David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

It was on this date one year ago that I received an email from Artemis Westenberg of the Mars Society, inviting me to join crew 88 at the Mars Desert Research Station. On that day I was terrifically excited, of course, but I had no idea just how much my trip to “Mars” would change my life in the following year.

The two weeks I spent in Utah were amazing. I got to experience first-hand the isolation, self-reliance, interdependence, and improvisation that are always going to be part of life on the frontier, and I became fast friends with a wonderful bunch of people from all around the world. I also learned about the beauty of the desert and the joy of barreling across it on an ATV. You can read my blog entries for the whole story.

Once I got back, though, the real transformation started.

I learned habits of “protagonistiness” — taking action to change the plot — on Mars that I tried to hang onto in my day-to-day life. I think I’m still a lot more likely than before to stick my neck out, take risks, commit to uncertain plans.

The Young Adult fantasy novel I was working on in the latter part of 2009 was blown right out of my head. Instead I wrote a short story, “Citizen-Astronaut,” based on my experiences and submitted it to the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest, where it took second prize. Later it was accepted for publication in Analog. I also started work on a YA science fiction novel about Mars, which currently stands at 28,000 words; I expect to finish and submit it early next year.

I had articles about my trip appear in Willamette Week and The Oregonian, and made appearances on KGW-TV and KATU-TV. I don’t know if this media exposure did my career any good, but it sure can’t hurt and I had a blast doing it.

I prepared a slide show about the trip and presented various versions of it at Radcon, Ignite Portland, Potlatch, Google, Powell’s, the Nebulas, Wiscon, Clarion West, the Washington Aerospace Scholars Program (twice), the Mars Society’s annual convention, Aussiecon, and OryCon. People really seem to like this presentation, but I don’t want to be “that guy who gives that Mars talk,” so I promised myself I wouldn’t keep doing it past the end of 2010. However, I won’t turn down requests; if people really want to see it, I’ll do it, but I won’t push for invitations the way I did this year.

I got to see a Space Shuttle launch (from the VIP viewing area no less!) and hang out with all kinds of extremely cool people at the Nebula Weekend. I presented to a packed house at the Bagdad Theatre as part of Ignite Portland. I got to visit the Museum of Flight after hours. I got to meet Robert Zubrin and the other Mars Society movers-and-shakers at their annual conference. I got to be on a couple of program items with GoH Kim Stanley Robinson at the Worldcon. None of these things would have happened if I hadn’t gone to “Mars.”

I collected together the blogs of all the members of the MDRS-88 crew in a trade paperback, The Mars Diaries — my first experience with self-publishing. Doing this was fun and educational, but I don’t think it’s any way to make a fortune, or even a living, from one’s writing.

I got a fabulous new author photo.

It’s been an amazing year, and my heart is full of love and wonder from all the things I’ve experienced and people I’ve spent time with that I would not have done otherwise.

I wonder what 2011 will bring?

Although I still hold out the vain hope that I may sell another story or two this year, I think my publications for 2010 are pretty much set. Here they are, and I must say I’m kind of astonished at the length of the list.

Click on a story title to read it or hear it online. Click on a publication name to buy it. Enjoy!

Original Fiction

• “Teaching the Pig to Sing” in Analog, May 2010
• “Pupa” in Analog, September 2010 (ebook)
• “A Passion For Art” in Interzone issue 228
• “Second Chance” in Alembical 2
• “Floaters” (audio) in The Drabblecast episode 177 (also available via iTunes)
• “A Little Song, A Little Dance” in Breaking Waves (ebook)
• “Family Matters” in Fangs for the Mammaries
• “Finding Joan” in Daily Science Fiction
• “Powers” in Wild Cards I

Non-Fiction

• “How the Future Predicts Science Fiction” in the final issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction
• The Mars Diaries from Lulu.com

Reprints

• “Wind from a Dying Star” (audio) in Escape Pod episode 238 (also available via iTunes)
• “The Last McDougal’s” (audio) in Escape Pod episode 240 (also available via iTunes)
• “Nucleon” in Retro Spec: Tales of Fantasy and Nostalgia
• “L’histoire de l’Aigle Royal” (French translation of “The Tale of the Golden Eagle”) in Légendes

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve sold “Citizen-Astronaut,” the story that won Second Prize in the 2010 Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest, to Analog! I’m so happy this story will see print. It’s a classic “guy in space who has to solve a problem” puzzle story and is very much based on my experiences on “Mars.” But I feel I need to point out that, even though I named my hero Gary Shu (yes, Gary Shu), the interpersonal, political, and physical problems I threw at him are far worse than anything I faced in Utah.

This marks my third sale to Analog, which is significant because along with your third publication you get a Biolog (short biographical article) published in the same issue. I’ve already done the interview, with writer Rick Lovett, and seen a draft of the article. And, although there’s no official definition of what makes a writer a member of the Analog MAFIA (the gang of writers who appear frequently in that magazine, the name being a tortured acronym for Making A Frequent appearance In Analog), I figure three sales is a pretty good lower bound so I asked Jerry Oltion to send me an Analog MAFIA button, which I will wear with pride at my next convention.

This sale also means that I sold to Realms of Fantasy and Analog within a month of each other. Pretty chuffed about that too.

I’m also pleased to announce that my story “Written on the Wind” (from the sff.net anthology Beyond the Last Star) will be podcast on Escape Pod!

Most of my writing time this month has been spent on a short story for a theme anthology, which is due Real Soon. I hope to put it in the mail today. I think I may take a good chunk of this week off from writing, just to rest and recharge, before diving back into the Mars YA novel.

Both cars failed to start during last week’s freeze. Fixed.

Heated towel rack went cold. New one ordered.

Kate’s iPhone went black and refused to start up. Fixed by Genius Bar.

iPod nano nonresponsive. Brought back (for now) by fiddling with lock switch.

Mac mini refused to read or eject CD or even to acknowledge existence of drive. CD extracted by brute force, tape placed over slot to prevent problem from recurring (I very rarely use the optical drive on that machine).

That’s all in the last WEEK. Can we hold off for a while now, please?

So endeth National Novel Writing Month.

I don’t “do” NaNoWriMo — I’ve never been able to produce that many words per day consistently no matter how hard I’ve tried. But every November I surf the NaNoWriMo energy by setting myself a moderately ambitious writing goal.

This year, after no writing at all in August (okay, I was in Australia) and extremely sporadic writing for much of the rest of the year, my NaNoWriMo goal was simple: write at least something on the YA SF novel every day. My target was 500 words per day, but I said at the outset I’d be happy with a couple hundred words.

I won. I wrote every day in November, usually right about 500 words, with a minimum of 204, a maximum of 1650, and a total of 18,593. That’s probably at least 10,000 words I would not have otherwise, so yay. The draft now stands at 28,141 words out of a projected total of 70,000.

A lot of those words are crap. But that’s what revision is for.

Now I have a couple of other projects that need attention. I hope to finish those up in the first week or two of December and get back to the novel after that. I also hope to continue writing every day, but I won’t beat myself up if I miss one.

::pats self on back::

We went to the home of friends for T’giving this year, so we didn’t have any leftovers. But with everyone talking about turkey sandwiches and all in the last day or so, we both had a hankering. So Kate went to the store yesterday, bought a turkey breast, and poached it. Today she made bread, and cranberry sauce. So tonight’s dinner was leftover turkey sandwiches… every bit of which was prepared fresh.

One nice thing about being retired is that I don’t have to commute in the snow, which Portland drivers absolutely cannot cope with. However, today I got my comeuppance. Although we had only a sprinkling of snow, the temperatures were below freezing, about 25° F, and when we went out to the car this morning to go to the gym, it wouldn’t start. The lights and radio came on, but when I turned the key… nothing. Not an “rr-rr-rr”, not even a click. Weirdly, the headlights didn’t dim, so it wasn’t the usual cold-weather problem of a weak battery.

Oh, bother. But that’s okay, we have another car.

Kate’s car wouldn’t start either, with the exact same symptoms.

Weird.

After trying a few more times to get both cars to start, I gave up and called my friendly local mechanic, Hawthorne Auto Clinic, which is literally two blocks away. A little while later one of their technicians came by (on foot) with a “jump box” — basically a battery in a case with attached jumper cables.

It wouldn’t start either car.

He also tried banging on the starter with a pry bar, in case it was frozen. No change.

Okay, he said, I’m going to go back to the shop and come back with some more diagnostic tools. But a little while later I got a call: they weren’t going to keep sending him out on foot in this weather. I would have to have the car towed in.

I called AAA and they sent out a tow truck about 40 minutes later. With amazing alacrity he picked up the car, towed it to the auto clinic, and zipped it into their parking lot neat as you please, all covered by my AAA membership. The auto shop said they’d get to it as soon as they could. But there were a lot of other cars there that had been disabled by the cold.

By this point our trip to the gym was shot, but I had a 1:00 appointment downtown and we were meeting a friend to see Harry Potter at 4:30 and I still hoped to make both of those. I checked online and found there was a bus that would take me right to my 1:00 appointment, but I’d have to eat lunch real quick to make it.

I was also really concerned about what was going to happen with the rest of today and tomorrow. We could maybe get our friend to pick us up on his way to the theatre, but if the car didn’t get fixed before we left for that we probably wouldn’t get it back until after Thanksgiving. And if that happened, how would we get to Thanksgiving dinner? Worry worry worry.

As I was scarfing down lunch, the auto clinic called. When they got to my car it had started right up, immediately and repeatably. Their best guess was that it had been a frozen starter or solenoid (the weather was not only below freezing, it had been duck-drowningly wet for the past several days) and that the jostling the car had received from being towed had broken whatever was frozen loose.

So I got the car back from the shop (no charge! I love Hawthorne Auto Clinic) and drove downtown where I got something from Lucius Shepard for Ellen Datlow. We had a nice little chat about Monsters and other movies.

So all’s well that ends well. Though Kate’s car still isn’t starting, I hope that it will recover when the weather gets back above freezing.

I have to say that I’m really noticing my privilege right now. I have a lot of friends who, when they have car troubles (and they have them frequently, because the best cars they can afford are crap) it turns into an appalling cascade of can’t-make-it-to-work and can’t-afford-to-fix-it. Whereas I, with money, have a well-maintained car that rarely breaks down, have a AAA membership (a form of insurance) to tow it when it does, and live in a neighborhood with a fine auto mechanic right down the street who will cut me some slack because I’ve been a good customer. So I really feel like I’ve gotten away with something here by getting out of this car crisis with no major problems and no money spent.

How often do you get to celebrate the release of the first volume in a series that you know, absolutely know, will not only spawn at least twenty more volumes but be a beloved, worldwide smash?

Wild Cards hit the stands for the first time in 1987 (the same year as Watchmen — it was a good year for superheroes). As an SF and comics fan, I snatched it up immediately. It was a “mosaic novel” — a shared-world anthology edited into a single, fairly coherent whole — that combined all the thrills of superhero comics with the depth of worldbuilding and character development possible only in novel-length prose. And with writers like Roger Zelazny, Howard Waldrop, and George R. R. Martin at the controls, how could it go wrong?

The universe of Wild Cards is an alternate history in which an alien virus is released into the world in 1946, a virus that transforms some of those it affects into “Aces” with superhuman powers and many of the rest into deformed “Jokers.” That first volume introduced the world and the characters through a series of stories giving an abbreviated history of this transformed world, beginning with the release of the virus and ending with the present day (1987). Subsequent volumes picked up from there, carrying the alternate history forward along in parallel with our real history. It was vivid, contemporary, groundbreaking. It was different.

I was a fan.

Flash forward to 2007. In the intervening years I became a writer, sold some stories, won some awards. Then I read in Locus that the Wild Cards series, which had been dormant for years, was about to be revived. With a freshly-awarded Hugo in my hands, I managed to find the temerity to query George about the possibility of playing in the Wild Cards sandbox. He very kindly explained that the first trilogy of revived books was already in progress but he’d keep me in mind for the future. “Be warned, though,” he said, “Wild Cards is not an easy gig.”

Two years passed. Then I met George at a Worldcon party and he gestured me out into the hall. We’re just starting up a new Wild Cards trilogy, he said; if you’re still interested, the thing to do is to pitch a character.

If I’m still interested. Ha.

I came up with several character sketches and sent them in. George smacked them down with brilliant, cogent observations about how they’re too obvious, too limited, too powerful, too similar to existing characters (he has every detail about the entire series in his head, I swear). Under George’s tutelage I combined two of them, rewrote, revised, expanded. Finally I came up with a character he liked: Tion James, aka The Recycler. Tion was accepted into the Wild Cards universe, and I officially became the 32nd member of the Wild Cards consortium. There was a fat contract describing the responsibilities and rewards of membership which I had to sign in blood.

But that’s only the beginning. Once you’re in the consortium, if you want to be published you have to earn it, by successfully pitching a story idea for the next book. And the first book to come down the pike after I joined was actualy two books: a reissue of Wild Cards Volume One with three new stories filling in missing bits of the alternate history, and a Jokertown police procedural called Fort Freak. As it happened, Tion didn’t really fit into either of them. So he remains on the shelf for now; perhaps he will appear in the next volume after that.

I wrote several pitches for both, but it was clear to both George and me that I was much more excited about Volume One. How could I not be? It was like an opportunity to write a new script for Star Trek: The Original Series… and to see it produced, with the young Shatner and Nimoy, and released on DVD right along with the original episodes. An amazing, overwhelming opportunity. Frightening, even.

Eventually my pitch for a story called “Powers,” featuring an entirely new character named Frank Majewski, was accepted with some modifications. I did a whale of a lot of research, into both our history and the Wild Cards universe. I wrote the story — actually a novelette. We went through a couple rounds of revisions.

Working on Wild Cards is probably the closest I’ll ever get to working in television: collaborative, high-pressure, hurry-up-and-wait, with an inexorable requirement to conform with the published history of the universe and characters. George is an amazing editor, with an almost frightening ability to find the one tiny point to push on that causes a whole structure to collapse into a new, more interesting shape. Working with him has been a revelation.

At last “Powers” was done, handed in, accepted. Meanwhile, work on Fort Freak was continuing. Even though I didn’t have a story in that volume, I participated by contributing some minor characters. One of the characters I’d originally pitched for Volume One was updated to the twenty-first century and incorporated into the Fort Freak cast, though he didn’t wind up appearing on stage in this volume. Again, a lot like working in television.

Which brings us to the present day. The revised Wild Cards I releases today, with a phenomenal cover by Michael Komarck. If you loved the series before, here’s your chance to get the Blu-Ray DVD of the first movie with never-before-seen footage by “eminent new writers like Hugo-winner David Levine, noted screenwriter and novelist Michael Cassutt, and New York Times bestseller Carrie Vaughn.” And if you haven’t read it before, this is your chance to get in at the beginning.

I recommend you buy it from Powell’s or your local independent bookseller.

It makes a great holiday gift.

squee!

I have a terrible habit of burying the lede, so here’s some signal boost for an item from the last post:

Locus reviewer Rich Horton’s year-end summary for Analog calls out my “Teaching the Pig to Sing” for special praise. Because this story has been catching some critical attention, I’ve put it online for you to read for free. Tell all your friends!

You may recall that I killed Realms of Fantasy last month, a phrase which here means “had a story accepted right before the magazine folded.” Well, rumors of Realms‘s death were somewhat exaggerated, and in the first buying round of the new regime they announced that they’d be buying that story: “Tides of the Heart,” AKA the Magic Lesbian Plumber Story.

(I’m not actually claiming to have had anything to do with Realms‘s revivial other than being a beneficiary of it. But as there isn’t an existing phrase in writer-slang for selling a story to a revived market that had been accepted before it died, I’m declaring that “bringing the market back from the dead” is it. Not that I expect to have another chance to use it any time soon.)

Now, there have been some concerns about Realms‘s new owners. But as effectively all of the original staff are returning, I’m prepared to give it a shot. It’ll be an interesting ride, if nothing else.

In other news, Locus reviewer Rich Horton’s year-end summary for Analog calls out my “Teaching the Pig to Sing” for special praise. Because this story has been catching some critical attention, I’ve put it online for you to read for free. Tell all your friends!