David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Lately I have been feeling like a WINO — a Writer In Name Only. Since my trip to “Mars” in January I’ve been spending a lot more time being an Author (traveling, speaking, signing) than being a Writer (actually putting words on paper).

The Author thing is a lot of fun and very rewarding. I got a thank-you card from the Clarion West students for the talk I gave there, which was extremely touching, and the feedback I’ve gotten from my Mars talk at the Nebulas has been overwhelming. The Mars thing has been my entree to so many experiences I would not have had otherwise — the TV appearances, my turn on stage at Ignite Portland, the Shuttle launch, and many more. But it’s also quite tiring. It seems to take me a week or so to completely recover from a trip out of town, even longer if I gave a speech, and in the last few months I’ve found myself heading out again right after that. So I’ve only been writing once a week, at the Tuesday afternoon writers’ coffee shop get-together. If it weren’t for that goad I probably wouldn’t be writing at all.

I really feel like a wimp by comparison with Jay Lake, who seems to write every week more than I have in the last six months, despite the ravages of chemotherapy. His amazing persistence in the face of the many blows cancer has dealt him is awe-inspiring.

I did write an outline and the first ten thousand words of a YA SF novel and got them critiqued. Based on the feedback I received, it needs a lot of work, and I’ve been reluctant to tackle that. I just need to pull up my socks and do it.

I also wrote two short stories in that time. One of them, “Citizen-Astronaut,” won second prize in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest (I just got the prize package of Baen books and schwag) and is currently seeking publication. The other one, “Floaters,” just today sold to the Drabblecast podcast. It should appear in August.

And I’ve kept the stories I wrote last year (and earlier) in circulation. “Finding Joan,” the story I read at Wiscon in 2009, sold to the new online market Daily Science Fiction, which hasn’t yet begun publication but pays eight cents a word. Another story was rejected with a note that described it as “powerful,” but too disturbing for the editor because it raised personal issues. I have high hopes for that one.

On reflection, I guess all in all I’ve been doing pretty well.

The Author thing continues. Tomorrow I head to the Washington coast to be “writer guru,” along with Jay Lake, at the annual Writers’ Weekend. Two weeks after that is the Mars Society convention, and three weeks after that we leave for Australia.

I hope to do some work on the YA SF novel while traveling. We’ll see.

Just back from a week in Chicago at the gay square dance convention. The convention, held in the luxurious and historic Chicago Hilton, was fantastic, well run, with plenty of great dancing (and, well, a few Squares From Hell, but into each life a little golfball-sized hail must fall, eh?). We also squeezed in a Frank Lloyd Wright bus tour and a downtown architecture river cruise, as well as a visit to the Art Institute.

The Art Institute visit was particularly interesting to me because my story “A Passion For Art,” which I wrote after visiting the Art Institute during the ChiCon 2000 worldcon, was just published in Interzone last month. It took ten years to be published because I waited a long while after getting it critiqued before editing and submitting it, and then it spent a few years kicking around various markets before being accepted. Touring the Art Institute I was surprised by a number of details that I had either mis-remembered or completely fabricated (and forgot I’d done so) in the story. For example, the statue of Pocohontas that plays a prominent role in the story, which I had remembered as being life-sized (and this is important to the plot), is actually only about four feet tall. Another piece that appears in the story, a pencil sketch of a ballerina by artist Edward Moy, is nowhere to be found at the museum or anywhere online; I guess I must have made that one (even the artist) up out of whole cloth. And Tuesdays are no longer free, though they were when I wrote the story.

When we returned I found a whole bunch of good stuff in the mail/email:

• My contributor’s copies of the September Analog, with my name not only on the cover, but listed first on the cover and spine! That’s a first for me.
• The June Locus, which not only included my photo (in the group shot from the Nebulas) and my name in the news section (for having won second prize in the Baen/NSS contest), but also three photos I took at Wiscon, along with a check for same! Another first!
• A note from Realms of Fantasy assistant editor Douglas Cohen that my RoF story “Joy is the Serious Business of Heaven” was selected as an Honorable Mention by Gardner Dozois in his Year’s Best SF.
• An invitation from the Mars Society to give my Mars talk at their annual convention (August 5-8 in Dayton, Ohio). I’ll be presenting to the whole convention right after Robert Zubrin opens the event!
• Page proofs for my story in Esther Friesner’s “werewolves in suburbia” anthology Fangs for the Mammaries (don’t blame me, or Esther, for the title; it was the winner of a contest).
• A short story rejection, just to keep me humble.

We’re only at home for two days. On Friday we head to Seattle for the Clarion West party and another session with the Washington Aerospace Scholars. Two weeks after that I’m off to the Washington Coast to be “writer guru,” along with Jay Lake, at the annual Writers’ Weekend. Two weeks after that is the Mars Society convention, and three weeks after that we leave for Australia! Whee!

Sometimes I blog a lot. This hasn’t been one of those times.

Not too long after returning from Wiscon I traveled back to Wisconsin for my mother’s funeral (technically a memorial service, I suppose, as there was no casket). It went very well — over 125 people attended, and there was more laughter than tears during the service. It’s clear she touched a lot of lives. I learned a few things about her that I’d never known, or had forgotten, including that she wrote a play about the last days of Spinoza that was given a reading by the Milwaukee Rep.

My aunt (Mom’s younger sister) told a story about visiting my mother when I was two years old. Apparently I was not being very cooperative in eating my dinner, and Mom gently upended the bowl of spaghetti on my head. As I sat stunned, Mom commented to her sister “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

After the funeral all of the relatives (me, Dad, my aunt and uncle, and great-aunt Millie), plus family friend and cookbook author Alamelu Vairavan, visited the spectacular Quadracci Pavilion of the Milwaukee Art Museum, which I’d not visited before. While we were there we saw the Blue Angels practicing for the following weekend’s air show, which utterly delighted tiny Aunt Millie.

Since the funeral I’ve been dealing with occasional bouts of free-floating grief, especially during the scene in Toy Story 3 where Andy’s mother says she wishes she could be his mom forever. (Excellent movie, though.) I’ve been generally low in energy and unfocused, but part of this could be the amount of travel we’ve been doing and the gray and chilly weather we’ve been having. But today’s weather has been gorgeous and I’m working to improve my mood by tackling my daunting to-do list. For example, this blog post.

Last weekend we took the train to Seattle. The excuse for the trip was that I was presenting my Mars talk to the Washington Aerospace Scholars (high school juniors interested in science, technology, engineering and math), but we took the opportunity to stay at a hotel in Pioneer Square and play Seattle tourist. In addition to visiting the Concorde, Air Force One, and the Curiosity mars rover at the Museum of Flight, we took a ghost walk of Pike Place Market and a “coffee crawl;” it was cool to see the back sides of some things and get a little bit of education about Seattle history and coffee. We also had a delightful dinner and excellent dim sum with fan friends. I also finished writing a creepy story on the train. It was over too quickly, but we’ll be back in a couple of weeks (July 9-11) for a Clarion West party and another Mars talk to a different group of Washington Aerospace Scholars.

Next week we’re heading to Chicago for the annual gay square dance convention. Whee!

I’m at the airport again (it seems that’s the only time I have for sitting and blogging these days), heading back to Milwaukee for my mother’s funeral. I’m still pretty much okay. I didn’t really cry hard until I heard the opening of “What a Good Boy” by Barenaked Ladies.

Grief is a funny thing. It sneaks up on you sometimes.

Apart from the whole business with my mother, I had a great trip. Three weeks and five cities, or 13 cities if you count every one we stopped at on our various airplanes. I’ve spent much of the intervening week digging out from under the stuff that wasn’t done during that time, including resubmitting a bunch of stories that were rejected. I also logged in some publications: the audio version of of “The Last McDougal’s” appeared in podcast Escape Pod 240, “A Passion for Art” appeared in magazine Interzone 228, and “Second Chance” appeared in anthology Alembical 2. Photos and videos of the Nebula Awards Weekend have also been posted, including a video of my keynote address.

Wiscon continues to be one of my favorite conventions, with some of my favorite people. I participated in the Writers’ Workshop, I was on two hilarious panels: “Let’s Build a World,” in which we wound up with a Klein-bottle world inhabited by solipsistic LoLcats who reproduce through music and fetishize prime numbers, and then sketched out the plot of “I Can Haz Musical! The Musical” set on that world (see LJ user “coraa”‘s panel notes for more details); and “Pshaw! Psst! Argh!,” in which we discussed sound effects in writing and I managed to make one of the audience members literally fall over laughing by positing the torturer Severian in Book of the New Sun grimly lopping off someone’s head, which then bounces down the steps with a “doink, doink, doink.” Amy Thomson’s proposal of a fantasy language consisting of nothing but apostrophes was also memorable.

I also gave my Mars talk to a small but packed room. Later in the convention I overheard someone praising it to someone else in the elevator. People really seem to like it, and at the Mid-Career Writers’ Gathering I got some great advice about how to parlay this brush with near-fame into writing success. It will mean selling myself much harder than I’m usually comfortable with, but you know what they say about the turtle, which makes progress only when it sticks its neck out.

Apart from that I spent most of the time hanging out with friends old and new, starting with the guests-of-honor reading at A Room Of One’s Own bookstore (“AROOO!”) and ending with shooting pool at the Great Dane. In between there were show tunes, readings, many fine dinners, and hallway conversations galore. I didn’t spend any money on books but I still came home with three more than I’d started with. I also received a couple of cool invitations which I will discuss more in due course.

Wiscon is too short. That’s all there is to it.

My mother passed away at about 3:00 this afternoon.

She was diagnosed with bladder cancer at about this time last year, and decided that she did not want any kind of treatment for it. Although this is not the course of action either my father or I would have wished, Mom was never the type to let anyone else tell her what to do. She died as she lived, on her own terms.

When we visited Milwaukee before Wiscon, Mom was suffering from an extended bout of stomach flu. During the time I was there she mostly sat and watched TV, while Dad and I talked about quantum physics or what have you. Then, while I was at the convention, she finally went to the doctor and it was determined that the “flu” was actually kidney failure caused by the cancer. She went into hospice at that time, though due to an email snafu I didn’t find out about it until Tuesday morning when we were about to come home from the convention.

We took one extra day in Milwaukee before heading home. Kidney failure isn’t a bad way to die; you just spend more and more time asleep until you simply don’t wake up. Talking with Mom in the hospice was like talking to a toddler who’s up way past her bedtime; she’d exchange a few words and then drift off. She received excellent care and obviously wasn’t feeling anything worse than mild discomfort.

The hospice was a lot more pleasant than visiting Jay or Mark in the hospital, because there was no tension, no worry, no fear that something worse might happen. The worst had already happened and now it was just a matter of managing the end game.

Dad is doing okay. He’s sad, of course, but also relieved. We’ve known for almost a year that this was coming and pretty much how it would go, and we all got to say goodbye. There wasn’t any deathbed drama with relatives or unfinished business. Even the medical bills are all taken care of. He said to me several times “she won,” which at first I thought meant she’d finally won the argument about whether or not to treat the cancer, but after a while I realized that he meant she’d gotten the quiet, pain-free death she’d wanted instead of a long drawn-out agonizing medical battle.

Here’s the obituary he wrote for her:

Marilyn Malka Levine was born on April 11, 1933 to Maurice and Frieda Gordon in Brooklyn New York. She attended public schools in Queens and met the man who was to become her husband in the spring of 1953 in a required dance class at Queens College of the City University of New York. At the end of the semester, at their first date, they decided that their union could be a solid one. One year later, after being graduated on June 9th they married on June 13, 1954 and moved to Syracuse. Marilyn was awarded an informal degree of P. H. T. (Putting Hubby Through) in 1959 and the adventure continued.

She began her first company “The Look-it-up Lady” in 1963 when it was clear that her son David D. was safe to go without diapers. She did manual data searches for clients in these pre-computer days. Her company name changed to “Doctor Levine’s Information Machine” with the award of her Doctorate from UWM’s School of Education. By this time it was becoming clear that Boolean Searches were possible in publicly accessible databases using terminals and the early dial-up data networks. Her company name changed to “Information Express” and remained that for about a decade.

She was convinced that Librarians could be innovators in data searching and offered courses to librarians using the good offices of UWM’s school of Engineering Extension. For several years it was clear that, if a librarian in southeast Wisconsin could generate a Boolean Search, she had learned how to do it by attending one of Marilyn’s classes. With the advent of services like Google, of course, much of that changed.

A strong advocate of free enterprise, Marilyn brought together, in June of 1987, 26 members to a meeting in Milwaukee to form the AIIP (the Association of Independent Information Professionals). She was the group’s first president. The organization has since grown to more than 500 members and is now worldwide.

In 1993 Marilyn sold the rights to the Information Express title to a California company and turned her attention to the field of Art. She opened the Bay View Gallery and ran it for about seven years until her retirement in 2000.

Marilyn holds a patent on a Phonic Keyboard. Intellectual discourse in the family continues. Small talk at home involves questions about the nature of a deity, whether or not there is a difference between god and nature, how much energy is required to actually store a singe “bit” of information and what, if anything, occurs in the universe when a new idea is created or the last copy of an old idea is destroyed.

Marilyn will be missed. She is survived by her husband Leonard just a few days short of 56 years of marriage and her son David.

I know that she was very proud of me.

I’m now at the Albuquerque airport, on the way from Taos NM to Milwaukee WI for the third leg of this three-week five-city tour. Kate’s in New York for another couple of days, then will meet up with me in Milwaukee, after which we will proceed to Wiscon by car.

This is the second time this year I’ve flown to a desert state, driven to an isolated location three hours from the nearest airport, and spent an extended period confined with a small group of smart people of debatable sanity. The first time was my trip to “Mars” (six people, two weeks); this time was the Rio Hondo writers’ workshop (twelve people, one week).

The food at Rio Hondo was much better.

The writers invited to Rio Hondo included Karen Joy Fowler, Daniel Abraham, Alex Jablakow, James Patrick Kelly, Diana Rowland, and our hosts Maureen McHugh and Walter Jon Williams. The primary purpose of the workshop is critique, but the week also included lots of schmoozing, talking about writing, hiking and touristing, and eating. Oh, how we ate. Walter and Maureen did most of the cooking, but Kristin Livdahl and I took the lead on a dinner each, and the food was both ambitious and fabulous. I was actually more intimidated by the prospect of cooking for this group than by the prospect of critiquing or being critiqued by them, but my main dish of Broccoli and Tofu in Spicy Peanut Sauce was well-received. Karen even asked for the recipe.

The workshop was held in the Snow Bear Condominiums, which boasted comfortable beds, plenty of hot water, well-equipped kitchens, and breathtaking views both down the mountain (trees, rock formations, pristine streams, deer, and marmots) and up the mountain (looming cliff down which pebbles continually rattled). On the last night a small tree fell down the cliff, coming to rest against the battered fence just above my room. With luck the Snow Bear will still be there next year.

A typical day at Rio Hondo went as follows. Morning: group critique of two stories. Afternoon: reading stories, hiking in the mountains, touristing around the area, cooking, and napping. Evening: chatting, watching episodes of Middleman, or playing Thing, all lubricated with appropriate amounts of alcohol. Kind of like Clarion but without the lecture or the pressure to produce a story a week (though many of us did spend a lot of time putting down new words, especially those facing deadlines). I didn’t do very much new writing but I did some research and a lot of thinking about my current project.

It was an honor, a privilege, and a great learning experience to have the opportunity to read these writers’ drafts with a critical eye. In many cases I got more out of the reading than I was able to give in critique, but I hope I was able to provide some useful feedback. I also learned that there’s no story that’s so good that eleven insightful writers can’t talk for an hour about how it can be improved. All of these pieces were, I think, publishable as they are, but just about all of them received at least one of those “ding!” comments that points the author in a direction that can make the story truly outstanding.

I got some excellent feedback on my own current project, which I am currently trying to assimilate. I need to keep in mind that all of the other stories, some of which were superb, got just as many comments as mine did, and I need to find a way to incorporate all of this feedback in a way that moves the story in the direction I want it to go. Once I decide what that is.

I also got some very good advice about my career, and I intend to get a lot more serious about writing and marketing my work once I get home, possibly including some difficult decisions. Though there’s lots of travel to come in June and July, and in August we head to Australia for a month. The days truly are just packed.

I’m now at the Houston airport, heading from Orlando (Nebulas) to Taos NM (Rio Hondo writers’ workshop) for the second leg of this three-week five-city tour. Kate’s still in Orlando for a couple of days, then will go to New York for a week before we meet up again in Milwaukee before Wiscon.

Saturday morning and afternoon at the Nebulas were mostly spent in programming — Future of Publishing, Finances For Writers, Social Networking, that sort of thing — and schmoozing. Best quote of the morning was from Finances For Writers: “The IRS won’t let you take off the dress you bought for the Nebulas.” (!?!) NASA TV was on the TV in the lobby 24/7 and I commented to someone else in the elevator that many of the things the astronauts get to do, even apart from going to space, are things the rest of us would kill for, such as commuting to their jobs via fighter jet. Another fellow in the elevator, not a SFWA person, commented that the pilot was a friend of his. This guy is the manager of the Solid Rocket Booster program, staying in our hotel for the launch. He’ll be going home after the SRBs are fished out of the ocean and sent back for refurbishment. ::gawp::

Saturday evening was the Nebula Awards Banquet, of course. The bad news is that I didn’t win a Nebula. The good news is that I didn’t lose a Nebula, either, though I think I was may have been nearly as nervous waiting for my speech as I have been as a nominee. I missed the pre-banquet milling and swilling in favor of making sure my audio-video equipment was properly set up, but I was very glad of that trade-off when my speech was the only audio-video presentation of the evening that went off without a serious glitch.

Kate tells me I was a little nervous and stammery at the beginning of the speech but I soon found my footing and delivered the rest of it fast but smooth. (The “fast” part was appreciated by the audience because the ceremony was running way behind schedule and the nominees had already gnawed their fingernails all the way to the collarbone.) I wasn’t feeling much of a reaction from the audience as I spoke, but I did get laughs in the right places and after the ceremony the praises were effusive. Connie Willis, Sheila Williams, Patrick Neilsen Hayden, Betsy Wollheim, and many others all went out of their way to say it was the best Nebula keynote they’d seen, using words like “riveting.”

(If you haven’t yet seen the list of Nebula winners, it’s here, and I must say I’m generally quite pleased with the results.)

After the ceremony and photographs we found ourselves out on the deck with most of the winners. So thrilled to see Eugie Foster still stunned by her win, after she’d said on the bus to the shuttle launch that she hadn’t even prepared a speech. Some wag — might have been China Miéville — suggested that all the winners should be required to get Nebula tattoos. “Tramp stamp!” said someone, but I countered that would only be appropriate for an urban fantasy — as Paolo Bacigalupi had won with a dystopian SF novel it should be on the neck, or perhaps forehead. This led to the idea of Nebula brands, where the winners would be branded immediately upon receipt of the award. (“And the Nebula goes to…” ::rotates brand in brazier of hot coals::) It would certainly make losing the award a lot more palatable.

I didn’t sleep well at all; maybe I was still wired from the banquet. I really do enjoy public speaking, and in fact I have already delivered variants of this same speech before packed houses at Ignite Portland, Potlatch, and Google so I should have been confident, but I think this was the toughest audience of all. Not to mention I was wearing my tux, which always induces nervousness. I think it’s soaked up pheremones from all the other nerve-wracking events I’ve worn it to, including my wedding, Writers of the Future, three Hugo ceremonies, and the Nebulas. Maybe I’ll get a nap on the flight from Houston to Albuquerque.

Sunday morning I gave a brief Q&A about my trip to Mars, because there wasn’t time for questions during the banquet. Only a few people showed up, but it was also streamed to the Internet and there were some good questions. Then we raced to the airport, where I discovered the addition of the Nebula freebies bag had pushed my checked luggage over the weight limit. Fortunately the removal of a large handful of books brought it down far enough to pass, and there was just barely room for them in my carry-on. Good thing I didn’t win a Nebula — those suckers are heavy!

The Science Fiction Writers of America’s annual Nebula Awards weekend started yesterday, and indeed we left home yesterday, but it doesn’t count because the entire day was consumed by travel. But everything went smoothly and we arrived at the hotel around 1:00 AM as expected and were settled and asleep by 2:00.

We awoke this morning at 7:00 to catch the bus to the Space Shuttle launch viewing area. There we met up with the Nebula folks, notably including Mary Robinette Kowal, Cat Valente, Eugie Foster, Laura Anne Gilman, and Jerry Oltion who was wearing the same T-shirt as I (the two-sided one with cats wearing NASA space suits), the bitch.

The part of Kaylee will be played today by Laura Anne Gilman

There was some confusion as to who was on which bus. The Nebula nominees and podium staff, including myself, were on the Short Bus to the VIPs’ Banana Creek launch viewing area, but Kate had been left off the Short Bus list and it seemed that she would have to go to the Causeway viewing area with the hoi polloi. But at the very last minute she was allowed on, yay. Even though our buses didn’t actually get rolling until nearly 10:00, we still got an earlier start than most and encountered no traffic on the way to Banana Creek nor any crowds once we arrived.

The Banana Creek viewing area is where the astronauts’ families and other VIPs watch the launches from. In addition to bleachers for a couple of thousand people and parking for their buses, it also includes the Saturn Building, a major visitor center containing a nearly-full-size replica of a Saturn V booster and many mockups, prototypes, and actual space hardware from the Apollo missions. Also bathrooms, a gift shop, and both permanent and temporary snack bars — all very welcome.

Oh, so that’s why they call it the Saturn Building

We spent a couple of hours gawking at the exhibits, then had a pretty decent lunch before heading out to the bleachers to claim seats. We’d been warned that the bleachers would fill up starting about two hours before launch, and indeed by the time we (Laura Anne, Kate, and I, later joined by Jane Jewell and Peter Heck) got out there more than three-quarters of the seats were taken. But as the afternoon wore on, people just packed in tighter and tighter. It was sunny but not unreasonably hot, especially since all the women in the party had brought parasols.

LEM cockpit mockup

The actual Apollo 14 command module, gosh wow

It took about three hours to get through the last hour of the countdown, with several scheduled holds and a search for a missing ball bearing, but no major problems occurred and the final countdown from 10 started exactly as scheduled.

T minus 26:11 plus me

I knew exactly what to expect from all the times I’d seen launches on video, including the rushing sound of the water they dump to lessen the blast, the rumble of the engines, and the pants-flapping rush of air and sound that follows a minute behind the sight of the launch. The one thing nothing had prepared me for was how bright the exhaust was. It was nearly as bright as the sun — hard to watch, yet impossible to look away. This can’t be captured on film or video, of course.

The shuttle climbed quickly. I alternated watching through binoculars, naked eye, and camera. Through the binoculars I saw the solid rocket boosters separate and fall away, just barely visible as a couple of tumbling flecks of white. Eventually that massive searing flame was reduced to a tiny bright dot. The Shuttle had become a star. A rising star, something I’d never seen before. It left behind a column of smoke which quickly dissipated, and swarms of disturbed birds.

The huge crowd that had taken all day to build up now all wanted to leave at once. Our bus was poised for a quick getaway, though we nearly lost a wheelchair when the driver failed to lock the back door, so we avoided much of the traffic. Even so it still took a couple of hours to get back to the hotel. Then it was nap time.

So we spent all day on a show that was over in about ten minutes. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Although I must confess that, space geek though I may be, I wasn’t as bowled over by the experience as some. It was still pretty freaking impressive, both the sight and sound and the knowledge that, as John Scalzi said on Twitter, we humans can actually throw people all the way into space and get them back again safely. Hard to come up with anything fictional that’s quite that awe-inspiring.

Go, baby, go!

After a bite of dinner provided by the Nebula committee, I found that I’d been assigned a spot next to Joe Haldeman at the mass autograph signing. I hadn’t signed up for a spot, but I duly took my place and actually signed a couple of autographs. After that was the traditional milling and swilling and the presentation of pins and certificates to the nominees. Then Grand Master Joe Haldeman and Author Emeritus Neal Barrett Jr. were called up to the podium to receive gifts from the committee. To my surprise, my name was also called. As the presenter of the Keynote Address I received a delightful surfboard-styled cribbage board. Cool.