David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

The two stories of mine from last year that I’m proudest of are “The Tides of the Heart” (short story) from Realms of Fantasy and “Citizen-Astronaut” (novelette) from Analog. One is a fantasy, the other is hard SF, and both were published in the same month (June 2011), which tickles my fancy.

As an experiment, I’m making them available for free on my web site in HTML and EPUB format:

• Tides of the Heart (HTML)
• Citizen-Astronaut (HTML)
• Tides of the Heart (EPUB)
• Citizen-Astronaut (EPUB)

The HTML files are plain old web pages that you can read on any browser. The EPUB files are ebooks that you can download and read on your computer, phone, tablet, or ebook reader; they are completely free and unencumbered by DRM.

This is the first time I’ve done an ebook conversion, so if you have any feedback on the formatting, appearance, navigability, readability, or other quality of the ebook, please email me.

Enjoy!

Word count: 4140 | Since last entry: 2382

We’re taking a trip to Guadalajara this month (in fact, we leave in less than a week, aiee) and we’ve been studying Spanish with the Pimsleur CDs since Thanksgiving. I’ve never studied Spanish before, but I do have a couple of years each of Latin and French and a little Italian under my belt… which helps in some ways (I’ve already been exposed to concepts like grammatical gender) and hinders in others (when I reach for a Spanish word, my brain rummages in the “Romance languages I kind of know” bag and hands me something which may or may not be correct). I feel rather overwhelmed, but my experience with Japanese tells me that even a little bit of the local language helps enormously.

Yesterday our Spanish lesson included phrases such as “Yo estoy enfermo” (I am sick) and “Necesito un médico” (I need a doctor). It’s sometimes kind of strange when a CD makes me lie in a foreign language (e.g. making me say “Me gusta la cerveza”), but as I was saying those things I realized that I was, in fact, feeling a bit of a scratchy throat coming on. It was as though I was actually getting sick from exposure to the concept in Spanish. Language is a virus, indeed. I took a bunch of vitamin C and sambucus before going to bed.

I felt somewhat better this morning, and I hope to be completely recovered in a day or two. But I don’t have a lot of energy.

The trip to Eugene to speak to the Wordos writing group went well. There were something over a dozen people present, including Nina Kiriki Hoffman and Jerry Oltion, and they seemed pleased with my talk about the various workshops and research trips I’ve taken for my writing and the Q&A afterwards. The trip also included several nice meals, a view of three volcanoes, and listening to Alan Cumming read Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan. Not too shabby a day, all told.

I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but I am in Eugene today, speaking to the Wordos writers group. I’ll be having dinner at Cafe Yumm on Broadway beforehand, at 5:30, with whoever shows up.

Word count: 1758 | Since last entry: 1055

Worked at Case Study Coffee today from about 3:00 to 5:00, making 850 words or so, and finished my thousand after dinner and a movie (The Artist) with friends Janet and Ron Lunde. I hope that the words will come more quickly as I become more confident in the voice and I don’t have to check vocabulary and other historical details several times per sentence.

I’m not promising to blog every day, by the way, but I find it helps with accountability.

Word count: 703 | Since last entry: 703

Spent a chunk of time today setting up the Scrivener project and reacquainting myself with Scrivener, then wrote 703 words on the YA Regency interplanetary airship adventure. It’s not a thousand, but this is a weekend so my target is only a hundred. We’re off!

We’d planned to go out to a big costume party, but at the last minute Kate decided she really wasn’t up to it. We wound up watching De-Lovely, a much sadder film than either of us had recalled (though excellent and quite touching), eating popcorn, and turning in right at midnight. A quiet finish to the old year.

Today we’ll be attending a couple of New Year’s Day brunches, one of which marks the 27th anniversary of the New Year’s Day brunch at which we met, and I swear I will begin drafting my new novel (even though I did not write the outline last week as I had intended to). I can write the first thousand words without an outline, ferpitysake.

But first, a little blog-maintenance coding. God help me, I just wrote this AND UNDERSTAND IT: sed -e ‘s;\([[:punct:]]*\)<[Ii]>;_\1;g’ -e ‘s;</[Ii]>\([[:punct:]]*\);\1_;g’

It’s been a good year.

In all honesty, I have to admit that I live a life of comfort and ease. I have a fine home and a wonderful wife, I’m retired at the age of 50 with enough money to do fundamentally whatever I want, and my health is excellent. I live in a wonderful town with an active community of writers. I love and I know that I am loved.

Flipping through the 2011 kitchen calendar, I see a lot of plays and movies and museum visits. We continued with yoga and our neighborhood SF book group. There was no overseas travel this year; instead we threw a big party which we called “BentoCon, a science fiction convention and square dance” to celebrate our 50th birthdays and 20th anniversary with about 100 of our friends and relatives. It was a heck of a lot of work but it was awesome. We have most excellent friends.

We did have the usual insane amount of domestic travel, including a week in the Bay Area for Fogcon and Potlatch (with a visit to Hearst Castle in between). I visited Buena Vista University in Iowa, where I spoke to the students of my old Clarion West classmate Inez. I participated in a mock battle of sailing ships. I was privileged to be invited to Walter Jon Williams’s Rio Hondo workshop, where I ate many fine meals and critiqued manuscripts with some of the finest writers in the field. I atttended Radcon, Wiscon, the World Fantasy Convention, and OryCon, and square dance events in Atlanta, Phoenix, and Vancouver BC. We took a trip to Eastern Oregon. I taught a crew of brilliant high school students at the Alpha Workshop in Pennsylvania, and was a guest pro at the Cascade Writers workshop on the Washington coast. And at the Worldcon in Reno, I got to present the Best Short Story Hugo to Mary Robinette Kowal.

As far as the writing goes… well, I’m a little disappointed in myself. Despite all the writing workshops I taught and the Hugo I presented and the interview in Locus, the actual writing and publishing didn’t go as well as I’d like. It was a year of near-misses, with “Pupa” coming in second in the Analog readers’ poll and missing the Hugo ballot by four nominations. I spent the whole year looking for a new agent and failed to snag one, despite getting >this< close with an agent who loved the book except for this one thing and then, after I rewrote it to her specifications, decided she didn’t really love it that much after all. I finished the first draft of a hard SF YA novel set on Mars, but reluctantly set it aside (for now) because my agent hunt has shown me that science fiction really isn’t selling right now. So I started researching and outlining a YA Regency interplanetary airship adventure that I think will be more marketable (and also a lot of fun). I intend to begin drafting that one on January 1.

With all that novel-related work I didn’t do a lot of short story writing and submitting, so I don’t have nearly as many new stories, submissions, or sales this year as in some previous years. I did make two pro sales and several reprint and audio sales, and I saw “Trust” published in Daily Science Fiction, “Citizen-Astronaut” in Analog, “The Tides of the Heart” in Realms of Fantasy (which, regrettably, folded shortly thereafter), “The True Story of Merganther’s Run” in The End of an Aeon (finally!), and “Into the Nth Dimension” in Human for a Day. I also saw reprints of “Pupa” in Into the New Millennium (Kindle), “Written on the Wind” at Escape Pod (podcast), “A Passion for Art” at StarShipSofa (podcast), “Zauberschrift” at PodCastle (podcast), and “Powers” in Wild Cards I (audio). “Tides of the Heart” got some very favorable reviews, including a Recommended review in Locus.

Short stories are good. Short stories are fun. But I really, really want to succeed as a novelist, because it’s clear to me that novels get far more attention in this field than short stories do. So in the coming year I intend to really buckle down and focus on the writing. The only way to succeed in this business is to produce, and I intend to put my butt in my chair and write a lot more next year than I did this year. I resolve to write every day, with a minimum of 1000 words per day on weekdays and 100 words per day on weekends and travel days. That’s a stretch — it’s a lot more words per day than I’ve managed in the past on a consistent basis — but I’m hoping that this aggressive goal will force me to find new ways of working and new attitudes that will increase my productivity going forward. And if I can really write at that speed or higher, I can finish this novel in less than a year and still write a bunch of short stories.

So that’s me. I hope you’re enjoying this holiday season and making plans for a great 2012. See you there!