David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Word count: 12802 | Since last entry: 715

Was greatly surprised this morning to find several inches of white stuff piled up on the car. Turned on the TV and very quickly concluded that this was no day to brave the Sylvan Hill. Stayed home from work. Felt guilty, but the news coverage indicated that I was wise to stay home.

We did go outside, to shovel the walk, brush the snow off the cars before it freezes, and take a walk around the block. It was great snow for sleds and snowballs, and kids of all ages were having a grand time with it. Like Tina Connolly, we saw a motorcycle pulling someone on a snowboard (must have been someone different, though, because Tina lives on the other side of town). Didn’t see a single snowman, though, even though it seemed like excellent packing snow.

So, I stayed home all day, but did I write? Some, but not nearly enough. I did dishes and laundry instead, and made a big pot of mushroom barley soup, and surfed the web, and watched Buffy.

I’d like to be able to blame my writing sloth on the bad news: neither snow, nor rain, nor sleet stayed the US Post from bringing not one but three rejections, for the New Orleans story, the novella, and the novel. Argh! It’s enough to make a guy wonder if he can write at all. (I try to remind myself of how many times “I Hold My Father’s Paws” was rejected before it finally got picked up for Year’s Best. Oh, and the Hugo.) One of those three is back in the (e)mail already, the other two will be shortly. Getting that paperwork sorted out took some time, but I really should have gotten more new words written anyway.

At the moment it looks like I will have another chance to get some writing done tomorrow, as the forecast for tomorrow is for continued icy conditions.

Oh, I did have one writing insight today. I just finished The Etched City by K. J. Bishop, which I found acceptable but a bit too mainstreamy, a bit too magical-realist, for my taste. One thing that it did well was that, although it had two major point of view characters, it did slip into several other points of view for anything from a paragraph to a couple of pages. This flies in the face of the advice I’ve often received, and even more often given, which is to pick one point of view (or a defined set of PoVs) and stick with it. But it worked.

I think that advice is still good advice, even though works like this one can flout it, and here’s why I think that: the core of the adminition is that you have to learn to control point of view. That is, when we say “you have to pick one point of view and stick with it” what we really mean is that “you must learn to avoid wandering from your chosen point of view by accident.” But once you have learned to do that with grace and confidence, and to communicate PoV shifts clearly, you can change PoV as often as you like.

As with so many things in life, you can get away with anything as long as you can do it convincingly.

Word count: 12087 | Since last entry: 1874

I have started coding again, at work. Although I was supposed to start coding almost three weeks ago, I allowed myself to be distracted by various design tasks. I should not have. Now that I’m writing HTML and CSS and JavaScript and Java code again, instead of making pretty pictures in Photoshop, I remember why I changed from tech pubs to software engineering in the first place. When I code, I control the user experience; when I design, I can only make suggestions. And because I care about the little details, like making controls line up and properly disabling buttons based on the states of other controls on the page, a lot more than most people, coding it myself is the only way to make sure it comes out the way I want it to. Coding is frustrating sometimes, but deeply satisfying when it works.

Yes, I am a control freak. I revel in my control freakness.

In other news, we have pretty much nailed down the details of the Thailand trip. We will be flying to Singapore with an hour and a half layover in Tokyo, then staying at the Perak Hotel in Singapore’s Little India district for a couple of days before the actual Club Geek event in Phuket. There are many keen things to do in Singapore but I sum up my plans for those two days as “sleep, eat, and goggle.” From there we’ll proceed to the Sheraton Grande Laguna Phuket for five days of corporate largess, including (if everything goes as planned) a Thai cooking class, an elephant ride, and a certain amount of speechifying and banqueting with colorful local entertainment. Then we fly back by the same route (Phuket-Singapore-Tokyo-Portland), except that this time we spend only six hours in Singapore and the whole thing somehow takes just one hour (depart Phuket 6am, arrive Portland 7am the same day). Voom!

The writing proceeds apace, 100-500 words a day with occasional days off. Today, thinking about Maria, my Earthling viewpoint character, I realized that her people, like the Pilgrims, would most likely not own their own ship. And a rented ship would have to come with its own crew. This provides an excellent opportunity for increased tension in her viewpoint and also lets me have at least one character who isn’t white and Christian. I don’t know why it bothered me to have the humans in my cast so homogenous, but it did. Maybe it’s because I grew up on Star Trek (the original series). Anyway, I spent most of today’s writing time (500 words or so) going back and inserting a new secondary character into Maria’s viewpoint. I also decided to change her name to Rachel. Because I wanted to.

A snippet:

“So,” said Gideon, turning his attention to Keale. “Our alien contact specialist assures me that the ship is not in danger. Therefore, according to the contract, your authority is secondary.” He lowered his head just slightly, reminding Rachel of a bull pawing the earth. “Is that clear, Mister Keale?”

“Yes, sir,” Keale replied. Though his lips moved, his teeth did not part.

Rachel watched the simulation spin in its frame, keenly aware of how fragile Kestrel and her sister ships were — slim pencils of metal, composites, and fabric. If the unknown craft attacked, they could all be dead in seconds. And God alone knew what an alien species might consider a hostile action.

Dance, little characters, dance to my will! Bwahaha!

Word count: 10213 | Since last entry: 488

No writing today. I had an eye exam, with dilation, after work and I wasn’t able to focus or take bright lights until quite recently (still a bit wobbly). Spent much of the evening lying on the couch with a blanket over my head, istening to a tape of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline.

We got our tickets to Thailand today. We’ll be stopping in Singapore for a couple of days on the way there. Any recommendations for places to stay, things to eat, or sights to see in Singapore?

Word count: 9725 | Since last entry: 520

Went to a spy-themed New Year’s Eve party (in honor of the year ‘007), then our usual New Year’s Day brunch at the home of local fans Marc and Patty. This is the twenty-second anniversary of the day we met, at Marc and Patty’s brunch on the first day of 1985. I always say I found Kate under the Christmas tree. We didn’t spend a weekend apart for months.

Twenty-two years. How the hell did that happen?

I’m just overwhelmed with my good fortune. I mean, so many good things have happened this year that if half of them hadn’t occurred I’d still be amazed at my good luck. And when I see how many of my friends are having health, financial, and/or emotional crises it’s all the more humbling. I can’t imagine how 2007 could be any better, except if I can find a way to spread the luck around a little more evenly.

I’ve brought my heroine’s section of chapter 2 to a temporary resolution. Next I’ll either spin up the next crisis, to leave her teetering on a cliff before the point of view switch, or leave her in peace (momentary, only momentary) while I go off and show what the other viewpoint character’s up to. After talking with another writer at the brunch today, I think I may need to bring them together sooner than I’d planned.

Hmm. I wonder what the other viewpoint character is up to?

Either way, I’ll worry about that tomorrow.

Oh, my new year’s resolution is to finish novel #2. This will be enforced by the same means I used for novel #1, which is: a new chapter for every crit group meeting or I have to buy everyone beer. This may have to be modified to “every crit group meeting I attend,” because I’m going to be out of town a lot.

I have other goals for the year, but just one formal resolution. I take my resolutions pretty seriously. (Even though I did tell someone at the brunch that my resolution is to give up sleeping.)

Word count: 9205 | Since last entry: 1063

We have returned from Kennewick in one piece. Presents were exchanged, dogs and small children were played with, much good food was eaten. The weather was great, clear and cold the whole time, and on the drive back the Columbia River was mirror-smooth, so that the opposite shore appeared to be a floating island. We do live in a very pretty place.

In the last week I’ve been pretty down on myself for lack of discipline. I’ve been eating too much, exercising too little, and writing not at all. But, as Kate points out, this is expected — nay, demanded — at this time of year. Despite this, I still felt bad about it, and today I did something about it: I went to the gym, and I took advantage of my critique group meeting being canceled to sit down and write. I surprised myself by turning out over a thousand words, in a scene in which my main character is arguing for her life in a situation where she barely speaks the language (actually it’s more complicated than that).

My mood was also greatly raised by an envelope that arrived in the last mail delivery of the year: Gardner Dozois is buying my Aeon Award shortlisted story “I Hold My Father’s Paws” for his 24th annual Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology. This is my first appearance in the Dozois Year’s Best antho and I’m right chuffed about it.

Word count: 8142 | Since last entry: 0 I’ve been rather down on the writing lately, what with the latest rejection and all. I’m afraid I’m running out of major publishers, but my agent is still enthusiastic about the book and advises me to put my energy into writing the next one. But with all the holiday foofaraw around here, I haven’t been finding the time to do that either. But a bit of good news arrived yesterday, in the form of a registered mail package from Poland containing two copies of the November issue of Nowa Fantastyka. My name was on the cover in big letters, and inside I found my story “Tk’Tk’Tk,” translated into Polish, with four great interior illustrations. I don’t know if the translation is any good, but the illustrator (whose name I couldn’t find) clearly read and understood the story. This is almost better than a good review. Heading off to Kennewick this morning. May or may not blog in the interval, depending on availability of time and bandwidth.

Word count: 8142 | Since last entry: 465

A very laid-back Christmas Day here. Woke up at a reasonable hour and fixed gingerbread waffles, then went back to bed for another couple hours. We opened one present each — I got Kate an orange juicer because she always orders fresh-squeezed OJ when we go out for breakfast, and she got me a copy of Lost Girls because I asked for it. Lazed about for much of the day, and watched the DVD of So I Married an Axe Murderer that the guys at work had loaned me so I wouldn’t be culturally deprived.

In the evening we had our traditional Christmas Day movie and squid dinner with our friend Michael — the movie was the new Casino Royale, which has a lot to recommend it (not least the hot new Bond, Daniel Craig) and the squid, unfortunately, was at a random Vietnamese restaurant because Thien Hong, home of the finest pepper-salted squid we’ve ever eaten, is closed on Mondays. Even if Monday happens to fall on a Christmas Day. Bastards.

Back to work tomorrow, for one day, then I’m taking the rest of the week off. Life is hard.

Word count: 7677 | Since last entry: 468 …or Christmas Eve, anyway.
We had a party yesterday, an open house where a couple dozen folks showed up to assemble jigsaw puzzles, talk, and eat. I made brownies using the recipe on the back of the Ghirardelli chocolate can, with the addition of some peppermint extract and mint chocolate chips, and OMG were they good. I’m not quite sure where today went. Went to the gym this morning, cleaned up from the party, went out for lunch, spent too much time online. We’re going to a dance performance in a little while, followed by dinner with friends. Tomorrow we will open some presents, but most of the presenting will be done when we get together with Kate’s family in Kennewick later this week. I hadn’t planned to take any time off this week, but then we decided to take two days for this trip, and now I’m thinking we’ll spend the second night there and come back a day later. I don’t think anyone at work will miss me for that extra day. I bought myself a new phone, a Treo 700p, and I’m liking it a whole lot. Gmail and Google Maps are the killer apps for this platform, for sure. I’m extremely glad I sprang for the unlimited data plan, because if I had all this power at my fingertips and I had to count every kilobyte I’d be going mad right about now. I’ve been fighting some WiFi interference issues that make my home digital music system flake out at irregular intervals. I’m pretty sure that it’s interference from a non-WiFi device such as a cordless phone or microwave, or possibly a WiFi network that’s not broadasting its SSID, because there’s no other WiFi network showing up on the same channel but the problem looks just the same as the interference I see when I run the microwave. But neither of my two closest neighbors was home Friday evening and I was definitely seeing the problem then. Might be my back-fence neighbor. I really need some kind of signal strength meter with a directional antenna to figure out where the problem is coming from. But if it turns out to be my neighbor’s phone or microwave, what do I do then? I’m considering some kind of signal booster to try to power past the problem, but unfortunately my cheapo wireless router (which I have to use because it is the only one supported by my DSL provider) doesn’t even have a detachable antenna so I’m not sure how I’d even connect it. As for the writing… well, things have not been going too well on that front. I’ve been writing only a hundred words a day on those days I’ve been writing at all (missed three days this week). And I got another rejection on the novel, this one from DAW. Plus another short story rejection. Bah, humbug.

Word count: 7209 | Since last entry: 2062

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted. Sorry. I did start this entry yesterday, but then the power to our whole neighborhood was knocked out by the massive wind storm that pummeled the whole Pacific Northwest. (The power came back a few hours later, while we slept, and we had no other damage, unlike Mary Rosenblum, who lost a shed and an apple tree when a huge tree landed on them.)

Tonight I had a phone interview with Jason Rennie, host of The Sci Phi Show (http://thesciphishow.com), a podcast from Australia that looks at questions of science fiction and philosophy. I talked about where my ideas come from, and how I differ from my characters, and my history and ambitions as a writer. I think it went well, and it should be up on the site in January.

I’ve been writing 100-300 words every day — haven’t missed a day yet this month. It doesn’t feel like much progress, but this tortoise-like steady progression is better than longer but intermittent bursts. Or so I tell myself. I’m learning about the world and the characters as I go — a vaguely-defined group of aliens that my protagonist encounters in chapter 2 of the outline has resolved into a single, elderly cat-like creature named Huss (at least so far). I like him.

I don’t feel that this novel has really found its voice yet, and I think my protagonist is far too independent and self-assured for a traumatized 14-year-old. I might decide that it’s easier to change my notion of who she’s supposed to be to match the way she’s turning out, rather than to go back and rewrite her to be more the way I originally conceived of her.

It’s also very hard to write any kind of meaningful description when the viewpoint character’s whole world is made up. Not only do I have to decide what the alien ship looks like, I have to describe it using referents that the main character (who was raised on a different alien ship) would have, rather than using analogies or metaphors that will be meaningful to the reader. Why did I set myself such a hard task?

Apart from the writing… well, I had a pretty head-exploding day on Tuesday. First, I learned that I have been selected as one of the top 7% of engineering staff in the company. What this means is that, along with about 100 other employees and their spouses, Kate and I will be taking a trip at company expense… to Phuket, Thailand. It will be some time in February and I don’t yet know how long we will be gone or any other details. It doesn’t seem real yet.

Thailand.

Right after getting that email I headed off to meet with our financial adviser. We’d paid for a detailed analysis of our retirement situation, to answer the question of exactly when we will be able to afford to retire. And the answer came back: we are already making more from our investments than from my day job. And even the most conservative estimates of inflation and return on those investments indicate that they will continue to provide enough for us to live on, in the style to which we’ve become accustomed, for the forseeable future.

I can retire any time.

Guh.

I enjoy my job (well, most aspects of it, most of the time). I’m good at it and, after all these years, I’ve finally reached a place that people respect and request my opinions. I feel a certain responsibility to my co-workers, not to mention that I want to see my current project, which I have been working on for between one and four years depending on how you count it, through to shipment some time next year. But the commute — lord, I’m tired of the commute. And it would be nice to be able to make travel plans without having to eke them out of a limited vacation budget.

So I’m probably going to retire in 2007. Or I might scale back to three or four days a week and keep on for longer than that. I don’t know — I haven’t discussed it with my boss yet. I talked with my dad and he suggested that there’s considerable value in continuing to work, even when you don’t need the money, for the external stimulus. It’s certainly true that Scott Adams’s work on Dilbert went downhill when he quit the day job.

Retirement is an extremely strange thing to contemplate. I’ve been going to work every weekday for twenty-three years, or thirty-nine if you count going to school as “work.” Although I’m sure I could find plenty to fill the empty days (everyone I know who’s retired says they can’t imagine how they found the time for the day job with all the other things they have to do) I still have a lot of trouble imagining what life would really be like if every day were Saturday. Yes, even with the writing.

As I was driving to work this morning, Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton came up on the iPod and I found myself crying. And laughing at the same time, because it’s a silly little song and a stupid thing to get all weepy about. But there you have it.

And I saw a heron. Any day you see a heron is a good day.