David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Word count: 119459 | Since last entry: -5467 | This month: -2718 In the last week, I… …added a graphical “time map” to the top of each chapter to help the
reader make sense of my unconventional timeline. …went through the critique comments and made a list of things I wanted
to do to the novel. Actually, I only looked at my notes from the oral critiques, and I only put the most important comments on the list. It was still eight pages long. …went back and highlighted only the most significant issues. That was
about half of them. …did a quick red-pen edit of the manuscript.
This was something half-way between Holly Lisle’s one-pass revision method and Neil Gaiman’s rather facetious six-step revision method and took most of three days. …checked off about one-quarter of the items on the things-to-do list.
Most of those were the simple ones, the ones that could be addressed by adding a sentence or a paragraph. The big ones, like almost all the ones under the heading “make the aliens more alien,” remain undone for now. …sat down and keyed in the red-pen edits, which took only half as long
as the editing itself (still a couple long evenings’ work, though — I haven’t had more than about 5 hours’ sleep in a night this week). …cut two complete scenes, several partial scenes, and a whole bunch of
paragraphs, sentences, and words, for a net gain (by which I mean loss) of over 5000 words (4%). I am proud of this. …reformatted the manuscript in Courier 12, printed it out, and sent
it off to the novel workshop just under the deadline. 509 pages plus cover letter and synopsis. Go me! So how do I feel about this significant accomplishment? See the title above: It Sucks. I have been looking at nothing but the flaws, missing details, missed opportunities, and most especially the petty, whiny, reactive, boring characters in this novel for the last week, and of the dozens and dozens of changes I wanted to make to address those flaws I was only able to make the simplest 25%. But. There were also many positive comments (about as large, and welcome, a percentage of the total as the raisins in raisin bran, but critique is focused on the areas for improvement) and at least I am done with the damn thing for a while. And I did feel a sense of accomplishment as I put the tightly-wrapped manuscript in the mail. Next: catch up with everything else in my life, which has been on hold for the last week. Then start in on critiques for the other novels in the workshop.

Word count: 124926 | Since last entry: 58 | This month: 2749 I had a number of things to do this evening. The main one was to write a list of things to do, and watch out for, during my quick revision pass. (It has to be in the mail by next Wednesday, aiee.) I started with my file of miscellaneous notes (which I haven’t added to in months) and the notes I have written at the top of some chapter files. While I was looking at those chapter notes I decided to go ahead and put all the chapters in one file. It took me, fundamentally, all evening to do that — put all the chapters in one file, in the right order, with consistent formatting and spacing. The file is 893 KB. It’s 317 pages long — with 1″ margins in 10-point Times New Roman. It’d be 532 pages in industry-standard 12-point Courier, which is what I’m going to have to do for submission, but since this printout is just for me I’d rather save paper with the smaller font. Oof. No wonder it took two years. Next steps: Look at the notes from all my chapter critiques and finish the to-do list. Print the giant document out. Start revising. I think my little WinCE device may not be up to the task.

Word count: 124868 | Since last entry: 126 | This month: 2691 I made a few edits to the last chapter and epilogue before printing them out and giving them to my crit group. Also got my crits on the previous chapter, chapter I (that’s letter “eye,” not Roman numeral one); generally positive. That was Friday and Saturday. Now it’s Tuesday. I seem to have spent the intervening time commuting back and forth between my to-do list at work and my to-do list at home (a mix of novel-related, kitchen-related, and general life stuff like groceries and laundry). Tonight I folded large quantities of laundry and did the thing of going through the last couple of sets of critiques and recycling all the pages with no marks on them. Not exciting, but necessary. During these tasks I also watched a couple of truly Godawful reality shows. Another reminder, if one were needed, why I so rarely watch television. Next step is to go through all the critiques and my various notes to myself from the last year and make a to-do list of changes to make during the editing pass. I’ll have to prioritize it, because there’s not enough time to do everything I want to do. Yes, one of the items on my to-do list is to make a to-do list. Truly I am lame. Oh, as long as I’m here I thought I would share with you something that came to me in the shower this morning:

Blade runner, that replicant’s after you
Blade runner, if he catches you you’re through

That Roy Baty is really a crazy clown
When will he learn that he never can mow him down?
Poor little blade runner never bothers anyone
Just huntin’ down a skin-job’s his idea of havin’ fun

Word count: 124742 | Since last entry: 1482 | This month: 2565 Okay, now it really is all over, including the shouting. I thought I’d finished the penultimate scene in the last chapter yesterday, but when I woke up this morning (at 5am, after going to sleep at midnight, oy) I realized the villain had been defeated too easily. So tonight I extended that scene with about five hundred words of serious physical action. Then I wrote the anticlimax, as planned, and dove right in and wrote the epilogue too: 775 words. I thought it would be brief, but I wonder if it’s too brief. And the very last sentence seems kind of weak. But… it’s done. The first draft is all done. One hundred twenty-four thousand seven hundred and forty-two words (plus about 87,000 words of notes, outlines, and journal entries) in just under two years. I still have some summary and synopsis stuff remaining to do, but… I wrote a novel. I WROTE A NOVEL! Falling over now. Thud.

Word count: 123260 | Since last entry: 1083 | This month: 1083 It’s all over now but the shouting. Dozens of bodies on the floor, including several main characters. Blood everywhere. Just a short anticlimax left to write, explaining how the few survivors make it home, and the last chapter’s done. The last chapter. Done. And I just killed off… someone I’ve spent the last two years with. Jeez. It was a good death, I think. Deserved, but not unredeemed. I’ve been planning this moment for so long… I’ve had this scene in mind for months, maybe in some form all the way back to the beginning. (Yep — I just checked, and this character’s death was in the “Sketch a Novel in an Hour” outline I did at OryCon in 2002, though I didn’t know then exactly how it would happen.) So it’s not unexpected, and I’m not particularly upset about it. I think? At the moment it’s nearly midnight and I do have to sleep. Maybe I’ll cry later. Maybe not. Good night, sweet prince.

Word count: 122177 | Since last entry: 1210 | This month: 9995 Back from a long weekend in Seattle and Vancouver, where we visited with relatives, had at least three Thanksgiving dinners that couldn’t be beat, and did much square dancing. Weather was great and I only gained two pounds for the weekend. Thanks to Will and Grant for their hospitality, and to Jeremy for taking me out for a late lunch on Sunday. I generally managed to write a couple hundred words a day, which is really unusual for me when traveling and brings my total for the month to a very respectable figure of almost ten thousand words. I got Jason and Sienna safely into orbit, where Green Hills soldiers menace them with maser pistols as they prepare to take them to Raptor. Only one scene to go, I think, in this final chapter — probably about a thousand words — and then I just have a brief epilog to write, plus the usual summary of the previous chapter, before Saturday’s critique group meeting. I might not get the epilog written in time, but I’m going to try. Preparations have begun for the novel workshop in January. I need to send out the complete novel to two people, plus chapters and outline to five, by December 15. I won’t have time to do much more than a very cursory editing pass, unfortunately. Then I’ll have two complete novels and five chapters-and-outlines to critique by January 15. Plus all that holiday stuff. Whee. But the workshop itself should be a lot of fun. One other bit of good news: I sold another story to Realms of Fantasy. It’s “The Ecology of Faerie,” AKA “the one with the frogs,” which I originally wrote for The Faerie Reel and then nearly sold to the Usborne YA Fantasy anthology. This is my first YA story sale, a sweet and gentle tale of magic and batrachians which nonetheless is a bit of a horror story as well. It’s also the first time I’ve sold a second story to the same market.

Word count: 120967 | Since last entry: 2274 | This month: 8785 Eighteen hundred words tonight! Plumped down in my writing chair right after dinner and didn’t get up until I’d written a scene in which Clarity and Jason launch into space, lasers blasting all around them, as they move into orbit for their final confrontation with Raptor. Zowie! And a million toy balloons save the day. That last detail is something I hadn’t had in mind until just today, when I realized that the ordinary human populace (represented by Garrett) had to have a part to play at the climax. It also solved a plot problem without unnecessary violence. I’m quite proud of it. And in case I don’t get to post tomorrow… Happy Thanksgiving!

Word count: 118693 | Since last entry: 672 | This month: 6511 So much for writing every day in November. I just missed two days in a row, and only got any writing in today through sheer cussedness (200 words during intermission at the symphony). But the kitchen looks gorgeous — we spent most of the weekend shopping and unpacking. We have most of the pots and pans in place, all of the spices, and most of the sauces. We bought a very nice teak step stool (necessary now, because we’ve made all the cabinets taller to compensate for the decreased width that gives us more elbow room) and a gorgeous, gorgeous bamboo cutting board which will live on the granite countertop because it is so very pretty. But we gave up on finding the telephone we wanted locally and ordered it from the web. Okay, I admit it — I am a good little consumer. New posessions make me happy. But we’ve also put a lot of old stuff in the “garage sale” box as we’ve been unpacking. There has been much discussion of the question “where does this want to live?” for various objects — we can’t put everything back where it was in the old kitchen — and all the answers are provisional and subject to change. But the new layout is very, very practical; it works exactly the way we hoped it would when we laid it out, as we found when we prepared fried rice tonight. Kate was easily able to reach the spices without getting in my way at the stove. Also, the bright halogen lighting in the new stove hood makes everything on the stove look delicious and wonderful. I feel like I’m in a cooking show. We have never had any kind of lighting over the stove, believe it or not, and have been cooking in our own shadows as long as we’ve been together.

Word count: 118021 | Since last entry: 907 | This month: 5839 Nothing yesterday. Tonight, wrote a scene with Jason and Clarity, in which they establish that they no longer love each other, but they do trust each other, despite everything. This sets up Jason dumping a bit of information on Clarity which she is not yet in a position to understand. I have to keep some surprises for the very end… Only a couple thousand words to go. It feels almost like a short story now, apart from the seventeen tons of backstory providing momentum. Jo Walton says something about the arrowhead and the shaft, which I cannot quite comprehend at the moment but I think it may be relevant. Long day. Tired now. Going to sleep.

Word count: 117114 | Since last entry: 1264 | This month: 4932 I haven’t exactly written every day since my last post. Most of the weekend was spent on kitchen stuff — we know exactly what we want in a garlic keeper, step stool, telephone, etc., which entails much going into stores, pointing, describing, and being met with blank looks. Despite this we did manage to obtain nearly half the objects on our list. We also unpacked several boxes, and tonight we achieved the triumph of the first meal cooked in our new kitchen! Okay, it was just a little sauteed onion and ground beef mixed with bottled pasta sauce, over bowtie pasta, with frozen corn warmed up in the new microwave. But we actually cooked! Our first home-cooked meal in over two months. And there was much rejoicing. I have gotten some writing done, though, and most days that didn’t have any writing in them had “writing-related activity,” like writing the synopsis of the chapter 9 and copying chapter I for critique. I also got some feedback on chapter 9 (the crit group meeting was sparsely attended), generally positive though one critiquer said she wished Jason wasn’t such a “cranky little man” and Clarity was “more of a fighter” (despite all the work I’ve put into them, sniff waah). But there’s little to be done about those problems at this point, with just one chapter to go. It continues to be the case (as it has since the very first critique at Wiscon last year) that nearly every reader has a different, strong opinion about which character is the best and which is the one they just want to drop-kick. I’d be happier if every reader liked every character (liked them as well-written characters, I mean — some of them are pretty unlikeable as people) but I’m prepared to accept this mixed bag as an indication that the characters are at least complex enough for people to have different opinions about, depending on their individual perspectives. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Things are moving really, really fast now, plot-wise. I’m finding that the things that need to happen just whiz by, pieces slotting into place and the characters running as fast as they can to keep up. The chapter still might be a long one, but it might not. Most of the secrets I’ve been keeping from the reader (and, in a few cases, wondering about myself) for as much as two years are out in the open now, with just a couple of revelations to go (such as: Raptor’s hidden motivation, though it might be obvious by now to some). I’m still not 100% sure how some details in the final climactic scene are going to play out, but at this point I’m confident it will shake out in the actual writing of it. Must sleep now. 8am meetings every day this week, oh joy.