David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

We’ve been back from DC for most of a week and I’m still just finding my feet, but here are a few brief observations anyway.

My talk at the Library of Congress before the convention went very well, despite the fact that they moved it to a different room at the last minute and put the sign announcing the change outside the new room, and there was another event with free food at the same time which took away many of the people who might otherwise have attended. We wound up with about 20 people all told, most of them square dancers who were also in DC for the convention.

Although I felt incredibly underprepared, that thing in my head that takes over when I have to do public speaking did its job and the presentation came off smashingly. Some of the square dancing librarians in attendance were so excited they were talking about inviting me to speak at an ALA conference. I’d love to, and I hope it really happens. I’m also going to try to sell the talk as a non-fiction article.

I’d originally planned to speak without visual aids, but at the last minute I was inspired by a talk at TED.com and decided to put together a PowerPoint slide show consisting only of images. It worked great, even though I had to clutch the projector cable in my hand all through the talk to keep the image from turning magenta. I also used PowerPoint to record the talk, but unfortunately it only recorded the first 10-20 seconds of audio per slide. Which is a real shame, because the bits that did get recorded sound fabulous.

The convention itself was superbly run and featured a lot of great dancing, including several unusual specialty tips: the Cipher tip with calls delivered as spoonerisms or riddles, a Mirror tip that swapped left for right (if your square breaks down during a Mirror tip, is that seven years bad luck?), and an hour of six-couple “rectangle dancing.” Allowing people to choose their table mates for the banquet, then placing the tables at random, was an excellent innovation. The one negative comment I have was that the Fun Badge Tour buses were given insufficient directions, which (together with a mechanical breakdown) caused us to miss an entire stop on the tour and wound up with our bus being so late for the last stop we had to dance it by ourselves. We had fun anyway.

We also visited the Newseum (highly recommended), the Spy Museum (only okay, especially because it was so crowded that day) and the Smithsonian Natural History museum (I saw so many skeletons there that for a few hours thereafter all the people looked like skeletons with skin and bones on) and ate many fabulous meals. The convention was right at the Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan subway stop (and why are the first two separated by a hyphen, but the last two by a slash?) and there were dozens of great ethnic restaurants within one block. Probably the best meal was the Afghan dinner we had on the first night, but none of them was less than good.

• Friday morning: Writers Workshop for those who have already signed up (I’m moderating).
• Friday 9-10:30pm, Senate B: Turns out this IS your Dad’s SF/F. Panel with me, Jane Acheson, Chip Hitchcock, and Brad Lyau (I’m moderating).
• Saturday 10-11:30am, Room of One’s Own: Attendees Receive Free Cyborg Unicorn. Readings with me, Rosalyn Berne, Greer Gilman, Nnedi Okorafor, and Catherynne M. Valente.
• Sunday 2:30-4:00pm, Wisconsin: The Rules: Use or Abuse Them. Panel with me, Ellen Klages, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Joan Vinge, and Patricia Wrede (I’m moderating).
• Sunday 4:00-5:30pm, Caucus: Humor in Feminist Speculative Fiction. Panel with me, Charlie Anders, Heather Lindsley, and Pan Morigan (I’m moderating).
• Monday 11:30am-1:00pm, Capitol/Wisconsin: The SignOut. I’ll be signing copies of Space Magic.

Looks like they believed me when I said I enjoy moderating!

I’ll be appearing on a panel at Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham tomorrow, Thursday April 16, 6-8pm, as part of National Library Week. It’s called “Worlds Connect with Science Fiction” and other panelists include Aimee Amodio, Tina Connolly, and M.K. Hobson. The panel will be held in the Bob Scott Room in the MHCC Library and is free and open to the public.

Hope to see you there!

Heading for Washington DC for the annual gay square dance convention. As is typical with large convention hotels, they charge an arm and another arm for network access, so I may be offline for the next week.

Until then, have a look at some of my photos from Radcon, which I didn’t get around to uploading until recently.

I’d also like to put in a plug for Molly Lewis, aka sweetafton23, the cutest little ukulele player (and the wittiest) you ever did see. We saw her with Jonathan Coulton back in January (you can see a video of that very performance) and you can now buy a couple of her songs as high-quality MP3s. Check her out!

It’s time to play the music! It’s time to light the lights! It’s time to meet the Muppets at the Portland Art Museum’s Whitsell Auditorium!

The NW Film Center is having a special retrospective in May entitled “Muppets, Music, & Magic: Jim Henson’s Legacy”.

“The retrospective presents a treasure trove of Henson’s extraordinarily imaginative work, including TV pilots, shorts, commercials, promotional films, feature films, and rarities galore. To further explore the magic of Henson’s world of fantasy, Emmy Award-winning collaborator Dave Goelz will host ‘Muppet History 101’ and ‘Commercials and Experiments,’ and answer your every question. One of the principal Muppeteers for over 30 years, Goelz has designed and performed dozens of beloved characters, including the Great Gonzo and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew.”

We’ve already bought tickets to the two Dave Goelz presentations on May 2 and 3, and Labyrinth on May 10.

For more information and to buy tickets: http://www.nwfilm.org/screenings/19/152/

No word count in this writing post, because the last couple of weeks has been spent on tasks other than creating new words of prose.

One of the biggies was that I edited my story “Teaching the Pig,” which was critiqued some time ago, and submitted it. This story was generally well-received by my crit group, but I felt it was still lacking something and the critiques were pulling it in all different directions. I finally decided that what it really needed was to take the aliens out and make it a solidly Earth-based story. (The aliens were offstage anyway, and removing them only cut about 200 words, but if the main character is backed by an Earth-based organization rather than benevolent aliens it makes his motivations a bit more suspect.) I didn’t really want to cut the aliens, as the “alien-imposed benevolent dictatorship” angle was the original starting point for the story, but in the end I decided that they were a distraction from the fundamental story of protagonist vs. antagonist and they had to go.

Looking over the critiques this story received, I’m realizing how my own critiques have changed over the years. Many of these crits are focused on small logic or worldbuilding issues, exactly the sort of thing I would have picked at myself ten or even five years ago. But now my focus has broadened… I’m much more prepared to excuse technical errors, even physics errors which would have once thrown me out of the story, as long as the story works. I’d like to think that I’m now “seeing the big picture” rather than “getting soft in my old age.”

The other thing I spent a chunk of time on was writing a pitch for a short story. (This is not normally done for short stories, but this is a special case.) I’m extremely pleased and excited to have this opportunity, and also rather frightened by the thought of participating in such a significant and long-running project. I don’t know if this particular idea will be accepted; the editor likes it but there are some changes that need to be made. I also plan on pitching a few more ideas and I have reasonable hope that one or more of them will eventually be accepted, but I don’t yet know which one(s). Sorry to be so vague, but I’ll provide more details when they’re nailed down (might be a couple of months), and when I do it’ll be a very squee-worthy announcement.

I’ve been sticking to my goal of writing at least 500 words per day (including notes/outlines, or at least one hour of editing) since the beginning of the year. This has generated four new short stories, of which two are already in submission, one critiqued and awaiting edit, and one currently in critique. I’ve also gotten off my duff and resubmitted some rejected stories, and submitted some reprints to audio markets. The end result is that my number of outstanding submissions has more than doubled since the beginning of the year, which should lead to more short story sales this year than last.

One of the audio submissions has already resulted in not only a sale, but a publication. “Babel Probe” appeared on the Drabblecast podcast this week and the response on the Drabblecast message board has been phenomenal (“Kick ass piece of short fiction,” “my favorite fiction podcast episode ever,” “I’ve heard the bulk of the episodes from most of the other story podcasts … hands down the best production of the best story,” “That was freaking awesome. No, seriously. I am considering pulling my subscriptions from a few podcasts that I listen to because I think the short audio fiction thing just peaked. It can only get worse”). All praise is due to the producer of The Drabblecast, Norm Sherman, who performs the story with voices, music, and sound effects that are absolutely perfect. It gave me chills, seriously. Go listen, and put some money in his tip jar.

I’ve also been writing my talk at the Library of Congress (“How The Future Predicts Science Fiction,” noon on April 9, free and open to the public), which I really should be working on right now.

Additional writing-related stuff:

• I received galley proofs and a cover flat for my story “Aggro Radius” in Gamer Fantastic (it comes out in July).
• I was invited to participate in a Science Fiction Panel on Thursday, Apr 16 from 6 to 8 at the Mt. Hood Community College Library, part of National Library Week.
• I won free books in a drawing at SF Signal.

Okay, back to work!

The other day, the folks at Drabblecast (http://www.drabblecast.org) asked if I had any stories under 2500 words. I sent them a few, and then the day before yesterday I received a surprise email: they were doing a podcast with a song relating to Ancient Near Eastern civilization, and could they possibly buy “Babel Probe” right away? They sent me a contract, I sent it back, and the podcast is available TODAY.

It is a most excellent audio performance of the story, with music and sound effects and everything, and you can hear it here or download it from iTunes. FREE!

This is the story for which thepussinboots drew this awesome picture (click to embiggen):

Yesterday was Kate’s birthday. I made her pancakes and fresh-squeezed OJ for breakfast, and bought her a KitchenAid mixer (which I am assured is the only acceptable kitchen appliance to give as a gift to a significant other). She’s been faunching after one for years… I just hope we can find a good place to store it.

In the evening we had a small party, attended by people from all our different communities of friends (writers, fans, square dancers, and, um, Sam and Rory, who are friends via fan Kate Schaefer but are not members of any of the above). We ate pecan pie from the recipe Mary Robinette Kowal had used in Chattanooga, which was tres yum, and played games including jelly-bean relay, charades, and a variant of “telephone” or “exquisite corpse” in which players alternately wrote phrases and drew pictures based on the previous picture/phrase without seeing any of the ones before that. The one that made birthday pie come out of Kate’s nose is shown below (click to embiggen, and again to embiggen again).

The text, in case you can’t read it, goes as follows:

1. Kate is glad to have a birthday party
2. Robespierre celebrates the guillotining of a Conehead
3. Bastille day for coneheads
4. Some monks assault the castle; others juggle; some lose their heads