ll do it again next year.

Editing hours: 49.8 | Since last entry: 0.9 | Percent complete: 87% Mostly this evening I just read over chapter 9. I had only two notes for this chapter in my giant list of things-to-do; I decided not to do one of them, and the other (an old note from before the last edit) I decided didn’t need any additional work. So I made no substantial changes, just a very few wording tweaks. I think the chapter before that still needs attention — more suffering, more danger, more suspicion. But there was nowhere to put it. Everything in the chapter felt finely polished, leaving no cracks or crannies to attach anything new. I considered adding a complete new scene just to show civilization breaking down, but that seemed artificial, and things in these late chapters are moving so fast that I can’t justify a whole scene that doesn’t advance the plot. Besides, I want to reduce the word count, not add to it. I’m having a definite, but low-key, crisis of confidence on this thing as I approach the end of the revisions (which I really hope to have done by the end of this month). I find myself thinking a lot about the fact that working hard on a novel doesn’t guarantee it will sell. Most first novels don’t sell. But I can’t bear to think that this thing on which I have spent over two years of my life might never go anywhere but my filing cabinet. Well. Knowing what I do about the publishing biz, it might take years to reach the point of deciding to trunk the thing. Plenty of time to write more novels, better ones. And this one might sell. Though at the moment I can only see its flaws. In any case, once I finish this one… it’s short stories for at least six months, baby. I want instant gratification!

Editing hours: 48.9 | Since last entry: 2.5 | Percent complete: 82% Spent most of the evening reducing a couple of Jason’s computer-hacking scenes that some critiquers thought went on too long. It was surprisingly hard to reduce; every bit of information seemed necessary. But I got rid of a sentence here and a paragraph there… and then I realized this wasn’t doing enough good, right around the time I noticed that it might be possible to excise an entire bit: a place where Jason connected a Cetan personal ID code to a Cetan email address by way of a document filched from somewhere else. All I had to do was to change the email address to an ID code and I could get rid of the connecting document, the filch, and the decipherment of the filched document. This is much easier in fiction than it is in real code. I’m not sure how many words I managed to get rid of, but it was probably nearly five hundred. Then I added back a hundred or two, smoothing over the seams where the removed bit had been. It does involve a bit of a coincidence, but the coincidence was there before, it just wasn’t as obvious. A good evening’s work. Definitely entering the home stretch here. By the way… I seem to have created a bit of a kerfuffle with my statement about removing references to food. This isn’t the first time I’ve raised hackles by overstating good advice I’ve received. Food is good and useful in fiction. It can be used to characterize people, and to give them things to do that display emotion, and even to raise tension. The thing to avoid is the use of food (or anything, really) in a scene where it isn’t doing any of those things. It’s an easy trap for some writers to fall into. Especially if you write while you’re hungry. And now, prompted by Jay Lake, the Microsoft Word Grammar Checker Follies! I wrote: The cavernous, bustling space rose five stories high and stretched all the way to the Platform’s far exterior wall. Word suggests: The cavernous, bustling space raised five stories high and stretched all the way to the Platform’s far exterior wall. I wrote: One, two, three wingbeats, and then the flyer was rolling forward, bumping along the road. Word suggests: One, two, three wingbeats, and then the flyer were rolling forward, bumping along the road. I wrote: The other doctors are doing their best, but… Word suggests: The other doctors are doing there best, but… I wrote: The big triple bed, where Clarity had bounced whenever she could get away with it, had been replaced by an elevated hospital bed, a human thing of steel and plastic covered with harsh white sheets. Word suggests: An elevated hospital bed, where Clarity had bounced whenever she could get away with it, had replaced the big triple bed, a human thing of steel and plastic covered with harsh white sheets. And my personal favorite… I wrote: But that blessed state was soon interrupted by the automated controller at the Moses Lake airport, which transmitted landing instructions to the human-made transceiver fastened like some boxy, awkward fungus to the smooth curves of the instrument panel. Word suggests: But that the automated controller at the Moses Lake airport, which transmitted, soon interrupted blessed state-landing instructions to the human-made transceiver fastened like some boxy, awkward fungus to the smooth curves of the instrument panel.

Editing hours: 46.4 | Since last entry: 3.6 | Percent complete: 79% Continuing to make Jason’s life harder, and even harder still, after Remembrance Day. His current situation diverges more and more from his situation in the previous draft, making the work more difficult, but I only have to do this for one more chapter, and then he’ll be in a completely different place both literally and figuratively. I also touched briefly on a Clarity chapter between the two post-Remembrance-Day Jason chapters, but that was pretty easy. I only had to add a couple of sentences to close off a possibility that I knew wasn’t open but never actually stated. I also made it clearer that Clarity is taking control of the Corporation — again, only a few sentences changed. A lot of the changes I’m making are subtle. One lesson I’ve learned (I forget from whom, probably Elizabeth Bear) is this: take away all references to food. Food is comfort. Characters who are eating are not serious about whatever problems face them. One lousy frozen burrito can suck 25% of the tension out of a scene. The parts of the book I’m editing now are in the best shape, because they’re more recent, and they benefit from everything I learned in the previous couple of years about how to write a novel. Editing this part is easy because it’s fresh in my mind and there isn’t that much that needs to be done. The parts of the book I’m editing now are in the worst shape, because they haven’t been edited and re-edited through several previous passes. Editing this part is hard because it’s fresh and I don’t have enough perspective on it.