David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Word count: 3603 I’ve been a bad boy, haven’t written a thing since Sunday. But I sat down tonight and wrote about 800 words. Huzzah. Probably not going to make 30,000 words in March for the sff.writing.novel-dare PseudoNaNoWriMo, but I still mean to try! With Kate out of town until Monday, I plan to spend tomorrow night and all this weekend writing. Got Clarity out of the potato field and on the road to New York… not sure if that’s the end of the chapter, but it’s an end to the chapter. The chapter so far has not gone exactly the way I had planned. This is perhaps a good thing. In other writing news, received a contract and check in the mail (for a story accepted last year), reviewed the galleys from Phobos, and read “Charlie the Purple Giraffe” at the Tugboat Brewpub downtown. Go me!

Word count: 2873 A very productive weekend for getting chores done. Not very productive for writing. Did have a nice long chat with Pam Davis, an old friend who is a nurse, on medical stuff. The best human analogy for the alien disease seems to be graft-vs.-host disease (GVHD), in which transplanted bone marrow begins attacking the patient. Treatment for graft-vs.-host involves suppressing the immune system, which opens the patient to opportunistic infections — it’s a no-win situation. Pam suggests that increased dramatic tension can be obtained by having an initial visible symptom (e.g. smallpox blister or KS lesion) which provides an unambiguous signal that “you are infected with this untreatable fatal disease, and everyone you’ve had any contact with has already been exposed.” If the symptom is one that can be hidden, that provides opportunities for duplicity and self-deception on top of that. I don’t think a visible “pox” makes sense for this disease, but some kind of patchy rash or “ick” is a possibility. (I still haven’t nailed down what the Taurans have for integument.) OK, maybe this is an AIDS metaphor after all. Pam also asked some interesting questions such as “What keeps this resistance fighter from just sharing the aliens’ vulnerability through some public mechanism such as the internet?” and “Are there no alien medicos?” I came up with an outline of a solution to these and other issues she raised, and it is a really scary situation for the characters. Mwah hah hah.

Word count: 2525 Got a little writing done at the square dance tonight. After thinking about the “Dalek” problem for a while I think I’ve figured out a way around it… using the same transmission method, but slower and more subtle so it’s not as easily spotted. Also changing the characters’ attitude toward aspects of the disease to make it harder for them to implement the block. This is not an AIDS metaphor, I swear.

Word count: 2240 Finishing up a customer support document at work, so I didn’t get home until way late. Got another 500 words written on Chapter 1, developing Clarity’s character a bit, but all the characters are still in the potato field. I plan to bring down the boom on Clarity real soon. This morning, during the time between when I woke up and the alarm went off, I had a horrible thought, something along the lines of “omigod, my Daleks can’t climb stairs, how the hell are they going to conquer the world?” The problem being that the disease is too easy to stop. I’m not sure if I have a real solution, but I have something (it involves limited bandwidth). I’ll let it percolate some more.

Word count: 1705 Started in on Chapter 1 this evening, after a long period of staring at the wall wondering just where Clarity is and what she is doing when she learns of her father’s death. Finally put her in a potato field in Eastern Washington. Why potatoes? I don’t know. But it gave me a chance to show a Tauran eating a raw potato. Also today, I learned that I will be one of 3 readers in the inaugural performance of the Portland Reading Series. I’ll be reading a story of mine called “Charlie the Purple Giraffe was Acting Strangely: A Serious Story about Funny Animals.” The reading will be held at the Tugboat Brewery, 711 SW Ankeny Street, on Monday, March 10, at 7:30pm. Neat!

Word count: 1164 Yesterday I had coffee with Mark Bourne and discussed the aliens. He came up with the idea that “seeing is believing” is the core of their philosophy and culture. If you don’t see something with your own eyes, it doesn’t exist; if you haven’t met someone personally, you have no preconceptions about them. Major transgressions are punished by the gouging out of eyes; less-major transgressions may result in “internal exile” caused by people refusing to see you. Minor transgressions result in diminished attention. Rather than “face”, their culture is ruled by attention, the fundamental coin of respect. Visibility equals attention; attention equals influence; influence equals power. No one can have direct influence over more people than can be gathered in one room at a time, but indirect influence can extend further (again, networks of small hierarchies). Theoretically, no government can extend beyond the limits of sight, which makes high places extremely valuable. The moon is the Eye of God, which sees all and is seen by all; this drove their space race, the race to literally claim the high ground and achieve the pinnacle of perception. My idea about the magnetosphere didn’t work for him, but then he’s not an expert in that area. He suggested, though, that perhaps they don’t use radio because communicating over the horizon is gauche. Hmm. Tonight I wrote a first draft of the Prologue. Woo hoo! Word counts from now on reflect only actual novel, not notes and outline.

Word count (outline and notes): 15471 I wanted to start drafting by the end of February. I didn’t make it. But I did spend this evening thrashing my first draft chronological outline into an insanely complicated spreadsheet (with color coding: blue is backstory, prologue, and epilogue; green is the alien plot thread; yellow is the human plot thread). So far I have not done anything to make sure the two threads complement each other well (balancing, echoing, mirroring, etc.). And I see that Clarity doesn’t have enough to do in the second half of the novel. At this point I’m prepared to run with this, knowing that things will change as the work goes on. I can shift incidents between chapters, and even between threads if I have to, to get the balance right. Looking over the outline, I’m excited. It looks like a rip-roaring story; the alternating plot threads seem to keep the tension up nicely, with a turning point at the end of just about every chapter. I hope to begin drafting this weekend.

Word count (outline and notes): 14656 On Saturday night, over a fine dinner at Zumi, I talked with friends Matt (former astrophysicist) and Janet (former anthropologist) about the aliens and their planet. Matt thought that giving them no magnetosphere would not necessarily kill them with the radiation, though it would not produce enough radio noise to make radio impractical, and the radiation would be enough to give them a biology different enough from ours to prevent us eating each other’s food (there are maybe 100 potential amino acids, of which Earth life uses about 20). Janet independently evolved the centrality of one-to-one communication from their background as presented, and agreed with my idea of “networks of small hierarchies” as the basis of their culture (a culture organized like the Internet, hmm). From this, we extrapolated a few ideas: they would have neither democracy nor dictatorship, but would be divided into small cooperating/competing clans and sects; they would have overlapping mosaics of culture (maps of religions, languages, ideologies, etc. would not overlap even as much as they do here); they might not even have the concept of a “language” as such, just swarms of ideolects of greater or lesser mutual comprehensibility; their philosophy of life might be something like “me against my brother; me and my brother against the clan; me and my clan against the world.” Matt wondered if such a society could develop the industrial base for spaceflight. I didn’t have an answer at the time, but I now think that their technology is more hand-crafted than industrial. (Plausible? Maybe not.) One other keen idea that came out in that conversation is that they would have Northern Lights all over the sky every night. Oh, as long as I’m here… just got two bits of good news in the mail yesterday: 1. My story “The Tale of the Golden Eagle”, which I sold to F&SF last year, will appear in the June 2003 issue. I should have my contributor copies in mid-April. 2. I received my contributor copies of Land/Space, containing my story “Fear of Widths.” They look great!

Word count (outline and notes): 13803 (Typing in the It’s Tops Coffee Shop on Market Street.) Yesterday I found something on the net about an AT&T research project called ShortTalk. This is a speech-based text editing system that uses non-English command words for commands, such as “looft” for “cursor left,” “spooce” for “insert a space,” and “gairk” for “move cursor to mark”. The advantage is that there is no ambguity as to whether an utterance is a command or a word to be typed. The disadvantage is that when using it you sound like the Swedish Chef. I think I may adapt this for use with datappliances by adopting the non-English command language but not so silly. Perhaps each command word starts with “z”: zeft, zight, zup, zown, zelect, zopy, zaste. “Zup zive; zelect zentence; zelete.” Hmm, still silly. But such a thing could catch on, if it works (e.g. Graffitti) and once it catches on it becomes part of the language. “Zuck zou!” “Zelete zat!” (Datappliances use small screens (the cheap ones) or heads-up displays (like Sienna’s) or project directly into the eyeball (the top of the line). There is no holography in this world.) The command language would be called ZTalk — no, Zalk. (Now at the Bombay Bazaar, eating ginger ice cream.) Alien words would also get picked up (viz. “tycoon,” “verandah”), but since the language is signed and the written language symbolic, how would it be picked up? Perhaps, like the ASL signs oh-I-see and you-and-me (vs. me-and-someone-else) such words can only be translated approximately and/or by phrases. This would limit their acceptance. We may see alien gestures being mixed in with human speech. (At a yarn shop, waiting for Kate, working on 2-column outline in Excel.) It occurs to me that if I can write these notes a paragraph at a time, in the small interstices of life, I could be writing the novel itself in the same way…

Word count (outline and notes): 14314 At Potlatch I took a Sunday morning workshop on “Transracial Writing for the Sincere” led by Nisi Shawl and Cyn Ward, which was about half lecture and half writing exercises. (Many and varied were the writing appliances in use, including a Palm with a soft fabric keyboard that doubled as a case and a notepad with shorthand.) The good news is that I am already doing a lot of things right, in questioning assumptions and not letting my characters fall into the default ROARS (Race, Orientation, Ability, Religion, and Sex). Key points: You are not a racist just because your reptile brain comes up with nasty stereotypical thoughts about people of different ROARS. Racism is when your conscious brain agrees with your reptile brain. — Your first impulse for character, setting, etc. is probably wrong; question your unconsidered choices. — If a person belongs to the “unmarked” (cultural default) ROARS his way is smoothed in ways he may never even recognize. — SF can create new social divides to illuminate marked/unmarked states. — As writers we can use marked/unmarked state to create parallax. Who is looking at whom? How do they look? It varies depending on the observer. — Difference is not monolithic; not everyone who is oppressed has common cause (e.g. American Indians and African-Americans may dislike/distrust each other though they are both oppressed), and complexes of characteristics do not always go together. Avoid the categorical fallacy of mistaking the traits of an individual for the traits of the group or vice versa. Catagorical thinking is not inherently fallacious, but it can be; you can have charactes engage in categorical thinking to reveal aspects of their character (e.g. blind spots). — Use congruence (shared characteristics) to establish ties between the reader and a character of a different ROARS. — Even secondary characters should have multiple traits, as real people do; even if a very minor character has only a few traits, they should not all point in the same direction (e.g. have your poor black man be passionate about classical violin, not rap). — Resonance is the association of related ideas (e.g. if a German is a torturer that inevitably raises the suspicion he might be a Nazi); it can be intentional or unintentional, but should be carefully controlled. An easy way to disarm unfortunate resonances is to have more than one member of a particular ROARS (e.g. don’t have the villain be the only bisexual in the book). — You will make mistakes, get feedback to correct them. In the exercises I tried rewriting a scene from “Nucleon” with Carl the junkyard owner as a Puerto Rican rather than a Polish-American, and a scene from “Primates” (a Clarion story, unpublished) with the primatologist as a woman rather than a man. I was intrigued to see how much the other characters changed in reaction to these changes. Obviously I need to do some research on African-Americans, if I’m going to get Sienna right.