David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

We’re at the San Jose airport on the way home. The visit started with a square dance fly-in, which featured good friends, excellent callers, and mostly good dancing. As a bonus, I won the centerpiece (a cute stuffed bunny) at the banquet and we got to visit Allan Hurst’s home and his California Desert Tortoise named Beta.

We then shifted to the lovely home of Karen Schaffer and Mike Ward, who provided an excellent home base for three days of fairly low-impact visiting with our Bay Area fan friends. On Monday we had lunch at Google and dinner with a friend who works for Intel and used to work for Apple (Allen Baum, and his wife Donya White). On Tuesday we had lunch at Apple and dinner with a friend who works for Google (Matt Austern, and his wife Janet Lafler and daughter Alice). The Google campus is amazing, with a life-sized replica of SpaceShipOne and many other cool gadgets on display, not to mention the free food. Apple seemed much more corporate by comparison. At Google I also presented my Mars talk, to about thirty people who paid close attention and asked some great questions. The talk was recorded and I believe it will be posted on YouTube at some point in the future.

We also visited the Intel Museum, toured the demonstration garden of Sunset Magazine and other gardens with Master Gardener Karen, and had an excellent lunch and ice cream with Spike Parsons.

This morning we took a ride on a Zeppelin. It was rather spur-of-the-moment and we snagged the last two tickets on the thirty-minute “taste of Zeppelin” trip from Moffat Field to Stanford and back. It was similar to the small plane trip we took from Seattle to Victoria BC a couple of years ago, only even cooler because the vehicle moved slower (only about 35 MPH), the windows were bigger, and you could move around the cabin. Got lots of great photos of which just one is shown at http://twitpic.com/1dvdes. Very, very cool and we hope we will be able to take a longer trip soon, maybe next year between Potlatch and FOGcon.

So all in all we hit just about all the Bay Area highlights, but it’s time to go home now. I’m giving my Mars talk at Powell’s Technical Books tomorrow night.

I just completed and submitted my first short story this year. After doing no writing at all in January and February due to the Mars thing, I began work on this story in March, but worked only sporadically on it during that month. I finally buckled down this week, as I had a market in mind with an April 1 deadline. I wrote 1530 words on March 31 and 2265 words on April 1, getting the completed story in at 7800 words just before deadline. It’s an un-critiqued second draft, but I feel pretty good about it.

At the moment I’m at the airport, heading for San Jose for the El Camino Reelers’ 25th-anniversary square dance fly-in. After that we’ll be hanging out in the Bay Area for a few days. This begins a summer with insane amounts of travel:

We’re not yet certain about the 4th Street Fantasy convention in June but everything else on there is committed. As I should probably be, for planning this much travel… but we want to do all these things! And as we don’t have day jobs, and we have the money for it, and we’re healthy enough to do it, we’re doing it.

The stars represent days I’ll be presenting my Mars talk. These are:

• April 5: Google, Mountain View CA
• April 8: Powell’s Technical Books, Portland OR (open to the public)
• May 15: Nebula Awards Weekend, Cocoa Beach FL
• May 29: WisCon, Madison WI
• June 20 and July 11: Washington Aerospace Scholars, Seattle WA

I’ll probably also be giving the talk at the Worldcon and Potlatch, but those are too far in the future for me to contemplate.

Why am I doing this? I’m not being paid for any of these speaking engagements and they probaby aren’t going to sell many books (I will be signing copies of Space Magic at some of these but it’s not directly connected). But it’s great exposure, and I consider it part of my job as MDRS Crew 88 Journalist to do public outreach in support of the Mars Society and humanity’s future on Mars. And I’m a huge ham.

So what the heck. Allons-y!

A couple weeks ago I hinted on Twitter and Facebook that I had some squee-worthy news I could not yet reveal. Well, it’s now public: I will be giving the Keynote Speech at this year’s Nebula Awards!. I’ll be presenting the same talk about my trip to “Mars” that was such a success at Potlatch.

On Thursday April 8 at 7:00 PM I’ll be presenting a thirty-minute talk about my trip to “Mars,” profusely illustrated with photographs, at Powell’s Technical Books in the Park Blocks (33 NW Park Avenue, Portland, Oregon). People seem to like this talk a lot. If you’re in the neighborhood, please do stop in!

I am feeling very much loved right now. And that includes both the warm-and-fuzzy and the cold-hands, butterflies-in-the-stomach aspects of that emotion.

It started at Ignite Portland, where I presented the five-minute version of my Mars talk in front of about 600 people. The feedback on my talk at the event, on Twitter, on the forums, and from my MDRS crew and others who watched it on YouTube has been most gratifying.

The next day we headed to Seattle for Potlatch, which was as usual filled with lovely people, both old friends and new, and we had many fine conversations and excellent meals. I was amazed by the number of people who came up to me to say they liked my work, even people I barely knew or didn’t know at all. The “Writing the Other” panel on Friday evening went well, and then at the auction Saturday night I got to do the Happy Snoopy Dance for a bid of over $100 many times — including when my MDRS mission patch and “Mars” rock went for $120. Color me astonished!

The peak of the weekend for me came at brunch on Sunday, when I presented the 30-minute version of my Mars talk. People laughed in all the right places, there were tons of excellent questions, and I was just bowled over by sustained applause at the end of it. After that several people came up to me to talk about presenting my Mars talk at other events (I’m told that one person from Wiscon said to someone else “we’ll have to be sure to get a big room for it!”). Some of those discussions are beginning to bear very exciting fruit, which I hope to be able to report on soon.

Online, I participated in a “Burning Question” discussion at the blog of Laptop Magazine, in which several SF writers answered the question “Which Technology Makes You Feel Like You’re Living In The Future?”. (Thanks to K. Tempest Bradford for the invitation.) That’s nice enough, but then the editors of Laptop liked the results so much that they decided to print it in the May issue of the paper magazine. And then Annalee Newitz at io9 picked up one paragraph I wrote in that about “techno-snot” and called it out for a whole article on its own. This attracted the attention of Dearbhaile Heaney, an MA student at the Royal College of Art in London, who is working on an art project investigating the social and cultural perceptions of “goo” and emailed me to pick my brain about the issue. I wound up writing a 300-word flash piece about a fictional techno-goo for the project.

On and on the connections and the links go. There’s more in the works, and I’ll let you know when I have details.

It’s amazingly cool to be at the center of attention like this, and yet it’s also scary and nerve-wracking. Although I’m a big ham, performing takes a lot out of me and I have to retreat to a dark room for a few hours afterward to recuperate. I imagine this is a tiny taste of what it’s like to be Neil Gaiman. It’s exactly what I’ve always wanted, but I’m also kind of hoping it will slack off and get back to normal soon. Looking at my schedule for the next few months, though, I’m not sure that it will.

The business of being a famous Marsonaut has also interfered with the business of writing. I’ve written barely half a short story since the beginning of 2010. I’ve also received a couple of very disheartening rejections recently. But when I look on all these accolades and awards I know that I am capable of writing work that makes people smile. I fully intend to get back on the writing horse this month.

Jay Lake and I will be “writer gurus” at Writers’ Weekend this July 22-25 (Thurs-Sun) at the Ocean Crest Resort on the coast of Washington state. This is a continuation of the former Iron Springs Writers’ Workshop at a new location. It’s educational, laid-back, and fun, with critique, lectures, and plenty of free time for writing and revising. There are still a few spots left, so if you’re interested you should head over to writersweekend.com for more information. To register, email writersweekend@hotmail.com.

We are coming to San Jose for the ECR@25 square dance fly-in, April 2-4, and have decided to stay on for a few days afterwards, returning on the 7th. Anyone in the Bay Area want to hang out April 4-7? We’re also interested in crash space, and information about events happening during those days. Leave a comment below or email me at dlevine at spiritone dot com.

At the moment we are at Potlatch in Seattle. So far we have had a delightful Chinese dinner with Janna Silverstein and Jack Bell, dim sum with Allen Baum and Donya White, and vegetarian Thai with Liz Argall and Julie and Greg Sardo. I also participated on a panel about “Writing the Other” with Ellen Klages and Nisi Shawl and hung out and talked with a bunch of other cool people.

We also spotted the May 2010 issue of Analog, containing my story “Teaching the Pig to Sing,” at a Seattle magazine shop. My name’s on the cover! (Yes, as far as the magazines are concerned it is now May. If you want a copy, run down to your local newsstand before June arrives at the beginning of April. This issue will also be available as an e-book in a variety of formats but I don’t know when.)

The video of my Ignite Portland talk has been posted on YouTube:

Someone accidentally opened a fire door at the beginning of my talk, causing a loud alarm buzzer. This made me really flustered and I flubbed some of my lines (like calling the Viking rover Voyager and forgetting where Bianca came from) but I did manage to recover once the noise stopped. Everyone said I handled the interruption really well.

Many people in the audience were on Twitter and you can see some of their comments here. The Mars Society’s Director of Operations called it “a very inspirational talk” and says she will be including it in the training videos for future crews.

You can see all 20 talks from Ignite Portland 8 on YouTube. My favorites are Why Wikipedians are the Weirdest People on the Internet and The Beginner’s Guide to Psychiatric Hospitalization.

I also participated in a group discussion on Laptop Magazine‘s blog about Which Technology Makes You Feel Like You’re Living In The Future?. Go over there, read it, and if you like it leave a comment. There may be more of these “Burning Question” discussions in the future if there’s sufficient response.

Having driven myself to a frazzle with rehearsing all day, I’m just heading out the door for Ignite Portland right now. If you’re coming, bring a nonperishable food donation. If not, you can watch it live — I’ll be appearing in the second half of the show. Wish me luck!

I wrote 500 words yesterday, and 500 words the day before, which is the first fiction I’ve committed this year. Nearly two months of writing time sacrificed on the altar of Mars, but I think it’s a decent tradeoff given the learning and publicity I’ve gotten out of it. Still, it’s good to get back to the actual writing, though I don’t think I’ll be producing any words today.

Although I haven’t been writing much lately, my little paper children are still out there in the world working on my behalf. In summary:

• My nonfiction essay “How the Future Predicts Science Fiction” appeared in the final (alas!) issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction. This essay is based on the talk I gave at the Library of Congress last year.
• The audio version of my story “Wind from a Dying Star” was podcast at Escape Pod. It’s also available on iTunes. This story was my first professional sale (it originally appeared in the anthology Bones of the World, which is amazingly still available) and I’m still proud of it.
• There’s a fascinating discussion of “Wind from a Dying Star” going on in the Escape Pod forums. I’m particularly touched by comment #17, from user Mobius04, which says of this story: “Know that you helped change one soldier’s life for the better.” (Go read the whole thing.)
• On the same day “Wind from a Dying Star” appeared, I sold another story to Escape Pod: “The Last McDougal’s,” which originally appeared in the January 2006 issue of Asimov’s.
• I learned that Fangs for the Mammaries, including my story “Family Matters,” will be published in September. Rich Horton liked my stories in the previous two volumes of this series.
• Finally, the expanded version of Wild Cards Volume One, including my story “Powers,” is scheduled for November.