David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Word count: 3525 | Since last entry: 759

I had a mind-numbing list of Things to Do today, but somehow the day just went “voom” without getting more than a few of them done.

It started off when I was just getting my act together after arising, when Kate suggested we go to the gym. Which I had to agree would be a good idea, but with one thing and another it took us quite a while to get moving, and when we got there we found the gym packed with new year’s resolution people. The mad crush usually passes by February, but for now it was crazy — we just did 20 minutes of cardio and came home.

After that I had some critiques to do, and some other chores like cleaning and putting away the Hanukkah menorah, before critique group in the afternoon. Then we had just time to fix and eat dinner before my corporate holiday party (which is held in January — kind of nice, actually, in that it doesn’t interfere with any other holiday parties).

The party was pretty enjoyable for a work-related event, with free drinks and hors d’ouvres and blackjack, craps, and roulette tables for entertainment, but the music and the standing around in dress shoes got to be a little too much so we went home early and watched the Season 2½ premiere of Battlestar Galactica. Then I did a little more writing — like yesterday, most of the wordcount above is copied from the previous draft.

A snippet: “I emerged into a motionless, darkened industrial station. The angular forms of platforms under construction jutted all around, harshly illuminated by white emergency pinpoints. Here and there a cable or tool floated free, left unsecured in the rapid evacuation, but there was no sign of the reason for that evacuation.”

Many more Things to Do this weekend. Tomorrow will be a busy day.

Word count: 2766 | Since last entry: 110

I neglected to mention yesterday that I got an update from the editor on my novel. He says that he liked the revisions and has passed my revised manuscript along to the publisher with his strong endorsement. Now we both get to wait for the publisher’s decision. Breath held, fingers crossed, etc.

Went to a square dance tonight, for the first time in many months. We missed the opening hour of C-2 (a level which Kate dances but I don’t, so I can do some writing while she dances) due to bad luck with dinner. We went to a local Mexican joint for a quick burrito and wound up waiting while the cashier told stories of his first job to the people in line ahead of us. Eventually we simply bailed, and went to a nearby Japanese place, where our dinner took a lot longer to arrive than it usually does. Grr all around.

So I didn’t do much writing during the dance, and when I got home I wrote the bare minimum to make my 100 words for the day. More tomorrow.

A snippet: “But while those of us who had invested early in the Project grew wealthy, poor Jupiter wasted away. His weather systems disrupted by the constant sucking of the Funnels, old Jove shrank from a proud banded beauty to a muddy, muddled yellow-brown gasball, and even his parade of attendant moons was cleared away to create a safer work environment. I found the sight depressing, so I buried myself in my work.”

Word count: 2656 | Since last entry: 1452

A productive day at work, some coding and some meetings, very little drama. Got home from work reasonably early, fixed an interesting chicken-and-cranberry recipe Kate clipped from the paper, then sat down to write much earlier than usual. Still going to bed later than I should. Kate’s still having problems with the iPod… it’s supposed to be easy to use, but under Windows it’s sometimes kind of flaky.

Don’t get too excited about the word count above. Only about 200 words of that is new; the rest is copied in from the previous draft (which isn’t really a “draft”, it was finished and submitted and came very close at several markets, including a rewrite request from F&SF). But I did make some significant changes in the copied material. I’m giving myself a gold star for the day.

A snippet: “Just getting the black holes to stabilize was a nightmare. The only tools we had were superconducting magnets the size of small moons, and if one of them decided to quench you wouldn’t even have the time to say your prayers. We lost half the hole team in one instant, when someone bobbled the matter feed and hole number four went straight from black to white without stopping for breakfast. We had invested a substantial portion of the genome money in the latest backup and restore equipment, of course, but the prospect of sudden death was still terrifying.”

Word count: 1204 | Since last entry: 308

As you can tell from the timestamps of my last few entries, I’ve been staying up stupidly late to get my writing done. I came home today tired and headachy and firmly committed to an early bedtime.

After a quick and simple dinner (soup made with instant Tom Yum soup paste from the Asian market, a yummy recent find) we set out to take our comforter and mattress pad to the laundromat and wash them in the big machines there. This looked like a win, because I could sit and write while we waited. But first Kate wanted to load up her iPod with some podcasts to listen to at the laundromat, and there were some frustrating technical problems (iTunes on the PC doesn’t always seem to notice that the iPod has been docked), so it got kind of late before we even hauled the stuff out to the car.

I don’t think we’ve gone to a laundromat once since we moved into this house. The first place we tried was completely empty of anything but washers and dryers — no other people, no place to sit, and no heat. The second was so skanky-looking we didn’t even slow down as we drove past. The third was just about to close. So we drove our bedding back home, with a frustrating detour caused by several police cars blocking a major street, lights flashing (I suppose we’ll find out in tomorrow’s paper what the fuss was about). I finally sat down to write about 9:30 — still tired and headachy, plus frustrated. I’m not sure I’m completely happy with tonight’s wordage, but it’s still over 100 words so I’m giving myself a silver star on the calendar.

A snippet: “During that period I traveled to Earth only when there was no alternative. By comparison with the clean expansive future we hoped to bring about, Earth seemed a sewer jammed with people too stupid to see how badly they were fouling their own nest.”

Word count: 896 | Since last entry: 337

First off, I’d like to point out that the deadline for the Potlatch 15 Taste of Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, which I am coordinating, is January 15. That is, manuscripts must be received by then. If you’ve been thinking about participating, now’s the time to take action.

With that out of the way… one of the two radio stations I listen to with any regularity is KINK, whose slogan is “True to the Music” (the other is KOPB, the public radio station). I really like KINK’s playlist, which is a mix of old and new stuff unlike any other station in town. But I don’t always catch the names of the artists and songs, which means that there are a lot of songs I enjoy but couldn’t pick out of a line-up (or, more to the point, out of the rack at a used CD store). So today I had a brainstorm. KINK makes its playlist available online. I wrote a shellscript to read the playlist and output a web page that searches for a song, artist, or album in the iTunes Music Store with a single click. Now I can start with an alphabetized list of KINK songs and easily hear a 30-second snippet that tells me which one is which. I hope to find out soon who my favorite artists are. Kate’s also excited by this tool.

The 337 words above is a bit of a cheat, since I brought in a couple of paragraphs from the previous draft of the story (so much for a from-the-ground-up rewrite). But they’re good paragraphs, and I see no reason to leave perfectly good words just lying around unused. I suspect I’m not going to be able to reuse a lot of verbiage, though, because the world of the story is a lot grittier in this draft and the main character’s much more of a hot-headed punk.

A snippet: “A few hours and a lot of kif later we were both scratching equations on the table top with an emergency rescue tool, shouting back and forth and grinning like idiots. When we ran out of table we started in on the wall.”

Word count: 559 | Since last entry: 234

Not much in the house for dinner tonight, but I looked in the fridge and spotted a pie crust and a carton of eggs. Quiche! A little more digging found Canadian bacon, some nice Cheddar, broccoli, and some mushrooms, so it turned out to be a very nice one. Unfortunately, it took quite a while to solidify and we didn’t sit down to dinner until about 8:30. It was good, though. After that I set out for the store so we wouldn’t have to scrounge up dinner again tomorrow. It was 10:00 by the time the groceries were put away, but lo! I am a dedicated writer. And I didn’t want to blow off my new year’s resolution on January 2. So. 234 more words and it’s definitely turning into a much more engaged and visceral story. But now it’s time for bed.

Word count: 325 | Since last entry: 325

I am disappointed in myself. 2005 was a good year for publications, but a wretched year for production and sales. I wrote only two new stories, one a collaboration, and made only one pro sale. Basically, I took a break after submitting the novel and (for a variety of reasons including being called upon to do some addional novel-related work, but also including my own laziness) never got back on the horse. As a result of this, I currently have only four stories in submission and no sold stories awaiting publication. I fear that I may have sabotaged my career.

So. That’s going to change.

My new year’s resolution is to write a hundred words a day, no matter what. I know that this is a very achievable goal — I can write 500 words an hour when I get rolling. The point of the hundred-word goal is to get my butt in the chair and writing, even on days when I “don’t feel like it.” I’m not making any commitments about what I’m going to write. Could be new stories, could be rewrites on existing stories, could be a new novel. But I’m going to put my butt in my chair and by God write.

I’m off to a good start, with 325 words on a from-the-ground-up rewrite of the Jupiter story (despite not getting back from dinner until 10pm). This story has had near-misses at all the major markets and the consensus of the editors is that it’s too distanced; the main character is all reflection and reaction, not action, and the whole story’s told in flashback. So I’m rewriting it from scratch, with the same plot outline but a new main character: an engineer instead of a photographer. If I can keep up this pace I should be done in two or three weeks, and that would feel good. Wish me luck!

Back from a delightful New Year’s Eve party at Willow Cottage, and just about to head off to a New Year’s Day brunch, followed by a movie and dinner with some other friends. Just enough time for a quick note while the biscuits are baking.

As faithful readers will no doubt recall, the Day Job was eating my life in the first half of December. So I didn’t even start my Xmas* shopping until about December 20, and we didn’t buy a tree until the 23rd. Never did get the lights up (lights are important to me, especially in these latitudes where I drive to work in the dark and drive home in the dark for months at a time).

Kate’s sister Sue came in on the 24th with our two younger nieces, ages 2 and 6. They made the house… lively. I don’t deal well with small children. And when we opened the presents on the 25th, what I found under the tree for me was a book, 3 CD’s, some napkins, and a table runner. All carefully chosen and apropos, but not exciting. We also got a nice package of goodies from Kate’s parents the previous week, but those had mostly been eaten already.

So the excitement didn’t really start for me until Thursday, when a package arrived from John Helmer (one of the nation’s finest haberdashers, which just happens to be located right here in Portland). It contained the present I’d requested from Kate: a collapsible top hat. It had to be special ordered in my size (1/8″ smaller than Bullwinkle’s). It made me go squee! I wore it to New Year’s Eve and got many compliments.

Then on Friday, another package arrived, containing two Squeezebox music players. Briefly, the Squeezebox is a small device that has a Wi-Fi antenna on one end and stereo plugs on the other. It makes all of the music stored on your computer available to your stereo. Along with a new file server installed in the attic, and a Kloss Model Two radio for the dining room we now have high-quality digital music available throughout the house, something we’ve wanted for years. This was my big present to Kate for the year.

Biscuits are done. Time to go!

* I’m using “X” here as a variable, to stand for The Winter Holiday of Your Choice.

Somewhere in my webbish peregrinations the other day I came across an appreciation of John Kessel’s “The Baum Plan for Financial Independence”. The appreciation includes this statement:

“A casual reader might have read this story: Two trashy people ride in a strange subway to an even stranger terminal where they are given tons of cash. That casual reader would, in my opinion, really miss out on some great layers of this deceptively simple story.”

Well, that’s how I read it. Although this story has been highly praised, and was in at least one Year’s Best volume, I thought it was rather lame. The main character takes harly any independent action — he is literally led by the hand through much of the story — but he is sent on an amazing journey and in the end he is, as it says above, given tons of cash. Which he accepts. The end. Whoopee. I guess I’m shallow. It may be that, as the appreciation says, there’s more to the story. But most of the Oz references went over my head, since I’ve never read that series. And the socio-economic allegories some other readers have found weren’t apparent or didn’t work for me. If there really was a lesson to be learned about the Haves gaining their wealth from the sweat of the brows of the Have-Nots, why did the main character simply acquiesce to the system? What some see as his “moment of epiphany” at the end of the story fails for me because he does not take any action as a result of his epiphany, nor is there any implication that he will do so in the future — which means that I don’t even consider it an epiphany. I guess what I’m trying to say is… well, I’m a simple guy, and I like my stories simple. It’s not that I’m incapable of appreciating a finely turned description or a reference to an older story; some of my favorite stories (and some — or even most — of my stories) are riffs on older stories by obscure authors. But for me, if a story doesn’t work at the first, most basic level, I’m not going to stick around to see if it has hidden depths. I didn’t like “What I Didn’t See” either. But that’s a rant for another day.