David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Word count: 3881 | Since last entry: 502

Not much writing in the last three days, and here’s why.

Thursday night we attended a charity event, called Cooking for Kids, in which we were treated to an exceptional French meal along with a lecture and demonstration by the chef, Lisa Schroeder of Mother’s (one of Portland’s finest restaurants). Key insights included that when preparing meat for sauteeing one should season the meat, then flour it (rather than mixing the seasonings into the flour) and that you should use a smoking-hot pan to sear and quickly cook it. Browning onions and other ingredients for French onion soup should also be done at a high temperature, but watched carefully for a long time to achieve a deep dark brown without going all the way to black. And a homemade chocolate sauce can be fixed surprisingly quickly, resulting in amazing flavor. The dinner was also accompanied by several wines, with lecture on the wines by a local winemaker, but this was lost on me.

Friday I learned that my uncle Ben, who lives near Sacramento, had passed on. He was in his eighties and had been seriously ill for only a few weeks, but his health had been declining for some time and he decided not to prolong his life any more. My father (Ben’s younger brother) and all Ben’s children and grandchildren had visited with him in his last few weeks. He’ll be missed. The funeral will be a small family affair and I decided not to attend, but there will be a celebration of Ben’s life later this year and I hope to be able to make that.

Most of today was spent in Tech Support Hell, trying to get the newly-reconfigured music server to connect to my network. After fighting repeated system hangs caused by the no-name wireless networking card (which I now suspect may have been the cause of the server’s hard disk becoming corrupt), I went out and bought a new card from a reputable vendor. Which repeatedly hung on install, and once installed would not reliably connect to either the local network or the LAN even though it had excellent signal strength. Unfortunately, the card’s tech support (in Bangalore, from the sound of the tech’s voice) said the problem was with my wireless router, and the router’s tech support (also in Bangalore) blamed the card.

Much worse, though, the router’s tech tried to convince me that if I just turned off my firewall and MAC authentication my problem would be solved. Yeah, right. I’m seeing anything from 20% to 100% packet loss on a ping, meaning that some packets are getting through, and it’s my firewall that’s to blame? I did turn off the Windows XP firewall, which didn’t help as I knew it wouldn’t, and the tech insisted I must have another firewall installed… even though I just reformatted the hard disk and installed all software from scratch in the last two days, and even though the behavior I observed (some, but not all, packets getting through) could not be explained by a misconfigured firewall. The proposed solution would not only not have fixed my problem, it would have left my network completely open. I was most intensely annoyed when I hung up.

I’m pretty sure that the problem is, indeed, in the router. The card vendor’s web site indicates that this problem can be addressed by lowering the router’s RTS threshold, which fits the symptoms, but my router doesn’t provide any way to change this setting. Unfortunately, my router is also my DSL modem and is the only one my DSL provider supports. I could try turning off the router’s wireless features and instead getting a separate wireless access point that will work with the wireless card, but I’m inclined to try yet another wireless card first, in hopes it will be compatible with the existing router.

This shouldn’t be so hard.

Apart from that, I went square dancing (for the first time in months!), had a nice dinner at Buster’s BBQ with some of the guys from the dance, and wrote about 100 words per night. I’ve finally moved past the initial scene that was causing me so much trouble (very hard to get all the information in without feeling infodumpy, especially given that none of the other characters want my first-person viewpoint character to find out what’s really going on) but I haven’t yet gotten past what I drafted in the initial burst, before I realized I had no idea where the story was going. I hope to pass that point tomorrow… unless I spend tomorrow talking to Bangalore again.

Word count: 3379 | Since last entry: 112 Spent the day fighting authentication issues at work that repeatedly locked me out of my account and had me talking to tech support in Bangalore a lot. But by the end of the day I think I got it all sorted out… which, functionally speaking, put me right back where I was. Came home and fixed biscuits while my sweetie made tempeh stroganoff. Yum. After dinner, sighed and reformatted the hard drive on the music server. After asking around at work and browsing the net, I decided I’d never be able to trust a disk with a broken index. So far I have reinstalled Windows XP and am now installing Service Pack 2. Oddly, after repartitioning and reformatting the disk only shows 130GB of the 250GB it’s supposed to have. I don’t remember if it was that way before. Also, after a fresh install I can’t set the monitor resolution higher than 640×480, and I know it wasn’t that way before. Same hardware, same OS. Why why why? While the OS was installing I did manage to write my 100 words for the day, but I’m still working on the same damn scene. I need to move forward. But it’s not going to happen quickly… I’m not going to be able to really concentrate on writing until the server is up and running again.

Word count: 3267 | Since last entry: -7

I didn’t get a lot of writing done tonight (and that mostly editing the first part I wrote last week to fit the new outline, which explains the negative word count), because I was tending to a sick computer.

For reasons unknown, the music server was not visible on the network when we woke up this morning… it was up and running, but couldn’t ping out or in. So I rebooted… and it didn’t come up. Disk read error. I’ve tried chkdsk and a few other things, and now I can see files on the disk, but it still won’t boot. I fear it may be a hardware failure. Might take a few days just to sort out what went wrong.

But! I got an email today from Asimov’s… they’re going to buy the Bigfoot story! I’m really pleased at this one — my third sale to Asimov’s, and my first new story sale in over a year.

Yay!

Word count: 2860 | Since last entry: 293

After writing the above-noted 300 words on Thursday, I realized that I was really pushing to get the words out. The story didn’t seem to be going anywhere; I was just putting words on the page and they weren’t adding up to anything.

On Friday I did quite a bit of thinking about the story (I left the radio off during my commute) but didn’t write anything down. However, I did earn a blue star for the day by resubmitting a story that bounced from Aeon (though I am beginning to suspect that story isn’t going to sell).

Also on Friday I attended the Portland Auto Show as a field trip from work. No, really, we were researching user interactions in the new navigation-computer-equippped cars. Well, that was the rationale. The real reason was to give my two co-workers (Audi and BMW fanatic respectively) an excuse to go to the Auto Show on company time. I gave it my best shot, but fundamentally I find cars boring, and I left early. The coolest thing I saw was a life-sized Volvo made entirely of Lego, and the one really amusing thing was the BMW M6, which has an “M” button on the steering wheel that boosts the horsepower or something. Personally, I would rather have the “C” button to extend the rotating saws, or the “F” button for underwater operation.

Saturday and Sunday mornings I put in about two writing hours each, and wrote nearly 4000 words of notes about the plot and characters (using the questions from the “Sketch a Novel in an Hour” workshop conducted by Chris York at OryCon a few years back as an outline). Clearly the words can flow rapidly when I don’t have to worry about picking the right word, or being consistent, or repeating myself. Maybe I need to approach the drafting process in this way. Anyway, this has been a worthwhile exercise and I think I’m ready to start over (keeping some of the existing words) and have it work better. Still don’t know how long it’s going to be, but longer than a short story.

Saturday afternoon was critique group, when I got some useful feedback on the Jupiter story. Everyone agreed it’s in good shape, which was reassuring after the first (email) crit I’d received ripped it to shreds. I think I’ll wait until I’ve received the last few crits from those who couldn’t make it this week before revising it and sending it to Analog.

Saturday night we met up with local writers Mary Hobson and Jay Lake, Jay’s friend Tammy, and Jay’s daughter (“The Child”) for conversation, coffee, and snacks before Doug Lain’s book launch party. Unfortunately, Kate and I had symphony tickets and couldn’t attend the book launch itself.

This afternoon we attended a Japanese New Year celebration, featuring much energetic Taiko drumming and the pounding of mochi (sticky rice) as well as some very entertaining storytelling and dance. Happy New Year, all!

Oh, one more thing: my story “Tk’Tk’Tk” from the March Asimov’s appeared in the Locus Recommended Reading list for 2005, along with many other fine stories. If you’re looking for something new to read you could do worse than to check this list out.

Word count: 3274 | Since last entry: 414

Tonight’s wordcount is a complete but rather sketchy outline of the current story, trying to work in all the key points from this weekend’s plot and character notes. Many missing pieces still. What is the main character’s job on board ship? Need to find an org chart for the Pioneer or Voyager mission to get names of scientific specialties… would also probably be good to find and re-read the daily logs from the International Space Station, which I saw posted on the web some years ago.

Outlining at this point feels rather like… cheating? Wasting time? I feel I should be writing, i.e. producing salable words, in my limited writing time. But I know that this story’s bigger than my usual and needs some planning and special attention if it’s going to work.

I am envious of people who produce 1000-2000 words per day on a regular basis (though I know that many of them don’t have day jobs).

Word count: 2567 | Since last entry: 48

Met with our financial adviser tonight, and Kate’s mildly under the weather. Not much actual writing, but did add another few hundred words of notes. I’m questioning the initial premise, alas, or at least some key aspects of it.

What kinds of unauthorized cloning would be a crime? Why would Chaz object to being vived with this set of memories, given that he had consented to having the record made, knowing that it might have to be used? Wouldn’t he be glad just to be alive? And wouldn’t the other team members want him alive, if the alternative is simply to pitch his warm and breathing body, fully capable of consciousness even if its memories are a bit out of date, out the airlock? Surely they need all hands, even half-trained ones. But what if there’s some other reason they all voted not to vive him?

So I might re-do some aspects of the first scene.

Apart from those notes, what I have is mostly infodumpy scene setting and character descriptions. Haven’t gotten at all into the meaty relationship issues that were my original reason for wanting to write this story. Yet. But now, it’s time for bed.

Word count: 2519 | Since last entry: 540

Dinner at Nuestra Cocina.

500+ words written at the airport, waiting for Kate’s plane.

My sweetie is back home.

Happy now.

Word count: 1979 | Since last entry: 234

In addition to the 234 words of mostly infodump I wrote tonight in the actual draft, I also wrote over 350 words of additional infodump in a separate file of notes, working out the characters, their physical descriptions, and their relationships to each other. And as I was doing that, it became clear to me whodunit, and why, and what event would precipitate the crisis, and what they would all do after that point. The end.

No idea how many words there are between here and there. But my brain tends to leap to conclusions, and no amount of “let’s just write it and see where it takes us” has ever derailed it before, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised it’s done it again.

(My brain is a guy. Focused on the orgasm destination rather than the journey. Stupid brain! Down, brain!)

On the other hand, I know that I am capable of changing the ending if the story seems to lead in another direction. So I’m going to keep going, and hope for the best.

A snippet: “Kyra got on the intercom and called everyone together in the Gamma work bay. Alpha should have been the command and control module, but it hadn’t made the rendezvous — lost somewhere in the vacant light-years between here and there. Also lost was Delta, which had made it all the way to Tau Ceti only to burn up in the first aerobraking maneuver. So instead of the planned pentagonal ring, Cassie was a shallow V, with Gamma module in the middle and Beta and Epsilon on the ends. Fortunately, three modules provided sufficient resources and space for our purposes; the mission had been designed to succeed with as little as one module, but it would have been tight quarters.”

(I told you it was an infodump…)

One thing that stopped me from making forward progress for half an hour was when I needed to describe a character’s… knees. See, he’s curled in a fetal position, and he notices that his skin is as clear and unmarked as a newborn’s, which is his first hint that he is actually a clone of the person he remembers himself as being. And I’m having a devil of a time describing it. I need a word, or short phrase, that describes skin that’s smooth and clear and unmarked and translucent and beautiful… and brown. Food, wood, and leather metaphors all seem inappropriate. Right now I’ve got “smooth and unmarked as a baby’s brown bottom” but I’m not 100% happy with it.

The hardest part to capture is the translucence, which is going to be immediately noticeable because this skin has never been exposed to light. Very few things in life are translucent in the way that human skin is. Porcelain is the traditional metaphor, but that only works with pale skin.

Ponder ponder ponder. But now, sleep!

Word count: 1745 | Since last entry: 280

It’s a good thing I managed 1500 words on Friday night, because I’ve barely gotten my minimum in yesterday and today. A hundred words isn’t much — only one paragraph in this case — but I feel it’s important to keep my hand in every single day.

So if I wasn’t writing, what was I doing? Shopping, mostly. Saturday I spent most of the morning at Fry’s, the cathedral of consumer electronics, which is so far out of town and such an anathema to Kate that I usually don’t get to go there except when she’s out of town. In this case I also had a $150 gift certificate, which I got at work a few months ago as a reward for my work on a key project. After much shopping and dithering I decided on a DVD burner, because backing up the documents directory on the PC has grown to require 3 CDs and burning 3 separate CDs is a pain. By complete coincidence the DVD burner and one spindle of DVDs came to $149.98.

Next I visited Bridgeport Village, the newest shopping center in town, which reminds me a lot of University Square in Seattle where we once met Janna Silverstein for fancy chocolates. I had a decent lunch, found a travel box for my collapsible top hat, and picked up a new kitchen scale to replace the one whose plastic window has become opaqued by years of kitchen grime.

Home by way of Music Millennium, where I took the time to consult with the friendly and knowledgeable staff in hopes of finding a compilation album of music similar to what they play on local station KINK. I came away with a couple of recommended discs, plus a few more finds from the used CD racks.

I arrived home to find that somewhere along the way the stylus from my trusty Palm V had vanished. Damn! I looked online and confirmed my fears: styli for this ancient device are no longer available anywhere except dodgy vendors on Amazon Marketplace. But then I thought: didn’t this critter come with two styli? After a bit of digging, I found the original stylus taped to the warranty card, tucked in the back of the owner’s manual. Yay for being a packrat.

Leftovers for dinner, followed by a nap. Despite the bracelet, I’ve been staying up way too late, but still rising around 6am. Then I met my friends Anthony and Rhia for dessert at Pix Patisserie (omigod the Concorde was marvelous — crunchy light chocolate meringue twigs surrounding a core of chocolate mousse, it looked like a firestarter and tasted divine), followed by…

The live theatrical production of Manos: The Hands of Fate! (Which I would never have known about if Mark Bourne hadn’t mentioned it in his LJ. Thanks!) It was a total hoot. They took the original script and played it reasonably straight, except that the small child was played by a grown woman, half of the Master’s wives were played by men, and the two dogs were played by stuffed animals. The wife catfight scenes were particularly hilarous — they looked like highly choreographed dances from the Hullabaloo era.

The production was amateurish, but that only added to its charm. These actors were deliberately overplaying, where in the original the actors were doing the best they could. But their Torgo was spot on, and really stole the show. He was definitely the tragic hero of this production.

The weird thing is that in this production the plot actually made sense. It helped that they moved it briskly along, taking a little more than an hour.

That was Saturday. Today I had a haircut, went to the gym, caught up on my email, did the dishes, did a little more shopping… I had a serious case of getting distracted all day. I found myself walking away from putting away dishes, leaving the cupboard door open, to send an email before I forgot, then abandoning the email half-finished to attend to some webpage maintenance, but leaving that half-done when I realized I needed to take out the garbage… I think I achieved closure on everything I started today, but there are a half-dozen projects I meant to do today and never even started.

So much for the weekend. I did get a lot done, but not as much as I’d hoped. Tomorrow night I can try to finish up some of those loose ends, and then Kate returns on Tuesday night. Yay!

Word count: 1465 | Since last entry: 1465

Yesterday evening I did a bunch of iPod-related stuff, noticing at nearly midnight that I had not yet done any writing for the day. So I looked over the Carpet story, made a few edits suggested by Sara from my crit group, and put it in the mail. I gave myself a blue star for submitting a story. (The other star colors are: silver for 100-500 words or any amount of revision, gold for 500-1000 words, red for 1000+ words, and green for sending a story to critique. So far I have at least one star on every day of 2006.)

Tonight I was good and spent the whole evening writing. After looking over the ideas in my Writing Ideas file, and rejecting all those that were too big, required too much research, or just didn’t appeal right now, I was left with about twenty — all science fiction but one (and that one a weird one), and about half of those space-based. My last two stories were also space-based SF, so I wanted to do something different… but one of those ideas, one that dates back to Clarion, grabbed me. So I started in on it. It even has a title: “Second Chance” (which describes both the main character’s situation and the larger situation of which he is a part).

Only one small problem: I think this might be shaping up to be a novel. Or at least a novella. Well, for once I’m just going to dive in, with the plot in my teeth, and see where I find myself when I emerge on the other side.

A snippet: “Uncurling, I grasped for an attach point, but misjudged my reach and scraped my hand on the rough plastic panel joint next to it. My body was all wrong — too thin, too long, the skin as delicate as a baby’s. Nothing was where I expected it to be. My heart started to pound again and I took slow, deep breaths to calm myself.”