David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

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.

Word count: 5147 | Since last entry: 1393

I did get back on the horse, the day after my last entry, and I’ve written at least a few words every day since. It sucks, of course, but I’m learning not to let that bother me. I’ve done this before and I know it’ll get better once I get my feet under me.

I’ve gotten some interesting writing-related emails in the last couple of weeks. A fellow from Australia wants to interview me for a podcast, and a guy from Milwaukee wants to make one of my stories into a student film. I’m willing to sell him the rights very cheap, for a limited period of time anyway, but I don’t want to do it without some kind of contract and I haven’t yet found a usable sample contract online. Any suggestions?

I’ve also been invited — nay, importuned — to be a guest at RadCon, so we’re going to that.

Not much else to report. Day job. Chores. Square dancing. Went to the Symphony. Didn’t go to the gym for almost two weeks, but clambered back on that horse too. You know — stuff.

Word count: 3754 | Since last entry: 0

We are lying side-by-side in the grass, the horse and I, staring up at the fleecy clouds scudding by across a luminescent blue sky. Each of us is chewing on a stalk of grass — me contemplatively, the horse as more of a snack.

“You’re going to have to get back on me sooner or later,” says the horse.

“Tomorrow,” I say. “I’ve been sick.”

“No, really. I mean, you call yourself a writer, and here it is nearly the end of NaNoWriMo and you haven’t written a word since you finished Chapter One over two weeks ago. That’s pathetic.”

I chomp my stalk for a moment before replying. “I finished the outline. 1700 words. Now at least I know where I’m going.”

The horse snorts. The sound vibrates through the damp earth between us. “Doesn’t count.”

I raise myself on one elbow and look the horse in the eye. “Give me a freakin’ break. First there was OryCon, and we had Lise in town before and after.”

“And she kept up her daily NaNoWriMo word count that whole time…”

“Shut up when I’m talking. I was so heavily programmed I didn’t even attend one program item I wasn’t on, nor did I see the art show. Good con, though. And then, on the day Lise leaves, I come down with a cold.”

“Poor baby.”

“No really, I was miserable. Achy, feverish, sneezing… I wasn’t good for much more than watching TV and sleeping for almost three days.”

“And you went to Thanksgiving dinner with your friends like that.”

“I washed my hands a lot.” I sigh. “At least I didn’t spread it to all the square dancers in Vancouver.”

The horse finishes his stalk and begins chewing on another. “Okay, I’ll admit it was a bummer that you had to miss the square dance. But look on the bright side — you got to see the BNL concert instead, and you aren’t fighting your way back home from Canada through a snowstorm right now.”

“Yeah, thank heaven for small favors.”

We look at each other for a while. “You’re still going to have to get back on me sooner or later.”

“Tomorrow,” I say. “Tomorrow.”

Word count: 3754 | Since last entry: 803

No new words on the novel per se in the last three days. I reached the end of chapter 1 (at least, an end) and found that I couldn’t get started on chapter 2. So I dropped back and started outlining — trying to figure out where this thing is really headed. I wrote about 1000 words of outline yesterday — a brief paragraph each on the first 12 chapters (out of about 20). Today I had dinner with a psychologist neighbor and talked about where my main character’s head is at, given her traumatized early life. I’m going to have to scale back the malnutrition (if she wasn’t properly nourished as a child she’ll have some cognitive problems, and I need her brain in one piece if she’s going to be an effective protagonist). Wrote up a couple hundred words of notes on that. None of those words are counted above.

So, though I have been doing novel-related work, I’m about 1200 words behind my pseudo-NaNoWriMo target, and OryCon starts tomorrow so I’m unlikely to catch up. I remind myself that I’m in this (novel writing thing) for the long haul — NaNoWriMo should be just a goad, not a requirement.

In other news, Analog rejected the novella — a long, thoughtful rejection hand-typed by Stan Schmidt that 1) points up a plausibility problem my critique group also had problems with, which I tried to address but apparently did not succeed, and 2) shows that Stan believes his readers don’t want too much of that pesky angst getting in the way of the rivets. I may try Analog again, if the right story should happen, but at this point I think the only way I’m going to sell there is if I consciously decide to shoot for the Analog market and scale the characterization way back. And I’m not sure I want to do that. I’m going to sit on the novella until I hear back from Asimov’s on the story I currently have there, then send it there. I may add a couple-sentence tweak that someone suggested as a way to help address the plausibility problem.

And at my neighborhood Starbucks, Christmas has come down as hard and sudden as a foot of snow overnight. Straight from Halloween to Christmas without even slowing down at Thanksgiving. Bah, humbug. But I don’t want to dig in my heels this year, because in previous years I’ve done that and it’s prevented me from enjoying the holiday (and there are enjoyable aspects to it — I really dig the lights) when its actual time rolled around.

Word count: 2951 | Since last entry: 829

I keep plugging away. Ten thousand words in a month seems doable for me but I’m giving up an awful lot of sleep to maintain this pace. I wonder how some people can write thousands of words a day, even with a day job. I think that perhaps I am editing too much as I go. On the other hand, this technique seems to work for me.

I talked with my agent today. He’s gotten several requests to see the novel so it’s going out to two different publishers at once (agents can do this, if they let everyone know it’s happening). I hope that this will encourage one or both of the publishers to feel they have to act before the other snaps it up.

I also got a nice email from the slushmaster at Realms of Fantasy saying that he’s passing the unicorn story (remember the unicorn story?) up to Shawna. He also said that the days of waiting 6-12 months for a response are long gone. We’ll see.

One more tidbit of writing news before I fall over: I talked with Gordon Van Gelder at World Fantasy about when “Titanium Mike” is likely to be published. He’d said a while ago that it might be in the January issue, but then he’d had to retract that, and I asked him what had happened. He explained that my story is 15 pages long, and he’d planned to run it in the January issue, but then he sold one more page of ads, so he ran another story that was 14 pages long instead. (Or perhaps it was the other way around.) It’s very informative to see how much influence these random commercial factors have on the makeup of an issue, even when you have a magazine that’s owned by its editor, who can theoretically do whatever he wants. So if you’re wondering why there were two alien kitten stories in one issue, or why one issue is heavy on the SF and another on the F, the answer might be as simple as that.

Word count: 2122 | Since last entry: 774

The day job’s been really intense so far this week. I haven’t been to the gym but once in the last week. And, ever since Halloween, traffic has been absolutely abysmal. I’ve been spending as much as three hours a day driving to and from work. This is getting really tiresome. Can I retire yet?

Also, my novel was rejected by Ace. “I’m sorry to say it’s not the kind of science fiction we’re doing well with right now.” Oh well, at least it was quick, and as rejections go it’s very straightforward and professional — nothing to make me question the book’s quality, it was just the wrong novel for this market at this time. We have several good candidates for the next place to submit it; I’ll be talking with my agent soon.

But the news on the political front has been refreshing, of course. We spent Election Eve at a Capitol Steps concert, with friends. Interesting that the audience refused to applaud even for a comedian pretending to be Bush. It was great to laugh about politics for a change, and even nicer to read the results after the show. I find I’m even more pleased about seeing the back of Santorum than Rumsfeld.

It’s been very hard to make time for writing lately, with all the political news to keep track of, and I’ve fallen 600 words behind my target for the month so far. I hope to be able to catch up tomorrow. I also hope to write out an outline (one one- or two-sentence bullet point per chapter) when I get a chance; I have a general sense of the book’s structure but it feels weird to be writing without a concrete plan.

Word count: 1348 | Since last entry: 1011

Back from World Fantasy Con. I decided early on that I wasn’t going to attempt to take notes, so all I can say is that I had a great if rather formless time, and I met many people in person whom I had known only as authors, names in Locus, or LiveJournal users, plus many new and cool people I hadn’t known at all.

I kept saying that if I was lucky I would come out of the convention with at least one new person for whom I could remember name, LJ username, and face all at once. I don’t think I was that lucky. So I’m not going to attempt to name the many fine people I had meals with or hung out with in the bar, for fear of omitting someone. You know who you are.

We ate (too) much great BBQ, fine Mexican food, and pie. We heard some amazing readings, especially Howard Waldrop in a Jolly Roger mask reading a crossover between Pirates of Penzance, HMS Pinafore, and Peter Pan. I appeared on one panel, about blogging, and quite a few people came up to me afterwards and said they’d liked it. I spent most evenings in the bar as one element of Elizabeth Bear’s slut-hat-wearing electron cloud. We saw the Texas State Capitol and a UT tailgate party (hook ’em, Dano Horns) and the original sniper’s bell tower from afar, and some other Austin sights (Toy Joy and a little bit of the Story of Texas museum) closer up.

We were delayed coming home by storms in Dallas, but as compensation we saw a spectacular aerial display of lightning as we flew home.

I worked on my novel for three days out of the five. I won’t let this lapse stop me from continuing. NaNoWriMo ho!

Word count: 337 | Since last entry: 337

Well, I have been foolish enough to stay up past midnight doing it, but I have embarked on NaNoWriMo — well, really a Pseudo-NaNoWriMo, because I have no intention of writing an entire novel, or even a miniature NaNoWriMo “novel” of 50,000 words, in one month. My goal for the month is 10,000 words, which requires an average of 333 words per day. This is going to be hard, what with WFC, OryCon, and Thanksgiving in there, but — as this entry demonstrates — I’m crazy/determined enough to do it. Wish me luck.

The first 337 words… well, they suck. But there they are. Gotta start somethere.

Leaving for Austin bright and early tomorrow (um, later today). See some of you there.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a long while. I spent a good chunk of last week at a meeting with customers in Santa Clara. I typed over 18,000 words of notes in two days (I wanted to be sure the customers’ input was properly captured) while sitting in a non-adjustable chair at a table that was too high, leaving my wrists resting on the hard edge of my laptop. After the first day I noticed the last two fingers on my left hand getting a bit numb and tingly — a very bad sign. I moved to a better chair, and when I got home I started taking ibuprofen and gave myself a three-day holiday from typing. I hope that this will be enough to prevent further problems. Carpal tunnel problems scare me more than anything other than AIDS. Just about everything I do — job, hobbies, volunteering, avocations, keeping in touch with friends — is keyboard-dependent.

In better news, I sold the story I submitted last week. “Firewall” will appear in Transhuman: On the edge of the Singularity, edited by Toni Weisskopf and Mark Van Name, coming from Baen some time next year.

I also got my OryCon schedule:

• Friday 4pm: The Magical City of Unbelievable
• Friday 9pm: Whose Line Is It, Anyway?
• Saturday 10am: RSS Feeds and the New News
• Saturday 1pm: Turkey Readings
• Saturday 2pm: Writers’ Workshop
• Saturday 3:30pm: Reading
• Sunday 12pm: Believable and Lovable Evil
• Sunday 2pm: Are You Really a Writer?
• Sunday 3pm: Remakes, Reimaginings, & Resurgencies

Pretty intense, but I guess that’s the price of fame.

I don’t yet have my World Fantasy Convention schedule, even though the convention’s less than a week away. They still haven’t sent me anything, but I see from their web page that I’m on a panel on Friday at 4:30 about “Fantasy, Social Networking, and the Blogosphere” with Elizabeth Bear and others. Cool.

This weekend Kate and I went to McMenamin’s Grand Lodge, a former Masonic retirement home, now hotel, in Forest Grove. It was far enough out of town to be an out-of-town trip, but close enough that we got the benefits without a lot of pesky travel.

The occasion for the trip was a knitting workshop. In a reversal of our usual pattern, Kate would be hanging out with her knitting friends, knitting and talking about knitting, while I sat in the corner and wrote — a little one-man writing retreat in the middle of the knitting workshop. I hoped to get a lot of prep work done on the novel.

I didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped, but I did accomplish a lot. I used a technique Chris York had shown me several years ago at an OryCon to sketch out a rough outline of the novel in about two hours. This was mostly an exercise in answering questions (like “what is the character just about to do as the novel opens?” and “how do the character’s strengths and weaknesses help and hinder him/her as the story progresses?”) in timed bursts of writing — I chose a 5-minute burst period. I wrote about 3300 words in an intense hour or two. It was mostly a matter of writing out stuff I already knew about the character and the plot, albeit subconsciously, with a few bits of brainstorming. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether I was remembering something I’d worked out previously or making it up. I was typing as fast as I could.

Do I know everything that happens now? No. But I have a better feel for the overall shape of the novel — beginning, rising action, climax, and resolution. There’s a whole lot of middle that I know this exercise isn’t much help with — in the coming week I’ll work on fleshing that area out.

My goal for the rest of the month is to learn as much as possible about the characters and plot, with the intention of beginning the first draft on or before November 1. Then I’ll celebrate NaNoWriMo by writing every day, shooting for 10,000 words (that would be an average of 333 words per day) to get off to a good start. Wish me luck.

In addition to that, I put the finishing touches on the firewall story and sent it off to the editors of the anthology via email. I hope to hear back in a week or so. And I did some critiques and nonfiction writing that were way overdue.

Also this weekend, we heard some live music, visited the farm where our vegetables come from (it was not too far from Forest Grove, and besides it was Pumpkin Pickup time — we picked out a nice sincere one), went to the gym, ate some very nice meals (and some mediocre ones), and booked our tickets for Japan. 330 days in advance is when tickets for frequent flyer miles become available, and there were upgrade seats available on our preferred flights. So we’re going business class, baby!

So it was a fun and relaxing weekend, and I had a surprisingly good time hanging out with the knitters — a charming and intelligent bunch, and I’m not just saying that because a couple of them turned out to be SF fans (or had family back home who are) and two of them asked me for my autograph.