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’