David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Word count: 55845 | Since last entry: 704 | This month: 5578 Wrote most of the drive from New Jersey into New York City today, with Jason’s Seattlite perspective on the city and a few hints of how it has changed under the influence of the Taurans (but not more than hints yet, because he’s in a moving car). Didn’t quite finish the chapter yet — there’s still one more twist to go — but since I blew my Saturday deadline another day or two won’t make that much difference. Rather depressed about Saturday’s critique. Despite the nice things people have said, I know that a main character who is insufficiently engaging can kill a book. Yes, it’s a learning experience, and I’ll do better next time. But I don’t want to have spent over a year of my spare time on an unsold novel. I just have to hope I can fix it in revision. Unfortunately, I know that I tried to address the Wiscon critiques of Jason and his world (“the world is not nasty enough to justify his actions”) before sending those chapters to my local critique group, and they had the exact same comments. These problems may be structural, to the novel and to me. What to do? In the meantime, I will just continue writing. Finish the damn first draft and see what we’ve got then.

Word count: 55141 | Since last entry: 1910 | This month: 4874 I tried, writing all morning, and came very close, but didn’t quite finish the chapter. I found myself still in my chair, typing furiously away, at 1:50 for a 2:00 group meeting, and with one scene still to go: the entrance to New York (which is under alien control). This is a big scene and deserved more than ten minutes’ work (it’s 10-15 minutes just to get to the place we meet, anyway) so I decided to give in and buy them a beer. But I arrived late, after everyone had already bought their own drinks, so I didn’t even do that. I should be able to finish the chapter tomorrow, and put it in the mail to the gang on Tuesday. Not Monday, that’s a holiday. I got chapter D critiqued today. Jason’s still a wimp and the aliens still aren’t alien enough. I honestly don’t know what I can do about the latter problem; how alien can I make them and still have them be sympathetic? For the former problem, I have some ideas but I don’t know if I’ll be able to overcome the forces (plot factors and aspects of my own personality) that made Jason who he is now. Changing his name and giving him a different backstory might help. A weaker strain of the same problem affects Clarity. Sigh. But despite these critiques, people still insist they are enjoying the book. Some of the folks in the group are speculating about what is happening behind the scenes, who is responsible, and where the plot is going to go from here. Some of the guesses are scarily accurate; some are completely off base (and I need to determine if this is due to bad writing or just a bad guess); some are not what I had thought, but they fit the evidence presented so far and are more interesting than what I had in mind. The scariest of all is one where the reader has guessed exactly what is happening, then rejected it because it seemed too obvious. That worries me. Now I have to decide whether I want to change my mind about what happens next. Some of the most interesting suggestions would, unfortunately, result in a substantial rewrite (e.g. the suggestion to add a third viewpoint character to show the interaction between humans and aliens, which Jason’s human-only environment and Clarity’s alien-only environment fail to) or would change the story into something completely different (e.g. the suggestion that the plague spread to the alien homeworld, which would require a faster-than-light drive, which would completely change the human/alien dynamic and require a different ending to boot), neither of which I am willing to do. But some of them are entirely plausible and better than what I had planned, so I’m likely to do them. I always feel strange about incorporating another writer’s suggestions, but a) that’s why we have critique groups, and b) what I do with the idea is almost always going to be different than what the suggester had in mind.

Word count: 53231 | Since last entry: 265 | This month: 2964 Opening night of the Portland International Film Festival, but I decided to write just a little after the movie (Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things) to keep my hand in. A few hundred words a day is better than a thousand-word binge once a week. But now it’s definitely bedtime.

Word count: 52966 | Since last entry: 673 | This month: 2699 I hoped to get at least a thousand words tonight while Kate was at the opera. It didn’t happen. I also hoped to make it onto the final Nebula ballot. That also didn’t happen. (Rats. But it’s an honor to be… well, nearly nominated.) I’m probably not going to finish this chapter by Saturday. Feh. But at least I did sit down and write something. Something is better than nothing. And 673 words is enough for a gold star. I also went back and tightened some of what I wrote on Tuesday. Introduced new character Commander Smith (no relation to Doctor Smith, Cordwainer Smith, or E. E. “Doc” Smith), while bringing Jason into the belly of the FFL. He’s realizing that these people he has already gotten thoroughly into bed with are Not Like Him, and it’s only going to get worse as the chapter progresses. I’m not yet sure how he and they are going to react to each other, but he’s definitely gotten off on the wrong foot with the Commander. Considering that everyone around Jason is willing to kill or die at the Commander’s word, this might be a bad situation.

Word count: 52293 | Since last entry: 623 | This month: 2026 I’ve been pretty busy the last couple of days, but I decided to turn off the radio for my commute (45 minutes to an hour each way) and spend the time thinking about the novel. It’s a lot like meditation, in that the intention to think about a given thing (or not think about anything) can very easily — almost unnoticeably — slip away into thinking about something else. Anything else. Monkey mind at work. But as soon as I notice myself thinking about work, or chores, or the dentist, I pull my mind back on track. I’m concentrating on what is one of the novel’s major problems: Jason, the main human character, is a wimp. He is more reactive than active. So I’m trying to come up with situations in this chapter in which he can make decisions and take actions for reasons of his own. I also hope to use these decisions and actions to set up some later things he has to do. So even though not much happens in this chapter in terms of advancing the plot, I hope it will still be a dramatic and valuable one. After all that thinking I found the actual writing went pretty quickly, though I only had an hour tonight so I only wrote about 600 words. Now I am frustrated that I can’t write faster, rather than frustrated by not having anything to write about. Even so, the chapter is nearly half done. I might even finish it by Saturday, but it’s going to be a close thing. In other news… the Hell story sold! I was getting a little worried about it, since I’d heard back from Gateways so quickly. So that’s two sales so far this year… a very good start. Also, after a good discussion on the Speculations message board about when to trunk stories vs. sending them to “lesser” markets, I mean to put some of my older stories that haven’t gone out in a while back in the mail soon.

Word count: 51670 | Since last entry: 842 | This month: 1403 Despite the best of intentions, I did very little writing this week. There was always something else that seemed more pressing or interesting. I think it’s due to the lack of definition of this chapter. This implies I should take some time to flesh out the outlines of other chapters that have as little as this one. In the meantime, I’m just going to have to keep struggling through. Many writers of my acquaintance get to talking about “that damn novel” after a while, and I can really see where that comes from. I do hope to get back into the swing eventually…

Word count: 50828 | Since last entry: 561 | This month: 561 I am such a slug. Far from getting right back to work on the novel after putting the Gateways and zeppelin stories in the mail, I slacked off for over a week. But I finally did put my butt in the chair tonight, and wrote 500 words for a gold star. It’s a start. One reason I had so much trouble getting going is that this is a transitional chapter — only one point in the outline, which is basically “move this set of characters from here to there.” And yet somehow I need to keep the reader’s attention for 4000+ words. I’ve been mulling it over in the back of my head for the last week, and I think I have a set of incidents to occur on the trip that will reveal needed information, develop the characters’ relationships to each other, build the world, and increase dramatic tension. I hope. I am encouraged by my success with the zeppelin story, which was written in one shot without an outline. We’ll see how it goes. I have ten days. Despite not writing very much on the novel in January, I think it was a very good writing month. I wrote almost 14,000 words (the most in one month since I’ve started tracking, including both the PseuDoNaNoWriMo and the NoReNaNoWriMo), including revising one story, writing two stories from scratch, and putting all three of the new stories in the mail. And the Gateways story has already sold! Just to keep my head from getting too big, I also got five rejections. February is not going to be as productive, I suspect, with Potlatch and the International Film Festival and several Fahrenheit 451 events (it’s the county library’s annual “Everybody Reads” program, with discussion groups and plays and movies and readings all focused on one selected book). Not to mention I can’t expect an ice storm to keep me home and writing for three solid days. But Kate’s going to be out of town for most of one week, which could be an opportunity to get a lot of writing done. Or maybe to melt down into complete slugdom. Again, we’ll see.

Word count: 50267 | Since last entry: 21 | This month: 13965 The 21 words shown above is the net result of edits on the Gateways and zeppelin stories. I put both of those in the mail tonight, as well as a resubmission of “Where is the Line”. Also sent off a couple of queries on stories that have been at their markets for a loooong time. Final word count on the Gateways story: 6684. But I e-queried the editor and he said “Don’t worry about the extra 600 words — if you’re happy with it, send it on over to me.” Tonight’s edits were mostly tweaks suggested by my crit group — I tightened up the first few paragraphs, eliminated a red herring or two, fixed a couple of technical and grammatical errors, and brought the bad guy on stage at the last so he could see he’d been defeated. In general, the crit group liked it. I think it’s a pretty good story. Why does the simple act of mailing a story take so much time? It’s not like I sweat over the cover letter (every one is the same except for the address, title, and wordcount). Maybe it has something to do with the reading over and over of my deathless prose. Handwriting the two envelopes is also kind of time-consuming, but it takes less time and stress than computer-printing them when the printer gags on the envelope two or three times, as it did more often than not before I gave up on it. Tomorrow I will write at least 100 words on the novel! Promise!!

Word count: 50267 | Since last entry: 4475 | This month: 13944 Just back from the Colonyhouse, a fun weekend of writing, talking, and eating. Had a full house of eight people this time, despite blustery weather (hard rain, occasional hail, and serious winds at the coast, with the threat of snow in the mountains) and personal crises for some of the attendees. Although I started this Colonyhouse weekend thing as a way to get in more words on the novel, I wound up starting a story for All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories instead. I blame Edd Vick, who was also working on a zeppelin story. The good news is that I also finished the zeppelin story, so I now have three solid weeks (with no more short story deadlines!) to write my next novel chapter. This story was unusual for me. It started as just a vignette: 400 or so words written for an Exquisite Corpse (a writing game in which each writer adds a short section to an ongoing story) started by Jay Lake. I whomped it off in an hour. But I was so intrigued by the setting — a kind of China Mieville magic/technology hybrid universe — that I decided to expand the vignette into a story. It already had zeppelins in it, and zombie goats to boot. I changed the zombie goats to human zombies, because I thought the goats were both implausible and just too much of an in-joke, but apart from that it was a straightforward extrapolation from that bizarre little vignette. Starting from that situation, I just wrote and wrote, introducing characters and relationships as needed. I was never sure as I wrote each paragraph just what was going to happen next. And then I wrote a sentence, and I stopped and thought “gee, what happens now?” — and I realized I had just ended the story. Boom, a whole 4500-word story in one day. I’m still not sure that’s really the end of the story. It’s a lot like the end of The Italian Job (the 1969 original, I haven’t seen the 2003 remake). At first, I thought it was terribly ambiguous. But I got a couple of the people who were there at the Colonyhouse to read the story, and they said the ending wasn’t ambiguous and it was satisfying. And, indeed, when I read it again I found it was not ambiguous — there’s really only one more thing that could happen after that point, so there’s no need to show it. It’s a bit of a downer ending, but it’s appropriate for the rather dark setting. (Though, as Kate points out, it’s nowhere near as dark as New Crobuzon.) I did go back and tweak one scene in the middle to make the ending work better — but I only added two letters, changing “I love you” to “I loved you” in two places. I have some worries about this story. Am I being derivative, channeling China Mieville as I channeled Cordwainer Smith (and some have called “Nucleon” Bradburyesque)? Am I in a rut, with a man in love with a zeppelin as I had a man in love with a spaceship in “Eagle”? And, still, does the ending work? But all in all I’m happy with it. If nothing else, it’s a great atmospheric piece. The really weird thing is that, even though I wrote it straight through in one sitting without knowing what was going to happen next, it hangs together surprisingly well. For example, in the first scene there is a little biotech cleaner that snuffles up some crumbs, then flies off to the corner to feed its young. It doesn’t have any relevance to the plot, it’s just there for atmosphere. But, upon reflection, it serves to show on the very first page that this is a world in which there are engineered creatures that perform services for humans but have their own lives and their own agendas. And they fly. Just like the intelligent zeppelin with whom the main character is later revealed to be in love. Since I finished up the zeppelin story on Saturday (and got to bed by 10:30, unlike Friday night when I stayed up talking until 1:30 AM), I took Sunday morning to do some edits on the Gateways story. Based on the two critiques I have already received, I decided to keep the demon alive until almost the end of the story, and I think it’s much stronger for that. I also used one of the new demon scenes to introduce the armorer at the middle of the story, so he doesn’t just appear from nowhere when he’s needed at the end. It’s like making pie crust — you have to cut the flour and shortening together, then roll it out so it’s a smooth dough with a uniform consistency (but without working it so much it turns into mush). Now I have to roll out some other ideas in the same way, to properly lead up to the ending and otherwise make the batter smoother, and do some word- and sentence-level editing to tighten the story and reduce the word count as much as possible. I’ll probably be able to put both these stories in the mail on Monday or Tuesday. And so, after a productive weekend, I’m going to take this evening off.

Word count: 50267 | Since last entry: -519 | This month: 9469 Trimmed the story down to 6600 words, just 10% over the stated limit, and sent it for a quick email critique. (I gave myself a gold star for the 500 anti-words.) Maybe my crit group will suggest some more trims. Even if not, I think I can probably get away with this length. I like this story a lot. It’s not quite up there with “Eagle,” I think — it didn’t make me cry — but it’s a good solid story with fear and danger and magic and sense of place, a really evil bad guy, and a couple of good guys who learn and grow. We’ll see how the critique goes.