The ongoing saga of David D. Levine's writing and other adventures.
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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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Word count: 3267 | Since last entry: -7
I didn't get a lot of writing done tonight (and that mostly editing the first part I wrote last week to fit the new outline, which explains the negative word count), because I was tending to a sick computer.
For reasons unknown, the music server was not visible on the network when we woke up this morning... it was up and running, but couldn't ping out or in. So I rebooted... and it didn't come up. Disk read error. I've tried chkdsk and a few other things, and now I can see files on the disk, but it still won't boot. I fear it may be a hardware failure. Might take a few days just to sort out what went wrong.
But! I got an email today from Asimov's... they're going to buy the Bigfoot story! I'm really pleased at this one -- my third sale to Asimov's, and my first new story sale in over a year.
Yay!
Posted 01/31/2006 23:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 3274 | Since last entry: 414
Tonight's wordcount is a complete but rather sketchy outline of the current story, trying to work in all the key points from this weekend's plot and character notes. Many missing pieces still. What is the main character's job on board ship? Need to find an org chart for the Pioneer or Voyager mission to get names of scientific specialties... would also probably be good to find and re-read the daily logs from the International Space Station, which I saw posted on the web some years ago.
Outlining at this point feels rather like... cheating? Wasting time? I feel I should be writing, i.e. producing salable words, in my limited writing time. But I know that this story's bigger than my usual and needs some planning and special attention if it's going to work.
I am envious of people who produce 1000-2000 words per day on a regular basis (though I know that many of them don't have day jobs).
Posted 01/30/2006 22:42 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 2860 | Since last entry: 293
After writing the above-noted 300 words on Thursday, I realized that I was really pushing to get the words out. The story didn't seem to be going anywhere; I was just putting words on the page and they weren't adding up to anything.
On Friday I did quite a bit of thinking about the story (I left the radio off during my commute) but didn't write anything down. However, I did earn a blue star for the day by resubmitting a story that bounced from Aeon (though I am beginning to suspect that story isn't going to sell).
Also on Friday I attended the Portland Auto Show as a field trip from work. No, really, we were researching user interactions in the new navigation-computer-equippped cars. Well, that was the rationale. The real reason was to give my two co-workers (Audi and BMW fanatic respectively) an excuse to go to the Auto Show on company time. I gave it my best shot, but fundamentally I find cars boring, and I left early. The coolest thing I saw was a life-sized Volvo made entirely of Lego, and the one really amusing thing was the BMW M6, which has an "M" button on the steering wheel that boosts the horsepower or something. Personally, I would rather have the "C" button to extend the rotating saws, or the "F" button for underwater operation.
Saturday and Sunday mornings I put in about two writing hours each, and wrote nearly 4000 words of notes about the plot and characters (using the questions from the "Sketch a Novel in an Hour" workshop conducted by Chris York at OryCon a few years back as an outline). Clearly the words can flow rapidly when I don't have to worry about picking the right word, or being consistent, or repeating myself. Maybe I need to approach the drafting process in this way. Anyway, this has been a worthwhile exercise and I think I'm ready to start over (keeping some of the existing words) and have it work better. Still don't know how long it's going to be, but longer than a short story.
Saturday afternoon was critique group, when I got some useful feedback on the Jupiter story. Everyone agreed it's in good shape, which was reassuring after the first (email) crit I'd received ripped it to shreds. I think I'll wait until I've received the last few crits from those who couldn't make it this week before revising it and sending it to Analog.
Saturday night we met up with local writers Mary Hobson and Jay Lake, Jay's friend Tammy, and Jay's daughter ("The Child") for conversation, coffee, and snacks before Doug Lain's book launch party. Unfortunately, Kate and I had symphony tickets and couldn't attend the book launch itself.
This afternoon we attended a Japanese New Year celebration, featuring much energetic Taiko drumming and the pounding of mochi (sticky rice) as well as some very entertaining storytelling and dance. Happy New Year, all!
Oh, one more thing: my story "Tk'Tk'Tk" from the March Asimov's appeared in the Locus Recommended Reading list for 2005, along with many other fine stories. If you're looking for something new to read you could do worse than to check this list out.
Posted 01/29/2006 20:27 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 2567 | Since last entry: 48
Met with our financial adviser tonight, and Kate's mildly under the weather. Not much actual writing, but did add another few hundred words of notes. I'm questioning the initial premise, alas, or at least some key aspects of it.
What kinds of unauthorized cloning would be a crime? Why would Chaz object to being vived with this set of memories, given that he had consented to having the record made, knowing that it might have to be used? Wouldn't he be glad just to be alive? And wouldn't the other team members want him alive, if the alternative is simply to pitch his warm and breathing body, fully capable of consciousness even if its memories are a bit out of date, out the airlock? Surely they need all hands, even half-trained ones. But what if there's some other reason they all voted not to vive him?
So I might re-do some aspects of the first scene.
Apart from those notes, what I have is mostly infodumpy scene setting and character descriptions. Haven't gotten at all into the meaty relationship issues that were my original reason for wanting to write this story. Yet. But now, it's time for bed.
Posted 01/25/2006 22:44 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 2519 | Since last entry: 540
Dinner at Nuestra Cocina.
500+ words written at the airport, waiting for Kate's plane.
My sweetie is back home.
Happy now.
Posted 01/24/2006 23:29 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 1979 | Since last entry: 234
In addition to the 234 words of mostly infodump I wrote tonight in the actual draft, I also wrote over 350 words of additional infodump in a separate file of notes, working out the characters, their physical descriptions, and their relationships to each other. And as I was doing that, it became clear to me whodunit, and why, and what event would precipitate the crisis, and what they would all do after that point. The end.
No idea how many words there are between here and there. But my brain tends to leap to conclusions, and no amount of "let's just write it and see where it takes us" has ever derailed it before, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised it's done it again.
(My brain is a guy. Focused on the
orgasmdestination rather than the journey. Stupid brain! Down, brain!)On the other hand, I know that I am capable of changing the ending if the story seems to lead in another direction. So I'm going to keep going, and hope for the best.
A snippet: "Kyra got on the intercom and called everyone together in the Gamma work bay. Alpha should have been the command and control module, but it hadn't made the rendezvous -- lost somewhere in the vacant light-years between here and there. Also lost was Delta, which had made it all the way to Tau Ceti only to burn up in the first aerobraking maneuver. So instead of the planned pentagonal ring, Cassie was a shallow V, with Gamma module in the middle and Beta and Epsilon on the ends. Fortunately, three modules provided sufficient resources and space for our purposes; the mission had been designed to succeed with as little as one module, but it would have been tight quarters."
(I told you it was an infodump...)
One thing that stopped me from making forward progress for half an hour was when I needed to describe a character's... knees. See, he's curled in a fetal position, and he notices that his skin is as clear and unmarked as a newborn's, which is his first hint that he is actually a clone of the person he remembers himself as being. And I'm having a devil of a time describing it. I need a word, or short phrase, that describes skin that's smooth and clear and unmarked and translucent and beautiful... and brown. Food, wood, and leather metaphors all seem inappropriate. Right now I've got "smooth and unmarked as a baby's brown bottom" but I'm not 100% happy with it.
The hardest part to capture is the translucence, which is going to be immediately noticeable because this skin has never been exposed to light. Very few things in life are translucent in the way that human skin is. Porcelain is the traditional metaphor, but that only works with pale skin.
Ponder ponder ponder. But now, sleep!
Posted 01/23/2006 23:51 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 1745 | Since last entry: 280
It's a good thing I managed 1500 words on Friday night, because I've barely gotten my minimum in yesterday and today. A hundred words isn't much -- only one paragraph in this case -- but I feel it's important to keep my hand in every single day.
So if I wasn't writing, what was I doing? Shopping, mostly. Saturday I spent most of the morning at Fry's, the cathedral of consumer electronics, which is so far out of town and such an anathema to Kate that I usually don't get to go there except when she's out of town. In this case I also had a $150 gift certificate, which I got at work a few months ago as a reward for my work on a key project. After much shopping and dithering I decided on a DVD burner, because backing up the documents directory on the PC has grown to require 3 CDs and burning 3 separate CDs is a pain. By complete coincidence the DVD burner and one spindle of DVDs came to $149.98.
Next I visited Bridgeport Village, the newest shopping center in town, which reminds me a lot of University Square in Seattle where we once met Janna Silverstein for fancy chocolates. I had a decent lunch, found a travel box for my collapsible top hat, and picked up a new kitchen scale to replace the one whose plastic window has become opaqued by years of kitchen grime.
Home by way of Music Millennium, where I took the time to consult with the friendly and knowledgeable staff in hopes of finding a compilation album of music similar to what they play on local station KINK. I came away with a couple of recommended discs, plus a few more finds from the used CD racks.
I arrived home to find that somewhere along the way the stylus from my trusty Palm V had vanished. Damn! I looked online and confirmed my fears: styli for this ancient device are no longer available anywhere except dodgy vendors on Amazon Marketplace. But then I thought: didn't this critter come with two styli? After a bit of digging, I found the original stylus taped to the warranty card, tucked in the back of the owner's manual. Yay for being a packrat.
Leftovers for dinner, followed by a nap. Despite the bracelet, I've been staying up way too late, but still rising around 6am. Then I met my friends Anthony and Rhia for dessert at Pix Patisserie (omigod the Concorde was marvelous -- crunchy light chocolate meringue twigs surrounding a core of chocolate mousse, it looked like a firestarter and tasted divine), followed by...
The live theatrical production of Manos: The Hands of Fate! (Which I would never have known about if Mark Bourne hadn't mentioned it in his LJ. Thanks!) It was a total hoot. They took the original script and played it reasonably straight, except that the small child was played by a grown woman, half of the Master's wives were played by men, and the two dogs were played by stuffed animals. The wife catfight scenes were particularly hilarous -- they looked like highly choreographed dances from the Hullabaloo era.
The production was amateurish, but that only added to its charm. These actors were deliberately overplaying, where in the original the actors were doing the best they could. But their Torgo was spot on, and really stole the show. He was definitely the tragic hero of this production.
The weird thing is that in this production the plot actually made sense. It helped that they moved it briskly along, taking a little more than an hour.
That was Saturday. Today I had a haircut, went to the gym, caught up on my email, did the dishes, did a little more shopping... I had a serious case of getting distracted all day. I found myself walking away from putting away dishes, leaving the cupboard door open, to send an email before I forgot, then abandoning the email half-finished to attend to some webpage maintenance, but leaving that half-done when I realized I needed to take out the garbage... I think I achieved closure on everything I started today, but there are a half-dozen projects I meant to do today and never even started.
So much for the weekend. I did get a lot done, but not as much as I'd hoped. Tomorrow night I can try to finish up some of those loose ends, and then Kate returns on Tuesday night. Yay!
Posted 01/22/2006 23:46 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 1465 | Since last entry: 1465
Yesterday evening I did a bunch of iPod-related stuff, noticing at nearly midnight that I had not yet done any writing for the day. So I looked over the Carpet story, made a few edits suggested by Sara from my crit group, and put it in the mail. I gave myself a blue star for submitting a story. (The other star colors are: silver for 100-500 words or any amount of revision, gold for 500-1000 words, red for 1000+ words, and green for sending a story to critique. So far I have at least one star on every day of 2006.)
Tonight I was good and spent the whole evening writing. After looking over the ideas in my Writing Ideas file, and rejecting all those that were too big, required too much research, or just didn't appeal right now, I was left with about twenty -- all science fiction but one (and that one a weird one), and about half of those space-based. My last two stories were also space-based SF, so I wanted to do something different... but one of those ideas, one that dates back to Clarion, grabbed me. So I started in on it. It even has a title: "Second Chance" (which describes both the main character's situation and the larger situation of which he is a part).
Only one small problem: I think this might be shaping up to be a novel. Or at least a novella. Well, for once I'm just going to dive in, with the plot in my teeth, and see where I find myself when I emerge on the other side.
A snippet: "Uncurling, I grasped for an attach point, but misjudged my reach and scraped my hand on the rough plastic panel joint next to it. My body was all wrong -- too thin, too long, the skin as delicate as a baby's. Nothing was where I expected it to be. My heart started to pound again and I took slow, deep breaths to calm myself."
Posted 01/20/2006 23:30 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
No writing per se today. But I did put the story that was rejected by Cricket back in the mail, prepared the Carpet story for submission (but didn't send it, I want to take one more look at it before I seal the envelope), and got all the manuscripts for the Potlatch writers' workshop copied and mailed -- that last was a pretty serious chunk of paperwork. I also got money from the money machine, groceries from the automatic cash register, and postage from the automatic postal scale and postage dispenser... didn't interact with a single human being all evening.
Going over those manuscripts was kind of a weird experience, each one with its earnest cover letter: "Dear Mr. Levine, please find enclosed my application for the Potlatch writers' workshop..." Jeez. I'm just a fan who got lucky, you know?
By the way, we could still use one more pro for the workshop. If you are a pro writer or editor (and I have an exceedingly loose definition of "pro"), and if you're coming to Potlatch, and if you'd be willing to crit 5 manuscripts (the workshop is 4-7pm on Friday), drop me a note.
Posted 01/18/2006 22:53 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 897 | Since last entry: -3
Spent all day in a meeting (as I will be doing every day this week) and then, when I got back to my desk, locked myself out of the payroll system. I must have forgotten my password -- not too surprisingly, given that we are forced to change them frequently and use passwords complex enough that they can't easily be remembered -- and then the backup authentication system decided my answers for favorite color, favorite movie, and mother's maiden name weren't close enough. Probably case-sensitive or some such garbage. Then I found out the people who can unlock the account are all at an offsite today. So no paycheck for me today. (Mind you, I did get paid, by direct deposit -- I just can't print my paystub.)
Got home late, to find a nice rejection from Cricket in the mail. This on top of a critique I received by email on Monday, which said my main character was "Nazi-esque" and the science fiction premise "disregards commonly known facts, basic physics, etc," and some other news which I won't go into other than to note that I found it far more annoying than it deserved.
I rewrote the carpet story again tonight, for a net wordcount change of -3, but at this point I have zero confidence it's any good.
Posted 01/18/2006 00:28 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 900 | Since last entry: 197
And so we come to the end of a three-day weekend. Took it easy, didn't get a lot done. Tonight we had a book group meeting (discussing Sabriel by Garth Nix, which I found lacking in depth... but when I found out it was intended as YA, I became much more favorably disposed toward it) and then I took Kate to the airport, to catch a red-eye to New York. She'll be there for a week, helping our friend Lise clean up her late mother's apartment.
It's been a lightweight weekend for writing, as I said, but I did get some stuff done. Saturday I finished up the edits on the Jupiter story and sent it off for critique. Sunday I wrote about 200 words of notes on "Moonlight on the Carpet" (the story itself is only 900 words long) in response to critiques I received last week. Today I revised the story according to those notes... and the story died on the table.
The main problem with this story is that people get to the end and aren't sure what has happened. But when I added the information they need to understand the situation, the twist ending became obvious. I think I'm going to go back to the previous draft and revise again, this time trying to sneak in the necessary information closer to the end, so it's part of the ending rather than part of the set-up.
"In the dark outside the living room window, seagulls cawed and the surf rumbled, while the babysitter snored in the armchair with a book open on her lap. Mommy and Daddy never took Liam along when they went to the island on a full-moon night. They said that Ritual was not for little boys -- like the other deck of cards, the one with the pretty colored pictures that moved."
(That snippet is not going to be in the next revision... it gives too much away.)
Anyway, even though I only got in a net word count change of 15 today, and I'm going to undo that change tomorrow, I'm giving myself a silver star for an hour of editing.
Neither Kate nor I is very good at going to sleep at a reasonable hour when we're apart. So I braided some yarn and made us a couple of bracelets: blue to remind us to go to sleep, green to remind us to eat right, and red to remind us we love each other. We tied them on our wrists and will cut them off when she returns. Mine is telling me right now to stop blogging and go to bed, so I will do so.
Posted 01/16/2006 23:09 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 6487 | Since last entry: 654
Finished up this draft of the Jupiter story tonight. The ending didn't make me cry like the Eagle story did, but I did feel it pretty intensely. It's a hard ending for the protagonist, but I think it's a good one.
I'll look it over tomorrow and then send it for critique.
A snippet: "I had come home. Truly home, in a deeper, realer way than even my own personal module, which I built with my own hands, can ever be. Perhaps it was the solid press of real gravity, perhaps it was the constant presence of the horizon behind every building, perhaps it was the magnetic field or the tug of the moon or something even more subtle than that. Whatever the cause, something in my bones knew where it needed to be, and that was here."
Also: I was worried that there weren't going to be enough participants for the Potlatch 15 Writers' Workshops, which I am coordinating. But three manuscripts came in today, which makes four, so it looks like it's going to be okay. (The deadline is January 15, by the way.)
Posted 01/13/2006 23:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 5833 | Since last entry: 176
Most of this evening's writing consisted of a quick editing pass through the whole story so far, cleaning it up and looking for cues that my subconscious had planted toward the ending, then straightening them up so they all point in the same direction. Still not 100% sure what the actual ending will be but it's definitely shaping up.
A snippet: "I keyed the laser with Merganther's personal emergency code. He answered almost immediately, and I told him about the failing spar. I gave him my honest assessment of the severity of the situation, and I did not overstate the risk. But I didn't tell him about the bloom."
Thanks to those who have commented on the last couple of entries. I don't have the time to post replies right now, but your comments are appreciated.
Posted 01/12/2006 22:58 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 5657 | Since last entry: 315
The climax continues. My main character is in the process of making a decision that many people would see as evil. Can I do this and still have him be sympathetic? Maybe I need to show his second thoughts as well as his rationale...
A snippet: "For a moment I just gaped at the sight -- a jet of gas as big as three platforms spewing into space. Slowing the fragment down. Changing its orbit. By how much? Enough to make the difference between life and death for Earth? Maybe. Probably. I couldn't tell. Too many unknowns."
Posted 01/11/2006 23:22 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 5342 | Since last entry: 314
This is the place where this draft of the story is going to be most different from the last one. Having created a new main character and put him in the same situation, his crisis is different and the resolution has to be different as well. This character simply doesn't care about the things that were important to the previous one. But his problem is the same: Earth is threatened, but he has more important things to defend.
Last time I came >this close< to destroying the Earth at the end of the story. It could still happen.
I wrote up a thousand words of notes about what might happen at the climax. A key piece of broken equipment could be repairable or not, and there are two separate pieces of information the character could choose to lie or tell the truth about, which creates eight possibilities. I wrote up a paragraph or two about each possibility and the most dramatic things that could happen as a result. (Yes, this is how I write. Could have been worse -- I seriously considered drawing up a decision tree.)
Several of the possibilities make no sense. One leads to a straightforward heroic ending, which is satisfying in a conventional way but I want more moral complexity from this story. Two lead to ironic downer endings, which I don't want either. But two of them lead to unconventional endings with a twist in the tail, one of them more straightforward than the other. That's the one I'm now driving toward. However, I may change course as the climax shapes up. (And I can go back and change the lead-in if that would make a better ending.)
A snippet: "I tried to place an urgent call to Merganther, on Funnel One, but the quantar link was down again -- it had become more and more cranky as years wore on without proper replacement parts -- and the radio was even more badly shredded than usual by Earth's magnetic fields. All I could hear was the roar of static and occasional snatches of words."
Oh, also: today's email brought a rejection from Fantasy, and a note from the editor at Tor that he has no idea how long it will take the publisher to come to a decision about my novel. The rejected story will go right back in the mail just as soon as I decide where to send it next; the nails will continue to be bitten.
Posted 01/10/2006 22:26 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 5028 | Since last entry: 1503
As readers of her LiveJournal are aware, Kate has been on a decluttering kick lately, and we've managed to accumulate four grocery bags of books and one of CDs that we decided we can live without. So yesterday, after I spent most of the morning ripping CDs into iTunes, we headed off with our bags to get the books and CDs back into circulation.
The first place we went was Music Millennium, a fine local music store where we had a coupon good for an extra 15% on any used CD sales. But lots of other people were cleaning out their CD shelves, possibly attracted by the coupon, and we were warned of a two-hour wait for the CD buyer. So we took them to Everyday Music instead, where we amused ourselves with browsing the racks while the buyer evaluated our wares. We wound up spending only $50 over what our CDs brought in. Then we lugged the books to nearby Powell's, where there were three buyers on duty and we only had to stand in line for a few minutes. After which, of course, we had to hit the stacks. But this time we came out ahead, with $10 in store credit. So we wound up with a net expense of about $40 and replaced five bags of unwanted books and CDs with one small bag of (hopefully) wanted ones. Not that there is any room on the shelves for those.
After we got home from that expedition, I headed right back to Powell's, because I'd forgotten I had a couple of Xmas presents to return and I wanted to complete the decluttering expedition. (Not presents I'd received; books I'd bought as presents and then learned the intended recipient already had them.) I knew it was dangerous to go to Powell's again, especially with a card now loaded with another $20 in store credit, but this time I managed to get away with nothing more than a cup of coffee.
Amazingly, that whole expedition took less than three hours, including lunch. I spent the afternoon ripping more CDs and making sure that all three computers had the right music on them. But when Kate and I went to consolidate the music collection on the office computer (which I've begun thinking of as "her computer"), we discovered there wasn't enough free disk space to perform the consolidation.
This led to a deep philosophical discussion about extending the concept of decluttering to the office computer. I'd been thinking for some time that it needed a larger hard disk, but to Kate this seemed like buying a bigger house when what was really needed was to keep the current one tidy. My main concern was that by comparison with the multimedia files that we've been adding lately, any space we could reclaim by removing unwanted documents would be just a drop in the proverbial.
But then I thought of a major decluttering option that would free up at least four GB -- I could delete the operating system and all the applications.
Okay, I could delete an operating system and its applications. Specifically, when I upgraded this PC from Windows 98 to Windows XP I'd partitioned the hard disk and done a fresh install of XP on the new partition. So the first partition contains our documents directory and an operating system we haven't booted up in over a year. If I just got rid of Win98 I could make enough space for about 66 more CDs. (Hmm, not all that much. Still substantial, though.)
But I'm not dumb. I immediately began backing up the C: partition to the new fileserver, in case I deleted something I regretted later. Then we went to the Bagdad for pizza and Flightplan, which was rather implausible in spots but still an entertaining two hours of mindless fun. We got home just as the backup was finishing... and the verification phase started, which would take just as long. So I did my writing for the evening, but didn't post anything to my journal because that would require using the PC (long story).
This morning when I awoke I saw that the backup had completed and verified successfully. I checked that I could successfully restore a directory full of files, then deleted everything on the C: partition other than the documents directory. Despite a couple of warnings about deleting the Program Files directory, the deletion proceeded without error, freeing up large amounts of space and leaving the system still functional. I tried running some programs and all seemed okay.
But when I rebooted... ack! A black screen with "Can't find NTLDR"! Woe! I had stupidly forgotten that, although the C: drive's operating system was no longer in use, it was still the boot drive.
After staring and sweearing at the black screen for a while, I tried booting from several emergency boot floppies. None of them worked. But the WinXP install CD did boot, and offered a Recovery Console. But the Recovery Console was nothing more than a DOS prompt. How to recover the lost files, which were gone to wherever files go when you empty the Recycle Bin?
Fortunately, I had a working server with a complete, fresh backup of the C: drive. I ran upstairs and restored C:'s root directory to a temporary folder, then copied key files -- including AUTOEXEC.BAT and the critical NTLDR -- to a floppy. Then I copied the files from the floppy (one at a time, the Recovery Console version of COPY doesn't support wildcards) to the C: drive. Cross fingers, press Reset and... it lives!
Amazingly, I made it to work less than an hour later than usual.
A few more files did have to be restored... old apps that were still running from the C: drive, sound files, that sort of thing. But all in all the operation was a success. I was stupid enough to get myself in serious trouble, but smart enough to get out of it. Geek triumph! Never did consolidate Kate's iTunes library, though.
This evening we ate leftovers, did some grocery shopping, and I also did some writing. Most of the word count above is copied in from the previous draft, but I'm getting to the climax and that's demanding a serious rewrite. Expect to see slower progress in the next few days. And when I finish, I need to go back and fix up the timescale a bit, and also restore some of the vast scope that the previous draft had -- the new draft is more personal and visceral for the main character, but as a side effect it's also lost some of its sensawunda.
Posted 01/09/2006 23:27 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 3525 | Since last entry: 759
I had a mind-numbing list of Things to Do today, but somehow the day just went "voom" without getting more than a few of them done.
It started off when I was just getting my act together after arising, when Kate suggested we go to the gym. Which I had to agree would be a good idea, but with one thing and another it took us quite a while to get moving, and when we got there we found the gym packed with new year's resolution people. The mad crush usually passes by February, but for now it was crazy -- we just did 20 minutes of cardio and came home.
After that I had some critiques to do, and some other chores like cleaning and putting away the Hanukkah menorah, before critique group in the afternoon. Then we had just time to fix and eat dinner before my corporate holiday party (which is held in January -- kind of nice, actually, in that it doesn't interfere with any other holiday parties).
The party was pretty enjoyable for a work-related event, with free drinks and hors d'ouvres and blackjack, craps, and roulette tables for entertainment, but the music and the standing around in dress shoes got to be a little too much so we went home early and watched the Season 2½ premiere of Battlestar Galactica. Then I did a little more writing -- like yesterday, most of the wordcount above is copied from the previous draft.
A snippet: "I emerged into a motionless, darkened industrial station. The angular forms of platforms under construction jutted all around, harshly illuminated by white emergency pinpoints. Here and there a cable or tool floated free, left unsecured in the rapid evacuation, but there was no sign of the reason for that evacuation."
Many more Things to Do this weekend. Tomorrow will be a busy day.
Posted 01/07/2006 23:22 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 2766 | Since last entry: 110
I neglected to mention yesterday that I got an update from the editor on my novel. He says that he liked the revisions and has passed my revised manuscript along to the publisher with his strong endorsement. Now we both get to wait for the publisher's decision. Breath held, fingers crossed, etc.
Went to a square dance tonight, for the first time in many months. We missed the opening hour of C-2 (a level which Kate dances but I don't, so I can do some writing while she dances) due to bad luck with dinner. We went to a local Mexican joint for a quick burrito and wound up waiting while the cashier told stories of his first job to the people in line ahead of us. Eventually we simply bailed, and went to a nearby Japanese place, where our dinner took a lot longer to arrive than it usually does. Grr all around.
So I didn't do much writing during the dance, and when I got home I wrote the bare minimum to make my 100 words for the day. More tomorrow.
A snippet: "But while those of us who had invested early in the Project grew wealthy, poor Jupiter wasted away. His weather systems disrupted by the constant sucking of the Funnels, old Jove shrank from a proud banded beauty to a muddy, muddled yellow-brown gasball, and even his parade of attendant moons was cleared away to create a safer work environment. I found the sight depressing, so I buried myself in my work."
Posted 01/06/2006 22:53 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 2656 | Since last entry: 1452
A productive day at work, some coding and some meetings, very little drama. Got home from work reasonably early, fixed an interesting chicken-and-cranberry recipe Kate clipped from the paper, then sat down to write much earlier than usual. Still going to bed later than I should. Kate's still having problems with the iPod... it's supposed to be easy to use, but under Windows it's sometimes kind of flaky.
Don't get too excited about the word count above. Only about 200 words of that is new; the rest is copied in from the previous draft (which isn't really a "draft", it was finished and submitted and came very close at several markets, including a rewrite request from F&SF). But I did make some significant changes in the copied material. I'm giving myself a gold star for the day.
A snippet: "Just getting the black holes to stabilize was a nightmare. The only tools we had were superconducting magnets the size of small moons, and if one of them decided to quench you wouldn't even have the time to say your prayers. We lost half the hole team in one instant, when someone bobbled the matter feed and hole number four went straight from black to white without stopping for breakfast. We had invested a substantial portion of the genome money in the latest backup and restore equipment, of course, but the prospect of sudden death was still terrifying."
Posted 01/05/2006 23:15 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 1204 | Since last entry: 308
As you can tell from the timestamps of my last few entries, I've been staying up stupidly late to get my writing done. I came home today tired and headachy and firmly committed to an early bedtime.
After a quick and simple dinner (soup made with instant Tom Yum soup paste from the Asian market, a yummy recent find) we set out to take our comforter and mattress pad to the laundromat and wash them in the big machines there. This looked like a win, because I could sit and write while we waited. But first Kate wanted to load up her iPod with some podcasts to listen to at the laundromat, and there were some frustrating technical problems (iTunes on the PC doesn't always seem to notice that the iPod has been docked), so it got kind of late before we even hauled the stuff out to the car.
I don't think we've gone to a laundromat once since we moved into this house. The first place we tried was completely empty of anything but washers and dryers -- no other people, no place to sit, and no heat. The second was so skanky-looking we didn't even slow down as we drove past. The third was just about to close. So we drove our bedding back home, with a frustrating detour caused by several police cars blocking a major street, lights flashing (I suppose we'll find out in tomorrow's paper what the fuss was about). I finally sat down to write about 9:30 -- still tired and headachy, plus frustrated. I'm not sure I'm completely happy with tonight's wordage, but it's still over 100 words so I'm giving myself a silver star on the calendar.
A snippet: "During that period I traveled to Earth only when there was no alternative. By comparison with the clean expansive future we hoped to bring about, Earth seemed a sewer jammed with people too stupid to see how badly they were fouling their own nest."
Posted 01/04/2006 22:49 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 896 | Since last entry: 337
First off, I'd like to point out that the deadline for the Potlatch 15 Taste of Clarion West Writers' Workshop, which I am coordinating, is January 15. That is, manuscripts must be received by then. If you've been thinking about participating, now's the time to take action.
With that out of the way... one of the two radio stations I listen to with any regularity is KINK, whose slogan is "True to the Music" (the other is KOPB, the public radio station). I really like KINK's playlist, which is a mix of old and new stuff unlike any other station in town. But I don't always catch the names of the artists and songs, which means that there are a lot of songs I enjoy but couldn't pick out of a line-up (or, more to the point, out of the rack at a used CD store). So today I had a brainstorm. KINK makes its playlist available online. I wrote a shellscript to read the playlist and output a web page that searches for a song, artist, or album in the iTunes Music Store with a single click. Now I can start with an alphabetized list of KINK songs and easily hear a 30-second snippet that tells me which one is which. I hope to find out soon who my favorite artists are. Kate's also excited by this tool.
The 337 words above is a bit of a cheat, since I brought in a couple of paragraphs from the previous draft of the story (so much for a from-the-ground-up rewrite). But they're good paragraphs, and I see no reason to leave perfectly good words just lying around unused. I suspect I'm not going to be able to reuse a lot of verbiage, though, because the world of the story is a lot grittier in this draft and the main character's much more of a hot-headed punk.
A snippet: "A few hours and a lot of kif later we were both scratching equations on the table top with an emergency rescue tool, shouting back and forth and grinning like idiots. When we ran out of table we started in on the wall."
Posted 01/03/2006 23:38 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 559 | Since last entry: 234
Not much in the house for dinner tonight, but I looked in the fridge and spotted a pie crust and a carton of eggs. Quiche! A little more digging found Canadian bacon, some nice Cheddar, broccoli, and some mushrooms, so it turned out to be a very nice one. Unfortunately, it took quite a while to solidify and we didn't sit down to dinner until about 8:30. It was good, though. After that I set out for the store so we wouldn't have to scrounge up dinner again tomorrow. It was 10:00 by the time the groceries were put away, but lo! I am a dedicated writer. And I didn't want to blow off my new year's resolution on January 2. So. 234 more words and it's definitely turning into a much more engaged and visceral story. But now it's time for bed.
Posted 01/02/2006 23:08 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count: 325 | Since last entry: 325
I am disappointed in myself. 2005 was a good year for publications, but a wretched year for production and sales. I wrote only two new stories, one a collaboration, and made only one pro sale. Basically, I took a break after submitting the novel and (for a variety of reasons including being called upon to do some addional novel-related work, but also including my own laziness) never got back on the horse. As a result of this, I currently have only four stories in submission and no sold stories awaiting publication. I fear that I may have sabotaged my career.
So. That's going to change.
My new year's resolution is to write a hundred words a day, no matter what. I know that this is a very achievable goal -- I can write 500 words an hour when I get rolling. The point of the hundred-word goal is to get my butt in the chair and writing, even on days when I "don't feel like it." I'm not making any commitments about what I'm going to write. Could be new stories, could be rewrites on existing stories, could be a new novel. But I'm going to put my butt in my chair and by God write.
I'm off to a good start, with 325 words on a from-the-ground-up rewrite of the Jupiter story (despite not getting back from dinner until 10pm). This story has had near-misses at all the major markets and the consensus of the editors is that it's too distanced; the main character is all reflection and reaction, not action, and the whole story's told in flashback. So I'm rewriting it from scratch, with the same plot outline but a new main character: an engineer instead of a photographer. If I can keep up this pace I should be done in two or three weeks, and that would feel good. Wish me luck!
Posted 01/01/2006 23:54 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Back from a delightful New Year's Eve party at Willow Cottage, and just about to head off to a New Year's Day brunch, followed by a movie and dinner with some other friends. Just enough time for a quick note while the biscuits are baking.
As faithful readers will no doubt recall, the Day Job was eating my life in the first half of December. So I didn't even start my Xmas* shopping until about December 20, and we didn't buy a tree until the 23rd. Never did get the lights up (lights are important to me, especially in these latitudes where I drive to work in the dark and drive home in the dark for months at a time).
Kate's sister Sue came in on the 24th with our two younger nieces, ages 2 and 6. They made the house... lively. I don't deal well with small children. And when we opened the presents on the 25th, what I found under the tree for me was a book, 3 CD's, some napkins, and a table runner. All carefully chosen and apropos, but not exciting. We also got a nice package of goodies from Kate's parents the previous week, but those had mostly been eaten already.
So the excitement didn't really start for me until Thursday, when a package arrived from John Helmer (one of the nation's finest haberdashers, which just happens to be located right here in Portland). It contained the present I'd requested from Kate: a collapsible top hat. It had to be special ordered in my size (1/8" smaller than Bullwinkle's). It made me go squee! I wore it to New Year's Eve and got many compliments.
Then on Friday, another package arrived, containing two Squeezebox music players. Briefly, the Squeezebox is a small device that has a Wi-Fi antenna on one end and stereo plugs on the other. It makes all of the music stored on your computer available to your stereo. Along with a new file server installed in the attic, and a Kloss Model Two radio for the dining room we now have high-quality digital music available throughout the house, something we've wanted for years. This was my big present to Kate for the year.
Biscuits are done. Time to go!
* I'm using "X" here as a variable, to stand for The Winter Holiday of Your Choice.
Posted 01/01/2006 12:40 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
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