David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Word count: 6753 | Since last entry: 6753

Fourth of July already!?

Went to the Iron Springs Writers Retreat on the Washington coast, where I was “writer guru” along with Jay Lake. Very strange for me to be Big Name Writer Guy. In addition to leading two critique sessions I also gave two informal talks, one on plotting and one on using sets and props to build character and display emotion. And of course there was much eating and chatting and walking on the beach (though my it was windy on that beach). Jay and I will be doing it again next year, though at a different location.

I also used the retreat to force myself to stop researching and start writing on my Wild Cards story. It worked. I wrote an outline and 1400 words of prose, and have continued to write 500-900 words per day since for a total of 6753 words so far. This is supposed to be a 10,000-word story and at this rate I expect the first draft to come in at about 12,000 words, but I can already see some places to make cuts.

Came home from Iron Springs to find a rejection in my email box from Catastrophia for the story I read at Wiscon. Darn it. Very encouraging rejection, though, and it’s already back in the mail. On the plus side, Space Magic is a finalist for the Endeavour Award and “Firewall” and “Sun Magic, Earth Magic” both got honorable mentions from Gardner Dozois in his Year’s Best SF. (Hmm… never noticed before that the titles of the latter story and my collection form an implied trilogy.)

Way too many of my friends have been in the hospital lately. M’s having a heart valve replaced, P shattered his humerus and collarbone while ice skating, D’s having a quadruple bypass, B was in a very serious car wreck, J’s got cancer, R has had two surgeries for a duodenal ulcer, E was hospitalized for exhaustion… It’s not even the usual “we’re all getting older” thing; every one of those people but R is younger than me. Stop it, y’all.

Yesterday, at Kate’s instigation, was a rock climbing party. Camille Alexa, Tina Connolly, Felicity Shoulders, and Camille’s and Tina’s partners joined us at a local rock gym for a laid-back “rock climbing for novices” evening. None of us had ever climbed before. Much fun and very impressed by everyone, especially Tina’s spider monkey clamber and Felicity’s patented “Falcon Girl” descents. I didn’t reach the top myself, but I did manage to go higher on each ascent. Afterwards: drinks and snacks at Doug Fir.

Leah Cutter is using the halfway point of the year to review her progress on her goals, which strikes me as a fine thing to do. My New Year’s Resolution was to celebrate the holidays with friends; I don’t think we did anything for the Vernal Equinox but we’ll be attending a potluck tonight for the Fourth of July. Other goals for the year are to write every day, exercise three times a week, watch what I eat, and keep the house clean and decluttered, and I’ve been doing quite well on those (except for the exercise, but I have been managing at least two sessions most weeks except when traveling). I’ve also sold two stories, which puts me on track for my usual four sales a year.

Looking into the future, I’ll be in Seattle July 9-11, visiting with Janna Silverstein and Mark and Elizabeth Bourne and attending Elizabeth Bear’s Clarion West party at Jordin and Mary Kay Kare’s. See some of you there!

Now it can be told: Space Magic, my first collection of short stories, is a finalist for the Endeavour Award!

The Endeavour is an award for a science fiction or fantasy book written by a Pacific Northwest author, and is presented each year at OryCon.

The other finalists for 2009 are Anathem by Neal Stephenson, Ill Met in the Arena by Dave Duncan, Long Walks, Last Flights and Other Stories by Ken Scholes, and A World Too Near: Book Two of the Entire and the Rose by Kay Kenyon. (Tough competition! It’s an honor just to be nominated.) The judges for this year, who will select the recipient from among the finalists, are Joe Haldeman, John Helfers, and Sarah Zettel.

If you do not yet own a copy of my newly-award-nominated book, you can correct that little problem at Wheatland Press. They’re even having a sale right now: buy two books, get one free!

Space Magic is also available in a limited hardcover edition of 100 copies, signed and numbered, exclusively from Wrigley-Cross Books.

Whee!

Right. There’s only one way to stop myself from obsessively researching this story and force myself to begin drafting the damn thing. I am kidnapping myself and squirreling myself away in an undisclosed location without access to the Internet or any other research materials.

Well, not really. But almost.

The fact is that I am, along with Jay Lake, “Writer Guru” at the Iron Springs Writers’ Retreat on the Washington coast, which begins tomorrow. It should be a very cool weekend of hanging out with writers, critiquing, and writing. There is no Internet or cell phone service, so if you have anything I need to know before Sunday you’d better let me know now.

I mean to come home with at least 1500 words of draft on the new story.

In other news, the podcast of “I Hold My Father’s Paws” from Beam Me Up has been re-posted in their archive. And the oil tank in the back yard has been successfully decomissioned… turns out it was not leaking, which means it took only a half-day and less than $1000 to drain, fill with gravel, and bury for future archaeologists to puzzle over. (Whew.)

I also got a rejection on the alien pupa story, just to keep me humble after the Analog sale, and sent it off to the next market in line, which just happened to be Analog. Not really expecting lightning to strike twice, but one never know, do one?

I am exceedingly proud to announce that I just sold short story “Teaching the Pig to Sing” to Analog, my first sale to that market. No idea when it will come out, though if I know anything about print magazine publishing it will probably not be until 2010 or maybe even 2011.

This story started as an idea I had for Federations, but December got kind of crazy and I didn’t even start writing it until after the deadline for that anthology. It evolved quite a bit in the process of drafting and editing, and I finally wound up taking out the alien federation altogether, leaving it as a character-focused story of Earth politics.

I’ve been sending stories to Stan Schmidt for over ten years now. Analog is the oldest continually-published SF magazine and has the largest circulation of any print SF magazine. I don’t know that this is particularly an “Analog story” but I guess Stan liked it.

Does one sale make me a member of the Analog Mafia?

Saw Up tonight, with square dance friends Bo and Don. Marvelous, as everyone has said, though I wish I hadn’t seen the trailer because it contained spoilers (mild though they were). We saw it at the newly-remodeled Roseway in glorious digital 3-D and I was amazed by the lifelike sharpness and clarity. Every Pixar film shows off a new technology (it was water in Finding Nemo, fur in Monsters Inc) and in Up I think it was clouds and lightning. Also, unlike Caroline, the 3-D added to the experience and was never egregious.

After the film we went out to the “cart pod” at 12th and Hawthorne for dinner. Portland is apparently an epicenter of food cart cuisine right now. The “hawker centers” were something I really loved about Singapore, and we really wanted to try this “cart pod,” which doesn’t open until 8pm and runs until 3am. For my main course I had poutine at Potato Champion, which wasn’t as good as the poutine we had at Frites Alors in Montreal (too much pepper in the gravy, I thought, though the base fries were quite nice). It did not come with a side of statins, though it should have. I considered destroying any remaining fragments of healthiness with a fried pie from Whiffie’s for dessert, but sanity prevailed and I just had a few bites of Kate’s chocolate-and-pear crepe from Perierra Creperie. The crepes were the real winner of the evening; several in the party had one and they were all fabulous. Will go again, I’m sure.

Tomorrow, we hit the gym first thing.

Circlet Press’s anthology Up for Grabs, including my humorous SF erotica short-short story “Fair Play,” is now available! It’s an ebook and you can buy it from circlet.com as a PDF (currently on sale for only five bucks). Click the “More Details” link there for other ebook formats, including Kindle, epub, Palm, and HTML. Warning: explicit sexual content. (My story is sexual, but not as explicit as some of the others.)

This story was originally written as a “no exposition” exercise at Clarion West. I wrote eight stories at Clarion and so far four of them have sold, two are trunked, and two still await revision and submission.