David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Word count: 78469 | Since last entry: 1602 | This month: 3948 Nearly finished chapter 7 on Friday, and printed out and copied what I had, then wrote the last few hundred words and the summary of the previous chapter Saturday morning. Got everything printed out and copied with over an hour to spare. Luxury. Also got my critique of chapter F. In general, they liked it, though one person threatened to pummel me with oranges if I let Jason have a crisis of conscience in his next chapter. I knew this was going to be a tricky bit… I’m finding the process of writing to be rather oppressive right now. This might have something to do with the fact that I have raised the pressure on both main characters to Marianas Trench levels — it really sucks to be them right now. Unfortunately, being them is something I have to do in order to write about them. (At Clarion, Geoff Ryman said that writing is more like acting than directing.) This hasn’t been a problem with short stories, but for a novel I find myself going to that dark place for months at a crack. And it’s going to continue until September or October at this rate… But. Chapter 7 is done. On to chapter G! And I’m not going to let myself leave so much until the last minute this time. I’m not officially doing the Shadow Clarion Challenge, but I’m going to continue to try to write every day during the next 6 weeks.

Word count: 76867 | Since last entry: 1217 | This month: 2346 Finished up a scene showing Clarity at a difficult press conference, followed by a brief respite of lunch with a human friend (showing that she’s coming to identify more with the humans than with her own people). I had originally started to write the press conference as a task force meeting, but I realized I’ve been showing Clarity in a lot of internal meetings and ignoring the public-relations aspect of her job. I want to keep the pressure on her from all sides — from the humans as well as from her fellow Council members. There are a lot of things I’ve introduced in previous chapters (the press, the task force, her cousin Candor, etc.) that ought to be kept on stage to emphasize just how complicated and scary Clarity’s life is getting. One more scene to go in the chapter. If I can finish it tomorrow during the day, I can take care of the copying at work and then go to a movie in the evening. By the way, I failed to note in yesterday’s entry that I just passed 75,000 words. Three-quarters done! (Unless my estimate of 100,000 words for the whole thing is off; it might be a bit low.)

Word count: 75650 | Since last entry: 1129 | This month: 1129 After Wiscon I was very busy with various things that had to be done before the trip to France. Then we had the trip itself — much delicious food was eaten, castles and caves visited, etc., and I wrote over 1000 words on the plane heading there, but nothing while there and I slept most of the way back — and since then I’ve been suffering badly from jet lag and haven’t been coherent enough to write a thing. Another thing keeping me from the writing since returning from France is that we’ve had lots of stuff to do on the kitchen remodel — just signed the contract today, and wrote what I think might be the third-biggest check of my life. The final quote came in at almost 1.5x the original estimate, which was in turn nearly 2x what we’d originally expected. But it’s going to be gorgeous. I was hoping to get something written today, but at this point it seems it’s not to be. I have 1000-3000 words to go on chapter 7, which is due Saturday. Looks pretty grim. One bit of good writing news: when I came home from France I learned that my story “The Tale of the Golden Eagle” is a nominee for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

Word count: 74521 | Since last entry: 613 | This month: 7899 I got some good writing in on the plane to the con, but nothing during the con, and on the way home I either slept or read. I always feel so ill-read coming back from a con like Wiscon. I’ll have a full con report later. For now, I need sleep.

Word count: 73908 | Since last entry: 894 | This month: 7286 I’ve been snatching a half-hour here and an hour there in the last few days, between work (8am meetings every day this week, sigh) and various chores and errands. I managed to kill almost all of last Sunday trying to install a Wi-Fi access point on my home PC, and much of Monday evening undoing Sunday’s work just to get the system working again. Damn Windows anyway. I have ordered a new DSL modem/router with built-in wireless support, which should make it easier to complete the task. I’m less than half done with chapter 7, though I’m pleased with the chapter so far; I just dropped a pretty big rock on Clarity’s head. That’s not as much as I had hoped to accomplish by now, but I might finish the chapter before Wiscon anyway — if I actually write on the flight and don’t get distracted by the in-flight magazine or involved in a conversation with my neighbor. Wish me luck.

Word count: 73014 | Since last entry: 137 | This month: 6392 Hey, a few hundred words is better than nothing.

Word count: 72877 | Since last entry: 937 | This month: 6255 I haven’t been as much of a slug as my lack of posting here would indicate. I have written a time or two since the last entry, I just didn’t write enough each individual time to justify saying anything about it. I’ve got the first scene and a half of Chapter 7 done, in which Clarity and the other Taurans realize just what the epixenic is and how it can be prevented… but some of them are having trouble dealing with the consequences. I’m afraid I may be getting a little heavy-handed on the AIDS parallel; I might tone that down a bit later. Apart from the novel writing, I have been terribly busy — a major deadline at work this week, shopping for tile and granite for the kitchen, line edits on the zeppelin story. I did not make it into the finals for the Lupton contest; I got my package back with a generic encouraging note. But… I now have a complete novel package ready to go! In fact, on the same day I got the bad news from the Lupton contest I put the first 4 chapters and outline in the mail to one of the agents I talked with at the Nebulas. If it hadn’t been for the Lupton contest I probably wouldn’t have had the outline yet. Onward.

Word count: 71940 | Since last entry: 718 | This month: 5318 The rewritten chapters A and B were critiqued on Saturday, and the new Jason is definitely on the right track. But though the group liked the new chapters, there were still some good suggestions about how they could be improved — as well as a few difficult questions. For now, I hope I can get away with some of those problem areas with readers who haven’t read the rest of the book yet. As usual, I got somewhat derailed by success, which is why I haven’t posted here for several days after finishing the previous chapter. I also spent a good chunk of this weekend doing various things related to the kitchen remodel — looking at tile and granite, thinking about sinks, etc. — instead of writing. I did write a couple hundred words while sitting in the lobby before Sunday’s symphony concert, but didn’t post about it here at the time. Yesterday I was just fried when I came home from work, and though I did sit down to write, my eyes kept closing as I was reading over the last chapter and I didn’t put down one new word. But tonight, though I should really have gone to bed at 10:00, I instead sat down to write at that time — just a hundred words and I’ll be happy, I thought. But, again as usual, once I got started I didn’t stop until I had over 500 new words. (If only I could do that starting at 9:00 instead!) Looking to the future: If I keep up the pace of a chapter every 3 weeks — including those crit group meetings when I’m out of town, which I haven’t managed so far — I will be finished in late October. I would really rather finish the first draft before Worldcon (September 1). This means writing more than one chapter for each crit group meeting. Will I be able to do it? Well, I certainly won’t if I don’t try. So I have a new yellow stickie posted above my writing calendar: “I don’t care if you ‘don’t feel like writing.’ WRITE ANYWAY!”

Word count: 71222 | Since last entry: 933 | This month: 4600 Took the train to work today, and wrote the whole way both ways. On the way home, I arrived at 5599 words in the chapter, 1006 words for the day, the moment after the Big Revelation when Jason sits down hard and says “Jesus”, and my stop, all at the same time. Kismet. I resisted Fate at first, thinking that I still had to write at least a few paragraphs of anticlimax to get Jason out of the building. But it seemed such a good place to stop. And not only that, but when I checked my outline for the next chapter it starts with him still in the building. So what the hell — there it stands. Chapter done with two days to spare. Of course, once I deleted a paragraph of notes from the end of the chapter the word count went down to just under 1000. But I’m still giving myself a red star for the day, and a green star for finishing the chapter. We have theatre tickets tomorrow, so I might not write again until Saturday. But I really want to write every day this month, to make up for my appalling performance in April. Maybe just a little, to keep up the streak.

Word count: 70289 | Since last entry: 621 | This month: 3667 Jason finally fulfilled his self-imposed mission, and I passed 70,000 words. Jason’s happy now, but in just a few hundred words comes the moment that brings everything he thought he knew about what he was doing crashing down around his ears — and ties the two plot threads together for even the most inattentive reader. I’m not yet sure how much more of this chapter there is after that point. I’m prepared to play it by ear. I also went back and added a couple of sentences to address an issue my crit grop has had with one of the characters in past chapters. I never anticipated the reading they have of the character, but since at least two of them had the same idea I have to assume that some of the readers will as well. So I put that idea in one character’s mouth so another character could pooh-pooh it. It probably needs to be dealt with more thoroughly in rewrite, but for now I’ve at least acknowledged the problem. It strikes me that writing is a lot like software user interface design (my day job) — you have to anticipate the user’s reactions and direct them to do or think the next appropriate thing from where they are. Sometimes you get it wrong, which is why we have usability tests and critique, to spot those cases and give you a chance to correct the problem before the product/novel ships. On the other hand, in user interface design the eventual goal is not just to create an idea in the user’s mind, but to have them take action and accomplish tasks based on that idea. That’s both easier (a novel is an exercise in pure imagination, with no need to build any real-world functionality) and harder (there’s no interaction — the novel doesn’t know, and can’t take appropriate action, if the reader is off on the wrong track). Imagine a dialog box: “Are you absolutely sure you want to keep thinking it would be a good idea for Genevieve to go out with Leon? [OK] [Cancel]” I might take the train again tomorrow. It worked so well on Tuesday.