David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

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.

I haven’t seen a copy yet, but I just learned that Greenberg anthology All Hell Breaking Loose, including my story “The Curse of Beazoel,” is now available at Powell’s and other fine booksellers (it got five stars from Harriet Klausner). Also, issue #26 of Tales of the Unanticipated, including my story “A Book is a Journey,” will arrive fresh from the printer on or about November 4. If you order now, your copy will be in the mail before it cools off.

“Titanium Mike Saves the Day” is now complete at just under 5000 words, and off to my critique group. It’ll be critted next Saturday and I hope to get it in the mail to Analog shortly thereafter. My first new story since March, and my first new solo story since… crikey, last September. Really need to get on the ball. Speaking of which… in response to the recent meme that’s been going around, here are the opening paragraphs of the just-completed “Titanium Mike” and a few other stories in progress (“in progress,” in this case, means that they were completed a year ago or more but are now high on the list to be revised next). Titanium Mike Saves the Day (Hard SF) “Gramma, I’m scared.” The poor girl wasn’t just scared, she was terrified — tense and shivering and speaking in a breathy whisper her helmet mike could barely pick up. Behind a faceplate fogged with rapid breaths, her skin was pale and clammy and her sapphire-blue eyes twitched like small frightened animals. Helen wasn’t exactly calm herself. “Don’t fret, Sophie,” she told the child, but her own voice trembled. She muted her mike and took a deep breath to settle herself, the sound echoing loud in her helmet until she felt under control. “We’ll be safe here.” For a while, anyway, she added silently. The shelter’s single dim light was already beginning to fade. Moonlight on the Carpet (Horror) “Vrrm, vrrm,” said Liam as he ran the little wooden car across the Persian carpet. It was summer, a hot humid Midwest summer, and there was nothing else to do. Daddy and Mommy were away again. The blue and gold pattern, a thing the shape of the big black card at the top of the poker deck, could be Laclede Island where they went every month at this time. Liam ran his car along the causeway — a long curve of blue and red and black, and through the stripe of bright white moonlight that crossed it. The little golden hairs on the back of his hand glinted in the light. Across the causeway and along the bay, the little car sped. Liam imagined himself in the back, leaning his chin on the back of the seat, peering out at the streetlights that flicked past one after the other. But above them all would loom the moon, the full moon, outshining them all. Mommy and Daddy never took him out to the island when the moon was full. Interview with the Photographer (Hard SF) We called ourselves the Trillion even then, though in those days it was a proud and overweening boast, not the vast understatement it is today. Those were heady days, early days, days of energy and promise when anything could, and did, happen on a daily basis. In those days a person could say something like “I think we ought to take Jupiter apart and build something useful out if it” and be greeted with cheers. How young we were! Let me tell you a thing to impress upon you how different those times were from these: I was given five names when I was born. It was a formality even then, of course; the UniTag was already two hundred years old, but my parents still held to the old ways and tried their best to give their child a unique spoken name. They were old-fashioned with my genome, too, which definitely explains my stodgily symmetrical appearance and probably explains why I have been too stubborn to change it. But I’m slave enough to fashion to go by just Jonquil now. Night Mail (Fantasy) Nate Richmond loved estate sales. The mundane thrill of searching for bargains, with the slight ironic tang of a second-hand encounter with death, had always been exactly what he needed to distract himself from his cares. Besides, they were cheap entertainment. So on a crisp sunny Friday afternoon in May, when Nate’s cares were particularly big and his wallet equally empty, he strolled down 43rd from his apartment on Belmont to see what he might find. Nate was a thin young man of 23, with white, white skin and black, black hair. His chunky shoes and his pants and his denim jacket were also black, as was his T-shirt, which bore the name and logo of the industrial band Bauhaus. The only article of clothing that wasn’t black was his socks, red cotton decorated with white skulls. Around his neck he wore a small silver ankh. The decedent at this particular estate sale had been a woman with size 8 feet and extremely practical taste in shoes and clothing. Emerging from her closet, Nate found his way blocked by two large, burly men, the proprietors of the sale, who were disassembling the mahogany sleigh bed that dominated the bedroom. As they levered the box spring out of the bed frame, Nate noticed a rectangle in the thick dust underneath. “What’s that?” he said. The older of the two men bent down and picked it up. “Looks like an old desk set.” It was a large flat rectangle of embossed leather with brass hinges and fittings, maybe twenty-four by sixteen inches, wrapped all around with yards of yellowed cellophane tape. In the Joy Business (Fantasy) “Joy is the serious business of Heaven.” — C. S. Lewis Monday. The angel Umiel was trying to finish writing a Customer Research Report when her screen beeped. Again. It was an e-pistle from Ganiel, her supervisor: would she please update her monthly budget figures? Today? By 11:00? Umiel looked at the clock in the corner of her Illuminated User Interface — the big hand was on the X and the little hand was on the IV — and sighed. She considered asking Ganiel if this budget thing were absolutely necessary, but she knew what the answer would be: all priorities are top priorities, it’s your job to manage your own time, et cetera, et cetera, et blah blah blah. Ganiel would probably quote at her from The One Second Manager, or whatever management book she was proselytizing today. She set the report aside and opened the icon for the budget. It took her ten minutes to find her department — they’d “rationalized” the budget spreadsheet again — and properly record her paltry expenditures for the month. Then, when she returned to her own report, she discovered she’d lost her train of thought. The morning was not going well. She decided to take an ambrosia break.

Well, on top of the F&SF rejection the other day I got my first review of “The Ecology of Faerie”, by Dave Truesdale in Tangent Online, and it could be summed up as “Eh.” Usually I can get at least one quotable phrase out of any review, but this one… not so much. Sigh. But! I did finish the first draft of “Titanium Mike Saves the Day.” Okay, I’m not at all sure this one works — in fact, I’m not certain it’s really a story. But it’s done, at about 5000 words, and I’ll send it to my crit group after a quick editing pass (probably Tuesday, since we have symphony tickets tomorrow). Then on to the next. I really need to build up my inventory, which has fallen to just a few stories. Writing is hard. But I persist.

Gordon Van Gelder didn’t buy the rewrite of the Bigfoot story. No “alas” in the rejection, but he also included his assistant editor JJA’s comments and they started with “Eh.” Which if you ask me is worse than an Alas. Oh well, it goes off to scifi.com tomorrow.