David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

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.”

No writing per se today. But I did put the story that was rejected by Cricket back in the mail, prepared the Carpet story for submission (but didn’t send it, I want to take one more look at it before I seal the envelope), and got all the manuscripts for the Potlatch writers’ workshop copied and mailed — that last was a pretty serious chunk of paperwork. I also got money from the money machine, groceries from the automatic cash register, and postage from the automatic postal scale and postage dispenser… didn’t interact with a single human being all evening. Going over those manuscripts was kind of a weird experience, each one with its earnest cover letter: “Dear Mr. Levine, please find enclosed my application for the Potlatch writers’ workshop…” Jeez. I’m just a fan who got lucky, you know? By the way, we could still use one more pro for the workshop. If you are a pro writer or editor (and I have an exceedingly loose definition of “pro”), and if you’re coming to Potlatch, and if you’d be willing to crit 5 manuscripts (the workshop is 4-7pm on Friday), drop me a note.

Word count: 897 | Since last entry: -3

Spent all day in a meeting (as I will be doing every day this week) and then, when I got back to my desk, locked myself out of the payroll system. I must have forgotten my password — not too surprisingly, given that we are forced to change them frequently and use passwords complex enough that they can’t easily be remembered — and then the backup authentication system decided my answers for favorite color, favorite movie, and mother’s maiden name weren’t close enough. Probably case-sensitive or some such garbage. Then I found out the people who can unlock the account are all at an offsite today. So no paycheck for me today. (Mind you, I did get paid, by direct deposit — I just can’t print my paystub.)

Got home late, to find a nice rejection from Cricket in the mail. This on top of a critique I received by email on Monday, which said my main character was “Nazi-esque” and the science fiction premise “disregards commonly known facts, basic physics, etc,” and some other news which I won’t go into other than to note that I found it far more annoying than it deserved.

I rewrote the carpet story again tonight, for a net wordcount change of -3, but at this point I have zero confidence it’s any good.

Word count: 900 | Since last entry: 197

And so we come to the end of a three-day weekend. Took it easy, didn’t get a lot done. Tonight we had a book group meeting (discussing Sabriel by Garth Nix, which I found lacking in depth… but when I found out it was intended as YA, I became much more favorably disposed toward it) and then I took Kate to the airport, to catch a red-eye to New York. She’ll be there for a week, helping our friend Lise clean up her late mother’s apartment.

It’s been a lightweight weekend for writing, as I said, but I did get some stuff done. Saturday I finished up the edits on the Jupiter story and sent it off for critique. Sunday I wrote about 200 words of notes on “Moonlight on the Carpet” (the story itself is only 900 words long) in response to critiques I received last week. Today I revised the story according to those notes… and the story died on the table.

The main problem with this story is that people get to the end and aren’t sure what has happened. But when I added the information they need to understand the situation, the twist ending became obvious. I think I’m going to go back to the previous draft and revise again, this time trying to sneak in the necessary information closer to the end, so it’s part of the ending rather than part of the set-up.

“In the dark outside the living room window, seagulls cawed and the surf rumbled, while the babysitter snored in the armchair with a book open on her lap. Mommy and Daddy never took Liam along when they went to the island on a full-moon night. They said that Ritual was not for little boys — like the other deck of cards, the one with the pretty colored pictures that moved.”

(That snippet is not going to be in the next revision… it gives too much away.)

Anyway, even though I only got in a net word count change of 15 today, and I’m going to undo that change tomorrow, I’m giving myself a silver star for an hour of editing.

Neither Kate nor I is very good at going to sleep at a reasonable hour when we’re apart. So I braided some yarn and made us a couple of bracelets: blue to remind us to go to sleep, green to remind us to eat right, and red to remind us we love each other. We tied them on our wrists and will cut them off when she returns. Mine is telling me right now to stop blogging and go to bed, so I will do so.

Word count: 6487 | Since last entry: 654

Finished up this draft of the Jupiter story tonight. The ending didn’t make me cry like the Eagle story did, but I did feel it pretty intensely. It’s a hard ending for the protagonist, but I think it’s a good one.

I’ll look it over tomorrow and then send it for critique.

A snippet: “I had come home. Truly home, in a deeper, realer way than even my own personal module, which I built with my own hands, can ever be. Perhaps it was the solid press of real gravity, perhaps it was the constant presence of the horizon behind every building, perhaps it was the magnetic field or the tug of the moon or something even more subtle than that. Whatever the cause, something in my bones knew where it needed to be, and that was here.”

Also: I was worried that there weren’t going to be enough participants for the Potlatch 15 Writers’ Workshops, which I am coordinating. But three manuscripts came in today, which makes four, so it looks like it’s going to be okay. (The deadline is January 15, by the way.)

Word count: 5833 | Since last entry: 176

Most of this evening’s writing consisted of a quick editing pass through the whole story so far, cleaning it up and looking for cues that my subconscious had planted toward the ending, then straightening them up so they all point in the same direction. Still not 100% sure what the actual ending will be but it’s definitely shaping up.

A snippet: “I keyed the laser with Merganther’s personal emergency code. He answered almost immediately, and I told him about the failing spar. I gave him my honest assessment of the severity of the situation, and I did not overstate the risk. But I didn’t tell him about the bloom.”

Thanks to those who have commented on the last couple of entries. I don’t have the time to post replies right now, but your comments are appreciated.

Word count: 5657 | Since last entry: 315

The climax continues. My main character is in the process of making a decision that many people would see as evil. Can I do this and still have him be sympathetic? Maybe I need to show his second thoughts as well as his rationale…

A snippet: “For a moment I just gaped at the sight — a jet of gas as big as three platforms spewing into space. Slowing the fragment down. Changing its orbit. By how much? Enough to make the difference between life and death for Earth? Maybe. Probably. I couldn’t tell. Too many unknowns.”

Word count: 5342 | Since last entry: 314

This is the place where this draft of the story is going to be most different from the last one. Having created a new main character and put him in the same situation, his crisis is different and the resolution has to be different as well. This character simply doesn’t care about the things that were important to the previous one. But his problem is the same: Earth is threatened, but he has more important things to defend.

Last time I came >this close< to destroying the Earth at the end of the story. It could still happen.

I wrote up a thousand words of notes about what might happen at the climax. A key piece of broken equipment could be repairable or not, and there are two separate pieces of information the character could choose to lie or tell the truth about, which creates eight possibilities. I wrote up a paragraph or two about each possibility and the most dramatic things that could happen as a result. (Yes, this is how I write. Could have been worse — I seriously considered drawing up a decision tree.)

Several of the possibilities make no sense. One leads to a straightforward heroic ending, which is satisfying in a conventional way but I want more moral complexity from this story. Two lead to ironic downer endings, which I don’t want either. But two of them lead to unconventional endings with a twist in the tail, one of them more straightforward than the other. That’s the one I’m now driving toward. However, I may change course as the climax shapes up. (And I can go back and change the lead-in if that would make a better ending.)

A snippet: “I tried to place an urgent call to Merganther, on Funnel One, but the quantar link was down again — it had become more and more cranky as years wore on without proper replacement parts — and the radio was even more badly shredded than usual by Earth’s magnetic fields. All I could hear was the roar of static and occasional snatches of words.”

Oh, also: today’s email brought a rejection from Fantasy, and a note from the editor at Tor that he has no idea how long it will take the publisher to come to a decision about my novel. The rejected story will go right back in the mail just as soon as I decide where to send it next; the nails will continue to be bitten.

Word count: 5028 | Since last entry: 1503

As readers of her LiveJournal are aware, Kate has been on a decluttering kick lately, and we’ve managed to accumulate four grocery bags of books and one of CDs that we decided we can live without. So yesterday, after I spent most of the morning ripping CDs into iTunes, we headed off with our bags to get the books and CDs back into circulation.

The first place we went was Music Millennium, a fine local music store where we had a coupon good for an extra 15% on any used CD sales. But lots of other people were cleaning out their CD shelves, possibly attracted by the coupon, and we were warned of a two-hour wait for the CD buyer. So we took them to Everyday Music instead, where we amused ourselves with browsing the racks while the buyer evaluated our wares. We wound up spending only $50 over what our CDs brought in. Then we lugged the books to nearby Powell’s, where there were three buyers on duty and we only had to stand in line for a few minutes. After which, of course, we had to hit the stacks. But this time we came out ahead, with $10 in store credit. So we wound up with a net expense of about $40 and replaced five bags of unwanted books and CDs with one small bag of (hopefully) wanted ones. Not that there is any room on the shelves for those.

After we got home from that expedition, I headed right back to Powell’s, because I’d forgotten I had a couple of Xmas presents to return and I wanted to complete the decluttering expedition. (Not presents I’d received; books I’d bought as presents and then learned the intended recipient already had them.) I knew it was dangerous to go to Powell’s again, especially with a card now loaded with another $20 in store credit, but this time I managed to get away with nothing more than a cup of coffee.

Amazingly, that whole expedition took less than three hours, including lunch. I spent the afternoon ripping more CDs and making sure that all three computers had the right music on them. But when Kate and I went to consolidate the music collection on the office computer (which I’ve begun thinking of as “her computer”), we discovered there wasn’t enough free disk space to perform the consolidation.

This led to a deep philosophical discussion about extending the concept of decluttering to the office computer. I’d been thinking for some time that it needed a larger hard disk, but to Kate this seemed like buying a bigger house when what was really needed was to keep the current one tidy. My main concern was that by comparison with the multimedia files that we’ve been adding lately, any space we could reclaim by removing unwanted documents would be just a drop in the proverbial.

But then I thought of a major decluttering option that would free up at least four GB — I could delete the operating system and all the applications.

Okay, I could delete an operating system and its applications. Specifically, when I upgraded this PC from Windows 98 to Windows XP I’d partitioned the hard disk and done a fresh install of XP on the new partition. So the first partition contains our documents directory and an operating system we haven’t booted up in over a year. If I just got rid of Win98 I could make enough space for about 66 more CDs. (Hmm, not all that much. Still substantial, though.)

But I’m not dumb. I immediately began backing up the C: partition to the new fileserver, in case I deleted something I regretted later. Then we went to the Bagdad for pizza and Flightplan, which was rather implausible in spots but still an entertaining two hours of mindless fun. We got home just as the backup was finishing… and the verification phase started, which would take just as long. So I did my writing for the evening, but didn’t post anything to my journal because that would require using the PC (long story).

This morning when I awoke I saw that the backup had completed and verified successfully. I checked that I could successfully restore a directory full of files, then deleted everything on the C: partition other than the documents directory. Despite a couple of warnings about deleting the Program Files directory, the deletion proceeded without error, freeing up large amounts of space and leaving the system still functional. I tried running some programs and all seemed okay.

But when I rebooted… ack! A black screen with “Can’t find NTLDR”! Woe! I had stupidly forgotten that, although the C: drive’s operating system was no longer in use, it was still the boot drive.

After staring and sweearing at the black screen for a while, I tried booting from several emergency boot floppies. None of them worked. But the WinXP install CD did boot, and offered a Recovery Console. But the Recovery Console was nothing more than a DOS prompt. How to recover the lost files, which were gone to wherever files go when you empty the Recycle Bin?

Fortunately, I had a working server with a complete, fresh backup of the C: drive. I ran upstairs and restored C:’s root directory to a temporary folder, then copied key files — including AUTOEXEC.BAT and the critical NTLDR — to a floppy. Then I copied the files from the floppy (one at a time, the Recovery Console version of COPY doesn’t support wildcards) to the C: drive. Cross fingers, press Reset and… it lives!

Amazingly, I made it to work less than an hour later than usual.

A few more files did have to be restored… old apps that were still running from the C: drive, sound files, that sort of thing. But all in all the operation was a success. I was stupid enough to get myself in serious trouble, but smart enough to get out of it. Geek triumph! Never did consolidate Kate’s iTunes library, though.

This evening we ate leftovers, did some grocery shopping, and I also did some writing. Most of the word count above is copied in from the previous draft, but I’m getting to the climax and that’s demanding a serious rewrite. Expect to see slower progress in the next few days. And when I finish, I need to go back and fix up the timescale a bit, and also restore some of the vast scope that the previous draft had — the new draft is more personal and visceral for the main character, but as a side effect it’s also lost some of its sensawunda.