David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Word count: 45058 | Since last entry: 217 | This month: 10390 Kate’s out of town, so I worked late, did my critiques for tomorrow, did some convention-related web stuff and other chores, spent too much time reading friends’ weblogs (bloglines.com makes this far too easy), and didn’t even start writing until 11:00. Still, I do get a silver star for writing something. More tomorrow, I promise.

Word count: 45058 | Since last entry: 1037 | This month: 10173 Couldn’t decide between staying home and writing tonight and going to a square dance. Kate finally suggested that she could drive and I could write in the car to and from. It worked great! I also wrote a little bit in the breaks between tips, and a little more after we got home, for a total of over a thousand words. Woo hoo! Note that the “word count” above has not gone up (that’s the novel word count), though the “since last entry” and “this month” counts have. The difference is what I’ve written so far on a short story for an anthology called Cosmic Tales of the Far Future, which is invitation-only and probably already full, but it’s a great market and even if I don’t sell this story to this market it’ll get my work in front of the editor and I’ll have another story in inventory. Working title is “Deconstructing Jupiter.” The whole story so far is told in the same breathless voice as the last paragraph. I’m trying to portray this particular hunk of the far future as a time just as exciting as the Wild West or the early days of the Internet. I may wind up cutting a lot of the words I wrote tonight, but I’m getting a real feel for the time. At this rate (which I doubt I can keep up, but maybe…) I’ll be done with this story in less than a week and I can get it and another chapter done in time for the crit group meeting after next. We’ll see. For now, life is exciting! Voom!

Word count: 45058 | Since last entry: 0 | This month: 9136 No actual novel words, nor short story words, today. But I formatted and printed out the completed chapter D, added 345 words to the synopsis (summarizing chapter 4) and printed that out, and made copies, so the package is ready for Saturday’s crit group meeting. I also resubmitted a story that bounced back from The Edge (UK magazine) to Argosy. So I’m giving myself a silver star for writing-related effort.

Word count: 45058 | Since last entry: 518 | This month: 9136 I hadn’t quite meant it to come out this way, but the last scene of the chapter turned into Sienna’s Saint Crispin’s Day Speech. I had fun playing with her tone of voice and body language, but I didn’t really indicate how her listeners responded. I’m relying on the reader to respond for them. This may be a mistake, but that’s the way it is for now. My other concern is that the level of bombast ratchets up too far too fast, but we’ll see what the crit group thinks. That’s the end of the chapter, so I get a gold star and a green star for today. Tomorrow I start on a short story, and critiques. Go me!

Word count: 44540 | Since last entry: 346 | This month: 8618 OryCon was fun, but the weekend went voom! About a dozen people came to my reading, most of my panels were well attended, Opening Ceremonies went well, and Whose Line was a riot. But I only hit about three parties (including the Baen party, where Sara and Jim and I sat in the back room talking — mostly about my novel — for hours) and attended maybe a half-dozen panels other than mine. I’m not quite sure where all the time went. Certainly not sleeping. Alas, I’ve broken my streak of writing every day this month. I wrote a couple hundred words on Friday before the con, and a couple hundred tonight, but nothing on Saturday or Sunday. On Saturday after the Baen party I did write nearly 500 words of notes on a new direction for Jason, to make him a more active character (but that isn’t reflected in the word count above). It involves scrapping the current Prologue and writing a new chapter in its stead, in which Jason takes some kind of direct, physically dangerous action. Many of the events of chapter A (to be renamed chapter B, and so on) would still take place, but the power dynamic between Jason and Sienna shifts radically, and the changes would echo down through the novel with decreasing force. For example: If Jason steals the biocomputer in the new chapter A, he’s not still going to be alive and free in chapter B unless he knows about the government’s omnipresent audio monitors before that. So Sienna can’t tell him about their existence in chapter B, and the whole “Jason researches the audio monitors” scene — with its cool technology — goes out the window. Ponder ponder ponder. I’m not going to change it now, though. Must finish first draft first. I have just one more (short!) scene to write in chapter D, then I have critiques to do and a short story to start. It may be mostly short stories for the next couple of months, actually, though I hope to keep plugging away at the novel as well. (Ha.)

Word count: 44194 | Since last entry: 521 | This month: 8272 Just introduced “the Infector”, a gizmo that I believe will be the maguffin (is there an official spelling or capitalization for that word?) for the whole rest of the book. The scene feels pretty flabby to me. Partly this is a result of writing in small bits rather than long stretches. Partly I’m still damn tired — though I got to bed early last night, I woke up well before the alarm clock. I’m not going to catch up on sleep any time soon, though, because OryCon starts tomorrow. I do intend to write every day at the con, though I’m not going to be posting my daily word counts here until Sunday evening at the latest. Wish me luck!

Word count: 43673 | Since last entry: 198 | This month: 7751 Although it’s been a really productive month, I’ve been making the time to write by staying up late, and today it caught up with me in a big way. I was just kind of dragging around the office, yawning every five minutes. So tonight I wrote a bare minimum, just a few paragraphs to keep up the streak, and now I’m going to bed early.

Word count: 43475 | Since last entry: 264 | This month: 7553 OryCon business took up a chunk of this evening, but I did find the time to write something. Largely edits and tweaks on yesterday’s scene, and a few hundred more words. Fixed a logic error. God, I’m tired. I think ten days of cumulative lack-of-sleep is catching up with me…

Word count: 43211 | Since last entry: 734 | This month: 7289 In tonight’s exciting episode, Jason demos the computer virus to Sienna. A rip-roaring, spine-tingling scene of low-resolution computer graphics. Okay, even in a thriller there have to be a few hundred words of exposition. Cope.

Word count: 42477 | Since last entry: 530 | This month: 6555 It’s a breakthrough for Jason, not for me. I finished up the current section with the scene I began on 11/6, in which Jason explains packet-based wireless communication to Chopper using a handful of bullets and a magazine as a visual aid, and Chopper uses the analogy to suggest a solution to Jason’s problem (without really understanding the problem itself). The trick was to come up with something Chopper would reasonably say, and that would point Jason in the direction of the solution but leave the key insight to Jason. It helps that I can change the technology to match the analogy — a power I don’t have in my day job! The transition between the end of the sex scene flashback and the beginning of the technology-analogy discussion is clunky. I may revisit it tomorrow. When I see NaNoWriMo participants writing 2000 words a day (which they have to, to achieve 50k words in a month), I look at my 500- and 600-word days and think “I could do better”. But those 500 and 600 words a day really add up, when you write every single day. At this rate I’ll be finished with the current chapter before OryCon, and then I can work on a short story for a while. It may be crap, but I feel way productive. And, frankly, I don’t think it’s crap. Oh, it may be kind of infodumpy and in need of tightening, and Jason’s motivations are muddled and the aliens aren’t alien enough. But this is a first draft, dammit, and these things can be corrected in rewrite. Onward!