David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Editing hours: 8.8 | Since last entry: 1.7 | Percent complete: 8% Still writing new text: 660 new words, showing Vigor’s collapse and its aftermath and introducing Raptor. Total word count now over 123,000 — too long, too long. Should not be adding words! Should be cutting! But the opening chapters are stronger, I think. This is not the place to end the chapter, but it’s where I’m stopping for tonight. I briefly considered ending the chapter right at Vigor’s collapse, but that seemed too abrupt, and I wanted to fight my tendency to go “naturally the reader will know what to feel here, I don’t have to describe it” and really show Clarity’s feelings. At the moment she’s mostly pissed that nobody’s telling her what’s going on (she doesn’t yet know that they don’t know either) — I need to get more concern and fear in there. Emotion has always been my bugaboo. One more good night’s work on this chapter and I should be done with it, and then things should progress more quickly as I shift into editing and cutting mode. I hope. I really hope.

Editing hours: 7.1 | Since last entry: 1.5 | Percent complete: 7% At the moment I’m generating new text rather than improving or cutting, so progress is slow — even slower than it was when I was concentrating on generating new text, because everything I’m writing now has to fit into what follows as well as what has preceded it. At one point tonight Kate went for a walk around the block, during which I managed a single sentence. But it is progress. (I’m not quite sure how the “percent complete” score went down from last time. Rounding error?) I just reached the point where Vigor collapses at the UN, so the chapter’s nearly over. I’ll probably go back and trim a bit before moving forward. Spent the weekend in Seattle, at a square dance event. Much riotous humor. At one point we were in a Completed Double Pass Thru formation and the caller, Sandie Bryant, told us to do a Checkmate the Column, which naturally resulted in a grand kerfuffle. I asked for some help on the traffic pattern and she said “Do you all know how to do a Track Two?” and of course we did, so she went on to say “Then why can’t you do a Checkmate from here?” and we all laughed our heads off. There were two little kids looking in the doorway, and they laughed too, despite the fact that they didn’t get the joke any more than you did. (Okay, there are a couple people on my LJ friendslist who would get it.) As long as we were in Seattle, we visited the Science Fiction Museum. We’d taken a hard-hat tour during the Nebulas, but it’s much more impressive with all the exhibits and interactives in place. The spherical display in the first hall and the three-dimensional touch-screens in the spacecraft exhibit were particularly impressive, and I really liked the way they combined books and magazines with the TV and movie props in almost every display case. They also had the humungous X-Prize trophy and several early models of SpaceShipOne on display. It must be nice to be Paul Allen. We had only an hour and a half, but the museum’s actually pretty small so we were able to see everything in that time. That might be a disappointment for the $12 entry fee if you aren’t as much of a sci-fi geek as I am. (Harlan Ellison’s typewriter, gosh wow!) To me, the conversation between Robby the Robot and the Lost In Space robot was almost worth the price of admission by itself. We also lucked out on the timing and visited with a goodly portion of Seattle fandom at the Big Time brewpub. Friendly conversation and fanzines were exchanged before we hit the road back home. One last novel-related bit: I just received an amazing, unexpected, and unprecedented email, about which I unfortunately cannot tell you anything. Let’s just say that I am both jazzed and terrified, and also highly motivated to finish the darn thing and get it in the mail pronto. Therefore, I plan to spend Easter weekend on a writing retreat. I’m not going to go anywhere, mind you — I’m going to unplug the phone and computer and have a writing retreat right in my own house. We’ll see how well that works.

Editing hours: 5.6 | Since last entry: 0 | Percent complete: 8% I awoke feeling more chipper than yesterday, and my mood rose further when I opened the paper and saw this article about our kitchen remodel! Well, the article’s mostly about Kate’s blog, but it does have some photos of the kitchen. We’re practically famous! Unfortunately, by the time my work day ended I was feeling pretty pounded down again. I’ve been thinking a lot in the last couple of days about how to find my joy. One of the big problems is that everything I would like to do takes time (which is in very short supply right now) or calories or both, so whenever I’m tempted to do something just for me it turns into a stressor because it takes away time from some important thing or is bad for me. But I really needed a break, so I said “screw it” and walked down to Ben & Jerry’s with my sweetie and got a Chocolate Therapy cone (how apropos!). And lo, it was good. After that I did the taxes (well, filled out the worksheets for the tax guy), which is something that really needed doing, and a few other chores. So no editing tonight, but my load is lightened. And, really, isn’t that the point? Thanks to everyone who has sent emails and comments of support.

Editing hours: 5.6 | Since last entry: 3.2 | Percent complete: 8% Over an hour of editing tonight, but I’m still frustrated. I got in an hour on the plane to Potlatch, but nothing at the con and only a few minutes on the plane back. Monday was Japanese class, and yesterday I came home from work with a splitting headache and didn’t have the energy to do anything productive. Which is not to say I got to sleep at a reasonable hour. Grr. Potlatch was a pretty good convention — had many nice conversations and meals with friends new and old — but I felt rather out of sorts for the whole thing. Maybe it was just lack of sleep, but somehow I just wasn’t in the mood to enjoy it completely. At the moment I am trying to remember what in life gives me joy. (It’s not editing, that’s for sure.) I’m also wondering if, when I remember that, I will be able to find the time to do it. I’m bogged down with responsibilities and somehow not finding the time to focus on any of them. This will pass, I think. Sleep would certainly help.

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!

Word count: 120661 | Since last entry: -256 | This month: 2708 Where did the weekend go? Didn’t do anything special, even though it was my birthday today… just the usual weekend round of chores and errands, but three days instead of two. All gone now. Voom. I spent my writing time this weekend working on the first Clarity chapter. In order to put Vigor’s death on stage I first had to remove the frenzied phone call from the end of the scene in the potato field. But once I’d done that, the remainder of the scene didn’t have a lot going for it… it had almost no emotional impact, didn’t establish Clarity’s story problem, and basically existed only for expository purposes. Obviously this scene didn’t have much going for it before, but removing the sting from the tail pointed that out clearly. So I thought “can I get rid of this scene completely, and open with Clarity in New York?” But though that idea had a lot of appeal, the existing scene sets up a lot of stuff that will be needed later: it establishes Garrett, and shows Clarity’s love of flight (in a scene that at least one of my first-readers really loved), and shows Clarity interacting with ordinary humans and establishing her sympathy for them. In New York she’s completely surrounded by her own people and that would be harder to convey. This scene also introduces a lot of details about the Cetans that would have to be redone in a different way in New York — basically making this a complete new chapter. So I rewrote the scene to have a lot more interior dialogue, in which we establish how long it has been since Cedar Point, and how Remembrance Day is a forgiveness holiday for the Cetans, and how much tension there is between Clarity and her father (which will never be resolved, bwah hah hah). To do all this I focused on her shoes. Yes, her shoes. There was a throwaway line in the very first draft about Clarity wearing Nikes, and I decided to use that as a symbol of all the ways in which she fails to conform to Cetan norms. I think it works. But. I’m still not convinced it’s the best way to introduce Clarity. I may break down and eliminate the entire scene (after spending the whole weekend rewriting it, argh) and create a new scene in New York that carries only the key information from the old scene, with more emotional punch. I know I can do it; I’ve learned a lot in the nearly two years since I wrote this chapter for the first time. But it’d be a lot of work, so I’m resisting. I think I can reuse a lot of the existing sentences and paragraphs, but it might be quicker to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. Either way I think it’s likely to be several days of work. The one thing I absolutely can’t introduce in New York is Garrett. But maybe I should put him on the phone and Clarity’s father dying on stage, instead of the other way around. Must ponder some more. I think I need a day or two to convince myself it’s worthwhile.

Word count: 120917 | Since last entry: 588 | This month: 2964 Finished up the revisions to the first Jason chapter, in which Jason creeps about to steal the biocomputer. Raised the tension in the creeping-about scene by adding a couple near-misses of being discovered. Also went back and re-edited the scene with Honor and Jason some more. It’s amazing how much cascading effect can occur from dropping one sentence — since Clarity’s sept name was revealed for the first time in that sentence, and I couldn’t find anyplace else in the chapter to slip that information in naturally, later sentences referring to that name had to be rewritten as well. It’s improving. It’s coming along, slowly. I persevere. Thanks to Kate for going off square-dancing and encouraging me to stay home and write. 588 net words doesn’t seem like much but I know the change is significant.

Word count: 120329 | Since last entry: -538 | This month: 2376 I spent much of this evening massaging one little fragment of a scene, in which Jason encounters Clarity’s old friend Honesty at the Platform. This is the first appearance of a Cetan (formerly Tauran) on stage and it has to carry a lot of weight. I’m trying to slip in a few sentences of exposition, so the conversation doesn’t have to do all the work, but I keep taking expository sentences out and putting them back in because I keep waffling over whether or not the scene is clear enough without them. It doesn’t help that I’m trying to establish details that didn’t even exist before this revision, so I’m not 100% sure of them myself. At the last minute I cut an entire small scene (which explains my -500 words for the day) because I determined it was, indeed, no longer necessary. But I’m not quite finished with the scene before the cut yet. Needs more massage. And, as always, the cat needs vacuuming. First must obtain cat…