David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Since my last post…

• The December Internet Review of Science Fiction was posted, including Greg Beatty’s long and thoughtful review of Space Magic. “[T]his collection makes it clear that David D. Levine is a writer to watch.”
• The December Locus arrived, including Gardner Dozois’s review of Transhuman: “There are probably no award-winners in [this anthology], but there is a respectable amount of good solid core SF. Best story here is by David D. Levine, but there are also good stories by Mark L. Van Name, Paul Chafe, Sarah A. Hoyt, Wen Spencer, and others.” I’ll take it.
• Locus also included the annual Forthcoming Books section, which told me that both Gamer Fantastic and Witch Way to the Mall will be published in July 2009. I’d been wondering when those were coming out. Also, Transhuman is going to be reissued as a mass-market paperback in April 2009.
• There was also a photo of me and Lou Anders at World Fantasy Con on page 5. In color, no less!
• I received my contributor’s copies of the February 2009 issue of Realms of Fantasy, including my story “Joy is the Serious Business of Heaven.” I love, love, love the illustration they gave it.
• The audio version of “Sun Magic, Earth Magic” (ably read by BCS editor Scott H. Andrews) was posted at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It’s also available from iTunes.
• A five-minute video of me blabbering incoherently, recorded by Bill Johnson of Willamette Writers at OryCon, was posted on YouTube. I thought it would be an interview, but once the camera was rolling I was informed that, no, I should just talk about whatever I wanted. I had nothing prepared. *cringe* Other writers fared better.
• I learned that Aeon Magazine, the next issue of which was going to contain my story “The True Story of Merganther’s Run,” is suspending publication. I think this is the first time I’ve “killed” a market. However, the story is supposed to appear in an anthology, The End of an Aeon, some time in 2009.

(Sorry to use bullet points in a blog post, but I was a technical writer for 15 years and sometimes I revert to type.)

In addition to all that, there have been several Real Life issues which are annoying and mildly worrying. We have options, though, and there’s nothing to get too concerned about, I hope. I have a list of seven “items I am waiting for”, three of which have notations such as “aargh!” next to them.

We leave for Germany today. Um, did I mention that? Our itinerary:

• December 5-6: fly Portland to Frankfurt
• December 6: Nuremberg
• December 7-14: Cruising the Danube on the Viking Spirit (stopping at Nuremberg, Regensburg, Passau, Linz, Melz, and Vienna)
• December 14-16: Vienna
• December 16-20: Munich
• December 20: fly Munich Portland

I’ll post from the road if I can.

My fever broke overnight, and Kate’s on the mend as well. We’re still not 100% but we were recovered enough to have a nice Thanksgiving luncheon of turkey pilaf, with pumpkin custard for dessert later. Apart from that we had a quiet day of reading and watching Torchwood. So, although we’re missing our friends, it wasn’t such a horrid Thanksgiving after all.

I am grateful for Kate, for our lovely home, and for being generally in good health and able to do whatever we want (though we have just been quite sick and couldn’t do what we wanted because of it, that was a temporary aberration).

Well, now I’m sick too. Not as sick as Kate was — I haven’t thrown up, at least — but I’m feverish, achy, and completely lacking in energy and appetite. So we’re putting Lise on a cab to the train to Seattle and will stay at home for the weekend. We may or may not have anything resembling Thanksgiving dinner, depending on how we feel tomorrow.

Happy turkey day to those who are in a position to celebrate it.

Pout.

At Orycon I thought I was having a pretty good time, though I recognized that the con was passing in a blur because I was so heavily programmed. Seeing other people’s con reports afterwards, though, I realize now that I missed an awful lot of people… in fact, I feel like I practically missed the con. There were many people there I saw only in passing or not at all, I attended only two program items that I wasn’t on, and I had only two meals away from the con hotel: I walked down to the farmers’ market by myself for a quick lunch, and we had a very nice French dinner with friends from Seattle. Every other meal was either eaten in the noisy sports bar or snagged from Hospitality or the Green Room, because I didn’t have time for anything else.

Next time I will try to remember that panels are not my only Orycon program commitment. I was only on 6 panels, but in addition to that I had a reading, a writers’ workshop, auctioneering the Sue Petrey Auction, and Opening Ceremonies (which included a runthrough beforehand and the Endeavour Award ceremony). Jay Lake phoned while I was at dinner on Saturday to ask if I could help out with Whose Line, but I begged exhaustion. Orycon is my hometown con and I feel I owe them a lot, but next year I think I need to tell Programming to schedule me on only one panel-qua-panel per day to leave room for all that other stuff.

At the end of the con Kate was very low in energy and we left early. Our friend Lise is staying with us for a few days post-con, and we took her around for some touristing in Portland today, but Kate was pretty draggy all morning and after we got back from lunch she threw up and went to bed. She’s been sick as a dog all afternoon, poor thing. I hope that our Thanksgiving plans will not be affected, but she’s really out of it. Neither Lise nor I is affected, at least not yet.

Well, it’s been about two weeks since my last substantive entry, and, as is usually the case, when I’m not blogging, I’m also not writing. I did write a few hundred words on a short story last Tuesday at the coffee shop, but I don’t really feel like it’s going anywhere and I haven’t been motivated to continue it. I’ve been kind of mopy, downright depressed in fact on a couple of days, and beating myself up for being a failed one-shot-wonder has-been hack.

Today I reminded myself that I completed and submitted a novel — only my second — at the end of October. Perhaps this is post-novel ennui. In any case, I deserve a couple of weeks off, dammit.

It’s not like I’ve been idle in those two weeks, either. We went to Calgary for the World Fantasy Convention, which was very enjoyable. Good people, good conversations, good dinners. Calgary felt exactly like a cross between Dallas and Minneapolis: oil companies, friendly humble people, an emphasis on beef in the cuisine, and skywalks. I didn’t make any big deals during the con, but I did talk with some editors and I had a good time hanging out with my writing peers.

Something about the geology of Alberta is conducive to fossils: in addition to the oil and coal industries, it is home to the Royal Tyrrell Museum, one of the finest paleontology museums anywhere. We rented a car on Thursday before the convention and took off for a day trip there with Ellen Klages, who made an excellent traveling companion. The Tyrrell features a very impressive collection of fossils, including no fewer than three T. Rexes, a whole herd of Ceratopsidae (e.g. Triceratops), two Plesiosaurs, and numerous other complete skeletons, as well as an excellent exhibit on the deeply weird creatures of the Burgess Shale (which is nearby in British Columbia).

One of the highlights of the museum was the quirky, informative videos starring this guy who seemed vaguely familiar (perhaps he was a member of Second City) and kept falling victim to amusing natural disasters. There was also one skeleton in the first major hall that looked to me exactly like the Utahraptor in panel 4 of Dinosaur Comics, but not one person to whom I noted this resemblance had ever even heard of the webcomic. Philistines.

The little town of Drumheller, where the museum is located, knows a good thing when it sees it and has gone completely dinosaur-mad. Every possible thing in town that could be decorated with dinosaurs is, and there are fossil stores galore (had to pass up the $40,000 Triceratops skull, alas, even though that’s only about $32,000 in US dollars). There were also a few cavemen in the decor, but I’ll try not to hold that against the good people of Drumheller.

Coming back from the convention we were surprised to find that our seats for the flight to Vancouver (row 13, seats A and B) were at the very front of the plane, facing backwards. Not only did they not recline; not only was there no tray table, no window, no underseat storage, and no overhead storage; not only did we have to play footsie with the people in the next row, but we spent the whole flight feeling like EVERYONE ELSE IN THE PLANE WAS LOOKING AT US! Exceptionally weird.

Upon return from the con I found two acceptances in my mailbox: one from Esther Friesner, for a humorous YA werewolf story in anthology Strip Mauled, and one from Cecilia Tan, for a gender-bending humorous erotica short-short in anthology Up for Grabs. Yay! Also a rejection from Asimov’s, to keep me humble. That story really wants to go to Strange Horizons next, but they are currently on hiatus, so I decided to hang onto it until January. The annoying thing is that if I’d been home when the rejection letter arrived I would have gotten the story to SH just before they closed for the year.

Also in the mailbox: the November Locus, with Gary K. Wolfe’s lengthy review of Space Magic. “An interesting portrait of a new writer who’s either impressively versatile, or still in the process of trying to define himself, or maybe just dealing with attention deficit issues.” I’d tell you what I think about this, but… ooh, look! A leaf!

The weekend after WFC was Wordstock, “Portland’s Festival of the Book.” This is the fourth or fifth year of the festival, but the first time I’ve participated as an author instad of just an attendee. Jay Lake and I had 25-30 people for our joint reading, and I had an absolute blast. They treat the authors really, really well.

The day before yesterday I did something I’ve been meaning to do since I retired, a little over a year ago: I went out and bought a new digital flatscreen TV (not enormous, only 26″) and a TiVo. I had some difficulty getting the TiVo to play nice with my WiFi network, but now it’s up and running. I’m impressed with the UI, as expected, though it’s a little on the busy and flashy side. And I was surprised to find that the new TV, hooked up to the same old analog cable, picks up nearly 60 additional digital channels, some in impressive HD. Too bad the TiVo HD can’t see them (at least, not without additional hardware which I haven’t yet sprung for). I have not yet found anywhere a comprehensive list of those channels, which include both the expected digital versions of Portland’s over-the-air channels and dozens of unidentified others.

Today’s newspaper included a couple of sentences from my letter to President Obama, which I’d cc’d to the paper. Unfortunately they were misattributed to one “David Levin,” but I’ll take what I can get.

This coming weekend is OryCon. Our friend Lise from New York will be staying with us for a couple of days before and after the con (the bathroom remodel was completed in time, huzzah!) and my programming schedule looks like this:

Friday:

• 1:00-2:00pm: First Novels: the road to the editor’s desk in Eugene with Mary Rosenblum, J.C. Hendee, and Mike Shepherd-Moscoe
• 4:00-5:00pm: Social Networking sites: the good, the bad, and the really, really ugly in Salon G with Petrea Mitchell, John Hedtke, and Phyllis Irene Radford
• 7:00-8:00pm: Opening Ceremonies in Salon E with Ginjer Buchanan, Harry Turtledove, Jeff Fennel, and Cecilia Eng
• 10:00-11:00pm: Erotica readings in Eugene with Edward Morris and Theresa Reed

Saturday:

• 10:00-11:00am: Ask Dr. Genius: Ad-Lib Answers to Audience Questions in Salmon with Alan Olsen, Rick Lindsley, Louise Owen, and Jim Kling
• 11:00am-12:00pm: Writers’ Workshop with Mary Rosenblum (not open to the public)
• 12:30-1:00pm: Reading in Salem
• 2:00-3:00pm: Discovering new planets — what are they like? Can we even tell? in Medford with Melinda Hutson, G. David Nordley, and Marilyn Holt
• 4:30-6:00pm: Sue Petrey Auction in Mt. Hood with Tom Whitmore

Sunday:

• 11:00am-12:00pm: A look back at 30 years of OryCon history in Eugene with Patty Wells, Debbie Cross, and Paul Wrigley

Hope to see some of you there!

Spent the evening among friends. We cooked a quiche, which was well received. One guy in the corner was filling out his ballot during the party and rushed out right before the deadline; I believe he did make it to the ballot collection location in time. When the election was called (we got the news from Comedy Central’s Indecision 2008) there was a big group hug and singing of patriotic songs. Then the champagne and single-malt came out.

I’ve been reading 538 obsessively for the last few months, so the election went pretty much as I’d been expecting it to. Which means that my main emotional note at the moment is a profound relief rather than anything more in the joy spectrum. But still…

Okay, let me give you an analogy, because that’s what I do. Right after I retired, I got rid of the last PC in the house, replacing it with a shiny new iMac. Since then my overall stress levels have been down noticeably, because I can ignore all the news about Windows patches, Windows bugs, and Windows viruses. I suspect the next year will see an even more noticeable reduction in stress, because I will no longer have to worry about what that asshole in the White House is going to do to us next.

It won’t be perfect. Obama will disappoint us in some areas. But all in all, it’s going to be much, much better than it has been.

Thank you, America.

California? Not so much.

Word count: 120224 | Since last entry: -435

My second novel, The Dark Behind the Stars, is complete and in the mail to my agent. We’ll talk soon about where he’s going to send it first. The -435 words shown above is a bit of a surprise; I’d thought it was up a bit since my last blog post. Whatever. It’s been see-sawing around 120,000 words for the last week, because even as I’ve been adding text (mostly deepening Rachel and the Anvilites’ religious lives) I’ve been continuing to try to tighten it. In many cases I was able to resolve a problem simply by cutting a paragraph or two. (For example: The Anvilites’ concept of the Devil was inconsistent — now it’s not mentioned at all.)

One of the key open issues was exactly what Rachel thinks has happened in the climax. Did she kill God, or just a powerful alien being? I had left that unspecified in previous drafts… I think I was hoping the reader would draw their own conclusions, but I see now that this was a cheat. But I now know Rachel well enough that for her to see what I see happening in the climax (yes, she killed God) is not in character for her. So I let her reach a different conclusion than I would have in her place (she killed a powerful alien being, who may or may not have been the God of the Old Testament, but there is still an ineffable something… still more to the universe than that which can be observed and measured.)

One other change is that a main character now dies onstage instead of off. The weird thing for me is that, even though I jumped straight to that page and just dove in and wrote it without even reading the scenes leading up to it, I still cried (a little). Shows how important it was to show the character’s death, I think.

I also spent a good hunk of the last two days trimming the 14-page synopsis down to 7 pages. I think it’s too choppy now, and leaves out too much, but I’m assured the previous one had too much detail. I accept that I am not yet good at synopses, and move on.

I’m not sure I agree with all of the comments I decided to do something about, but almost all of them came from more than one person so I think they were worth doing. I also ignored a lot of other comments. I did the best I could with some other comments, but don’t feel I’ve completely addressed them. I think the book is stronger than it was, but it’s still imperfect — abandoned rather than completed, as they say — but what the hell, it’s done.

Also done: the bathroom is now effectively complete. We’ve hung the shower curtain and everything. There’s still a few minor details, which will probably be taken care of while we’re in Calgary, but mostly now the ball is in our court (we need new bath mats, curtains, trash can, etc.). When we return from World Fantasy Con I plan to get the house professionally cleaned to get rid of lingering dust.

And finally: we voted. Oregon is 100% vote by mail, and I took my ballot to a voting party at a friend’s. We didn’t discuss the partisan races (just about all of them are no-brainers anyway)… the big discussions were around ballot measures, such as the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t Measure 57. No consensus on that one, but at least I feel I’ve made an informed choice.

Heading to Calgary tomorrow for WFC. You may or may not hear from me before I return. If not, Happy Halloween, and don’t forget to vote!