David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Word count: 79538 | Since last entry: 1215

Day go voom. But I know exactly what I was doing every hour.

We started off by packing up all our Christmas presents that need to be shipped, then got them to the UPS store first thing. From there Kate went off to take our friend M to a dentist appointment.

Next I called an accountant and talked with him for an hour — my current tax guy is not going to be doing individual accounts much longer and I need a new one, someone who understands both investments and writing. This guy sounds like he’ll fill the bill nicely. Next I wrapped up Kate’s presents. All present-related tasks are now done (well, I still have one thing to do for Kate, but that won’t take long). Then the electrician arrived, right on schedule, to fix a dead light fixture in the kitchen and install an electrical outlet on the front of the house for outdoor Christmas lights. I ate lunch while he was doing that.

Shortly after the electrician left, I discovered that the dead light fixture, which we had both seen come back to life as soon as he wiggled it and had both agreed was just a loose wire, was dead again. Wiggling the wire did not help. However, because I’d seen him disassemble it I now could attempt a diagnosis that I’d been unable to do before. I hauled out my old voltmeter and determined that power was making it as far as the fixture (beyond where we thought the loose wire had been), and because all three (low-wattage halogen) bulbs were out it was probably a bad transformer.

Took the fixture down and drove to A-Boy for a new one. They didn’t have that brand, but suggested a couple places that might. Used my fancy-pants phone in the parking lot to call around, and found one place that had exactly one in stock. Asked them to hold it for me. Drove across town, bought the fixture, came home, installed it. One of the (expensive low-wattage halogen) bulbs was broken when I took it out of the box, but I just swapped it out for one of the ones from the old dead fixture. Success! Proper illumination for that corner of the kitchen for the first time in months.

Fixed dinner (broccoli and tofu in spicy peanut sauce, a household favorite). Sat down to write. 1200 words later, watched half of the pilot of ER (a recent DVD acquisition) with Kate. Blogged. Bed. Tomorrow is another day.

Word count: 78323 | Since last entry: 1810

Being retired means that I can get kind of disconnected from the calendar. We often don’t know what day of the week it is, and (you may find this hard to believe) we actually haven’t really felt the pressure of Christmas approaching. Some years it’s kind of snuck up on us, but this year it really pounced. As of this morning I had purchased exactly three presents, and we have no tree nor lights.

The good news is, I’m retired. So we drove downtown and did our shopping, and now I’m done with that. The crowds weren’t too bad, even this close to Christmas, given that we were shopping on a weekday. We will wrap the presents tonight, and they’ll go in the mail tomorrow. Also tomorrow, the electrician is coming to install an electrical outlet on the front of the house, so we can put up lights (as we haven’t been able to do since we replaced our porch light with a compact fluorescent fixture that doesn’t support those screw-in plug adapter thingies we used to use). We’ll get a tree soon.

Meanwhile, I’ve had a number of interesting writing and other workshop opportunities appear for next year. They’re all cool, but even for me there’s only so much time and money, so I’m going to have to make some hard choices. One unpleasant surprise: the workshop I want to take this novel to has a deadline at the beginning of March, not April as I’d thought. So I have to double my productivity if I’m going to get the damn thing done in time. A thousand words a day should do it.

So I wrote a thousand words today. It’s getting easier now that the plot is really starting to accelerate, but we’ll see how long I can keep this up.

Word count: 76513 | Since last entry: 2587

The other day Kate said that she was really feeling oppressed by clutter, so I’ve been watching out for places to do something about that. I got all the dishes done this weekend, yesterday we sorted out a box of posters, and today we completed a major swath of decluttering that began when Kate got a new stereo for her car.

Now that Kate’s car is CD-based rather than cassette-based, you see, there was no real reason to keep most of our stash of music cassettes. The only ones to stay were those that will never exist on CD (like the recording of my college synthesizer class final project) and/or have sentimental value (like the copy of Billy Joel’s Storm Front we bought while driving across France, with its 50F price sticker). Of the rest, about 1/4 are commercial cassettes (they go to Goodwill), 3/4 are cassette copies of music we own on CD (those will just have to be recycled, probably through GreenDisk), and about a dozen are filk (those will be donated to some fan fund).

After taking down the cassette racks, we now had several empty shelves, which I thought might be just about large enough to hold the CDs that have been piled up all over the house because there was no room to shelve them. I hauled out the power drill and made new holes in order to mount the extra shelf which we’d bought years ago for just such an emergency. We then sorted out the CDs onto the now-CD-sized shelves, and lo and behold they all fit with about 6″ to spare.

The final step will be a Goodwill run to dispose of the commercial cassettes and the old, ugly cassette storage boxes. We also have some nicer cassette storage boxes (4 silver wire mesh units, kind of like this but with 4 cassette-size drawers each) which Kate thinks would be a shame to take to Goodwill, as it’s so hard to find decent cassette storage these days. If anyone in Portland has cassettes (or anything!) that need storage and would like these, just leave a comment in Kate’s blog (there should be an entry for this very shortly, I can hear her tapping away in the next room).

Much else has been happening round here, including a delightful cheese party chez Jay Lake. I’ve been plugging away at the novel, making good but not spectacular progress; the good news is that the plot has really begun to pick up steam, and the climax is now visible somewhere down the track. Exciting though this is, I will need to make space for a short story project very soon.

Word count: 73926 | Since last entry: 618

I really feel like I wasted a lot of today. I spent the entire morning creating a planning calendar for our 2008 travel, which took entirely too long because Excel 2004 on the Mac doesn’t seem to be able to align text properly and has two different ideas about what a cell’s background pattern should look like, depending on whether or not the cell also has a colored background. I finally switched the file over to the trial edition of Numbers (haven’t yet decided whether to pony up the $80 for iWork), which handled the text spacing much better but has issues of its own with patterns and colors. This is, of course, far more work than the problem really deserves.

Then I went to lunch with some local writers. Unfortunately, due to an unfortunate excess of health-related problems in the area only two other people showed up. Nice to see them, anyway.

In the afternoon, I worked on synchronizing my email address books (Palm, Gmail, and Mac), which turned out to be a painfully manual process. Got halfway through before my brain rebelled.

Fixed hash for dinner, using potatoes from the farm and some lovely leftover pork loin, then watched an episode of Torchwood before finally setting down to write. And, as you see, got 600 words, which is respectable, but I really need to be doing more like 1000 words a day to finish two chapters (instead of my usual one) for the next crit group meeting. I need to do that at least twice between now and April to make my deadline.

Oh well. Tomorrow is another day. (Bites radish.)

Word count: 73308 | Since last entry: 1304

A productive evening’s writing at the coffee shop. It was only me and Jay Lake tonight, and Jay left a while ago, but I kept slowly plugging away. The plot is being fractious and not helping me to guide it to the right place, but I think some kind of confrontation is brewing even if it wasn’t the one I had in mind. Also, Jay gave me some great writing-business tips. In exchange, I gave him my opinion (for whatever that’s worth) on a novella of his which I think could be great if he just let it go in the direction it wants to go instead of the direction he wants it to go. But it’s his novella and I wish him all the best with it.

Kate and I have been enjoying the latest season of Amazing Race and we keep thinking about what it would be like to compete for real (as opposed to the pretend version we had in Thailand). I think we could be good at it — it is what we do for fun, after all — except for the physical demands of some of the Detours and Roadblocks, and the whole going-without-food-and-sleep thing. I know that there are a couple of tour packages offering a semi-equivalent experience for money (a trip around the world with some competitive and adventure aspects, though without either the million-dollar prize or the possibility of elimination). I’ve also considered asking our friends to put together an itinerary for us (places to go and certain things to do or see) which we would then unseal bit by bit as we traveled. Could be kind of expensive, though, since we’d have to buy all the tickets on a last-minute basis. Kate’s also considered adding an element of unpredictability to our travels by going to the first postcard rack we see in a new location, giving it a spin, and traveling to whatever is shown on a randomly-selected postcard.

I’m just putting together a calendar of all the SF and square-dancing events we want to attend next year. There’s two or three events every month — we’re plainly not going to be able to do all of them, and if we add any non-convention-related international travel (we’re thinking Venice/Vienna, and/or maybe Kate’s delayed trip to Guadalajara) or just-visiting-friends domestic travel (Bay Area, New York, and Vancouver are among the candidates) we’re going to have to forego even more. The paradox of choice is that too much choice makes one unhappy. But it’s still good to have the options.

Word count: 72004 | Since last entry: 300

Back to work on the novel again. I must increase my pace if I’m going to have this thing finished and edited in time for a workshop in April that I want to take it to.

Meanwhile, a summary of my fiction publications for 2007.

• “Tale of the Golden Eagle,” translated into Czech in the Czech edition of Fantasy & Science Fiction (February 2007).
• “Tk’Tk’Tk,” translated into Italian in Robot (Spring 2007).
• “Tk’Tk’Tk,” translated into Finnish in Portii Science Fiction (March 2007).
• “Titanium Mike Saves the Day,” in Fantasy & Science Fiction (April 2007).
• “Babel Probe,” in Darker Matter (issue #1)
• “Tk’Tk’Tk,” translated into Hebrew in Bli-Panika.
• “Titanium Mike Saves the Day,” translated into Hebrew in The Tenth Dimension.
• “I Hold My Father’s Paws,” reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection.
• “I Hold My Father’s Paws,” podcast in Beam Me Up.
• “Moonlight on the Carpet,” in Aeon (#12).

Although that’s a very satisfying list of publications (and I’m really jazzed about the Year’s Best, which has gotten the story taught in at least two college-level science fiction classes), I note that it includes only three new stories. As far as short fiction goes, I’m reaping the rewards of spending most of the last couple of years working on as-yet-unsold novels. Once this novel is done I swear I’m going to do nothing but short stories for at least six months. (And no more damn novellas!)

Word count: 71704 | Since last entry: 0

Latkes for dinner tonight. Yum. Haven’t lit a single Hanukkah candle yet this year, though. And once we are done with dinner we’ll be off to see the Christmas Ships. I am a bad Jew.

Although the word-count-o-meter above shows zero, that only represents work on the novel. I’ve actually been working quite hard this week, finishing up edits on an invited short story. I got good crits on it, which helped me identify an entire character and scene that could be cut (the fact that the character appeared in only one scene should have pointed out to me how little he was doing for the story) to get the story from 6300 words down to the required 5000.

Unfortunately, after making that change and a few others, the story felt… meh. Workmanlike. It had plot and characters and all that, but it didn’t grab me. I had it all printed out and ready to go in the mail, but I just couldn’t. So today I gave it one last editing pass, just for me. Because the market is a humorous anthology, I went through and added a few funny lines here and there, and amped up the ridiculousness of a few situations. It’s better. Probably good enough to get published, in an invite anthology (I hope!) but I don’t feel great about it. I put it in the mail anyway.

But then, who am I to judge my own stuff? The ones I really love are the ones that never sell. And at some point I think all my stuff is crap. But going through the manuscripts trying to pick stories for the collection, I found that I really liked them.

Also today, received an 11-month rejection from F&SF on that damn novella. I emailed it to another market but it was immediately turned back as being too long. The only other major market that would take a novella is closed until March (at least). I’ve sent a query to a UK publisher that sometimes does novellas as chapbooks, but if those two don’t pan out I think it may be the end of the line for this one, for a while at least. Mama, don’t let your stories grow up to be novellas.

Word count: 71704 | Since last entry: 5586

Well. It’s been three weeks since I’ve had a proper blog entry. Sorry about that.

It’s been a busy few weeks. As an example of those Telling Details they’re always telling us to put in, either “Pack” or “Unpack” has been on my to-do list nearly continuously during this time. Which means that I’ve either been just about to travel somewhere, just back from somewhere, or too busy (or lazy) to unpack the bag that’s sitting in the middle of the living room.

I participated in a multi-author SF/Fantasy event at Powell’s in Beaverton. It was apparently a success. I had a large pile of the current Year’s Best Science Fiction and a very small pile of every other anthology this store had in stock with one of my stories. I managed to sell one or two YBSFs and all but one of the other anthologies. Also spent the evening hanging out with the other writers and playing with the pencils on the bench there, so it was a win all around.

I was a very busy boy at Orycon, between panels and workshops and dinners with friends. At the writers’ workshop, the other pro and I found ourselves with a bit of time to discuss the manuscripts before the workshoppers arrived. One of the stories had a blind protagonist, and both of us thought that she was shown doing things that no blind person would actually be able to do and found her generally unconvincing. And then the workshopper came in and sat down, with the seeing eye dog she sat down… the moral of the story is that there’s a difference between factually correct and believable.

I was on a lot of panels, which occupied most of the convention, but I didn’t mind because they were all very good panels and I feel I owe my hometown convention a lot. I had about a dozen people for my reading, and I was told several times that I moderate well. I also spent most of Friday evening at the RadCon party (on the bed), because I will be Short Story Guest of Honor at RadCon in February, about which I am right chuffed. Orycon got a very nice article in the Oregonian, in which I had the honor of being mentioned in the same paragraph as Ursula K. Le Guin and Kate Wilhelm.

The best thing that happened at the con was learning that I have sold a collection of 15 of my previously-published short stories to Wheatland Press. A pre-publication edition should be available at RadCon, with the real edition available at WisCon. A whole book all to myself! I am most pleased. We are in discussions about title, cover, and introduction and I hope to have very exciting news on all these fronts shortly.

Right after the con we discussed The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett at our neighborhood book group. This first Discworld book is rather disjointed and episodic, and the characters are largely cruel and unsympathetic — it doesn’t reflect the later magnificence of Pratchett. But all of the seeds of what Discwould would eventually become are here, from Unseen University and the Librarian to Death and, of course, The Luggage. An interesting historical note.

We played host to our friend Lise from New York for several days after the con, then drove up to Vancouver BC for the annual Thanksgiving square dance. On the way we stopped in Seattle, at the home of Kate’s sister Sue, where we had a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat and didn’t get up until the next morning when we all had to drive to Canada.

We managed to get past an accident at Mount Vernon that blocked all lanes of I-5 (yay Google Maps!), but then at the border we waited for two hours in a crowd of Canadians coming back from the day-after-Thanksgiving sales, flexing their Strong Canadian Dollars and kicking sand in the faces of ninety-eight-cent weaklings. All in all it took nearly an entire day to drive the 120 miles from Seattle to Vancouver, but the fly-in was tons of fun. As usual, we enjoyed the hospitality of Will Martin, the calling of Anne Uebelacker and Grant Ito, and another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.

After returning from Thanksgiving I focused my attention on my writing, shamefully neglected during the previous two weeks. I managed to pound out over 2500 words yesterday, by dint of working diligently (though not continuously) from 10am to 1am, and finished chapter 10 of my second novel in time for today’s critique group meeting. 2500 words in one day might be a record for me. I don’t understand how some people are capable of 5,000-word or even 12,000-word days. Part of this is almost certainly because I edit as I go and my first drafts are in publishable shape (in terms of words, sentences, and general coherency, anyway… the story always benefits substantially from critique, and often changes dramatically before it is ready for submission). I sometimes wish I had a different process, but this seems to be the way I work.

In other writing news, Issue 12 of the e-zine Aeon Speculative Fiction, containing my rather short story “Moonlight on the Carpet” and over a hundred pages of other fine stories, is now available for purchase in Microsoft Reader (.LIT) format. Other formats will be available soon. And I received the contracts for another sale to Aeon, novelette “The True Story of Merganther’s Run,” along with the pleasant surprise that Aeon has doubled its pay rate from 3 to 6 cents per word. That story is tentatively scheduled for Aeon 15 (August 2008).

During this time we also spent a lot of time and emotional energy on our friend M, who had to go into the hospital with (still undiagnosed at this writing) serious problems with vision, balance, and cognition. Special thanks to Robin Catesby for taking care of M’s dog for most of two weeks. He is supposed to return home on Sunday, which will be a big improvement even though we all know this story is far from over.

And that was November.

Word count: 66118 | Since last entry: 445

Back on the novel chain gang, with 445 words on chapter 10. It’s not exactly NaNoWriMo speed, but it’s not too shabby. I’ll have to keep up this pace or more on my writing days to make my next (self-imposed) deadline, given the fact that OryCon and Thanksgiving both fall between now and then.

The short story ended up at 6300 words, which means I wrote 2500 words on Friday, which is huge for me. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out. Unfortunately, this market has a hard limit of 5000 words and I did not have time for an editing pass before sending the story to critique. It will probably be easier to edit it down after it’s been critiqued (and has lain fallow for three weeks) anyway. I think there’s a certain amount of repetition, duplication, redundancy, and redundancy that can be trimmed, but it might take a bit more than that to get it down to 5000 words. Whatever. I’ve done this before and I know I can do it again.

Spent much of this weekend at Wordstock, Portland’s annual “festival of the book.” Attended many readings, some by people you might have heard of, such as Patrick McManus (Never Sniff a Gift Fish) and Peter Sagal (public radio’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me). All the readings I went to were entertaining, especially the one by Ann Marie Fleming (The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam). Between readings, browsed the booths from local presses (and some not so local), writers’ organizations, and bookstores. This year’s Wordstock, the third, didn’t seem as well organized and didn’t have as many big names as previous years, but it wound up being more fun than I’d thought it would be.

I love this town.

Word count: 65673 | Since last entry: 0

No novel work this week, but I’ve been powering away at a new short story — 3800 words so far, limit is 5000, first draft will probably come in about 6500. I really want to get this one done by Saturday; it’ll be a near thing.

The cold I had last week is still hanging on a bit, no doubt because I took such good care of myself at World Fantasy (cough). Kate’s also draggy, coughy, and phlegmy. Between the two I have not exactly been leaping out of bed in the morning, sometimes schlumpfing about in my bathrobe until as late as noon. I don’t want this to become a regular thing.

A few missed notes from World Fantasy: thanks to Dierdre S. Moen for consultation on this story, wowzers to Deanna Hoak for showing up in a phenomenal dress that showed off all her chakras, and nods to new pal Todd Lockwood. I met Todd at O’Hare on the way to the con, where we comisserated on the almost complete absence of publicly-accessible power outlets. Then we kept passing each other in the hall at the con, giving each other the same “I know that guy, but where from?” look but never really intersecting. And then we wound up on the same flight back to O’Hare on Monday, where we had a very nice chat in the departure lounge. Turns out he’s next year’s WFC artist guest of honor! Small world.

We’ve seen Blade Runner: The Final Cut and a play called The Underpants in the last couple of days. You wouldn’t think that Blade Runner really needed yet another cut, and yet this one is just marvelous. The changes are numerous but subtle, including replacing the obvious stunt double with Joanna Cassidy’s actual face and fixing the mouth movements in the scene where Decker assaults the Egyptian so they match the dialog. It all adds up to an improvement you can feel, but not actually see. This 25-year-old SF movie holds up astonishingly well. The Underpants, written by Steve Martin (yes, that Steve Martin) based on a German play from 1911, wasn’t nearly as memorable. Despite some fine performances, the whole thing was weighed down by over-broad comedy and a lack of surprises.

Remember that community college class that was studying “I Hold My Father’s Paws”? I can’t link to the class discussion, because it’s password-protected, but the instructor’s lecture on “Paws” and “The Best Christmas Ever” by James Patrick Kelly is publicly available in text and audio format. I’m just flabberghasted. I didn’t put any of that stuff in on purpose, but all of those cultural and historical references are entirely valid and I can believe that I had many or all of them in mind at a subconscious level. It’s great to get such a thoughtful outside perspective on my own writing process.

One last reminder: I will be participating in a “Local/NW Sci-Fi Authorfest” with 13 other authors at Powell’s Cedar Hills next Wednesday, November 14, at 7pm. Hope to see some of you there!