David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Wordstock, Portland’s annual Festival of the Book, begins tomorrow at the Oregon Convenion Center. Last year Jay Lake and I were on the program, but not this year — they don’t like to have people come back year after year. I’ll be in the Oregon Writers Colony booth from 1:00 to 3:00 on Saturday, volunteering for one hour, selling and signing copies of Space Magic for the other hour. Stop by and say hi.

In other news, I finally succumbed to temptation and bought an iPhone. It is very cool and shiny. Kate and I have a family plan, so if you ignore the cost of the new phone we’re actually saving a little money per month. I’ve already loaded it up with the following apps: AAA Roadside (call for assistance), Facebook, LiveJournal, MetrO (worldwide subway trip planner), Nambu (Twitter client), Notespark (sync and share notes), NPR (read and listen to news), PDX Bus (find a bus stop and when the next bus arrives), Peak.ar (augmented reality app that shows the names of the nearest mountains), and Urbanspoon (restaurant finder). What’s your favorite app?

So often in this business our joys are provisional. Hey, I finished a story! …but I don’t know if anyone will buy it. Hey, I sold one! …but I have to wait for the contract and check, and wait some more for galleys, and wait yet more for publication. Hey, it finally appeared! …now we’ll see if anyone likes it.

I’ve been spending a lot of the last couple of months in a nebulous space between creation and publication — closer to publication than sometimes, but not quite there yet. For some reason I’ve gotten rewrite requests on five submissions this year, and I also got feedback from my critique group on a couple of recent stories that prompted extensive revisions. So I’ve been doing a lot of rewriting and not a lot of drafting, which is not as satisfying to me and also not terribly conducive to blogging-about.

I’ve made a couple of sales, too, but even there things are kind of nebulous. I got a rejection from an anthology, but it was accompanied by a request to use the story on the anthology’s website (for five cents a word). I would rather have been in the print antho, but it’s a decent pay rate and online publication means I don’t have to ask my friends to shell out money to read my stuff. So that’s a sale, sort of. I also got paid for the Wild Cards story, but there might still be a few revisions requested, depending on exactly what happens with the other stories in the book. So that’s another sale, again sort of.

Anyway, I just finished and mailed… let’s see, that’s the fourth revision in a row, and I’m nearly done with another piece, a nonfiction essay based on the talk I gave at the Library of Congress back in July, which isn’t exactly new writing either. Next up — and I should start that today — is a project somewhere between drafting and revision: a YA novel proposal based on the three stories I wrote for Esther Friesner’s fantastical-suburbia anthologies. I’ve been asked to write about half of it (~40,000 words) plus an outline.

The original short stories were set in the 1970s, because that’s when I was in intermediate school and I have no idea what life is like for Kids Today. It worked well but I’ve been asked to bring it up to the present day for the novel. I started off with one of the original stories but it was just too finished… trying to revise it was like trying to reshape a marble statue with a butterknife. So I’m going to tackle the project as a completely new novel with the same characters (well, with people based on the same characters) and then, once I have a good solid idea of the setting, characters, and voice, maybe revise the existing stories to fit in the new present-day world.

Now I have a research problem: how to find out what life is like for Kids Today, ages 13-14? I don’t know any kids that age well enough to talk to, and I can’t go down to the local middle school and just hang out… that’s creepy, and probably illegal these days. Any recommendations of books, magazines, movies, TV shows, or websites?

Just back from a writing weekend at the Oregon coast with Kate, Laurel Amberdine and her Chris, Corie J. Conwell, Diana Sherman, Shannon Page, and Executive Chef Jay Lake who tried to kill himself with a knife on the first day and spent the rest of the weekend trying to kill the rest of us with delicious high-calorie goodies. (Mmm, momos.) Despite which we somehow had room for a stop at the Tillamook Cheese Factory for ice cream on the way home.

In addition to the eating, much writing and hilarity ensued. Walks on the beach. Gossip. We decided that the Next Hot Thing will be unicorns, but unicorns as unlike the typical boring sparkly old-hat unicorn as the fast zombies in 28 Days Later were unlike the shambling zombies of yore. We’re talking carnivorous, ancient, implacable, anthropomorphic, shapeshifting unicorns. We’re going to make it happen, just you watch.

I spent my writing time revising a short story and a novella. I realized that the reason I hate revisions is that when you’re drafting, you know when you’re getting close to the end, but when you’re revising — especially if what you’re trying to do is “make the story more (x)”, e.g. “make the character more sympathetic” or “make this plot point more plausible” — it’s hard to know when you’ve achieved that goal and when you need to do more. Double especially when, as seems to be the case more often than not for me, the feedback you’re trying to address is “make the story more (x)” when you already pulled out all the stops and made the story as (x) as you possibly could in the first draft.

We dropped off Laurel and Chris at Mary Robinette Kowal’s new digs, where they will be spending the rest of this week and we were all treated to a delightful vegetarian dinner and conversation. Marlowe the cat decided not to entertain us by demonstrating his Helmet of Invisibility.

A grand time was had by all and it’s not quite over yet. Corie is spending the night here; tomorrow morning we drop her off at the airport. Then we will have another house guest (square dancing friend Mark) tomorrow night. But for now… to bed.

A couple of friends of mine, Eleri and Blade, have been fighting what seems like a losing battle against serious life issues for the past several years. They have two children with a rare genetic disorder that has dramatically impacted their quality of life (the parents’ as well as the kids’), and Eleri has health issues as well that make it tough for her to earn a living. All of this has put them in a deep financial hole.

Now some of their friends are banding together to try to dig them out of it. I hope that you will go to http://helpthehamiltons.wordpress.com/ and contribute something, or buy something from the Etsy shop you’ll find linked there. Every little bit helps.

So we got Kate’s iPhone bill for the month including our trip to Canada. We knew that using the phone in Canada was expensive and she’d been sparing in her use of it, but I was wondering how much they’d charge us. (I carefully monitored my use of my Verizon Treo and kept it down to about $12 in additional charges, but the Treo’s not as data-hungry as the iPhone.)

The bill included $114 in data roaming charges. (!!)

Fortunately, I’d seen a blog post in the last week or so, with the subject “Goodwill”, talking about a similar situation — the poster had made a weekend trip to Victoria BC and managed to rack up a $300 bill. When they called AT&T to complain, they managed to talk with a phone rep for like an hour before the rep happened to mention “oh, there’s this thing I could do that would knock that charge down to $25.” The poster was saying that treatment like this will cause AT&T to lose customers in droves when the iPhone is finally no longer exclusive to them, but thanks to that post, I knew to call AT&T and ask for that retroactive change.

It took quite a while — the rep I got was ignorant but very helpful — but I did eventually get that $114 charge reduced to $25. The magic incantation is “Data Global Plan” and you can find more information about it here: http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/international/roaming/iphone-travel-tips.jsp. You can be sure I will check back next month to make sure we don’t get charged the same $25 every month going forward.

So the only remaining question is: who was that masked poster? I’ve Googled all over and can’t find the original post.

ETA: An anonymous commenter tells me that the original post was here: http://zzzorg.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-lose-customers.html. Thanks to The Zorg for letting me know this option existed! If not for that I would have just sighed and paid the $114.

I’m definitely going to Foolscap, World Fantasy, and Orycon. Currently not planning on Steamcon or the Browncoat Ball, but could perhaps be persuaded. Are any of you, my blog readers, going to either of those?

Just got my program schedule for Foolscap. I’ll be auctioneering and appearing on a bunch of programming:

• Fri 5-6 pm – 20th Century Archeology: Panelists will bring along contemporary objects and make us guess – if we were archaeologists 300 years from now, and we dug it up, what would we think it was?
• Fri 9 – 10:30 pm – Which Stories Matter? The world contains an infinite number of stories; some pass by and are gone, while others are revisited over and over. Which stories matter to us? To the world? To the future? What makes a story important?
• Sat 10:30-11 am – Strut Your Stuff – David Levine: Reading
• Sat 11am-noon – Hats, Chapeaux, Huts, Bunkaquanks & Sombreros: Come talk about what you wear on your head, what you’ve seen people put on their heads, and other hat discussion. Bring examples!
• Sat 4:30-6 pm – How to Write What You Don’t Know, and Putting What You Know Into Your Work: So you’ve got a great story, but it just so happens to include something – a location, occupation, field of study, something – that you don’t really know much about. If you’re really attached to it, how can you make it work? How do you research it effectively, and then write about it without overwhelming the reader with “guess what I found out” recitations? Similarly, how do you avoid the same problem when you write about what you DO know?
• Sun 10-11 am – Food in SF Literature: Speculative writing about food can be extremely evocative and compelling, but it’s also often difficult to do well. What’s the purpose of including food in a story? What are some good ways to go about it, and what are the pitfalls?
• Sun 1:30-3 pm – Auction

Just a brief note to let everyone know that we are back home after touristing around the province of Quebec for a week after the Worldcon. We had a great time, saw lots of historical stuff, and ate many fabulous meals. Last night we enjoyed the fine hospitality of Jo Walton, to whom many thanks. The weather here is even hotter than it was there but the humidity’s far more tolerable. And now to bed, because my brain’s still on the East Coast.

Oh, almost forgot: my email box filled up yesterday, so if you tried to email me something yesterday or today and it bounced, please re-send it.

Word count: 1463 | Since last entry: 2425

Quebec. I’m still in Quebec.

We have arrived in Quebec City after nine days in the province, all without affordable or dependable Internet. Now that we finally have good free connectivity I find that the amount of stuff I would like to blog far exceeds both my time and my brain capacity. I will sum up briefly…

Had an excellent Worldcon. All the programming I was involved in went well, especially the Doctor Who panel and my reading. Much difficulty getting to convention parties on Thursday and Friday, due to problems with hotels and elevators, but hung out in the bar instead with lots of cool people. Spent most of my time not in programming or hanging out in the bar hanging out in the halls instead. At Worldcons I have a real tendency to stand in one place (often the hall outside the dealers’ room) for two and three hours at a time, talking with a varying knot of people, and this Worldcon was no exception. Food was awesome… even the worst meal I had (noodles from NooBox in the convention center) was pretty good and with good company.

After the con we rented a car, hit the road, and hung out in the countryside, staying at a B&B in a former school near the town of Saint-Armand. We sampled ice cider, picked blueberries, visited the J. A. Bombardier museum (he invented the Ski-Doo snowmobile), and drove past lots of horses and cows. Frustratingly, most of the restaurants Kate had researched were closed (I blame the zombie apocalypse), including one stretch of two hours and over a hundred kiometers seemingly without one restaurant that was both still in business and actually serving food. But once we did find something to eat it was generally fabulous.

The food problem here in Quebec City is quite the opposite: way too many amazing restaurants to choose from. Also there are book and record stores, plus plenty of touristy things to do. We won’t be bored.

We’re here in Quebec for four nights and will be heading home (with a stop in Montreal) on Wednesday. No promises about blogging or tweeting during that time.

Word count: 4639 | Since last entry: 4639

Rather frazzled at the moment because we just found out third-hand that the Pink Martini concert on September 5 (“Oregon! Oregon!”, written by Stan Freberg no less) has been moved from the Coliseum to the Zoo, necessitating purchase of new tickets. Glad this happened while we were in town.

This all came down while I was in the middle of grilling up dinner: chicken mango sausages from Trader Joe’s, marinated grilled beets, and corn on the cob. The beets got overdone but I’d try that recipe again.

Yesterday we were privileged to attend a workshop performance of Mike Daisey’s new monolog “The Last Cargo Cult”: a comedy, a travelogue, and a meditation on the meaning of money. It made me laugh; it made me think. It’s in Seattle later this month, then goes on tour; I’d encourage you to check it out if it comes to your town.

We got a new issue of Bento finished at the last minute, as is traditional, but thanks to the fine people at DocuMart it’s already all printed and bound. We’ll have copies to hand out at the Worldcon, of course. If you are not going to be at the Worldcon, would like a copy, and think we might not have your current address, please email your address to us.

We leave for Montreal bright and early Tuesday. On Wednesday night Ellen Klages and I will be “celebrity guest hosts” at the Reno in 2011 party. After that I’ll be on a lot of programming. I particularly invite you to sign up for my kaffeeklatsch (2pm Sunday) and come to my reading (3:30pm Sunday). I’ll be reading an excerpt from my Wild Cards story.

Much and much to do before then…