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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David's Index for 2011

Novel words written: 40,243
Short fiction words written: 28,006
Notes, outline, and synopsis words written: 22,486
Blog words written: 25,268
Total words written: 116,003
Novel words edited out: 4,381
Net words written: 111,622

New stories written: 4
Old stories trunked: 1

Short fiction submissions sent: 38
Responses received: 28
Rejections: 20
Acceptances: 3 (2 pro, 1 semi-pro)
Other responses: 1 (rewrite request)
Other sales: 5 (2 reprint, 2 audio, 1 live performance)
Non-responses: 1 (magazine changed ownership)
Awaiting response: 3

Short stories published: 9 (5 pro, 1 reprint, 3 audio)

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

Agent submissions: 11
Rejections: 14
Acceptances: 0
Awaiting response: 1

Happy New Year!

Posted 12/31/2011 15:11 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

It's been a good year.

In all honesty, I have to admit that I live a life of comfort and ease. I have a fine home and a wonderful wife, I'm retired at the age of 50 with enough money to do fundamentally whatever I want, and my health is excellent. I live in a wonderful town with an active community of writers. I love and I know that I am loved.

Flipping through the 2011 kitchen calendar, I see a lot of plays and movies and museum visits. We continued with yoga and our neighborhood SF book group. There was no overseas travel this year; instead we threw a big party which we called "BentoCon, a science fiction convention and square dance" to celebrate our 50th birthdays and 20th anniversary with about 100 of our friends and relatives. It was a heck of a lot of work but it was awesome. We have most excellent friends.

We did have the usual insane amount of domestic travel, including a week in the Bay Area for Fogcon and Potlatch (with a visit to Hearst Castle in between). I visited Buena Vista University in Iowa, where I spoke to the students of my old Clarion West classmate Inez. I participated in a mock battle of sailing ships. I was privileged to be invited to Walter Jon Williams's Rio Hondo workshop, where I ate many fine meals and critiqued manuscripts with some of the finest writers in the field. I atttended Radcon, Wiscon, the World Fantasy Convention, and OryCon, and square dance events in Atlanta, Phoenix, and Vancouver BC. We took a trip to Eastern Oregon. I taught a crew of brilliant high school students at the Alpha Workshop in Pennsylvania, and was a guest pro at the Cascade Writers workshop on the Washington coast. And at the Worldcon in Reno, I got to present the Best Short Story Hugo to Mary Robinette Kowal.

As far as the writing goes... well, I'm a little disappointed in myself. Despite all the writing workshops I taught and the Hugo I presented and the interview in Locus, the actual writing and publishing didn't go as well as I'd like. It was a year of near-misses, with "Pupa" coming in second in the Analog readers' poll and missing the Hugo ballot by four nominations. I spent the whole year looking for a new agent and failed to snag one, despite getting >this< close with an agent who loved the book except for this one thing and then, after I rewrote it to her specifications, decided she didn't really love it that much after all. I finished the first draft of a hard SF YA novel set on Mars, but reluctantly set it aside (for now) because my agent hunt has shown me that science fiction really isn't selling right now. So I started researching and outlining a YA Regency interplanetary airship adventure that I think will be more marketable (and also a lot of fun). I intend to begin drafting that one on January 1.

With all that novel-related work I didn't do a lot of short story writing and submitting, so I don't have nearly as many new stories, submissions, or sales this year as in some previous years. I did make two pro sales and several reprint and audio sales, and I saw "Trust" published in Daily Science Fiction, "Citizen-Astronaut" in Analog, "The Tides of the Heart" in Realms of Fantasy (which, regrettably, folded shortly thereafter), "The True Story of Merganther's Run" in The End of an Aeon (finally!), and "Into the Nth Dimension" in Human for a Day. I also saw reprints of "Pupa" in Into the New Millennium (Kindle), "Written on the Wind" at Escape Pod (podcast), "A Passion for Art" at StarShipSofa (podcast), "Zauberschrift" at PodCastle (podcast), and "Powers" in Wild Cards I (audio). "Tides of the Heart" got some very favorable reviews, including a Recommended review in Locus.

Short stories are good. Short stories are fun. But I really, really want to succeed as a novelist, because it's clear to me that novels get far more attention in this field than short stories do. So in the coming year I intend to really buckle down and focus on the writing. The only way to succeed in this business is to produce, and I intend to put my butt in my chair and write a lot more next year than I did this year. I resolve to write every day, with a minimum of 1000 words per day on weekdays and 100 words per day on weekends and travel days. That's a stretch -- it's a lot more words per day than I've managed in the past on a consistent basis -- but I'm hoping that this aggressive goal will force me to find new ways of working and new attitudes that will increase my productivity going forward. And if I can really write at that speed or higher, I can finish this novel in less than a year and still write a bunch of short stories.

So that's me. I hope you're enjoying this holiday season and making plans for a great 2012. See you there!

Posted 12/30/2011 08:05 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Happy Boxing Day to all those who observe it! We will be roasting a chicken, and having stuffing with it, which we haven't made at home in years.

Yesterday was spent in the quiet traditional way, beginning with the unwrapping of presents in front of the fire, continuing with a full day curled up on the couch watching Dr Who and other geeky TV, and ending with the traditional movie and squid dinner with our friend Michael. I honestly can't say how many times we've done the movie-and-squid thing with Michael on Christmas Day. This year's movie, Sherlock Holmes, was full of sound and fury and didn't signify a heck of a lot, but was visually very impressive.

I got Kate a comic book (Angel: Smile Time) and some Signature needles and some stitch markers and an empty box and something she already had. The empty box was a prepaid thing from Ritz Camera where you fill up the box with photos (up to 450), bring it in, and they'll scan them for you. The thing she already had was our wedding album. The old album's vinyl cover had gotten aggressively sticky, you see, to the point that it was attacking the items next to it on the shelves. Though it was a very expensive "archival" album and supposedly guaranteed for life, the company that made it no longer exists and their successor wants an astonishing amount for a new cover. The good news is that the photos themselves were unharmed. So I bought a gorgeous handmade leather-covered photo album (which also claims to be archival, but I must say I will probably never trust that word again) and stuck all the photos into it with those little paper corners (also archival). This took many hours of painstaking work spread over several days, but I think she's very pleased with the results.

Kate got me a Nook Simple Touch, and a charger and a case and a stand, and also some T-shirts and pens and candy and a pair of toast tongs and a DVD (Creature Comforts) and a dozen jars of homemade jam.

The Simple Touch is awesome -- very readable, very light and comfortable in the hand, a nice user interface, and the battery is supposed to last for months. I'm extremely pleased with the device. Unfortunately, it refused to connect to our home wifi network, and without wifi it's much less useful. I called Barnes & Noble and checked the message boards and tried everything I could think of, but it simply would not connect. Given that we've also been having intermittent problems with another wifi device (a Squeezebox Radio) for months, I decided to bite the bullet and replace our Ruckus wireless router with something more dependable. So today is also Unboxing Day, because I went out and bought an Apple Time Capsule, unboxed it, and installed it.

I've been putting this off for a long time, because I'm always afraid that any change to our wireless network will mess something up, but it only took about half an hour to set up the Time Capsule and get everything connected to it. The Nook had no problems connecting, and -- knock wood -- the problems we were seeing before with the Squeezebox Radio should also be a thing of the past. And connectivity between the systems in the house is markedly faster. I'm aware that Time Capsules have had reliability issues in the past, but (again knocking wood) Apple seems to have cleaned up its act on this one. I'll start backing my laptop up to it tonight (the other computers have their own attached hard disks for constant Time Machine backup, but I've been backing up the laptop manually and rather sporadically).

I ought to mention one other issue with the Nook, which is that when I went to transfer to it an ebook I had earlier bought from Powell's (yes, you can buy ebooks from your local brick-and-mortar bookstore, thanks to Google) there were some permission issues and I wound up losing the ability to read that book on any computer. I sent off a help request to Google, not expecting a response until Monday, but I heard right back -- on Christmas Day! -- with a reply that the book's permissions had been re-set, which did indeed fix the problem. So, though I oppose DRM in principle, kudos to Google for good customer support on this incident.

So all in all things are very good here. Hope you are also having a relaxing and happy holiday.

Posted 12/26/2011 15:43 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

My national TV debut! You can see me on Grimm (briefly) in two shots beginning at 42:55.

You might also recognize me walking in the background (mostly behind Nick's head) at 9:20.

Watch the episode at http://xfinitytv.comcast.net/tv/Grimm/143120/2177761040/Let-Your-Hair-Down/videos?cmpid=syn_rss

Posted 12/19/2011 22:45 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Having cashed in all of our Alaska Airlines miles, we are now in posession of tickets for next year's trip to Europe, which I'm calling the "Former Capitals of Europe Tour." We'll be flying to Venice (which dominated Europe in the 13th-15th centuries) on April 18, and returning home from Berlin (which dominated Europe in the 20th-21st centuries) on May 19. Our itinerary in between is not yet set, but we plan to hit Vienna (which dominated Europe in the 15th-19th centuries) and Prague (which was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire in the 14th century), and will probably also take a tour of the Czech Republic.

This is our second visit to Venice and Vienna, my first and Kate's second to Berlin, and our first to Prague. Any recommendations for sites, hotels, restaurants, events, etc. to see (or avoid) would be highly appreciated.

Whee!

Posted 12/13/2011 13:48 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

This morning my friend Janna was notified that she'd been selected as one of 1000 contestants to make a video explainng why she should be the one to win a suborbital flight on Virgin Galactic. I'm thrilled for her, of course, and in my LJ comment on her post I suggested that she use Kip Russel's contest-winning slogan from Have Space Suit Will Travel. But I didn't remember the actual slogan, so I went and re-read the first few chapters of the book.

Not only did I find the winning slogan ("I like Skyway Soap because it is as pure as the sky itself!"), I found that the book was packed with something I've chosen to call retroanachronisms: worldbuilding elements that were contemporary or futuristic at the time the book was written, but are distractingly outdated today. For example, in this futuristic world with bases on the Moon and Mars, Kip's small town has three paper newspapers, he has to "tune in" the local TV station on his hand-built black-and-white TV set (at one point the picture and sound go out and he tunes a station from another city "on the skip" but it's too staticky so he switches back), and the contest winner is announced on a variety show with singing, dancing cigarette packs. Not to mention the gender issues.

I have committed a few retroanachronisms myself. In "I Hold My Father's Paws," which must take place at least ten years in the future, I have a character remembering hiding something in a box of old CD-ROMs when he was a kid. Referring to something present-day as being in the past (in this case, a memory of something that was old at the time) is a great way of establishing that we're in the future, but it bit me here. There's no way the character -- who would be at most ten years old in 2011 -- would even know what a CD-ROM is, never mind have a box of them anywhere in the house. They became more thoroughly obsolete, and faster, than I anticipated when I was writing the story (2002). The exact same problem affected Back to the Future II, in which Marty lands in an alley containing bales of discarded 12" laserdiscs.

Retroanachronisms are, I think, impossible to avoid when writing fiction set in the future. You have to have some elements of the present day in your future world, for the sake of reader identification, and sure as shootin' some of them will turn jarring as the future takes twists you didn't anticipate. But they're fun to watch for in older SF.

Posted 12/10/2011 10:54 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Talking with Kate about what a character in a newspaper comic strip is likely to do next, based on our knowledge of his previous actions, I realized: we have circuits in our brains devoted to analyzing and predicting the behavior of other humans in our monkeysphere, and fiction exercises those circuits in a way we find entertaining. This is why characters are important.

Posted 12/05/2011 10:20 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I just finished and submitted the first draft of my story for Lowball, the 22nd volume in George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards series. There will be much revising and head-scratching before it's complete, but I'm pleased with this draft and thrilled to be participating in this long-running project.

Although you'll have to wait until 2012 or 2013 to read Lowball, the audiobook of Wild Cards Volume I (the revised edition, including my story "Powers") is now available from Brilliance Audio in audio CD, MP3 CD, and WMA download format wherever fine audiobooks are sold. The second volume of Wild Cards, Aces High, will be available as an audiobook on December 20 and is now available for pre-order. Here's a very complimentary review of the Wild Cards Volume I audiobook.

If you'd rather read Wild Cards than listen to it, Tor is running a special holiday sale on the ebook editions of the first four Wild Cards books (Wild Cards, Inside Straight, Busted Flush, and Suicide Kings) -- just $2.99 each from now through December 14. Here's the announcement.

If you prefer dead tree format, you can buy the trade paperback of Wild Cards I now, or preorder the mass-market paperback which will be out on June 26 of next year.

And if you want something visual that's not too abysmal, Wild Cards has been optioned as a movie. Of course, you might have to wait a while for it to be released...

Posted 11/16/2011 20:23 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

The Drabblecast podcast is now offering a 10-episode "highlight reel" or "primer" to introduce themselves to new readers, and my stories "Charlie the Purple Giraffe" and "Babel Probe" are included. You can download it here: http://www.drabblecast.org/new/

Posted 11/15/2011 15:42 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

My goodness, OryCon begins tomorrow! Here's my programming schedule:

Friday:

3:00PM, Hamilton: Workshop: Story Outline in an hour. Bring something to write on and write with. You'll have an outline (or a good start) to a story by the end of this panel. Bonus--this would be a great head start to that creative writing class homework you're ignoring over the weekend. David D. Levine [M], Mary Robinette Kowal

Saturday:

12:00PM, Mult/Holl: Ask Dr. Genius: Ad-Lib Answers to Audience Questions. No, really, they're real scientists, honest. Bring your science questions, and if they don't have an answer they'll make something up, and it might even be sort of right. Louise Owen [M], David D. Levine, Andrew S. Fuller, Daniel H. Wilson

3:00PM, Idaho: Mission to Mars: Is a 6 month journey really too long? Artificial gravity to prevent blood clots. Living on 3 gallons of water a day. We're making advances, but can we realistically put men on Mars? What are the issues, and how close are we to solving them? David D. Levine [M], Dan Dubrick, G. David Nordley

4:30PM, Grant: David Levine Reading. David reads from his own work.

8:00PM, Hawthorne: Lionel Fanthorpe Presentation. OryCon Public Broadcasting's homage to the legendary Lionel Fanthorpe. Debbie Cross [M], David D. Levine, Paul Wrigley, Brian Hunt

10:00PM, Jefferson/Adams: Whose Line Is It Anyway? Ya want funny? Louise Owen, Mary Robinette Kowal, David D. Levine, M.K. Hobson, Cindy Fangour

Sunday:

12:00PM, Hawthorne: Spaceships, Colonists, and Castaways. How Small Communities Function in isolated conditions with minimal resources. David D. Levine [M], Camille Alexa, G. David Nordley, Krista Wohlfeil

Also on Sunday (4:30-6:00PM) will be the Sci-Fi AuthorFest at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing. Two dozen authors, including Vonda McIntyre and Ursula K. Le Guin, will be there for you to meet and get autographs. Free and open to the public.

Posted 11/10/2011 10:19 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

We're winging off to San Diego this afternoon for the World Fantasy Convention. Hope to see some of you there! I'll be hanging out in the bar, trying to remember to chat up agents and editors, helping out Tina Connolly with a dramatic reading on Thursday night, and appearing on one panel:

Friday 4:00 PM, Pacific 2/3: A Sea of Stars

Is the sea to fantasy what space is to science fiction? Are they both the uncharted territory that leads somewhere unexpected? Are they the habitat for unfamiliar aliens? Stories like Jeremiah Tolbert's "The Godfall's Chemsong" and Helen Keeble's "A Journal of Certain Events..." seem parallel in many ways, even though the former is science fiction and the latter is fantasy. Why use one over the other -- can your settings be interchangeable if the plot is good?

David Brin, Michael Cassutt, David Levine(M), Courtney Schafer, Rachel Swirsky

Yes, I am moderating David Brin. Hah! He don't scare me.

I wonder if there will be a group viewing of the Grimm premiere at 9:00 Friday night? I have seen the pilot episode and it is good.

Posted 10/26/2011 08:19 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Just saw the pilot of Grimm, at the Portland Art Museum with a rowdy crowd and the producers and cast in attendance. Awesome! I think this show is going to be dynamite. Silas Weir Mitchell as Eddie Monroe -- the "Spike" character -- will be everyone's favorite.

Grimm premieres Friday, October 28, but you can watch a 20-minute preview clip now.

Posted 10/24/2011 22:19 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I can't say that Margin Call is exactly an enjoyable film, but it's absolutely frickin' brilliant.

This is a film where everything happens in the spaces between words, between lines, between scenes. It's a... what's holier than a Swiss cheese? A ciabatta of a film, but tasty nonetheless.

This is a film about the Wall Street collapse of 2008 that barely attempts to explain the insanely complex financial shenanigans that caused the crisis. It feels as though the filmmakers decided that the audience is never going to understand it anyway, so let's go ahead without explaining it at all. Though there is some explanation late in the film, and as one critic said they play the "explain this to me in words of one syllable" card a bit too often, the key here is that you don't need to understand the finances. All you need to understand is how important they are to the characters, and the top-notch cast makes that abundantly clear through a variety of understated techniques.

Another way in which this film takes place in the gaps between lines is that it depends a whole heck of a lot on the audience's understanding of the characters' world. If this film somehow fell through a time warp to the year 2000, no one would understand it. You need to have at least some understanding of the 2008 financial crisis to understand the plot. You need to know that when one character flips another character a small black object (which barely even appears on screen), and later that second character pulls the top off of something that looks like a lipstick, that it is a USB thumb drive... and what a thumb drive is, and how it is used, and what it can contain. When two characters are sitting at a bar, and you hear a buzz, and one of them glances down at his lap, and they both leave the bar without a word, you have to know what text messages look and sound like and what they can mean.

When I was in high school I took an acting class in which we memorized a very simple, meaningless dialogue¹ and then had to present a brief scene using that simple script to express a relationship between two characters (first date, estranged lovers, father and son who's going off to college, etc.) -- it's all in the intonation, the body language, the pauses, the subtext. Practically this entire movie is like that. Much of the dialogue is banal, and the action restrained, yet the actors manage to convey the emotion and importance of the situation.

And the situation is important, dramatically important. There's a lot of tension in this movie, even though we know how the 2008 financial crisis ended up.

I commented to Kate on the way home that "this is a science fiction movie, and the science is economics." But, as she pointed out, that isn't really true; it's not SF because there's nothing in it that didn't actually happen. This is, nonetheless, a fabulous example of how you can take a plot that is made up of technobabble and mathematics and turn it into a story about people and emotions. I'd love to do something like this in SF, but as I mentioned above it depends so much on the audience's understanding of the history and technology that you would have a real tough time writing an SF or fantasy story that still worked if you left out as much as Margin Call leaves out.

So, in summary: not a fun movie, but one that's worth studying.

-------------

¹ I still remember every word: "Hi." "Hello." "It's been a long time." "Yes it has." "How've you been?" "Do you have to ask?" "No, I suppose not." "Did you walk?" "No, I got a ride." "Oh."

Posted 10/22/2011 22:08 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I've been thinking about the consciousness of Mr. Potato Head in the Toy Story films.

His limbs are capable of independent action when detached, and Mrs. Potato Head can see through a detached eye. One can imagine that if Mr. Potato Head were dropped and every single piece fell off except for one arm, he would reassemble himself. What if all the pieces fell out? I believe that his detached lips would call for help. This gedankenexperiment implies that Mr. Potato Head's consciousness is housed in his plastic body but somehow extends to his pieces wherever they may be.

Yet he can replace one set of eyes with another (e.g. "angry eyes"), and the new eyes can be seen through once plugged in. How does this work? Is it the plugging in that activates the new eyes and deactivates the old, and they remain active (even if detached) until a new set of eyes is plugged in? Or does he continue to see through all his eyes whether attached or detached (as a potato, he should be comfortable with any number of eyes)? If so, what defines which eyes are "his"? Could he see through one of Mrs. Potato Head's eyes if plugged into his head?

And then there's the scene in which he replaces his body with a tortilla. So somehow his consciousness can inhabit other, non-Mr.-Potato-Head objects if his pieces are plugged into it. What happens to his plastic potato body while the tortilla with his eyes, arms, and legs is walking around? If the plastic potato were smashed, would Mr. Tortilla Head die? What would happen if you put one eye, one ear, one arm, and one leg into, say, a zucchini? Would both Mr. Potato Head and Mr. Zucchini Head be capable of (limited) perception and action? Would they share a consciousness, or would they become two separate beings?

If any random object can become Mr. Potato Head's body, what about his other pieces? Could he see through a plain wooden peg if it were plugged into his eye hole? If so... we've seen that he can still use his pieces properly if they are plugged into the wrong holes. Could he still see through a wooden peg if it were plugged into his arm hole? What, then, makes it an "eye"? Consider an ambiguous peg with a vaguely ear-like shape and an eye spot. Could he see through it? Hear with it? Would it depend on where it was plugged in? What if it were plugged into an arm hole? Does its shape matter? For that matter, could he see through one of his own feet if it were plugged into an eye hole? Or any hole? Does the effect depend on the intent of the child who plugged it in, if any? (No, let's not go there. The epistemological relationship between toys and humans in the Toy Story universe is a whole separate essay. Or book.)

If Mr. Potato Head can see through his eyes wherever they are, and if any random object can become part of Mr. Potato Head, that implies that Mr. Potato Head's consciousness could theoretically extend to any object.

What would happen if you plugged an eye, or a shoe, into the Earth? What are the odds that this has already happened?

Is Mr. Potato Head God?

Posted 10/14/2011 07:20 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I spent the day yesterday working as an extra on the new NBC series Grimm, a supernatural cop show which is being filmed in (and, unlike Leverage, is set in) Portland. The show premieres on October 21 and, with luck, you'll see me in the seventh episode, as a reporter holding a microphone in the police chief's face and also possibly as an out-of-focus figure in the background of some other shot. Will the show be any good? Heck if I know. But I had fun working on it.

Extra work is, as I've said before, very much like jury service. The pay's a pittance, the hours long, and there's lots of waiting, but you get to play a small but vital part in a large, complex, and societally significant enterprise. Also you get to spend time with interesting random strangers and see tantalizing bits of a larger story whose beginning and end you may never know.

Being as how I was sitting around the set for a long time with not much to do but watch and think, and being as how I am a writer, I couldn't help but be reminded of a few writing lessons.

The first one came from the fact that, once we extras were all costumed up, you could tell at a glance exactly what kind of character we were supposed to be. This one was obviously a perp, that one a tough cop, that one a no-nonsense detective, that other one a caring social worker. This is no accident -- the casting directors look over photographs of the available talent, choose people to represent the desired type of background character based on their appearance, then select appropriate costumes and props to thoroughly reinforce that first impression.

The writing lesson here is that not all characters need to be fully rounded. The purpose of extras is to make the scene look realistic (it would be pretty odd if our heroes were all alone in the police station all the time), but apart from that they should not be allowed to take any attention away from the main characters. Making them obvious types means that the viewer can see them, understand who they are, and not spend any additional brain power on them. By contrast, I've seen some beginning writers apply everything they've read about developing believable characters to every character, even the spear carriers. This is distracting and counterproductive. You don't want to be too stereotypical -- not every cop is a beefy Irishman, not every nurse an attractive white woman -- but there's no need to build up a life story and background for every person who appears in every scene.

The second writing lesson is that props are a great way to quickly communicate character. I myself had been a police detective in a previous casting call, but this time -- wearing the same suit and standing on the same set, but with a microphone instead of a gun and badge -- I was a reporter. If you have a character enter the scene wearing a stethoscope or carrying a wrench, you've prepared them for action and communicated their role to the reader in just a few words. This technique can be used with major characters as well, to create an initial impression or communicate their current intent.

The third writing lesson is that nothing is deeper than it has to be. When you see a scene with many people bustling about in the background, what you don't see is that every one of them was carefully positioned and began moving just moments before the beginning of the shot. Often there's a line of extras waiting just out of sight, each one with instructions to step out at a certain interval after the previous one. And the wall they're waiting behind? On the side that isn't facing the camera, it's unpainted plywood. In writing, you don't necessarily need to know everything about your characters and your world -- you just need to know a little more than you're showing, enough to create a believable illusion for your readers. (Of course, as you go on writing about the same characters or world you may find that some of your early handwaves need to be fleshed out. This is one of the things that revision is good for, and one of the reasons later books in a series can be much harder to write.)

None of these writing lessons was new to me, and every one of them can be overdone or used inappropriately, but they're all useful techniques and it's good to be reminded of them every once in a while.

Posted 09/29/2011 21:00 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

So now I can finally talk about the big project that has kept me virtually silent on all social media for the last month or so.

It started... oh, a couple of years ago, when I realized that the year 2011 would mark both my 50th birthday and Kate's, and also our 20th wedding anniversary. This confluence of major milestones seemed to call for a big celebration, and after some cogitation I decided I wanted to hold "BentoCon: A Science Fiction Convention and Square Dance." The name BentoCon commemorates the fanzine Bento that Kate and I have been producing on an approximately annual basis since 1989, and the combination of science fiction and square dancing commemorates the two hobbies (or is that ways of life) that have occupied so much of our time together.

The idea of a birthday convention is not our invention. The first one I'm aware of (though we did not attend it) was Elise Matthesen's EliseCon, which begat Jane Hawkins's JaneCon (which we sort of crashed), which was followed by Donya Hazard White, Deb Notkin, and Jeanne Gomoll's CroneCon and Ellen Klages's month in France. But BentoCon was going to be the first with a square dance.

After kicking around ideas in a desultory fashion for a year or more, at the end of 2010 we decided to get serious about the project, and signed a hotel contract in January of 2011. Over the next few months we sent out invitations (although we would have loved to invite everyone we know, the space was limited and so, unfortunately, some lovely people had to be left out), arranged for a celebratory cake, booked a square dance caller (our good friend the talented Bill Eyler, and asked some of our friends to help us run it (notably Karen Schaffer, who headed up the hospitality suite, and Mary Kay Kare, who ran the at-con registration desk). Kate and I ran the program, publications, hotel, audio-video, and displays as well as being the chairs and guests of honor. I joked that we really could have used a couple of GoH liaisions.

The last few weeks, especially since the Worldcon, were incredibly hectic; we were both working on BentoCon essentially every waking hour and neither of us got a whole lot of sleep. But when people began to show up, and we saw the square dancers and the science fiction fans chatting happily together in our incredibly convivial hospitality suite, we knew it had all been worth it.

We had a fabulous hotel, which in a previous life as the Hotel Multnomah had been the site of the 1950 Worldcon. The main program space included a fireplace, which (thanks to a last-minute inspiration of Kate's) we decorated with cardboard stand-up photographs of the various awards on our mantel at home. The large and comfy hospitality suite was mere steps away from the program room, and included distinct areas for food, games, conversation, jigsaw puzzles, and badge decoration (thanks to a fantastic collection of stickers sent by Geri Sullivan who, alas, could not attend in person). On Saturday night we had a second function room, just across the hall, for the square dance, to which we'd also invited any local dancers who cared to attend. And the mezzanine area between them all was the site of the registration and info tables, plus two additional tables for a book swap and craft swap. The latter two provided a useful public service of redistribution of quality books and craft items to people who could better appreciate them, as well as draining away any impulse our guests might have had to bring presents.

The hotel's location in downtown Portland was superb, within walking distance of Powell's Books and tons of excellent restaurants, not to mention a couple of "pods" of food carts, a half-dozen chocolate shops, and Portland's only glow-in-the-dark pirate-themed indoor mini-golf. The hotel staff were also fabulously helpful and efficient.

We recognized from the beginning that this event might run afoul of the Geek Social Fallacies, especially #4 (Friendship is Transitive, which we risked violating by inviting people from different social groups), but we needn't have worried. We opened the convention (after softening everyone up with the singing of rounds and a pair of fabulous cakes from the Bakery Bar) with a pair of panels on "introduction to science fiction fandom for non-fans" and "introduction to gay square dance culture for non-dancers" that got everyone on the same page and gave people things to talk about. Everywhere I looked for the whole rest of the convention I saw dancers, fans, and relatives talking together, going out to dinner together, and singing songs together.

The singing of songs was a surprisingly important part of the event. We opened with the Apple Maggot Quarantine Song from Bento #1 and "To Stop the Train" from Bento #4, complete with gestures. On Saturday we had a group singalong, with projected videos and lyrics, of our favorite songs from Tom Lehrer, Jonathan Coulton, Queen, the Arrogant Worms, Savage Garden, and They Might Be Giants. And my old college roommate Kurt Gollhardt brought out his guitar on Saturday night; a mixed bunch of fans and dancers sang Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, and show tunes until the wee small hours.

The relatives were also well received. I'll note that Camille Alexa claimed to have a "rockstar crush" on my dad, which he asked me to explain. I'm not sure I can. (Sorry Camille, he's already got a girlfriend back home.)

We had a single track of programming, including readings by the authors present, a discussion of great female SF writers, the "embarrass David and Kate hour" of baby pictures and anecdotes by the relatives, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and "On the Road with Kate and David" with slides, videos, anecdotes, and an explanation by Kate of how she finds fabulous restaurants wherever she goes.

The square dance on Saturday night was a hit; the dancers had a blast and the fans participated enthusiastically. With the addition of some dancers from the Portland square dance community, we had about forty people doing simple square dances, country dances, a line dance, and the Time Warp, plus a couple of full-level demo tips. I've been to a lot of introductory square dances and this was one of the most fun I've ever attended.

We also had a group Greek lunch on Friday, a catered Japanese dinner in the hospitality suite on Sunday night for those who remained (a much better way to close out the con than the usual spluttering away), and on Friday afternoon a choice of walking tours (Kate led the "Keep Portland Weird" tour to such sites as the 24-Hour Coin-Operated Church of Elvis, while I led a chocolate tour to some of those nearby chocolate shops). Any remaining unprogrammed spots in the schedule were filled in with "nanoprogramming" by the participants.

All in all, it went fabulously well. The worst problem we had wasn't even at the convention, it was when Janna Silverstein got rear-ended on the way home, damaging herself and her car.

We spent Monday packing up and moving everything out of the hotel. After that Kate and I both came down with sore throats, aches, and general overall exhaustion that has kept us near-comatose since then. But it's a good kind of comatose.

That was a lot of fun. I think we might do it again... in another fifty years.

Posted 09/14/2011 23:33 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I spent the last week in Reno at the annual World Science Fiction Convention. I think.

Usually I take notes at these things, but this time I didn't. I also can't look back at my Twitter or email or blog to see what I said I was doing, because I barely even read any social media, never mind writing it. So I must have been busy doing something.

I didn't make it to the art show at all. I visited the dealers' room and the SFWA suite only briefly and just as they were closing. I only hit about three parties, and saw just a few panels that I wasn't on. And there was not the usual endless hanging around with cool people in The Bar, because this convention didn't have a The Bar. Between the convention center and the two hotels there were dozens of bars, but the ones that were open were noisy and smoky and the one that was comfortable, quiet, and smoke-free closed at 10pm. Despite any other snark in this post, the lack of a The Bar was the only major problem I had with the convention.

The one thing I am certain of is that I appeared on programming. A lot. I can tell this from the "program items you are on" sticker on the back of my badge, which is crammed with tiny type. I spent a lot of time looking at the back of my badge to figure out where I was going next. I did this while I was walking to the next program item.

I did a lot of walking. That part I remember. The convention center, which measured 2.68 x 10^5 Standlees from end to end, was connected to my hotel by a skybridge that was long enough to show the curvature of the Earth. But my hotel was closer than the other hotel, which was approximately ten parsecs away and was the site of the Masquerade, Hugos, writers' workshops, and a few other important program items. We had rented a car for pre-convention travel, with the intent of returning it at the beginning of the con, but once we understood the layout of the con we called Hertz and extended the rental for the rest of our stay. Made a huge difference.

That pre-convention travel, by the way, included a visit to Virginia City with Janna Silverstein and Madeleine Robins -- we had tons of fun touring an old print shop, school, and silver mine -- and a trip to a famous Basque restaurant in Gardnerville, 50 miles away, with Glenn Glazer and his sweetie, where we found ourselves driving directly toward a 300-acre wildfire (which, fortunately, did not engulf the restaurant while we were there). The meal wasn't quite worth the drive, but it was very good and we had a lovely evening of scenery and conversation.

The program items I was on were all well-attended and fun. I had a great spectrum of programming from serious panel discussions (The Necessity of Reviewers, Fans Turned Pro, Wild Cards) to solo presentations (a reading, my Mars talk, and a kaffeeklatsch) to wacky entertainments (Ask Doctor Genius, Liar's Panel, Whose Line is it Anyway?). I also co-led a writers' workshop section with Walter Jon Williams, which went pretty well.

I had about twenty people for my reading, where I read the first bit of my "Ned Kelly in power armor" story. I was a little nervous doing an Australian accent in front of Liz Argall but she said that, although it wandered a bit, it was quite good. There were about a hundred people at my Mars talk, which was well received as usual, though it's been a while since I last gave it and I ran out of time before I ran out of slides. Still, I covered the most important bits.

The Liar's Panel was probably my favorite single program item, with Jay Lake, James Patrick Kelly, Connie Willis, and me answering questions from a large, packed hall. Best moment: to a question about bad reviews, Connie replied "What's that?" (big laugh). I said "Here's an example: 'You call this a book? It's only half a book!'" (bigger laugh). Connie actually shook my hand on that one. Thanks so much to Jay for inviting me onto the panel when another panelist had to drop out.

Whose Line also rocked, where I joined Ellen Klages, Madeleine Robins, Dave Howell, and (fresh from her triumph at Just a Minute) Seanan McGuire for two hours of improv hilarity. I was afraid that no one would attend an 11pm-1am panel following the Masquerade, but more and more people filtered in as time went on and we ended with a fairly full house. My favorite bit was when I played a dragon, suffering from an inflamed flame gland, visiting Doctor Seanan. Who, by the way, was wearing candy corn underwear. Don't ask me how I know that.

And then there was the Hugo Awards ceremony, where I was thrilled to present the Best Short Story Hugo to Mary Robinette Kowal. You can watch a video of that presentation. I got a lot of compliments afterwards on my speech and on how snazzy I looked in tails. Hugo night also included a pre-Hugo reception (with a giant ice Hugo) and a "Hugo Losers' Party" (actually open to all nominees and guests, though the winners had to make an announcement about how they were actually losers in some way) where I got to mingle with the movers and shakers and explain the complicated Hugo vote-counting process to Phil and Kaja Foglio. (If you're confused yourself, take a look at this great explanation of the voting system, using the Muppets.)

So that was the Worldcon. I had a great time.

I think.

Posted 08/23/2011 09:00 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

After seeing Les Miserables last week, I keep thinking about the song "The Confrontation" in which Valjean and Javert sing hard at each other for ten minutes about how wrong the other guy is.

Javert, the police inspector who has been pursuing Valjean for years already and will keep doing so for years more before the show is over, sings to Valjean "Men like you will never change." But of course it's Javert who never changes, and when in the end he does change he kills himself immediately because he can't cope with it. (Oops, spoiler, sorry.)

Valjean, on the other hand, sings to Javert "I'm a stronger man by far," yet Javert in his dogged pursuit displays undeniable strength and determination; he is, in his way, even more indefatigable than Valjean, the hero of the story. Javert does, in fact, catch Valjean in the end, and it's only Javert's change of heart that lets Valjean escape. It's Javert who is the stronger man, and after running from him for so long Valjean can't help but know this.

You know how the things we don't like about ourselves are also the things that drive us completely bats when we see them in other people? This is, I think, a technique that we writers can use to tie our protagonist and antagonist together. If each one sees in the other his own flaws magnified and despises him for that, that deepens and strengthens their relationship and makes the climactic confrontation more inevitable and powerful.

Posted 08/11/2011 08:53 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I just got back from the bimonthly writers' lunch (FYI, the baked squash side dish at the Old Spaghetti Factory, plus a small salad, makes a very nice light lunch) and I was kind of stunned at the amount of writing news that's come down the pike in the last 60 days. Then I realized I hadn't posted much of it here, so here's an update.

• Analog is about to publish its first anthology in Kindle digital format, titled Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales from Analog Science Fiction and Fact 2000-2010, and Stanley Schmidt has selected my novelette "Pupa" to appear in it!
• The anthology End of an Aeon, including my novelette "The True Story of Merganther's Run," is finally here! I wrote this story in 2003, rewrote it in 2006, revised it in 2007, sold it to Aeon in 2007, then Aeon folded in 2008. You can order the anthology of all the stories Aeon bought and couldn't publish, in paper or Kindle format, from Fairwood Press.
• My story "Zauberschrift," originally published in Apprentice Fantastic, has been podcast at PodCastle, with a fine reading by Wilson Fowlie.
• The awesome Alpha Workshop class of 2011 has posted their official class video!
• I have been added to the Liar's Panel at the Worldcon: Thursday 20:00 in A03. Jay Lake, James Patrick Kelly, Connie Willis, and me! (And if you believe that, you'll believe anything.)
• Issue 100 of Realms of Fantasy has been reviewed by Rich Horton in Locus: "I particularly liked... David D. Levine's 'The Tides of the Heart' -- pure urban fantasy, in which a plumber specializing in magical problems runs into a special one: an undine trapped in the pipes of an historical old house marked for demolition. The plumber's solution to the problem is personal as well as magical, and the intermixing of the two works perfectly. Recommended."
• I sold short story "The Last Days of the Kelly Gang" to John Joseph Adams for his anthology Armored. It's a steampunk powered-armor story set in the Australian Outback in 1880.

Posted 08/10/2011 15:42 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

fter a lovely French dinner (steack frites FTW) and a walk around downtown, we are just about to head into the auditorium for Les Misérables, a very significant show for us.

We first saw Les Mis on our first trip to London together, cheap last-minute obstructed-view seats, and it blew us away. We've seen it many times since, we own the original French concept album and a couple of different cast albums on LP and CD... we even have a documentary video on laserdisc. Okay, it's kind of hokey and formulaic, and the music isn't as good as we once thought it was, but it's Our Show.

Now if I can only stop myself from singing along using the Forbidden Broadway version of the lyrics...

Posted 08/04/2011 22:51 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I am pleased and proud to announce that I will be presenting the award for Best Short Story at the Hugo Awards ceremony in Reno!

Good news: I get to hang out with the other presenters, nominees, and SMOFs at the reception before the ceremony. I get to dress up in my fancy party duds. I get to be on stage. I don't have to worry about winning.

Bad news: I have to write and present a speech. I know I won't go home with a rocketship.

On balance: WIN!

The rest of my Worldcon schedule is below:

Wed 17:00 - 18:00, Ask Doctor Genius, A03 (RSCC)
The panelists provide authoritative (but not necessarily correct) answers to audience questions on any topic. David D. Levine (M), Paul Cornell , Sam Scheiner

Thu 11:30 - 12:00, Reading, A15 (RSCC) David D. Levine

Thu 14:00 - 15:00, The Necessity of Reviewers, A05 (RSCC)
Ten or twenty years ago, information was scarce by today's standards. The reviews in Locus, F&SF, and other magazines were the primary source of information for readers. In today's environment of blogs and Amazon reader reviews, what is the role of the reviewer in the traditional magazines and their online peers? David D. Levine (M), Lev Grossman, Farah Mendlesohn, Mark R. Kelly, Gary K. Wolfe

Thu 16:00 - 17:00, My Trip to Mars, A01+6 (RSCC)
David D. Levine was part of a group who lived in a simulated Martian environment. Sponsored by the Mars Society, the Mars Desert Research Station gives researchers of all kinds the opportunity to see what exploring Mars could be like. David D. Levine

Fri 10:00 - 12:00, Writers Workshop, Section K, Peppermill
All workshop sessions required advanced sign-up and are filled. Walter Jon Williams, David D. Levine

Fri 15:00 - 16:00, KaffeeKlatsch, KK1 (RSCC)
David D. Levine

Fri 23:00 - 01:00, Whose Line is it Anyway?, Naples7 (Peppermill)
Our version of the improvisational TV show. Marc Wells (M), Sean Wells (M), David D. Levine, Dave Howell, Madeleine E. Robins, Seanan McGuire

Sat 10:00 - 11:00, Fans Turned Pro, A09 (RSCC)
There is a long and distinguished tradition in the field of SF fans turning pro while retaining their connections. This tradition, dating from the early day of fandom, is alive and well today. Our panel discusses their experiences as pros and fans. Moshe Feder (M), Vylar Kaftan, Lois McMaster Bujold, David D. Levine

Sat 8:00 - 10:00, Hugo Ceremony, Tuscany Ballroom (Peppermill)

Sun 12:00 - 13:00, Wild Cards, A01+6 (RSCC)
George R.R. Martin, Carrie Vaughn, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Ian Tregillis, Paul Cornell, Kevin A. Murphy, Daniel Abraham, David D. Levine, Walter Jon Williams, Ty Franck

Hope to see you there!!

Posted 08/01/2011 17:24 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Somehow it has been a whole week since I got back from the Cascade Writers Workshop at the Washington coast, where I was one of the instructors.

The workshop seemed ill-starred at first, with author guest Jay Lake having to drop out (as it happened, he wound up having surgery on the first day of the workshop) and his replacement Ken Scholes only able to attend Friday and Saturday. A few weeks before the workshop, the restaurant of the hotel where it was to be held burned to the ground, leaving the organizers scrambling to find a new space for lectures and the Saturday night banquet; the fire also took out the stairs leading from the hotel down to the beach. And on the first night of the event, workshop organizer Karen Junker's step-father (who was helping out) died in his sleep, an unexpected tragedy that left many people dazed and sleepless the next day.

Despite these unfortunate events, though, the workshop itself went well. Ken and I, along with editor Beth Meacham, provided critiques and Q&A sessions, with additional lectures by NYT bestselling author Bob Mayer and writers Randy Henderson and Spencer Ellsworth. The students included a nice mix of people from previous workshops and new people, and some of the stories were very exciting. And the food, all of it provided by Karen and her family, was first-rate. There was so much to do that I didn't even really miss the fact that we couldn't easily walk down to the beach (I did have a nice soak and conversation in the hot tub).

One incident from the weekend stands out in my mind. During my Q&A session, someone had just asked a question about creating sympathetic characters when a bird flew into the room, battering itself against the glass doors in an attempt to escape. Everyone leaped to its assistance, gently guiding it back outside. As soon as we'd settled back down I pointed out how that bird was an object lesson in creating a sympathetic character: it was a character (the bird), in a situation (the room), with a problem (an impenetrable glass door), which tried and repeatedly failed (battering itself against the door), but eventually succeeded (it got out with our help) and was rewarded (it flew away).

By taking action in an attempt to better its situation, what I call "protagonistiness," the bird demonstrated pluck, which makes it admirable. By failing it demonstrated that the problem was significant and not easily overcome, which made it sympathetic. By repeatedly trying and failing it demonstrated persistence, which made it even more admirable and sympathetic. And then it succeeded by using a quality that had been inherent in it from the beginning (its cuteness) to solve the problem in an unexpected and yet satisfying way (getting us to help it). Kind of hokey, yes, but how could I turn down such a brilliant example when it literally flew in the door? We imagined that great bird legends would be written about the battle and defeat of the Invisible Wall.

I enjoy teaching but it does take a lot out of me; I was pretty wiped out when I got home. But the feedback I've gotten from the weekend has been excellent, so I will happily keep doing it as long as people keep inviting me.

Posted 07/31/2011 22:19 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

In a discussion in the car on the way home from Cascade Writers, I realized that writing about vampires or zombies is a lot like writing fanfic. In both cases, much of the character development and worldbuilding are done for you; all you have to do is say "vampire," or "Kirk," and the reader instantly knows what to expect.

In both cases, defying those expectations is possible, but it's more work, and it's not often done because it will disappoint or anger a good chunk of the readers. Some writers wind up "filing off the serial numbers" so that the fanfic is no longer recognizable as such (or is recognizable in a camouflaged, wink-and-a-nod way). You end up with a starship that isn't quite the Enterprise, or a powerful life-draining immortal who isn't quite a vampire. There has been some quite good fiction produced in this way.

Although I recognize that fanfic is a useful writing exercise, and can be used as the basis of some interesting transformational works that take the basic material and comment on it, or use it to comment on other aspects of society, I generally find it uninteresting because it's lazy. And that might be why I find so much vampire and zombie fiction (and there is so much of it, these days) extremely put-downable.

Posted 07/27/2011 15:23 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

At the Pittsburgh airport now, heading home from the Alpha Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Workshop for Young Writers where I was an instructor. The Pittsburgh airport is pretty cool; it has a T. rex skeleton and exhibits on Mister Rogers and Andy Warhol, plus free wi-fi.

I had a fabulous time at Alpha. The young writers are smart, energetic, focused, and extremely talented, and the staff very helpful and well-organized. Even the school cafeteria food was good. The four manuscripts I critiqued from the "Betas" (previous students returning to the workshop as teaching assistants) were of extremely high quality, and the ideas I reviewed for the stories the Alphas will be writing this week were astonishing in their creativity. I wish I could be here next week to see the stories that result.

I got great feedback on my lectures and critiques; one of the Betas even told me that he'd been to Alpha three times and he liked my lectures the best. Everyone was friendly and supportive. However, I must publicly acknowledge the debt I owe to my own instructors: Pat Murphy, who gave me the "turn an idea into a story" exercise I used for my first lecture; Algys Budrys, who gave me the seven-point plot outline I used in my second lecture; and Carol Emshwiller, who gave me the line "use exposition as ammunition." I stand on the shoulders of giants.

One of the students, Gretchen Hohmeyer (@adkwriter15 on Twitter) live-tweeted the following highlights from my lectures:

• "Writing is a form of telepathy. You are putting your thoughts into someone else's brain."
• "Experiment with experimental writing... just don't inhale."
• "A symbol is a prop that has more weight than its own self."
• "Use exposition as ammunition."
• "The first sentence of any story is going to be world-building."
• "You can do a lot of world-building in a few sentences, if you choose the right detail."
• "Smoking's a great help during dialogue. I dont smoke, I dont recommend it. But ur characters wont get cancer unless u want them to!"
• "English is a marvelously rich language. We've stolen language from every other language."
• "You can get away with anything in this business as long as you can sell it, in both senses of the word."
• "The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is where you choose to end the story."
• "Ideas are like neutrinos: they fall from the sky and we just have to be dense enough to catch them."

We also had a successful reading and signing at a local bookstore and attended a showing of the final Harry Potter film, which I really enjoyed (much more than the previous one, which took the sins of the whole book onto itself, leaving all the good bits for the final film).

All in all, I'm pleased, honored, satisfied, and very tired. It's been fun, but I'm ready to be home now.

Posted 07/16/2011 13:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Just a reminder that "Ephemerata Speculata," a live event of F&SF story readings, will be held TOMORROW, July 17, at 5:00 pm at Tabor Space, 5441 SE Belmont, in Portland Oregon. Writers Bob Zahniser, David D. Levine, David W. Goldman, and Jennifer Cox read their work. For more information, see http://www.ephspec.com.

Posted 07/16/2011 04:31 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Woke up at 4am. Now at the airport headed to Greenburg, PA (via Denver and Pittsburgh) for the Alpha Workshop for young F&SF writers.

I'm honored to have been selected to teach at this workshop. This is something I wanted; in fact, I pushed hard to get it. Yet I don't feel remotely qualified for it. Maybe I can write (sometimes I have my doubts about that), but can I teach it? I have a one-page handout prepared for the first of my four lectures, and apart from that I'm just going to wing it. What was I thinking??

Still, I have taught at Cascade Writers and workshopped at many other venues; this is just a step up from there. I've lectured off the cuff many times and people seemed to like it. I have excellent support from the Alpha staff. And even if I blow it completely, there are three other instructors following me to clean up the mess.

I've wung it before, and I'll wing it again.

Posted 07/13/2011 10:44 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I woke up this morning and realized that at 7am tomorrow I will be on a plane to Pittsburgh to be the first of four instructors at the Alpha workshop for young F&SF writers (the others are Tamora Pierce, Ellen Kushner, and Scott A. Johnson). I know that I can do this, but I'm still kind of freaked out. It seems like so much responsibility.

I will be giving four lectures, of about an hour each (1:15 in the morning, 0:50 in the afternoon). I have decided I'm going to speak on the following topics:

• How to develop an idea into a story
• What is plot?
• Using sets and props to develop character
• Using all the senses (there are more than 5)

For the first one I'm going to use the method Pat Murphy gave us at Clarion West, and I'm pretty solid on the last two. But plot is important, and I don't feel that I have as firm a handle on it as I'd like.

One way of looking at plot is Algys Budrys's basic seven-part outline: a person, in a situation, with a problem, who tries, and repeatedly fails, but eventually succeeds, and is rewarded. Another is the three-act structure used in Hollywood: setup (inciting incident and first turning point), confrontation (second turning point), and resolution (climax). One definition of plot is "a series of events that happen for a reason." I can't talk about plot without talking about how plot, character, and setting are thoroughly intertwined.

What are some of the most useful things you've been told about plot?

Posted 07/12/2011 07:08 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

So I was on jury duty today.

I spent the whole day in voir dire (i.e. listening to the attorneys quiz the other jury candidates). I was called up for two juries and was not able to serve on either of them, because I'm flying to Pittsburgh on Wednesday for the Alpha workshop and both of the trials will take longer than that. Nonetheless I had to wait for the entire voir dire process to finish before I could leave. Frustrating.

The good news is that jury service is only for one day, so even though I was not on a jury I've still discharged my civic duty for the next two years. Go me.

Posted 07/11/2011 20:43 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Just back from the annual gay square dance convention in Atlanta, which was held in the same "H.R. Giger" Marriott as the 1986 Worldcon.

Mindful that we'd had elevator problems at that Worldcon, and that at a previous square dance convention in a hotel with an internal atrium and glass elevators some friends of mine had gotten stuck in one for hours on the 4th of July, I was careful not to board an overloaded elevator and kind of pushy about not letting people get on when I thought the elevator was full. We had no elevator problems until the last day of the con, when at the convention's brunch banquet the food ran out before everyone was served -- the elevator with the food had gotten stuck on the way up from the kitchen. Okay, it was a service elevator rather than one of the glass ones, but I was amused. I suspect I would not have found it so amusing if I were one of the ones who waited in line for breakfast for half an hour or more.

Apart from that the convention went very smoothly and I came away happy and footsore. In addition to lots of dancing, socializing, flirting, and eating (we had some fine meals), we did a couple of days of touristing around Atlanta. Highlights included the Center for Puppetry Arts, Martin Luther King's old neighborhood with several different facilities with exhibits about Dr. King and the civil rights struggle, and the Fernbank Museum of Natural History with the Biggest! Dinosaur! EVER!

Note to convention planners: if you are going to hold a convention on a holiday weekend, it behooves you to contact the local restaurants and include information in the restaurant guide about which ones are open on the holiday. Not that the restaurants make this easy -- we actually made reservations at a restaurant for dinner on the 4th (through their web page) only to find when we arrived that it was closed.

We got home to find that summer has finally arrived in Portland, with gorgeous sunny weather and a blessed lack of humidity. We celebrated by setting up the grill for a delightful dinner of corn on the cob and grilled tofu.

That's July so far. The rest of the month promises to be equally interesting:

• July 8: Clarion West party, Seattle.
• July 11: Jury duty.
• July 14-15: Alpha Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Workshop for Young Writers, Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Instructor.
• July 17: Ephemerata Speculata, Portland, Oregon. Reading "Charlie the Purple Giraffe."
• July 21-24: Cascade Writers Workshop, Moclips, WA. Workshop group leader, along with Ken Scholes and Beth Meacham.

I need to go unpack now, so I can pack...

Posted 07/07/2011 09:32 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

"Ephemerata Speculata," or EphSpec, is an ephemeral, time-based event whose purpose is to allow writers of speculative fiction to share their work with the public, and to provide an opportunity for community with other writers and readers of the genre. The inaugural EphSpec event will be held at 5:00 pm on Sunday, July 17, 2011 at Tabor Space, 5441 SE Belmont, Portland, Oregon (corner of 55th and SE Belmont).  Come hear writers Bob Zahniser, David D. Levine, David W. Goldman, and Jennifer Cox read their work!  For more information, see http://www.ephspec.com.

(I'll be reading "Charlie the Purple Giraffe.")

Posted 07/06/2011 09:42 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I have a bunch of writing news that, for a variety of boring real-world reasons, did not get posted in the last... er, couple of months. Hence, I fall back on the technical writer's greatest crutch: the bullet list.

• My story "Tides of the Heart" was published in Realms of Fantasy magazine's big issue 100 (June 2011)! You can buy the issue as a PDF or buy a print copy. Science-fiction-and-fantasy-writing me is chuffed to note that this publication means I had stories in the June 2011 editions of both Realms of Fantasy and Analog.
• My story "Pupa", from the September 2010 Analog, came in second for Best Novelette in the 2010 Analog readers' poll.
• The blog Pillow Astronaut posted a keen review of The Mars Diaries, including an interview with my MDRS-88 crewmate Laksen Sirimanne.
• I've spotted reviews of the revised Wild Cards Volume I, including my story "Powers," at Val's Random Comments and Captain Comics.
• The latest Outer Alliance podcast includes an interview with me.
• You can preorder the long-awaited anthology End of an Aeon from Fairwood Press.
• My story "Zauberschrift," which just happens to have been my first sale to an anthology edited by the late Martin H. Greenberg, has just been accepted at the podcast PodCastle.

That's all for now! Going forward, I'll try to be better at posting my news when it first appears.

Posted 06/28/2011 13:00 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Spent most of yesterday afternoon going through my writing papers with the person who comes in on an irregular basis to help us organize things. (Actually, a different person from the same company... the woman we've been working with fell and cracked her neck. She's currently in rehab and expects to be walking again within a year. Our thoughts are with her.)

I have a file drawer with folders for each story, and a second file drawer for novels. I also had a stack of papers that needed to be filed. Well, actually, several stacks. It's only recently that I realized that those stacks added up to about two feet of papers going back to 2006. Oog. Hence the organizer.

It was very, very helpful to have a second pair of eyes and hands. All I had to do was look at a page and tell her which story it was associated with, and she filed it away in the appropriate folder while I was looking at the next page. She also helped me by forcing a decision about "file first, then sort chronologically" or vice versa or both at once, which seems a stupid thing to get hung up on but had been stalling me on this project for literally years. She was also very cruel to me and forced me to keep sorting long after I would have given up if it were just me, or just me and Kate. All of which is what we pay her for.

In three hours we powered through the two feet of papers and got everything sorted into folders. The bad news is that the file drawer filled up and half the folders are now in hanging-file boxes on the floor. At least the big tottering piles of unsorted papers have been vanquished.

Next step is to go through each folder, sort it chronologically, and pull out (or copy) papers to be sent to the NIU archives. I have an appointment with the organizer to do that in July, but I think it may take more than one session. I hope that once that's done the remaining papers will fit into one file drawer.

Going through my old papers was actually a heartening experience. Yes, there were a lot of rejection letters (the pile goes back far enough that I was getting most of my rejections on paper, which isn't true any more), but there were also a lot of contracts, a lot of positive reviews, and many reminders of other successes, like the program from the 2006 Hugo Awards ceremony. So, although that was a lot of work and I didn't do any actual writing yesterday, I feel really good about the whole thing.

Posted 06/23/2011 08:32 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

We're just back from a week in Eastern Oregon. This is a trip that Kate's been wanting to take for years, and I must confess that I was unenthusiastic about the idea until my trip to "Mars" showed me how beautiful the desert can be.

Sun 6/12: Portland-Kennewick

We started off with two days at the home of Kate's parents in Kennewick, Washingon. On the way we stopped to eat our sandwiches at the Portland Women's Forum State Scenic Viewpoint (AKA Chanticleer Point) and to admire the scenery from the historic Crown Point lookout. As we drove we passed quickly from the wet green side of the mountains to the dry brown side.

We crossed the Columbia for a stop at the Maryhill Museum, which was built as the home of Quaker enterpreneur Sam Hill (yes, he's the origin of the phrase "What the Sam Hill?"). When the utopian farming community he'd planned failed to materialize, he repurposed the building as an art museum. It contains a fine collection of chess sets, a bunch of Rodin sculptures, many artifacts of Hill's friend Queen Marie of Roumania (yes, she of the "glorious cycle of song"), and the 27" fashion dolls the French fashion industry created to show off their creative powers immediately after World War II, when there weren't enough resources for a full fashion show. These dolls were thought by the French to have been destroyed, but they've been at Maryhill ever since. Recently they were rediscovered by the French and were spruced up and taken on tour, along with new replicas of the sets on which they were originally displayed... including a bizarre one by director Pierre Cocteau. As we usually wind up doing, we went through all the exhibits backwards (it's not on purpose, I swear) so we saw the weird one first.

Mon 6/13: Kennewick

A pleasant day of thrift-storing and suchlike with Kate's parents.

Tue 6/14: Kennewick-Pendleton

On the way out of town we made a slight detour to buy tortillas at a tortilleria in Pasco. We had some difficulty finding it, but it was worth it -- we wound up with a backstage tour and a package of chapatis. It's weird to realize that the Columbia doubles back and flows West-to-East here, so to get from Oregon to Pasco we had to cross the Columbia twice. Then we managed to enter Oregon from Pasco without crossing the river again. Never drove around a river before...

After driving through pretty rolling hills and lots of wheat (?) fields, we reached Pendleton ("Where the Sidewalk Ends and the Real West Begins!") and had dinner at Hamley's (a Pendleton tradition since 1863). We split a steak that was one of the better ones I've ever had.

Wed 6/15: Pendleton

After a lovely B&B breakfast we visited the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute, an excellent museum of Native American culture and history, though the story it told is kind of depressing.

In the afternoon we took the Pendleton Underground Tour. This tour is less sensational and overblown than the Seattle equivalent, more matter-of-fact, and felt more like true history (much of the story you'll hear on the Seattle tour is pure hogwash). The tunnels themselves were built by the city as a "backstage" delivery route, kind of like Disney World, more prosaic than Seattle's. Many of the underground rooms we visited were decorated as shops, using artifacts found in the tunnels, though the rooms themselves were used at the time as storerooms and workrooms for the shops above. Other rooms were shown in the same state they were used in, such as the living quarters for Chinese laborers (below). We also visited an above-ground former brothel, shut down in 1953 and apparently left exactly as it was, untouched, for decades.

After the tour we visited the Round-Up and Happy Canyon Hall of Fame, where the famous bronco War Paint now bucks forever. Pendleton is best known for the annual Round-Up, a major rodeo and civic festival. It sounds like a lot of fun, but because of the expense and crowds we will probably never visit Pendleton during the Round-Up. Happy Canyon is the Native American side of the Round-Up, a cheesy melodrama that's been presented in exactly the same way every year since 1916 (kind of a Western version of Oberammergau's passion play).

Thu 6/16: Pendleton-John Day-Dayville

After another fine breakfast, we packed up, checked out, and hit the famous Pendleton Woolen Mill for a tour of the mill and a turn through the factory store. I never did get an answer to my question about the blue label on all Pendleton products that says "Warranted to be a Pendleton" -- if you believe the product is not actually a Pendleton, where do you take it for your warranty claim? If you bring it here, they'll either say "no, you're wrong, it's one of ours" in which case there's nothing for them to do, or "yep, you're right, it's not one of ours" in which case they have no responsibility for it. Either way you're stuck with it. This is, I suppose, a purely philosophical question as I got nothing but strange looks from every Pendleton employee I asked.

From there we drove through the Umatilla and Malheur National Forests -- beautiful country, green and mountainous and covered with trees, which then changed to rolling hills and scrub -- to the Kam Wah Chung Co. in the town of John Day, a unique bit of Chinese-in-America history. This building is the only surviving remnant of John Day's Chinatown, claimed to have been the 3rd-largest Chinatown on the West Coast during the 1861 gold rush. Two Chinese men lived here and ran a number of prosperous businesses for both Chinese and Western customers (grocery, apothecary, Chinese traditional medicine, hotel, translation service, even an Oldsmobile dealership) up until the 1970s, when the building was abandoned and locked up after their deaths. It stood pretty much untouched for decades and is now displayed with all its original artifacts.

From there we drove to Dayville ("Our Fossils are Friendly!"). I'd thought Pendleton was small, but downtown Dayville consists of a tiny one-room city hall, a post office, a park, a mini-mart, a mercantile store of the "if you can't find it here, you can probably get along without it" variety, and a cafe (which wasn't open). A nanny goat followed us all the way back to the hotel, until Zander the owner's golden retriever chased it bounding away.

Fri 6/17: Dayville

Fortunately we'd been forewarned about the lack of restaurants, so we'd filled our cooler in Pendleton. After a breakfast in our room of yogurt, banana, and cold canned coffee, we drove through very pretty Picture Gorge to the Sheep Rock unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. This national monument consists of three widely-separated units. The first thing we hit was the visitor center and fossil museum, opened 2004, which was packed with interesting fossils (all mammals and plants, these formations postdate the dinosaurs), very well labeled and laid out, with good use of color coding and a lot of information about climate change to emphasize its relevance to today's world.

From there we drove a short way to the Blue Basin trailhead for a guided trail walk with chatty, earnest Ranger Danny. There we saw beautiful, strikingly blue-green mineral formations and got an interesting talk about how this area has changed in the past 33 million years or so and how many different disciplines come together to understand the fossils that have been found here. The broad fossil leaves with "drip tips" characteristic of very wet climates contrast sharply with the tiny, water-conserving leaves of the plants found in the basin today.

Next we drove to the Cant Ranch, across from the fossil museum (it WAS the fossil museum until 2004) for some more recent history, an interesting contrast (e.g. Q: "How do we know when this happened?" A: "We asked Mrs. Cant last week, she's 98", vs. "radiocarbon dating and guesswork"). It's still a working ranch, we saw cattle being loaded onto trucks. Ranger Danny was our tour guide again; fortunately, we liked him. We talked with him about sheep shearing in Oregon vs. Australia, and found a pair of unlucky rabbit's feet still attached to the gnawed leg bones (Seanan, we thought of you).

Sat 6/18: Dayville-Mitchell-Fossil

Awoke to gray and drizzle, alas. After another breakfast of yogurt etc. in our room, we packed up, checked out, and drove through the tiny town of Mitchell ("More espresso stands per capita than Seattle!") to the Painted Hills Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. We walked a couple of the trails, which were very colorful and pretty in a different way from anything else we've seen, some of it reminiscent of the "Mars" base in Utah.

Then we drove back to Mitchell for lunch and explored Mitchell's main street. We bought a few things, but despite the many characteristic old buildings it's kind of a depressing, broken-down little town.

Next we drove through a variety of terrain, almost a recap of all the geology we've learned about this week, on some very pretty but kind of scary twisty mountain roads, until we arrived in the town of Fossil, where we walked right into our B&B room (no host at the moment and no locks at all). After a nap we walked around the town, which is bigger than Dayville but still pretty damn small. I kept thinking about Cicely, Alaska (the town in Northern Exposure).

Fossil's main attraction is a hill behind the high school where you can dig your own fossils ($5 per person, please don't mess up the site or take too much and please put the tools back). We fossicked for a little less than an hour and I found some recognizable leaf fossils, so I'm happy.

Sun 6/19: Fossil-Clarno-Antelope-Shaniko-Maupin-Portland

Breakfast at our B&B was family-style, the food merely okay but there was plenty of it. We packed up, checked out, and tried to get gas, but the one gas station in town was not yet open for the day. Then we drove to the Clarno Unit of the John Day National Monument. We'd considered passing this unit by, but the first two units had been so different from each other that I wanted to see what the Clarno unit offered. I'm glad we did. The main attraction here was a huge spectacular mineral formation called the Palisades, a petrified 44-million-year-old "lahar" (mudflow), the most amazing landform of the whole trip. We walked three short trails, including one 150 feet up to the base of the formation (didn't quite make it all the way up that one).

We'd planned to drive home via Condon and I-84, but our host at the B&B had recommended the route via Antelope as being more scenic, and as the weather wasn't bad we decided to go that way. The town of Clarno was so small it didn't even get a speed-limit sign. We hit Antelope (former Rajneeshpuram) at 11:30, it had a cafe, it was open, so we stopped for lunch. The cafe had a gas pump but no gas. I was starting to get a little worried about running out of gas in the middle of nowhere.

Next stop, Shaniko. We'd thought Shaniko was a ghost town, but when we got there we found a hip happenin' place... turns out it was Pioneer Days, with food, a blacksmith demo, free wagon rides, and other activities. Too bad we didn't know about this in advance. We thought we'd pass on the wagon ride, but the guy from the Oregon State Wagon Train was very persuasive, he even bought us a couple of sarsaparillas to get us on board. It was all pretty cool, but though Shaniko had two gas stations neither one had any gas.

The next town, Maupin, was a fairly large town by our revised standards. It seems to run almost entirely on river rafting, and -- hallelujah -- featured an open gas station. We were followed into the station by a convoy of four VW vans we'd seen in Shaniko. From there it was a straight shot across dry flat desert scrub with Mt. Hood, Mt. Jefferson(?), and the Three Sisters(?) visible ahead, a picture-postcard Eastern Oregon view.

I blinked and suddenly we were surrounded by steep hills densely carpeted with huge trees, more green than we'd seen in a week. We made a rest stop in Government Camp, where we found chill air, and even a heap of black not-yet-melted snow at the end of the parking lot. The Portland-area small town of Sandy seemed so cosmopolitan by comparison with the last few days. Finally, we arrived at home -- damp, cool, noisy Portland, hurray. And what's this in the mail? Oh boy, a jury summons.

Ah, civilization.

Though it was all very pretty, I'm happy to be back on the soggy, populous west side of the Cascades. But it's cool to hear the names of these places on the radio news and know a bit about what they're really like.

Posted 06/20/2011 22:21 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

The month of May has been busy so far and promises to get even more so, with things getting even more interesting in June.

Briefly:

• There's an interview with me in the May issue of Locus, with a full-page photo, and my picture on the cover even! (Though it's just one of the postage-stamp-sized insets on the right-hand side.) You can read some excerpts from the interview online.
• The Breaking Waves charity anthology is still going strong, with all proceeds going to the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund of the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
• I have my Wiscon program schedule and it is awesome:
  • Friday morning: Writers' Workshop (closed).
  • Saturday 4:00 pm, Michelangelos: Space Fairies from Beyond. A reading by Seanan McGuire, Sarah Monette, Catherynne M. Valente, Pamela Dean, and me. Did I say awesome already?
  • Sunday 10:00 am, Assembly: About the "Writing the Other" Workshops. I'll be moderating, with fellow panelists Ada Milenkovic Brown, Nisi Shawl, and Cynthia Ward talking about the book and workshops.
  • Sunday 1:00 pm, Room 629: World-Building as a Spectator Sport. Amy Thomson, Deirdre M. Murphy, Paul Rehac, Benjamin Rosenbaum and I improvise an alien world using suggestions from the audience. This was a real hoot last year.
  • Sunday 4:00 pm, Senate A: I'd Object, If I Weren't Invisible. I'll be moderating again, and discussing bisexuality with fellow participants Betsy Lundsten, Jennifer M. Nissen, Julia Rios, and Alberto Y%26aacute%3B%26ntilde%3Bez.
• In Locus Online, Lois Tilton reviews the June Analog, including my story "Citizen-Astronaut," and calls it "pretty good stuff."
• I presented a half-hour talk before Hand2Mouth Theatre's production Uncanny Valley. I blathered for half an hour, without hesitation, deviation, or repetition, on the subject of science fiction for a fairly large and polite audience. Got a few questions, and a couple of people came up to me with compliments after the show. It was fun! The show itself was... well, not a "play," per se, more of a performance piece with music, movement, and words on the topic of memory. But if you kind of squinted you could see that in the world of the piece there was a technology of some sort that used motion, music, and objects to evoke lost memories. I talked with the director afterwards and discovered that in earlier versions of the piece (it's constantly under development) the science fiction aspects of the show were much more overt. But audience members got angry when they broke the rules they'd established, so rather than becoming more consistent they made it vaguer. Oh, well. Would have liked to have seen the earlier version.
• Just for a lark, I signed up with a casting service in hopes of getting cast as an extra on Leverage. Wish me luck! I've already gotten one call (not for Leverage) but I was not available when they needed me.
• I had two stories due (one final, the other a draft) on May 15. I got both of them done in time, and I'm pretty happy with the way they both came out. Now we wait.
• I had a colonoscopy. (Happy 50th birthday.) The preparation was no fun at all, but the procedure itself was a complete non-event. By which I mean that, although I was apparently rather chatty while under sedation, I have no memory of it whatsoever. My memories go straight from the doctor starting the IV to talking with Kate (plainly in the middle of a conversation) in the recovery room, with no sense of lost time in between. Weird. They found and removed a couple of small polyps, which were non-cancerous, and I don't have to do that again for five years.

I am now at the airport awaiting my flight to Albuquerque for the Rio Hondo writing workshop. From there I'll proceed to Milwaukee (rendezvousing with Kate at Phoenix) where we'll spend a few days with my dad before heading to Wiscon. Basically, I won't be home until June.

I've also received a couple of very good writing opportunities in the last couple of days, which I will have to work fast, hard, and smart to properly exploit. It's all good stuff but a lot of it requires work and a lot of it I can't talk about yet.

Boarding soon. Whee!

Posted 05/15/2011 10:10 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I have been asked to present an informal "pop talk" half an hour before the May 14 performance of Hand2Mouth Theatre's Uncanny Valley, described as a "sci-fi adventure into psychic space." I haven't seen the show yet myself, but here's a little bit of information about it:

We have used a number of SF inspirations and sources throughout the 1.5 year creation process (books, stories, films, etc.) We have been particularly interested in the "what if" suppositions in SF as well as perspectives on the "other", "doubling", and the "uncanny". One of the underlying questions of the show is "What if the theatre were a literal memory machine that allowed actual past events to be re-experienced, experienced by others, possibly even manipulated and altered?" In earlier phases of the show, SF was a strong stylistic force (space suits, mind reading machines, alien doubles, time travel, etc.). In this final phase of the show, these elements are de-emphasized and treated more subtly. What remains is a thrilling and uncanny meditation on the nature of memory, consciousness, reality, and time. In the course of the show, by seeing skewed unfamiliar alternate versions of ourselves through the looking glass of the memory machine, we can somehow view our past and present with greater clarity (much in the same way that SF can reveal hidden truths about the real by exploring the unreal).

You can watch the intriguing video trailer for the play, and read more on the company's blog.

My talk will be informal, conversational, and interactive. I'm planning to mention Philip K. Dick, of course. Are there any other SF themes, authors, or notable works I should be sure to bring up?

If you're in the Portland area this Saturday, I hope you'll come to the show!

Posted 05/08/2011 15:25 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

The Lady Washington and Hawaiian Chieftain are a pair of replica 18th-century merchant sailing vessels. The Lady Washington portrayed the HMS Interceptor in the film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and also appeared in Star Trek Generations. Their home port is in Aberdeen, Washington, but this weekend they were visiting Rainier, Oregon. As it happens, I'm considering setting my next novel aboard an 18th-century sailing vessel, so for research purposes Kate and I drove up to Rainier to experience one of their "Battle Sails," in which the two ships shoot at each other with real black powder. It was a great day for a sea battle, with temperatures in the fifties, lightly overcast, and just enough wind for sailing.

There were about 40 of us passengers all told, about 10 of them small children who had come to sail on the "pirate ship." As it happens, the Chieftain was unable to carry passengers at this time due to generator issues (though she was still able to sail and fight) so we all piled onto the Lady Washington. It was a little crowded but not unreasonably so.

The crew numbered 11: the captain decided where the ship should go, manned the tiller, and gave high-level instructions to the first mate; the first mate turned those instructions into detailed commands for the hands who actually set the sails; the engineer was in charge of the diesel engine (which we used only when docking; in the 18th century a ship like this would almost always have anchored offshore) and when under sail was the most experienced hand; the steward was in charge of herding the passengers and also acted as gunner; and seven hands clambered about and hauled on ropes as directed. This complement is fairly similar to the size of crew the ship would have had when hauling cargo in the 18th century.

I noted that there were neither NO STEP signs nor friction strips anywhere on the vessel; any approximately horizontal surface was fair game for being clambered upon.

All of the crew were dressed in a rough approximation of period costume, accessorized with safety harnesses and other modern practicalities. Several of the hands wore Vibram shoes with individual toes, which seemed a reasonable accomodation to soft modern feet. The captain and engineer were in their thirties, I'd say; all of the rest were college-age and I believe all of the hands were volunteers who were paying for the privilege of working and learning aboard. The youngest and least experienced hand had been on board for three days. Three of the hands were women, as was the first mate (who was addressed by the captain as "madam mate") and short Mohawks were popular with both sexes.

The ship herself was also a compromise, being equipped with a diesel engine, radar, life jackets, and other modern features, as well as bunks with a lot more than eighteen inches per crew member. I'm glad we were on the Lady Washington rather than the Hawaiian Chieftain, as the latter vessel is both based on a more recent original and is less authentic in many of her appointments.

The captain, a skinny somber fellow who advised a small child to get away from the tiller because "there's two hundred tons of ship pushing that rudder around, and I've seen men's femurs get snapped right in half" and remarked "madam mate, see to it that doesn't happen again," was an interesting contrast to the first mate, all grin and aviator sunglasses, who said things like "awesome!" and "set the jib, question mark?"

I wish we'd been given a little more information than the basic safety drill (how to put on the life jackets and when to put your fingers in your ears). I did pick up a few words of sailor-ese, but I never got a very good understanding of how the mate's shouted commands translated into the motions of the sails, never mind how those motions translated to the ship's heading and velocity. The crew climbed up into the rigging to unfurl and furl the sails at the beginning and end of the voyage; the rest of the time, all but one of them spent their time running back and forth between four stations on the deck, hauling on ropes to turn the sails around the axes of the two masts. The one remaining hand was entirely responsible for all of the sails at the front of the ship, which kept her very busy; apparently this was a rite of passage. Those motions of the sails, plus the tiller, were sufficient to direct the ship into a favorable position to fire on the other ship while avoiding being fired upon. Even though the wind was quite light, only about 8 MPH, when the sails were turned to catch it, the ship gave a very perceptible lean and surge -- a thrilling moment.

Combat for this type of small merchant ship does not resemble the massed broadsides you've seen in the movies. She was equipped with two deck guns, each about two and a half feet long and firing a three-pound ball, plus two small swivel guns at the back. Our single gunner, carrying a satchel of black power and a slow match, ran to whichever gun was closest to the enemy, loaded it, and fired at the captain's command (which was generally "as they bear"). These little three-pounder guns (by comparison, the guns in Master and Commander were eighteen-pounders) were enough to make a noise and do a little damage -- hopefully enough to scare off any seagoing predators. Our main battle tactic was to try to get directly ahead of the other ship, where she had no guns, while attempting to get into a position where we could fire a "raking" shot down the length of the other ship. It was also useful to get upwind of the other ship, stealing the wind she needed to maneuver. Between the maneuvering and the time for the gunner to prepare the guns, each ship got off a shot every five to fifteen minutes; it was a duel, not a slugfest.

The two ships were firing blanks -- just black powder, no cannonballs -- at each other. We were instructed to plug our ears for the shot (and it was damn loud; I can't imagine the noise of a broadside of eighteen-pounders) and then listen for the echo. A quick echo back from the other ship was counted as a hit; a delayed echo from the far shore was a miss. There was definitely a difference in the sound between the two. When the other ship shot at us, meanwhile, we could tell when the shot was about to come because we could see and hear them preparing it. Apart from all the yelling and gunfire, sailing ships are quite quiet.

The 18th-century sailing vessel was the most complicated machine of its day. There were hundreds of different ropes, every one of them had a specific purpose, and the crew had to know the vocabulary, leap into action, and execute the commands with precision and alacrity, or else lines would foul, sails would collide, and the ship would lose way -- a sitation difficult to recover from. In other words, it was a lot like square dancing.

Unlike square dancing, however, the crew was expected to repeat back every command even as they began to execute it, and also to announce changes in status such as opening hatches and returning to deck after going aloft (e.g. "back on deck, three in the fore" meaning that there were three hands still aloft on the foremast). These formalities were strictly observed even though it didn't seem that anyone was listening. At one point, when a hand landed on the deck, he looked up and announced "back on deck... can't tell." I don't think anyone other than Kate and I laughed.

Lady Washington was handicapped with several inexperienced hands, in addition to the passengers getting in the way, and when we returned to port the captain announced that "if we all had fun, then everybody won" -- in other words, we lost the battle badly, and if this had been an actual emergency we would have been disabled, boarded, and taken prisoner. (The goal was never to sink the enemy ship -- whether pirate or navy, there was always more money to be made by capturing it in usable condition.)

Now I have a real understanding of why the officers always stand on the elevated quarterdeck at the back of the ship. Because of its position and elevation, it has the best view of what's going on both onboard and out on the sea. From there you can see if lines or sails are fouled, if hands are in the wrong place, and where the other ship is. The crew, on the other hand, doesn't need this information and in fact may be better off without it. At one point, during a brief lull in the action, the engineer paused in coiling ropes and idly wondered aloud where the other ship was. I said to him "you don't really have to know, do you?" He grinned and said "Naw, all I have to do is pull on whatever rope the guy in the funny hat tells me to."

This little trip was nothing more than a taste of an approximation of an 18th-century sea battle, but we had fun and I got some sensory details that I can probably use in my writing. If nothing else, it provides a solid real-world structure on which we can hang the imagery when we read the Aubrey/Maturin novels.

     

Posted 05/01/2011 20:47 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Last night I presented the annual Stolee Lecture to an audience of about 60 BVU students, faculty, and staff. When I saw the beautiful video projection set-up they had, I asked the audience if they'd rather see slides of my trip to Mars, or hear me read a story as originally scheduled. They voted overwhelmingly for the Mars talk, so Mars it was.

Iowa people are quiet, polite people. They didn't react a lot, or ask a lot of questions, but I'm told the talk was well received.

After the talk I wrote 1630 more words on the steampunkish story. It now stands at 7003 words and still isn't quite done, which is unfortunate as I was asked for 3000-5000 words. Once it's finished I will see how much I can cut, and then I will probably have to beg the editor's forgiveness for going over. We will see.

Woke up this morning to snow. Two or three inches of wet, slushy stuff, still coming down, and a hard cold wind. I am assured this will not affect my ability to get to the airport. I really hope it doesn't cause any problems, because I'm tired and I'm lonely and I want to go home and see my sweetie.

Posted 04/19/2011 08:37 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

So here I am at Buena Vista University (which, by the way, they pronounce "byoona" rather than "bwayna"... apparently this has something to do with the Spanish-American War) in Storm Lake, Iowa. BVU is small and in the middle of nowhere but very well endowed; the campus is saturated with wifi and every student gets a laptop and, this year, an iPad as well. Walking past students' screens at breakfast, I see: Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Microsoft Word, Facebook. The school also makes up for its location with an extensive travel program. Most students travel somewhere like New York each year, and my host Inez is going to Korea. And, of course, they paid to bring me out here to speak.

Nonetheless, it is the middle of Iowa. The coffee I got this morning was so pale and weak I literally thought I'd gotten tea by accident. I mean, if there were text on the bottom of the cup you would have had no difficulty reading it. Inez took me out for Mexican last night; it was actually quite good, but as we were preparing to leave the gal at the next table asked me what I'd had. "Arroz con pollo," I said. She blinked and asked me what that was in English.

The school mascot is the beaver, which apparently most of the visiting lecturers find hilarious. As I'm from Oregon, the Beaver State, it's not funny but it is a bit distracting.

I got a lot of writing done on the plane yesterday: 1684 words for the day, total of 5363. Just the siege and aftermath to go. Unfortunately, the editor asked for 3000-5000 words, so once I'm done I'll have some cutting to do. More writing this morning, as I don't have any obligations today until lunchtime.

And that's the news from Storm Lake, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the students are jesus christ, was I ever that young?

Posted 04/18/2011 08:37 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

At the airport oh-God-early for a flight to Omaha via Denver, followed by a two-hour drive to exciting Storm Lake, Iowa, home of Buena Vista University. My Clarion West classmate Inez Schaechterle is a professor in the English department there, and she's invited me to come out for a few days to deliver the annual Stolee Lecture (I'll be reading my story "The Tale of the Golden Eagle") and speak to several English classes. All expenses paid, and an honorarium besides, so yay.

I've been working on a short story which is something in the steampunk direction. I expect to finish it before I return home, possibly even today.

Otherwise there's not really much to report. Kate and I have been hither-and-yonning a lot, and yesterday was the first day in two weeks we were in the same place at the same time. Now I'm off again, but I'll be back on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday it's a 24-hour fast and other fun stuff in preparation for a colonoscopy Thursday. No worries, it's just a standard screening, but it's a royal pain; what with the prep and the sedation it affects most of a week. Feh.

Stick around, the fun never stops around here.

Posted 04/17/2011 07:41 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

You can hear me in a panel discussion about YA science fiction in this month's Salon Futura podcast.

In other news, the brand new Mac Mini I bought to replace the one that died two weeks ago has, itself, died. It went roaring, like a Klingon, as its fan revved up to top speed when it crashed and never came back. Several attempts to revive it proved futile... it wouldn't even give the usual startup bong. Took it back to the shop and got a new one in exchange. Was dismayed to find the backup I'd made as soon as I got the previous new system all set up could not be restored. But I also had a Time Machine backup, which did restore just fine. So after one full day of cussing at technology I'm right back where I was. Yay?

Posted 04/11/2011 12:07 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I will be presenting my Mars talk at the April meeting of the Portland Science Fiction Society, free and open to the public. If you're in Portland, please come along! This might be your last chance to see it!

Saturday, April 9th, 2011
Meeting starts 2:30pm, talk at 3:30pm
Concordia University Library
http://www.cu-portland.edu/documents/campus_map.pdf
2811 NE Holman Street
Portland, OR
Room GRW108

David D. Levine is a science fiction writer who's sold over 40 short stories to all the major markets, including Asimov's and Analog. He's won a Hugo Award, been nominated for the Nebula, and won or been shortlisted for many other awards as well as appearing in numerous Year's Best anthologies. He retired in 2007 after a 25-year career as a technical writer, software engineer, and user interface designer for Tektronix, Intel, and McAfee and now spends his days writing, traveling, and getting into trouble.

In January 2010 David spent two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station, a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert. Although the Martian conditions were simulated, the science was real, as were the isolation, hostile environment, and problems faced by the six-person crew. Although his official title was Crew Journalist, he soon found himself repairing space suits, helping to keep the habitat running, and having interplanetary adventures he'd never before imagined.

David's talk, profusely illustrated with photographs, has been presented at the Worldcon, the Nebula Awards, Clarion West, the Mars Society's annual conference, Powell's Technical Books, and Google and has received many rave reviews. You'll laugh! You'll cry! You might even learn something!

Posted 04/02/2011 11:06 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

My story "Trust" (of which even the editor who bought it says "Warning: Disturbing") has been published as the story-of-the-day at Daily Science Fiction. It will remain on the front page until Monday, and will be available in the archive indefinitely at http://dailysciencefiction.com/story/david-d-levine/trust.

I hope you find it interesting and thought-provoking.

Also: Just got the galleys of my Locus interview, which should be published in the May issue. SQUEE!

Posted 04/01/2011 19:53 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Yesterday I wrote 266 new words and called it a draft. There's a lot of denouement that I thought I'd have that isn't in there -- maybe I'm just tired, and sick of this draft -- but it's a kind of conclusion anyway and I typed THE END before the end of March, as I had resolved. YA SF novel The Loneliest Girl on Mars is in the can!

I was a lot happier with my other two first drafts; I'm keenly aware of the problems with this one. Maybe this just indicates how much I've learned over the course of writing three novels. I need to go through my notes file and all the notes embedded in the manuscript and collect together a big master list of all the changes I want to make when I rewrite.

But! It is done. 68,922 words, 338 manuscript pages, in just less than a year (I started outlining on April 11 last year and started drafting on April 24... note that I took the month+ we were in Australia almost completely off). That's not to mention 29,215 words of notes and outline. It goes in the drawer for a bit now -- two to six weeks, I guess -- while I do research for the next novel and write one or two short stories. And then it's a couple weeks or a month of revision before going to beta readers. May or may not get it in the mail by the end of June as originally scheduled, but there's nobody but me who cares about that deadline.

Yay me.

Yesterday was also Kate's birthday. I fixed up the Squeezebox so she could listen to Internet radio again (she was very excited about that), and I also bought her a primrose and a ranunculus plant. We had lunch with our friend Michael and spent the afternoon at the Portland Archives.

And today I received my contributor's copies of the June Analog, including my novelette "Citizen-Astronaut" (which won second prize in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest) and my Biolog and photo. Reading over the story, I feel I ought to mention that although it was inspired by my experiences in Utah, this story is fiction and none of the awful things that happen to my protagonist in the story actually happened to me at MDRS. In particular, I must point out that my entire MDRS crew and the fine volunteers at the Mars Society were a lot nicer and more cooperative than the people in the story who give my protagonist so many problems, and we didn't have to face nearly the same level of equipment failure that my protagonist does.

Even though his name is Gary Shu.

Posted 03/31/2011 21:29 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 68818 | Since last entry: 4088

Last weekend we spent a lovely four days at a cozy little rustic shack on the Olympic Peninsula in Union, Washington. This place was an amazing McMansion with seven bedrooms, dual ovens, dual microwaves, four refrigerators including a wine fridge, three fireplaces, five gigantic televisions, pool table, foosball, heated tile floors throughout, and more light switches than God. A little overwhelming, perhaps, and yet not completely without taste. If only the owners had not taken down all of the art when they turned it into a rental...

The occasion was the thirtieth wedding anniversary of our friends Paul and Debbie, to which they'd also invited our friends Marc and Patty, John and Ruth, Malinda, and Judy (none of whom, curiously, are on LiveJournal or Twitter). We spent the weekend eating, chatting, playing games (including a variant on Apples to Apples in which you select your noun card before the adjective card you're trying to match is revealed, then have to explain why it's a match!), watching videos, and just generally hanging out. Very relaxing. The weather was generally too rainy for outdoor activities but the view of the Olympics was occasionally very impressive.

I only did a few hundred words of writing, but this novel is very very very close to a finished draft. I might even write THE END before the end of March, as I promised myself I would at the beginning of the year.

When we returned home, I found that the TiVo was stuck on "powering up" and I had to pull the power plug a couple of times before I could get it to wake all the way up. Then, while we were watching The Amazing Race (and, by the way, the current season -- in which all the teams are returning former contestants -- is the best I can recall, with unexpected twists and some truly devious challenges), I noticed that the clock on the music player powered by the server in the attic had stopped. Turns out that the hard drive on the server, a 2006 Mac Mini, had Died The Death. I suspect that there may have been a power fluctuation while we were gone.

After trying all of the usual things to bring the hard disk back from the dead, I decided that the old Mini had accumulated enough hardware problems in recent years that it was better to replace it completely. So off to the Mac Store I went, and by 3:00 the next day the new server was up and running in its place.

Let me take a moment here to reflect on the importance of backups. This is actually the second time this year I've suffered a catastrophic hard disk failure, and neither one was more than an expensive inconvenience. New hardware, restore backup, done. Instead of enjoying my music right now I might be cursing and trying to re-create my music library, or still moaning about all of the writing and email and other stuff I'd lost back in January. In this case, the computer actually died in the middle of a backup, causing the backup to be unusable, but because I'm paranoid there was an older backup available as well.

There are a lot of alternatives for backing up your computer. Pick one and use it. (I clone each computer's hard drive to a bootable external disk on a monthly basis, and use Time Machine for incremental backups on the main computer.) Check your backups every once in a while to be sure they're good.

You know how they say you should only floss the teeth you want to keep? The same is true for backing up your data.

Posted 03/30/2011 08:36 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

As you may know, the deadline for Hugo nominations is this Friday. Here are my eligible publications.

Click on a story title to read it online. Click on a publication name to buy it. Enjoy!

Novella

• "Second Chance" in Alembical 2

Novelettes

• "Pupa" in Analog, September 2010
• "Powers" in Wild Cards I

Short Stories

• "Teaching the Pig to Sing" in Analog, May 2010
• "A Passion For Art" in Interzone issue 228
• "A Little Song, A Little Dance" in Breaking Waves (ebook)
• "Family Matters" in Fangs for the Mammaries
• "Finding Joan" in Daily Science Fiction

Dramatic Presentation

• "Floaters" (audio) in The Drabblecast episode 177 (also available via iTunes)

Of all of these, I think "Pupa" is the one that has the best chance of making the ballot.

Posted 03/22/2011 09:02 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 64730 | Since last entry: 1802

D: "Oh boy. I just got my first e-rejection from Asimov's."

K: "Rah."

D: "Some milestones are more fun than others."

K: "I like the ones made of marzipan."

D: "...never seen one of them."

K: "They don't last long."

Posted 03/21/2011 13:30 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 62928 | Since last entry: 1833

I got this email from my square dance friend Bo and just had to share it:

It went like this at my dad's assisted living complex:

Resident 1: "Can you believe we've put men on Mars?"

Resident 2: "Say, that story is about a woman. When did the men go?"

Bo (politely): "Oh, that's a story about a Mars-like research station. It's in Utah. My friend David went there."

Resident 1: "Oh, so David was the man. How come the article wasn't about him?"

Bo: "Sorry. David went some time ago. He said he learned a good deal. I went to one of his presentations and thought it was very interesting."

Resident 1: "Seems like it would take too much time to get there and back." (peers at article). "Must've made it up."

Bo: "Oh, no. I'm quite sure he went. It's a research station in Utah that is set up to feel like Mars."

Resident 2: "Why would they name a state on Mars 'Utah'? Isn't one of those enough?"

And so it went from there....

Posted 03/18/2011 19:20 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I will be appearing on the radio show "Dialogue: Between the Lines" TODAY, 3/17, at 10am PDT. Tune in at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/dialogue/ and hear me make a complete stammering fool of myself!

Update: You can hear or download the interview now, as a 14MB MP3 file.

Posted 03/17/2011 11:33 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

As you may have heard, Jay Lake has had to bow out of Cascade Writers, a three-day workshop held at the Ocean Crest Resort on the Washington coast, July 21-24th. However, he will be replaced by the inestimable Ken Scholes. The other two instructors are still Beth Meacham and my own self. There are still a few spots open at the workshop, and the deadline for application is May 15, so if you'd like to spend a long weekend hanging out at the coast with me and some other cool writer-type people it's not too late.

Posted 03/15/2011 11:37 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I will be appearing on the radio show "Dialogue: Between the Lines" on 3/17 at 10am PST. Tune in at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/dialogue/

Posted 03/14/2011 11:24 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 61095 | Since last entry: 1805

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco, nursing a cappuccino and hunched over my laptop like a real San Francisco hipster. We're here for Fogcon, at the end of a week that started with Potlatch in San Jose.

Potlatch was a lovely, laid-back convention which featured, as it usually does, many fine conversations and meals with old friends. (Armenian Gourmet for the YUM!) Tom Whitmore and I hosted the "Tough Guide to the Post-Apocalypse" discussion as an icebreaker on Friday evening, where I typed up a running transcript of the discussion, including a few snarky asides (e.g. "Darth Alfalfa: 'I am your fodder!'"), which was projected on a big screen. The panel didn't go exactly as planned, but it was still a good start to the convention -- though now I want to write up an actual "Tough Guide to the Post-Apocalypse." Maybe for Bento. I also conducted a writers' workshop session with four fine manuscripts, and ring-led the author readings on Saturday afternoon.

For some reason this particular Potlatch was focused on very long talks with one person at a time, old friends and new. It's good to go deep sometimes. I also attended sessions on Earth Abides, the convention's book of honor, and on the future of Potlatch. There will be a Potlatch 21, in Seattle, next year, chaired by Jack Bell.

After the con we piled into our rented Grand Marquis tuna boat, along with friends Kate and Glenn from Seattle, and took off for the coast. The main impetus for this trip was a visit to Hearst Castle, which I've long wanted to see but which is just too far from either San Francisco or Los Angeles to be done as a day trip from a convention, but with a whole week between conventions we had time to do the Central Coast in some depth.

We took two of the four available tours of Hearst Castle and also saw the 45-minute IMAX movie about Hearst at the visitor's center. The movie, with its focus on Hearst and complete absence of information on his wife and girlfriend, reminded me of the L. Ron Hubbard museum (which presented Hubbard as a solo genius with no co-workers or family), an impression which was reinforced by the theatre gift shop stocked with nothing but hundreds of copies of the DVD of the movie we'd just seen. The castle itself is, of course, extraordinary, both architecturally and for the astonishing collection of artifacts housed within it. One room holds four of the five surviving panels of a 10-panel tapestry that may have once hung at Versailles. Copies of these panels hang in the Louvre, and this room was where Hearst's sons liked to play touch football. Amazing what you can do with way, way too much money.

We also visited Cannery Row, the Monterey Bay aquarium (Otters! Seahorses! Octopus! Flamingos! Diving murres! Jellies! Sardines! Mackerel! And a big-ball-o-fish!), and the National Steinbeck Center ("to which all the regional Steinbeck Centers report"); walked on several very picturesque beaches; and observed elephant seals from a safe distance ("HRWAAANK!"). In between those experiences we ate many fine meals. Especially notable was the Salinas City BBQ, a very modest place where each simple item on the plate was exceptional of its ilk. Probaby not worth the drive from San Francisco but if you should happen to visit the Steinbeck Center I'd highly recommend it for dinner. Go early, they sell out.

I was surprised to find cell phone coverage and free wi-fi nearly everywhere we went. Thanks to which, I discovered that someone from Australia was accusing me on Twitter of impersonating a New Zealand earthquake survivor, and threatening to expose me to the media. WTF? But after a couple of days she apparently realized she had me mixed up with someone else and apologized for the whole incident.

After much driving through lovely and characteristic seaside towns (Cambria was particularly fine), scenic and vertiginous coastlines, rolling hills, spectacular mountains, and verdant farmland -- all with excellent sunny weather -- we turned inland and headed to San Francisco for Fogcon. Suiting the convention's name, the weather turned to a heavy mist, then a light drizzle. We dropped off our tuna boat and checked into the convention hotel, where fans are just beginning to trickle in.

This morning we awoke to news of the Japan earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Many of the beaches we walked on this week were probably inundated today, and I'm very glad we decided to depart the coast yesterday rather than today. My thoughts and hopes are with everyone affected by this disaster.

And I've done almost no writing this week. Such is life.

Posted 03/11/2011 11:34 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 59290 | Since last entry: 4492

As you can see from the word count above, I'm very close to 60,000 words on my YA novel, with a target of 70,000 words. I hope to finish the first draft by the end of the month, then let it rest for a few weeks before giving it a self-edit pass and then sending it to trusted beta readers. I would like to have it in submission by the end of June but that might be overly ambitious.

Meanwhile, my story "A Passion for Art," which originally appeared in Interzone 228, has been podcast at StarShipSofa, narrated by my old pal Randal Schwartz (AKA Merlyn) and with a keen illustration by Robyn Moir.

And my novelette "Pupa" from the September Analog has been included on the Tangent Online Recommended Reading List for 2010, with three stars (the maximum possible). "Pupa" was also listed in the Locus Recommended Reading List and was recommended for the Hugo by a couple of BASFA members. I'm really excited by the reception this story has received and if you'd like to read it you can do so here: "Pupa" by David D. Levine.

In other news, I've got new glasses. Not just one pair but two: one for distance vision and the other for computing and other close-up work.

I learned from the difficulties Kate has had with her reading glasses (never remembering which pair she was wearing) and made sure to get frames that looked and felt very different (wire frames for distance, plastic for close-up). Both are progressive (multifocal) but the close-up pair have a smaller range of focal lengths so the usable area at short distance is much bigger. Now I can see my whole 27" iMac screen in clear focus! It's great.

The distance pair are from a different lens manufacturer from my previous ones and also offer a larger usable area than before. They will take some getting used to but both pairs are a big improvement over my previous ones.

Posted 03/02/2011 15:40 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 54798 | Since last entry: 2564

Today is my fiftieth birthday.

Spent the day at home, doing pleasant but ordinary things. Got a couple of nice presents, with one more on the way, and a call from my dad. Also, by coincidence, received some other good news, including a larger-than-expected check for the Italian translation of my Wild Cards story. In the evening we saw a fine documentary about cinematographer Jack Cardiff, followed by an excellent dinner at Nel Centro.

I'm okay with turning 50. I have been thinking lately about the benefits of maturity; I find that I am more likely to have the solutions to problems, or to have avoided the problem in the first place, which makes me calmer, happier, and more stable than I have ever been before. This has been a very good year so far and I have no reason to anticipate that the rest of the year will be any different. I have no money worries, I'm in excellent health, and I know that I am beloved.

I wish the same to all of my friends.

Posted 02/21/2011 21:41 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 52234 | Since last entry: 655

This coming weekend is Radcon, in Pasco, Washington, and I'll be on the following program items:

Friday 2:00 pm, Executive: Interational Space Happenings
What is everyone else doing as far as satellites, space exploration, space stations and missions to other planets and moons?
Dubrick, Daniel; Levine, David; Nordley, Gerald David

Friday 4:00 pm, Emerald: The Urban Monster
A guide on how to blend in to the masses in this modern day and age. A must for monsters of all types.
Briggs, Patricia; Burk, Jim; Lake, Jay; Levine, David

Friday 5:00 pm, Silver Front: Charades
Last year we started with one audience member but by the end had filled the room. Join David Levine and Lizzy Shannon for an hour of hilarity.
Bonham, Maggie; Burk, Jim; Gregory, Roberta; Levine, David; Nagle, Pati; Ross, Deborah J.; Shannon, Lizzy

Saturday 1:00 pm, Garnet: The End of Manned Spaceflight in America?
With the current space policy, are we seeing America abandon manned space flight?
Dubrick, Daniel; Gregory, Hugh; Levine, David; Nordley, Gerald David

Saturday 3:00 pm, Sage: Steampunk Medicine
Many of the commonsense practices of today, such as requiring doctors to wash their hands between patients and general sanitation in the hospital, were "invented" in the Victorian era. Radical new ideas such as germ theory challenged the established ideas of miasmatic theory of disease. Come explore this period of change and innovation, the conflicts that erupted and how people such as Florence Nightingale and Dr. I gnaz Semmelweis changed the world.
Bruscas, Chris; Garrison, Miki; Hill, Laurel; Levine, David

Saturday 6:00 pm, Emerald: What Makes a Successful Critique Group?
One of the most helpful things in a writer's toolbox can be other writers! A good critique group is a win-win situation in which all the participants become the best writers they can be. However, a bad critique group experience can be very discouraging, indeed. What makes a successful critique group?
Bolich, Sue; Held, Rhiannon; Lake, Jay; Levine, David; Silverstein, Janna

Sunday 10:00 am, Bronze: The Formidable Woman
What makes a formidable woman character formidable? What makes a woman character a woman? Can a man write an accurate woman character?
Alexander, Alma; Briggs, Patricia; Cherryh, CJ; engh, MJ; Kenyon, Kay; Lake, Jay; Levine, David

Posted 02/15/2011 10:16 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 51579 | Since last entry: 2272

Not much to blog about recently. Mostly I've been plugging away on the YA novel. I just passed 50,000 words, with a target of 70,000, so I should be done with the first draft by the end of the quarter, as scheduled. I'm not entirely happy with it, but I hope I will be able to fix the problems I see myself putting in when I revise it.

While I'm chugging away here, my previously published stuff is making good progress:

• "Written on the Wind", my fourth published story, has been given a fine audio version, read by Mur Lafferty, at Escape Pod. You can also read the full text of the story at the Escape Pod website, and there's a lively discussion of the story on the podcast's message board.
• I recently learned that the Italian translation of Wild Cards 1 is of the new edition, so it does include my story "Powers". I don't yet know what the title of the translated story is.
• My story "Pupa" from the October 2010 Analog made the Locus Recommended Reading List!

Posted 02/14/2011 15:50 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 49307 | Since last entry: 1936

As you may recall, my MDRS-88 crewmate Diego Urbina was selected to participate in the Mars-500 project, a full 520-day simulated voyage to Mars and back. He and five other guys have been locked in a tin can in Moscow for 250 days now, and their simulated spacecraft is now in simulated orbit around simulated Mars. They have just docked with the landing module, which was sent ahead and has been waiting for them in Martian orbit full of supplies they will use on the long trip back. In a few days, Diego and two of his crewmates will undock and descend to the Martian surface for ten days of Mars exploration.

I've been following Diego on Twitter and the following series of tweets was just so lovely I had to share it:

still moving stuff to the martian module, getting ready to start the hard orthostatic intollerance test

it simulates what happens when you transition from 0g to martian gravity

last night was the last one in the orbital module, tonight I'll start sleeping with head down @ 12 deg

and wearing in the day pants that confine blood to the upper body, 3 days later I remove the pants and see what funky things happen

oh but let me tell you more about an orthostatic intollerance test in the words of the expert in charge:

"Orthostatic test can be accompanied by deterioration of state of health, occurrence of weakness, dizziness..."

"...a short breath, a nausea, sweating and, as a last resort, development of an unconscious condition"

people in the street just call it "falling in love"

Also, here's a cool five-minute video from the ESA about Mars-500 and its current status.

Posted 02/10/2011 08:47 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 47371 | Since last entry: 4880

As you may know, I'm a big fan of writers' workshops. Workshops are a great way to find the weak spots in your writing, hone your critical eye, learn techniques, and make contacts (and friends) in the field. And now is the time to apply for this year's major workshops.

Clarion West is a six-week intensive "boot camp for writers" in Seattle, June 19 through July 29, 2011. I am a Clarion West alum and I found it almost overwhelming but incredibly valuable. This year's instructors are Paul Park, Nancy Kress, Margo Lanagan, Minister Faust, L. Timmel Duchamp, and Charles Stross, and the deadline for application is March 1. If you apply before February 10 there's a discount on the application fee. You can read about my Clarion West experience over here.

Clarion is the spiritual predecessor of Clarion West and offers the same six-week intensive experience, June 26 to August 6, 2011. Sometimes known as Clarion Classic or Clarion East, it's moved around over the years and is now located in San Diego. This year's instructors are Nina Kiriki Hoffman, John Scalzi, Elizabeth Bear, David Anthony Durham, John Kessel, and Kij Johnson, and the deadline for application is March 1.

Taos Toolbos is a two-week master class for more experienced writers and is focused on the craft of the novel. It's held in a ski lodge in Taos Ski Valley, July 10-23, 2011, and this year's instructors are Walter Jon Williams, Nancy Kress, and Jack Skillingstead. I went to Taos Toolbox in 2008 and you can read my blogs about it over here.

Cascade Writers is a three-day workshop held at the Ocean Crest Resort on the Washington coast, July 21-24th. This year's instructors are Beth Meacham, Jay Lake, and me! The deadline for application is May 15.

The Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers is a ten-day workshop for writers ages 14-19, held at the University of Pittsburgh’s Greensburg Campus. This year's instructors include Ellen Kushner, Tamora Pierce, and me! Plus others to be named later. The deadline for application is March 1. For more information, check out Ellen Kushner's post and be sure to read the comments!

These aren't the only workshops in existence, of course, but they're the ones that have a special place in my heart for one reason or another.

If none of these work for you, check with your local or regional science fiction convention. Many of them have short (one day or less) workshops as part of their program. I will be leading workshop sections at Potlatch and FOGcon, and probably at Wiscon, Renovation (Worldcon), and OryCon as well.

Posted 02/07/2011 11:06 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 42491 | Since last entry: ?

I see I haven't blogged since January 2. Sorry about that.

I've been having a busy, complex, and fulfilling life. Been plugging away on the YA novel, 500 or so words a day most days; I've missed three days so far this year but I said I wasn't going to be doctrinaire about it.

I got my first acceptance of the year: SF short story "Into the Nth Dimension" to DAW anthology Human for a Day. Also some rejections. Did you know that Clarkesworld has two different form rejection emails? Like Realms of Fantasy's "blue form of death" and "yellow form of promise," one's more encouraging than the other, but the difference between them is pretty subtle. The more promising one includes the words "your story was close" instead of the other one's "your story isn't quite what we're looking for right now."

Some of the rejections have carried more sting than others. I'm very frustrated by the publishing industry right now but I'm trying to channel that frustration into productivity rather than despair. Sometimes it's hard.

A lot of Kate's and my time this month has been spent working on a big non-writing-related semi-secret project. We expect to hit a major milestone on it this week. It will continue to occupy a big part of our time for most of the rest of this year.

We're also doing a lot of travel planning. Even though we are not planning to leave North America, it's going to be another big travel year. Right now we're working on nailing down flights, car, hotels, and other details for the Radcon/Madrona Fiber Arts weekend (February); Potlatch, FOGcon, and the week in between (March); Kate's trip with our niece to Disneyland (April); my "endowed speaker" gig at Buena Vista University in Iowa (April); a research trip on the tall ship Lady Washington (April or May); and a trip to Eastern Oregon (June).

I'm going to be doing a lot of teaching/workshopping/mentoring this year. In addition to the trip to Iowa, where I will be delivering the annual Stollee Lecture and working with English students and faculty (my Clarion West classmate Inez Schaechterle is an English teacher at BVU), I'll be a workshop group leader at the Cascade Writers Workshop in July (where there are still seats available, by the way); I'll be doing writers' workshops at Potlatch and FOGcon; and I was just invited to appear as a guest pro at the Alpha Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Workshop for Young Writers in Pittsburgh. I wouldn't be surprised if I did writers' workshops at Wiscon, the Worldcon, and OryCon as well.

Kate and I have been watching the DVDs of Day Break, a 2006 TV show that was canceled after five episodes although a full season of 13 was completed. It's a taut, smart show about a cop being framed for murder in contemporary LA who is, for reasons as yet unknown, living the same day over and over. We really liked this show on its frustratingly-curtailed broadcast run and are looking forward to finally finding out how it ends. We also watched episode 1 of Portlandia, which -- although it skewers Portland in a loving and painfully accurate way -- was too slow-paced and disjointed to be really funny, so we won't be buying the remaining episodes from iTunes.

We've also seen some local theatre, including Captured By Aliens!, a late-night semi-improvised serial comedy about six contestants on a reality show who discover that they have actually been abducted by aliens. We saw the first week's show and it was a complete hoot, a bit amateurish but full of heart and brains. We will unfortunately miss week 2 (January 28-30) but plan to attend the week 3 show on February 4. The series concludes with week 4 (February 11-13).

There's also been a lot, and I mean a lot, of day-to-day Stuff To Do, so much so that I've actually been feeling rather oppressed by my ever expanding Things To Do list. Which is absurd, given that I'm retired and can spend my days exactly as I wish, but there it is. I had an important realization about this last night, though.

Throughout my working career, on every single project I ever participated in, we spent a huge proportion of our time developing requirements, whacking the requirements down to something that could be implemented within the time and resources available, tracking performance against plan, whacking the deliverables down yet again as the actual work involved became apparent, and deciding which of the thousands of acknowledged bugs could be "deferred" (which, more often than not, meant "never fixed") in order to ship something resembling the promised functionality on something resembling the promised schedule.

Acknowledging that there simply wasn't enough time in the day to do everything we wanted to do, no matter how important it might be, was always a big and unavoidable part of my working life. And yet somehow I think that in my personal life I should be able to get it all done. I don't have a program manager to help me track my progress and reassess the feasibility of my goals, and I don't have a lot of externally-imposed deadlines to force me to cut down the deliverables and finish something, so the to-do list just grows and grows and grows. I'm not yet sure how I will incorporate this insight into my daily life, but I think it's significant.

Apart from all that... I have no money problems, I am in great health, and my personal relationships are going well.

I can't complain, but sometimes I still do.

Posted 01/26/2011 09:49 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Kate says "if that's another year-in-review post I'm cutting you off." But it isn't; it's current affairs.

We saw a lot of movies this holiday season, in theatres and on DVD and on TiVo. It was almost like being sick, when I tend to curl up in my bathrobe on the couch in the parlor and just watch and watch. But more fun than that. Here are my thoughts on those films, in no particular order.

Tron: Legacy. What an irredeemable mess. The plot made no sense whatsoever; picking at plot holes is like shooting slats in a barrel (at least the fish move). Even the flashy action sequences, like the Tail Gunner / Star Wars crossover aerial battle, were boring. We knew going in that it wasn't going to be good, but I still wanted to see it in 3-D because, you know, Tron! But it really failed to live up to expectations. The best thing about it was the quotes from the previous film.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A delightful, surprisingly complex science fiction film, which went a lot farther than movies usually do into the implications of the posited technological change. Thoughtful and highly satisfying.

The King's Speech. One of the best movies I've seen this year, combining high stakes with a very small and human story. Brilliant performances by the leads; sure to be an Oscar contender.

A Town Called Panic. This played at the Hollywood Theatre for several months this summer but we only just now saw it on DVD. A bizarre, surreal film in which tiny plastic toys are animated in a way that looks and feels childish but has an adult sensibility. The fact that it's all in French pushes it completely over the top. Recommended.

The Lives of Others. A drama about a member of East Germany's Stasi secret police who eavesdrops on a dissident playwright; a gimpse into a world that has vanished; a story of conscience and consequences. Thoughtful but not gripping.

The Empire Strikes Back. Comfort viewing. This is the first time I'd seen the special edition, and though some of the added special-effects shots entering Cloud City were brilliant the overall effect of the changes was just distracting and the new readings of Boba Fett's lines were awful. Otherwise it held up pretty darn well.

Titan A.E. The first time I'd seen this Don Bluth animated film since its original theatrical release. The plot and characters are simplistic and kind of nonsensical, and the songs were eye-rollingly bad, but it handled zero gravity, vacuum, and truly alien aliens better than almost any SF movie I can think of. The destruction of the Earth, the fight in the hydrogen swamp, and the extended sequence in the ice rings are each worth the price of admission themselves. This stupid little film has been surprisingly (perhaps appallingly) influential on my own work.

The Emperor's New Groove. This is what you'd get if Chuck Jones directed a Disney movie. I laughed out loud.

The Tempest. Generally a win, but Caliban (whose line readings I could barely understand) and the weird kaleidoscopic sequence in the middle were just baffling. I'm glad I saw it anyway.

Posted 01/02/2011 14:00 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I tend to take my new year's resolutions pretty seriously. Some years they've been a little frivolous, like the year my resolution was to watch Casablanca, but even then I did make sure to do it. They're usually pretty concrete, and measurable, and designed to be achievable though a bit of a stretch. A legacy of my years at Intel, I guess.

My resolution for 2010 was to read the Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O'Brien, in order. I knew up front I wouldn't be able to read all twenty-and-a-bit of them in one year, but I intended to read as many of them as I could. Well, that's what I did, and "as many as I could" turned out to be three: Master and Commander, Post Captain, and HMS Surprise, plus a little bit of the fourth (The Mauritius Command). Fairly pathetic, really, but I gave it my best shot. I intend to continue plugging away at them until I'm done, along with all the other reading I want to do.

In 2011 I need to get back on the writing horse in a big way, after the many Mars-related and travel-related disruptions of 2010. They were enjoyable and valuable disruptions, to be sure, but they did interfere with the word count. So my new year's reosolution for 2011 is: finish and submit my current novel and make a good start on another novel.

To break down the elephant into smaller, more chewable chunks, I intend to attack this resolution as follows:

• Complete the first draft of the current novel by the end of the first quarter (March 31);
• Have the current novel critiqued, revise it, and submit it to at least one publisher by the end of the second quarter (June 30);
• Write at least 30,000 words on a second novel by the end of the third quarter (September 30);
• Have at least 60,000 words of draft on the second novel by the end of the year.

In support of these goals, I intend to write at least 500 words, preferably 1000, every day. Though I'm not going to get doctrinaire about it like I did in 2009; if I miss a day, that's life.

I know these goals are laughably unambitious by the standards of some of my writer friends, but for me they are a stretch. However, I think I can achieve them, with good quality, and if I can do this it'll be my best novel-writing year ever. Wish me luck!

Posted 01/01/2011 22:06 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

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