David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Word count: 2861 | Since last entry: 2861

Worked with the organizer today. Got the dining room table whipped back into shape, and worked on sorting and properly storing my old convention badges. I got rid of all the old program books and progress reports a few decluttering sessions ago, but decided that I wanted to keep one memento from each convention, and as badges are pretty small that’s what I kept. I had them all pinned to strips of fabric on the wall, but we ran out of wall a while ago and the rest just got thrown into a box. Today I learned that “a while ago” was actually 1995. Where does the time go?

After considering several storage options, I wound up getting a bunch of postcard-sized plastic envelopes and cardboard boxes from The 2 Buds, which specializes in storage solutions for postcard collectors. Each badge goes in an envelope, backed up with a blank postcard with the convention name and date, then they all line up neatly in the box. It worked well and we got through all of the badges on the wall (1975-1995). Based on the number of envelopes left in the package, that was about 90 conventions. Wow. Lotta memories there. I’ll try to put in an hour a day on sorting and storing the badges in the box (1995-present); I figure it’ll take about a week at that rate.

Apart from that…

Got the vampire story finished and in the mail. Managed to slim it down from 8400 words to 6900 without losing its heart or flavor. I’m now working on a new story, a “cosy catastrophe” in which everyone dies (and I mean everyone) but the ending is still, I hope, reasonably happy.

I have a short essay in the latest “Mind Meld” at SF Signal. This one’s about taboos in SF.

I will be giving a talk at the Library of Congress at noon on April 9, part of their “What If…” series. More details as I have them.

Spent the entire day yesterday upgrading the iMac to OS X Leopard. The OS install itself went quickly and cleanly, but backing everything up (twice!), migrating in all the files from the backup after the install, and downloading two years’ worth of updates took about ten hours.

After the upgrade, everything seems to be working except two obscure utilities: ClickBook and TiVoDecode Manager.

ClickBook is essential to the production of Bento, and didn’t even launch under Leopard 1.5.6. I bought an upgrade to a new 4.0 version, which works, but has some problems with the 4-up layout we use. (It lays out each page in the order 3, 4, 1, 2 instead of 1, 2, 3, 4 as you’d expect.) I’ve sent in a support ticket.

I’ve been using TiVoDecode Manager 2.1 to archive The Amazing Race to DVD. Unfortunately neither 2.1 nor the Leopard-specific 3.0 version works on my computer, and from what I’ve gleaned online I’m not the only one. I even tried using 2.1 on another Mac, still running Tiger, and it failed there too (!?). Searching around online I found a number of alternatives, including iTiVo, which is based on the TiVoDecode Manager code base but is under extremely active development. So far it seems to be the best replacement, though I’m still trying to find a combination of parameter settings that does exactly what I want.

The TiVo thing took up the entire afternoon and well into the evening and, well, early morning as well, because each download-and-decode attempt takes one or two hours. I did manage to get in some writing time, though; one must have one’s priorities.

Apart from those two problems I’m generally quite impressed with Leopard. Time Machine has already saved my bacon once; I accidentally deleted a whole directory of files and was able to immediately recover all but the newest one (and that one can easily be reproduced). Leopard FTW!

My story “At the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of Uncle Teco’s Homebrew Gravitics Club” has been posted on the Reno in 2011 Worldcon bid website. Bid chair Patty Wells announced online:

We have been using articles, and now a story, in our New Frontiers section to help push our thinking on what are the new frontiers, but also to add in some of the content we always wished would show up on websites. A story by David Levine always falls into this category, as do the other material we’ve run, and we thank our contributors.

http://www.rcfi.org/nf-levine.php

Word count: 6844 | Since last entry: 2637

I’m into the home stretch on the vampire story; it should be done today or tomorrow (which is good, because I need to send it to critique on Saturday at the latest). It’s already passed the 6000-word limit for the target market, but I hope that once I’m done I’ll be able to go back and cut a couple thousand words out.

Meanwhile, I have some other minor writing news to report:

• SF Signal has a regular feature called “Mind Meld” in which they ask a number of writers to contribute short essays on a given topic. I’m participating in the latest Mind Meld, on the topic “what books and writers have influenced you and what influences do you hope to have on future writers.” Other participants include Tobias Buckell, Mike Resnick, and Jay Lake.
• I learned from this blog post that my story “Firewall” has been translated into Chinese, in the magazine “SF King”. This was, shall we say, a surprise to both me and my editors. It’s the first time, to my knowledge, that I’ve been pirated, and I’m actually kind of proud, in a strange way. I found a contact email for the editor, and got this response: “We tried to get touch with you,but failed,which is really a pity. Now we will send you the copy of our magazine in which you can find your fiction.” We shall see. Ironically, the first sentence of the story is “It started in China, as I’d always feared it would.” (You can read the whole thing here.)
• I learned from another blog post that the February issue of Realms of Fantasy was briefly reviewed in Locus (I had read the issue but managed to miss that somehow.) Rich Horton led off the review with my story “Joy is the Serious Business of Heaven,” which he called “a nice humorous story.”
• I received payment for my story “Fair Play” from Circlet Press, and galleys of my story “Midnight at the Center Court” from Witch Way to the Mall.
• I’m working on a Sekrit Projekt which is extremely cool and unlike any other kind of writing I’ve ever done. (This is not related to the other Sekrit Projekt I was working on earlier this month, which wasn’t writing-related.)

Now I’m off to Potlatch, with a few days of hanging around in the Bay Area afterwards. See some of you there!

Got new glasses yesterday. The prescription in the left eye is a lot stronger and I can’t see very well with that eye yet. I’ll give it a week.

Word count: 4207 | Since last entry: 1323

Imagine this: it’s 1978, you’re a Trekkie, and you’ve just learned that, after a decade off the air, they’re making a movie of Star Trek.

Starring Jerry Lewis as Captain Kirk.

Punch in the gut, right?

That’s how I felt when I saw the trailer for the new Land of the Lost movie starring Will Ferrell. Oh. My. God.

Okay, Land of the Lost was a dopey 1970s Saturday morning TV show. But it was good, dammit. They had scripts by Larry Niven, Theodore Sturgeon, Ben Bova, and David Gerrold, which introduced concepts like time loops and closed universes to what had, I’m sure, originally been intended as an unexceptional kids’ show with dinosaurs. Remaking it as a stupidity-comedy with the star of Elf and Anchorman and Blades of Glory is… well, it’s like a bad, bad movie of a fondly remembered book. Yes, the book is still there, but the movie swamps it in the public consciousness and poisons one’s memories.

Feh, I say. Feh and feh.

(Footnote: Yes, I liked Ferrell in Stranger than Fiction. But the trailer for Land of the Lost makes clear that this is not, shall we say, a film in that mode.)

(Footnote 2: For more information on the real Land of the Lost:
http://www.landofthelost.com/faq.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Lost_(1974_TV_series))

I had to draw this diagram for my own sanity, but I thought it might be interesting to you so I’m posting it as well (via the “entry” script).