David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

So I was doing a Google search on my own name, as one does, and Google turned up this page on a mysterious site known only by a number. The page is about “The Tale of the Golden Eagle” and it has two reader comments. One reader gives the story a grade of 5, the other a 4. I can’t even figure out what language the page is in, never mind what it says. The Xerox language guesser thinks it’s Estonian. But there doesn’t seem to be any automated Estonian to English translator on the web. I’ve tried Romanian, Slovenian, and Serbian translators and none of them can extract any meaning from it. Can anyone reading this tell me what it says?

And “Titanium Mike Saves the Day” goes off to Analog. On to the next thing. Has anyone else noticed that short stories in standard manuscript format weigh just about one ounce per thousand words?

Finally got a chance to sit down and finish the edits on the Titanium Mike story, and I got through to the end. It’s about 200 words longer than it was, and I’m not 100% convinced I’m done with the edits. I shall sleep on it.

Whoa, how did it get to be {Friday, December, Smofcon, Christmas, 2007} so quickly? Thanksgiving was swell. We stayed in Portland Thursday evening and had a fantastic dinner at the home of our friends Paul and Debbie, then hit the road fairly early on Friday for the Vancouver square dance fly-in. Had a great time enjoying the hospitality of our friends Will and Grant and hanging out with square dance friends from all over, returning to Portland on Monday. I was supposed to go to Sunnyvale (for some entirely explicable reason I’m always tempted to say “Sunnydale” instead) for business on Tuesday, but when I got home Monday night I had a phone message that the trip was postponed to Thursday. So I went to work as usual on Tuesday to find a sh*t storm of major proportions. My boss had been out of town for two weeks, and apparently several serious problems that had been simmering for some time, and which he might have been able to defuse if he’d been there, burst open on Monday — people screaming at each other and all kinds of mean nasty ugly stuff. Glad I missed it. But I didn’t miss the aftermath, which is still unfolding. None of the serious issues are my fault, but some of the repercussions will affect me. Probably some people will be shifted to different projects. One of the consequences was that the person who was supposed to go with me to Sunnyvale was diverted to another trip. But then, when he had cancelled his Sunnyvale tickets and was in the process of scheduling the other trip, he was told that the other trip was off. So I had to go to Sunnyvale by myself while the other person just stayed back at the office. I was really worried about this trip, because the weather forecast called for a major snow storm to hit Portland that day. I packed with the assumption that I might have to stay in the Bay Area for a day or two. But, apart from the fact that I had to get up at 4am to catch my flight, everything went smoothly. My meeting in Sunnyvale was intense and productive and I got home by 8pm. I had a busy day at work today (Friday) and went from there straight to Smofcon, the convention-runners’ convention, which is in Portland this year. Kate and I hung out with SMOF friends, had dinner with Arthur Aldridge, then participated in the traditional Friday night icebreaker. This year’s icebreaker was to re-enact the Orycon hotel search (with all the Portland hotels disguised behind names such as Trantor Hilton and Towers and Innsmouth Hotel at the Docks) in fifteen minutes. Amusingly, my team selected the same hotel the actual Orycon did, and for pretty much the same reasons. Martin Easterbrook suggested we write our press release as a pastiche of “The Raven,” and we whomped out three verses of pretty good faux Poe (Paux?) in about five minutes. You can see it, along with another poem from one of the other teams, here. The writing, unfortunately, hasn’t been going well. I’ve been making fitful progress on the rewrite of the Titanium Mike story, but I haven’t sold anything since February. Several stories have been published in the last couple months, but there have been few reviews and most of those have been bad (one poster on the Asimov’s message board said he wanted to slap me). I’m hoping for some better news in the December Locus. And there’s still no word on the novel. The editor said he hoped to look at the rewrite in December, so I’ll bug him fairly shortly if I don’t hear something soon. Well. Anyway. More Smofcon this weekend, and that should be fun. And I don’t have any more work-related travel until December 12! (Unless I have to go to Sunnyvale again next week, but I think I should be able to avoid that.)

Today was interesting. At work, it was almost like Christmas as the long-awaited Macs arrived. I must confess I was surprised — I’d been figuring that someone, somewhere in the purchase order approval chain, would say “we make Windows software — I don’t care if they’re ‘Designers’, they can’t have Macs!” But, despite my skepticism, there they were: three shiny (very shiny!) new dual-processor Power Mac G5 Towers with half a gig of RAM and 250 gigs of disk each, plus three boxes of assorted software. And so the day was spent in setting up, configuring, installing, and tweaking. (Um, can anyone tell me how to make IntelliJ Idea use Command instead of Control for its keyboard shortcuts?) Then, at home, I finally got off my duff — well, no, actually I got on my duff — and started editing “Titanium Mike.” Shortened the first scene by about 200 words (in the first 800) and made the Mike story a bit more outlandish. The edits on the next scene are going to be trickier. But I’m editing again! I hope to have this one in the mail by the end of next week.

In the last week, I’ve mostly divided my time between work and being sick. The project at work, time- and energy-consuming though it is, is coming together nicely and I’m pleased with my part in it. At this point my greatest fear is that our fine design might prove to be too much to implement. I wish we were in the same city as the implementers. And then I come home at 7pm or so, read or watch TV a bit, and fall into bed. I just don’t have enough energy or brainpower for anything more. I’m so glad I’ve got Kate to take care of me when I get like this. In the last couple of days I’ve been much less sick. I’m still blowing my nose a lot, but the sore throat, aches, and fever are mostly gone. So I have had enough energy to put a bunch more music into my iPod (including several discs of Broadway show tunes — still not convinced they will work well in rotation, but it’s worth a try), see the new Harry Potter movie (I have some problems with the plot, but I applaud the filmmakers’ decision to exclude those beastly Dursleys from the film), and read the new Iain Banks novel, The Algebraist, which I picked up at the Worldcon. I had heard some disappointment at this one, but for myself I found it a cracking good read with inspiring scope and complexity. I don’t get nearly as much time as I would like for reading these days, so I should feel glad that I managed to read a whole novel that wasn’t required for anything. But I still feel like a total slug. Perhaps I shall accomplish something useful later this week. But for now… going to bed early has a lot of appeal.

Wow, it has been a while since I’ve posted. Well, I’ve been very busy with real life… barely time to read email, and definitely not enough time to read my friends’ online journals, never mind writing in my own. Here’s a brief, brief update.

• I finished the revisions on my novel before World Fantasy Con, though I had to stay up until 3am to do it. I haven’t heard anything from the editor yet except an acknowledgement of receipt. If it doesn’t sell after all this I will be Annoyed.
• Lise Eisenberg from New York was our houseguest for several days before OryCon. Great conversation, good eats, but in trying to open my wireless network to let her in I managed to bring the whole thing down — it took me until 2am to get it working again.
• I had to get up at 4am for my flight to WFC. On Saturday morning of the con I was able to announce in the dealers’ room, in all sincerity, that I was tireder than the whole rest of the convention… put togithir!
• I must have had a good time at WFC, because I didn’t go to any programming at all (except for the one panel I was on and my reading, both of which had quite respectable audiences — oh, wait, I did also attend the Monette/Bear/Lake readings Sunday morning). Basically I spent the whole con schmoozing in the halls, the parties, and the bar. Now, when I say “schmoozing,” I really mean “hanging out with writer friends” more than “sucking up to editors,” but there was also a certain amount of the latter. And I really wish there was something I could wear that would look as sexy on me as Elizabeth Bear’s corset did on her.
• Came home to find that Kate, Lise, and Dave Howell had had a good time without me at OryCon, ending with an amazing series of mishaps that I will let one of them relate. Sounds like their convention was a lot more… eventful than mine. Both Lise and Dave stayed at our house for a day or two after the convention. Wonderful to see them both, to be sure, but it was nice to get the house back.
• All through this time I’ve been working 9-10 hour days at the day job. We’ve made some difficult decisions about which projects to defer, but we still have tight deadlines on the one major project that remains on our plate, and when that is done we will be behind the 8-ball on the other projects we’ve deferred. Work will probably remain quite heavy well into next year.
• What with all the strange people I’ve hugged and the massive sleep deficit I’ve rung up in the last couple of weeks, it’s not too surprising that I’ve come down with a cold. Nothing serious, but it does slow me down a bit.

So that’s what’s up with me. If I owe you an email or a phone call… please be patient, I’m treading water as fast as I can.

44% done with this editing pass. Hardly any changes tonight, but every word has to be examined because I’m taking away the sounds the aliens make, and it’s real easy to read over a line like “she trilled in pleasure” and not notice that it’s a sound if you’re not paying close attention. Search and replace won’t do it; I used too many different sound words. Removing the sounds isn’t the only change I’m making in this pass, but it’s the most pervasive. The other changes — like making Jason more head-over-heels in love with Clarity — are localized (in this case, to the comparatively rare flashback scenes with the two of them together). I’m not sure how much I can change on that without adding additional scenes, which I don’t want to do for a variety of reasons. Today at work we had the celebration for the release of a major product. We all went off to a very nice brewpub/cinema, a former Masonic lodge, where we were treated to beer and wine, barbecue, and a showing of Office Space. Not the movie I would have chosen for a morale booster… it was a little too close to reality sometimes. Also today… you remember I mentioned that work ate my life for a couple of weeks there? The VP responsible just gave each person on my team an iPod nano as a thank-you for that work. So there is some justice in the world. I gave the new nano to Kate, but I have to get a USB 2.0 port for the PC before she can put any of her music on it.

Editing continues apace. I’m about 1/3 of the way through on this pass — things are going much faster now that I’ve answered some of the hard questions in the early chapters — with a total word count increase of around 800 words. It’s coming along nicely (though perhaps not as great a change as might have been hoped) and at this rate I should have no trouble finishing by World Fantasy Con. Speaking of which, I got my program schedule for WFC. One panel, “A Maze Demands a Minotaur”, at 8pm Sunday. No reading, alas. I’m starting to get really conflicted about missing Orycon for WFC this year. I had hoped to be able to talk up my newly-sold novel at WFC, but once again I have a major convention and it’s still in limbo. And I’m going to be missing a lot of friends at Orycon… and Kate, too, of course. Waah.

Sorry about that. The day job rose up and swallowed my life. You know that scene in Broadcast News where Holly Hunter the producer is leaning over Bobby the technician, who is editing the tape for tonight’s broadcast, and saying “C’mon Bobby-bobby-bobby-bobby…” because it has to be finished by, like, five seconds from now? That was my life for the last couple of weeks. I was Bobby. I finally heard some more from the editor on my novel. He’s still excited about it, but the publisher is less so, and the editor would like me to make some changes to make it more acceptable to the publisher. I consulted with my agent about it, and he says that if I think the novel would be improved by the suggested changes I should go ahead and do them. Which, since some of the problems the editor has identified are also problems I’ve been fighting the whole way through, I’m going ahead and doing. So I spent the whole weekend revising, making the aliens more alien and increasing the friction between the aliens and the humans. Thanks to Mary, Sara, Nalo, Jim, and Denny for brainstorming assistance. I’ve rewritten the first 50 pages so far, including fairly significant changes in Clarity’s introduction and the funeral scene. Mostly what I’ve been doing is adding exposition — a sentence here, a paragraph there — and rewriting a few scenes to make them more dramatic and conflict-y. The total word count change so far is only about 600 additional words. In other writing news, the January 2006 issue of Asimov’s, including my story “The Last McDougal’s,” has been reviewed at Tangent Online. “Levine paints the future with a clever brush…. His down-to-earth and realistic portrayal of family and the dynamic between two distant generations is refreshing and timely.” Watch for the issue on newsstands or in your mailbox soon.