The Days Are Just Packed     
The ongoing saga of David D. Levine's writing and other adventures.

I'm a geek, fan, and writer who lives in Portland, Oregon. For more information about me, please see my web page. If you have questions, comments, or just want to chat, you can send me e-mail. Or you can post a comment on my LiveJournal.

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12/31/06: David's Index for 2006

Short fiction words written: 44,485
Novel words written: 9,205
Notes, outline, and synopsis words written: 9,946
Blog words written: 44,048
Total words written: 107,684

New stories written: 3 (2 short stories, 1 novella)
Existing stories revised: 2

Short fiction submissions sent: 27
Responses received: 21
Rejections: 18
Acceptances: 3 (3 pro, 0 semi-pro)
Other sales: 7 (2 reprints, 4 translations, 1 audio)
Awaiting response: 8

Short stories published: 7 (3 pro, 1 reprint, 2 translations, 1 audio)

Novel submissions: 4
Rejections: 4
Acceptances: 0
Awaiting response: 1

Agent submissions: 3
Rejections: 2
Acceptances: 1

Major award nominations: 1
Minor award nominations: 0
Major awards won: 1

Happy New Year!

Posted 12/31/2006 09:34 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 9205 | Since last entry: 1063

We have returned from Kennewick in one piece. Presents were exchanged, dogs and small children were played with, much good food was eaten. The weather was great, clear and cold the whole time, and on the drive back the Columbia River was mirror-smooth, so that the opposite shore appeared to be a floating island. We do live in a very pretty place.

In the last week I've been pretty down on myself for lack of discipline. I've been eating too much, exercising too little, and writing not at all. But, as Kate points out, this is expected -- nay, demanded -- at this time of year. Despite this, I still felt bad about it, and today I did something about it: I went to the gym, and I took advantage of my critique group meeting being canceled to sit down and write. I surprised myself by turning out over a thousand words, in a scene in which my main character is arguing for her life in a situation where she barely speaks the language (actually it's more complicated than that).

My mood was also greatly raised by an envelope that arrived in the last mail delivery of the year: Gardner Dozois is buying my Aeon Award shortlisted story "I Hold My Father's Paws" for his 24th annual Year's Best Science Fiction anthology. This is my first appearance in the Dozois Year's Best antho and I'm right chuffed about it.

Posted 12/30/2006 23:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 8142 | Since last entry: 0

I've been rather down on the writing lately, what with the latest rejection and all. I'm afraid I'm running out of major publishers, but my agent is still enthusiastic about the book and advises me to put my energy into writing the next one. But with all the holiday foofaraw around here, I haven't been finding the time to do that either.

But a bit of good news arrived yesterday, in the form of a registered mail package from Poland containing two copies of the November issue of Nowa Fantastyka. My name was on the cover in big letters, and inside I found my story "Tk'Tk'Tk," translated into Polish, with four great interior illustrations. I don't know if the translation is any good, but the illustrator (whose name I couldn't find) clearly read and understood the story. This is almost better than a good review.

Heading off to Kennewick this morning. May or may not blog in the interval, depending on availability of time and bandwidth.

Posted 12/27/2006 08:42 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 8142 | Since last entry: 465

A very laid-back Christmas Day here. Woke up at a reasonable hour and fixed gingerbread waffles, then went back to bed for another couple hours. We opened one present each -- I got Kate an orange juicer because she always orders fresh-squeezed OJ when we go out for breakfast, and she got me a copy of Lost Girls because I asked for it. Lazed about for much of the day, and watched the DVD of So I Married an Axe Murderer that the guys at work had loaned me so I wouldn't be culturally deprived.

In the evening we had our traditional Christmas Day movie and squid dinner with our friend Michael -- the movie was the new Casino Royale, which has a lot to recommend it (not least the hot new Bond, Daniel Craig) and the squid, unfortunately, was at a random Vietnamese restaurant because Thien Hong, home of the finest pepper-salted squid we've ever eaten, is closed on Mondays. Even if Monday happens to fall on a Christmas Day. Bastards.

Back to work tomorrow, for one day, then I'm taking the rest of the week off. Life is hard.

Posted 12/25/2006 22:08 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 7677 | Since last entry: 468

...or Christmas Eve, anyway.

We had a party yesterday, an open house where a couple dozen folks showed up to assemble jigsaw puzzles, talk, and eat. I made brownies using the recipe on the back of the Ghirardelli chocolate can, with the addition of some peppermint extract and mint chocolate chips, and OMG were they good.

I'm not quite sure where today went. Went to the gym this morning, cleaned up from the party, went out for lunch, spent too much time online. We're going to a dance performance in a little while, followed by dinner with friends.

Tomorrow we will open some presents, but most of the presenting will be done when we get together with Kate's family in Kennewick later this week. I hadn't planned to take any time off this week, but then we decided to take two days for this trip, and now I'm thinking we'll spend the second night there and come back a day later. I don't think anyone at work will miss me for that extra day.

I bought myself a new phone, a Treo 700p, and I'm liking it a whole lot. Gmail and Google Maps are the killer apps for this platform, for sure. I'm extremely glad I sprang for the unlimited data plan, because if I had all this power at my fingertips and I had to count every kilobyte I'd be going mad right about now.

I've been fighting some WiFi interference issues that make my home digital music system flake out at irregular intervals. I'm pretty sure that it's interference from a non-WiFi device such as a cordless phone or microwave, or possibly a WiFi network that's not broadasting its SSID, because there's no other WiFi network showing up on the same channel but the problem looks just the same as the interference I see when I run the microwave. But neither of my two closest neighbors was home Friday evening and I was definitely seeing the problem then. Might be my back-fence neighbor. I really need some kind of signal strength meter with a directional antenna to figure out where the problem is coming from. But if it turns out to be my neighbor's phone or microwave, what do I do then? I'm considering some kind of signal booster to try to power past the problem, but unfortunately my cheapo wireless router (which I have to use because it is the only one supported by my DSL provider) doesn't even have a detachable antenna so I'm not sure how I'd even connect it.

As for the writing... well, things have not been going too well on that front. I've been writing only a hundred words a day on those days I've been writing at all (missed three days this week). And I got another rejection on the novel, this one from DAW. Plus another short story rejection. Bah, humbug.

Posted 12/24/2006 16:33 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 7209 | Since last entry: 2062

It's been a long time since I've posted. Sorry. I did start this entry yesterday, but then the power to our whole neighborhood was knocked out by the massive wind storm that pummeled the whole Pacific Northwest. (The power came back a few hours later, while we slept, and we had no other damage, unlike Mary Rosenblum, who lost a shed and an apple tree when a huge tree landed on them.)

Tonight I had a phone interview with Jason Rennie, host of The Sci Phi Show (http://thesciphishow.com), a podcast from Australia that looks at questions of science fiction and philosophy. I talked about where my ideas come from, and how I differ from my characters, and my history and ambitions as a writer. I think it went well, and it should be up on the site in January.

I've been writing 100-300 words every day -- haven't missed a day yet this month. It doesn't feel like much progress, but this tortoise-like steady progression is better than longer but intermittent bursts. Or so I tell myself. I'm learning about the world and the characters as I go -- a vaguely-defined group of aliens that my protagonist encounters in chapter 2 of the outline has resolved into a single, elderly cat-like creature named Huss (at least so far). I like him.

I don't feel that this novel has really found its voice yet, and I think my protagonist is far too independent and self-assured for a traumatized 14-year-old. I might decide that it's easier to change my notion of who she's supposed to be to match the way she's turning out, rather than to go back and rewrite her to be more the way I originally conceived of her.

It's also very hard to write any kind of meaningful description when the viewpoint character's whole world is made up. Not only do I have to decide what the alien ship looks like, I have to describe it using referents that the main character (who was raised on a different alien ship) would have, rather than using analogies or metaphors that will be meaningful to the reader. Why did I set myself such a hard task?

Apart from the writing... well, I had a pretty head-exploding day on Tuesday. First, I learned that I have been selected as one of the top 7% of engineering staff in the company. What this means is that, along with about 100 other employees and their spouses, Kate and I will be taking a trip at company expense... to Phuket, Thailand. It will be some time in February and I don't yet know how long we will be gone or any other details. It doesn't seem real yet.

Thailand.

Right after getting that email I headed off to meet with our financial adviser. We'd paid for a detailed analysis of our retirement situation, to answer the question of exactly when we will be able to afford to retire. And the answer came back: we are already making more from our investments than from my day job. And even the most conservative estimates of inflation and return on those investments indicate that they will continue to provide enough for us to live on, in the style to which we've become accustomed, for the forseeable future.

I can retire any time.

Guh.

I enjoy my job (well, most aspects of it, most of the time). I'm good at it and, after all these years, I've finally reached a place that people respect and request my opinions. I feel a certain responsibility to my co-workers, not to mention that I want to see my current project, which I have been working on for between one and four years depending on how you count it, through to shipment some time next year. But the commute -- lord, I'm tired of the commute. And it would be nice to be able to make travel plans without having to eke them out of a limited vacation budget.

So I'm probably going to retire in 2007. Or I might scale back to three or four days a week and keep on for longer than that. I don't know -- I haven't discussed it with my boss yet. I talked with my dad and he suggested that there's considerable value in continuing to work, even when you don't need the money, for the external stimulus. It's certainly true that Scott Adams's work on Dilbert went downhill when he quit the day job.

Retirement is an extremely strange thing to contemplate. I've been going to work every weekday for twenty-three years, or thirty-nine if you count going to school as "work." Although I'm sure I could find plenty to fill the empty days (everyone I know who's retired says they can't imagine how they found the time for the day job with all the other things they have to do) I still have a lot of trouble imagining what life would really be like if every day were Saturday. Yes, even with the writing.

As I was driving to work this morning, Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton came up on the iPod and I found myself crying. And laughing at the same time, because it's a silly little song and a stupid thing to get all weepy about. But there you have it.

And I saw a heron. Any day you see a heron is a good day.

Posted 12/15/2006 23:50 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 5147 | Since last entry: 1393

I did get back on the horse, the day after my last entry, and I've written at least a few words every day since. It sucks, of course, but I'm learning not to let that bother me. I've done this before and I know it'll get better once I get my feet under me.

I've gotten some interesting writing-related emails in the last couple of weeks. A fellow from Australia wants to interview me for a podcast, and a guy from Milwaukee wants to make one of my stories into a student film. I'm willing to sell him the rights very cheap, for a limited period of time anyway, but I don't want to do it without some kind of contract and I haven't yet found a usable sample contract online. Any suggestions?

I've also been invited -- nay, importuned -- to be a guest at RadCon, so we're going to that.

Not much else to report. Day job. Chores. Square dancing. Went to the Symphony. Didn't go to the gym for almost two weeks, but clambered back on that horse too. You know -- stuff.

Posted 12/04/2006 23:08 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 3754 | Since last entry: 0

We are lying side-by-side in the grass, the horse and I, staring up at the fleecy clouds scudding by across a luminescent blue sky. Each of us is chewing on a stalk of grass -- me contemplatively, the horse as more of a snack.

"You're going to have to get back on me sooner or later," says the horse.

"Tomorrow," I say. "I've been sick."

"No, really. I mean, you call yourself a writer, and here it is nearly the end of NaNoWriMo and you haven't written a word since you finished Chapter One over two weeks ago. That's pathetic."

I chomp my stalk for a moment before replying. "I finished the outline. 1700 words. Now at least I know where I'm going."

The horse snorts. The sound vibrates through the damp earth between us. "Doesn't count."

I raise myself on one elbow and look the horse in the eye. "Give me a freakin' break. First there was OryCon, and we had Lise in town before and after."

"And she kept up her daily NaNoWriMo word count that whole time..."

"Shut up when I'm talking. I was so heavily programmed I didn't even attend one program item I wasn't on, nor did I see the art show. Good con, though. And then, on the day Lise leaves, I come down with a cold."

"Poor baby."

"No really, I was miserable. Achy, feverish, sneezing... I wasn't good for much more than watching TV and sleeping for almost three days."

"And you went to Thanksgiving dinner with your friends like that."

"I washed my hands a lot." I sigh. "At least I didn't spread it to all the square dancers in Vancouver."

The horse finishes his stalk and begins chewing on another. "Okay, I'll admit it was a bummer that you had to miss the square dance. But look on the bright side -- you got to see the BNL concert instead, and you aren't fighting your way back home from Canada through a snowstorm right now."

"Yeah, thank heaven for small favors."

We look at each other for a while. "You're still going to have to get back on me sooner or later."

"Tomorrow," I say. "Tomorrow."

Posted 11/26/2006 23:25 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 3754 | Since last entry: 803

No new words on the novel per se in the last three days. I reached the end of chapter 1 (at least, an end) and found that I couldn't get started on chapter 2. So I dropped back and started outlining -- trying to figure out where this thing is really headed. I wrote about 1000 words of outline yesterday -- a brief paragraph each on the first 12 chapters (out of about 20). Today I had dinner with a psychologist neighbor and talked about where my main character's head is at, given her traumatized early life. I'm going to have to scale back the malnutrition (if she wasn't properly nourished as a child she'll have some cognitive problems, and I need her brain in one piece if she's going to be an effective protagonist). Wrote up a couple hundred words of notes on that. None of those words are counted above.

So, though I have been doing novel-related work, I'm about 1200 words behind my pseudo-NaNoWriMo target, and OryCon starts tomorrow so I'm unlikely to catch up. I remind myself that I'm in this (novel writing thing) for the long haul -- NaNoWriMo should be just a goad, not a requirement.

In other news, Analog rejected the novella -- a long, thoughtful rejection hand-typed by Stan Schmidt that 1) points up a plausibility problem my critique group also had problems with, which I tried to address but apparently did not succeed, and 2) shows that Stan believes his readers don't want too much of that pesky angst getting in the way of the rivets. I may try Analog again, if the right story should happen, but at this point I think the only way I'm going to sell there is if I consciously decide to shoot for the Analog market and scale the characterization way back. And I'm not sure I want to do that. I'm going to sit on the novella until I hear back from Asimov's on the story I currently have there, then send it there. I may add a couple-sentence tweak that someone suggested as a way to help address the plausibility problem.

And at my neighborhood Starbucks, Christmas has come down as hard and sudden as a foot of snow overnight. Straight from Halloween to Christmas without even slowing down at Thanksgiving. Bah, humbug. But I don't want to dig in my heels this year, because in previous years I've done that and it's prevented me from enjoying the holiday (and there are enjoyable aspects to it -- I really dig the lights) when its actual time rolled around.

Posted 11/15/2006 23:25 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2951 | Since last entry: 829

I keep plugging away. Ten thousand words in a month seems doable for me but I'm giving up an awful lot of sleep to maintain this pace. I wonder how some people can write thousands of words a day, even with a day job. I think that perhaps I am editing too much as I go. On the other hand, this technique seems to work for me.

I talked with my agent today. He's gotten several requests to see the novel so it's going out to two different publishers at once (agents can do this, if they let everyone know it's happening). I hope that this will encourage one or both of the publishers to feel they have to act before the other snaps it up.

I also got a nice email from the slushmaster at Realms of Fantasy saying that he's passing the unicorn story (remember the unicorn story?) up to Shawna. He also said that the days of waiting 6-12 months for a response are long gone. We'll see.

One more tidbit of writing news before I fall over: I talked with Gordon Van Gelder at World Fantasy about when "Titanium Mike" is likely to be published. He'd said a while ago that it might be in the January issue, but then he'd had to retract that, and I asked him what had happened. He explained that my story is 15 pages long, and he'd planned to run it in the January issue, but then he sold one more page of ads, so he ran another story that was 14 pages long instead. (Or perhaps it was the other way around.) It's very informative to see how much influence these random commercial factors have on the makeup of an issue, even when you have a magazine that's owned by its editor, who can theoretically do whatever he wants. So if you're wondering why there were two alien kitten stories in one issue, or why one issue is heavy on the SF and another on the F, the answer might be as simple as that.

Posted 11/10/2006 23:40 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2122 | Since last entry: 774

The day job's been really intense so far this week. I haven't been to the gym but once in the last week. And, ever since Halloween, traffic has been absolutely abysmal. I've been spending as much as three hours a day driving to and from work. This is getting really tiresome. Can I retire yet?

Also, my novel was rejected by Ace. "I'm sorry to say it's not the kind of science fiction we're doing well with right now." Oh well, at least it was quick, and as rejections go it's very straightforward and professional -- nothing to make me question the book's quality, it was just the wrong novel for this market at this time. We have several good candidates for the next place to submit it; I'll be talking with my agent soon.

But the news on the political front has been refreshing, of course. We spent Election Eve at a Capitol Steps concert, with friends. Interesting that the audience refused to applaud even for a comedian pretending to be Bush. It was great to laugh about politics for a change, and even nicer to read the results after the show. I find I'm even more pleased about seeing the back of Santorum than Rumsfeld.

It's been very hard to make time for writing lately, with all the political news to keep track of, and I've fallen 600 words behind my target for the month so far. I hope to be able to catch up tomorrow. I also hope to write out an outline (one one- or two-sentence bullet point per chapter) when I get a chance; I have a general sense of the book's structure but it feels weird to be writing without a concrete plan.

Posted 11/08/2006 23:37 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 1348 | Since last entry: 1011

Back from World Fantasy Con. I decided early on that I wasn't going to attempt to take notes, so all I can say is that I had a great if rather formless time, and I met many people in person whom I had known only as authors, names in Locus, or LiveJournal users, plus many new and cool people I hadn't known at all.

I kept saying that if I was lucky I would come out of the convention with at least one new person for whom I could remember name, LJ username, and face all at once. I don't think I was that lucky. So I'm not going to attempt to name the many fine people I had meals with or hung out with in the bar, for fear of omitting someone. You know who you are.

We ate (too) much great BBQ, fine Mexican food, and pie. We heard some amazing readings, especially Howard Waldrop in a Jolly Roger mask reading a crossover between Pirates of Penzance, HMS Pinafore, and Peter Pan. I appeared on one panel, about blogging, and quite a few people came up to me afterwards and said they'd liked it. I spent most evenings in the bar as one element of Elizabeth Bear's slut-hat-wearing electron cloud. We saw the Texas State Capitol and a UT tailgate party (hook 'em, Dano Horns) and the original sniper's bell tower from afar, and some other Austin sights (Toy Joy and a little bit of the Story of Texas museum) closer up.

We were delayed coming home by storms in Dallas, but as compensation we saw a spectacular aerial display of lightning as we flew home.

I worked on my novel for three days out of the five. I won't let this lapse stop me from continuing. NaNoWriMo ho!

Posted 11/06/2006 21:28 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 337 | Since last entry: 337

Well, I have been foolish enough to stay up past midnight doing it, but I have embarked on NaNoWriMo -- well, really a Pseudo-NaNoWriMo, because I have no intention of writing an entire novel, or even a miniature NaNoWriMo "novel" of 50,000 words, in one month. My goal for the month is 10,000 words, which requires an average of 333 words per day. This is going to be hard, what with WFC, OryCon, and Thanksgiving in there, but -- as this entry demonstrates -- I'm crazy/determined enough to do it. Wish me luck.

The first 337 words... well, they suck. But there they are. Gotta start somethere.

Leaving for Austin bright and early tomorrow (um, later today). See some of you there.

Posted 11/02/2006 00:15 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Sorry I haven't posted in a long while. I spent a good chunk of last week at a meeting with customers in Santa Clara. I typed over 18,000 words of notes in two days (I wanted to be sure the customers' input was properly captured) while sitting in a non-adjustable chair at a table that was too high, leaving my wrists resting on the hard edge of my laptop. After the first day I noticed the last two fingers on my left hand getting a bit numb and tingly -- a very bad sign. I moved to a better chair, and when I got home I started taking ibuprofen and gave myself a three-day holiday from typing. I hope that this will be enough to prevent further problems. Carpal tunnel problems scare me more than anything other than AIDS. Just about everything I do -- job, hobbies, volunteering, avocations, keeping in touch with friends -- is keyboard-dependent.

In better news, I sold the story I submitted last week. "Firewall" will appear in Transhuman: On the edge of the Singularity, edited by Toni Weisskopf and Mark Van Name, coming from Baen some time next year.

I also got my OryCon schedule:

• Friday 4pm: The Magical City of Unbelievable
• Friday 9pm: Whose Line Is It, Anyway?
• Saturday 10am: RSS Feeds and the New News
• Saturday 1pm: Turkey Readings
• Saturday 2pm: Writers' Workshop
• Saturday 3:30pm: Reading
• Sunday 12pm: Believable and Lovable Evil
• Sunday 2pm: Are You Really a Writer?
• Sunday 3pm: Remakes, Reimaginings, & Resurgencies

Pretty intense, but I guess that's the price of fame.

I don't yet have my World Fantasy Convention schedule, even though the convention's less than a week away. They still haven't sent me anything, but I see from their web page that I'm on a panel on Friday at 4:30 about "Fantasy, Social Networking, and the Blogosphere" with Elizabeth Bear and others. Cool.

Posted 10/29/2006 21:49 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

This weekend Kate and I went to McMenamin's Grand Lodge, a former Masonic retirement home, now hotel, in Forest Grove. It was far enough out of town to be an out-of-town trip, but close enough that we got the benefits without a lot of pesky travel.

The occasion for the trip was a knitting workshop. In a reversal of our usual pattern, Kate would be hanging out with her knitting friends, knitting and talking about knitting, while I sat in the corner and wrote -- a little one-man writing retreat in the middle of the knitting workshop. I hoped to get a lot of prep work done on the novel.

I didn't get as much done as I'd hoped, but I did accomplish a lot. I used a technique Chris York had shown me several years ago at an OryCon to sketch out a rough outline of the novel in about two hours. This was mostly an exercise in answering questions (like "what is the character just about to do as the novel opens?" and "how do the character's strengths and weaknesses help and hinder him/her as the story progresses?") in timed bursts of writing -- I chose a 5-minute burst period. I wrote about 3300 words in an intense hour or two. It was mostly a matter of writing out stuff I already knew about the character and the plot, albeit subconsciously, with a few bits of brainstorming. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether I was remembering something I'd worked out previously or making it up. I was typing as fast as I could.

Do I know everything that happens now? No. But I have a better feel for the overall shape of the novel -- beginning, rising action, climax, and resolution. There's a whole lot of middle that I know this exercise isn't much help with -- in the coming week I'll work on fleshing that area out.

My goal for the rest of the month is to learn as much as possible about the characters and plot, with the intention of beginning the first draft on or before November 1. Then I'll celebrate NaNoWriMo by writing every day, shooting for 10,000 words (that would be an average of 333 words per day) to get off to a good start. Wish me luck.

In addition to that, I put the finishing touches on the firewall story and sent it off to the editors of the anthology via email. I hope to hear back in a week or so. And I did some critiques and nonfiction writing that were way overdue.

Also this weekend, we heard some live music, visited the farm where our vegetables come from (it was not too far from Forest Grove, and besides it was Pumpkin Pickup time -- we picked out a nice sincere one), went to the gym, ate some very nice meals (and some mediocre ones), and booked our tickets for Japan. 330 days in advance is when tickets for frequent flyer miles become available, and there were upgrade seats available on our preferred flights. So we're going business class, baby!

So it was a fun and relaxing weekend, and I had a surprisingly good time hanging out with the knitters -- a charming and intelligent bunch, and I'm not just saying that because a couple of them turned out to be SF fans (or had family back home who are) and two of them asked me for my autograph.

Posted 10/22/2006 20:57 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 4447 | Since last entry: 46

Finally heard back from Del Rey, after six months.

The word is no. Bottom line: "the fundamental setup just doesn't hold up in terms of suspense." I don't agree, obviously. But the sting is lessened somewhat by comments like "I'm loath to pass on getting a chance to publish a talented writer like David."

I am not as crushed by this rejection as I was by the Tor one, because I hadn't been led to expect an acceptance and I wasn't as emotionally invested in it. My agent is querying other publishers right now, and I'll be talking with people at World Fantasy Con.

Onward and upward.

Posted 10/18/2006 22:10 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 7843 | Since last entry: 314

I'm really enjoying these Tuesday night writing get-togethers. Only two other people tonight, and I wound up with Jay Lake's power supply, but I pried open the firewall story and, after a long period with story parts spread out all over the garage floor, got everything crammed back inside and the casing bolted back on before heading home. It wants another read-through and a smoothing pass, and perhaps a bit of a trim, but I've done just about everything I wanted to do with it based on last week's critique. Is it better, or even good? No idea.

Posted 10/17/2006 22:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 4401 | Since last entry: 1459

1500 words of notes on the novel, mostly about the stardrive. This is fun, and of only marginal utility for developing the characters, but it's a great generator of possible plot ideas. I've come up with a novel stardrive (combining aspects of Babylon 5 and The Space Eater) that has plenty of things that could go disasterously wrong, i.e. potential drama. Kate doubts that anyone would actually use something that dangerous, but, hey, an airplane could run out of fuel or hit a mountain or be blown off course, and we take those every day.

Also worked extensively on editing the firewall story -- 360 new words, not counted above, plus many changed words (many of which I did not eventually put back the way they'd been in the first place). I'm not sure it's really getting better, but I am at least trying to address the issues identified by my critique group. There's certainly more angst. I think I need one more scene, in which my main character consults with his boss before throwing the switch, but the biggest issue is that it's not plausible that he'd take the action he does at the climax. Well, maybe he doesn't. (But if he doesn't, he doesn't change.) Need to find a way to plant a seed of his final action earlier in the story, but the action's moving so fast I find it very difficult to cram in even a small character moment. Ponder ponder ponder.

In other news... our VCR died earlier this week, and since it's early in the new TV season and many of the good shows we like haven't been canceled yet, this crisis required immediate attention. So we spent far too much of yesterday looking for a new VCR. Surprise! VCRs are obsolete. Even the largest video equipment store we visited had a total of two VCRs... and one of them turned out to be out of stock. So we bought a DVD/VCR combo -- the only machine we saw anywhere that supported the VCR+ codes that make programming the timer so much easier. (None of them allow you to program channel numbers or times using the numeric pad on the remote, or to seek by time.) This brings the household up to seven DVD players. But the new machine has some very cool features, such as "replay the last ten seconds" and displaying the title of the current program. The astonishing thing is that it can display the program titles from tapes recorded on the previous VCR.

TiVo or something like it is in our future, to be sure, but we didn't want to make that decision right now because it's so tightly coupled to questions of which cable/satellite/etc. system we're going to subscribe to in the long run. I need to do research on that. And we'll need a new TV eventually, too.

Also this weekend: had a very nice dinner at a new Balkan restaurant called Two Brothers (the former cheap Chinese at 39th and Belmont), and met up with recent returnees-to-Portland Robin Catesby and Dave Molner for coffee, which then turned into dinner at Malay Satay Hut.

The coming week will be a busy one.

Posted 10/15/2006 22:21 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2942 | Since last entry: 1546

It's been a while since I posted any new word count here. That's because I haven't been writing a lot. My things-to-do list for the weekend was HUGE, which isn't to say I actually crossed off a lot of items. But we did visit old friends Sonia and Devin on their property out by Vernonia. And the dogs and the cats and the llamas and the goats and the emus. Emus. Emus are very, very strange creatures. I've never felt the thud of a bird's feet on the ground before, nor heard a bird breathing. The chick (only about three feet high) pecked endearingly at my trouser buttons. It came back every few minutes and pecked at me again in case I'd changed into something edible while it wasn't looking.

But today was a good writing day. I dropped off the car for an oil change and took the train to work, during which I batted out about 1200 words of notes on the novel. This worldbuilding stuff is easy and cheap -- all I'm doing is writing down random thoughts, and the further thoughts that spring from them. The main benefit is that writing this stuff down frees up brain space that was being used to hold it, and encourages/allows me to follow the idea to the next step. Writing about the aliens is also helping me to get a handle on the main human character.

In the evening I met with some other writers at a coffee shop for what may become a regular Tuesday writing evening. During this time I worked on revisions of the Singularity story, which I got critiqued on Saturday. The critiques found some serious problems -- the ending feels rushed, and the protagonist changes his mind much too hastily at the climax, but the big problem is that my happy ending is read by some as a chilling horror story. It may be that this is okay. I think that in its intended context the ending will be seen as a happy ending, and even if it is not... well, it's valid for the reader to reach their own conclusions.

So far in the revisions I've just nibbled away at the minor problems. I'll start tackling the more serious issues with the climax and character interactions next. One thing I need to keep in mind is this: if the ending seems broken, you probably need to fix the middle. Specifically, I need to plant some doubts in the protagonist's mind earlier so that his change of heart at the climax isn't so much of a surprise.

One other thing and then I'm off to bed: I'm reading Jules Verne's From The Earth to the Moon for our book group. I didn't know it was a comedy. Or possibly an extended infodump with comedic moments. A fun, light read, though.

Posted 10/10/2006 22:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 1396 | Since last entry: 1396

Joined several other writers at a pizza place for convivial-sitting-and-typing-together tonight. I had been kind of worried about what I was going to do, since I just finished up a project and I didn't feel ready to start on my novel. So what I did was just start typing notes. It went really well (1400 words in less than 2 hours), despite the fact that the place was too bright and too loud. If we do this again we'll go someplace else.

So far what I've written is mostly the natural history of the Drur, the main alien species in the novel -- how did they evolve, what is their history, what is their culture. I also wrote one paragraph about the main human character but, apparently, I find it easier to understand aliens than a 14-year-old girl. Because Keelie was raised by an alien of one species while they were both enslaved by aliens of another species, I'm going to have to build both species' cultures from the ground up before I can understand Keelie.

Apropos of which, Karen Berry mentioned that she saw something on the Discovery Channel about children raised by wild dogs. This really happens?! I must investigate, because the enslaving species has a pack culture (though they aren't nearly as warm and fuzzy as a pack of slavering wolves -- they're more like wasps, only more competitive). I also need to call my psychologist neighbor to talk about what a girl with such an f'd-up upbringing might be like -- what will she fear, what "issues" will she have?

It's much easier for me to write this sort of stuff than actual drafting. It doesn't have to do more than one thing, it doesn't have to lead anywhere, it doesn't have to echo the theme or even be particularly well written. I just make stuff up and type it out, which I can do almost as fast as I can type. One interesting aspect of the exercise is that it points out all the stuff I do when I'm writing fiction -- I don't draft as fast as some, but it's really solid for a first draft. These notes... aren't.

As he mentions in his blog, Jay Lake and I talked a bit about his word counts and whether he should post them. I said that, though I do find them a bit intimidating sometimes, if you're capable of producing that quality of work at that speed, why not say so? Some may find it an inspiration. As the joke goes: Q: Why did the chicken cross the road? A: To show the opossum it could be done!

I figure I'll work on this notes file for a while (days? weeks? months?) before I'm ready to outline. So, for now, word counts above are all notes. I wound up with over 32,000 words of notes on Remembrance Day before I was done.

In other news, the Southeast Examiner story came out, and... well, on the cover it said "Sci-Fi Guy, page 18" and I actually did say most of the things I am quoted as saying. It's not a bad article by any means, but I still find it a bit wince-worthy in spots. I'll probably scan it and put it up on my web page anyway.

Also, I have been invited to be a speaker for A Writer's Weekend, June 30-July 1, 2007 in Seattle. I've never been to one of these before but I'm looking forward to it.

And I talked to my agent today. The first novel's been at the same place for almost six months and it's time for them to fish or cut bait. There may be news, one way or another, later this week.

Posted 10/03/2006 22:21 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 7149 | Since last entry: 1676

Finished up the first draft in a burst of enthusiasm and sent it immediately to my critique group. Some of the characters and background I made up in the early parts are unused at the climax, which means that they can perhaps be excised, but on the other hand they add richness to the world. Whatever. If it's a problem, my critiquers will tell me.

I got a little weepy when writing the climax, which is always a good sign but doesn't guarantee that others will feel the same way. It's impossible to know whether enough of the things that were going on in my head made it to the page or not.

I do know that the climactic scene itself was not exactly something I'd planned. It was a solution to a problem that had been bugging me yesterday -- the question of "how do you know what you know?" In this case, all of my protagonist's information was coming to him through an unreliable channel, and he's a smart enough guy that he'd realize this -- how does he make any decision when he knows he can't trust his information? So I, or perhaps my subconscious (which Jay Lake calls "Fred") came up with an outside source of confirmation -- an outside source that also answered another problem I had, which is that I felt my setting was being underused, and provided a powerful image of the protagonist's emotional dilemma. It all came together in a single brief scene which is the one that almost made me cry.

I have many short story ideas knocking on the inside of my skull right now, but I think I really ought to work on the novel next. However, I may take a day or two off first -- I've been grinding really hard for the last week and Kate needs some of my attention.

After that, we went downtown to the big public hoo-hah over the new Gerding Theatre, a marvelous refit of the grand old Armory building just one block from Powell's. While waiting for our backstage tour to begin, we wandered over to nearby Chinatown, which was also having a grand civic celebration in honor of the opening of its new street renovations, and had a bite of dim sum for lunch.

In the evening, we met up with square dancing friends Bo and Don for a fabulous dinner of many meats at Brazil Grill (and, by the way, if you haven't read this you must: Argentina on two steaks a day). After which we watched the first episode of Heroes, which shows a lot of promise.

An excellent weekend.

Posted 10/01/2006 23:09 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 5473 | Since last entry: 2360

800+ words yesterday, 1500+ words today. Of course, I spent all day today on those 1500 words, not like Some People who can whip out 2500 words in an evening after work. But it's still been a good productive day and I hold out some hope I can finish the story tomorrow.

I did find a way to work in the necessary backstory. My protagonist is a real Baen/Analog hero, a hard-nosed practical guy, but he's also emotionally damaged in a way that will pin him to the wall at the climax... which is coming very soon now, I think. The biggest remaining problem is how to set it up in such a way that his choice at the climax makes emotional sense for him. (Some writers would just wind him up and see what choice he makes on his own. My characters aren't that self-actualized, unfortunately; they only do what I tell them to.)

In addition to the writing, today we did grocery shopping, cooked dinner (curried green beans and eggplant, using some pico de gallo we had on hand for some of the tomatoes, garlic, and spices -- it worked pretty well, but we neglected to compensate for the lime juice that was already in the salsa when adding lemon juice and it came out pretty darn tart), and took in a movie (An Inconvenient Truth -- a well-made and rather hopeful documentary, despite its serious topic, but on top of this week's rape of the Constitution I found it a bit of a downer). And now I'm going to bed before midnight, because I'm tired.

Oh, one more thing. I dealt with a storm of over 7000 bounce messages caused by some spammer who used various made-up names at osfci.org as his forged return address -- and that's not counting the unknown number of messages that didn't bounce (probably tens of thousands). It would have been even more except that I got my ISP to turn off the "catchall" email forwarding in the middle of it. This was the second such storm this week, and it was over four times as big as the first one.

This spam storm and its resolution has three possible consequences for you, the reader of this blog: 1) If you ever send mail to some random address at osfci.org or orycon.org (e.g. programming@orycon.org) on the assumption that it will magically reach the appropriate person, you can stop that now. It used to be that I would receive such mail, sigh, and manually forward it to the appropriate person. Now such messages will bounce or vanish silently. 2) If you sent me an e mail today and didn't receive a reply, there's a possibility it got mixed in with the flood of spam and deleted -- please resend. 3) If you are a mail administrator, please don't bother bouncing obvious spam back to the From: address, as it's almost certainly forged, and will do nothing other than annoy some innocent third party.

I hates spammers, I hates them to pieces.

Posted 09/30/2006 23:32 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 3113 | Since last entry: 877

Another post-Hugo rejection in today's mail, this one from F&SF. Alas, he just bought another post-Katrina ghost story. I'd been afraid that might happen.

That made three stories requiring resubmission, so I went ahead and resubmitted them. As it happened, the story that F&SF just bounced went to Asimov's, and the story Asimov's bounced earlier in the week went to F&SF. The Jupiter story, which I'd intended to send to Asimov's as soon as they replied to the previous story, had to be held back again because I wanted to send the post-Katrina story to Asimov's before it gets any staler than it already is. So rather than let it languish any longer, I sent it to Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show -- my first submission there. The story is really a better fit for Baen's Universe, but that market's closed until further notice (though I now see that it could reopen as early as October 1... oh well, the story's in the email already).

It took entirely too much time to update my spreadsheet, decide where to send the three stories, and prepare the packages and emails. But I did get some more writing done. The action is cracking along nicely -- in fact, I think it might be moving too fast, because the main character has some backstory that I have to lay in so that the climax will make emotional sense. (I don't have a written outline for this one, but by now I know everything that is going to happen.) Ponder ponder ponder.

Changing topics completely... I'm considering changing my phone -- I want to carry a single device instead of my web-enabled phone, Palm V, and camera. It has to have a QWERTY keyboard, and I would really prefer PalmOS to Windows Mobile, so it comes down to a Treo 650 (Cingular) or Treo 700p (Verizon or Sprint). But it seems that the minimum calling plan I can get that supports this phone's data capabilities costs $60 (Cingular, 450 minutes + 5MB, or Sprint, 450 minutes + unlimited data), or $80 (Cingular or Verizon, 450 minutes + unlimited data) per month. My current plan (Cingular) is $40 for more minutes than I ever use + 1MB (I use maybe 50 minutes a month, but 1MB is a little too small). $240 or $480 more a year seems like a lot to pay for email and web on my phone. Any advice?

Posted 09/28/2006 23:11 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2236 | Since last entry: 623

The story's moving along, and the rivets are flying. I may need to engineer a pause soon to work in some critical backstory. ("Engineer." "Work in." "Critical." Yep, it's a Baen story all right, with a protagonist who's an engineer and a soldier.) Also, I'm almost halfway into a 5000-word story and the real problem hasn't even appeared yet. Some of what I have just written may have to be jettisoned. ("Jettisoned." Yep.)

As important as it is to me to finish this by this weekend, I still have some critiques and submissions and stuff to do this week, so I'm setting down the draft right now in favor of some of that. Sleep would also be good -- I have an early meeting tomorrow.

But first, this public service announcement: the deadline for the R. L Fanthorpe Write-Alike Contest is October 10, which is remarkably nigh. The contest is a benefit for the Susan C. Petrey Clarion Scholarship Fund and is a chance for all you writers to get some bad writing out of your systems, aid a worthy cause, and maybe even win some cash money. Click the link for details. Enter early and often!

Posted 09/26/2006 21:58 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 1613 | Since last entry: 119

As you may already know, we lost Mike Ford last night. A fine and wise and quiet man with amazing eyebrows, he wrote extemporaneously on nearly any topic, often in highly structured poetry, and the more you knew the funnier it was. He will be sorely missed.

We spent most of the evening at our neighborhood book group. Unusually, we managed to spend most of the time actually discussing the book, 40,000 in Gehenna by C. J. Cherryh. When we got home I read over my work in progress (tentatively titled "Firewall") and realized that it would really be happier in first person. I think I'd been avoiding it largely because my last two stories were in first, but when I went through and changed it, it was like loosening a belt that's too tight. After that I added one paragraph and a few scattered sentences and I'm calling it a night. I'll take the train tomorrow.

Much else ought to be done. I have two stories to put back in the mail, two short stories and two novels to critique, and I still have to unpack from Foolscap, plus the usual groceries, dishes, and other life maintenance. Too bad. Not gonna happen right now.

Posted 09/25/2006 23:20 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 1494 | Since last entry: 268

Foolscap was a small, pleasant convention, and we had a nice time talking with Jay Lake, Dave Howell, Kate's sister Sue, Sue Mohn, Hal and Ulrika O'Brien, Amy Thomson and Edd Vick, and artist/author guest of honor Mark Ferrari. But, as has often been the case, it felt a little underpopulated... just not quite enough people for critical convention mass. Many Seattle fans were missed (although I'm sure they all had good reasons not to be there). Also, the last panel I was on, which concerned "why do so few science fiction characters go to church or have any religion at all?" was fairly stressful both because of its touchy subject matter and because of some argument over what the exact topic of the panel should be, so my convention ended on a slightly sour note. But many people congratulated me on the Hugo win and we had some fine meals.

In addition to the 268 words above on the work in progress, also participated in an exercise where I wrote a 700-word scene based on an artwork. I might finish that up into a whole story, I might not. Not right now, anyway. I have too many excuses not to start on novel #2 already.

Came home to find the first post-Hugo rejection, from Asimov's as it happens. That's okay, now I can send them the Jupiter story.

Posted 09/24/2006 23:22 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 1226 | Since last entry: 679

Had to choose today between taking the train (writing, no gym) and driving (no writing, possibly gym). After yesterday's nightmare commute, leaving the driving to Tri-Met sounded like a real good idea. I'd hoped to get 1000 words for the day but it was still productive (though a bit heavy on the exposition... which is to be expected for this stage in the story).

I mentioned yesterday how I felt the story expand when I added the internal conflict to my concept of the story. I've been meaning to say something about a concept I think of as a story's "trajectory." The best analogy I can draw is to Evel Knievel's aborted attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon. If you look at films of the event, you can easily see that his "motorcycle" (actually a one-man short-range rocket with decorative wheels) was plainly on a perfect parabola to the other side of the canyon when its parachute accidentally deployed. If it hadn't been for that chute, there's no doubt in my mind he would have made it. In the same way, I can feel this story taking off at a certain angle. That angle tells me that the end is about 7000 words away (plus or minus about 10%) and I can take a thousand words or so to set up the situation. If the story were accelerating faster I'd know I'd have to get to the action right away and defer or cut that exposition.

(Okay, that's not a very good analogy, but it's the one I've got.)

Several people commented on yesterday's entry to the effect that "why change your working style when the old style is demonstrably working extremely well?" A fair question...

1. I don't feel that I must change my style, I just want to try another way. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to write as well, only faster? I'll never know if I can unless I try.
2. I'm working on a project that has a deadline. In order to get it critiqued in time to incorporate critique comments before the deadline, given that the group meets every 3 weeks, it has to be done by either 9/30 or 10/21. Sooner is better than later, and also there's a chance I might be out of town for the second (10/28) meeting, so I'm shooting to be done by 9/30. At my usual working speed this would be a stretch, especially with Foolscap this weekend.
3. Now that I've gotten that external validation, I feel confident enough that I can try messing with the way I work and see whether it helps or hinders.

None of which is to say I'm actually achieving a faster speed. But I'm still trying.

Got interviewed tonight by a reporter from the Southeast Examiner. It was fun -- the reporter's an SF reader and we spent a good part of the time swapping recommendations -- and the piece should appear next week, I think.

Posted 09/21/2006 23:44 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 547 | Since last entry: 547

I have been a slug. A slug most foul and slimy. I haven't been to the gym, and I haven't been writing. Well, I did write over 1500 words of notes on the new story ("Firewall") on Monday and Tuesday, but yesterday I sat and read fanzines during the hour I should have been writing. A slug, I say.

Today didn't start well. I had an 8am meeting followed by an all-day planning session, so I awoke in the dark and didn't expect to get much done all day. But the 8am meeting lasted only half an hour, giving me time to type up some notes from yesterday's UI review. Then the planning session finished unexpectedly quickly, right after lunch, so I got in some actual productivity and even managed to go to the gym for the first time this week (go me!). Homeward-bound traffic was insane, but I took advantage of the situation to make some phone calls. (Usually I would never make a phone call from a moving car, but... well, I wasn't moving.) I set up an appointment to talk with a reporter from my neighborhood paper (the Southeast Examiner) about the Hugo.

Got home and warmed up the ratatouille we'd made yesterday from the magic vegetable basket -- it's always better the next day, so we made it ahead -- and then sat down to write. Again, go me.

I know who the main character is. I know his backstory and his current situation. I have an internal problem for him that parallels his external problem (and when Kate gave me that idea I felt the story expand from 5000 to 7500 words -- weird, never had that happen before). I have a general idea of the shape of the plot, and I know what happens at the climax. I'm not 100% sure how to convey what happens after that point, but I'm pretty sure I know what decision he'll make. I even have some secondary characters. What I don't have is an outline. For me, this is working without a net.

I also am trying to write fast (after much good advice on this from Jay Lake at the Worldcon). So far, it's not working. 500 words in 76 minutes isn't fast -- I keep backing up and tweaking with the current sentence until it's perfect, which is my usual habit. I will try again tomorrow to break that habit.

Oh, almost forgot: I have an entry in the current Brain Parade over at memetherapy.net.

Posted 09/20/2006 22:38 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I put the fershlugginer novella in the mail to Analog on Monday. Thanks to Elizabeth Bear, who posted a LiveJournal entry that made me realize the time had come to stop tweaking and send it out to seek its fortune.

The "A Hacker, a Machinist, and a Writer Talk About Craftsmanship" panel at the Portland PerlMongers meeting on Wednesday went well. The audience seemed to enjoy it; I know I did. It was like a good convention panel, but without the convention. There's a podcast of the whole thing here: http://pdxpm.podasp.com/archive.html

Fall has arrived. It rained today, for the first time in I forget how long. Also, I had a dentist appointment first thing today and I wound up working late, so I woke up in the dark and got home in the dark. This will become increasingly more frequent in the coming weeks, alas, until it's dark and rainy all day every day. (But it beats shoveling snow, and the summers here are gorgeous.)

I've been catching up on my critiquing, and my reading. Finished 40,000 in Gehenna and Fun Home (the latter is absolutely brilliant) and started in on His Majesty's Dragon.

No writing. This must change soon.

Posted 09/14/2006 22:50 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Kamila Miller writes:

I'd like to have folks spread the word that OryCon's writer's workshop deadline is coming up fast, and I hope that you can encourage people to submit. Have them contact me, Kami, at kamila@easystreet.com for more info. We're still building the workshop and so right now there is lots of room.

Kami

More information is available at http://www.orycon.org/orycon28/writers_workshop.

Posted 09/10/2006 10:42 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Started off the day with a trip to the Belmont Street Fair and a visit to the old firehouse there, which is now a museum. Great use of firefighting stuff to make up the practicalities of the museum, such as ladders as display elements and fire hoses as railings. This particular firehouse has been in use since fire engines were pulled by horses, and still has the old hayloft and hose tower. I got to slide down (a segment of) the fire pole, and see the mechanism of a fire alarm (a very simple spring-powered clockwork to send out the alarm's location code). And you know those big round things they used to use to catch people jumping out of burning buildings? They stopped using them because, although it might save one person's life, a single use would often destroy the shoulders or backs, and hence careers, of three or four firemen.

Next came a dim sum expedition to Fong Chong, to celebrate the return of Robin Catesby to Portland. Mary Hobson was there, along with numerous other writer-types, and I talked with her about the Damn Novella, which she has read in its current state and assures me it's fine. (Which is not to say it doesn't have any problems; they always have problems even when they're done and published -- see this post by Elizabeth Bear.) I will give it one last quick pass tomorrow and put it in the mail on Monday.

After that, we returned to the Belmont Street Fair and wandered the booths and storefronts, drinking coffee and counting black dogs. I love my town, and my neighborhood. I got to ride on a Segway -- it was strange and freaky, like standing on a wobbly wheeled chair that, for no apparent reason, doesn't tip over and dump you on your butt. Along the way we hit a couple of rummage sales and picked up a bunch of used CD's. Next to us some teenaged or early-twenties kids enthused over CD's from the 1970's. "Dude! It's Boston! If I owned these I'd never sell them!" Oddly disturbing.

Back home for a nap and a quick dinner of peanut butter sandwiches before heading out again for Garrison Keillor at the Symphony. Between Garrison and the opening night of the Time-Based Art Festival (maybe other things too), the whole area was rocking. Though it was hard to find a parking place, I'm glad to live in a town with a vibrant and lively downtown. The performance itself was as entertaining as you'd expect, an interesting integration of Garrison's usual radio show schtick with classical music. I wonder how much of it was improvised.

And so, after an evening snack of corn flakes, to bed.

Posted 09/09/2006 23:12 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Took the train to work today, determined to push through and finish work on the novella. Wrote a new 670-word scene, second from the end, intended to address a couple of problems with the climax and anticlimax. Not sure whether it works, or whether it's just a huge steaming redundant infodump. And sappy. I'll sleep on it. Maybe I'm done, maybe not. If not, I will be soon.

Also, I've been invited to appear on a panel discussion at the Portland PerlMongers meeting next Wednesday: "A hacker, a machinist, and a writer discuss the question of Craftsmanship." Sounds like the lead-in to a joke; should be fun. Follow the link for more information.

Posted 09/07/2006 22:38 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

It's been a productive (and expensive!) fannish evening.

Unfortunately, we waited too long on World Fantasy Con; memberships cost us $150 each, and we had to settle for a room in the overflow hotel. It's not like we haven't known since the beginning of the year that we were going to Austin. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I also sent in my program questionnaire; I hope that it's not too late to get on the program.

We didn't (yet) sign up for the WFC banquet. Should we?

At the complete opposite end of the spectrum, we also made our hotel reservations for Nippon in 2007. We're in the Pan Pacific, which is slightly cheaper and has larger rooms (40 square meters -- seems HUGE for Japan) than the hotel attached to the convention center. I believe we have paid for the whole stay in advance -- good thing we have savings.

No writing tonight. I have given myself a couple of stars for the last two days for editing on the novella, but they haven't been very productive. I have changes I would like to make, but they're fairly deep and structural and I find it's much easier just to poke at wording here and there (and I have literally done the thing of putting in one word and then coming back half an hour later and taking it out). I'm thinking that I need to either set it aside for a while and work on something else -- and I do have something else I could be working on -- or shove it out of the nest. At the moment the nest thing is looking awfully attractive, but at the same time I've worked so long on this novella that I really, really want it to sell. Ponder, ponder.

Posted 09/06/2006 22:24 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Tuesday: "The next time they offer us a room near the elevator, remind me to ask which elevator."

My main memory of the trip down was that our early afternoon flight, which gave us a very relaxed half-day off to prepare for the trip, put us into L.A. right at rush hour. So any hopes we had entertained of spending Tuesday night at Disneyland were revealed as fantasy, replaced by fighting through traffic. It didn't help that we gave friends Joyce and David a ride from the airport, and the four of us had sufficient luggage that they had to share the back seat with two large and pointy suitcases. After a quick light dinner of banh mi (Vietnamese sandwiches) at the famous Lee's Sandwiches, we arrived at the con just after registration closed. We hung around in the reg area and the hotel lobby for a while, and ran into my Writers of the Future classmate Pat Rothfuss, Interzone editor Jetse de Vries, and fanzine editors Dick and Nicki Lynch before falling over around 10pm.

Wednesday: "You're hanging around with him, you obviously don't overwhelm easily."

Got a little bit of writing done in the morning before heading to downtown Orange for an antiquing expedition with Nicki Lynch Downtown Orange has been featured in many films, including playing 1960s Erie, Pennsylvania in That Thing You Do, and we started with breakfast at Watson's Drug Store, which looked as though it hadn't changed in forty years. We spent an entertaining morning browsing the antique stores and had a nice lunch at a Lebanese place called Byblos before returning to the con, already in progress.

I ought to mention here that I thought the convention was remarkably well run. Everything happened pretty much on time; all convention publications, especially the pocket program, were well-laid-out and accurate; and pre-con communications with the program participants were first-rate. My only complaints are that the daily program change sheets were often insane (containing items such as "Joe Schmo Reading: remove panelist Joe Schmo" and "Dogs Vs. Cats: replace moderator Jane Doe with Jane Doe") and that the convention lacked a central gathering place to rendezvous (accidentally or on purpose) with other fans. The Hilton lobby, Hilton bar, convention registration area, several places in Hall A, and the outdoor plaza between the Hilton and the Convention Center were all plausible, but none of them were "the place were everyone passes each other." Because of this lack of a central meeting place, I didn't see a lot of my friends until the last day and I found out later I'd missed some of them completely.

The first two panels I appeared on were "What I Do When I Should Be Writing" and "Mix & Match Writing Challenge." The first was an entertaining romp, with Sarah Monette, Phyllis Eisenstein, Fiona Avery, and me swapping anecdotes and advice; the second was also a crowd-pleaser, where I found myself seated between Peter S. Beagle and John Barnes, both of whom turned out phenomenal stories in very little time based on someone else's character, setting, and plot (Beagle's R. Daneel/Casablanca/Pygmalion mash-up was particularly fine). My own story, featuring Superman in the Springfield of The Simpsons with the plot of Logan's Run, was less successful, and didn't even have an ending.

After that I attended Sarah Monette's reading, then went off to Mamma Cozze's for a fine old-fashioned Italian dinner with Richard Threadgill and his sweetie. We returned to the con in time for the writers' workshop reception, but I didn't know very many people there so we buggered off to the SFWA suite. The rest of the evening was Nomad Fever, never really finding a satisfactory party to settle in at, and I turned in about midnight feeling mildly grumpy.

Thursday: "I would say: stick it to the Mouse and do the geek thing."

I wasn't scheduled to appear on any programming today, so I found myself standing around in the registration area talking with the delightful Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, and Jay Lake who borrowed my thumb drive so he could print out a story. From there I decided to indulge my inner media geek, attending talks by Star Trek visual designer Rick Sternbach and actor Marina Sirtis (Counselor Troi). Both talks were entertaining, but I would have enjoyed them more if I'd watched more than two episodes of any Star Trek after season 4 of Next Generation.

I snagged a quick and not-entirely-unsatisfactory lunch in the convention center before my writers' workshop session, where I joined with Jean Lorrah, Darrell Schweitzer, and Lori Ann White to critique the work of three new writers (I said "I dislike the terms 'pro' and 'amateur;' I prefer 'eviscerator' and 'evisceree'"). I was able to encourage the new writers by pointing out that I'd workshopped my story "Tk'Tk'Tk" at a similar workshop at ConJose, and it was now on the Hugo ballot.

After my workshop session I was scheduled to sign autographs for an hour at the Dell Magazines table in the dealers' room. Not too surprisingly, only two or three people wanted my autograph, but I had a nice time talking with Asimov's associate editor Brian Bieniowski and his Analog counterpart, and when I was done there I was interviewed on camera for a Writers of the Future documentary. The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering about the dealers' room, art show, and fan room, followed by a wonderful halal Chinese dinner at Mas' with fans Mary Kay Kare and Ulrika O'Brien.

When we got back from dinner I grabbed my laptop and headed to the Hilton bar for the "Two Beers and a Story Challenge" convened by Laura Anne Gilman. But Jay Lakewussed out, and without his participation the event collapsed. Nonetheless, I spent the entire rest of the evening in the bar and had a great time. Got to bed around midnight.

Friday: "It's a tool for removing the valve guide covers from a Model A Ford."

This was a great convention for attracting keen people from outside fandom, such as Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. I attended a fascinating panel about online communities, featuring Craig and Teresa Neilsen Hayden spouting delightful phrases such as "early bloggers like John Locke." At one point it looked as though a fugghead in the audience was going to derail the panel, but I reassured Kate that with Teresa on the podium everything would soon be under control, and indeed it soon was.

Next I appeared on the 'Physics of Superheroes" panel. One realization I had during the panel is that comic book physics (and cartoon physics) is essentially Aristotelian -- things behave as you would intuitively expect them to behave rather than in the messy and peculiar way that actually do. For example, Superman's heat vision was originally an extension of his X-Ray vision: objects were melted by the X-Rays coming from his eyes, just as vision in the Aristotelian system works by sending out rays from the eyes.

After that panel I went to a panel including the editor on whose desk my novel is currently sitting. I had an encouraging chat with him after the panel (he'd read the first 200 pages on the plane, and was reasonably pleased with it although he thought the opening was muddled), which was briefly interrupted by someone who'd sent him a book when he was at another publisher and wondered if he'd be interested in taking another look at it. He said yes, and the writer proceeded to hand him a postcard with "comp covers" for the first five books in the ten-book series (!) and discuss the books' movie, action figure, and TV series potential, which he hoped his new agent would help him realize, unlike the agent he'd just fired. Life as an editor at the Worldcon must be hell.

Casting about for a decent lunch, I wound up jumping over the railing to join my Clarion West classmate Amy Sisson in the Hilton lobby restaurant, along with her astrophysicist husband and one of his NASA colleagues. Amy and I talked writing while her husband and his friend talked NASA politics, but it was a fascinating conversation nonetheless and the food wasn't half bad either.

After lunch I appeared on two panels in a row: "Zen Scavenger Hunt" and "Intermediate Writing." The Scavenger Hunt, in which the panelists brought random objects and the audience told them what they'd been looking for, was mostly a two-way contest between Geri Sullivan (who had brought an amazing assortment of intriguingly fannish objects) and Pat Cadigan (who didn't know she was supposed to bring anything and brazened through with the contents of her purse and a healthy dose of attitude). Pat won on points but it was a delightfully entertaining hour. The Intermediate Writing panel was one of my least favorite hours of the convention, unfortunately, because while Jay Lake and I wanted to talk about the life of a writer who's sold a few short stories (as described in the panel's precis), the other two panelists wanted to turn it into the "Novelists Recovering From Mid-Career Meltdown" panel. One of the two, in particular, had a nasty habit of stating his opinions as Facts, and when he said to me after a difference of opinion -- not once but twice -- "we'll see who's still here in ten years" I had difficulty keeping my replies civil.

Due to a scheduling snafu, we wound up double-booked for dinner, with both Bridget/Simon Bradshaw and Elise Matthesen/Ellen Klages. We finally decided to dine with both pairs, sending Elise and Ellen ahead in a cab since our car could only accommodate four. After many adventures we all met up at Johnny Reb's for Southern-style barbecue, with peanut shells on the floor, and had delightful conversation over sweet tea in Mason jars and fried apple pie the size of your arm for dessert. On the way back we somehow crammed everyone into the car, with four in the back seat and me on Ellen's lap, and it's possible that Ellen has since managed to stand up straight.

Upon our return from dinner we went straight to the Asimov's Dessert Reception in the SFWA Suite. At one point I had to stop and go "whoa" because I suddenly realized that it was only six years ago that I'd been a fresh Clarion grad wishing I could go into the SFWA suite with the cool kids, and now not only was I attending a party in the SFWA suite, but copies of Asimov's with my name on the cover were scattered all over as decorations/party favors. How cool is that?

Then we set off on the Search for the Tor Party, which was a lot more complicated than it had to be because the Hilton's Lanai deck had not only a non-Euclidean floor plan but three Presidential Suites. Eventually we did locate it, and I very quickly wound up in conversation with Keith Watt, an astrophysicist friend of Amy Sisson's husband. We talked about black holes (research for my next novel! really!) for hours -- the convention practically paid for itself right there. Staggered off to bed around 1am.

Saturday: "Getcher ass up here!"

I didn't have anything specific to do until the afternoon, so naturally we were kicked out of our room by the housekeeping staff around 10am. We went to the Galaxy Quest writer's talk, but the writer was ill, so the space was being used for a showing of the film. It tried to suck us in, but we pulled ourselves free and spent the rest of the hour chatting with Lise Eisenberg, Marci Malinowycz, and other random fans in the hall outside. Then we headed off to get a seat at the presentation by the Lost writers, but that too was canceled. Bummer. I went to a different panel, then snagged a pretty good grilled chicken salad at the convention center, which I ate during Ellen Klages's reading ("In the House of the Seven Librarians" from Firebirds Rising, a wonderful story about a little girl raised by feral librarians).

After that I had a half-hour for the Hugo rehearsal, which consisted of a quick walk-through from the audience, up the stairs to the lectern, and then offstage. The stage of the Anaheim Arena was far too familiar to me from my position as Opening Ceremonies co-director at the last L.A.con, but as soon as I got up there I had the same reaction I'd had at the last two Hugo rehearsals I'd attended: I've been pretty good at keeping my hopes in check up until now, but you know... I might just win it. I reswallowed my heart, slapped that hope down as hard as I could, and dashed off to my next panel.

"Is SF Like a Shark?" went reasonably well. In fact, all my panels went well -- in all cases the panel happened on time and in the originally-scheduled room, we panelists were well outnumbered by the audience, and people came up to me afterwards and said they'd enjoyed it. This panel would have been better, though, if the moderator had not insisted on a) asking a series of prepared questions, b) using the microphone (every other panel I was on, even those in larger rooms, did well enough by simply speaking up), and c) passing the mike to the panelists (in the same order each time) so that each of us got exactly one shot at answering each question. This moderation technique prevented the panel from building up any momentum. But I did get to say that I thought SF was less like a shark than an octopus: intelligent, predatory, and communicates by changing color. I also got to meet and thank John-Henri Holmberg, editor of the Swedish magazine Nova Science Fiction, in whose latest issue "The Tale of the Golden Eagle" was just translated.

After that Kate and I had time for a brief nap before changing into our Hugo-night finery. In our fancy duds we attended a very cool panel with three writers from the Whedonverse (Buffy, Angel, Firefly) and then headed off to the pre-Hugo reception. At the reception we noshed, sipped, and mingled with the other nominees, presenters, and guests, served by a bartender named Hugo (I wonder if that was deliberate?). The Hugo base was revealed -- everyone agreed it was one of the most handsome in years -- and group photos were taken of the nominees in each category. I was the only nominee present for Short Story; Mike Resnick was also at the con, but didn't arrive until later. I was certain this was an omen, because when I was up for the Campbell the first time, Wen Spencer had come late to the "Meet the Campbell Nominees" panel and then proceeded to win it.

Patty Wells said that she had burned incense and sacrificed a goat for me. I thanked her for this, but suggested that it might have been more effective to bribe our mutual friend John Lorentz, who had counted the ballots. She replied that John is one of the most incorruptible people she knows, and anyway what could she bribe him with? "A goat dinner," I said.

The time arrived for us to move out into the hall, where we sat with Campbell nominee Sarah Monette and her co-author and Campbell presenter Elizabeth Bear in the center of the second row. I commented to Sarah that when you're really nervous your heart doesn't beat faster, just deeper. She agreed.

The ceremony went on, with the speeches and the Big Heart and the Seiun and the Campbell awards. Sarah cheered mightily for John Scalzi, so clearly she wasn't too badly crushed by her loss. And now that the non-Hugos had been taken care of, the Short Story award must come next.

But no. Next came the artist and the fan and the semi-prozine awards. And then the editor and dramatic presentation and best related book. And I started to realize that Short Story was one of the evening's major awards.

Which was presented by Harlan Ellison. Who, whatever I may think of him personally, is surely a major figure in the field. He gave a long talk about how short stories are the heart of science fiction, and how the Short Story Hugo is really the "big one," and he read the names of the nominees, and he pronounced my name and the title of my story correctly. And he tore open the envelope.

And then he said "I'm not gonna tell you" and started to walk off the stage. But he was dragged back to the mike. And he spoke into that mike and his voice boomed out and he said -- no, not "and the winner is," nor the politically correct "and the Hugo goes to" -- he said "Levine? You here?"

"Yeah?" I managed.

"Getcher ass up here."

I think I said "oh shit oh god oh jesus" or something like that instead of "excuse me" as I rushed past Sarah and Elizabeth and anyone else who had the misfortune to be seated between me and the aisle. I was moving so fast when I hit the stairs that they broke into two sections, the lower section sliding sideways by about six inches. I got up on stage and Harlan was standing there with his arms outstretched and I gave him an enormous hug. In fact, I climbed him like a spider monkey. In the photos you can see that he was holding the Hugo in one hand, and it's just good luck that no one was hurt, because that thing's heavy and very very pointy.

You have to understand that I have been in fandom since I was sixteen years old. Winning a Hugo Award has always been the pinnacle of possible achievements that I could reasonably aspire to. And here I had won it -- I had won a Hugo of my very own. My little story about a guy and some bugs was going to be listed with "Soldier, Ask Not" and "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" and "Neutron Star" and "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones." Written in the Book of Life forever.

I read my prepared speech, including the top line: "2006 Hugo acceptance speech, which will never be used," which got a laugh, and although I was trembling all over I managed to hold it together and not start sobbing until I got off stage, where Janice Gelb held me up and offered me water, which I was silly enough to refuse.

I spent the rest of the evening grinning maniacally and clutching the Hugo to my chest, so much so that my right bicep was sore for the rest of the convention. I just couldn't believe my good fortune. I had totally not expected to win. And, indeed, "Singing My Sister Down" had the most votes in the first round, and my story won only because it received more second- and third-place votes from people whose first and second choices were eliminated in later rounds. This is exactly the effect our preferential voting system is designed to achieve: finding the nominee that is most acceptable to the most voters.

Many wonderful things happened after the ceremony ended. Ellen Klages pointed out that she'd won a Nebula after wearing a chicken suit at the Tiptree auction and I'd won a Hugo after wearing the same suit -- it must be a lucky chicken suit, we should charge authors money to wear it. I was invited to perform the ceremonial breaching of the sake cask at the post-Hugo party (hosted by Nippon in 2007), and I did the best I could, although the little wooden mallet they gave me wasn't up to the job. I ran into Geoff Landis, who tore the Past Hugo Winner ribbon off his name badge and gave it to me. I made a delirious round of parties, surrounded by people who wanted to congratulate me and take my photo and tell me how much they liked my story. And I think they really meant it.

Edward Morris posted on the Asimov's website's message board later: "David Levine was on cloud 9 from outer space the whole night. I have never seen a human being so transported with joy. Good for him."

Just before I drifted off to sleep, about 2am, I realized that the four fiction winners this year were Spin (one of the best SF novels I've read in years), Connie Willis (the Hugo-winningest author of all), Peter S. Beagle (author of the classic The Last Unicorn)... and me. Omigod.

Later, I awoke in the night and made my way in the dark to the desk, to touch the Hugo, to make sure it was still there.

Sunday: "Here, kid. Have a torch."

I woke up the next morning still weepy about the whole experience. The first task of the day was to go to the convention office and pick up the promised box to keep the Hugo safe on its way home. But no one on duty first thing in the morning knew where the boxes were. So I carried the Hugo around for a while, enduring much ribbing (um, partially deserved) about not wanting to put it down, before my reading.

About a half-dozen people came to my reading, only one of whom I knew. I answered questions for a while, then read "Titanium Mike Saves the Day" which will be appearing in F&SF later this year -- I'd picked that story because it's short and upbeat. During the hour Francesca Myman and Ulrika O'Brien showed up, and we chatted together as we left so that I forgot I'd promised to stop by kids' programming and show off the Hugo. Oops.

I returned to the convention office, where I discovered that the boxes provided, while perfectly good for mailing, were huge, so I just wrapped it in bubble-wrap. It was still too big to fit in my carryon bag, though.

I met up with Kate at the Ray Bradbury talk. This was one of the program items I absolutely did not want to miss, because Bradbury doesn't travel and isn't getting any younger. They wheeled him up on the stage, put a mike in his face, and he proceeded to talk rivetingly for an hour about his life, about how he'd sold two novels he didn't even know he'd written, how he'd channeled Herman Melville while writing the screenplay of Moby Dick, and how Robert Heinlein and Leigh Brackett and the other pro writers had been so good to him when he was a teenage kid, and when he was done I looked down at the little Hugo in my lap and I got all weepy again.

After that I said to Kate "Okay, the convention's over now." I bought a canvas bag at Scott and Jane Dennis's souvenir stand that said "Space Cadet Class of 2006" and was just big enough to contain the bubble-wrapped Hugo. Then I joined Kate at the Starbuck's in the Marriott, where she'd already obtained me a panini for lunch. We went back to the room then, but I looked at the Hugo, whose bubbles were already beginning to pop, and decided that it needed more protection. So I went back to the convention office, where I hauled out my long-dormant architecture-student skills and my Swiss Army knife, and I crafted a close-fitting cardboard protector for the Hugo. It fit very tidily into the Space Cadet bag.

At this point there was about an hour before our final dinner rendezvous of the convention, so I went to the bar and hung out with Jay Lake, Diana Sherman, Bridget Coila, and many other writers, several of whom I hadn't seen before at the con. As I talked with Jay I noticed a peculiar thing: while Jay and I were talking, everyone else was keeping mum and just listening. It made me want to try to be especially profound or something.

We had a nice Vietnamese dinner with New York fan Lise Eisenberg; at another table in the same restaurant was a large group including Francesca Myman. The food was really good but they didn't seem to understand the concept of "we're finished now, please bring us the check." Once we finally extracted ourselves we went back to the room and packed up our stuff, getting to sleep around 10pm.

Monday: "I can't take that from you, because it might go boom."

We finished packing and checked out, leaving our bags in the car, then caught a shuttle to Disneyland -- actually Disney's California Adventure, because we'd given it only one day on our previous trip and there were several rides there we really wanted to do again. When we arrived at the park, early enough that we were first in line at the gate, someone wearing mouse ears congratulated me on the Hugo win.

Disney has a very confused notion of what it means to "open." The posted opening time for the park was 10am, but at 9:30 an exceptionally cheery gentleman showed up and led all the people in line in a big count-down for the opening of the park. But though we got our tickets stamped and entered the park, none of the rides were going yet, so all we could do was mob at the rope closing the entrance to the Hollywood district and wait for another half-hour. But we overheard a park employee mention to someone else that Soaring Over California, one of our favorite rides, was already running, so we walked over there, rode that, and came back to the Hollywood entrance just in time for the rope to drop.

In Hollywood we rode the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror -- where I got so wrapped up in the Twilight Zone stuff (they have several original props, or possibly just accurate re-creations, in the pre-ride and post-ride areas) that I actually forgot that the elevator drops, so I got a nice shock out of the ride. Then we rode Monsters Inc., the California Screamin' rollercoaster, and the Mulholland Madness mad-mouse in short order -- thus hitting every one of our "really want to do this" rides by 11am. First thing on a non-holiday Monday the park was practically deserted, and there were no lines to speak of. In some ways this made it less exciting, and exacerbated the California park's excess of white space, but I can't really complain.

Having hit every ride we really wanted to ride, we took half an hour to take the tortilla factory and sourdough bread bakery tours, which were entertaining and provided a nice morning snack for free. Then we rode Screamin' one more time (by this time the line had grown to 20 minutes, but we'd picked up a Fastpass on our first visit so we were able to skip most of it) and left the park.

I've already posted about the catch-22 at the airport security gate. At the airport we ran into Laura Majerus, Amy Thomson, and Edd Vick, Jay Lake, and Mike Moscoe. In fact, Jay and Mike were both on the same plane as us, and Jay had the Campbell regalia in his luggage, so if that plane had gone down the field would have been devastated. But it did not, and we arrived home safe and sound.

After Return: "I'm happy, shaggy, wet, stinky, brave, sloppy, and dark -- I must be a Newfie!"

That was a week ago. I went to work on Tuesday with the Hugo, planning to say "Hey, let me show you this cute little souvenir I picked up at the convention," but the guys in my department had already put up posters all over the office announcing my Hugo win, with pictures from the midamericon.org site. I didn't get a lot of work done the first day back, with people coming by to congratulate me and admire the Hugo.

I haven't gotten any writing done since then (or during the convention, either). Most of my keyboard time in the last week has been taken up with answering email, much of it congratulatory. I hope to get back to the writing today. After much talking with Jay Lake and others about the value of writing fast, once I finish the novella I may try to whomp out one more short story -- in one week, tops -- before diving into novel #2.

On Friday we had a celebratory gathering at the Barley Mill pub. About 30 people attended, and it got kind of crowded -- one person described it as "like a Tor party, but without a balcony to cool off on" -- but everyone seemed to be having a good time. In addition to hanging out with many long-time fan and writer buddies, I made several new friends and got an invitation to a panel discussion at Free Geek about the value of craftsmanship.

This weekend, as Kate has blogged, we hosted Kate's sister Sue and the three nieces, and spent a lot of time on miscellaneous household chores. We've gotten a lot done, but not nearly as much as I had hoped. So it goes.

Chop wood, carry water.

Posted 09/04/2006 11:16 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

As most of those reading this already know, my story "Tk'Tk'Tk" won the Hugo for Best Short Story. I am, in brief, stunned. I really, really didn't expect this. I literally sobbed with joy when I received the award (from Harlan Ellison, no less), I spent most of the next twenty-four hours clutching the Hugo and grinning like a maniac -- I mean, even more than usually -- and I'm still stopping in my tracks and going "wow" at intervals. This is a phenomenal honor and I am just plain overwhelmed.

The complete voting results and details are here. Some photos from the award ceremony can be found here.

I just got back from Los Angeles tonight, after being off-Net for the last week, and I will respond to the many congratulatory emails as soon as I get a chance. One thing that's slowing the process down is that I have to examine all the spams with subject lines like "Congratulations!" and "You won!" to see if any of them are actually from friends of mine.

A proper con report is forthcoming, but I thought I ought to clear up a few things:

1. Humping Harlan's leg. As you probably already know, I am a toon. I can and will do anything as long as it's funny. In particular, I will often put one leg behind the other person when engaged in a big fat hug. This is a joke I've done so often I just about can't stop myself. Under the circumstances it seemed the thing to do. Soon it will be all over the net... but I survived the Chicken Suit Incident, and I'll survive this. Most people seemed pleased by my enthusiasm.
2. Breaching the sake keg. All I can say is that I did the best I could with the inadequate mallet provided, and I sure hope that failure to break the lid on the first blow isn't a bad omen.
3. Does winning the Hugo help your career? So far, signs are positive. I've already received offers for Czech and Italian rights for the winning story, been solicited to contribute to an anthology, and received at least one email with the subject line "No One I've Seen Naked Has Ever Gotten A Hugo Before (I Think)." Well, maybe that last one isn't really a career thing.
4. Getting the Hugo home. There was much discussion and debate at-con about the advisability of attempting to bring a large, heavy, and very pointy rocket-shaped object in carry-on luggage. I thought I was being practical when I decided I'd ask at the security gate if I could carry it on, and if the answer was no I'd put it in my checked luggage. But no, practicality and the TSA have nothing to do with each other. Consider this Catch-22: I couldn't get an opinion from the TSA agent as to whether I could bring a bag on board until it had been X-rayed; I couldn't go through the X-ray line without a boarding pass, nor could I hand my bag to the TSA agent to be X-rayed; and even if I could get a boarding pass without checking my checked bag, it would be rejected when I took it through the security line.

   The best I could hope for was an awkward and peculiar boarding process involving a minimum of two passes through the very slow security line, whether or not the Hugo passed X-ray muster. So to save time I just packed it in the middle of my checked bag. Which arrived on time and in good shape. The trophy's on the Radiola in the dining room right now.

Tired now. More later.

See also Kate's perspective.

Posted 08/28/2006 22:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Up until a few days ago I considered the F&SF Slush Bomb of women writers proposed by Charlie Finlay for 8/18 (see here) to be of only academic interest to me. But late Wednesday I realized that the New Orleans story, which I was planning to revise and submit to F&SF as soon as I was done with the revisions on the novella, had a female co-author. Duh! So I took the train to work on Thursday, laptop in hand, and tackled the revisions during my commute.

I finished the revisions on Thursday night, then we joined my co-author Andrine de la Rocha and her housemates at their home on Friday for a previously-planned get-together. After a truly wonderful dinner, we looked at Andrine's photos from her trip to New Orleans (it was weird to see actual photographs of scenes that until now I'd only visualized from Andrine's diary -- many of which made it into the story), after which I gave a reading of the story. I put it into an envelope that night, though it wasn't picked up by my mail carrier until today.

I don't know if this really counts as part of the Slush Bomb, both because I'm not of the designated gender and because it lacks the 8/18 postmark. But it is done and in the mail.

I feel pretty good about this one. I've never written anything so explicitly based on real people and incidents, and it makes me a little nervous, but since I have everyone's permission I'm sure it's okay.

Today we attended a delightful backyard party where various fans and geeks, many of whom I hadn't seen in years, feasted on fresh roasted corn and burgers. In the evening we watched the intriguing and puzzling film Primer (I enjoyed it, which is not to say I understood it completely) and I added nearly a hundred words to the novella. And now to bed -- tomorrow is my last day before the Worldcon with any free time and I have a lot to get done.

Oh, and Bento is back from the printer and looks fabulous. We'll be handing out copies at the Worldcon, and mailing them shortly thereafter to people who aren't there.

Posted 08/19/2006 23:48 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Spent most of the time since my last post producing another issue of Bento. Yes, each issue of our nearly-Hugo-nominated zine takes about one week to write, edit, lay out, and paste up. It's at the printer now and we should have copies at the Worldcon.

No writing during that time, but I did get back into it after taking the zine to the printer on Monday. I'm grinding slowly through the edits on the novella... slowly because it's hard to make the changes I'm trying to make, and because I don't have a lot of time for it. Some days the word count goes up, some days it goes down, rarely more than 50 words plus or minus. One day I worked for forty-five minutes and achieved a net wordcount change of one word.

I did get a couple small bits of writing egoboo: a college professor asked permission to use my story "The Last McDougals" in a freshman seminar on science fiction (along with a lot of other stories by better-known writers) and someone on LiveJournal whom I don't know recommended two of my stories (available online) as reading for English-as-a-second-language learners. Also, an excerpt from "Primates" has been posted at the Asimov's website.

We leave for Anaheim in six days. I have tons of stuff that needs to be done before then. We're waffling over whether or not to go to Disneyland again. And a voice in my head is trying to tell me that I might win the Hugo after all. I'm trying to slap it down. Not going to win no way nohow. I'd rather get myself in a frame of mind where a loss is expected and a win would be a pleasant surprise, rather than one where a win is expected and a loss would be a disappointment. But I don't think it's working.

My final Worldcon schedule:

• What I Do When I Should be Writing: Wednesday 2:30-4:00pm
• Mix & Match Writing Challenge: Wednesday 4:00-5:30pm
• Writers Workshop (closed session): Thursday 1:00-4:00pm
• Autographs at the Asimov's table in the dealers' room: Thursday 4:00-5:00pm
• Physics of Superheroes: Friday 11:30am-1:00pm
• Zen Scavenger Hunt: Friday 4:00-5:30pm
• Intermediate Writing: Friday 5:30-7:00pm
• Is SF Like a Shark?: Saturday 2:30-4:00pm
• Hugo Ceremony: Saturday 8:00-10:00pm
• Reading: Sunday 11:00am-12:00pm

(Not gonna win. No way nohow. Never gonna happen. Nuh uh.)

Posted 08/16/2006 23:26 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Since my last post the editing has been moving forward slowly. Most days I only add or subtract a few dozen words. I've been waffling over how much planetology is really needed to set up the ending, and trying to find a way to cram in an explanation of some backstory that most of my critiquers didn't pick up on. The problem I have is that, the way I write, by the time a story is ready for critique it's pretty much a hermetic whole. I find that there just isn't any place to put in even a single extra sentence without breaking the rhythm of the scene, and taking information out generally leaves something hanging someplace else. So making even minor changes involves fairly severe restructuring. Which means a lot more thinking than typing, and quite often finds me putting it back the way it was in the first place. I just love my own deathless prose too much.

Also since my last post, I've gotten another rejection (that story, at least, is already back in the mail), and the August Locus, containing reviews of the September Asimov's. Alas, Nick Gevers found my story "unconvincing" and Rich Horton didn't see fit to mention it at all (though he did say he'd been unimpressed with the issue as a whole). Le sigh.

I also got my preliminary Worldcon schedule, and I'm mighty happy with it. I got two readings, and I'm on panels with some very keen people. But I'm going to be a very busy boy:

• Wed 2:30pm: What I Do When I Should Be Writing with Fiona Avery, Phyllis Eisenstein, and Sarah Monette.
• Wed 4:00pm: Mix & Match Writing Challenge with John Barnes, Peter S. Beagle, K. A. Bedford, and Valerie Estelle Frankel. "Authors are presented with a character description for a well-known character, the setting of a (different) famous work, and a brief plot description of still another work. Without knowing their sources, they create and tell a story on the fly." I'm moderator for this one, so I might be handing out the assignments rather than playing.
• Thu 5:30pm: Themed Reading: Weird Sex with Cecilia Tan and Sean Williams. Shall I read the ovipositor sex scene from Remembrance Day or the all-dialogue biotech sex toy implant short-short?
• Fri 4:00pm: Zen Scavenger Hunt with Pat Cadigan, John Pomeranz, Geri Sullivan, and Mary A. Turzillo. "Panelists each bring ten items. Audience members ask for a type of item, a la a standard scavenger hunt. The panelists will then have to show one of the items they've brought and try to convince the audience that their item is the best match for what was requested." Should be fun.
• Fri 5:30pm: Intermediate Writing with Jay Lake, Mike Shepherd Moscoe, and Deborah J Ross.
• Sat 10:00am, Jay Lake Roast with Christopher J. Garcia, Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen, and (duh) Jay Lake. I'm moderator of this one, God help me. If anyone reading this has any Jay Lake anecdotes or wants to participate in the roast, drop me an email.
• Sat 2:30pm, Is SF Like a Shark? with Charles N. Brown, John-Henri Holmberg, Don Sakers, and Vernor Vinge.
• Sun 11:00am, Reading. Please do come. I'm told my readings are quite entertaining.

I will also have an autograph session at the Asimov's table in the dealer's room, not that I expect anyone to want my scrawl; I have a writers' workshop section; and of course I will be at the Hugos. See (many of) you there!

Posted 08/02/2006 23:08 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Got a lot of chores done. Had a long talk with Sara from my critique group about the novella, which helped me understand that despite the logic and motivation problems, the story's emotional core is in good shape and the problems are surmountable. Worked out a checklist of changes to make and began picking away at the edits. For breakfast this morning: blackberry pancakes. For dinner tonight: Chicken, Charred Tomato, and Broccoli Salad.

Life is good.

Posted 07/30/2006 22:40 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

When I got home from work today, the first step in making dinner was to take out the compost. As I headed out to the compost bin I noticed three spectacular blackberry canes looping over the back fence, like the Martian's fingers in the commercials for the War of the Worlds TV show from a few years back. I wanted to go out and hack at them right then, but Kate restrained me for the sake of getting dinner on the table.

It was a good thing she did. When I got out back, limb-loppers in hand, I found that the three big canes (the largest of which rose about ten feet high and was thicker than my thumb) were only the vanguard of a massive invasion force, thorny and heavy with fruit. I whacked at them for about forty-five minutes, and would probably have been completely overwhelmed except that our neighbors (the best neighbors in the entire universe) came by just then. Pat, who's much taller than I, was just barely able to cut the tallest cane with the loppers at their longest extension, while Michelle and five-year-old Rowan gamely helped denude the invading canes of their evil (and delicious) seed-bearing fruit. While I cut up the canes and gingerly transferred them to the yard debris bin, the neighbors picked about five pints of berries and left one of them for us. I'm more than happy with the deal. They'll be back for more berries in a couple of days.

Writing news: Four of my stories received Honorable Mentions in Gardner Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction: "A Book is a Journey," "Circle of Compassion," "The Ecology of Faerie," and "Tk'Tk'Tk." Which is, um, everything I published in 2005 except for "The Curse of Beazoel."

I'm going to go edit the novella some more now. Blackberries and yogurt await for dessert.

Posted 07/26/2006 21:03 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Yesterday was a good writing day. I got my subscription copy of the September 2006 Asimov's, including my story "Primates." My name's on the cover! Also, the issue has already been reviewed in Tangent Online, and I couldn't ask for a better review: "Levine cleverly weaves a sense of humanity and empathy into the pages... [a] must-read."

But when I finished up my evening chores, I found that the actual writing itself (I am editing the novella) was like pulling teeth. Even figuring out how to approach the task of writing down what I wanted to do in this editing pass was too much to contemplate. I gave myself a star for the day for sitting down and trying, but I think my total wordcount delta was about 3.

Today was better, but still nasty. The comments were fair, and consistent, but the problems they point out are deep-seated and difficult to resolve. I'm going to have to either change one of the main character's most fundamental personality traits, or find a way to explain how he could wind up where he is despite it. And the other characters' reaction to him makes them all unsympathetic. Not to mention some smaller, but still significant, problems of motivation and unexplained (in)action. If it weren't that these comments were accompanied by statements like "some of the strongest work we've seen from you" I'd be despairing. As it is I just see it as a craft challenge. A big craft challenge.

After all this, I sure as heck hope it sells.

Posted 07/25/2006 22:14 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Finally broke my nearly-month-long non-writing streak yesterday; I'm incorporating comments on the New Orleans story from my alpha readers, preparatory to sending it to my critique group. After I send that off I'll work on editing the novella.

In other writing news, I got another rejection, this one from F&SF for the twice-rewritten Jupiter story. Gordon appreciated the effort I'd put in but he still isn't connecting with the story, alas. Asimov's is next on the list for that one, but I just sent another story there. Must ponder whether to send it elsewhere or hold onto it until Asimov's opens up.

Also, my robot servants found a brief review of "I Hold My Father's Paws" in a Portugese blog. Google's translation: "In this story of David Levine, the irrigation ditch between father and son is closed through one bizarra mesclagem of biotechnology with the desire so human being to be free of all the concerns." My thoughts exactly.

Tonight we saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch, with local phenomenon Wade McCollum in the title role. The plot didn't exactly hang together -- in fact, I'm not really sure what happened at the end -- but McCollum was amazing. I can't imagine anyone else pulling off the vocal, physical, and emotional demands of that role. The next time he appears in anything, we'll be there.

Posted 07/21/2006 23:56 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Just back from a quick trip to Seattle, where we enjoyed the hospitality of Hal and Ulrika O'Brien (and their very enthusiastic dog Sarah and cat Tinka) and attended not just one, but two Clarion parties: one at the home of Kate Schaefer and Glenn Hackney and the other at the home of author Greg Bear. The second, a Clarion tradition was an unexpected bonus, where we were treated to a delicious dinner and the sights of the Bears' lakefront home as well as fine company including authors Terry Brooks and Kathleen Alcala. Other people we conversed with at one party or the other included Nalo Hopkinson (this week's Clarion instructor), Mark & Elizabeth Bourne, Dave Howell, Luke & Julie McGuff, Jane Hawkins, Jerry Kaufman & Suzle Tompkins, Nevenah Smith, Anita Rowland & Jack Bell, Mary Kay & Jordin Kare, Nisi Shawl, Cyn Ward, Vonda McIntyre, Eileen Gunn & John Berry, L. Timmel Duchamp, Andy Hooper & Carrie Root, Marci Malinowycz, Margaret Organ-Kean, and many others.

In addition to the parties, we joined in a delightful dim sum expedition at Jade Garden (where they had spoo!!) and visited a couple of yarn shops and the U. District Farmers' Market (where we acquired a couple of different apple ciders and several cans of locally-caught tuna). On the way to the Bears' we picked up a baker's dozen donuts at Top Pot, home of some of the finest donuts on the planet, where I also got an Ovaltine latte (?!).

This morning started with a delicious breakfast with our hosts at the Brown Bag Cafe in Redmond (where a single plate from the "light" portion of the menu provided brunch for both of us, with enough left over for dinner for both of us) followed by a side trip to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma. The most interesting bit of the museum was "Jane's Hot Shop", where a team of glass artists were at work on a life-sized skeleton in black glass; another intriguing exhibit featured glass dresses, cast (indirectly) from life. Much of the rest was, unfortunately, disturbing and macabre. Tacoma itself was also a mixed bag, combining dramatic architecture and natural views with charmless industrial areas.

Once returned home, we put some of the tuna together with new potatoes and lettuces from our weekly basket-o-vegies to make a nice Salad Nicoise, then I put the three stories rejected last week back in the mail (go me) as well as doing some other writing-related paperwork. And now, to bed.

Posted 07/16/2006 22:35 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Well, after a long dry spell of no responses at all, I got three rejections in the mail today. Looks like Friday the 13th came on a Thursday this month.

To take a bit of the sting out, yesterday I received an email from someone with a slashed L in his name, offering to buy translation rights to "Tk'Tk'Tk" for Nowa Fantastyka, a respected Polish SF magazine. They also wanted electronic copies of two other stories for further consideration. Not too shabby.

Also, the Asimov's rejection came with an invitation to autograph for an hour at their dealer's table at the Worldcon. I'm pleased, and I'll do it, though I doubt many people want my autograph.

I have written nothing in almost three weeks, and this doesn't seem likely to change in the next few days. I finished up one story right before leaving for Anaheim, and the next thing on the plate was revisions on another story. Which, because my revision process involves spreading papers out around my writing chair, was exceedingly difficult to do on the plane. Then... well, I should stop even pretending I'm going to try to get any writing done at conventions. And when I got home I found I'd brought back a mild but exceptionally annoying cold, which I am only now getting over, and there was a pile of chores to do (about some of which, perhaps, more later) with what little energy I had left.

Tomorrow we're heading to Seattle, to attend the Clarion party at the home of Kate and Glenn. We'll be staying with Hal and Ulrika on Friday and possibly Saturday night, and would welcome an opportunity to get together with Seattleites while we're there.

After I return I'll put those three stories back in the mail and start in on the editing.

Posted 07/13/2006 22:07 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Back from Los Angeles. Came home with a mild summer cold that is surprisingly persistent and enervating. Trip report coming eventually. No writing in over a week. Bad me. One piece of writing news: My Aeon Award shortlisted story "I Hold My Father's Paws" can now be read online, for free, at Infinity Plus: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/paws.htm. Enjoy.

Posted 07/09/2006 22:56 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 7760 | Since last entry: -1170

No writing this weekend, as we were busy playing host to Kate's sister and three of her kids. We went to the zoo. I'm exhausted.

Tonight I hacked out the entire second performance, which had some nice descriptive passages but didn't advance the plot, and several paragraphs of atmosphere, along with general trimming here and there. Then I went back and replaced some of the best sentences I'd cut, slotting them in in place of similar sentences not quite as good that happened to be in scenes that remained. It's still a bit long for a short story, but a lot more plausible. I can perhaps find a way to trim the remaining 200 words or so if necessary.

I'm sending it off to a few key first readers (including a couple of New Orleanians) tonight.

Posted 06/27/2006 00:01 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 8930 | Since last entry: 1735

Finished up the first draft of the New Orleans story. It's grown to novella size, but I think that might just be the size it wants to be... unless I cut the whole arthritis subplot, which is a possibility.

Sleep now. It'll be a busy weekend.

Posted 06/23/2006 23:11 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 7195 | Since last entry: 1300

Another good writing day on the train. This time I didn't miss my stop either coming or going.

All the cards are in play now, the main character knows what he's up against, and all he has to do is figure out what to do about it and how to convince everyone else to go along with it. I should be able to wrap this up in less than a thousand words. Which will give me a fighting chance to edit it below 7500.

Unfortunately, the timing is bad for critique group, because it's not going to be done before the next meeting and I'll be missing the one after that, so it might be almost two months until I get my crit. Oh well, sometimes things work out that way.

Posted 06/20/2006 23:25 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 5895 | Since last entry: 108

No writing today, and only a little yesterday, but it was a good weekend anyway: we went to the Pride festival, saw singer/songwriter Jill Sobule, and hosted a party on the occasion of Paul McCartney's 64th birthday. We were a little concerned that not enough people would show, but in the end it was a nice little dinner party and everyone had a great time and lots of good food.

As part of the party, we held a Beatles Lyrics Scavenger Hunt. Various objects scattered about the house represented Beatles lyrics; the challenge for our guests was to find and identify them. This proved to be much harder than we'd anticipated it would be; only a couple people found more than one. (Though some people found several we hadn't planted deliberately, and they got full credit for those.)

For those playing along at home, we've made it a little easier by pointing out which objects are the actual scavenger hunt items. Your challenge is just to figure out what Beatles lyrics they represent. (Hover your mouse over a picture to see the answer.)

Posted 06/18/2006 22:57 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 5787 | Since last entry: 887

Good progress on the writing in the last few days. I just wrote a horrific little scene that's all the more scary because it's not fiction at all.

I didn't sleep too well last night, but it had nothing to do with the story I'm working on. As you may recall, we bought some software to help plan our trip to Disneyland. Well, a friend read this blog and decided he'd buy a copy too. But just as I was going to bed last night I got an email from him saying that his anti-spyware program had detected a keylogger in the Disney planner's installer.

This was not a good thing. Keyloggers are among the worst kinds of spyware; they log your every keystroke and send them to bad guys who troll the data for passwords, account numbers, and other information that can be used to steal your money and your identity. I started wondering what secure websites I'd visited in the last few days.

But I ran a couple of different spyware checks on my system, and I read up on the keylogger his anti-spyware program had detected and looked for any sign of that one specifically, and I found nothing. Maybe it had been a false positive. I shut down and went to bed some time after midnight.

I rolled over at 6am and was instantly, thoroughly awake. I got up, booted the computer, and ran another couple of checks. Still nothing. But some spyware can be pretty stealthy. I submitted a copy of the installer program to my security software vendor. The automatic reply came back in a few minutes, saying that nothing obvious was found and that they'd get a human being to look into it.

By lunchtime I got the response: no sign whatsoever of any spyware. I asked my friend to send a query to his anti-spyware vendor. Eventually he heard back; they agreed that it was probably a false positive. Whew, and grr.

So: nothing lost but a few frazzled nerves. But it did kind of put a pinch on the whole day.

Posted 06/16/2006 23:20 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 4900 | Since last entry: 677

I got absorbed in my work and missed my stop on the train. Fortunately, when I noticed the problem (two stops later) I got off and was able to catch a train going the other way just a few minutes later. The same thing happened last week, though on the inbound instead of the outbound commute.

Another way that writing is dangerous is that it can break your heart. Man, if you ever want to find out just how much one of your stories sucks, just get it nominated for a major award. I should learn to stop reading my reviews but I can't help myself. I am a hack and my "aliens" are just stereotypical Orientals in rubber suits.

Having written nearly all of day 2 of the story, I see a couple of problems: 1) the supernatural event on day 2 happens during the day, which has atmospheric problems as well as violating the rules I've set for myself, and 2) having written day 2, I'm not sure that day 3 is different enough (i.e. moves the plot forward enough) to justify its existence.

After thinking about it a while, I think I may be able to solve both problems by rejiggering the outline as follows: eliminate the morning of day 3, rewrite the afternoon of day 2 to be the evening of day 3, and eliminate all of day 4 except the night (which is the climax of the story). A more drastic rewrite would lose the morning of day 2 (which I just wrote today, sob) in favor of the morning of day 3, but I think I may have the content of that scene already covered elsewhere.

This new outline, covering only 2 very long days, means dropping the date headers on each day. No biggie. Could be a good thing, in fact, because it solves the phase-of-the-moon problem. Just need to establish the approximate date in text (nail it hard on the first page!).

Even after eliminating 2 full days of the original outline there's still a lot to write. However, this outline goes into more detail than the old one; I might be able to squeeze it into 8000 words all told, and then edit it down to below 7500. We'll see.

I'm babbling; I have no idea if this will make sense to anyone else. Another way that writing is dangerous is that it keeps me up much too late. Good night.

Posted 06/13/2006 22:18 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 4223 | Since last entry: 251

In just a few weeks we will be going to Anaheim for the annual gay square dance convention. Naturally this includes a visit to Disneyland, and because we are obsessive control freaks we have been doing considerable research in order to beat the crowds. This has extended to the purchase of a software program called RideMax, which uses the latest available information on schedules and line movement rates to calculate an optimal touring plan for the attractions you want to see. It's like the touring plan in The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland, which we swear by, but customized. Unfortunately, it's Windows-only, which means we will be unable to make modifications to the plan after we leave home.

Yes, we are geeks. But we will spend less time standing in line than you, nyaah nyaah.

Tonight's writing was remarkably hard. I had to write several paragraphs of description of the devastation of Pass Christian, Mississippi, without either having been there or plagiarizing the very-well-written description of that exact thing I found on the web. I hope that the telling details I have made up out of whole cloth sound as plausible to other people as they do to me. The hard part will continue until I reach the end of this day of the story, when my co-author's diary picks up again.

I've been thinking a lot about whether the subplot I've invented to make life harder for my main character is extraneous or not. The problem is that if I don't have this subplot he has nowhere to grow. He needs to start off at a place that is worth growing away from, and I can't use even a variant of the typical "selfish/angry/repressed man learns to be generous/calm/uninhibited" plot because the character himself has to be quite generous, calm, and uninhibited or he wouldn't be doing the job he is. I will hang onto this subplot for now, but at some point I may try removing it completely and see if the story stands up without it.

(I hope that stuff like the previous paragraph is interesting and useful to you, the readers of my blog. I haven't thought as much, or as coherently, about writing as Jay Lake and Elizabeth Bear; all I can do is to write about what I'm doing and hope that some people will find it worthwhile. Which is just what I do with the writing itself, too, so what the hell.)

Posted 06/12/2006 23:16 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 3972 | Since last entry: 924

Today I did a lot of dishes. They'd really gotten out of hand. I finally pooped out without finishing them all, but I made a big dent. Also did grocery shopping. This week's dinners will not be nearly as ambitious as last week's.

In the evening, we saw a play at Artists' Rep: Theatre District, written by Richard Kramer (creator of thirtysomething and My So-Called Life). Uproariously funny and moving by turns. I found the characters incredibly well drawn and the situation, though sometimes a bit confusing, was true-to-life. For dinner we had the spinach tacos I mentioned earlier, which were pretty good but I thought there wasn't enough to them (but I am still trying to lose the weight I put on at Wiscon, so that might not be a bad thing).

I worked on my story at several different times during the day, adding a ghost at the end of day 1, a long conversation at the beginnning of day 2 in which the protagonist considers packing it in and also begins to realize that something supernatural might be happening, and an Authors' Note explaining that "this story is fiction, but it climbs a trellis of fact."

I'm going to have to work harder as I continue to write about day 2, because I discovered that my source material only gives about half a paragraph to what happened on that day. Fortunately, I found another journal of the tour posted on the web, but I need to keep reminding myself that I don't have permission to use those words so I'll have to read, digest, and regurgitate the events in my own words. I'm also working from a book called The Great Deluge which, by complete coincidence, Kate is reading right now. God, what a mess. I'm glad we don't have hurricanes around here (just earthquakes and volcanoes...).

Posted 06/11/2006 22:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 3048 | Since last entry: 952

Finished up the first day of the story (out of four days). If the other days are as long as the first, the story will be 12,000 words, which is way too long for the story's weight. But the other days will be shorter, because day 1 is heavy with scene-setting and introduction of characters. I hope.

I was able to add nearly a thousand words in about an hour by virtue of pulling in large amounts of text from my source document. The challenge now will be to cut it back. But it's very good stuff. I need to decide how much of the wonderful atmosphere of this diary, which is what I fell in love with in the first place, will have to be sacrificed on the altar of Plot.

Oh, and I also have to go back and add another ghost.

The Plot must live!

Posted 06/09/2006 21:23 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2096 | Since last entry: 150

In today's writing I integrated the new opening into what I wrote earlier, including writing a brief conversation that introduced the situation a little better.

The other week we saw a movie called The Sci-Fi Boys, a documentary about Forrest J. Ackerman and his magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland and the boys (they were all boys) who made homemade sci-fi and horror movies after reading it and went on to become John Landis and Rick Baker and Peter Jackson and suchlike. The movie included a lot of clips from both the homemade movies and the 1950s and 60s classics that inspired them. This, in turn, inspired us to seek out a few of those classics, so tonight we rented The Day of the Triffids. It managed to be quite commendably tense and interesting despite the shabbiness of the special effects and some ludicrous logic holes (especially the ending). Tomorrow: This Island Earth.

I also feel I ought to blog about our dinners this week. For some reason (at least partly because we've started to receive our weekly basket of organic veggies from Pumpkin Ridge Gardens) we got inspired to try a whole bunch of new and fairly ambitious recipes. They've all turned out fabulous. So far this week we've had:

• Stir-fried mixed greens (bok choi, spinach, and beet thinnings) with tofu, greatly enlivened by the addition of a strip of bacon [improvised]
• Broiled halibut in a teriyaki marinade [Moosewood cookbook], accompanied by brown rice and sauteed broccoli with oyster sauce
• A salad of grilled chicken slices on a bed of blanched greens (snap peas, snow peas, and arugula) topped with a fresh strawberry vinaigrette [Eating Well magazine]
• Lamb satay stir-fry (lamb, cabbage, carrots, kohlrabi, and green onions in a light peanut-lime sauce) [Eating Well again] served on brown rice
• Cashew chicken [an old family recipe], with white rice -- this was better than usual, made with fresh organic vegetables and chicken

We don't usually eat this well, but I'm proud of us and I wanted to brag about it. Tomorrow: spinach tacos [Eating Well again].

Posted 06/08/2006 23:10 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 1946 | Since last entry: 328

Found another way to handle the opening. Now there's at least a hint of something weird within the first two pages. Will have to clean up the edges a bit tomorrow.

Also, I worked in the main character's name in paragraph 2. One of the perils of first person is that I managed to write over 1500 words without naming the narrator. Oops. Fixed now.

Posted 06/07/2006 22:48 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 1618 | Since last entry: 834

Took the train to work today, always a good way to get some writing done. And unlike last week, this time I didn't leave my work badge on the train and have to pay $20 for a new one.

I'm pleased with the character and setting development so far, and I've just introduced the main character's internal conflict, but the actual plot is still somewhere over the horizon. My current hope is that the situation and characters are engaging and unique enough to carry the reader along until the fantastic element appears -- certainly I was engaged in the original diary (the true story around which I'm weaving my fiction) even when I knew no fantastic element was forthcoming. If it doesn't work I can always start with the first fantastic incident and put what I have now in as an expository flashback.

However, if the story continues on its current trajectory it'll be in the 8-10,000 word range, which is too long for many markets. I may have to go back and trim quite a bit after I've finished the first draft. (Yes, I'm obsessing over word count again. As if this is a surprise?)

Posted 06/06/2006 23:07 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 784 | Since last entry: 409

I got absolutely pummeled at the day job today. Being in a separate user interface design group means I get to work on a lot of different projects, but it can sometimes create a slightly adversarial relationship with the developers. Today I really missed being part of the development team -- we did have our arguments, to be sure, but I had a better idea of what the issues were, and neither I nor the developers got blind-sided the way I did today. It wasn't too bad, really -- no hard feelings, but a very intense discussion.

I filled out one of those census forms the other day -- how many people live at this address, where do you work, how much do you make, how did you get to work last week. Boy, do I feel lucky. I own my home, I drive my own car, I work every week. This survey really made me think about just how much of a privilege those simple things are.

Meanwhile, in fictionland, I'm developing the setting and introducing the rather large cast. One recent volunteer to join the cast (you know who you are) hasn't appeared yet, but I'll find a way to fit him in soon. I'll get the plot rolling within another few hundred words, I hope.

Posted 06/05/2006 23:00 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 375 | Since last entry: 375

It has taken me entirely too long to get started on this story. I've been researching, outlining, and thinking thinking thinking... entirely too much. I've been paralyzed, I think, by the responsibility of writing a fictional story set in a real situation with characters based on people I know. I want to be true to their experience, but at the same time it has to be a proper story, with a plot, and that means conflict. So I've been trying to find a way to inject conflict into the situation without offending anyone.

I've written three complete cast lists, some more recognizable as the real people and others less so, each around a different central conflict. The final cast list is the closest to the originals, because the conflict I've settled on is mostly an internal one, and internal to one of the people I don't know as well. So I'm less likely to step on toes because I don't know his real problems -- anything I come up with will be entirely mine, not his. I'm hoping that the resemblances between my characters and the real people will be seen as homage rather than appropriation.

The other big problem was finding a viewpoint character and a grammatical person/tense. I've settled on the second-in-command rather than the leader (though the real-life person he's based on is not really the second in command) because for some reason I feel that leaders are best seen from the side, and I'm writing it in first person past tense. I'm a little concerned that I've been doing a lot of first-person stuff lately, because I know it's kind of restrictive. But given the internal conflict and the source material, I think this story has to be driven in first.

This story scares me. I'm concerned I may not have the chops to pull it off. I suppose this is what Kelly Link said we should be trying to do. (I had an interesting discussion with Jay Lake about this topic at his birthday party yesterday, and we came to the consensus that the author's truly unique voice is something that can't be invoked consciously, though there are things you can do to encourage it.)

Whatever. At least I have begun.

Posted 06/04/2006 23:18 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Back from Wiscon. And what a treat it was.

This was the 30th annual gathering of the fans and creators of feminist science fiction, and for this special anniversary they pulled out all the stops. Just about all of the previous guests of honor were present, including Ursula Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Nalo Hopkinson, Mary Doria Russell, Emma Bull, and many more. This surfeit of wonderfulness brought the fans out in droves, so that the convention (usually about 600 people) had to be capped at 1000 members.

1000 members was a good choice for this hotel, the always-wonderful Concourse, giving the rooms and corridors a bustling and energetic feel without being overcrowded. Even the Tor party offered a reasonable amount of oxygen to its attendees. The one event that seemed to exceed the hotel's capacity was the Guest of Honor speeches, where I found myself in a back corner.

My own personal Wiscon began on Wednesday, when we flew to Milwaukee to have dinner with my parents at Mader's. This turned out to be excellent planning, because when the spectacular thunderstorm hit we were lying in a hotel room gawking at the lightning instead of running through a duck-drowning rain or sitting in an airport lounge somewhere wondering whether we'd ever arrive in Madison, both of which happened to far too many people.

First thing Thursday morning we drove to Madison, taking picturesque back roads to avoid freeway construction. This provided some bucolic views, but made it surprisingly hard to find a good place for breakfast. But we arrived in plenty of time for the writers' workshops, where I served as "guest pro" for four talented new writers. It was interesting to see how much I've learned about critiquing in the past five years. It's not that the other participants didn't have useful comments to share, but I found that I was the only one to mention some problems that seemed really obvious to me. I hope they found my comments useful.

Friday morning we blew off the con for the morning to visit Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's home and school, along with Australian bookseller Ron Serdiuk. Some of the spaces were really spectacular, particularly the theatre and the student drafting room; I was particularly intrigued how intimate these spaces felt considering how large they were (the living room in the Wright residence, for example, felt no bigger than mine though it could easily have seated fifty people). On the other hand, Wright's signature low ceilings and lack of doors/walls made me feel rather uncomfortable in parts of what was supposed to be a private home, and the level of craft (as opposed to design) was surprisingly low. Wright's buildings were often built on the cheap, and Taliesin in particular was built by apprentices working for free. No wonder Wright's roofs always leak.

On the way back to the con from Taliesin we stopped for lunch at a hippy-dippy general store and organic cafe, then hit Candinas Chocolates in Verona for a box of their amazing truffles. Somehow there were still three truffles left in the box when we got back to Portland. They really are best when they're fresh.

We arrived at the con in mid-Gathering, and this is where things start to get a little fuzzy. I deliberately decided not to take notes at this con, in deference to being in the moment, so I can't tell you all the panels I attended or who I had dinner with.

I can tell you that I didn't attend much in the way of programming, per se, nor did I hit the dealers' room or art show until the second or third day of the con. Mostly I engaged in conversations, in hallways and at parties. For some reason this con most of my conversations were one-on-one rather than in groups, and largely with people I hadn't met before (or hadn't seen for years, or knew mostly from the net).

The programming I did attend was definitely up to Wiscon standards, but none of it stands out. Most of what I remember was the programs I was on.

Saturday was my big program day, beginning with a reading at 8:30 in the morning. I had put up posters all over the con encouraging people to attend in their jammies. Only a couple people came in sleepwear -- and I'm not sure it wasn't their normal hall costume -- but an amazing (for that hour on Saturday morning) 18 people came to hear me and Meg Turville-Heinz and P.C. Hodgell read. I guess the posters paid off. Saturday afternoon I had back-to-back panels on class mobility (with Chip Delany) and animals (with Ursula Le Guin) which were sprightly and well-attended. Sunday morning I appeared on a Battlestar Galactica panel at which I may have been trying too hard to be funny.

Saturday evening was the Tiptree auction, which only Ellen Klages and I knew was a program item for me. I can't believe I let Ellen talk me into appearing in a chicken suit, but it was for a good cause and I got money stuffed into my drumsticks by Elizabeth Bear, Freddie Baer, Jane Yolen, and I'm-ashamed-to-admit-I-don't-know-how-many others. Plus a kiss from Geoff Ryman. (Pictures here.) The auction itself was a hoot too, especially the part where Mary Doria Russell chased Geoff Ryman around the hall with a bright pink underwire bra.

Having started off Saturday in my jammies and ended it in a chicken suit, on Sunday -- the night of the guest of honor speeches and the traditional Wiscon fancy dress party -- I wore my tux (the whole deal, with tails, vest, black tie, starched shirt, and collapsible topper). This got me up on stage again, to help with the singing of the traditional Tiptree song, and another kiss from Geoff Ryman. The tux also got a great deal of (quite welcome) attention at the parties afterwards, easily repaying the discomfort of wearing it and the hassle of carting it back and forth across the country. Truly is it said that a tuxedo is the sexiest thing a man can wear.

I kept hoping that the tux and the chicken suit would cancel each other out and everyone would think I spent the whole weekend in ordinary clothes. But no such luck -- it was chicken jokes the whole evening.

By Monday I was in a befogged state combining equal parts "I'm not ready for the con to be over" and "I'm ready to go home now." I packed up in a rush in order to make the "Writers in Mid-Career" group session, which turned out to have been rescheduled to another time, but enough people hadn't gotten the memo (including Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Terri Windling, Elisabeth Vonarburg, and Naomi Kritzer) that we still had a valuable discussion. Ursula said that the publishing business was worse than she'd ever seen, but it had never been good, which was curiously reassuring.

Lunch. Hugs. Drive to Milwaukee. Plane to Minneapolis. Another plane to Portland. No problems on any of these -- which, I learned the next day, was a miracle -- but didn't get home until after midnight.

Sleepy now.

Posted 05/30/2006 23:39 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

One week until Wiscon. Must do critiques for writers' workshop. Must double-check on plane, hotel, and car reservations. Must reinforce hat box. Must remember to breathe.

The final convention program has been posted. There are so many cool people! on it. My own personal schedule is:

Saturday, 8:30-9:45 a.m.: General Reading Session 6, Capitol A

Patricia C. Hodgell, David D. Levine, Meg Turville-Heitz

Saturday, 1:00-2:15 p.m.: Myth of Class Mobility?, Wisconsin

Research indicates economic mobility decreased in the United States between the 1970s and 1990s, and that France, Canada, and Denmark have more mobility than the United States. Software programming used to be a clear career choice for people looking to move into the middle or upper-middle class. But in an era of outsourcing and offshoring, is it anymore?
Avedon Carol, Matthew H. Austern, Samuel R. Delany, David D. Levine, Victor Jason Raymond

Saturday, 2:30-3:45 p.m.: Animal, Human, Alien, Wisconsin

Let's talk about books which explore animal/human boundaries as a way to explore gender and, often, race. Books where women become animals, or animals take on a narratively feminine gender role. Examples would be Carmen Dog, Troll, Mister Boots, books like that. What roles do we project on animals? The trope of the telepathic companion animal as perfect Wife, or as the externalization of the heroine's object position and disempowerment. What are the boundaries of sentience? In fact, animals, aliens, and AIs all explore this idea.
Elizabeth Bear, Liz Henry, Tom La Farge, Ursula K. Le Guin, David D. Levine, Lisa Tuttle

Sunday, 10:00-11:15 a.m.: Battlestar Galactica: Starbuck Ain't a Boy Now!, Capitol A

Battlestar Galactica (the new series) has taken scifi TV by storm. Let's talk about the mythology (Greek Pantheon, the dying leader, a cost in blood) involved along with the religion (monotheism vs. polytheism) and the fact that women play key roles in this series (President Laura Roslin, Starbuck as a woman).
Bill Humphries, Heather Galaxy, David D. Levine, Juliana B. Perry, JJ Pionke

Yes, my reading is at eight thirty in the A-freaking-M. Please come anyway. I will be in my jammies and I encourage everyone else to do the same. Will probably also have coffee and donuts if I can swing it.

In other news: my story "Tk'tk'tk" is now available as an MP3 file for your listening pleasure. Thanks to the fine folks at Escape Pod for creating audio versions of all the Hugo nominees on such short notice.

Posted 05/18/2006 20:21 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Just got back from a delightful long weekend in Vancouver BC, staying with square dancing friends Grant and Will.

It was a weekend filled with serendipity. For example, our morning amble along the shore turned into a trip to Granville Island when we happened to notice the water taxi. This kind of thing happened over and over -- it was wonderful to be so free of agenda that we could indulge the fates. It was also a weekend filled with ducks -- flying in the air, paddling on the water, stuffed and mounted on the wall, floating in the soup. Wherever we went, there they were.

The weekend began on Thursday night, when we got out of Portland right after work and hit the McMenamins' Olympic Club Hotel & Theater in Centralia, just in time to see the movie Inside Man and have a bite to eat. The next morning we zipped up to Vancouver and avoided both the border crush and the rush hour traffic we meet when we leave Portland first thing Friday morning.

We usually only visit Vancouver, which is one of our favorite cities, for the square dance fly-in on (US) Thanksgiving weekend, and it was a real treat to a) not have to try to cram in visits and touristing around the dancing, b) have more opportunities to sample Vancouver's fine restaurants (the fly-in provides several meals), and c) visit during warm dry weather.

The weather was, in fact, even better than we could have hoped, with record high temperatures making for shirtsleeve weather almost all weekend. We walked on the beach; we walked in Stanley Park (twice); we browsed antique stores; we took a water taxi to Granville Island and browsed the market there, also taking in an outdoor orchestra concert. And we ate -- oh my, how we ate. Fine French cuisine. Excellent dim sum. Marvelous gelato (two different places). Singaporean. Japanese. Pub grub. Fresh bagels (of the Montreal rather than New York variety).

We got to spend more time than usual with Grant, though Will was away much of the weekend due to various responsibilities. We seem to amuse them. We also met square dancer Jan and her partner Deb for dim sum, which we might have missed out on (due to Mother's Day brunch crowds) but for Jan's persistence and familiarity with the staff. Thanks, Jan!

We introduced our hosts to the joys of polenta. We had a nice conversation with a vendor of intriguing knitted items (would you believe a knitted seaweed hat, knitted vegetables and flowers as brooches, and knitted teapot and French press cozies with such patterns as skull and crossbones?) at Granville Market. We met various dogs and cats. We walked through Mole Hill and other neighborhoods we'd never visited. We selected from among 218 flavors of gelato at La Casa Gelato, an amazing Disneyland of frozen treats, with an international clientele, hidden away in the middle of an industrial wasteland. We dropped in on Grant's weekly knitting group. I picked up a couple of CDs at a rummage sale.

I didn't blow off the writing completely. I spent a half-hour here and a half-hour there and completed the edits (after a month of work, jeez) on my "Heaven as bureaucracy" story from Clarion, now titled "Joy is the Serious Business of Heaven." It goes in the mail to F&SF tomorrow. I considered sending it to my critique group to get their feedback on the revisions, but after spending so much time revising it I just want it out of my hands.

And, speaking of serendipity, my next writing project just fell in my lap. I got a long email from a friend last week, describing a recent adventure of hers, which had almost everything -- curious incidents, rich setting, telling details, unusual characters -- all it needed was a fantastic element and a little plot structure to be an incredible story. She's given her permission for me to turn it into a story, and I'll start in on that tomorrow.

Posted 05/15/2006 22:34 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I haven't blogged properly in weeks. Sorry about that. Life's been busy but not particularly interesting. Or, actually, interesting but not notable in a blogworthy way. I went to a square dance in Palm Springs. We saw Assassins, the musical, which Kate commented was a mixed bag of a play but the production was top-notch. We saw guitar god Richard Thompson's "1000 Years of Popular Music" show -- teriffic. We hosted a Tupperware party, of all things; silly fun, much plastic was purchased. At the day job, we lost one person (gone off to get his MBA), hired another, and interviewed several more... we have at least one and possibly as many as three more positions to fill. I looked for a copy of the soundtrack CD of Star Trek II, without success so far.

As for the writing, I've been grinding very slowly away at rewrites of one of my Clarion stories (the "Heaven as bureaucracy" story, for those with long memories). Should have this one ready to submit within a week. It was amazingly painful to read over the critique comments and remember the emotions of that time, but I've gotten past that point and am diligently trying to make the story the best it can be. I now think that 17 critiquers is too many... you get too many comments pulling the story in different directions, and any problem so obvious that half of more of the people comment on it makes you really feel hammered, no matter how kind the individual comments. I may produce an essay about "Clarion as viewed from six years later."

Must sleep. Early meeting tomorrow.

Posted 05/10/2006 22:31 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Last weekend some people went to Norwescon, some to Minicon, some to Eastercon. We went to Sacramento for my uncle Ben's memorial gathering. Ben had a big family -- six kids, most with spouses and kids of their own -- and many friends, so that there were nearly a hundred people in attendance. It was an occasion with more laughter than tears, and I got in some good conversations with my parents and cousins (special shout-out to my cousin Adam Levine of GamerAndy.com). Not to mention some very good food. Our hotel had a noisy disco, but on the second night they moved us to a different room with a view of the lake, which offered a pair of geese with fuzzy little goslings and, as a special bonus, flittering bats. (Bats = good.)

Since then I've mostly been revising. I got a reply back from Gordon Van Gelder about my rewrite of "Titanium Mike," and he liked the new fifth scene I'd written in which I put Mike on stage. So I revised the story one last time, to integrate the new scene and punch up the ending, and sent it in. I think this is the final version.

I also finished revising the Jupiter story -- now titled "The True Story of Merganther's Run" because "Merganther's Drive" suggested a stardrive to some readers -- and put it in the mail to Analog. (Okay, technically it's still sitting on the sofa. But it's in the envelope and will go in the mail first thing tomorrow morning.) It took me almost two full weeks to revise it, because I spent only half an hour or so per evening on it. I think I needed a break after completing my novella.

Speaking of the novella, I got it critiqued yesterday. The crit stung quite a bit, because I was pretty emotionally involved with the story and the comments, harsh though some of them were, were generally on target. But one critter pointed out that it wouldn't have gotten such intense crits if it hadn't touched a nerve in the readers. This story has considerable potential if I can just smooth out the rough bits. Also, it does seem to be the right length for the material, and I've identified four pro and five semi-pro markets that will take stories of this length. I'm going to take a little time away from it before attempting to revise it.

Also this weekend I had coffee with Jay Lake, visited the Portland Farmers' Market (where we acquired lovely tomatoes and basil for a tomato-bread salad, plus a small container of ladybugs for the garden), and attended a bit of Wordstock, Portland's annual "festival of the book." We only went to one reading and barely bought anything at the book fair, but it was still nice to be in a space with thousands of people all of whom cared about words.

What next? First, I'm going to revise at least one of my older stories and either get it critiqued or put it right in the mail. Then I'm going to start in on a new story. It will be a fantasy, it will be set in the present or the past, and it will be short.

Posted 04/23/2006 23:07 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Spent the last two writing days revising "Titanium Mike" according to comments received from Gordon Van Gelder (he's already paid for it, but he had some line edits and suggestions), including writing a complete new scene at the end in which the legendary Titanium Mike actually appears on stage. But then, at the last minute, I pulled the scene out again because it changed the whole flavor of the story to have Mike be a character. I included the scene in my cover letter so that Gordon can tell me if it's a better ending, because I am a waffler nonpareil.

Also, tonight I was interviewed by a high-school student (child of a friend) for a science fiction class he's taking. All kinds of questions about "what's the first book you remember reading" and "what was the most memorable thing that happened while you were trying to sell a story." I feel so professional.

At work I have been learning Photoshop. Now I find myself looking at book covers and seeing the masks and layers that might have been used to produce them.

I've been meaning to mention what we've been having for dinner, because we've been cooking and eating very well lately. Käseschnitzel with gnocchi and red cabbage; sloppy joes (entirely improvised, and they turned out great); tandoori chicken with Gujerati cabbage. I like cooking with Kate, and the new kitchen is still wonderful over a year later. She also fixed me chocolate pudding, in a shallow dish so it would have plenty of the yummy skin on top, but, alas, it failed to set properly. Will have to try again soon.

Very tired. To bed now. Tomorrow: revisions on the Jupiter story.

Posted 04/11/2006 22:29 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 20919 | Since last entry: -52

A relaxed but fairly productive weekend. Got a bunch of mundane chores done, watched Neverwhere, looked over the galley proofs of "Primates" for Asimov's, and did a quick editing pass over the novella and sent it to my critique group. I didn't make a lot of changes (other than changing several names); I'm still very very close to it. Which is why we do critique. Amazingly, despite the thing's length I have a long list of additional stuff I wanted to get in but couldn't find a place to do it. Maybe this thing does want to be a novel.

Also, I just got word that UK webzine Infinity Plus has accepted "I Hold My Father's Paws", and it should be available online in about June. If you can't wait until then or you'd rather have it on paper, you can order a copy of Issue 31 of Albedo One.

Posted 04/09/2006 23:29 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 20971 | Since last entry: 573

First draft's done. (Throws confetti.) Almost twenty-one thousand words -- that's three or four normal short stories. The next one will be shorter, I swear.

A snippet:

"Peri and I leaned on each other, watching her go. 'We'd better haul in that parasail before it blows away,' Peri said to me after a while. 'Start setting it up as a tent.' Her arm was warm across my shoulders. I'd forgotten how much taller she was than me.

"'In a minute,' I said. 'I'm enjoying the view.'

"We stood side by side, watching the sun rise over our new home."

The panel tonight at the Mt. Hood Community College library with Jay Lake, M.K. Hobson, Ken Scholes, Doug Lain, Josh English, David Goldman, and Damian Kilby went off well. We were very nearly outnumbered by the audience, who listened attentively and asked perceptive questions despite being mostly non-genre readers. I did too much of the talking, as usual. If you've been following Jay's LJ you've gotten a good taste of the kinds of things we talked about.

One of the questions was about the difference between writing novels and short stories. As it happens, I just wrote a couple of paragraphs on that very subject for the Clarion alumni newsletter, which I quoted, and I include them here in hopes you will find them worthwhile.

For me, writing short stories is like building intricate little puzzle boxes. I can put them together out of little scraps of whatever wood I happen to have lying around, and if a piece doesn't fit I can take the time to file or carve or sand it until it's right. It doesn't require a detailed plan, just a general idea of what I want it to turn out like. And if it doesn't work -- if the chisel slips or the wood has an unexpected knot, or I think it's fine but no one wants to buy it -- I can sigh and set it aside and move on to the next.

Writing a novel is more like building a house. It takes months or years. You don't have to have a detailed plan when you start, but if you don't, you must be aware that you may find yourself having to rip out the foundation and re-do it before you can move in. Whether or not you have a plan, you'll have to order large quantities of wood and nails and glue and paint -- probably more than you will be able to use (but, with luck, you can use some of the leftover bits to make puzzle boxes). It's so big that you can't possibly get all the little fiddly bits perfect, so you shouldn't even try, but there is plenty of cabinetry and finish work where you can show off your craftsmanship skills. But if it doesn't work -- and there are a million ways it can fail, many more than for a little puzzle box -- you've wasted a year of your life and you're stuck with this enormous eyesore that no one wants. Even if it does work, after you've moved in you'll constantly be hitting your head on the doorway that's too low or catching your clothing on a railing that needed more sanding. Either way, you'll vow that either you're never going to do this again or that you'll get it right the next time. Maybe both.

Posted 04/06/2006 23:18 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 20398 | Since last entry: 334

Received in the mail today: a copy of issue 31 of Albedo One, containing my Aeon-Award shortlisted story "I Hold My Father's Paws." They very kindly put my name first on the cover, although one of the other stories in the same issue was the one that won the award. I suspect I have editor Roelof Goudriaan, a friend from way back, to thank for this. You can order your own copy here: http://homepage.eircom.net/~albedo1/html/a1__magazine.html

Also, my Hugo-nominated story "Tk'tk'tk" is now available for all to read, for free, in its entirety, on the Asimov's web site: http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0604_5/tk.shtml

Aaaand... I'm almost done with the first draft of the novella. One or two more nights of writing should do it.

A snippet: "Supporting each other, we shuffled to the airlock -- the one that had been Epsilon sys lock before we'd torched it off and joined it to the growing assemblage of the crew lander. There we found, to our surprise, that we were already breathing Bianchon's atmosphere. The crude welded seam joining the lock to the hull had parted from the stress of the landing."

Posted 04/04/2006 23:35 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 20064 | Since last entry: 1432

Had a haircut today, and the person after me in the chair also happened to be a writer, and we spent an hour talking about mother-rapin' and father-stabbin' and all kinds o' groovy things. I came home all jazzed up.

I've really been hitting my stride, wrapping up and writing some tough scenes that have been in my mind since the beginning. This is where all the secrets come out and the new beginning begins.

A snippet:

Peri was silent for a long time. Finally she said "We have to break it to them one at a time. Bring them in on the secret only when they're ready."

"I'll accept your judgement on that. But when the time comes... I want to be the one to tell Thad. He told me the truth I needed to know, even though it hurt both of us, and I feel I owe him the same."

Just one more scene left to write, an epilogue. Then I should probably give the whole thing a thorough self-edit before sending it for critique.

Once that's done I have galley proofs on "Primates" and line edits on "Titanium Mike" before I get back to the new stuff. "Primates" will apparently be in the September issue of Asimov's, which isn't all that long from now.

Posted 04/03/2006 00:03 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 18632 | Since last entry: 1340

The day job is kicking my ass. And I seem to have picked up some minor bug -- something that makes me a little phlegmy and a little achy and a little hoarse. Nothing much, to be sure, but enough to slow me down.

However, yesterday the car was in the shop for an oil change, so I took the train to work. Wrote almost a thousand words. I should do that more often. Somewhere around Millikan way my little novelette became a novella. (Throws confetti.)

At this point I seriously doubt this story will ever sell. It's so long that only the big three magazines would even consider it, and even they buy very few stories this length. It's got too many rivets for Asimov's or F&SF, and it's got gay and transsexual characters which Stan Schmidt doesn't like (not to mention that some of the science is, frankly, a little rubbery). But, having put so much effort into the damn thing, I mean to finish it, for myself if nothing else. Probably a couple thousand words to go. Once it's done I may write an essay here about what this story is really about, and why it's important to me.

After that? I have line edits to do on "Titanium Mike" for F&SF, then some critique comments to incorporate on the Jupiter story so I can start sending it out again. And then it might be time to start on the next novel. Or possibly one more short story first. Something fantasy, just as a change-up. We'll see.

Must sleep now.

Posted 03/29/2006 22:50 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 17292 | Since last entry: 1391

Only minimal writing for most of this week, with one missed day, but I got in nearly a thousand words today. Unfortunately, the piece shows no sign of stopping any time soon (though the very last subplot has now been introduced), so it seems that it will be a novella rather than a novelette. Oh well. And it's clearly going to need an immediate revision pass once I've completed the first draft.

A snippet: "The grainy image on the big monitor showed why Alpha was so late. One of the four sails that was supposed to catch the light from the boost lasers, then drop off for coast phase, was still attached -- bent and twisted into a crumpled C shape. The sail had probably jammed on initial deployment, and had cut the module's thrust during boost phase by twenty percent or more. There was some concern that the jammed sail could cause problems during the first aerobraking maneuver, as Alpha slammed into Moliere's atmosphere at interstellar speed. But simulations showed that it would most likely come off as the module's aerobraking balute inflated, and if it didn't do that it would probably simply burn away early in the maneuver."

Apart from the writing, we've seen movies Transamerica (good, but not as polished as I'd expected from the buzz), V for Vendetta (excellent, the changes from the comic book made it stronger), and The Mummy on DVD (silly) and play Crowns (a marvelous production, I was especially impressed with the set and lighting). I've also suffered another recurrence of the awful fungus infection that attacks the same two toes on my right foot every year or two. Prescription antifungal ointment and Burow's solution seem to be doing the job this time.

Some upcoming dates you might want to know about:

• I'm a guest pro at the Wiscon writers' workshop, in Madison. This is the 30th Wiscon and it promises to be a real blow-out. The deadline for submissions is April 1 and you must have a membership to the convention (which is already sold out).

• On the evening of April 6, from 7 pm to 8:30 pm, I'll be appearing in a panel discussion at Mount Hood Community College in Gresham, Oregon. The topic will be "Getting published and the relationship between writers, books and readers" and the panel is also scheduled to include local authors Jay Lake, David Goldman, M.K. Hobson, Damian Kilby, Doug Lain, Ken Scholes and Josh English. All good people.

• The voting deadline for the Locus Awards is April 15. Anyone can vote (I had said elsewhere that only Locus subscribers can vote, but I was wrong) and you may, if you wish, write in anything you want in any category.

Posted 03/26/2006 22:35 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 15901 | Since last entry: 593

My story "Tk'tk'tk" from the March 2005 Asimov's is a nominee for the Hugo Award!

I'm not expecting to win, but it really and truly is an honor just to be nominated. And, heck, I wasn't expecting to be nominated either, so anything can happen!

The Hugo ballot will be posted on the LACon web site shortly. I anticipate that the whole story will be posted for everyone to read for free on the Asimov's web site soon too. Until then, you can read the first part of the story.

Thanks to Dave Clark, Kevin Standlee, and Kevin Roche, who mentioned the story on the Emerald City Hugo recommendations list. I'm sure this was a significant factor in its reaching the ballot.

And, by the way, the story title is pronounced "tick-tick-tick."

(P.S. Squeeeeeeeeeee!)

Posted 03/21/2006 22:38 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 15308 | Since last entry: 781

Busy weekend, many chores done. We're going to have to forego Minicon again this year, because my late uncle Ben's memorial service is that weekend. I made all the arrangements yesterday, cancelling all the Minicon travel reservations and making new reservations for Sacramento instead. It will be nice to see the family, anyway.

I'm not at all convinced that this story is going in the right direction, but if I keep up my average of about 300 words a day and if my guesstimate that it's in the high novelette or low novella word count range (about 17,500 words) is correct, it might conceivably be done by next Saturday, in which case I could get it critiqued at the next crit group meeting. Those are both pretty big ifs, but even if I miss that date it is beginning to feel like it's coming to a conclusion.

When I first created my WWW home page in 1998, before I even started to think about writing fiction, most of the content on the page was my fannish writings and art projects (architecture, cartoons, and costumes/props). I've barely touched that content since then, as the writing-related content has grown and grown. But still, it continues to attract readers.

A couple of days ago, for example, I got a note from someone who'd found the page about my Rocketeer costume, asking for more details on how I'd built the rocket pack. I got it out of the attic -- it still looks good -- and took some new digital photos, which I sent to him along with some text. And, since I'd done the work, I also posted it as a sub-page of the Rocketeer page.

And just today, I got another email from someone who'd found my Analytique of Phnom Bakheng. He's working on a Phnom Bakheng Conservation Master Plan (I have no idea if this is the real thing or just a school project) and he wants to use the image in his report. I gave my permission and said I'd try to scare up a better scan than the one I have posted.

It's amazing the things that happen when you put content up where people can find it.

Posted 03/19/2006 23:04 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 14527 | Since last entry: 1142

For some reason, I've been terribly slug-like at work for the past couple of days. I have a freaking enormous to-do list and I'm not making much progress on it at all. I've been attending meetings, to be sure, and they've been productive, but I have so many other things that need to happen in between and I just can't get motivated. I haven't been going to the gym, either. Bad me.

The writing's been going well, though. I wrote almost a thousand words in one sitting yesterday... a long, serious conversation that I've been thinking about since well before I started this draft. This is the point where the main character finds out that his problems are much, much worse than he even suspected they were. This is where he has to either start digging himself out -- by becoming a different person -- or give in to despair.

Today after square dancing I went back and nipped and tucked that conversation a bit. It's still a bit infodumpy, and I'm afraid it might not be emotional enough. I had originally envisioned it as a huge screaming argument, but given the tone of the scenes that led up to it, it turned into more one of those long sad talks that leaves both parties crying. But they're both Guys, so neither of them is going to admit it.

A snippet:

Thad hooked an elbow around a nearby structural element. He started to speak, hesitated. Tried again.

"You died just a week before scan number two -- almost six months after your last scan. You know that, right?"

I just looked at him.

"Haven't you wondered what happened during those six months?"

I considered the question. "Not really. No more than any of the rest of the two years I don't remember."

He turned away from me, spoke to the transparent plastic of the wall. "Chaz, this is going to hurt you. But you deserve to know."

"Okay, let me hear it." I wasn't really ready to hear any bad news, but this was the first time in months anyone had even started to talk straight to me and I wasn't going to let the opportunity slip by.

Posted 03/16/2006 23:20 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 13385 | Since last entry: 601

"Titanium Mike Saves the Day" sold to F&SF!

My second sale of the year, and my second sale to Gordon (the first was "Tale of the Golden Eagle", of course). I am quite chuffed. I knew it was good news when I saw the envelope: it was an F&SF letterhead envelope, not my SASE, which meant a check or at least a rewrite request.

Of course, this does put a crimp in my Cunning Plan to increase my number of stories in circulation :-)

As it happens, at this moment of happiness I am driving my character deep into the pits of despair. Writing is more like acting than it is like directing...

A snippet: "The slowly rotating sun warmed my skin as I floated among the peas and peppers, curled in a ball and shaking with pent-up tears that would not come. The air here was foul and heavy. My life stank like shit.

"Once I had thought that being selected for the Clarion crew was the greatest thing that could ever happen to me. How had it come to this?"

Posted 03/14/2006 23:32 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 12784 | Since last entry: 721

Just back from the gay square dance in Seattle, where we danced to the stimulating Saundra Bryant and local caller Stephen Cole. Sandie is always a treat -- even her Challenge dancing is actually dancing, with flow and rhythm and all that stuff. On Saturday morning we skipped the fly-in's brunch in favor of a wonderful breakfast at Etta's, followed by a stroll around the Pike Place Market area and a trip to Uwajimaya for more Japanese puzzle books for Kate.

I've gotten better at keeping up the writing during trips like this one, maintaining at least 200 words per day. Which is a good thing, since this fershlugginer story has just passed 12,500 words and seems doomed to exceed the 17,500 word barrier between novelette and novella. But it seems to demand this length, so I mean to see it out.

A snippet: "When my reserved time arrived, the five satellites swiveled themselves to focus on Earth and kept up this scrutiny for a full eight hours. Post-processing took another two hours. During this time I floated among the tomatoes and zucchinis in the greenhouse, trying to distract myself with pruning and pollinating but actually accomplishing little more than plant-assisted nail-chewing. When my watch chimed, I rushed eagerly to Delta work bay, where the monitor revealed...

"Nothing.

"The interpolated data of the five satellites did not reveal any signal from Earth at all."

Posted 03/12/2006 22:08 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 12063 | Since last entry: 1616

It's been more than a week since I've posted. During most of that week, the day job has kept me hopping with 8am meetings most days, and in the evening we've been playing host to house guests Jon Singer, in town for a ceramics conference, and Lise Eisenberg, touring the West Coast after Potlatch. They are both fine conversationalists and the temptation to stay up until midnight or later talking with them has been very hard to resist. So I haven't been sleeping a lot, and I've been writing my hundred words a day only through force of will (I did miss one day, the first day they were both here). With all that going on, posting here fell below the cutline.

A snippet:

Thad's eyes were icy above the mask. "You shouldn't even be here."

"What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

He started to respond, then cut himself off, waving a hand in front of his face. "No. Never mind. I shouldn't have said anything."

"What did you mean by that?" I demanded.

"Never. Mind." Our eyes locked for a long cold moment.

In the end I was the one who had to look away.

Today I had a "recharge day" at work, during which we took our minds off our usual jobs and did some out-of-the-box thinking about interaction and design. We looked at QuickBooks Simple Start, accounting software for novices, which fell down hard after a good start, then spent a little while sketching out some alternative user interfaces that might work better for that audience. Then we visited a health clinic inside a pharmacy, for insights into finding different ways to serve a user community, and the Build-A-Bear Workshop for a taste of a radically customer-focused experience (we each built a bear -- I thought of donating mine to charity but Kate refused to let it go). Finally we toured Target looking for interesting examples of design in consumer products.

Also today I had a dentist appointment. Look Ma, no cavities!

Tomorrow we head off for Seattle again, for a square dance event.

I am so tired.

One bit of news before I fall over: I have been invited to be a guest pro at the Wiscon writers' workshop. The deadline for submissions is April 1 and details are here.

Posted 03/10/2006 00:07 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 10447 | Since last entry: 453

Went to the theatre tonight, a play called The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow -- the story of a Chinese adoptee, now age 22, who happens to be obsessive-compulsive, agoraphobic, and a genius. Unable to leave her house, she builds a flying robot double of herself to go to China and find her birth mother for her. Billed as a "techno-comedy", it offered some genuine laughs but ended on a downer.

Although it had some extremely affecting moments, and a couple of fine performances (the cold-fish adoptive mother was chillingly real and yet sympathetic), this play was a real mixed bag. I was annoyed by the robot's traditional 1950's me-chan-i-cal-voice and jerky movements (until she learned better) and the actress playing the central character just wasn't strong enough to serve as the play's hub. The ending was also insufficiently well connected with the rest of the play, both thematically and emotionally. I will say, though, that the parallel relationships of the main character with her robot and the birth mother with the main character really made me think. Subtext -- your sign of quality entertainment.

In other, extremely weird, news, I got an email from Carl Fredrick, one of my Writers of the future buds. He just got contracts from Asimov's for a story he sold there, and in the envelope were my contracts as well. (I got notification of the sale by email back in January, but have been waiting for the contracts.) I can understand that papers sometimes get stuffed into the wrong envelope, but what are the odds they'd go to a friend of mine?

Posted 03/03/2006 00:15 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 9994 | Since last entry: 971

Back from Potlatch. Had a good time, saw some old friends and made some new ones, thought and talked a lot about writing. Octavia Butler's passing put a damper on the last day of the convention, and the novel rejection was a constant nagging pain, but all in all it was still a good time. And I only missed one writing day, which was the day of the rejection (but the main reason I didn't write that day was because I was busy with the writers' workshop, not because I was depressed). More on Potlatch later, I hope.

The story is starting to click, I think. Three different crises are starting to come together at once and I have an opportunity to throw in some weird-ass space science detail from my researches (see snippet below). In fact, the event density in the story is so high now that I suspect I'll have to go back and cut thousands of words from the beginning to keep it from having this sudden jump in excitement nine thousand words in. This might turn out to be a short story after all.

Since Potlatch, I've been very busy with the day job. I should really be asleep right now, in fact, because I have two customer presentations at 8 and 9 tomorrow morning.

I also bought some more RAM for both the iBook and the office PC. The iBook upgrade went without a hitch (and it's now much quieter and somewhat quicker), but the office PC crashed hard and repeatedly as soon as I powered it up with the new RAM. It wouldn't even boot from the Windows install CD. So I reinstalled the old RAM, but the windows/system32/config/system file was corrupted by the crash and it still wouldn't boot. Fortunately, I found a web page that explained how to manually restore this file from the last system restore point, and I got the machine back up and running. I'll ask some folks at work if this means the new RAM might be bad.

A snippet from tonight's writing: "I called up the decompression checklist on the airlock's little monitor. It had four hundred and eleven steps and, even under emergency conditions, took a minimum of two hours and twenty minutes. While Thad unshipped the lock's two exercise bicycles, I connected two oxygen masks to the gas nozzle in the wall and fastened one of them over my nose and mouth. Then I handed the other mask to Thad and fitted my feet into the bike's pedals."

Posted 02/28/2006 23:52 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

After ten months, three blurbs, two proposals, and an extensive rewrite, my novel was turned down by Tor.

"It is with extreme regret that I write to report that I have been unsuccessful in securing approval to proceed with the acquisition of REMEMBRANCE DAY.

I still believe in this book and in David's potential, and it pains me to finally have found an SF novel I really wanted to buy, and an SF writer I really wanted to work with, and not to be allowed to do so. I'm sure my disappointment is exceeded only by your own."

Damn.

Well, there are other publishers, and I do have an agent. But still.

Damn.

Now I get to go off to Potlatch and share the happy news with all my friends.

Posted 02/24/2006 08:28 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 9023 | Since last entry: 520

Loverly birthday dinner at Caprial's Bistro (home of Portland's celebrity chefs Caprial and John Pence) with Kate's parents; my parents sent a cool T-shirt from thinkgeek.com with the letter pi made of over 4400 digits of its value. Work continues very very busy. Writing keeps slogging along -- word count above is a bit lower than usual because yesterday's writing progress consisted entirely of putting a story that was just rejected by Interzone in the mail to Black Gate. Now must go and pack, heading for Potlatch bright and early tomorrow morning.

Oh, one other very minor announcement: my story "Tk'Tk'Tk" from the March Asimov's has gotten a couple of mentions in the Emerald City Hugo recommendation list for 2005. Thanks to those who have recommended it! And to the rest of you: if you would like to read the story for award consideration purposes (Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Nobel, whatever), just drop me an email at d levine at spirit one dot com (after removing all spaces and making the obvious punctuation conversions in the address, of course).

Posted 02/24/2006 00:09 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 8503 | Since last entry: 232

I had the day off from work today, and I had so many things to do that I realized the only way I was going to get anything accomplished was to pick some kind of theme. Was it going to be a writing day, or a writing-related activities day with webpage maintenance and critiques, or a day of household chores, or a day of computer stuff?

It turned out to be none of these. It turned out to be a day off.

We went for a walk with some friends. We went to the gym. We did grocery shopping. We did dishes, baked for the Potlatch bake sale, and cooked Broccoli and Tofu with Spicy Peanut Sauce (one of our favorite dishes). I read a lot from the current book club book, Coalescent by Stephen Baxter (and if "pearlescent" means white and shiny, does "coalescent" mean black and shiny?). I don't do nearly enough reading for pleasure.

Okay, I did do a couple of critiques, and of course I did some writing -- I haven't missed my 100-words-per-day minimum yet this year, and it would be ironic if the first time I did miss it was on a holiday with nothing on the calendar.

(But, to be frank, I'm not happy with the way the story is turning out. This is an idea I cared pretty deeply about, and it's shaping up to be a lot less emotionally engaging than I'd thought it would be. Someone (maybe it was me) once compared the process of turning an idea into a first draft to taking a beautiful little bird, pulling out each of its feathers one by one, and taping the feathers to a piece of paper, the end result being a vaguely bird-shaped bunch of taped feathers and a dead, featherless bird corpse. This is definitely turning into one of those. At this point I'm going to finish it out of sheer cussedness, then hope that it can be rescued in revision. Not that I think it can ever be the story I'd once thought it could be, but maybe it can be better than it is now.)

Anyway, it was a pretty laid-back day all told, and now I'm going to cap it off by going to bed before midnight for once. Tomorrow's my birthday, and Kate's folks will be here; we're all going out for a nice dinner.

Posted 02/20/2006 22:41 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 8271 | Since last entry: 2077

Wow, has it been a week? How'd that happen?

Well, I know how it happened. It happened because it was a series of individual days, each of which found me writing until well past what should have been my bedtime, and it didn't seem worthwhile to stay up even later to write about the day.

Apart from the writing -- a consistent 300 words per day, which feel a bit sloggy and space-filling, but, as I keep reminding other people, the purpose of the first draft is to create "cookie dough" which can then be formed and baked into something worth reading -- it has been a pretty busy week.

Last Monday we hosted our neighborhood SF book group. This month's book was Futures, a collection of four novellas by Peter F. Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley, and Ian McDonald. Even though we don't actually spend a lot of time discussing the book at each meeting, I really like having this book group because I get to spend time with my neighbors and it makes me read books I might not otherwise have read -- okay, let's be honest, it makes me read, period. Between the writing and the many other tasks and chores of each day, I have really kind of fallen off the reading bandwagon. I'm not proud of this, and I am really looking forward to retirement so that I can actually start chipping away at my humongous To-Read stack. Anyway, I really enjoyed Futures, especially the McAuley ("Making History") and the McDonald ("Tendeleo's Story"). Both of these were particularly successful in evoking a unique world -- a devastated post-war colony on one of Saturn's moons in one case, and a Nigeria menaced by an interstellar biological invasion in the other. My own writing seems terribly flat by comparison.

Tuesday was Valentine's Day, of course. I bought a package of spacey retro kiddie Valentines and hid them all over the house before Kate woke up. It took her nearly a week to find them all. In the evening we stayed home and cooked a nice dinner for ourselves in our wonderful remodeled kitchen -- grilled salmon with Moroccan spices, braised carrots, and couscous. After which we watched a romantic movie: Shall We Dance with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

The movie was... well, it was bizarre. Fred Astaire was a fine dancer, but he was a very strange looking man, much too skinny to be attractive and with a notably asymmetrical face. The plot had him as an American ballet dancer in Paris who really wants to tap, who falls in love with an American tap dancer (Ginger Rogers) after seeing her dance in a flip-book. Attempting to impress her, he poses as a famous Russian ballet dancer, complete with outrageous accent. But this doesn't do it, so he winds up following her onto the next boat to New York. On the boat, he engages in an extremely strange tap-dance number in the enormous, spanking-clean Art Deco engine room, while happy darkies dance and sing all around him. He also torments his impresario (Edward Everett Horton, voice of Peabody from Rocky & Bullwinkle) and woos Ginger by borrowing an enormous dog. But, again, she spurns his advances, and dumps him once the boat arrives in New York. Her manager, seeking to prevent her from marrying her fiance' and leaving his employ, starts a rumor that Fred and Ginger are secretly married, which he substantiates by photographing the sleeping Fred with an exact duplicate mannequin of Ginger that he happens to have lying around. Ginger responds to the rumor campaign by running off to New Jersey to marry Fred, just so they can get a divorce. After which, running from reporters, they have a fabulous tap-dance on roller skates and sing "You Say Tomato" at each other (a fine song which has no relevance whatsoever to the plot in which it finds itself embedded). But even that doesn't convince Ginger that Fred is the man for her, and she leaves him again. Did I mention they have adjoining suites at their hotel, and there are many misadventures with the key to the connecting door? In the end, Fred stages a dance number with a contortionist and dozens of women wearing Ginger Rogers masks. This disturbing and stalkerish moment convinces Ginger to dump her fiance' and take up with Fred. The end.

They just don't make 'em like that any more.

Thursday was another Portland International Film Festival movie: Tapas, from Spain. It was trying to be a Spanish version of Tampopo, and it was amusing and sometimes affecting, but somehow it failed to satisfy. Maybe a romantic comedy in which a man's wife leaves him, a woman takes up with a boy half her age and then dumps him, and another man commits suicide, has several strikes against it.

Friday was another PIFF movie: Kinky Boots, from Britain. This one was my favorite of the festival, lightweight and formulaic but very well done for its genre. The plot involves a shoe factory in a small Northern industrial town, whose hapless CEO saves it from bankruptcy by changing its product from brogues to kinky boots for transvestites. The show is absolutely stolen by Chiwetel Ejiofor, the coolly efficient assassin from Serenity, as Lola the outragous drag queen. I believe he even did his own singing in the several musical numbers. This one's got distribution from Miramax, and I recommend it.

Saturday I had critique group, and got the final bunch of crits on the Jupiter story. Very much a mixed bag, but the consensus is that it nicely written, but distanced... too much told and not enough shown (I was afraid of that). I also got a great suggestion to punch up the ending, if I can make it plausible.

Saturday afternoon we were supposed to see The Sun, a Russian drama about Emperor Hirohito. We even had purchased advance tickets. But the review in Friday's Oregonian was so scathing ("brutally dull, slow and dreary... fritters away a great concept... vacuous in its screenwriting, shockingly crude in its visual technique, deaf to the needs of an audience in its pace... an ordeal to sit through") that we decided to skip it.

Saturday night was a Bar Mitzvah party for a 13-year-old of our acquaintaince, at which we played Pictionary and Lord of the Fries and reconnected with some friends we hadn't seen in years. Had a nice time geeking with old friend Keith Lofstrom, who mentioned that he is learning Perl and compared regular expressions to line noise. As we drove away from the party, I realized I hadn't actually seen line noise in years... just about all communications these days use prototcols that ensure that an entire packet of bytes is either delivered correctly or not delivered at all. (If this makes no sense to you, don't worry about it. It's a geek thing.)

Today managed to vanish completely into a haircut, lunch with Kate Schaefer and her family, and our final PIFF movie: KZ, a moving British documentary about the current state of the Mauthausen concentration camp -- a sobering tourist attraction surrounded by a living city. It seems inappropriate that the homes and taverns where the camp's officers lived and drank are still in use today; but it would seem equally inappropriate to sacrifice the life of an entire town (and every other concentration camp town) on the altar of memory. One of the camp's tour guides is clearly obsessed with its history, which is affecting his health and marriage but permits him to give a tour that cannot fail to touch those who take it. Such people are deeply unhappy, but beneficial to socieety. It's just a shame that we need to have them.

Tomorrow is a holiday. No specific plans, other than going to the gym. And Tueday's my 45th birthday -- I already received an MP3 of my parents singing "Happy Birthday", so anything else can only be an improvement (hi, Mom!).

Posted 02/19/2006 23:56 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 6194 | Since last entry: 522

I had a pretty massive list of things to do for the weekend, and accomplished about half of them, plus a few things not on the list. Unfortunately, some of the most important things didn't get done. Oh well, there's always tomorrow.

Things that did get done include:

• Installed the DVD writer I bought a few weeks ago, and sent in the rebate forms. I hate mail-in rebates -- they really are nothing more than an attempt to keep people from getting the price they thought they were paying. The whole point of offering a mail-in rebate, rather than just lowering the price, is the hope that the consumer will either forget to mail it in or mess something up so that the rebate will not actually be delivered. Scum scum scum. But I put the forms in the mail before the deadline, and the drive itself seems to work well (backed up my whole My Documents directory, except for the music files, to one disc in just 20 minutes). Unfortunately, the resulting DVD can't be read by the PC's existing DVD reader (though it can be read by the DVD writer itself and by my Mac). I'm not sure if it's the drive, the disc, or the way I burned it. But this is not a killer problem.

• Did some tax research. Mutual funds, rah.

• Wrote over 500 words -- less than I'd hoped, more than the minimum. A snippet: "Fine. It wasn't my fault, and it wasn't really their fault either. I would just have to make the best of it -- to try to fit in as best I could. Maybe if I could make some significant scientific progress they'd take me more seriously."

• Attended a fine party given for Jay Lake by his friend Tami to celebrate his recent novel sale. Local writers Mary Hobson and Karin Berry and several of Jay's relatives were also in attendance, along with Jay's "The Child" and "The Niece". The food was quite memorable, including delectable crab cakes and two festive gateaux. The Niece (two years old) had trouble with the idea of eating cake when it wasn't someone's birthday, so we all sang "Happy Book Deal To You". A tradition I hope to continue myself, some day soon.

• Saw two Portland International Film Festival movies: Giant Buddhas and Sophie Scholl - The Final Days.
  Giant Buddhas had some very striking imagery, including amazing footage of the Bamiyan buddhas being blown up (the Taliban wasn't very good at it and it took a long time), and also featured some interesting side trips to other colossal Buddhas elsewhere in Asia and thoughts on the possible reconstruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. But as a documentary, it was muddled and confused -- often it was uncertain when certain footage had been shot, and although the narrator was apparently in continuous correspondence with an Afghani(?) woman, the relationship between them and her role were never made clear.
  Sophie Scholl was a much more effective film. The story of a young German woman who was arrested, tried, convicted, and executed by the Nazis -- in a span of just four days -- for the crime of distributing leaflets criticizing the government, this movie had the unprecedented effect of shutting me up. I was stunned into silence for nearly an hour by the spectacle of a government staffed almost entirely by thoughtful, patriotic people (the judge was one of the few Nazis portrayed in an entirely unsympathetic light) performing horrible atrocities for the sake of national security and solidarity. Although this is a German film, I couldn't help but think of it as a commentary on the direction the United States is going. I fear for the future of my country.

Posted 02/12/2006 23:58 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 5672 | Since last entry: 813

I've been slipping into a mode where I leave the writing until the last possible minute (often not starting until well after a reasonable bedtime) and then banging out the bare minimum 100 words before stumbling off in the dark to where Kate has already gone to bed. This is no way to make real progress on the writing and does not contribute to a happy home life. So, starting this weekend, I'm going to try to get to the writing first, and do other things thereafter, whenever possible. I might not get to bed any earlier, but I think this will help with both quantity and quality.

And I really need the quantity. I've now written a good-sized short story's worth of words and I'm only to the fifth point of a seventeen-point outline, which implies a final length in the 15,000-25,000 word range: either a long novelette or a short novella. This is a very difficult length to sell (though, as Kate points out, if I do sell it the competition for awards is much less). But, having started the damn thing, I mean to finish it... but I don't want it to take all year. Which means I need to keep plugging away at it. Ganbatte!

Anyway. 500 words tonight, and it's not even time for Galactica yet. More words tomorrow. And I worked out with my trainer and went to the bank today, so I'm feeling especially virtuous.

A snippet: "It had been so different six months ago... six months ago in my memories, that is; six months before first scan, which turned out to be my last. That was when the crew had first eaten together, right after the press conference where our selection had been announced to the world."

Oh, one more thing: I've received a number of emails in the last couple of days from friends and strangers, asking for writing help and advice. Even though this represents yet more Things To Do, I find it enormously cheering.

Posted 02/10/2006 21:52 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 4859 | Since last entry: 348

Okay, I've passed the point I stopped in the first pass and the story's beginning to move now. I've got a couple of people who are clearly pissed at the protagonist, and though he understands the immediate causes he has no idea why they are so upset with him for what seems like minor transgressions. At this point he doesn't even quite realize just how much trouble he's in.

A snippet: "Half an hour later I got something, but it wasn't what I'd expected. Tien shot out of the port from Gamma work bay, diving right at me and looking like she was ready to spit nails. 'What were you thinking?' she said, jerking to a halt with one hand on a panel edge."

Posted 02/07/2006 22:35 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 4511 | Since last entry: 630

After spending half of Sunday in Tech Support Hell trying to get the third wireless card to work (this time, surprisingly, talking with technicians in the States -- they mentioned that phone wait times were long because so few people were on staff due to the Super Bowl) I finally got the network up and running by moving the card to another slot. Yay! Unfortunately, with the card in this slot I couldn't replace the computer's cover. After much debate about the relative merits of trying to get the card working in the one slot where it would physically fit, vs. Leaving Well Enough Alone And Getting On With My Life Already, I decided to just cut a piece of cardboard to keep the dust out. It's unsightly, but it's in the attic, so who cares.

And so, this morning after I got out of the shower, I turned on the music. Then, over breakfast, another one of my favorite songs came on, and I sighed... it was nice to have Radio David and Kate on the air again. No commercials, no talk, nothing too hard or too soft, and a large enough playlist to provide some surprises. Happy David.

My 100 words per day goal might be a little too conservative. It's been a little too easy to write just the 100 words and then stop, when I know that if I exerted myself even a little bit I could get 500 words or more. So I did exert myself today and I did do nearly 500 words. Mind you, they're pretty flabby words.. not a lot happening in this scene yet. I seem to be slipping into a novelistic level of detail here. I don't think this is a novel, but it certainly is trying to stretch into something much bigger than a short story. Oh well, you can't fix a blank page. I'll just keep going and see what it turns into. If necessary, I can go back and cut brutally later.

The weekend's mail brought a brief personal reject from Stan Schmidt, saying that he enjoyed "Titanium Mike," but "I'm afraid it didn't seem to me to have enough actual science fiction in it to be a good fit for Analog." Sigh. It's off to F&SF.

Posted 02/06/2006 22:37 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 3881 | Since last entry: 502

Not much writing in the last three days, and here's why.

Thursday night we attended a charity event, called Cooking for Kids, in which we were treated to an exceptional French meal along with a lecture and demonstration by the chef, Lisa Schroeder of Mother's (one of Portland's finest restaurants). Key insights included that when preparing meat for sauteeing one should season the meat, then flour it (rather than mixing the seasonings into the flour) and that you should use a smoking-hot pan to sear and quickly cook it. Browning onions and other ingredients for French onion soup should also be done at a high temperature, but watched carefully for a long time to achieve a deep dark brown without going all the way to black. And a homemade chocolate sauce can be fixed surprisingly quickly, resulting in amazing flavor. The dinner was also accompanied by several wines, with lecture on the wines by a local winemaker, but this was lost on me.

Friday I learned that my uncle Ben, who lives near Sacramento, had passed on. He was in his eighties and had been seriously ill for only a few weeks, but his health had been declining for some time and he decided not to prolong his life any more. My father (Ben's younger brother) and all Ben's children and grandchildren had visited with him in his last few weeks. He'll be missed. The funeral will be a small family affair and I decided not to attend, but there will be a celebration of Ben's life later this year and I hope to be able to make that.

Most of today was spent in Tech Support Hell, trying to get the newly-reconfigured music server to connect to my network. After fighting repeated system hangs caused by the no-name wireless networking card (which I now suspect may have been the cause of the server's hard disk becoming corrupt), I went out and bought a new card from a reputable vendor. Which repeatedly hung on install, and once installed would not reliably connect to either the local network or the LAN even though it had excellent signal strength. Unfortunately, the card's tech support (in Bangalore, from the sound of the tech's voice) said the problem was with my wireless router, and the router's tech support (also in Bangalore) blamed the card.

Much worse, though, the router's tech tried to convince me that if I just turned off my firewall and MAC authentication my problem would be solved. Yeah, right. I'm seeing anything from 20% to 100% packet loss on a ping, meaning that some packets are getting through, and it's my firewall that's to blame? I did turn off the Windows XP firewall, which didn't help as I knew it wouldn't, and the tech insisted I must have another firewall installed... even though I just reformatted the hard disk and installed all software from scratch in the last two days, and even though the behavior I observed (some, but not all, packets getting through) could not be explained by a misconfigured firewall. The proposed solution would not only not have fixed my problem, it would have left my network completely open. I was most intensely annoyed when I hung up.

I'm pretty sure that the problem is, indeed, in the router. The card vendor's web site indicates that this problem can be addressed by lowering the router's RTS threshold, which fits the symptoms, but my router doesn't provide any way to change this setting. Unfortunately, my router is also my DSL modem and is the only one my DSL provider supports. I could try turning off the router's wireless features and instead getting a separate wireless access point that will work with the wireless card, but I'm inclined to try yet another wireless card first, in hopes it will be compatible with the existing router.

This shouldn't be so hard.

Apart from that, I went square dancing (for the first time in months!), had a nice dinner at Buster's BBQ with some of the guys from the dance, and wrote about 100 words per night. I've finally moved past the initial scene that was causing me so much trouble (very hard to get all the information in without feeling infodumpy, especially given that none of the other characters want my first-person viewpoint character to find out what's really going on) but I haven't yet gotten past what I drafted in the initial burst, before I realized I had no idea where the story was going. I hope to pass that point tomorrow... unless I spend tomorrow talking to Bangalore again.

Posted 02/04/2006 11:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 3379 | Since last entry: 112

Spent the day fighting authentication issues at work that repeatedly locked me out of my account and had me talking to tech support in Bangalore a lot. But by the end of the day I think I got it all sorted out... which, functionally speaking, put me right back where I was.

Came home and fixed biscuits while my sweetie made tempeh stroganoff. Yum.

After dinner, sighed and reformatted the hard drive on the music server. After asking around at work and browsing the net, I decided I'd never be able to trust a disk with a broken index. So far I have reinstalled Windows XP and am now installing Service Pack 2. Oddly, after repartitioning and reformatting the disk only shows 130GB of the 250GB it's supposed to have. I don't remember if it was that way before. Also, after a fresh install I can't set the monitor resolution higher than 640x480, and I know it wasn't that way before. Same hardware, same OS. Why why why?

While the OS was installing I did manage to write my 100 words for the day, but I'm still working on the same damn scene. I need to move forward. But it's not going to happen quickly... I'm not going to be able to really concentrate on writing until the server is up and running again.

Posted 02/01/2006 23:36 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 3267 | Since last entry: -7

I didn't get a lot of writing done tonight (and that mostly editing the first part I wrote last week to fit the new outline, which explains the negative word count), because I was tending to a sick computer.

For reasons unknown, the music server was not visible on the network when we woke up this morning... it was up and running, but couldn't ping out or in. So I rebooted... and it didn't come up. Disk read error. I've tried chkdsk and a few other things, and now I can see files on the disk, but it still won't boot. I fear it may be a hardware failure. Might take a few days just to sort out what went wrong.

But! I got an email today from Asimov's... they're going to buy the Bigfoot story! I'm really pleased at this one -- my third sale to Asimov's, and my first new story sale in over a year.

Yay!

Posted 01/31/2006 23:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 3274 | Since last entry: 414

Tonight's wordcount is a complete but rather sketchy outline of the current story, trying to work in all the key points from this weekend's plot and character notes. Many missing pieces still. What is the main character's job on board ship? Need to find an org chart for the Pioneer or Voyager mission to get names of scientific specialties... would also probably be good to find and re-read the daily logs from the International Space Station, which I saw posted on the web some years ago.

Outlining at this point feels rather like... cheating? Wasting time? I feel I should be writing, i.e. producing salable words, in my limited writing time. But I know that this story's bigger than my usual and needs some planning and special attention if it's going to work.

I am envious of people who produce 1000-2000 words per day on a regular basis (though I know that many of them don't have day jobs).

Posted 01/30/2006 22:42 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2860 | Since last entry: 293

After writing the above-noted 300 words on Thursday, I realized that I was really pushing to get the words out. The story didn't seem to be going anywhere; I was just putting words on the page and they weren't adding up to anything.

On Friday I did quite a bit of thinking about the story (I left the radio off during my commute) but didn't write anything down. However, I did earn a blue star for the day by resubmitting a story that bounced from Aeon (though I am beginning to suspect that story isn't going to sell).

Also on Friday I attended the Portland Auto Show as a field trip from work. No, really, we were researching user interactions in the new navigation-computer-equippped cars. Well, that was the rationale. The real reason was to give my two co-workers (Audi and BMW fanatic respectively) an excuse to go to the Auto Show on company time. I gave it my best shot, but fundamentally I find cars boring, and I left early. The coolest thing I saw was a life-sized Volvo made entirely of Lego, and the one really amusing thing was the BMW M6, which has an "M" button on the steering wheel that boosts the horsepower or something. Personally, I would rather have the "C" button to extend the rotating saws, or the "F" button for underwater operation.

Saturday and Sunday mornings I put in about two writing hours each, and wrote nearly 4000 words of notes about the plot and characters (using the questions from the "Sketch a Novel in an Hour" workshop conducted by Chris York at OryCon a few years back as an outline). Clearly the words can flow rapidly when I don't have to worry about picking the right word, or being consistent, or repeating myself. Maybe I need to approach the drafting process in this way. Anyway, this has been a worthwhile exercise and I think I'm ready to start over (keeping some of the existing words) and have it work better. Still don't know how long it's going to be, but longer than a short story.

Saturday afternoon was critique group, when I got some useful feedback on the Jupiter story. Everyone agreed it's in good shape, which was reassuring after the first (email) crit I'd received ripped it to shreds. I think I'll wait until I've received the last few crits from those who couldn't make it this week before revising it and sending it to Analog.

Saturday night we met up with local writers Mary Hobson and Jay Lake, Jay's friend Tammy, and Jay's daughter ("The Child") for conversation, coffee, and snacks before Doug Lain's book launch party. Unfortunately, Kate and I had symphony tickets and couldn't attend the book launch itself.

This afternoon we attended a Japanese New Year celebration, featuring much energetic Taiko drumming and the pounding of mochi (sticky rice) as well as some very entertaining storytelling and dance. Happy New Year, all!

Oh, one more thing: my story "Tk'Tk'Tk" from the March Asimov's appeared in the Locus Recommended Reading list for 2005, along with many other fine stories. If you're looking for something new to read you could do worse than to check this list out.

Posted 01/29/2006 20:27 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2567 | Since last entry: 48

Met with our financial adviser tonight, and Kate's mildly under the weather. Not much actual writing, but did add another few hundred words of notes. I'm questioning the initial premise, alas, or at least some key aspects of it.

What kinds of unauthorized cloning would be a crime? Why would Chaz object to being vived with this set of memories, given that he had consented to having the record made, knowing that it might have to be used? Wouldn't he be glad just to be alive? And wouldn't the other team members want him alive, if the alternative is simply to pitch his warm and breathing body, fully capable of consciousness even if its memories are a bit out of date, out the airlock? Surely they need all hands, even half-trained ones. But what if there's some other reason they all voted not to vive him?

So I might re-do some aspects of the first scene.

Apart from those notes, what I have is mostly infodumpy scene setting and character descriptions. Haven't gotten at all into the meaty relationship issues that were my original reason for wanting to write this story. Yet. But now, it's time for bed.

Posted 01/25/2006 22:44 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2519 | Since last entry: 540

Dinner at Nuestra Cocina.

500+ words written at the airport, waiting for Kate's plane.

My sweetie is back home.

Happy now.

Posted 01/24/2006 23:29 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 1979 | Since last entry: 234

In addition to the 234 words of mostly infodump I wrote tonight in the actual draft, I also wrote over 350 words of additional infodump in a separate file of notes, working out the characters, their physical descriptions, and their relationships to each other. And as I was doing that, it became clear to me whodunit, and why, and what event would precipitate the crisis, and what they would all do after that point. The end.

No idea how many words there are between here and there. But my brain tends to leap to conclusions, and no amount of "let's just write it and see where it takes us" has ever derailed it before, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised it's done it again.

(My brain is a guy. Focused on the orgasm destination rather than the journey. Stupid brain! Down, brain!)

On the other hand, I know that I am capable of changing the ending if the story seems to lead in another direction. So I'm going to keep going, and hope for the best.

A snippet: "Kyra got on the intercom and called everyone together in the Gamma work bay. Alpha should have been the command and control module, but it hadn't made the rendezvous -- lost somewhere in the vacant light-years between here and there. Also lost was Delta, which had made it all the way to Tau Ceti only to burn up in the first aerobraking maneuver. So instead of the planned pentagonal ring, Cassie was a shallow V, with Gamma module in the middle and Beta and Epsilon on the ends. Fortunately, three modules provided sufficient resources and space for our purposes; the mission had been designed to succeed with as little as one module, but it would have been tight quarters."

(I told you it was an infodump...)

One thing that stopped me from making forward progress for half an hour was when I needed to describe a character's... knees. See, he's curled in a fetal position, and he notices that his skin is as clear and unmarked as a newborn's, which is his first hint that he is actually a clone of the person he remembers himself as being. And I'm having a devil of a time describing it. I need a word, or short phrase, that describes skin that's smooth and clear and unmarked and translucent and beautiful... and brown. Food, wood, and leather metaphors all seem inappropriate. Right now I've got "smooth and unmarked as a baby's brown bottom" but I'm not 100% happy with it.

The hardest part to capture is the translucence, which is going to be immediately noticeable because this skin has never been exposed to light. Very few things in life are translucent in the way that human skin is. Porcelain is the traditional metaphor, but that only works with pale skin.

Ponder ponder ponder. But now, sleep!

Posted 01/23/2006 23:51 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 1745 | Since last entry: 280

It's a good thing I managed 1500 words on Friday night, because I've barely gotten my minimum in yesterday and today. A hundred words isn't much -- only one paragraph in this case -- but I feel it's important to keep my hand in every single day.

So if I wasn't writing, what was I doing? Shopping, mostly. Saturday I spent most of the morning at Fry's, the cathedral of consumer electronics, which is so far out of town and such an anathema to Kate that I usually don't get to go there except when she's out of town. In this case I also had a $150 gift certificate, which I got at work a few months ago as a reward for my work on a key project. After much shopping and dithering I decided on a DVD burner, because backing up the documents directory on the PC has grown to require 3 CDs and burning 3 separate CDs is a pain. By complete coincidence the DVD burner and one spindle of DVDs came to $149.98.

Next I visited Bridgeport Village, the newest shopping center in town, which reminds me a lot of University Square in Seattle where we once met Janna Silverstein for fancy chocolates. I had a decent lunch, found a travel box for my collapsible top hat, and picked up a new kitchen scale to replace the one whose plastic window has become opaqued by years of kitchen grime.

Home by way of Music Millennium, where I took the time to consult with the friendly and knowledgeable staff in hopes of finding a compilation album of music similar to what they play on local station KINK. I came away with a couple of recommended discs, plus a few more finds from the used CD racks.

I arrived home to find that somewhere along the way the stylus from my trusty Palm V had vanished. Damn! I looked online and confirmed my fears: styli for this ancient device are no longer available anywhere except dodgy vendors on Amazon Marketplace. But then I thought: didn't this critter come with two styli? After a bit of digging, I found the original stylus taped to the warranty card, tucked in the back of the owner's manual. Yay for being a packrat.

Leftovers for dinner, followed by a nap. Despite the bracelet, I've been staying up way too late, but still rising around 6am. Then I met my friends Anthony and Rhia for dessert at Pix Patisserie (omigod the Concorde was marvelous -- crunchy light chocolate meringue twigs surrounding a core of chocolate mousse, it looked like a firestarter and tasted divine), followed by...

The live theatrical production of Manos: The Hands of Fate! (Which I would never have known about if Mark Bourne hadn't mentioned it in his LJ. Thanks!) It was a total hoot. They took the original script and played it reasonably straight, except that the small child was played by a grown woman, half of the Master's wives were played by men, and the two dogs were played by stuffed animals. The wife catfight scenes were particularly hilarous -- they looked like highly choreographed dances from the Hullabaloo era.

The production was amateurish, but that only added to its charm. These actors were deliberately overplaying, where in the original the actors were doing the best they could. But their Torgo was spot on, and really stole the show. He was definitely the tragic hero of this production.

The weird thing is that in this production the plot actually made sense. It helped that they moved it briskly along, taking a little more than an hour.

That was Saturday. Today I had a haircut, went to the gym, caught up on my email, did the dishes, did a little more shopping... I had a serious case of getting distracted all day. I found myself walking away from putting away dishes, leaving the cupboard door open, to send an email before I forgot, then abandoning the email half-finished to attend to some webpage maintenance, but leaving that half-done when I realized I needed to take out the garbage... I think I achieved closure on everything I started today, but there are a half-dozen projects I meant to do today and never even started.

So much for the weekend. I did get a lot done, but not as much as I'd hoped. Tomorrow night I can try to finish up some of those loose ends, and then Kate returns on Tuesday night. Yay!

Posted 01/22/2006 23:46 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 1465 | Since last entry: 1465

Yesterday evening I did a bunch of iPod-related stuff, noticing at nearly midnight that I had not yet done any writing for the day. So I looked over the Carpet story, made a few edits suggested by Sara from my crit group, and put it in the mail. I gave myself a blue star for submitting a story. (The other star colors are: silver for 100-500 words or any amount of revision, gold for 500-1000 words, red for 1000+ words, and green for sending a story to critique. So far I have at least one star on every day of 2006.)

Tonight I was good and spent the whole evening writing. After looking over the ideas in my Writing Ideas file, and rejecting all those that were too big, required too much research, or just didn't appeal right now, I was left with about twenty -- all science fiction but one (and that one a weird one), and about half of those space-based. My last two stories were also space-based SF, so I wanted to do something different... but one of those ideas, one that dates back to Clarion, grabbed me. So I started in on it. It even has a title: "Second Chance" (which describes both the main character's situation and the larger situation of which he is a part).

Only one small problem: I think this might be shaping up to be a novel. Or at least a novella. Well, for once I'm just going to dive in, with the plot in my teeth, and see where I find myself when I emerge on the other side.

A snippet: "Uncurling, I grasped for an attach point, but misjudged my reach and scraped my hand on the rough plastic panel joint next to it. My body was all wrong -- too thin, too long, the skin as delicate as a baby's. Nothing was where I expected it to be. My heart started to pound again and I took slow, deep breaths to calm myself."

Posted 01/20/2006 23:30 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

No writing per se today. But I did put the story that was rejected by Cricket back in the mail, prepared the Carpet story for submission (but didn't send it, I want to take one more look at it before I seal the envelope), and got all the manuscripts for the Potlatch writers' workshop copied and mailed -- that last was a pretty serious chunk of paperwork. I also got money from the money machine, groceries from the automatic cash register, and postage from the automatic postal scale and postage dispenser... didn't interact with a single human being all evening.

Going over those manuscripts was kind of a weird experience, each one with its earnest cover letter: "Dear Mr. Levine, please find enclosed my application for the Potlatch writers' workshop..." Jeez. I'm just a fan who got lucky, you know?

By the way, we could still use one more pro for the workshop. If you are a pro writer or editor (and I have an exceedingly loose definition of "pro"), and if you're coming to Potlatch, and if you'd be willing to crit 5 manuscripts (the workshop is 4-7pm on Friday), drop me a note.

Posted 01/18/2006 22:53 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 897 | Since last entry: -3

Spent all day in a meeting (as I will be doing every day this week) and then, when I got back to my desk, locked myself out of the payroll system. I must have forgotten my password -- not too surprisingly, given that we are forced to change them frequently and use passwords complex enough that they can't easily be remembered -- and then the backup authentication system decided my answers for favorite color, favorite movie, and mother's maiden name weren't close enough. Probably case-sensitive or some such garbage. Then I found out the people who can unlock the account are all at an offsite today. So no paycheck for me today. (Mind you, I did get paid, by direct deposit -- I just can't print my paystub.)

Got home late, to find a nice rejection from Cricket in the mail. This on top of a critique I received by email on Monday, which said my main character was "Nazi-esque" and the science fiction premise "disregards commonly known facts, basic physics, etc," and some other news which I won't go into other than to note that I found it far more annoying than it deserved.

I rewrote the carpet story again tonight, for a net wordcount change of -3, but at this point I have zero confidence it's any good.

Posted 01/18/2006 00:28 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 900 | Since last entry: 197

And so we come to the end of a three-day weekend. Took it easy, didn't get a lot done. Tonight we had a book group meeting (discussing Sabriel by Garth Nix, which I found lacking in depth... but when I found out it was intended as YA, I became much more favorably disposed toward it) and then I took Kate to the airport, to catch a red-eye to New York. She'll be there for a week, helping our friend Lise clean up her late mother's apartment.

It's been a lightweight weekend for writing, as I said, but I did get some stuff done. Saturday I finished up the edits on the Jupiter story and sent it off for critique. Sunday I wrote about 200 words of notes on "Moonlight on the Carpet" (the story itself is only 900 words long) in response to critiques I received last week. Today I revised the story according to those notes... and the story died on the table.

The main problem with this story is that people get to the end and aren't sure what has happened. But when I added the information they need to understand the situation, the twist ending became obvious. I think I'm going to go back to the previous draft and revise again, this time trying to sneak in the necessary information closer to the end, so it's part of the ending rather than part of the set-up.

"In the dark outside the living room window, seagulls cawed and the surf rumbled, while the babysitter snored in the armchair with a book open on her lap. Mommy and Daddy never took Liam along when they went to the island on a full-moon night. They said that Ritual was not for little boys -- like the other deck of cards, the one with the pretty colored pictures that moved."

(That snippet is not going to be in the next revision... it gives too much away.)

Anyway, even though I only got in a net word count change of 15 today, and I'm going to undo that change tomorrow, I'm giving myself a silver star for an hour of editing.

Neither Kate nor I is very good at going to sleep at a reasonable hour when we're apart. So I braided some yarn and made us a couple of bracelets: blue to remind us to go to sleep, green to remind us to eat right, and red to remind us we love each other. We tied them on our wrists and will cut them off when she returns. Mine is telling me right now to stop blogging and go to bed, so I will do so.

Posted 01/16/2006 23:09 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 6487 | Since last entry: 654

Finished up this draft of the Jupiter story tonight. The ending didn't make me cry like the Eagle story did, but I did feel it pretty intensely. It's a hard ending for the protagonist, but I think it's a good one.

I'll look it over tomorrow and then send it for critique.

A snippet: "I had come home. Truly home, in a deeper, realer way than even my own personal module, which I built with my own hands, can ever be. Perhaps it was the solid press of real gravity, perhaps it was the constant presence of the horizon behind every building, perhaps it was the magnetic field or the tug of the moon or something even more subtle than that. Whatever the cause, something in my bones knew where it needed to be, and that was here."

Also: I was worried that there weren't going to be enough participants for the Potlatch 15 Writers' Workshops, which I am coordinating. But three manuscripts came in today, which makes four, so it looks like it's going to be okay. (The deadline is January 15, by the way.)

Posted 01/13/2006 23:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 5833 | Since last entry: 176

Most of this evening's writing consisted of a quick editing pass through the whole story so far, cleaning it up and looking for cues that my subconscious had planted toward the ending, then straightening them up so they all point in the same direction. Still not 100% sure what the actual ending will be but it's definitely shaping up.

A snippet: "I keyed the laser with Merganther's personal emergency code. He answered almost immediately, and I told him about the failing spar. I gave him my honest assessment of the severity of the situation, and I did not overstate the risk. But I didn't tell him about the bloom."

Thanks to those who have commented on the last couple of entries. I don't have the time to post replies right now, but your comments are appreciated.

Posted 01/12/2006 22:58 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 5657 | Since last entry: 315

The climax continues. My main character is in the process of making a decision that many people would see as evil. Can I do this and still have him be sympathetic? Maybe I need to show his second thoughts as well as his rationale...

A snippet: "For a moment I just gaped at the sight -- a jet of gas as big as three platforms spewing into space. Slowing the fragment down. Changing its orbit. By how much? Enough to make the difference between life and death for Earth? Maybe. Probably. I couldn't tell. Too many unknowns."

Posted 01/11/2006 23:22 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 5342 | Since last entry: 314

This is the place where this draft of the story is going to be most different from the last one. Having created a new main character and put him in the same situation, his crisis is different and the resolution has to be different as well. This character simply doesn't care about the things that were important to the previous one. But his problem is the same: Earth is threatened, but he has more important things to defend.

Last time I came >this close< to destroying the Earth at the end of the story. It could still happen.

I wrote up a thousand words of notes about what might happen at the climax. A key piece of broken equipment could be repairable or not, and there are two separate pieces of information the character could choose to lie or tell the truth about, which creates eight possibilities. I wrote up a paragraph or two about each possibility and the most dramatic things that could happen as a result. (Yes, this is how I write. Could have been worse -- I seriously considered drawing up a decision tree.)

Several of the possibilities make no sense. One leads to a straightforward heroic ending, which is satisfying in a conventional way but I want more moral complexity from this story. Two lead to ironic downer endings, which I don't want either. But two of them lead to unconventional endings with a twist in the tail, one of them more straightforward than the other. That's the one I'm now driving toward. However, I may change course as the climax shapes up. (And I can go back and change the lead-in if that would make a better ending.)

A snippet: "I tried to place an urgent call to Merganther, on Funnel One, but the quantar link was down again -- it had become more and more cranky as years wore on without proper replacement parts -- and the radio was even more badly shredded than usual by Earth's magnetic fields. All I could hear was the roar of static and occasional snatches of words."

Oh, also: today's email brought a rejection from Fantasy, and a note from the editor at Tor that he has no idea how long it will take the publisher to come to a decision about my novel. The rejected story will go right back in the mail just as soon as I decide where to send it next; the nails will continue to be bitten.

Posted 01/10/2006 22:26 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 5028 | Since last entry: 1503

As readers of her LiveJournal are aware, Kate has been on a decluttering kick lately, and we've managed to accumulate four grocery bags of books and one of CDs that we decided we can live without. So yesterday, after I spent most of the morning ripping CDs into iTunes, we headed off with our bags to get the books and CDs back into circulation.

The first place we went was Music Millennium, a fine local music store where we had a coupon good for an extra 15% on any used CD sales. But lots of other people were cleaning out their CD shelves, possibly attracted by the coupon, and we were warned of a two-hour wait for the CD buyer. So we took them to Everyday Music instead, where we amused ourselves with browsing the racks while the buyer evaluated our wares. We wound up spending only $50 over what our CDs brought in. Then we lugged the books to nearby Powell's, where there were three buyers on duty and we only had to stand in line for a few minutes. After which, of course, we had to hit the stacks. But this time we came out ahead, with $10 in store credit. So we wound up with a net expense of about $40 and replaced five bags of unwanted books and CDs with one small bag of (hopefully) wanted ones. Not that there is any room on the shelves for those.

After we got home from that expedition, I headed right back to Powell's, because I'd forgotten I had a couple of Xmas presents to return and I wanted to complete the decluttering expedition. (Not presents I'd received; books I'd bought as presents and then learned the intended recipient already had them.) I knew it was dangerous to go to Powell's again, especially with a card now loaded with another $20 in store credit, but this time I managed to get away with nothing more than a cup of coffee.

Amazingly, that whole expedition took less than three hours, including lunch. I spent the afternoon ripping more CDs and making sure that all three computers had the right music on them. But when Kate and I went to consolidate the music collection on the office computer (which I've begun thinking of as "her computer"), we discovered there wasn't enough free disk space to perform the consolidation.

This led to a deep philosophical discussion about extending the concept of decluttering to the office computer. I'd been thinking for some time that it needed a larger hard disk, but to Kate this seemed like buying a bigger house when what was really needed was to keep the current one tidy. My main concern was that by comparison with the multimedia files that we've been adding lately, any space we could reclaim by removing unwanted documents would be just a drop in the proverbial.

But then I thought of a major decluttering option that would free up at least four GB -- I could delete the operating system and all the applications.

Okay, I could delete an operating system and its applications. Specifically, when I upgraded this PC from Windows 98 to Windows XP I'd partitioned the hard disk and done a fresh install of XP on the new partition. So the first partition contains our documents directory and an operating system we haven't booted up in over a year. If I just got rid of Win98 I could make enough space for about 66 more CDs. (Hmm, not all that much. Still substantial, though.)

But I'm not dumb. I immediately began backing up the C: partition to the new fileserver, in case I deleted something I regretted later. Then we went to the Bagdad for pizza and Flightplan, which was rather implausible in spots but still an entertaining two hours of mindless fun. We got home just as the backup was finishing... and the verification phase started, which would take just as long. So I did my writing for the evening, but didn't post anything to my journal because that would require using the PC (long story).

This morning when I awoke I saw that the backup had completed and verified successfully. I checked that I could successfully restore a directory full of files, then deleted everything on the C: partition other than the documents directory. Despite a couple of warnings about deleting the Program Files directory, the deletion proceeded without error, freeing up large amounts of space and leaving the system still functional. I tried running some programs and all seemed okay.

But when I rebooted... ack! A black screen with "Can't find NTLDR"! Woe! I had stupidly forgotten that, although the C: drive's operating system was no longer in use, it was still the boot drive.

After staring and sweearing at the black screen for a while, I tried booting from several emergency boot floppies. None of them worked. But the WinXP install CD did boot, and offered a Recovery Console. But the Recovery Console was nothing more than a DOS prompt. How to recover the lost files, which were gone to wherever files go when you empty the Recycle Bin?

Fortunately, I had a working server with a complete, fresh backup of the C: drive. I ran upstairs and restored C:'s root directory to a temporary folder, then copied key files -- including AUTOEXEC.BAT and the critical NTLDR -- to a floppy. Then I copied the files from the floppy (one at a time, the Recovery Console version of COPY doesn't support wildcards) to the C: drive. Cross fingers, press Reset and... it lives!

Amazingly, I made it to work less than an hour later than usual.

A few more files did have to be restored... old apps that were still running from the C: drive, sound files, that sort of thing. But all in all the operation was a success. I was stupid enough to get myself in serious trouble, but smart enough to get out of it. Geek triumph! Never did consolidate Kate's iTunes library, though.

This evening we ate leftovers, did some grocery shopping, and I also did some writing. Most of the word count above is copied in from the previous draft, but I'm getting to the climax and that's demanding a serious rewrite. Expect to see slower progress in the next few days. And when I finish, I need to go back and fix up the timescale a bit, and also restore some of the vast scope that the previous draft had -- the new draft is more personal and visceral for the main character, but as a side effect it's also lost some of its sensawunda.

Posted 01/09/2006 23:27 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 3525 | Since last entry: 759

I had a mind-numbing list of Things to Do today, but somehow the day just went "voom" without getting more than a few of them done.

It started off when I was just getting my act together after arising, when Kate suggested we go to the gym. Which I had to agree would be a good idea, but with one thing and another it took us quite a while to get moving, and when we got there we found the gym packed with new year's resolution people. The mad crush usually passes by February, but for now it was crazy -- we just did 20 minutes of cardio and came home.

After that I had some critiques to do, and some other chores like cleaning and putting away the Hanukkah menorah, before critique group in the afternoon. Then we had just time to fix and eat dinner before my corporate holiday party (which is held in January -- kind of nice, actually, in that it doesn't interfere with any other holiday parties).

The party was pretty enjoyable for a work-related event, with free drinks and hors d'ouvres and blackjack, craps, and roulette tables for entertainment, but the music and the standing around in dress shoes got to be a little too much so we went home early and watched the Season 2½ premiere of Battlestar Galactica. Then I did a little more writing -- like yesterday, most of the wordcount above is copied from the previous draft.

A snippet: "I emerged into a motionless, darkened industrial station. The angular forms of platforms under construction jutted all around, harshly illuminated by white emergency pinpoints. Here and there a cable or tool floated free, left unsecured in the rapid evacuation, but there was no sign of the reason for that evacuation."

Many more Things to Do this weekend. Tomorrow will be a busy day.

Posted 01/07/2006 23:22 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2766 | Since last entry: 110

I neglected to mention yesterday that I got an update from the editor on my novel. He says that he liked the revisions and has passed my revised manuscript along to the publisher with his strong endorsement. Now we both get to wait for the publisher's decision. Breath held, fingers crossed, etc.

Went to a square dance tonight, for the first time in many months. We missed the opening hour of C-2 (a level which Kate dances but I don't, so I can do some writing while she dances) due to bad luck with dinner. We went to a local Mexican joint for a quick burrito and wound up waiting while the cashier told stories of his first job to the people in line ahead of us. Eventually we simply bailed, and went to a nearby Japanese place, where our dinner took a lot longer to arrive than it usually does. Grr all around.

So I didn't do much writing during the dance, and when I got home I wrote the bare minimum to make my 100 words for the day. More tomorrow.

A snippet: "But while those of us who had invested early in the Project grew wealthy, poor Jupiter wasted away. His weather systems disrupted by the constant sucking of the Funnels, old Jove shrank from a proud banded beauty to a muddy, muddled yellow-brown gasball, and even his parade of attendant moons was cleared away to create a safer work environment. I found the sight depressing, so I buried myself in my work."

Posted 01/06/2006 22:53 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2656 | Since last entry: 1452

A productive day at work, some coding and some meetings, very little drama. Got home from work reasonably early, fixed an interesting chicken-and-cranberry recipe Kate clipped from the paper, then sat down to write much earlier than usual. Still going to bed later than I should. Kate's still having problems with the iPod... it's supposed to be easy to use, but under Windows it's sometimes kind of flaky.

Don't get too excited about the word count above. Only about 200 words of that is new; the rest is copied in from the previous draft (which isn't really a "draft", it was finished and submitted and came very close at several markets, including a rewrite request from F&SF). But I did make some significant changes in the copied material. I'm giving myself a gold star for the day.

A snippet: "Just getting the black holes to stabilize was a nightmare. The only tools we had were superconducting magnets the size of small moons, and if one of them decided to quench you wouldn't even have the time to say your prayers. We lost half the hole team in one instant, when someone bobbled the matter feed and hole number four went straight from black to white without stopping for breakfast. We had invested a substantial portion of the genome money in the latest backup and restore equipment, of course, but the prospect of sudden death was still terrifying."

Posted 01/05/2006 23:15 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 1204 | Since last entry: 308

As you can tell from the timestamps of my last few entries, I've been staying up stupidly late to get my writing done. I came home today tired and headachy and firmly committed to an early bedtime.

After a quick and simple dinner (soup made with instant Tom Yum soup paste from the Asian market, a yummy recent find) we set out to take our comforter and mattress pad to the laundromat and wash them in the big machines there. This looked like a win, because I could sit and write while we waited. But first Kate wanted to load up her iPod with some podcasts to listen to at the laundromat, and there were some frustrating technical problems (iTunes on the PC doesn't always seem to notice that the iPod has been docked), so it got kind of late before we even hauled the stuff out to the car.

I don't think we've gone to a laundromat once since we moved into this house. The first place we tried was completely empty of anything but washers and dryers -- no other people, no place to sit, and no heat. The second was so skanky-looking we didn't even slow down as we drove past. The third was just about to close. So we drove our bedding back home, with a frustrating detour caused by several police cars blocking a major street, lights flashing (I suppose we'll find out in tomorrow's paper what the fuss was about). I finally sat down to write about 9:30 -- still tired and headachy, plus frustrated. I'm not sure I'm completely happy with tonight's wordage, but it's still over 100 words so I'm giving myself a silver star on the calendar.

A snippet: "During that period I traveled to Earth only when there was no alternative. By comparison with the clean expansive future we hoped to bring about, Earth seemed a sewer jammed with people too stupid to see how badly they were fouling their own nest."

Posted 01/04/2006 22:49 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 896 | Since last entry: 337

First off, I'd like to point out that the deadline for the Potlatch 15 Taste of Clarion West Writers' Workshop, which I am coordinating, is January 15. That is, manuscripts must be received by then. If you've been thinking about participating, now's the time to take action.

With that out of the way... one of the two radio stations I listen to with any regularity is KINK, whose slogan is "True to the Music" (the other is KOPB, the public radio station). I really like KINK's playlist, which is a mix of old and new stuff unlike any other station in town. But I don't always catch the names of the artists and songs, which means that there are a lot of songs I enjoy but couldn't pick out of a line-up (or, more to the point, out of the rack at a used CD store). So today I had a brainstorm. KINK makes its playlist available online. I wrote a shellscript to read the playlist and output a web page that searches for a song, artist, or album in the iTunes Music Store with a single click. Now I can start with an alphabetized list of KINK songs and easily hear a 30-second snippet that tells me which one is which. I hope to find out soon who my favorite artists are. Kate's also excited by this tool.

The 337 words above is a bit of a cheat, since I brought in a couple of paragraphs from the previous draft of the story (so much for a from-the-ground-up rewrite). But they're good paragraphs, and I see no reason to leave perfectly good words just lying around unused. I suspect I'm not going to be able to reuse a lot of verbiage, though, because the world of the story is a lot grittier in this draft and the main character's much more of a hot-headed punk.

A snippet: "A few hours and a lot of kif later we were both scratching equations on the table top with an emergency rescue tool, shouting back and forth and grinning like idiots. When we ran out of table we started in on the wall."

Posted 01/03/2006 23:38 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 559 | Since last entry: 234

Not much in the house for dinner tonight, but I looked in the fridge and spotted a pie crust and a carton of eggs. Quiche! A little more digging found Canadian bacon, some nice Cheddar, broccoli, and some mushrooms, so it turned out to be a very nice one. Unfortunately, it took quite a while to solidify and we didn't sit down to dinner until about 8:30. It was good, though. After that I set out for the store so we wouldn't have to scrounge up dinner again tomorrow. It was 10:00 by the time the groceries were put away, but lo! I am a dedicated writer. And I didn't want to blow off my new year's resolution on January 2. So. 234 more words and it's definitely turning into a much more engaged and visceral story. But now it's time for bed.

Posted 01/02/2006 23:08 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 325 | Since last entry: 325

I am disappointed in myself. 2005 was a good year for publications, but a wretched year for production and sales. I wrote only two new stories, one a collaboration, and made only one pro sale. Basically, I took a break after submitting the novel and (for a variety of reasons including being called upon to do some addional novel-related work, but also including my own laziness) never got back on the horse. As a result of this, I currently have only four stories in submission and no sold stories awaiting publication. I fear that I may have sabotaged my career.

So. That's going to change.

My new year's resolution is to write a hundred words a day, no matter what. I know that this is a very achievable goal -- I can write 500 words an hour when I get rolling. The point of the hundred-word goal is to get my butt in the chair and writing, even on days when I "don't feel like it." I'm not making any commitments about what I'm going to write. Could be new stories, could be rewrites on existing stories, could be a new novel. But I'm going to put my butt in my chair and by God write.

I'm off to a good start, with 325 words on a from-the-ground-up rewrite of the Jupiter story (despite not getting back from dinner until 10pm). This story has had near-misses at all the major markets and the consensus of the editors is that it's too distanced; the main character is all reflection and reaction, not action, and the whole story's told in flashback. So I'm rewriting it from scratch, with the same plot outline but a new main character: an engineer instead of a photographer. If I can keep up this pace I should be done in two or three weeks, and that would feel good. Wish me luck!

Posted 01/01/2006 23:54 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Back from a delightful New Year's Eve party at Willow Cottage, and just about to head off to a New Year's Day brunch, followed by a movie and dinner with some other friends. Just enough time for a quick note while the biscuits are baking.

As faithful readers will no doubt recall, the Day Job was eating my life in the first half of December. So I didn't even start my Xmas* shopping until about December 20, and we didn't buy a tree until the 23rd. Never did get the lights up (lights are important to me, especially in these latitudes where I drive to work in the dark and drive home in the dark for months at a time).

Kate's sister Sue came in on the 24th with our two younger nieces, ages 2 and 6. They made the house... lively. I don't deal well with small children. And when we opened the presents on the 25th, what I found under the tree for me was a book, 3 CD's, some napkins, and a table runner. All carefully chosen and apropos, but not exciting. We also got a nice package of goodies from Kate's parents the previous week, but those had mostly been eaten already.

So the excitement didn't really start for me until Thursday, when a package arrived from John Helmer (one of the nation's finest haberdashers, which just happens to be located right here in Portland). It contained the present I'd requested from Kate: a collapsible top hat. It had to be special ordered in my size (1/8" smaller than Bullwinkle's). It made me go squee! I wore it to New Year's Eve and got many compliments.

Then on Friday, another package arrived, containing two Squeezebox music players. Briefly, the Squeezebox is a small device that has a Wi-Fi antenna on one end and stereo plugs on the other. It makes all of the music stored on your computer available to your stereo. Along with a new file server installed in the attic, and a Kloss Model Two radio for the dining room we now have high-quality digital music available throughout the house, something we've wanted for years. This was my big present to Kate for the year.

Biscuits are done. Time to go!

* I'm using "X" here as a variable, to stand for The Winter Holiday of Your Choice.

Posted 01/01/2006 12:40 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

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