David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Word count: 28663 | Since last entry: 7477

Back from the Rain Forest Writers Village writing retreat — four days in the woods, writing and hanging out with writers. It was awesome and relaxing. I wrote a lot (159 words Thursday night, 2221 words Friday, 2379 words Saturday, and 1418 words Sunday for a total of 6712 words for the weekend) and finished the chapter I’d been working on just five minutes before closing ceremonies started.

The chapter’s too long and too heavy on the exposition, but I have time to whack it back a bit if that’s what I choose to do. Which I may.

A snippet:

If only Keelie could find a doctor of her own kind. “Reesa told me you’d heard a rumor about a new ship. Maybe they can help.”

G’ni leaned forward with a rustling sound and pitched her voice low. “I wouldn’t be asking too many questions about that.”

“Why not?”

“Bad feelings are gathering around this ship. The rumor goes that this type of ship was seen just once before, over fifteen years ago. The people offended nuum and the Drur were forced to destroy them.”

Keelie’s chest tightened. She was not quite fifteen years old. “Were there any survivors?”

G’ni spread her hands, a gesture indicating ignorance or equivocality. “Some say no. Some say there were a few. Enslaved by the Drur, perhaps. It’s certain that no one has seen any of them for many years.”

Attendees at the retreat included Jay Lake, Louise Marley, J.C. and Barb Hendee, Susan R. Matthews, and about two dozen others, all writers (except for a couple non-writing spouses such as Kate). I knew about half of them already. There was a whiteboard with word count for the weekend, and several people also posted their progress on socks. For some reason all of the knitters present were working on socks. It got to the point that some writers noted “2300 words, 0 socks” as their progress for the day.

Apart from the writing (with early-bird, night-owl, and, um, middle-bird sessions) there were a few laid-back programming items such as How To Find An Agent and Overcoming Writers’ Block Using Runes. I skipped almost all of those in favor of more writing time. In between sessions there was much eating, with Jay and writers Barb and J.C. Hendee as special guest cooks.

The resort itself was charming and rustic, though we saw very little of it on account of the continuous rain, ranging from drizzle to downpour. It was what we’d expected, being in a rain forest and all, but it was still a great relief when the sun came out on Sunday morning and we saw the mountains on the far side of Lake Quinault for the first time. Up until that point the world apparently ended in a gray blur at the water’s edge.

One other highlight of the weekend was the Ranch House BBQ, on highway 8 at about mile post 15, which Jay has mentioned as having the best barbequeue outside of Texas. We stopped there on the way up, just to try the food even though we’d already had lunch. We stopped there again on the way down, even though we’d already had lunch. It was that good.

Jay has posted some photos from the weekend in his journal.

Big props to hosts Patrick and Honna Swenson for putting together a fabulous weekend!

Word count: 21186 | Since last entry: 1154

Had a nice time at Potlatch. Got to take some of our out-of-town friends to some of our favorite restaurants. Appeared on some programming. Had a reading. A good time was had by all.

Apart from that my life has pretty much been eaten by the Day Job. We’re just a few weeks away from the Feature Complete milestone and I’ve had a lot of questions to answer, bugs to fix, and email to deal with. We also had a bunch of customers in on Tuesday and Wednesday, with another bunch of customers due in next Tuesday and Wednesday, and there was plenty of prep work and wrap-up for that. And it’s annual review time, with the concomitant paperwork. And I have two other projects (one big, the other minor) that are supposed to be done by the end of the quarter. Which is two weeks from today.

It’s nice to be wanted, but I’m getting a bit crispy around the edges. I’ve been falling behind on my personal email and blogging (reading as well as writing), I have three rejected manuscripts to put back in the mail, and I haven’t done any writing since before Potlatch — too brain-dead in the evenings. Nor tonight either.

Nonetheless, many writing-related things have happened without any effort on my part:

• Illustrator Rachel Stoleru posted a cute picture inspired by “Titanium Mike”;
• “Tk’Tk’Tk” was translated into Hebrew in the webzine Bli-Panika;
• “Titanium Mike” is also being translated into Hebrew, in the print magazine The Tenth Dimension;
• “Tk’Tk’Tk” will be translated into Romanian, in the fan-produced (but very slick-looking!) magazine Helion.

I am a very lucky guy.

Word count: 20032 | Since last entry: 177

Went to start chapter 4 and discovered that the quickie outline I wrote has Keelie doing just about nothing in her half of this chapter. But I can’t move the action of chapter 5 forward because Keelie has to wait for Rachel to do her thing in the other half of the chapter first. Must find something for Keelie to do that isn’t just stalling for time. I have some ideas.

Meanwhile, “Titanium Mike Saves the Day” has been reviewed in SFRevu (“a great little piece”) and Tangent Online (“an entertaining and engaging work”).

Word count: 19855 | Since last entry: 784

Writing at the coffee shop tonight, first time in months. Engaged in naughty writerly gossip, but did not succumb to peer pressure and accompany Jay and Karen to the bar, staying behind to keep butt in chair and hands on keyboard. Finished chapter 3. Go me.

A snippet:

“I’m afraid something’s come up,” Gideon’s voice replied. “With the aliens.”

A harsh jolt straightened Rachel’s spine. “What’s wrong?” When she’d left the alien ship a few hours ago it had seemed that everything was clear. They would be permitted to move to a closer orbit, nearby some other alien ships, as long as they agreed to subject themselves to an inspection for weapons. Since they had none, this was no barrier. But even after days of negotiations, hours spent training and tuning the translation software, and restating every point five different ways, her deepest fear was that something important had been lost in the gulf of interspecies communication.

“Nothing’s wrong with the negotiations,” Gideon clarified. “But… well, I think you should hear this in person.”

Rachel swallowed. “I’ll be right there.”

Also, today’s mail brought my author copy of the Spring 2007 issue of Robot, with the Italian translation of “Tk’Tk’Tk.” The coolest thing about these foreign translations is that most of them have interior illos. Most US magazines don’t have interior illustrations any more, and it is very very cool to see all the different artists’ interpretations of my story. (Photos coming soon.)

Finally, the first issue of the new online SF magazine Darker Matter is now available, with my story “Babel Probe”. You can read it now, for free!

Word count: 19071 | Since last entry: 308

I have never been so jetlagged before in my entire life. Nearly a solid week of fogginess, bleariness, incoherency, and bone-cracking yawns. Some nights I fell over at 9 and slept heavily for ten hours. Other nights I lay awake staring at the ceiling for I don’t know how long. I finally returned to a semblance of coherency this weekend, and kept very busy with various missed chores. Still very very far behind on all of them.

One thing I did this weekend was to go to the gym, for the first time in nearly three weeks. Now, although I’m less tired, I ache.

Tonight, for the first time since before the trip, I wrote. Yay me.

Another rejection today. Now I have three stories that need to go back in the mail. Bleah.

Going to bed now…

Word count: 18763 | Since last entry: 0

Back in one piece from Thailand, but very very jetlagged. Nothing worthwhile accomplished today.

The mail received while we were gone included:

• Copies of the April 2006 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, including my story “Titanium Mike Saves the Day”
• Copies of the March 2006 issue of Portti Science Fiction, including the Finnish translation of “Tk’Tk’Tk.” I got my name first on the cover and a great interior illo, in color no less. Also in the package was my check for the translation, which seems to be typical for foreign sales.
• An offprint from the Czech translation of “Tale of the Golden Eagle” from the February 2006 issue of the Czech edition of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
• No acceptances or rejections. However, I did receive two rejections by email.

I did not do any writing or critiquing, and not much reading, on the trip. We were, as Kate says, on vacation. Despite which, we were extremely busy. Detailed trip report is definitely forthcoming, but format and distribution mechanism are an open question.

Word count: 18763 | Since last entry: 998

Last work day for a while today. In the afternoon, as I found myself considering various tasks through the lens of “can I finish this today?” and spending the last hour of the day shutting everything down and making ready for a long absence (not all that long, really, only a week and a bit) I would describe my attitude as… detached.

I’m a bit nervous about the trip, actually — worried about my health and Kate’s, and concerned because I have never before traveled to someplace where I had so little comprehension of the local culture and language. The sheer magnitude of the voyage — a full twenty-four heartbeat hours of travel each way — is also daunting. I have never in my life traveled so far from home. (Frankly, it’s not possible to get much farther from home without leaving the planet.) But that very alienness and distance guarantees a unique experience. It’s going to be a heck of a ride.

There may be wi-fi, here and there, but I don’t expect to blog until I return. I’ll try to take pictures and keep a diary, but knowing me I’m not making any guarantees. The experience is the point, not the record of the experience.

Any feelings of foreboding I have were not ameliorated by the movie we went to see tonight, Children of Men. A brilliant movie, a spectacular tour-de-force of worldbuilding and violence. Coming home from that movie I flinched at a car coming out of a side road, and I had to remind myself aloud that I was in the real world, where most people are friendly and want to help us. When we got home we made hot chocolate to remind ourselves that our real lives are rich and sweet.

I’ve spent the last couple of evenings packing rather than writing. I’m not quite finished packing, but I’m going to bed now. We leave tomorrow mid-day, and arrive in Singapore on Monday.

One last thing before I go: There’s an interview with me on the Sci-Phi Show podcast (http://thesciphishow.com/). You can find it at http://thesciphishow.com/audio/tspsoc29.mp3. I’ve only listened to half of it, but it sounds really good! I’m all, like, professional or something.

Take good care of the place while I’m gone, and I’ll see you in a week.

Word count: 17765 | Since last entry: 1159

First, a public service announcement: the deadline for the Potlatch 16 Writers’ Workshop has been extended to February 9. Manuscripts must be received by then. Pros for the workshop include Mary Rosenblum, Jay Lake, L. Timmel Duchamp, and Dave Goldman.

Had a delightful lunch today at the home of Mary Robinette Koval, with Jay Lake and others, welcoming a new writer to town. Excellent conversation and wonderful food. Too bad Mary’s moving to New York soon. Several people threatened to steal her distributor cap or otherwise make it impossible for her to leave.

I haven’t posted lately because I don’t feel I have a lot of progress to report. I’ve been writing 100-200 words a day and it feels like work… though I see from the total above that even a couple hundred words a day does add up if you just keep plugging away at it. I’ll be taking the train to work tomorrow and that generaly allows me to produce a goodly quantity.

As to the quality of those words… I feel that they’re terribly flat and stale. Things are happening, and I think that at least one of my two protagonists is definitely acting in a protagonisty fashion (in my novels, at least, my primary flaw is protagonists who are too passive and reactive), but I’m unhappy with the quality of the prose. On the other hand, when I read over chapters 1-2 before sending them for critique they didn’t seem all that bad. I am certainly too close to the work to make an unbiased judgement.

A snippet:

Rachel had brought two folding chairs and a small table into the alien ship, and she sat with the tablet in front of her. She and the aliens communicated through a combination of speech and touching pictures on the tablet. The aliens’ language was a series of growls, ticks, hisses, and purrs that the tablet translated into English in a genderless voice with an awkward, jerky intonation. Everything the tablet said sounded hesitant. Rachel wondered what her own translated words sounded like to the aliens.

“We have no intention of harming the singularity,” she said for the dozenth time in as many different ways. A moment later, the tablet purred and spat out something she hoped meant the same thing. “I don’t think it’s even possible for us to damage it.”

The one called Kurrth, or something like that, growled a reply. “You, must remain, at least four, thousand eight hundred twenty, light-seconds? distant, from, the singularity,” the tablet said. The distance was probably a nice round number in the alien’s measurement system.

Other writing news: I just sold science fiction story “Babel Probe” to the brand new online science fiction magazine Darker Matter. It’ll be in the first issue, which is scheduled for March 1. This story has been kicking around for a long, long time (I wrote the first draft in 24 hours, based on characters and a situation generated at random, as a pre-Clarion challenge) and I’m pleased that it’s finally found a home.

The other day we had the furnace guy in for Ferman’s annual checkup. Kate says that when he came in the house he stopped dead as soon as he saw the Hugo. “Do you read science fiction?” she asked. “Does a carnivore… never mind,” he replied. They talked about SF the whole rest of the time he was there.

Much of my non-work, non-writing time has been taken up by computer maintenance stuff. I replaced the cheap piece of crap wireless access point provided by my ISP with a Ruckus MediaFlex router which has a cool skiffy blinking dome on top and seems to be successful at resisting the interference that brought the old AP to its knees. Unfortunately, networking is a black art and the replacement took nearly an entire day before everything was working the way I wanted. And the printer for which I just bought sixty bucks of ink cartridges has started acting up — it’s seven years old and it goes off to la-la land after printing each page. I suspect the paper handling mechanism has just worn out and there may be nothing to do but replace it.

Apart from the writing, I need to focus on getting ready for the trip to Singapore and Thailand — we leave in less than a week. We just found out about Singapore’s Tiger Balm Gardens and it sounds like something I want to see. But for now, what I need to do to get ready for the trip is go to bed.

Word count: 16606 | Since last entry: 836

First off, I’d like to point out that the deadline for the Potlatch 16 Writers’ Workshop, coordinated by Mary Rosenblum, is February 1. That is, manuscripts must be received by then. If you’ve been thinking about participating, now’s the time to take action.

Kate’s at a knitting conference in Tacoma this weekend, and I’ve been running a lot of errands. And not sleeping nearly enough — I was up until 2am yesterday, and awoke around 8am despite my best efforts. I am, surprisingly, not groggy — I suspect I may be too stupid from lack of sleep to realize how stupid I am.

This always happens when Kate’s out of town. After all this time (22 years!?) I think she has taken custody of part of my brain. I’m sure it’s mutual.

I have a humonstrous list of things I want to get done this weekend and I’m probably not going to be able to check off more than about a third of them. Some of them, like replacing the wireless router in an attempt to eliminate the annoying and increasingly frequent dropouts in our digital music system, have had to be pushed off to another weekend due to lack of parts (the sexy-looking Ruckus MediaFlex router that seems most likely to be able to overcome interference — I can now see as many as 10 WiFi networks from here, not to mention cordless phones and microwaves — is only available from a few vendors, none local). But I did manage to find the external hard disk I wanted, and ink cartridges for my printer — I was beginning to wonder if HP had stopped making them.

You know how errands always take longer than you think they will? I haven’t gotten a lot of writing done, but I have at least gotten in a few hundred words every day. One breakthrough was to realize that the 1500 or so words I’d written so far in chapter 3 were really just an outline of what really wanted to be in chapter 3. Too much tell, not enough show. So I’m going back and replacing those flashbacks with fleshed-out scenes. This does change the structure of the chapter a bit. (This is my process. I don’t leave a word, a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter until I’m happy with it, and I’m perfectly willing to go back and rework something I’ve already done. My first drafts are slow but essentially ready for publication. I’ve tried writing faster, God knows, but it just doesn’t seem to work for me.)

A snippet:

Keelie heaved at the container. This one was cylindrical, half a length high and about the same in diameter, and felt as though it were full of liquid. It was made of the same chill, slick, damp green-and-black material as all the rest.

She hated the container. Hated it with a passion almost as intense as her old hatred of the Drur — lesser only because it was younger. It wasn’t anything about this container in particular that made her hate it; she loathed them all equally.

Sometimes I eat badly when Kate’s out of town, but this time I’ve been fortunate to be the recipient of gifts of good food. Friday evening I went out with a bunch of guys from work to Uptown Billiards, which has amazingly good food for a pool hall (the avocado soup was great, though I usually detest avocados, and the kumquat-braised lamb was to die for) and the boss was paying. And tonight there was a party at Casa Deedop with Robin and Dave’s culinary talents on display. Yum.

Also at the party: I attempted Dance Dance Revolution for the first time (the Dance Dance Government is in no danger from me, I assure you), talked with Mary Hobson about the frustrating process of trying to sell a novel, and congratulated Rob Vagle and Jimena on their recent engagement. The silent-movie wedding they’re planning sounds like a real hoot.

To bed now, before I get even stupider.

Word count: 15770 | Since last entry: 0 No writing tonight. Instead, we went to the clinic and got our shots for the trip. Technically, no shots are required for Thailand, but they thought it would be a good idea to get vaccinated for tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis A, and typhoid. Ow. Because we were a good boy and girl they gave us lollipops. Mine was “artificial mystery flavor.” Speaking of ow… the post brought a rejection on the unicorn story, alas. At least Realms of Fantasy only took a couple of months to reject it. I’m not quite sure where to send that one next. It’s already been to Asimov’s, F&SF, Scifi.com, Strange Horizons, Interzone, Cidada, Polyphony, Aeon, Fantasy Magazine, and Realms of Fantasy. It’s a young-adult coming-of-age story with unicorns and lesbians, so Analog is right out. Any suggestions? On the other hand, I did finally get the contract for an anthology sale from last year. And I got a request to submit to a new webzine that’s just starting up. Onward and upward.