David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

I have just released a 15-minute video of my story “Letter to the Editor” from John Joseph Adams’s forthcoming anthology The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination!

I hope you enjoy the video. If you do, please share it with your friends! The YouTube short URL is http://youtu.be/NkOuPyILWx0

I made this video after reading the story at a couple of conventions and receiving rave reviews for the story and performance. The nature of the story (plus my friend Robin Catesby’s mad video skills) makes it work really well as a video and I’m extremely pleased with the way it came out. The Mad Scientist’s Guide is also a kick-ass anthology, which has already received a starred review from Library Journal and been named a Top Pick by Romantic Times, and I hope that the video and anthology will be excellent publicity for each other.

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, due out on February 19, is now available for pre-order in both hardcover and trade paperback at traditional brick-and-mortar stores nationwide, via online retailers such as amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com, or you can support an indie bookstore by ordering through indiebound.org. See http://www.johnjosephadams.com/mad-scientists-guide for more information on the anthology.

So this was the week of the Space Magic ebook release. Thank you to everyone who helped to publicize it and/or bought it! Here’s a round-up of the press it’s received so far:

• It got a bunch of really good reviews from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program.
• It also got some more really good reviews at Amazon.com.
• I blogged daily at Book View Café about how some of the stories came to be written, with excerpts.
• I answered “three questions” at M.K. Hobson’s blog.
• I also had an interview at the blog of Keith Brooke (of infinity plus fame).
• There was a very flattering article about the release at the Writers of the Future Herald.

Thanks to everyone for your support, blogs, and retweets on the Space Magic ebook release. This, and my new website (https://daviddlevine.com) are two of the three major projects that have been occupying a lot of my writing time in the last few months.

The third project goes live next week. Here’s a teaser.

I am very pleased to announce that the ebook of Space Magic, my award-winning short story collection, is available for purchase starting today!

This Endeavour Award-winning collection pulls together 15 critically acclaimed science fiction and fantasy stories that take readers from a technicolor cartoon realm to an ancient China that never was, and from an America gone wrong to the very ends of the universe. Including the Hugo Award-winning “Tk’Tk’Tk,” the Writers of the Future Award winner “Rewind,” “Nucleon,” “The Tale of the Golden Eagle,” and many other highly-praised stories, Space Magic shows David D. Levine’s talents not only as a gifted writer but as a powerful storyteller whose work explores the farthest reaches of space as well as the depths of the human heart.

This edition comes to you from Book View Café, an author-owned co-op publisher whose 40 members include Hugo and Nebula award winners (Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda N. McIntyre, and Linda Nagata), NY Times bestsellers (Patricia Rice and Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff), and other notable book authors (Sherwood Smith, Madeleine Robins, Lois Gresh, and Sarah Zettel). BVC members pool their many talents — in editing, proofing, graphic design, marketing, management, and book formatting — and, in return, receive 95% royalties on their books. Currently they have over 160 titles for sale and publish around five new titles each month. They publish romance, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, and a strong YA list. I’ve been a member of BVC for a while now, but this, my first official BVC release, marks my formal debut.

I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the members of Book View Café for assistance and impetus in transforming this book into an ebook, especially Chaz Brenchley for proofreading and Chinese transliteration, Dave Smeds for work on the cover, and Vonda N. McIntyre for much help and advice on the ebook transformation. Also to Janna Silverstein for her fabulous marketing copy, Darin Bradley and Bruce Holland Rogers for selflessly donating the e-rights to their work on the print book, and of course to Deborah Layne of Wheatland Press for publishing the original paper version.

You can buy Space Magic directly from Book View Café or on the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Apple ebook stores. It’s DRM-free and I’ve made it available in as many countries as I could on each store. In addition to the collection itself, for $5.99, each of the 15 short stories is also available as a stand-alone ebook for 99¢.

With so many choices, where should you buy it? I’d ask that you buy it from whatever ebook store you usually frequent, because more sales on each store will help make the book more visible, but you should also consider buying from the Book View Café website because almost all of the money goes to me and the other members.

If you aren’t an ebook reader, the trade paperback is still available from Wheatland Press, Powell’s, and Amazon, and there are still a few copies of the signed and numbered hardcover at Wrigley-Cross Books.

Wherever you buy it — or even if you’ve already bought the paper version, or just borrowed it from the library or a friend — if you’ve read and enjoyed the collection or any of the stories in it, I would really appreciate it if you would let your friends know about it (on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, or your blog) or post a review (on Goodreads, LibraryThing, Powell’s, Amazon, or the nearest tree).

Thank you very much for your support!

This is just a quick reminder that SFWA’s Pacific Northwest Reading Series is having its next events in two weeks!

On Tuesday, in the Seattle area, local favorite Cat Rambo will be accompanied by Portland writers Felicity Shoulders and Grá Linnaea. The University Bookstore will be on hand again selling books and all the authors will be available to sign.

When: Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Where: Wilde Rover Irish Pub and Restaurant, 111 Central Way, Kirkland, WA 98033

On Wednesday, in Portland, we’ll have multiple award winner James Patrick Kelly (all the way from Maine!), also accompanied by Felicity Shoulders and Grá Linnaea. Wrigley-Cross Books will be selling books and all the authors will be available to sign.

When: Wednesday, January 30, 2013, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Where: McMenamins Kennedy School, 5736 N.E. 33rd Ave. Portland, OR 97211

Both events are free and open to the public.

I hope you can join us! It should be a lot of fun.

See http://www.sfwa.org/for-readers/sfwa-northwest-reading-series/ for more information and to RSVP (not required, but encouraged).

Here’s what I published last year, for reference and for your awards consideration. Click on a story title to read it or hear it online. Click on a publication name to buy it. Enjoy!

Original fiction

• “The Last Days of the Kelly Gang” (short story) in Armored, March 2012
• “The White Raven’s Feather” (short story) in Daily Science Fiction, March 2012
• “Liaisons Galantes: A Scientific Romance” (novelette) in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #108, November 2012

Reprints

• “Charlie the Purple Giraffe Was Acting Strangely” in Galaktika #262 (Hungary), January 2012
• “Love in the Balance” in Gears and Levers: A Steampunk Anthology, April 2012
• “Trust” in Not Just Rockets and Robots, August 2012
• “Finding Joan” in Not Just Rockets and Robots, August 2012
• “Floaters” in Buzzy Mag, August 2012
• “Firewall” in Digital Rapture, August 2012
• “Nucleon” in Retro Spec: Tales of Fantasy and Nostalgia, September 2012
• “The White Raven’s Feather” in Spells: Ten Tales of Magic, October 2012
• “The Tides of the Heart” in Heiresses of Russ 2012, October 2012
• “The Last Days of the Kelly Gang” in Journey Into… #52 (podcast), November 2012
• “Moonlight on the Carpet” in Toasted Cake #49 (podcast), December 2012

A collection of brief news updates:

• My story “I Hold My Father’s Paws” will be reprinted in Telling Tales, a Clarion West fundraising anthology edited by Ellen Datlow.
• In the January Locus, Gardner Dozois calls “Last Days of the Kelly Gang” “among the best in the book” and Rich Horton calls “Liaisons Galantes” “a slight but quite enjoyable piece.”
• Also from Locus, online short fiction reviewer Lois Tilton calls “Liaisons Galantes” “interesting” and “quite charming.”
• I will be appearing on a panel, with Erik Wecks, William Hertling, and Daniel (Robopocalypse) Wilson, at the Portland Comic Con (Feb 22-24 at the Oregon Convention Center).

That’s all for now. Watch for some bigger, more exciting news from me in the next couple of weeks!

As you may know, Potlatch is being held this year in conjunction with Foolscap, February 1-3, 2013 at the Redmond Marriott Town Center. As is traditional for both conventions, we’ll be having a writer’s workshop, and the deadline to submit manuscripts for critique has just been extended to January 10. The deadline to sign up for the interactive writing seminars remains January 25. See http://potlatch-sf.org/workshop.php for information.

I’ve just discovered that Bridget and Marti McKenna’s anthology End of an Aeon is now available as an ebook from Baen Ebooks, and what’s more they’ve put up my story “The True Story of Merganther’s Run” as one of the sample chapters you can read for free online. Enjoy!

With LiveJournal’s recent issues, lots of people are talking about moving to Dreamwidth.

I have been posting all of my content at DW as well as LJ (as well as my own blog at daviddlevine.com) for some years now, though I’m still using LJ as my main blog-reading interface. I don’t anticipate this will change soon, but as I’m a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy I have just gone over to Dreamwidth and friended everyone who’s on my LiveJournal friendslist.

If your username on Dreamwidth is different from (i.e. not character-by-character identical to) your username on LiveJournal, please comment here or otherwise notify me of your Dreamwidth username if you’d like to keep in touch there.