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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Meanwhile, life goes on

Apart from the Mars thing, I haven't had a single substantive blog post this month. Sorry about that.

In mid-December we spent five days at Walt Disney World. We had a blast. My favorite part of the trip was the Animal Kingdom, which is basically a world-class zoo with thrill rides and shows; my favorite ride was Mission: Space at Epcot, a simulated trip to Mars (and at the time I had no idea I'd be taking the next step on that trip in January). I've posted pictures from the trip over at Flickr.

By going to Disney World halfway between Thanksgiving and Christmas we avoided crowds almost completely. Between the lack of crowds, willingness to hit the parks right when they opened, and cunning use of The Unofficial Guide and RideMax software we could basically do whatever we wanted without having to stand in line for more than ten minutes. And unlike 1992, the food was excellent -- our dinner at Jiro, in the Animal Kingdom Lodge, was a standout.

This was the first time I'd ever tried one of those package vacations and it worked really well. Southwest Airlines had a special of "buy one airfare, get one free" and "buy one Disney ticket, get one free" which meant that the whole trip cost ony $1800: two people, five days, including airfare, hotel, and car. We stayed on-property at Port Orleans French Quarter and it was lovely and oh so convenient. I'd do it again, for sure.

Even while we were at Disney the writing has continued. I haven't missed a single writing day this year, though in December I've bumped my words-per-day quota down from 500 to 250. It's become rather a chore, unfortunately, and so I am going to continue this regime for only one more day (365 days in a row) and then take January 1 off. Having broken the streak I will then be free to try something different in the new year.

I made a sale last week... well, I say "sale" but it was really only that I received the contract for a submission that had been informally accepted some weeks ago. My novella "Second Chance" will be in Alembical II from Paper Golem LLC, appearing some time next year.

Much of this week has been consumed in Mars prep. I bought a bunch of stuff, such as a new sleeping bag and gloves, which will be necessary for the cold dry desert. I've been reading a lot; maintenance and operations of the simulated Mars habitat are complicated and tricky. And I've already started my work as crew journalist by copy-editing the crew bios which have just been posted. It is an impressive bunch of people and I feel rather as though I'm just along for the ride. I hope that I can pull my weight by assisting in the science and engineering as well as doing my primary job which is to document and publicize the mission.

Life goes on. Chop wood, carry water.

Posted 12/31/2009 13:11 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Novel words written: 16,426
Short fiction words written: 51,887
Notes, outline, and synopsis words written: 10,153
Blog words written: 34,281
Total words written: 112,747

New stories written: 9 (8 fiction, 1 non-fiction)
Existing stories revised: 1

Short fiction submissions sent: 63
Responses received: 61
Rejections: 42
Acceptances: 8 (6 pro, 2 semi-pro)
Other responses: 6 (rewrite requests)
Other sales: 5 (1 reprint, 1 translation, 3 audio)
Non-responses: 4 (2 magazines folded, 2 never replied)
Awaiting response: 6

Short stories published: 12 (5 pro, 1 semi-pro, 2 reprint, 1 translation, 3 audio)

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

Endeavour Award nominations: 1
Endeavour Awards won: 1

Happy New Year!

Posted 12/31/2009 11:45 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Man, it is so weird when you hear on the radio "David Levine died yesterday"...

(The David Levine who died was the New York Review of Books caricaturist, probably the most famous living person of that name. Now the rest of us move up one step.)

Posted 12/30/2009 08:23 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Well, not the actual Mars. But pretty darn close.

As faithful readers will no doubt recall, back on December 7 I posted a blog entry in which I listed my space travel wish list, starting with an actual stay in orbit ($35 million) and ending with a zeppelin ride ($500). #2 on that list was to participate in a simulated Mars mission (cost unknown, time commitment substantial).

See, the Mars Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the exploration and settlement of Mars, maintains a couple of simulated Mars habitats -- the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah and the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS) in Canada -- where volunteers perform real research on geology, astronomy, and medicine in a simulated Mars environment (complete with space suits).

Well, my old college friend Steve Sywak commented on that post that he knew someone in the Mars Society. We exchanged emails about this, the end result of which was that on December 22 I sent an email to one Ed Fisher wondering if there was any possibility of me spending a week or two on "Mars". He replied on December 23 that he was no longer involved with the Mars Society but "I'm sure they would be interested in your application for a crew position. ... The current season is underway, so you would probably need to wait for next season; however, it can't hurt to apply now, because sometimes there are crew cancellations for various reasons."

The application process was quite simple but it did call for a resume, and for a variety of reasons I hadn't updated mine since 2001. However, with the benefit of distance and a "what the hell" attitude, the usual resume-updating angst was absent and I was able to update it (and shorten it from three pages to two) in only about an hour. I sent off my application to the Mars Society on the evening of December 23.

I awoke on December 24 to an email from Artemis Westenberg of the Mars Society. Even the little snippet of the message I could see in my inbox made me go "Guh?!"

I have no idea how flexible in dates you are
but for crew 88 we indeed have an opening (9-23 January 2010)
the lady who was supposed to be part of that crew works at Johnson Space Center in Houston
and her bosses told her very recently that she can not be part of that crew this season
I have read your resume and would like to invite you to be part of that crew

I took a few hours to think about it, but really there was no question. I accepted the invitation at noon on December 24 and bought my plane tickets that night.

So in less than two weeks I will be on my way to "Mars" (actually a stretch of desert near Hanksville, Utah), where I will spend two weeks as a member of MDRS crew 88. The other members are Commander Stephen Wheeler (Professor at DeVry University, Texas); Health Officer Bianca Nowak (High School Teacher, Belgium); Astronomer Paul McCall (Graduate Student at Florida International University, Florida); Biologist Diego Urbina (Electrical Engineer, Bogota, Columbia); and Engineer/XO Laksen Sirimanne (Biomedical Engineer, California). My own crew position is Journalist. I don't yet know what experiments this crew will be performing or exactly what my duties and responsibilities will be. This has all happened so very fast and I don't anticipate it's going to slow down soon. I'll keep you posted.

You know the character who joins the mission at the last minute? The non-expert -- under-trained, ill-prepared, and in over his head -- who gives the reader someone to identify with and the author a perfect excuse to info-dump? Well, that's me.

I am excited, honored, and rather stunned.

For more information on MDRS, please see the MDRS web page, especially the press kit and photos. Laksen has a blog and has posted information on the location of the MDRS.

My mind is strangely bifurcated. On the one hand, I have two weeks to prepare for a two-week camping trip in the desert with five people I've never met, and there are lots of practical details to arrange.

On the other hand...

I'M GOING TO MARS!!

Posted 12/25/2009 13:00 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 10524 | Since last entry: -1216

In honor of today's unveiling of SpaceShipTwo, the first commercial spacecraft, here's a wish list I've held in my head for some years:

1. Actual stay in orbit (e.g. via Soyuz to ISS - $35,000,000)
2. Simulated Mars mission (e.g. FMARS - cost unknown, substantial time commitment)
3. Sub-orbital flight (e.g. Virgin Galactic - $200,000)
4. Zero-G experience (e.g. ride on the Vomit Comit - $5000)
5. Simulated astronaut training (e.g. Space Camp - $500-900)
6. Zeppelin ride (e.g. Airship Ventures - $200-500)

Posted 12/07/2009 20:19 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 11740 | Since last entry: 2849

Finished the first draft of... um, this thing I'm working on. Which definitely isn't a short story, at almost 12,000 words, but I don't think really deserves to be a novelette... it's not a novelette-sized plot. I think it must have a lot of stuff that can be removed. But it isn't really meant to be an independent story anyway, it's meant to be a chapter of a novel, or to be more accurate a story in a book that's a collection of stories about the same characters. (This is all new to me and I'm still figuring it out.) It's probably too long for a chapter anyway. I'll see what I can do about editing it today.

I don't think this is the first story/chapter in the book, either. Nor do I have even a vague idea what I'm going to write next. Whee!

Also: celebrated the Endeavour Award win by buying myself a new MacBook Pro. Shiny! I now have an iBook G4, in great shape, for sale at a reasonable price.

In other news...

• Applications open today for next summer's Taos Toolbox workshop, a two-week master class for SF/F writers taught by Walter Jon Williams, Nancy Kress, and Carrie Vaughn.
• Applications are already open for next summer's Clarion West workshop, an intensive six-week workshop for SF/F writers taught by Michael Bishop, Maureen McHugh, Nnedi Okorafor, Graham Joyce, Ellen Datlow, and Ian McDonald.
• The current Wild Cards trilogy wraps up with Suicide Kings, the concluding volume of the Committee Triad, which will be released on December 22. To celebrate, Pat's Fantasy Hotlist is having a contest to win copies of the first two volumes. (I'm not in this trilogy, but Wild Cards is too cool not to blog about.)

Posted 12/01/2009 13:20 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

To my astonishment, I seem to have won the Endeavour Award!

Space Magic was selected over worthy competitors Anathem by Neal Stephenson; Ill Met in the Arena by Dave Duncan; Long Walks, Last Flights and Other Stories by Ken Scholes; and A World Too Near by Kay Kenyon by judges Joe Haldeman, John Helfers, and Sarah Zettel.

Thanks to the judges, everyone who read books for the award, members of the Lucky Lab Rats crit group, Mary Hobson for suggesting I try to get a collection published, Deborah Layne for publishing it, and Kate Yule for love and support.

The award comes with a $1000 check and an engraved glass trophy. I really did not expect to win it.

Posted 11/30/2009 00:25 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 8891 | Since last entry: 5201

Last week I sold two stories in one day: "A Passion for Art" to Interzone and a reprint of "Nucleon" to Retro Spec: Tales of Fantasy and Nostalgia.

I originally write "A Passion for Art" way back in 2000, inspired by a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago after the Worldcon that year; I believe it was the first story I wrote after Clarion. I got it critiqued at a workshop at the following OryCon, and the responses I got there convinced me it needed serious work. I set it aside... and for reasons lost in the mists of time I didn't get back to it until 2008, when I cleaned it up for a different convention workshop. I didn't wind up sending it to that workshop, but decided it was in good enough shape to submit. It was rejected by 8 other markets (including sitting at one magazine for 145 days, ending with the magazine's death, then being resubmitted when the magazine revived and being immediately rejected) before settling at Interzone.

"Nucleon" is one of my earliest and most popular stories, and this is its fifth reprint. It was a little long for Retro Spec but I sent it along anyway because it seemed perfect for the market. Apparently the editor agreed.

This coming weekend is OryCon, where I will be appearing on a bunch of programming, including the Endeavour Award ceremony -- where I expect that Space Magic will lose to Anathem, but hope springs eternal -- following which I will portray a crazed director in Opening Ceremonies. Anyone up for dinner after that? I'll be starving.

If you're in Portland but not attending OryCon, perhaps you can come to Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton for the third annual Sci-Fi Authorfest where a whole bunch of SF authors who just happen to be in town for some reason will be signing books for the Thanksgiving weekend shoppers. We'll be ably defended by the stormtroopers of the Cloud City Garrison of the 501st Imperial Legion.

Finally, even though I do not have a story in Polyphony 7, I'm pleased to see that it has a chance to finally be published -- if you, the book buying public, support it by pre-ordering it. See this blog post for details.

Posted 11/24/2009 10:00 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Spotted this gem in Michael Swanwick's interview with Rick Lkeffel in the World Fantasy Convention program book:

"As a writer, I consciously try to make what I write exciting for the reader -- to give him or her more than just a really well-written change on something they've read before. I try to give each story something that the reader has never encountered before. Something as big and obvious and wonderful as a giant striding the downs with dinosaurs and tribes of stone-age elves living in the forests atop his head is worth any number of polished and lapidarian phrases."

Word.

Posted 11/21/2009 11:24 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 3690 | Since last entry: 1502

Still plugging away on the YA fantasy. I feel my brain trying to impose plot, but I'm trying to continue just driving where my headlights can see.

Luke McGuff posted a video of a really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, happy dog (ETA: fixed link), to which I commented "I have never before heard Doppler shift on a squeeky toy." For this feat of scientific detection I have been named an Improbable Research Investigator.

I received a fat envelope from F&SF, which I tore open with great excitement. But it wasn't a contract... just a rejection with some suggestions on tightening the opening. Alas. (And no, it wasn't a subtle rewrite request.)

In his year-end round-up of Realms of Fantasy, Rich Horton calls my "Joy is the Serious Business of Heaven" one of the best short stories in the magazine this year.

Artisan booksmith Todd Sanders is hand-making a few bound copies of my zeppelin story "Love in the Balance." You can see a picture of the work in progress here.

On Sunday November 29, I will be participating in Sci-Fi Authorfest III at Powell's Books in Beaverton. This multi-author booksigning event starts at 4:00 PM and includes Lilith Saintcrow, Camille Alexa, Barb and J.C. Hendee, Devon Monk, Brenda Cooper, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, Alma Alexander, Louise Marley, and others, plus the Cloud City Garrison of the 501st Imperial Legion.

The OryCon 31 program schedule has been posted. Gosh, that's only two weeks away!

Posted 11/13/2009 13:23 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2188 | Since last entry: 2188

After far too many weeks of research, noodling, and outlining, none of which seemed to be going anywhere, I decided to adopt a new strategy: just start writing. I'm driving cross-country in the dark with no map, no destination, and no visibility beyond the reach of my headlights. It feels weird and I can see plenty of problems in what I've written so far, which I know will have to be heavily edited when I'm done, but at least I'm putting down words and it feels good.

This is an unusual writing strategy for me, but for the moment it seems to be working. This book is not like anything else I've written because I'm already familiar with (a version of) the characters and setting and because it's structured as a collection of related short stories. I was beating myself up about the linking überplot and character arc that ties them all together, but I've given up on that for now. I'm just writing one story about these characters (not even necessarily the first story in the book), and when I'm done with that one I'll write another, and after I've written a few I bet I'll understand what bigger things are happening and I'll be able to put the stories I have into the correct order and insert the necessary bits to expose to the reader the überplot that, in some subconscious way, was there all along.

I'm putting a lot of trust in my subconscious here. This is kind of the opposite progression from what Jay Lake did with his New Model Process a year or two ago, but then his process and mine started off very different and I'm sure we have different lessons to learn.

Alas, the writing isn't going any faster this way -- still about 500 words a day -- but at least I'm moving.

Posted 11/10/2009 11:26 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I attended my first World Fantasy Convention in Seattle in 1989, when a friend was running Hospitality and needed people to help. I didn't really enjoy it -- it's basically a professonal conference for writers, editors, and agents and has little for the fans. That was before I was writing fiction professionally. Today it's one of my favorite conventions of the year.

The convention started out a little shaky. Our Southwest Airlines flight from Portland to San Jose was running about a half-hour late, and we were just starting to wonder what was up when I got this rather strange email on my phone:

However, as the gate agent explained a minute or two later, we didn't actually have to fly PDX-SJC-LAX, LAX-PDX-SJC. It turned out that the plane had been delayed by mechanical problems to the extent that it jeopardized people's connections in LAX, so they skipped the SJC stop and gave the few of us who were actually getting off in SJC tickets on an LAX-SJC flight that left LAX almost immediately, so that we only spent about ten minutes in LAX. Although this change turned our one-hour nonstop flight into a five-hour detour, I think it was well-handled: they communicated the problem well, gave priority to people with connections, and provided an immediate solution to the rest of us. Kudos to Southwest.

Once we got there, this year's WFC was one of the best I can remember, indeed one of my favorite cons in a long time. Being on the West Coast, a lot of my writer friends were there; the hotel and its location, close to many fine restaurants in downtown San Jose, were excellent; and there was a great bar where everyone could hang out (unlike, for example, the Montreal Worldcon where there was no single obvious gathering place).

I didn't attend a lot of programming that I wasn't on. I was actually on two program items: a reading from the four DayBreak Magazine writers, which was remarkably well attended considering it was opposite the mass signing, and an uproarious Improv Storytelling event with Jay Lake and Mary Robinette Kowal about which someone later told me "I peed my pants laughing." Most of my time was spent hanging out in the bar, the halls, and occasionally a party, talking with my friends and peers.

This seemed to be my con for meeting cool Portland people I hadn't known existed: Lee Moyer, Victoria Blake, and Carlton Mellick III. I also met and was blown away by Seanan McGuire and Kate Secor, who fling off quotable quips like some cats shed hair -- now I know how some people feel around me and Kate. (Just one example: I debated with Seanan whether the ASL sign for "moose lobotomist" should end with the sign for "doctor" or the suffix "-ist.") I also got to hang out with some people I'd met before but never spent a lot of time with, including Grá and Jennifer Linnea and Laura Anne Gilman. I hadn't realized I was getting Grá and Chris Reynaga mixed up, but now I think I'll be able to tell them apart.

Most of the con, though, I spent hanging out with writer friends from all over, whom I will not attempt to enumerate for fear of missing someone. I don't think I schmooze very effectively at these things -- I should have been chatting up book editors a lot more than I did -- but I got a lot of good writing advice and a few useful rumors as well as a lot of laughs.

At one point in the con I suffered a bout of Imposter Syndrome. What am I doing here? I whined to myself. I don't even have one published novel!. I got over it, though, and shortly after the con Kristine Kathryn Rusch posted an entry in her Freelancer's Guide series that helped me to understand what was going on in my head during that time. This quote in particular, from Robert Silverberg, nailed it: "My career, marked as it has been by triumph after triumph, has often seemed to me like nothing but a formidable struggle." We don't see our own successes, only our problems. Read Kris's post for more useful insights on the hazards of success.

Apart from that one moment of bleakness, though, it was an excellent excellent con and I'm really looking forward to next year's WFC even though it's in Columbus, Ohio.

Oh, one other thing. This was my first con with an iPhone and I got into Twitter in a big, big way. There was a lot of Twittering at this con; see this post by Scott Edelman for one perspective on just how useful this minimal communication method can be. (My story "horrorhouse" was also inspired by Twitter.) So, for my own future reference as much as anything, I'm including my tweets from the con below:

10/28/09 11:19 AM: Flight change: our direct flight PDX-SJC is now shown as PDX-SJC-LAX-LAX-PDX-SJC. (Not really -- but we are now changing planes in LA.)
10/28/09 3:20 PM: Only spent about 10 minutes at LAX; now on board plane to SJC.
10/28/09 6:32 PM: After a short side jaunt to LAX, we have arrived at #wfc2009! About to go for tapas with Sara Mueller and her friends Chris and Chris.
10/28/09 7:43 PM: Sangria Oobleck! "Sounds like a Bond villain."
10/28/09 10:32 PM: Was afraid book bag this year would be paltry on account of the economy. But no! Bigger than ever! Some good stuff too.
10/29/09 10:18 AM: Breakfast at Bijan Bakery & Cafe. Pastries 10, service 3. Good quiche, free wifi.
10/29/09 2:31 PM: Visited the outdoor History San Jose museum; nice cheap lunch at tacqueria at Willow & Vine; now at The Tech for the Star Trek exhibit.
10/29/09 9:46 PM: Ellen Klages's Google Hand beats Google on iPhone in timed test!
10/30/09 8:01 AM: Awake. Spent entire evening in the bar. Much good conversation and laying of fiendish plans. Shower now, then search for breakfast.
10/30/09 8:25 AM: Kate found a place that's supposed to have good chilaquiles, about 15 minutes' walk away. Leaving shortly.
10/30/09 9:39 AM: Not sure whether the name of this place is 5 Spot or Chivas Grill but the food is good.
10/30/09 10:47 AM: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro on likeable vs. interesting characters: "If I were Watson I'd take a frying pan and whack Holmes on the head."
10/30/09 1:49 PM: RT @Shineanthology: David D. Levine's “horrorhouse” is is now live at DayBreak Magazine: http://is.gd/4IqqO and http://is.gd/4IquO .
10/30/09 1:55 PM: I will be reading from my DayBreak story "horrorhouse" tonight (Friday Oct. 30), 9 PM, Crystal Room. It's not in the program book!
10/30/09 3:07 PM: I'll have my zeppelin call your zeppelin. We'll do lunch.
10/30/09 7:27 PM: We ordered the sushi boat at Kazoo. Good thing we ordered the small one! http://twitpic.com/nm3sb
10/30/09 9:12 PM: Time for the DayBreak reading in the Crystal Room! (Tweeting about this particular story is extremely apropos.)
10/31/09 12:01 AM: Spent evening in con suite, crashed ~12am. @LAGilman accuses me of wimping out, insists on seeing me up later Sunday. Yes ma'am!
10/31/09 8:34 AM: Awake. At the SFWA meeting. Why?
10/31/09 9:01 AM: Just FYI, @nkjemisin has the most fabulousest hall costume EVAR.
10/31/09 10:42 AM: Michael Swanwick compares steampunk to NASCAR: both are "revolutions of joy" taking pride in exciting technology.
10/31/09 10:45 AM: How to kill steampunk: drive a brass stake through its heart and bury it at a train crossing
10/31/09 10:50 AM: Anne Vandermeer is reading from http://tinyurl.com/4577tt Brilliant!
10/31/09 11:10 AM: I actually hate it when other people post about events (that I'm not at) as frequently as I've been posting about #wfc2009 -- sorry folks
10/31/09 11:42 AM: Listening to @gregvaneekhout read Kid vs. Squid. Hilarious! Next, @jay_lake, @MaryRobinette, and me doing Improv Storytelling
10/31/09 2:00 PM: Falafel lunch w/@LAGilman & @KateYule. Nap time now. It may surprise you to learn that being "on" like that takes a lot out of me.
10/31/09 3:09 PM: Cool reading by Zoe Washburne #imaginaryRealWFC2009
10/31/09 5:32 PM: ...brief gloomy bout of Imposter Syndrome...
10/31/09 9:20 PM: Even worse than having your e-published story pirated is having it used as bait on spam/virus sites.
10/31/09 11:08 PM: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell them panel raised literally buckets of money for Variety Children's Charity
10/31/09 11:25 PM: Remember folks: Spring Back, Fall Over.
11/1/09 7:41 AM: HOTEL INTERNET DOWN STOP AT&T REDUCED FROM 3G TO EDGE SPEED STOP MAY BE REDUCED TO SMOKE SIGNALS SOON STOP
11/1/09 8:47 AM: This conversation with @seananmcguire and @aiglet is so dripping with tweets that I cannot possibly do it justice.
11/1/09 10:21 AM: At the at-con post office, sending a big box of books home. This convention is dangerous.
11/1/09 2:21 PM: Skipped the banquet in favor of dim sum with square dance friends (Mayflower) and a visit to a yarn shop (Pearlescent).
11/1/09 4:32 PM: It's reached the point in the convention where I have to count my brain cells and make sure I have enough to get home...
11/1/09 5:53 PM: Every time I tweet, another brain cell dies. "With my last brain cell I tweet at thee!"
11/2/09 11:16 AM: Had breakfast at Bijal and saw Kij Johnson, just like the first morning of the con. Now at SJC for the flight home.
11/2/09 12:39 PM: After surprisingly good sushi at Sora in the airport, we're on board the plane to Portland. And there's wifi on this flight!
11/2/09 3:56 PM: Home safe to find THIS as the view from our front porch. Good thing we moved the cars before we left. http://twitpic.com/o2a5j

Posted 11/06/2009 16:53 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

You can now read my story "horrorhouse" online at DayBreak Magazine. Enjoy!

Posted 11/06/2009 14:24 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

We've got our tickets for Australia!

The original plan was to buy economy-class tickets, upgrade to business class with miles, and stop over in Singapore on the way. That plan fell through when it turned out that Singapore's in a different "region" and the stopover would turn the trip into three separate legs. Then it turned out that upgradeable economy class tickets were insanely expensive (not as bad as business class, but more than twice the non-upgradeable fare). But it was possible to buy enough miles to obtain business-class tickets outright. Also, looking at the itineraries of the Star Alliance partners we thought we'd be able to stop over in New Zealand on the way. But that too proved infeasible -- New Zealand Air is extremely stingy in releasing business-class tickets to its partners.

So here's what we wound up with: we'll be flying business class PDX-LAX-SYD-MEL, departing on August 25 and returning on September 22. The Worldcon is in Melbourne September 2-6 and our itinerary is otherwise completely open.

Business class makes a HUGE difference on a flight this long. Because of the arbitrariness of upgrade awards I was really worried we wouldn't be able to get it, so I'm greatly relieved. The additional miles we had to buy to make this possible cost a little more than one economy-class ticket, so we're flying business class for about half the price of economy (plus, of course, every single mile in both our accounts).

Now that we've reduced our United mileage balance to near zero, I'm seriously considering switching to Alaska as my primary mileage account. United does fly everywhere but it's sometimes been extremely unpleasant to deal with them.

Posted 11/05/2009 09:23 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

A surprising amount of good writing-related news has arrived in the last week.

While I was in Albuquerque I received an email acceptance from Escape Pod for a podcast of "Wind from a Dying Star," which was my first professionally-published story. It should appear on the podcast early next year.

I came home to find in the paper mail a contract from Analog for my short story "Pupa." This was the story I was working on during RaceFail, with a protagonist of color. I'm pleased to say that I finished it, sent it to my critique group, revised it, sent it out, got a couple of rejections, got a rewrite request from Stan Schmidt, rewrote it as requested, and sold it! Now we'll see what people think of it when it appears, probably some time next year.

A couple of days later I received an email from an editor indicating that he liked a story I sent him for an anthology he's working on. Unfortunately, he won't know until next year whether or not there's room in that anthology for it. But if there isn't, he says, he'll take it for a new online magazine he's editing. (Just to keep me humble, he also rejected another story I sent him for a different anthology.) I'll let you know more as soon as I have it.

And just the day before yesterday, I learned that "The Tale of the Golden Eagle" will be translated into French, in the anthology Légendes edited by Jacques Fuentealba, to be published in March 2010 by Céléphaïs. I submitted that one over a year ago and had managed to forget all about it, so that was a very pleasant surprise.

I also have one more acceptance pending, I believe, but I'll wait until I have a contract in hand before saying anything more about that one.

Posted 10/26/2009 15:15 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Here's where you can find me in the next couple of months:

At the World Fantasy Convention, October 29 - November 1 in San Jose, I'll be appearing on the following panels:

• Friday, 9:00 PM, Crystal Room: DayBreak Magazine Reading with Jetse de Vries, Jeff Soesbe, Amanda Clark, Brenda Cooper, and Jennifer Lineae.
• Saturday, 12:00 PM, Gold Room: Improv Story Telling with Jay Lake and Mary Robinette Kowal.

At OryCon 31, November 27-29 in Portland, I'll be appearing on the following panels:

• Friday, 12:00 PM, Madison Room: I have a story idea, where do I start? with Mary Robinette Kowal and Mary Rosenblum.
• Friday, 2:00 PM, Morrison Room: Not enough humanoids? with Elton Elliott, Camille Alexa, and Irene Radford.
• Friday, 4:00 PM, Broadway Room: And the winner is... with Jim Fiscus, Ben Yalow, Ruth Sachter, and Jerry Kaufman.
• Friday, 6:30 PM, Multnomah Room: Endeavour Awards presentation.
• Saturday, 1:00 PM, Madison Room: Reading.
• Saturday, 2:00 PM, Washington Room: Writing the Other: Races and Cultures with Nisi Shawl, Rory Miller, and Lenora Rain-Lee Good.
• Sunday, 12:00 PM, I Will Call My Story... Bob with Richard A. Lovett, Rebecca Neason, Patricia Briggs, and Camille Alexa.
• Sunday, 1:00 PM, Improv Writing with Amber Cook, Lizzy Shannon, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and Garth Upshaw.

I will also be signing books at the post-OryCon Sci-Fi Authorfest on November 29 at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton.

Posted 10/26/2009 14:42 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

This morning I spent a couple of hours at the local Hotlips Pizza for a writing workshop. This event is held in the morning on the third Thursday and last Sunday of each month (no Sunday workshops in November or December) and is a chance to "experience the transformative power of writing in community" and to support Write Around Portland with a donation ($10-30 sliding scale). See http://www.writearound.org/events/events.html for more information.

About twenty people attended. The structure of the workshop was that we were given a series of writing prompts and then a few minutes to write on each, after which those who wanted to could read their pieces aloud, then the floor was opened for reactions. Only positive comments were allowed -- this was an exercise in energizing writers rather than improving writing. Each excercise included two or three different prompts to choose from, and we were encouraged to write whatever we wanted without worry, apology, or fear of rejection.

The writing here was much different from what I usually encounter on the printed page or in critique groups. It was all raw, first-draft stuff, of course, but everyone who chose to read what they'd written had prose that was not only coherent but sometimes brilliant. The big difference was that everyone except me seemed to be coming from a modern-fiction, slice-of-life, or personal-memoir background. Some of the pieces seemed autobiographical, others were clearly completely fictional, but there was a lot more focus on emotion, memory, and poetic language (example: "the blue sky hanging in acres above the yellow leaves") than I have in my own work or am used to seeing in SF. My own stuff seemed commercial -- plotty, slick, and facile -- by comparison with the best of these. Not that this is a bad thing, but it's useful for me to be exposed to completely different kinds of writing every once in a while.

Here, for the record, is what I wrote, with the prompts:

"On the street where I live...", 3 minutes:

On the street where I live, there is this enormous tree. I mean, it's really huge -- you can see it on Google Maps. I don't know what kind of tree it is (probably a maple) or how long it's been there, but the neighborhood dates from 1913 and I assume it was there before then. I imagine it as a full-grown but still young tree on this street of fresh new bungalows, right before WWI when Portland was young and new. It was here when the Titanic went down.

"Everyone knows him as...", 8 minutes:

Everyone knows him as Devin. It's a name he picked for himself when he came to this place, cold hungry lonely crying, not wanting to be himself any more. It's a new opportunity, he tells himself, but it's still a bitch -- scrambling for work, never more than half a step away from homelessness, balancing necessities against absolutes, riding the float on his skinny little bank account. Then comes the day he finds the wallet.

It's a fine, rich wallet -- you can tell not only by the smooth dark leather of it but by how thin it is. This is not the wallet of a person who has to peel off grubby singles for a cheese slice 'cause he can't afford pepperoni. Devin picks the wallet up, shakes off a few drops of filthy gutter water. It's stiff with cards, gold platinum turquoise ruby... who ever heard of a ruby credit card? These colors remind Devin of a treasure cave, a fabulous hoard stumbled upon in a trackless desert.

But cards mean a name, and an address, and a fancy phone with a keyboard and color screen. Devin can't use these cards -- he'd go to jail for sure. Maybe, though -- maybe there'd be a reward.

Pennies from a rich man's purse. Charity.

Devin drops the wallet with a splash and goes on to his dishwashing job.

March 22, 1942 and "Everything seemed different after..." (For this one we all wrote a date, something significant to us, on a slip of paper, put the slips in the middle of the table, and then drew one at random. I also used one of the two verbal prompts.)

Emily sat behind the counter at the USO, a cigarette's smoke streaming gently up from between her fingers. All around, men in khaki and blue danced, chatted with the girls, talked seriously in the corners. Tojo was on the march -- the Phillipines -- bombing in Belgium. No Will. No Will anywhere, any more.

Emily stubbed out her smoke and rose, plastering a smile on her face and moving out into the crowd. Cleancut shaved faces perked up, turned toward her like flowers to the sun -- then turned away as they found this sun shed no warmth. Why the hell had she come here anyway? Guilt? Guilt at being the young widow of a man who'd died at home -- died changing a goddam lightbulb?

Will was going to sign up as soon as he got out of school. Emily'd worried about him -- fighting out there in the jungles or on the fields of France -- and when he'd fallen, and gasped his last alone in his own home, she'd been snapped in half by the irony -- grief and a weird sense of relief. At least he died at home, she thought, and not in some bullet-pocked hell hole in the Pacific.

But still he was gone, and she'd been left behind -- a warless war widow with no gold star to show for it. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to smile at the next pink shaven face.

"My favorite costume...", 7 minutes

It's the tie I love the best -- slick silk, blue with subtle grey dots, that slips through my fingers as I twist and knot it around my neck. The shirt, too, stiff starched collar and cuffs, cool crisp fabric like a bright promise on my skin. The suit jacket's warm weight on my shoulders, pads and layers of wool, cotton, and silk, are comforting to me -- armor against a world that would tear me apart if it knew what lay beneath those layers. And the shoes -- shiny leather, firm yet flexible, finge and stitches and, yes, two shiny copper pennies.

The last, most important part of my costume I don't like so much. The clinging, imprisoning plastic of the mask, tight and pink over the green of my face. The contacts are the worst -- they burn and irritate my sensitive eyes, masking the amber behind white and blue. The false plastic tongue and teeth, uncomfortable though they are over my fangs, are not as bad.

At last I am prepared.

Trick or treat.

Posted 10/25/2009 14:10 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Spent the day touristing around Albuquerque, including the Petroglyph National Monument (fun scramble up into the rocks to see ancient carvings), Coronado State Monument (site of an ancient pueblo and some interesting old murals), the town of Corrales (which lacked a center), and lunch at the Range Cafe in Bernalillo. Dinner was at Rudy's BBQ, which was not so much a restaurant as a place that sells smoked meats by the pound, and side dishes, and has tables you can eat your food at. Totally without frills but excellent BBQ. In the evening, dancing started.

I also got a bunch of writing-related emails, some good news and some bad.

• My story "horrorhouse" will be published on October 30 at DayBreak Magazine, the online companion to Shine, Jetse de Vries's print anthology of optimistic near-future SF.
• I got my program schedule for World Fantasy Convention. I'll be joining Jay Lake and Mary Robinette Kowal in Improv Storytelling on Saturday at 8pm.
• I also got a draft program schedule from OryCon, about which more later.
• After waiting more than a year for a response to a submission of my first novel, I got this: "Sadly, the manuscript wasn't for me. I am not engaging with the writing style as much as I want to. Also, I fear the market for debut SF has continued to shrink. I get much smaller orders for my SF than I do for my fantasy, and so I am buying less of it, and as I buy less of it, I'm getting pickier and pickier about the SF I do take on board. I hope you understand." This makes me sad.

Tomorrow: more square dancing.

Posted 10/16/2009 22:42 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

At PDX, heading for Albuquerque for a square dance event.

Right after my last post about doing more rewriting than writing, I got another rewrite request -- this one a second request on a story I'd already rewritten for the same market. I rewrote it as requested and sent it in, and shortly received some more feedback. Admittedly it was only a few nits, but I put my foot down and said no, that's it, take it or leave it. Fortunately the editor took this response well.

Now I'm back onto the YA novel based on 3 previous short stories. Right now I'm in the "noodling and notes" phase, thinking out loud on paper (as it were) about the characters and setting and plot. I'll be needing to do a bunch of research as well, but that's not going to happen during this trip.

We've seen a lot of live theatre recently. Chicago's "Second Story" troupe did a performance for the opening of Wordstock, a mix of music and story-reading that was kind of like a live version of This American Life but not quite so noodly. The first couple of stories were lots of fun, but the last one was quite sordid and we bailed. "Becky's New Car" at Artists' Rep was excellent, hilarious and poignant by turns with some brilliant performances -- recommended.

Last night we saw the "Star Wars in Concert" extravaganza at the Rose Garden arena. We worried at first that we were in the wrong place or on the wrong night, because the crowd was clearly more sporty than geeky, but it turned out there was also a Trail Blazers basketball game at the coliseum next door. The Star Wars crowd was geekier and heavy with the eight-to-ten-year-old set, many of them in costume. It made me regret that I hadn't had Star Wars to play with when I was eight.

The performance itself was spectacular -- scenes from all six movies on a humungous LED screen while a tremendous live orchestra played a series of symphonic suites from the films, all held together by Anthony Daniels telling the story. Tons of fun, and it was clear that the Imperial March was everyone's favorite. ("We are the Empire, we're big and we're mean / We are Darth Vader's destruction machine / When we engage the rebellion in war / We'll strew the galaxy with gore / 'Til the last man is dead.")

Seeing this summary of the six movies in two hours really brought home just how disappointing the prequels were. The scenes from the original trilogy were not as technically proficient, but the scenes from the prequels lacked soul, heart, authenticity -- even with most of the dialogue silenced, you could still see how flat the acting was. Especially that pouty kid with the stupid goggles.

Posted 10/15/2009 11:17 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Wordstock, Portland's annual Festival of the Book, begins tomorrow at the Oregon Convenion Center. Last year Jay Lake and I were on the program, but not this year -- they don't like to have people come back year after year. I'll be in the Oregon Writers Colony booth from 1:00 to 3:00 on Saturday, volunteering for one hour, selling and signing copies of Space Magic for the other hour. Stop by and say hi.

In other news, I finally succumbed to temptation and bought an iPhone. It is very cool and shiny. Kate and I have a family plan, so if you ignore the cost of the new phone we're actually saving a little money per month. I've already loaded it up with the following apps: AAA Roadside (call for assistance), Facebook, LiveJournal, MetrO (worldwide subway trip planner), Nambu (Twitter client), Notespark (sync and share notes), NPR (read and listen to news), PDX Bus (find a bus stop and when the next bus arrives), Peak.ar (augmented reality app that shows the names of the nearest mountains), and Urbanspoon (restaurant finder). What's your favorite app?

Posted 10/09/2009 23:18 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

So often in this business our joys are provisional. Hey, I finished a story! ...but I don't know if anyone will buy it. Hey, I sold one! ...but I have to wait for the contract and check, and wait some more for galleys, and wait yet more for publication. Hey, it finally appeared! ...now we'll see if anyone likes it.

I've been spending a lot of the last couple of months in a nebulous space between creation and publication -- closer to publication than sometimes, but not quite there yet. For some reason I've gotten rewrite requests on five submissions this year, and I also got feedback from my critique group on a couple of recent stories that prompted extensive revisions. So I've been doing a lot of rewriting and not a lot of drafting, which is not as satisfying to me and also not terribly conducive to blogging-about.

I've made a couple of sales, too, but even there things are kind of nebulous. I got a rejection from an anthology, but it was accompanied by a request to use the story on the anthology's website (for five cents a word). I would rather have been in the print antho, but it's a decent pay rate and online publication means I don't have to ask my friends to shell out money to read my stuff. So that's a sale, sort of. I also got paid for the Wild Cards story, but there might still be a few revisions requested, depending on exactly what happens with the other stories in the book. So that's another sale, again sort of.

Anyway, I just finished and mailed... let's see, that's the fourth revision in a row, and I'm nearly done with another piece, a nonfiction essay based on the talk I gave at the Library of Congress back in July, which isn't exactly new writing either. Next up -- and I should start that today -- is a project somewhere between drafting and revision: a YA novel proposal based on the three stories I wrote for Esther Friesner's fantastical-suburbia anthologies. I've been asked to write about half of it (~40,000 words) plus an outline.

The original short stories were set in the 1970s, because that's when I was in intermediate school and I have no idea what life is like for Kids Today. It worked well but I've been asked to bring it up to the present day for the novel. I started off with one of the original stories but it was just too finished... trying to revise it was like trying to reshape a marble statue with a butterknife. So I'm going to tackle the project as a completely new novel with the same characters (well, with people based on the same characters) and then, once I have a good solid idea of the setting, characters, and voice, maybe revise the existing stories to fit in the new present-day world.

Now I have a research problem: how to find out what life is like for Kids Today, ages 13-14? I don't know any kids that age well enough to talk to, and I can't go down to the local middle school and just hang out... that's creepy, and probably illegal these days. Any recommendations of books, magazines, movies, TV shows, or websites?

Posted 10/06/2009 13:19 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Just back from a writing weekend at the Oregon coast with Kate, Laurel Amberdine and her Chris, Corie J. Conwell, Diana Sherman, Shannon Page, and Executive Chef Jay Lake who tried to kill himself with a knife on the first day and spent the rest of the weekend trying to kill the rest of us with delicious high-calorie goodies. (Mmm, momos.) Despite which we somehow had room for a stop at the Tillamook Cheese Factory for ice cream on the way home.

In addition to the eating, much writing and hilarity ensued. Walks on the beach. Gossip. We decided that the Next Hot Thing will be unicorns, but unicorns as unlike the typical boring sparkly old-hat unicorn as the fast zombies in 28 Days Later were unlike the shambling zombies of yore. We're talking carnivorous, ancient, implacable, anthropomorphic, shapeshifting unicorns. We're going to make it happen, just you watch.

I spent my writing time revising a short story and a novella. I realized that the reason I hate revisions is that when you're drafting, you know when you're getting close to the end, but when you're revising -- especially if what you're trying to do is "make the story more (x)", e.g. "make the character more sympathetic" or "make this plot point more plausible" -- it's hard to know when you've achieved that goal and when you need to do more. Double especially when, as seems to be the case more often than not for me, the feedback you're trying to address is "make the story more (x)" when you already pulled out all the stops and made the story as (x) as you possibly could in the first draft.

We dropped off Laurel and Chris at Mary Robinette Kowal's new digs, where they will be spending the rest of this week and we were all treated to a delightful vegetarian dinner and conversation. Marlowe the cat decided not to entertain us by demonstrating his Helmet of Invisibility.

A grand time was had by all and it's not quite over yet. Corie is spending the night here; tomorrow morning we drop her off at the airport. Then we will have another house guest (square dancing friend Mark) tomorrow night. But for now... to bed.

Posted 09/20/2009 22:38 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

A couple of friends of mine, Eleri and Blade, have been fighting what seems like a losing battle against serious life issues for the past several years. They have two children with a rare genetic disorder that has dramatically impacted their quality of life (the parents' as well as the kids'), and Eleri has health issues as well that make it tough for her to earn a living. All of this has put them in a deep financial hole.

Now some of their friends are banding together to try to dig them out of it. I hope that you will go to http://helpthehamiltons.wordpress.com/ and contribute something, or buy something from the Etsy shop you'll find linked there. Every little bit helps.

Posted 09/17/2009 10:20 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

So we got Kate's iPhone bill for the month including our trip to Canada. We knew that using the phone in Canada was expensive and she'd been sparing in her use of it, but I was wondering how much they'd charge us. (I carefully monitored my use of my Verizon Treo and kept it down to about $12 in additional charges, but the Treo's not as data-hungry as the iPhone.)

The bill included $114 in data roaming charges. (!!)

Fortunately, I'd seen a blog post in the last week or so, with the subject "Goodwill", talking about a similar situation -- the poster had made a weekend trip to Victoria BC and managed to rack up a $300 bill. When they called AT&T to complain, they managed to talk with a phone rep for like an hour before the rep happened to mention "oh, there's this thing I could do that would knock that charge down to $25." The poster was saying that treatment like this will cause AT&T to lose customers in droves when the iPhone is finally no longer exclusive to them, but thanks to that post, I knew to call AT&T and ask for that retroactive change.

It took quite a while -- the rep I got was ignorant but very helpful -- but I did eventually get that $114 charge reduced to $25. The magic incantation is "Data Global Plan" and you can find more information about it here: http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/international/roaming/iphone-travel-tips.jsp. You can be sure I will check back next month to make sure we don't get charged the same $25 every month going forward.

So the only remaining question is: who was that masked poster? I've Googled all over and can't find the original post.

ETA: An anonymous commenter tells me that the original post was here: http://zzzorg.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-lose-customers.html. Thanks to The Zorg for letting me know this option existed! If not for that I would have just sighed and paid the $114.

Posted 09/11/2009 23:03 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I'm definitely going to Foolscap, World Fantasy, and Orycon. Currently not planning on Steamcon or the Browncoat Ball, but could perhaps be persuaded. Are any of you, my blog readers, going to either of those?

Posted 09/08/2009 12:27 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Just got my program schedule for Foolscap. I'll be auctioneering and appearing on a bunch of programming:

• Fri 5-6 pm - 20th Century Archeology: Panelists will bring along contemporary objects and make us guess - if we were archaeologists 300 years from now, and we dug it up, what would we think it was?
• Fri 9 - 10:30 pm - Which Stories Matter? The world contains an infinite number of stories; some pass by and are gone, while others are revisited over and over. Which stories matter to us? To the world? To the future? What makes a story important?
• Sat 10:30-11 am - Strut Your Stuff - David Levine: Reading
• Sat 11am-noon - Hats, Chapeaux, Huts, Bunkaquanks & Sombreros: Come talk about what you wear on your head, what you’ve seen people put on their heads, and other hat discussion. Bring examples!
• Sat 4:30-6 pm - How to Write What You Don't Know, and Putting What You Know Into Your Work: So you've got a great story, but it just so happens to include something - a location, occupation, field of study, something - that you don't really know much about. If you're really attached to it, how can you make it work? How do you research it effectively, and then write about it without overwhelming the reader with "guess what I found out" recitations? Similarly, how do you avoid the same problem when you write about what you DO know?
• Sun 10-11 am - Food in SF Literature: Speculative writing about food can be extremely evocative and compelling, but it's also often difficult to do well. What's the purpose of including food in a story? What are some good ways to go about it, and what are the pitfalls?
• Sun 1:30-3 pm - Auction

Posted 09/05/2009 10:48 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Just a brief note to let everyone know that we are back home after touristing around the province of Quebec for a week after the Worldcon. We had a great time, saw lots of historical stuff, and ate many fabulous meals. Last night we enjoyed the fine hospitality of Jo Walton, to whom many thanks. The weather here is even hotter than it was there but the humidity's far more tolerable. And now to bed, because my brain's still on the East Coast.

Oh, almost forgot: my email box filled up yesterday, so if you tried to email me something yesterday or today and it bounced, please re-send it.

Posted 08/19/2009 21:53 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 1463 | Since last entry: 2425

Quebec. I'm still in Quebec.

We have arrived in Quebec City after nine days in the province, all without affordable or dependable Internet. Now that we finally have good free connectivity I find that the amount of stuff I would like to blog far exceeds both my time and my brain capacity. I will sum up briefly...

Had an excellent Worldcon. All the programming I was involved in went well, especially the Doctor Who panel and my reading. Much difficulty getting to convention parties on Thursday and Friday, due to problems with hotels and elevators, but hung out in the bar instead with lots of cool people. Spent most of my time not in programming or hanging out in the bar hanging out in the halls instead. At Worldcons I have a real tendency to stand in one place (often the hall outside the dealers' room) for two and three hours at a time, talking with a varying knot of people, and this Worldcon was no exception. Food was awesome... even the worst meal I had (noodles from NooBox in the convention center) was pretty good and with good company.

After the con we rented a car, hit the road, and hung out in the countryside, staying at a B&B in a former school near the town of Saint-Armand. We sampled ice cider, picked blueberries, visited the J. A. Bombardier museum (he invented the Ski-Doo snowmobile), and drove past lots of horses and cows. Frustratingly, most of the restaurants Kate had researched were closed (I blame the zombie apocalypse), including one stretch of two hours and over a hundred kiometers seemingly without one restaurant that was both still in business and actually serving food. But once we did find something to eat it was generally fabulous.

The food problem here in Quebec City is quite the opposite: way too many amazing restaurants to choose from. Also there are book and record stores, plus plenty of touristy things to do. We won't be bored.

We're here in Quebec for four nights and will be heading home (with a stop in Montreal) on Wednesday. No promises about blogging or tweeting during that time.

Posted 08/13/2009 19:27 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 4639 | Since last entry: 4639

Rather frazzled at the moment because we just found out third-hand that the Pink Martini concert on September 5 ("Oregon! Oregon!", written by Stan Freberg no less) has been moved from the Coliseum to the Zoo, necessitating purchase of new tickets. Glad this happened while we were in town.

This all came down while I was in the middle of grilling up dinner: chicken mango sausages from Trader Joe's, marinated grilled beets, and corn on the cob. The beets got overdone but I'd try that recipe again.

Yesterday we were privileged to attend a workshop performance of Mike Daisey's new monolog "The Last Cargo Cult": a comedy, a travelogue, and a meditation on the meaning of money. It made me laugh; it made me think. It's in Seattle later this month, then goes on tour; I'd encourage you to check it out if it comes to your town.

We got a new issue of Bento finished at the last minute, as is traditional, but thanks to the fine people at DocuMart it's already all printed and bound. We'll have copies to hand out at the Worldcon, of course. If you are not going to be at the Worldcon, would like a copy, and think we might not have your current address, please email your address to us.

We leave for Montreal bright and early Tuesday. On Wednesday night Ellen Klages and I will be "celebrity guest hosts" at the Reno in 2011 party. After that I'll be on a lot of programming. I particularly invite you to sign up for my kaffeeklatsch (2pm Sunday) and come to my reading (3:30pm Sunday). I'll be reading an excerpt from my Wild Cards story.

Much and much to do before then...

Posted 08/02/2009 20:00 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

A couple of months ago, Kate told me that July 23 would be "a surprise." We got in the car this morning and drove across town to... a big industrial-looking parking lot full of giant trucks and earth-moving machines. "The hell?" I said.

Turns out she'd signed us up for the Portland Water Bureau's annual Field Day. In other words, we went on a field trip. It was fun and we learned a lot about how the water we drink (and use for so many other things) gets from the Bull Run watershed to our tap. If you have the opportunity to go next year, I'd recommend it. It's free.

Me being me, I couldn't help but take extensive notes, which I present for your edification below.

Started off with a talk by the head of the Bureau and the Chief Engineer - we all got bright orange hard hats, reflective vests, and a safety lecture - it felt like Take Your Citizens To Work Day at the Water Bureau

Water is absolutely vital to life but we usually don't see the infrastructure that brings it to us

4 C's of water: Clean, Cold, Constant, and Cheap - taking water from different levels of the dam to select the right temp for people & fish - colder = deeper - they take surface water during the winter to "bank" cold deep water for the summer

Portland's Water Event Station (WES) is a mobile system to provide tap (fire hydrant) rather than bottled water to events like Bridge Pedal

Portland does have a seasonal drought - since June 23 we have been in "drawdown" where we're taking more water from Bull Run reservoirs than is coming in - most years we don't have to use groundwater from the Columbia wellfield to supplement, but sometimes we do - groundwater is also used when heavy rain or other events cause turbidity (dirt in the water) in Bull Run reservoirs

Water conservation: Benson bubblers are on timers and now have flow reducers (40% of previous usage) - most decorative fountains recirculate - these add up to a tiny fraction of 1% of total water usage - Benson bubblers are symbolic of Portland - there are only 2 outside of Portland: Maryhill and Sapporo

Portland's system is completely unfiltered - water doesn't really move very fast in the pipes so what sediment does come in from Bull Run settles in the pipes and must sometimes be flushed out (UDF = Uni-Directional Flush) - system is full of loops, can set valves and flush any given section of pipe with fire hydrant water

Federal LT2 standards against cryptosporidium will require burying/covering reservoirs and (unless we can get a waiver) treating the water with either UV ($90 million) or filtration ($400 million) - chief engineer has a clock on his desk counting down to the LT2 deadline

Bull Run is unique because it has never been logged, inhabited, or used for recreation - only one protected by Presidential Proclamation - New York State has some fine reservoirs but they're surrounded by houses and people water-ski on them

Boarded a bus for our selected tour "Maintenance and Construction" - our tour guide: Kelly Mulholland (!) - no relation to Willam Mulholland of Chinatown fame

There's a lot of standing around a hole waiting for something to happen - "Authentic shovel-leaning experience"

You have to have perfect trust in the backhoe operator - so many ways to die - one of the most dangerous jobs in the city - even dumping the dirt into the truck can be done well or badly

Water hammer is a hazard to big pipes - valves must be opened slowly and in sequence to prevent damage down the line

Ductile iron has some magnesium, will bend a little, vs. cast iron which just cracks if bent

Some cast-iron mains from the early 1900s are in great shape - mains from the 1940s are in worse shape because their iron was made with lower-quality higher-sulfur coal

pH balance: you don't want too much acid because it leaches lead out of brass fittings, but more acid makes the chlorine more effective against microorganisms - it's a tradeoff like so many things - modern brass is made without lead

What's that valve you just took out of the hole? Just a piece of scrap some previous Water Bureau worker threw in the hole as fill, years ago

Former bank being converted to a gym - have to bring everything up to code - old 2" domestic water line being converted to fire service and new 1" domestic line being installed - fire & domestic water used to be separately metered & billed - today there's just a remotely-monitored backflow meter to check that you are not using fire water for domestic purposes - meter is buried in dirt with a "remote-read gun" port (black circular plastic thing with cross) in the sidewalk above it

Paint marks on the street use an agreed color code (blue = water, etc.) - water, sewer, gas, electricity, cable TV, telephone - each utility is responsible for locating (marking) its own lines before anyone starts work, based on records & metal detectors - both can be inaccurate - "Every day with a backhoe downtown is like Christmas - you never know what you'll get" - City to property owner: "Does your basement extend under the sidewalk?" Owner: "No." Backhoe: "Yes."

They take out dirt, send it to the dump, where they pull out the concrete etc. and re-use much of it - they re-fill with gravel rather than dirt because dirt turns into mud - vaults are used (vs. direct burial) to protect electronics or when frequent access is needed - a CV or CIV (small Cast-Iron Valve cover) marks a pipe going down to a buried gate (valve) that is opened/closed with a key (T-shaped wrench)

Many of the other people on the tour are PSU students in the interdisciplanry "Capstone" program - one is a water bureau employee (customer service) who wants to learn about other parts of the department

Uni-Directional Flush: test and close valves to send the flow down the target stretch of pipe to a fire hydrant - onto the street and down the storm drains - a "dechlorinating diffuser" on the hydrant to keep chlorine out of streams, bad for fish - UDF dislodges pebble-sized "rocks" of old sediment - first flush is pretty ugly brown - doesn't generally affect customers except for a loss in pressure, but if there are unknown closed gates (valves) they can cut off water to a block without meaning to - they don't send out letters because they don't know for sure who will be affected - they don't do UDF when we are using groundwater (pumped, therefore expensive) or when it's raining (storm drains already taxed) or freezing

Portland has very low losses (3-4%) - it's a very nice place for pipes, non-acid soil and not much freezing - in some parts of Australia the pipes are buried in sand and they lose up to 17%

Each valve has a "gate card" that says which way to turn it (on/off) and how many turns - before doing a UDF they verify this info for each gate in the area and mark what they've done in chalk on the underside of the CV

Portland's water is entirely gravity-fed from Bull Run except for a few parts of the West Hills - pumping is expensive (other water bureaus spend 20-30% of their budget on energy) - we could get 100% of our water from groundwater but we don't like to because pumping it up is costly

I wonder about people driving by and seeing 20 people in fluorescent vests and hard hats staring into a hole - thinking "must be a big problem" or "what a waste of tax dollars"

Very nice lunch at Sabin Hydro-Park - sandwiches from Grand Central, your tax dollars at work - Hydro-Park is not a water park, it's a community park, playground, and garden on Water Bureau property - there are 7 of them, offering parks to neighborhoods that lacked them - maintenance and liability issues are kind of hairy, the Water Bureau owns the land but isn't really in the park business - 2 water towers here - is the water pumped up into them? Actually no, it's gravity-fed from Bull Run, which is even higher than this hill - these towers store water for the neigborhood and provide backup pressure, also they moderate pressure changes in the main supply - also provide a site for cell antennas and microwave dishes

Cell phones make the water bureau more efficient - crews can now talk to each other and to local businesses directly, rather than going through dispatch - but there's a loss of tracking & accountability

Kind of cool to be driving around Portland in a big tourist bus - can see stuff from up here that's invisible from Corolla level

Watching a live tap into an 8" water main for a new subdivision - big honkin' drill, very slow - drill goes thru a valve - when hole is done, withdraw drill and close valve - cut-out circle is called a "coupon"

The 4 C's are NOT: Cloudy, Crunchy, Colorful, and Coagulated

In addition to coordinating with other utilities and property owners, also have to deal with dept of transportation, Tri-Met, etc for any traffic disruptions

New 4" water main is just a fraction of an inch too long - haul it out of the hole and cut it down - shower of sparks, and smoke coming out the other end of the pipe - cut-off circle is still hot to the touch half an hour later

Doing a live tap avoids disruption for customers and water quality issues (disturbing sediment in the pipes by turning water off and on again)

Putting in a new bioswale near PDX - water mains need to be lowered to go under swale, meters and fire hydrants also need to be moved to new curb line - have to do this work so that road can be re-opened so that traffic can go through here so that another road can be closed - everything depends on everything else

Taking out a fire hydrant attached to a 12" main - very glad to dig down and find a valve, it was just marked on the map as a T - if it had been a T they would have had to shut down the main (supplying a big stretch of Columbia Blvd) - as is they can just close and cap the valve, no shutdown required - don't want to start that work today, though, it would mean the bike path would be torn up on the weekend - nice to see so much consideration for the citizens

Posted 07/23/2009 20:43 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

A variety of circumstances have come together such that we will be going to Seattle tomorrow, leaving Portland after lunch Friday and returning home in time for dinner Saturday. We'll be bunking at Mary Kay Kare's for One! Night! Only!

While we're in town we'll hit the Clarion West party, possibly visit Mark Bourne in the hospital if he's up to it, and pick up our six-year-old niece Alex. We will then take Alex home for a one-night sleepover at Aunt Kate and Uncle David's place (Saturday night), sending her home with her mother who's coming to Portland for a concert on Sunday.

We're also working on Bento. It has to go to the printer on July 30 if we want to have copies in hand for the Worldcon. Wish us luck.

In other news, I've participated in an SF Signal Mind Meld, about memorable F/SF stories. Check it out for a bunch of recommendations of really fabulous stories, many of them online. My own selections, I realized after I had written them up, say a lot about me and why I write the kind of stories I do. See my essay there for more details.

Also, Ellen Klages and I will be Celebrity Party Hosts at the Reno in 2011 party on Wednesday night at the Worldcon. See the at-con convention newsletter for location and other details.

Posted 07/23/2009 20:02 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Here's where you can find me at Anticipation, the World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal, August 6-10 (which is, um wow, really soon).

Thu 20:00: Overpaid, Oversexed and In Our Time Zone
Curtis Potterveld, Cynthia Huckle, David D. Levine (M), Paul Cornell, Perrianne Lurie, Ronald Oakes
What's going on with Dr. Who? Has becoming a sexual being made him a more or less interesting character? Just how far can they go with this?

Fri 13:00: Writing Workshop K (2 hours)
David D. Levine (M), Jenny Rae Rappaport
Critique session for previously submitted manuscripts.

Sat 11:00: Fan Editors Panel
David D. Levine (M), Guy H. Lillian III, Jeanne M. Mealy, Joseph T Major, Steve Green
Fanzines have different audiences, frequencies, means of distribution, and editorial attitudes. Editors explain why they publish a fanzine. Thinking of publishing a fanzine? Encouraging words will be offered. An optional lunch outing follows the panel.

Sun 9:00: I left my heart in Clarion East, West, South
David D. Levine, Maura McHugh, Steven Popkes (M), Nalo Hopkinson
Workshops can get in your blood, and they can provide both life changing and shattering events. Panelists discuss the six-week Clarion workshop, including highlighting differences between the different Clarions.

Sun 11:00: Writing in a Culture Not Your Own
David D. Levine (M), Emma Hawkes, Joshua Palmatier, Kaaron Warren
How does a writer get into the head of a character from a different culture, race, planet, gender? How can writers include diversity in their writing without using stereotypes? Or should they not try at all?

Sun 14:00: Kaffeeklatsch
David D. Levine
A chance to ask those burning questions.

Sun 15:30: Author Readings (1.5 hours)
Aliette de Bodard, David D. Levine, Karin Lowachee

You may also see me listed in the program on a couple more Sunday panels, but that would have meant six and a half solid hours of programming in one day and I had to beg off.

Posted 07/21/2009 15:41 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 16823 | Since last entry: 297

First draft complete at 16,823 words. (I actually wrote more than 500 words tonight, but I also deleted the last couple hundred words of outline from the end of the file.) I like the character, the story's structure, its emotional arc, a lot of the details. It needs to be streamlined and strengthened, and I think it needs even more period detail, but it's a draft.

I think I'm going to have to treat this draft as raw footage -- like the thousands of hours of tape that comes out of a reality show, most of which will never appear in the forty-one minutes of content that fit in an hour of commercial TV. It has to be a process of picking the bits that are necessary rather than cutting out the bits that aren't. It will mean leaving a lot of darlings on the cutting room floor, but that's the biz.

I can do this. And I will. Starting tomorrow.

Posted 07/19/2009 22:40 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 16526 | Since last entry: 2425

1500 words today at Camille Alexa's, including the dramatic climax. Just one more scene to go. The story will probably come in at about 17,000 words, and will require much hacking and slashing to get down to the target 10,000 (or so) words.

After that, set up the grill and grilled corn on the cob (first of the season) and a nice spice-rubbed pork tenderloin. Oh yum.

Talking with folks at Camille's I realized I'd never posted my theory of "hacks and artistes." You may be familiar with the idea that every other driver on the road is either an idiot or an asshole: the idiots are the ones who are going slower than you, and the assholes are the ones who are going faster. Well, in writing it's similar: every other writer is either a hack (someone you look down upon because their writing is more commercial than yours) or an artiste (someone you look down upon because their writing is artier than yours). Probably the same is true of many other art forms.

But this theory has a sting in the tail, to wit: in driving, by definition, one is never an idiot or an asshole oneself. But in writing, the concepts of "hack" and "artiste" are relative to one's aspirations rather than one's actual current performance. Which means that you can look at your own work and brand yourself as a hack or an artiste. Possibly both at once; writers can be very creative when it comes to self-denigration.

We saw Moon yesterday. I liked it a lot -- it's a serious science fiction film, heavy on the moral and intellectual problems and light on the thud-and-blunder. I had a few quibbles with some of the science, tech, and plot logic, but in every case I have to admit that the things they did "wrong" were the right things to do to bring the film in under budget and/or make it more accessible to a general audience. (One spoiler-free example: the characters bounce around like people in 1/6 gee only outside the lunar base. Simulating low-gee inside the base would have been difficult, expensive, and probably giggle-inducing, but on the lunar surface it's familiar from the Apollo footage everyone's seen.) Highly recommended.

Also seen recently: Duck Soup, outdoors on the roof of the Hotel deLuxe's garage. I may never have seen the whole thing in one sitting before. Tons of laughs even for a 75-year-old film where I knew most of the jokes already. But the complete chaos, especially of Harpo, was a surprise. I had expected it to be a little more, oh I don't know, coherent? Still, marvelous entertainment.

Posted 07/18/2009 19:16 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 14101 | Since last entry: 1238

Argh. This story is supposed to be 10,000 words long. It's now about 13,500 words (plus about 600 words of outline in the main file) and I've probably got another 2000 words to go to wrap up the plot. Maybe more. The outline was too complex to begin with, I realize now. This is a common failing for me... too many scenes in the outline. I need to combine scenes, streamline, strengthen, move faster. Maybe even cut out a character or two. Probably everything I've written in the last three days will have to be cut. But maybe a few incidents or character moments can be preserved.

Oh well. Nothing to do but bull through to the end and then cut back. I've got almost a week and a half before the next crit group deadline... that should be enough time to finish the first draft and then give it a good whacking back. Maybe not enough time to whack it all the way back to 10,000 words, though. I'll have to ask the editor if there's any flexibility on length.

David Gerrold had a problem kind of like this with the first draft of the Trouble with Tribbles script: he was using a nonstandard 12-pitch typewriter, so his script came out the right number of pages but 20% too long. When he was done cutting it back, though, he found that the exercise had made it tighter and crisper. I think this story will definitely benefit from the cutting I'm going to have to do. (But can I get it all the way down to 10,000 words? We'll see, I guess...)

Posted 07/16/2009 19:22 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 12863 | Since last entry: 1681

I've been following astronaut Mark Polansky (Astro_127) on Twitter, and thinking how cool it would be to see a shuttle launch someday, when I happened to receive an email from OMSI, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, about upcoming events. One of which was that they were going to show the shuttle launch on the big screen in the planetarium. Today. It just so happened that I had nothing specific to do at that hour this afternoon, so I went.

I showed up just as they opened the auditorium, half an hour before launch. There were about 60-70 people there, mostly families with small children, and an OMSI volunteer provided running commentary to fill in the gaps between the NASA announcer's pronouncements. Leaning back in that planetarium seat, listening to the countdown and the poll of the various departments, and feeling that tiny personal connection with the pilot because of reading his Twitter feed, my heart really started to race as we got down to the final nine minutes. And when the Orbiter Access Arm (the bridge through which the crew boards) pulled away from the shuttle at T minus 7:30, the pilot waved at the arm's camera as it swung away. Hey, that's Astro_127 waving at me!

We were supposed to count along with the final countdown from 10, but the announcer didn't actually start counting out loud until 5. It was still pretty impressive when it went up. And then we got External-Tank-Cam all the way to orbit, which was cool too.

On the way out of the museum I noticed a display of slide rules. How far we've come.

Posted 07/15/2009 16:20 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

There have been some problems with publicizing the Writer's Workshops at Anticipation. Due to a glitch with the Worldcon website, the workshop isn't listed there and thus the submission process has also gone astray.

According to workshop organizer Oz Whiston:

"The Writers Workshops at Anticipation are small session workshops for either experienced or beginning writers based on manuscripts submitted in advance. These workshops provide Anticipation members the opportunity to have their manuscripts evaluated by selling writers and industry professionals who enjoy helping them grow as writers. Many of these professionals have taught at residency workshops, such as Clarion, or in creative writing programs."

Information on the workshops, their guidelines and how to sign up for them can be found in the rest of Oz's blog post. The deadline's July 25th, which is soon.

I'm one of the pros tapped to do a workshop session this year, so if you've ever had an inexplicable burning desire to be critted by me, sign up in the next week!

Posted 07/15/2009 13:11 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 11182 | Since last entry: 1253

Spent the weekend in Seattle, visiting with our friend Janna. We had several very nice meals with her, including her birthday brunch with her friends Jack, Irene, and others. We had tons of fun playing with Sophie the new kitten and Spanky the not-so-new cat -- it was like LoLCats Live! 24/7 and my jeans are covered with little kitten-claw snags -- and although my allergies did act up it was never a serious problem. We attended the Clarion West party in honor of Elizabeth Bear at Mary Kay Kare's; always nice to see Bear, however briefly, as well as many Seattleite friends (both old and new, permanent and temporary). We went to a steampunk swap meet where I scored a fabulous floor-length leather coat and we ran into several Seattle friends, followed by a fine lunch with Jerry and Suzle. We had a nice walk around Fremont and visited Cleopenguin in her new home. And we bopped down to Kent for an excellent Chinese dinner and a game of Apples to Apples with friends Hal and Ulrika.

But the main event of the weekend, and dominant emotional note, was Mark Bourne's heart valve replacement. The plan was to hang out with Mark's wife Elizabeth at the hospital on Friday and then attend the Clarion West party after Mark came out of the operating room.

It didn't work out like that.

The operation went smoothly until they went to take Mark off the heart-lung machine and close him up, at which point his heart did not start up as it should have. Since then Mark's situation has been a continuous medical crisis and a hell of waiting for those who love him. The details can be found in Elizabeth's and Janna's LiveJournals, but at last report his chest had still not been closed (they don't want to do that until they are 100% sure everything is working properly in there) and he's still in critical condition. The good news is that he's been unconscious this whole time and when he wakes up he won't remember any of this.

The model I've been using is that one's social support system resembles the roots of a tree, with the weight traveling down the trunk and being spread out to successively smaller and more distant roots, putting less and less weight on each smaller root until it eventually vanishes into the ground. The weight of this crisis falls on Elizabeth, of course, and I think Janna's in second position (she and Mark are Evil Twins and share a birthday, which happened to be the day of the surgery); I viewed my role as supporting them (especially Janna) with my physical presence, stupid attempts at levity and light conversation, and occasional errands. It didn't feel like much but I hope it helped. I then turned around and depended on Kate and our Seattle friends, and so on. I thought I was handling it well until I showed up at the Clarion West party and EBear commented that I looked wrecked.

Anyway. Home now. Managed to write at least 500 words every day, if by "at least 500" you mean "well, anything more than 250 as long as it's a good-faith effort". Haven't yet written today but there's still an hour or two before bedtime; I expect to complete a first draft this week with a week to cut it back to 10,000 words before the next critique group deadline. All in all things are going well.

I'm still worried sick about Mark, of course, but I know that he's in good health, is in one of the best cardiac units anywhere, and has the best circle of friends one could hope for.

Posted 07/12/2009 21:07 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 9929 | Since last entry: 3176

Busy day today, ending with dinner with David J. Williams and Kamila Miller before David's reading from his new book Burning Skies at Powell's.

The writing is going well but will plainly blow way past my 10,000-word budget before I'm done. Could be as much as 15,000. As I said, I see some places to cut, and I think the exercise will also tighten and swiften (if that were a word) the story.

Heading for Seattle tomorrow, to hang out with Janna Silverstein and Mark and Elizabeth Bourne and attend the Clarion West party for Elizabeth Bear at Mary Kay Kare's.

And that's enough namedropping for one blog post.

Posted 07/08/2009 23:23 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 6753 | Since last entry: 6753

Fourth of July already!?

Went to the Iron Springs Writers Retreat on the Washington coast, where I was "writer guru" along with Jay Lake. Very strange for me to be Big Name Writer Guy. In addition to leading two critique sessions I also gave two informal talks, one on plotting and one on using sets and props to build character and display emotion. And of course there was much eating and chatting and walking on the beach (though my it was windy on that beach). Jay and I will be doing it again next year, though at a different location.

I also used the retreat to force myself to stop researching and start writing on my Wild Cards story. It worked. I wrote an outline and 1400 words of prose, and have continued to write 500-900 words per day since for a total of 6753 words so far. This is supposed to be a 10,000-word story and at this rate I expect the first draft to come in at about 12,000 words, but I can already see some places to make cuts.

Came home from Iron Springs to find a rejection in my email box from Catastrophia for the story I read at Wiscon. Darn it. Very encouraging rejection, though, and it's already back in the mail. On the plus side, Space Magic is a finalist for the Endeavour Award and "Firewall" and "Sun Magic, Earth Magic" both got honorable mentions from Gardner Dozois in his Year's Best SF. (Hmm... never noticed before that the titles of the latter story and my collection form an implied trilogy.)

Way too many of my friends have been in the hospital lately. M's having a heart valve replaced, P shattered his humerus and collarbone while ice skating, D's having a quadruple bypass, B was in a very serious car wreck, J's got cancer, R has had two surgeries for a duodenal ulcer, E was hospitalized for exhaustion... It's not even the usual "we're all getting older" thing; every one of those people but R is younger than me. Stop it, y'all.

Yesterday, at Kate's instigation, was a rock climbing party. Camille Alexa, Tina Connolly, Felicity Shoulders, and Camille's and Tina's partners joined us at a local rock gym for a laid-back "rock climbing for novices" evening. None of us had ever climbed before. Much fun and very impressed by everyone, especially Tina's spider monkey clamber and Felicity's patented "Falcon Girl" descents. I didn't reach the top myself, but I did manage to go higher on each ascent. Afterwards: drinks and snacks at Doug Fir.

Leah Cutter is using the halfway point of the year to review her progress on her goals, which strikes me as a fine thing to do. My New Year's Resolution was to celebrate the holidays with friends; I don't think we did anything for the Vernal Equinox but we'll be attending a potluck tonight for the Fourth of July. Other goals for the year are to write every day, exercise three times a week, watch what I eat, and keep the house clean and decluttered, and I've been doing quite well on those (except for the exercise, but I have been managing at least two sessions most weeks except when traveling). I've also sold two stories, which puts me on track for my usual four sales a year.

Looking into the future, I'll be in Seattle July 9-11, visiting with Janna Silverstein and Mark and Elizabeth Bourne and attending Elizabeth Bear's Clarion West party at Jordin and Mary Kay Kare's. See some of you there!

Posted 07/04/2009 11:30 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Now it can be told: Space Magic, my first collection of short stories, is a finalist for the Endeavour Award!

The Endeavour is an award for a science fiction or fantasy book written by a Pacific Northwest author, and is presented each year at OryCon.

The other finalists for 2009 are Anathem by Neal Stephenson, Ill Met in the Arena by Dave Duncan, Long Walks, Last Flights and Other Stories by Ken Scholes, and A World Too Near: Book Two of the Entire and the Rose by Kay Kenyon. (Tough competition! It's an honor just to be nominated.) The judges for this year, who will select the recipient from among the finalists, are Joe Haldeman, John Helfers, and Sarah Zettel.

If you do not yet own a copy of my newly-award-nominated book, you can correct that little problem at Wheatland Press. They're even having a sale right now: buy two books, get one free!

Space Magic is also available in a limited hardcover edition of 100 copies, signed and numbered, exclusively from Wrigley-Cross Books.

Whee!

Posted 06/30/2009 21:10 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Right. There's only one way to stop myself from obsessively researching this story and force myself to begin drafting the damn thing. I am kidnapping myself and squirreling myself away in an undisclosed location without access to the Internet or any other research materials.

Well, not really. But almost.

The fact is that I am, along with Jay Lake, "Writer Guru" at the Iron Springs Writers' Retreat on the Washington coast, which begins tomorrow. It should be a very cool weekend of hanging out with writers, critiquing, and writing. There is no Internet or cell phone service, so if you have anything I need to know before Sunday you'd better let me know now.

I mean to come home with at least 1500 words of draft on the new story.

In other news, the podcast of "I Hold My Father's Paws" from Beam Me Up has been re-posted in their archive. And the oil tank in the back yard has been successfully decomissioned... turns out it was not leaking, which means it took only a half-day and less than $1000 to drain, fill with gravel, and bury for future archaeologists to puzzle over. (Whew.)

I also got a rejection on the alien pupa story, just to keep me humble after the Analog sale, and sent it off to the next market in line, which just happened to be Analog. Not really expecting lightning to strike twice, but one never know, do one?

Posted 06/24/2009 20:22 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I am exceedingly proud to announce that I just sold short story "Teaching the Pig to Sing" to Analog, my first sale to that market. No idea when it will come out, though if I know anything about print magazine publishing it will probably not be until 2010 or maybe even 2011.

This story started as an idea I had for Federations, but December got kind of crazy and I didn't even start writing it until after the deadline for that anthology. It evolved quite a bit in the process of drafting and editing, and I finally wound up taking out the alien federation altogether, leaving it as a character-focused story of Earth politics.

I've been sending stories to Stan Schmidt for over ten years now. Analog is the oldest continually-published SF magazine and has the largest circulation of any print SF magazine. I don't know that this is particularly an "Analog story" but I guess Stan liked it.

Does one sale make me a member of the Analog Mafia?

Posted 06/23/2009 10:14 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Saw Up tonight, with square dance friends Bo and Don. Marvelous, as everyone has said, though I wish I hadn't seen the trailer because it contained spoilers (mild though they were). We saw it at the newly-remodeled Roseway in glorious digital 3-D and I was amazed by the lifelike sharpness and clarity. Every Pixar film shows off a new technology (it was water in Finding Nemo, fur in Monsters Inc) and in Up I think it was clouds and lightning. Also, unlike Caroline, the 3-D added to the experience and was never egregious.

After the film we went out to the "cart pod" at 12th and Hawthorne for dinner. Portland is apparently an epicenter of food cart cuisine right now. The "hawker centers" were something I really loved about Singapore, and we really wanted to try this "cart pod," which doesn't open until 8pm and runs until 3am. For my main course I had poutine at Potato Champion, which wasn't as good as the poutine we had at Frites Alors in Montreal (too much pepper in the gravy, I thought, though the base fries were quite nice). It did not come with a side of statins, though it should have. I considered destroying any remaining fragments of healthiness with a fried pie from Whiffie's for dessert, but sanity prevailed and I just had a few bites of Kate's chocolate-and-pear crepe from Perierra Creperie. The crepes were the real winner of the evening; several in the party had one and they were all fabulous. Will go again, I'm sure.

Tomorrow, we hit the gym first thing.

Posted 06/20/2009 22:13 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Circlet Press's anthology Up for Grabs, including my humorous SF erotica short-short story "Fair Play," is now available! It's an ebook and you can buy it from circlet.com as a PDF (currently on sale for only five bucks). Click the "More Details" link there for other ebook formats, including Kindle, epub, Palm, and HTML. Warning: explicit sexual content. (My story is sexual, but not as explicit as some of the others.)

This story was originally written as a "no exposition" exercise at Clarion West. I wrote eight stories at Clarion and so far four of them have sold, two are trunked, and two still await revision and submission.

Posted 06/20/2009 08:55 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Just back from Camille Alexa's reading at Powell's, which went smashingly. Lots of fine Portland writers at dinner beforehand as well.

I've had a number of nice things arrive in my mailbox recently: contract for the vampire story, galleys for the werewolf story, a nibble on film rights for one of my short stories (probably won't come to anything, but it's nice to be asked), and some other really good news that I'm not at liberty to share yet.

We're having the oil tank in the back yard taken care of, finally -- should have done it years ago, when we replaced the oil furnace with gas, but we'd just had the back yard landscaped and didn't want to mess it up. But now that the Japanese maple's been replaced by a pile of sawdust, it's time to take action. Today we had soil samples taken; we won't have results until tomorrow but the samples look and smell clean, indicating that the tank hasn't leaked. No leakage means we're looking at an $800 "drain the tank, fill it with gravel, and leave it there" job rather than the $5000-7000 "dig up and cart away half the back yard as toxic waste" job. So I'm cautiously optimistic on this.

Posted 06/18/2009 20:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I've been doing yoga for about two years now. As with the square dancing, Kate did it for a while before I joined in. I'm often the only man in the class, which tends to make me feel like the character Stuart in Dykes to Watch Out For.

Yoga reminds me obscurely of when I was in college and taking Physics 101 and Calculus 101 at the same time. Physics, as you may know, uses a lot of calculus and I often found that I would encounter a calculus concept in physics class first. Because the physics gave me some real-world application for the math concept, and also because my physics prof was a much better teacher, I got a much better understanding of calculus from taking the two classes together than I would have from taking Calc 101 alone.

Yoga has the same kind of relationship with the stuff I've been doing with a series of trainers at the gym for... gosh, over ten years now. Both are concerned with strength, balance, stability, and especially core strength. Both spend a lot of time on proper posture and doing the moves in a way that won't put undue strain on muscles, joints, or ligaments. But the yoga instructors (all the instructors at this studio are also physical therapists) give me a lot more of the theory, such as explaining why my tight hamstrings make my feet turn out. At the same time, my gym workouts give me practical applications for the yoga concepts.

I find that the time I've spent at the gym makes the yoga exercises easier, while my yoga classes make my gym workouts make more sense. It's all one body.

Posted 06/17/2009 12:43 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

It's been weeks and weeks since my last proper blog post. Sorry.

Attended Wiscon, which was tremendous fun as usual. I was moderator for a bunch of panels and I thought they all went well. There was one panel that had some uncomfortable follow-up online but the conversation remained civil and I think we all learned a lot from it.

As long as we were in Wisconsin we hung out with my parents for a few days, and also visited the Mitchell Domes (which always remind me of the film Silent Running), the Forevertron (an amazing collection of junk sculptures), and Ten Chimneys (the palatial home of famous actors Lunt and Fontanne -- sadly, the day's tours of the estate were sold out, but we had fun at the attached museum).

At the con I learned that I'd sold a story, "Family Matters," to Esther Friesner for her as-yet-untitled anthology about vampires in suburbia. This story is the third in a series that begins with "Midnight at the Center Court" in Witch Way to the Mall, Esther's anthology about witches in suburbia, which just hit the shelves. I also got some positive feedback from an editor about another story, but nothing definite yet.

Upon returning home from Wisconsin we both immediately came down with Con Crud, which wasn't nearly as bad as last year's norovirus but still laid Kate low for a week. I wasn't hit as hard but I still found myself completely lacking in energy for a long time and I'm only now returning to full function.

Despite my illness, I gave an interview to local journalist T. K. Gilb which should appear as one or more articles on examiner.com at some point in the future.

Kate and I ran the Great Urban Race, a kind of one-city mini-version of The Amazing Race. Challenges included locating the quote from Mae West on the "Walk of the Heroines" (never heard of it before), decoding a simple cipher and then taking a picture with eight other people at the specified location, and making a fish face at the famous giant salmon sculpture.

It was a fun day out, with a nice mix of intellectual puzzles and the physical challenge of getting around the city as quickly as possible, though having the Rose Parade at the same time meant that we did a lot more walking, rather than taking the bus or streetcar, than we might have otherwise. We completed all 12 clues without any errors, but our time of just over 3 hours put us in 168th place out of 233 teams (roughly equivalent to being eliminated in episode 3 or 4 of the 11-week Amazing Race). We'd hoped for better, but given that Kate was still coughing her lungs out I can't say I'm too disappointed.

On the writing front... for the last several weeks I've been spending 100% of my writing time doing research for my Wild Cards story. Despite the fact that I've already taken over 20,000 words of notes (twice the projected length of the story!), I feel I still haven't done enough research, and yet I'm also extremely frustrated with myself that I haven't started actually writing yet. I'm sure that at least part of the reason I haven't started is that I'm daunted by the challenge of writing in someone else's universe, which I've never done before for money, and feeling enormous pressure to get it right. I should probably just bite the bullet and start drafting the damn thing.

Posted 06/09/2009 22:02 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Currently kate (at) bentopress (dot) com is not working. Trying to fix. Fixed.

Also, can anyone recommend a good registrar? (Do not want: dotster.com nor godaddy.com.)

Posted 06/08/2009 16:35 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

It's come to my attention that emails including URLs from bentopress.com (like the one in my standard email signature) are being treated as spam and/or viruses by some providers (notably GoDaddy). I've talked with my ISP and they say the problem is that "GoDaddy's filters reject any messages containing an URL that resolves to an IP address in the PBL (a spam blacklist)." I believe that the problem IP address is with dotster.com (my registrar and forwarder) rather than spiritone.com (my ISP).

I'm in the process of moving bentopress.com's registration and forwarding from dotster.com, whose customer support is worse than clueless, to my main ISP spiritone.com, which I hope will resolve the problem. It might take a few days for the change to propagate around the net. Until then, be aware that emails from me or Kate may be marked as spam or viruses, even though they're no such thing.

Posted 06/08/2009 14:28 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

We leave for Wisconsin tomorrow, to spend a couple of days with my parents in Milwaukee before the con, and will be heading home on Tuesday. Here's my official programming schedule:

• Fri 9:00AM - 12:00PM, Senate B: Writers' Workshop
  Open only to writers who submitted stories before the convention.
• Fri 9:00 - 10:15PM, Senate B: Turns Out This Is Your Dad's SF/F
  David D. Levine (moderator), Eileen Gunn, Chip Hitchcock, Brad Lyau, Pat Murphy
  Back in the 30s SF/F was a welcome escape from Cowboy and Indian/Detective fiction that consumed American pop culture. The "new" of SF/F built up steam and seemed to blossom in the 50s and 60s. The 70s new weird was "not your dad's SF" and the 80s cyberpunk wasn't your dad's SF, and the 90s/00s post-human wasn't your dad's SF. This panel will debate the assertion that there is little "new" that can be added to SF, and that, coupled with the fact that we are clearly living in an SF world, makes SF writing near impossible. How are writers and readers handling the inevitable alchemy of the time?
• Sat 10:00 - 11:15AM, Room Of Ones Own: Attendees Receive Free Cyborg Unicorn (readings)
  Rosalyn Berne, David D. Levine, Nnedi Nkemdili Okorafor, Catherynne M. Valente
  
• Sun 2:30 - 3:45PM, Wisconsin: The Rules: Use or Abuse Them
  David D. Levine (moderator), Ellen Klages, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Joan D. Vinge, Patricia C Wrede
  Many beginning writers are taught such rules as "Never use adverbs" or "Avoid using fancy synonyms for 'said.'" While these rules may help writers avoid overwriting their prose, the rules can also hamper writers from developing their own unique voices. Are these rules a hinderance or a help? Which rules can be bent or broken effectively? What are the best ways to apply these rules, both to your own writing or to someone else's?
• Sun 4:00 - 5:15PM, Caucus: Humor in Feminist Speculative Fiction
  David D. Levine (moderator), Charlie Anders, Cynthia Gonsalves, Heather Lindsley
  A common criticism of feminists is lack of a sense of humor, yet Ellen Klages and Geoff Ryman successfully use humor in their work. What about other authors? Is the humor in Russ's The Female Man missed by some readers? Is humor used for satire more or less successful than other kinds of humor?
• Mon 11:30AM - 12:45PM, Capitol/Wisconsin: The SignOut
  Come and sign your works, come and get things signed, come and hang out and wind down before you leave.

Posted 05/18/2009 07:44 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 3855 | Since last entry: -324

Beautiful sunny day today. Went to the last yoga class of the term, walked down to Stumptown for more beans, mowed the lawn. Also finished up and submitted my story for the Shine anthology.

This story wasn't all that hard to write, but I had a lot of trouble dealing with the comments from my critique group. Some of them liked the story; some found its utopia implausible; others found the utopia plausible enough, but morally ambiguous (which was not my intent). How to deal with these varied reactions?

The biggest problem with writing optimistic near-future SF, I think, is that if you're going to write about a future in which some of today's most serious and intractible problems are solved, and make it convincing, you almost have to come up with a real, workable solution, and that's something much better minds than mine have failed at again and again. (People will accept a logically flawed dystopia, because they know that stupidity and greed are endless, but a logically flawed utopia won't stand up.) I tried to deal with the problem by setting the story well after the change point, but I did try to explain how we got there from here and some of my readers just didn't buy it.

In the end I think that whether a given given reader buys a story like this (and if the reader is an editor, that's literal) will depend on whether or not they accept the basic premises from which the story's solutions proceed. In editing the story, I tried to make the utopia more plausible by providing more concrete details... they won't necessarily convince an antagonistic reader, but may help a neutral reader accept the story even if they don't buy the utopia.

In other news, the podcast of "Titanium Mike Saves the Day" is now up at StarShipSofa (also available via iTunes). Happy listening!

Posted 05/14/2009 20:02 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I saw a poster for this at Stumptown Coffee this afternoon. "Filmusik promotes live performance over prerecorded media through presenting new venues for musicians and composers."

Plan Nine from Outer Space: May 27 and 29
Missile to the Moon: June 3 and 5
Both at the Hollywood Theatre

That's all I know... see http://www.filmusik.com/ for more info.

Posted 05/14/2009 16:05 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

"Charlie the Purple Giraffe" has now been adapted to audio at The Drabblecast, complete with classic cartoon music and sound effects. I love the production, and I am pleased to have been asked to provide the voice of Charlie. You can listen to it here (embedded QuickTime), or download the MP3 here.

Meanwhile, just to keep me humble, I received three rejections in a span of 12 hours. This is the downside of writing and submitting a lot. However, I've already resubmitted two of them and sent a query about the third.

I'd been noticing lately a funny noise coming from the front end and the car pulling a bit to the right, and had made an appointment for a front end alignment. However, on our way to dinner Thursday night (with writers Mark and Elizabeth Bourne at the home of our friends Janet and Ron Lunde), the problem seemed much worse. We pulled over and took a look, and found that the right front tire was completely flat. I could have changed it myself, I suppose, but we're paying for AAA, and as it turned out a big dyke with the right tools could change it a lot more quickly and easily than I could. Unfortunately, because I drove on the tire for a day or more after it had gone flat, it was too damaged to be repaired and had to be replaced. I don't feel too bad about that, though, as the other front tire was low enough on tread that it made sense to replace both of them. The good news is that I could then cancel the front-end alignment appointment.

The tire repair ate up much of this morning, and the rest of it was taken up by a trip to the UPS store to fax the Certificate of Coverage from our just-expired COBRA to our two new insurance companies. Kate now has a conventional plan, and I have one of those plans with a Health Savings Account. My plan has a $5000 deductible, which means that unless something serious happens it will never pay anything at all, but it's inexpensive and it comes with all kinds of discount cards for prescription drugs, diagnostics, medical imaging, etc.... which remind me a lot of the kind of crap free software that new PC's tend to come with. Basically it is medical disaster insurance; the HSA is used to pay for regular and minor medical expenses. I'm a little uncomfortable with this plan but it does make the best economic sense for us, for a variety of reasons.

In the afternoon we saw Star Trek with our friend Nancy McClure, followed by a lovely dinner with her and her husband Martin. Omigod. It's been a long time since I wanted to go right back and see a movie a second time! And we definitely will be doing that while it's still in its first run. There's so much amazing detail in every shot! The worst thing I can say about this movie is that there's way too much lens flare. I am a happy Trekker.

Posted 05/09/2009 00:37 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

(Some thoughts prompted by this blog post)

A question I have often asked, and never gotten a satisfactory answer to, is this: what can I wear to a science fiction convention that would be as sexy as a corset?

Lots of women wear corsets at conventions these days. They make nearly any woman look sexy, whether she's svelte or generously proportioned. But I'm not aware of anything equivalent for men. One answer I've gotten to this question is "a corset, duh." But I've tried male corsets and they don't do anything for me. Fundamentally I believe the problem is that they don't change my shape at all. Another answer is "a tux." I can get into that (and have), but it's not quite the same thing.

I realized the other day that the reason there's no good answer to this question arises from Western society's ideas about gender. A corset is not sexy principally because it emphasizes a woman's secondary sexual characteristics. A corset is sexy because it emphasizes the differences between a woman and a man -- where "man" should be read in the deprecated meaning of "human being." In other words, a corset emphasizes the difference between a "woman" and a "person," or between "mark" and "norm." Thus, there is no equivalent of a corset for men because there are no differences between a man and a person (societally speaking) to emphasize.

Clothing that emphasizes a man's secondary sexual characteristics can still be sexy, and appealing to individuals. But it's not "sexy" in the societally-endorsed way that a corset is.

Note that I am not endorsing this view, I'm just observing it.

Your thoughts?

Posted 05/07/2009 18:05 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

What I would like is a screen saver that, when you sit down at the computer, will not unlock until you answer the question "What did you come to the computer to do?" and then displays that answer prominently but not obnoxiously on the screen (perhaps in a floating or semi-transparent window) until dismissed. Perhaps to dismiss it you would have to type in some text indicating what you had done about the whatever-it-was. Perhaps the prompt and the reply would be recorded, time-stamped, in a log file.

This is intended to address the problem of going to the computer and getting sucked in by LiveJournal or Facebook or Twitter or such for an hour before you realize you didn't even do the simple five-minute thing you went to the computer to do.

Does this exist (for the Mac, please)? Or do any of you have the skillz to write it?

(Yes, it could be overridden by typing gibberish, and after using the thing for a while one would probably get in the habit of doing so. It's as hard to outsmart oneself as it is to tickle oneself. But one must try...)

Getting up and doing something else now.

Posted 05/04/2009 13:09 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

A while ago I learned that my story "Firewall" (the link goes to the complete story at Baen Books' WebScription.Net) had been translated into Chinese, without authorization or payment, by the magazine SF King. I tracked down an email for them and sent a request for author copies, at least. Well, the other day a very battered package arrived from China containing five copies of the magazine.

I have to say that, even though it's pirated and all, I'm really happy with it. I don't know SF King's readership but even if it's a minor Chinese magazine it probably has many times the readers of F&SF or Asimov's. It's a quality magazine, my story is second on the cover, and it's got five lovely illustrations (three of them are below, click to embiggen).

   

I love seeing foreign illustrations of my own stuff. The illos are always apropos, definitely representing images from my story, and yet they are characteristic of the translator's country (for example, the version of Walker in the illustrations of the Polish translation of "Tk'Tk'Tk" looks Polish to me). In this case, as usual, the characters are nothing like I'd pictured them but totally like themselves. Although they are kind of anime versions of themselves. Which is very cool.

If anyone reading this reads Chinese, I'd be happy to send you scans of the whole story (25MB of JPGs). It has footnotes, and I would love to know what they say!

Posted 05/04/2009 09:04 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 4179 | Since last entry: 1623

Finished up the first draft of my story for the Shine anthology in a burst of 1000+ words, and sent it to my critique group. Stories always go quicker for me at the end, when I've built the world, established the character's voice, and set up all the plot bits to set up the ending. In this case, though, I got to the climax and realized it didn't match up with the character's situation at the beginning of the story, so I went back and changed the beginning to set up the end I'd come to. That's the nice thing about fiction, as opposed to real life. I'm not 100% satisfied with the story as it stands, but that's what critique is for.

Yesterday we went to the art museum for an exhibit centered on a new Ganesh stele they just acquired, which was quite nice although the exhibit was smaller than I'd anticipated (only about a dozen pieces). As we walked in, we noticed that the two large stone bowls in front of the museum's Mark Building (a former Masonic temple) were spewing flame, which they don't normally do, and we guessed that a movie or TV show was using the museum as a location. But when we came out, we found ourselves in the middle of a colorful parade of academics. We eventually determined that the parade was part of the ceremony of installation, or investiture, or some such, for the new president of Portland State University.

The parade was led by a drum corps, followed by the Royal Rosarians, followed by a hundred or so people wearing doctoral gowns. These are a lot more interesting than the usual black graduation gowns, as each institution and department that grants doctoral degrees has its own special gown and hood, and sometimes hat, and the tradition is that on ceremonial academic occasions each person with a doctorate wears the outfit of the institution where they obtained it. (I believe they are usually rented rather than owned... the job of stocking and renting out the appropriate academic garb for hundreds or thousands of colleges must be daunting.) Some of them are quite flamboyant and colorful.

We went back to the art museum today, for a presentation of rare footage of the Muppets (including the original pilot for The Muppet Show, titled Sex and Violence and featuring the Swedish Chef subtitled in Chinese). Original Muppeteer Dave Goelz (Gonzo) was scheduled to present it, but unfortunately was unable to appear. We still laughed harder than I can recall doing in a long time. One of the highlights was a string of ten or twenty of the thirty-second "this week on the Muppet Show" commercials, each of which was a delightful dollop of concentrated goofiness despite the fact that it was so brief and held to such a strict formula. We'll be back again tomorrow, for another Muppet show entitled "Commercials and Experiments."

Posted 05/02/2009 22:48 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2556 | Since last entry: 555

Here's the squee-worthy detail I couldn't reveal before: I have been selected to write one of three new stories in a hardcover reissue of Wild Cards Volume One! It's kind of like a Director's Cut with additional bonus tracks... we're trying to create stories that feel as though they were left out in the first place. It's quite a challenge, but also an amazing honor -- like getting to write a new episode of the original Star Trek, then getting it filmed (somehow) with the young Shatner and Nimoy and then seeing it broadcast right along with the classic episodes.

George R. R. Martin has more details over at his blog.

Posted 05/01/2009 07:43 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2001 | Since last entry: 586

Remember The Game of Life? ("I heartily endorse this game." -- Art Linkletter. "Who?" -- Kids Today.) One of the major decisions you had to make near the beginning of the game was to take the lengthy detour to College, and earn a higher salary, or go straight into Business, ensuring a lower starting salary but you'd begin receiving it immediately. Even as a kid I always chose the College route.

Writing a novel is like going to college, in that you are investing a lot of time up front with the hope of a bigger payoff later on. Though I am pleased for friends like Greg Van Eekhout and Lisa Mantchev as they go through the throes of first novel publication, I'm also somewhat jealous... I spent most of last year working on my second novel, and now I'm waiting for a response that will probably take another six months or more. Meanwhile I didn't publish a lot of short stories in 2008, and I won't publish a lot this year even if I start selling soon. I feel a little sidetracked.

That's why I'm working intensively on short stories right now. I know the competition for the major short story markets is even fiercer than it is for novels, but I've had good luck with my stories and, even if they don't sell any more quickly than novels do, there are more of them out there so the odds of some kind of sale in any given month are pretty good. If nothing else, I get the thrill of completion every couple of weeks and the chance to start over with something new and interesting.

But I'm hedging my bets. I have another couple short story projects that will keep me busy through July or August, but once those are done I intend to start in on novel #3. Hopefully by alternating novels and short stories I'll be able to keep my name in front of readers while waiting for that elusive first novel sale.

Posted 04/30/2009 00:04 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 1415 | Since last entry: 1415

Busy, busy day today. The cleaning lady, plumber, and appliance repair guy all came today (not the way we'd have planned it if we'd had the choice, but that's when they could make it), and then this morning we discovered that overnight Kate's car had been broken into and the radio stolen, so she had to take it to get the smashed window repaired. So I had to deal with all the service people, so I couldn't leave the house and it was too distracting to get much of anything done at home. But everyone had left by 4:00, including the cops who came to take Kate's report, so I could go to the coffee shop and write.

The Fireside Coffee Lodge, where Jay Lake and I and some others sometimes write on Tuesdays, recently changed owners, name, and decor. It's no longer festooned with bears and tacky woodsy stuff... it now looks like, well, like a brand-new coffee shop, with hard little chairs and tables and no character whatsoever. I'm sure that will change as the new owners settle in, but though the old place was funky and weird and disturbing in a vaguely Deliverance kind of way, the new incarnation is just soulless. Even though the coffee's better, and they have Voodoo Doughnuts (for the Amazing Race viewers in the audience, this is the place whose motto is "Where the magic's in the hole!"), I think we'll be looking for a new place to write on Tuesdays. Maybe Fat Straw, which is comfy and really convenient for me, but the coffee is apparently awful. (The bubble tea is great, but too calorific to make it a weekly habit.)

Anyway... at the end of the day (hmm, usually that's a metaphor), the house is cleaner, the stove is working again, the loose faucet in the bathroom has been tightened, the broken window in Kate's car has been repaired, and I have 1400 words of draft on a brand new story.

For a variety of reasons I would really like to get this draft done by Saturday, so I'm shooting for 1000 words per day rather than my usual 500. As it happens, the above progress is two days' worth, so I'm well below that mark, but my brain is full so I'm stopping now.

Oh, one other thing: I was randomly selected to receive an invite code to Dreamwidth, so I'm set up there as davidlevine. I've imported all of my LiveJournal posts to my DW account, and if I've set everything up properly all my new posts will appear in both places as well. However, for now I intend to do almost all of my reading and commenting on LJ. That may change if a substantial fraction of my friends (and here I'm using the word "friends" in its ordinary, real-world sense) move from LJ to DW.

What is Dreamwidth, you ask? DW is basically a clone of LJ with some differences. The founders are ex-LJ employees and are trying to create an online community that is more like LJ used to be, using LJ's code base. It's basically almost completely identical to LJ, except that they are doing some things differently, like separating the concepts "I read your journal" and "I give you access to my protected journal posts" that are unified in the LJ term "friend." A more significant difference is that Dreamwidth is, and intends to remain, advertising-free. Also, DW is currently in closed Beta and some things are definitely not ready for prime time, like journal styles. On balance, it's no better and no worse than LJ.

I've created a Dreamwidth account and copied my content to it basically as a backup, a contingency plan in case LiveJournal either becomes unusable for some reason (goes out of business, becomes technically unstable, or makes a management decision that I can't live with) or simply becomes substantially less popular than DW among my friends. But for now LJ is where I am and where I intend to stay.

Posted 04/28/2009 21:36 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Our gas stove is on the fritz (oven won't turn on, everything else works fine). The guy I called last time we needed appliance repair is no longer in business. Any recommendations? We're in the Hawthorne neighborhood.

Posted 04/25/2009 17:50 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I've been keeping up with my goal of at least 500 words or 1 hour of editing per day, but the last time I wrote a word of new draft prose was about a month ago. Since then it's been all editing, outlines, notes, and proposals.

The good news is that in the last month or so I completed edits on three or four stories and sent them off to market for the first time. I also resubmitted some stories that had been languishing after being rejected, plus sent in some reprints to audio markets... all in all, I've more than doubled my number of stories in submission from the first of the year. More submissions will, I hope, lead to more sales. Also, now I can say that the proposals I wrote were for Wild Cards characters and stories, and that some of them were accepted (more news on that front when I can share it).

The bad news is that I haven't sold a spec story since August. I've had seven acceptances since then, but four of those were audio reprints and the other three were sales to markets where I'd been invited. It's nice to get an invite, or to sell a reprint, but a sale of a new story to a magazine or open anthology is more of a triumph. However, the recent increase in submissions has led to an increase in rejections, which does at least feel more like progress than the period from November to February during which I received no responses at all. It doesn't help that I've had three stories out for over 200 days (the longest has been out for almost 400 days), which is a long time to wait for a response on a short fiction submission. None of these markets have responded to the e-queries I sent in mid-February, but for a variety of reasons I'm not ready to give up on any of them yet.

However, one of the audio reprint sales was "Babel Probe" at Drabblecast, which is a truly amazing performance of the story, and another one (just last week) was "Charlie the Purple Giraffe," also to Drabblecast, which I am really looking forward to hearing.

I've also received my author copy of Nebula Awards Showcase 2009, which has a gorgeous cover and includes my Nebula nominee "Titanium Mike Saves the Day" (illustrated below by thepussinboots).

So, all in all, a pretty good writing month. Tomorrow I expect to begin work on an entirely new story... though I haven't yet decided which one, and the first few days at least will still be notes and outline. I'm looking forward to drafting again!

Posted 04/23/2009 21:12 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Kristine Kathryn Rusch pointed me to a post about ebooks at The Idea/Logical Blog: Some ebook observations.

What this post suggests to me is that publishers need to change from a "book" model of selling their products to a "software" model. Software publishers today manage to sell products very like ebooks, with the same problems of "need to be quality-checked on every platform they run on" and "retailers want to use margin to gain share," yet they seem to be doing very well. The key is that many different strategies have been successful (for different products in different markets at different times) -- publishers will have to become as nimble in selling ebooks as software publishers have been forced to become in selling software. And, as with software, the pricing will be all over the map -- bestselling fiction for $4.99, technical titles for $499 -- as publishers learn what the market will bear. The transition to this model will occur as it did when video tapes moved from a "priced for rental" model to a "priced for sale" model in the 1980s -- same product + different market = entirely different price points.

The branding problem is an interesting one, and differs from the software model. On my computer, the user experience of the Apple-branded word processor, the Microsoft-branded word processor, and the several other brands of word processor differs enormously, but the content (the words they process and the things you can do to those words) is quite similar. But on my ebook reader, the user experience of the Tor-branded, Del Rey-branded, and DAW-branded ebooks is nearly identical although the content of each book is unique. This makes it tough for a brand to establish itself.

Some publishers will try to impose a "house look-and-feel" on their ebooks to create a brand. This won't work because the ebook experience is so malleable -- devices vary in their capabilities, and users want to impose their reading preferences (e.g. font and font size) which is one of the main selling points of the ebook over the paper book -- and anything the publisher does to put anything other than plain, readable text on the screen will be resisted by readers.

One thing that publishers can do to establish a brand is to make sure to nail the aspects that make one ebook better than another on the same platform. Make sure the illustrations are the best possible for the platform, make sure the table of contents works, enable any optional features, and do the right thing for every supported platform. This is a heck of a lot of work, but quality control in a multi-platform environment always is, and in the software business we have a saying that "quality doesn't cost money... quality makes money."

I think, though, that the bottom line for branding ebooks is identical to that for paper books. A publisher can get some aspects of a paper book right or wrong (font and font size, paper quality, binding) but fundamentally most paper books are quite similar -- ultimately the thing that readers will remember about a publisher, if they remember anything at all, is whether or not they consistently provide the kind of books they want to read. That's how to create a brand.

Posted 04/23/2009 07:40 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I've been waiting to announce this until I had some more specific news to report (and it is coming, and it is good, but there are still x's to be crossed and j's to be dotted), but as George R. R. Martin has just let the cat partway out of the bag, I figure I ought to blog about it now.

I'm now a member of the Wild Cards consortium. The other members of the Wild Cards Class of 2009 are Cherie Priest, Mary Anne Mohanraj, David Anthony Durham, and Paul Cornell.

For those who don't know, Wild Cards is a shared universe (where multiple writers all create stories in the same setting, with their characters interacting with other writers' characters) that has been running since 1985. It's basically a superhero comic in prose form, a world in which superpowered "aces" and deformed "jokers" live, love, and struggle.

I was a huge fan of the series in college and for me to join in this bunch is the fulfillment of a dream I didn't think would ever have a chance of coming true.

Posted 04/22/2009 16:02 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Kate is now on Twitter, as KateYule. (I'm on there too, as daviddlevine.)

I've compared Twitter to a whole fanzine full of linos. Many of the 140-character-or-less "tweets" in my reading list are, indeed, mundane notes on what the author had for breakfast, or some such, but the people I choose to follow are a reliable source of brief, witty bons mots. I particularly recommend MaryRobinette, whose glimpses into her work with props and puppets are like found poetry.

Posted 04/20/2009 07:40 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

How could I have forgotten to mention one of the keenest parts of our trip to DC? Before my talk at the Library of Congress we got a backstage tour of the Manuscript Division.

I had envisioned musty historic documents under glass -- maybe not the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, but other important and well-known individual documents. Not so! The Manuscript Division is where ALL the papers of prominent individuals are stored. (They have the files of presidents up through Madison; later presidents have their own libraries.)

We saw table after table covered with box after box of papers from Ron Zeigler, being sorted and cataloged, and another room with papers from Hollywood director Rouben Mamoulian. The latter was more interesting to me... it included several award statuettes, including a Saturn and a Dracula, and boxes with intriguing labels like "production stills, Cleopatra." Also boxes and boxes of Hollywood industry magazines, and a copy of the California Drivers' Manual... everything that had been in his files at the time of his death. Our guide explained that anything that is significant to the subject is kept (for example, they might keep a magazine if it has marginal notes) and the other stuff is offered to other institutions or destroyed. Processing a new collection (which usually arrives after the subject's death and may not be in the best of shape) can take years.

After everything's been gone through, duplicates and dross eliminated, and the remaining interesting stuff sorted into folders and the folders placed in boxes, the library prepares "finding aids" to help researchers find the stuff afterwards. Each "finding aid" is a folder containing a brief biographical sketch of the subject and a list of the information they have on him/her. But the detail is only down to the folder level... you can learn that the library has a folder of "correspondence with Joseph P. Blow, 1959-1963" but if you want to know any more about what's in there you have to request the folder and look in it yourself. (I don't know if you can get them through interlibrary loan... you probably have to come down to the library in person. The reading room is quite nice.)

The ranks and ranks of shelves on which the boxes and bound volumes of papers are stored are an interesting historical exhibit in themselves, showing the changes over the years in what's considered state-of-the-art in manuscript preservation. Some of the material is self-destructive, high-acid paper and the like, and these are carefully photocopied, though the budget for preservation and conservation is finite, of course.

The thing about the Library of Congress, our guide explained, is its scale... there's tens or hundreds of times more of everything here than anywhere else a librarian may have worked, and dealing with so much material requires different ways of thinking. And it keeps coming in, in ever-increasing amounts.

Looking over all this stuff helped me to understand why and how my own papers should be preserved for future historians (Lynne Thomas at NIU has requested mine, as she has for many other SF writers) and when I got home I started in on the process of sorting them into "keep," "send to NIU," "send the original and keep a copy," "send a copy and keep the original," and "why is this here anyway?" which I've been meaning to start on for almost two years. The work is going slowly, and it's mind-numbing, but it's kind of cool to look over my own history and realize how much progress I've made in the ten years or so I've been doing this writing thing. Finding the Writers of the Future Honorable Mention certificates, for example, was a nice surprise, and a reminder of how pleased I was to receive each one.

I've also been a little bit depressed at the thought that my best years may already be behind me. "Tale of the Golden Eagle" was written in 2001, after all, and I don't think I've written anything quite as good since. On the other hand, the lack of major successes in the last few years may just be due to the fact that I've spent much of that time working on novels, and since each novel submission can take months or years it may be quite a while before that work bears fruit. And "Titanium Mike" did get a Nebula nomination just last year.

I keep plugging away.

Posted 04/17/2009 09:12 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

We've been back from DC for most of a week and I'm still just finding my feet, but here are a few brief observations anyway.

My talk at the Library of Congress before the convention went very well, despite the fact that they moved it to a different room at the last minute and put the sign announcing the change outside the new room, and there was another event with free food at the same time which took away many of the people who might otherwise have attended. We wound up with about 20 people all told, most of them square dancers who were also in DC for the convention.

Although I felt incredibly underprepared, that thing in my head that takes over when I have to do public speaking did its job and the presentation came off smashingly. Some of the square dancing librarians in attendance were so excited they were talking about inviting me to speak at an ALA conference. I'd love to, and I hope it really happens. I'm also going to try to sell the talk as a non-fiction article.

I'd originally planned to speak without visual aids, but at the last minute I was inspired by a talk at TED.com and decided to put together a PowerPoint slide show consisting only of images. It worked great, even though I had to clutch the projector cable in my hand all through the talk to keep the image from turning magenta. I also used PowerPoint to record the talk, but unfortunately it only recorded the first 10-20 seconds of audio per slide. Which is a real shame, because the bits that did get recorded sound fabulous.

The convention itself was superbly run and featured a lot of great dancing, including several unusual specialty tips: the Cipher tip with calls delivered as spoonerisms or riddles, a Mirror tip that swapped left for right (if your square breaks down during a Mirror tip, is that seven years bad luck?), and an hour of six-couple "rectangle dancing." Allowing people to choose their table mates for the banquet, then placing the tables at random, was an excellent innovation. The one negative comment I have was that the Fun Badge Tour buses were given insufficient directions, which (together with a mechanical breakdown) caused us to miss an entire stop on the tour and wound up with our bus being so late for the last stop we had to dance it by ourselves. We had fun anyway.

We also visited the Newseum (highly recommended), the Spy Museum (only okay, especially because it was so crowded that day) and the Smithsonian Natural History museum (I saw so many skeletons there that for a few hours thereafter all the people looked like skeletons with skin and bones on) and ate many fabulous meals. The convention was right at the Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan subway stop (and why are the first two separated by a hyphen, but the last two by a slash?) and there were dozens of great ethnic restaurants within one block. Probably the best meal was the Afghan dinner we had on the first night, but none of them was less than good.

Posted 04/16/2009 16:17 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

• Friday morning: Writers Workshop for those who have already signed up (I'm moderating).
• Friday 9-10:30pm, Senate B: Turns out this IS your Dad's SF/F. Panel with me, Jane Acheson, Chip Hitchcock, and Brad Lyau (I'm moderating).
• Saturday 10-11:30am, Room of One's Own: Attendees Receive Free Cyborg Unicorn. Readings with me, Rosalyn Berne, Greer Gilman, Nnedi Okorafor, and Catherynne M. Valente.
• Sunday 2:30-4:00pm, Wisconsin: The Rules: Use or Abuse Them. Panel with me, Ellen Klages, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Joan Vinge, and Patricia Wrede (I'm moderating).
• Sunday 4:00-5:30pm, Caucus: Humor in Feminist Speculative Fiction. Panel with me, Charlie Anders, Heather Lindsley, and Pan Morigan (I'm moderating).
• Monday 11:30am-1:00pm, Capitol/Wisconsin: The SignOut. I'll be signing copies of Space Magic.

Looks like they believed me when I said I enjoy moderating!

Posted 04/16/2009 14:53 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I'll be appearing on a panel at Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham tomorrow, Thursday April 16, 6-8pm, as part of National Library Week. It's called "Worlds Connect with Science Fiction" and other panelists include Aimee Amodio, Tina Connolly, and M.K. Hobson. The panel will be held in the Bob Scott Room in the MHCC Library and is free and open to the public.

Hope to see you there!

Posted 04/15/2009 19:00 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Heading for Washington DC for the annual gay square dance convention. As is typical with large convention hotels, they charge an arm and another arm for network access, so I may be offline for the next week.

Until then, have a look at some of my photos from Radcon, which I didn't get around to uploading until recently.

I'd also like to put in a plug for Molly Lewis, aka sweetafton23, the cutest little ukulele player (and the wittiest) you ever did see. We saw her with Jonathan Coulton back in January (you can see a video of that very performance) and you can now buy a couple of her songs as high-quality MP3s. Check her out!

Posted 04/07/2009 06:38 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

It's time to play the music! It's time to light the lights! It's time to meet the Muppets at the Portland Art Museum's Whitsell Auditorium!

The NW Film Center is having a special retrospective in May entitled "Muppets, Music, & Magic: Jim Henson's Legacy".

"The retrospective presents a treasure trove of Henson's extraordinarily imaginative work, including TV pilots, shorts, commercials, promotional films, feature films, and rarities galore. To further explore the magic of Henson's world of fantasy, Emmy Award-winning collaborator Dave Goelz will host 'Muppet History 101' and 'Commercials and Experiments,' and answer your every question. One of the principal Muppeteers for over 30 years, Goelz has designed and performed dozens of beloved characters, including the Great Gonzo and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew."

We've already bought tickets to the two Dave Goelz presentations on May 2 and 3, and Labyrinth on May 10.

For more information and to buy tickets: http://www.nwfilm.org/screenings/19/152/

Posted 04/04/2009 12:56 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

No word count in this writing post, because the last couple of weeks has been spent on tasks other than creating new words of prose.

One of the biggies was that I edited my story "Teaching the Pig," which was critiqued some time ago, and submitted it. This story was generally well-received by my crit group, but I felt it was still lacking something and the critiques were pulling it in all different directions. I finally decided that what it really needed was to take the aliens out and make it a solidly Earth-based story. (The aliens were offstage anyway, and removing them only cut about 200 words, but if the main character is backed by an Earth-based organization rather than benevolent aliens it makes his motivations a bit more suspect.) I didn't really want to cut the aliens, as the "alien-imposed benevolent dictatorship" angle was the original starting point for the story, but in the end I decided that they were a distraction from the fundamental story of protagonist vs. antagonist and they had to go.

Looking over the critiques this story received, I'm realizing how my own critiques have changed over the years. Many of these crits are focused on small logic or worldbuilding issues, exactly the sort of thing I would have picked at myself ten or even five years ago. But now my focus has broadened... I'm much more prepared to excuse technical errors, even physics errors which would have once thrown me out of the story, as long as the story works. I'd like to think that I'm now "seeing the big picture" rather than "getting soft in my old age."

The other thing I spent a chunk of time on was writing a pitch for a short story. (This is not normally done for short stories, but this is a special case.) I'm extremely pleased and excited to have this opportunity, and also rather frightened by the thought of participating in such a significant and long-running project. I don't know if this particular idea will be accepted; the editor likes it but there are some changes that need to be made. I also plan on pitching a few more ideas and I have reasonable hope that one or more of them will eventually be accepted, but I don't yet know which one(s). Sorry to be so vague, but I'll provide more details when they're nailed down (might be a couple of months), and when I do it'll be a very squee-worthy announcement.

I've been sticking to my goal of writing at least 500 words per day (including notes/outlines, or at least one hour of editing) since the beginning of the year. This has generated four new short stories, of which two are already in submission, one critiqued and awaiting edit, and one currently in critique. I've also gotten off my duff and resubmitted some rejected stories, and submitted some reprints to audio markets. The end result is that my number of outstanding submissions has more than doubled since the beginning of the year, which should lead to more short story sales this year than last.

One of the audio submissions has already resulted in not only a sale, but a publication. "Babel Probe" appeared on the Drabblecast podcast this week and the response on the Drabblecast message board has been phenomenal ("Kick ass piece of short fiction," "my favorite fiction podcast episode ever," "I've heard the bulk of the episodes from most of the other story podcasts ... hands down the best production of the best story," "That was freaking awesome. No, seriously. I am considering pulling my subscriptions from a few podcasts that I listen to because I think the short audio fiction thing just peaked. It can only get worse"). All praise is due to the producer of The Drabblecast, Norm Sherman, who performs the story with voices, music, and sound effects that are absolutely perfect. It gave me chills, seriously. Go listen, and put some money in his tip jar.

I've also been writing my talk at the Library of Congress ("How The Future Predicts Science Fiction," noon on April 9, free and open to the public), which I really should be working on right now.

Additional writing-related stuff:

• I received galley proofs and a cover flat for my story "Aggro Radius" in Gamer Fantastic (it comes out in July).
• I was invited to participate in a Science Fiction Panel on Thursday, Apr 16 from 6 to 8 at the Mt. Hood Community College Library, part of National Library Week.
• I won free books in a drawing at SF Signal.

Okay, back to work!

Posted 04/04/2009 10:23 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

The other day, the folks at Drabblecast (http://www.drabblecast.org) asked if I had any stories under 2500 words. I sent them a few, and then the day before yesterday I received a surprise email: they were doing a podcast with a song relating to Ancient Near Eastern civilization, and could they possibly buy "Babel Probe" right away? They sent me a contract, I sent it back, and the podcast is available TODAY.

It is a most excellent audio performance of the story, with music and sound effects and everything, and you can hear it here or download it from iTunes. FREE!

This is the story for which thepussinboots drew this awesome picture (click to embiggen):

Posted 04/02/2009 10:35 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Yesterday was Kate's birthday. I made her pancakes and fresh-squeezed OJ for breakfast, and bought her a KitchenAid mixer (which I am assured is the only acceptable kitchen appliance to give as a gift to a significant other). She's been faunching after one for years... I just hope we can find a good place to store it.

In the evening we had a small party, attended by people from all our different communities of friends (writers, fans, square dancers, and, um, Sam and Rory, who are friends via fan Kate Schaefer but are not members of any of the above). We ate pecan pie from the recipe Mary Robinette Kowal had used in Chattanooga, which was tres yum, and played games including jelly-bean relay, charades, and a variant of "telephone" or "exquisite corpse" in which players alternately wrote phrases and drew pictures based on the previous picture/phrase without seeing any of the ones before that. The one that made birthday pie come out of Kate's nose is shown below (click to embiggen, and again to embiggen again).

The text, in case you can't read it, goes as follows:

1. Kate is glad to have a birthday party
2. Robespierre celebrates the guillotining of a Conehead
3. Bastille day for coneheads
4. Some monks assault the castle; others juggle; some lose their heads

Posted 03/31/2009 14:43 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

As I believe I mentioned earlier, I will be giving a talk at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. My topic is "How the Future Predicts Science Fiction" and the event is free and open to the public. I'll also be signing and selling copies of Space Magic. Tell all your DC-area friends!

When: Thu Apr 9, 12-1pm
Where: 101 Independence Ave, SE, Washington DC, 20540 ; Madison Building, LM-139 (map)
For more info: Contact Colleen Cahill ccah@loc.gov or Nate Evans natev@loc.gov.
Google Calendar entry

Posted 03/26/2009 07:49 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 6062 | Since last entry: 3201

So I was plugging away on the end-of-the-world story, 500-600 words a day, when the editor of the anthology for which it's being written posted a blog post reminding about the deadline (May 31) and that he expects a lot of stories to come in right at the deadline. And he's already accepted several stories, so the competition's getting tighter all the time.

Given this prod, I decided that getting the story in for the next critique group meeting, rather than the one three weeks after that, would be a Very Good Thing. So I put the pedal to the metal.

I wrote until late last night, then all this morning. I finished the first draft at 1:15 or so and sent it to the group for critique next week. Go me.

I finished just in time to rush off to the theatre for The Importance of Being Earnest, an excellent production. After which we had to hustle to get to writing friend Camille's Book Swap and Cocktail Party, which was full of fun people and awesomeness. And books. We brought five boxes of books and came away with one... unfortunately, the boxes we brought were ones that Kate had brought back from her parents' place, so we are actually net +1 box instead of -4.

In the middle of the awesomeness my phone rang. It was square dance friends Bo and Don, asking "aren't we getting together for dinner tonight?" Turns out they had it on their calendar but we didn't... not sure how that happened, but we decided not to spurn the opportunity for a nice dinner with friends, so we said hasty goodbyes and scurried off to Del Inti on Alberta for a fabulous Peruvian dinner and excellent mojitos.

After that we watched the Battlestar Galactica finale, which I found fairly satisfying though it had way too many endings and dragged a bit in the second half. I know that others had big problems with it... perhaps reading those (while avoiding spoilers) lowered my expectations to the degree that I could enjoy it.

That was my Saturday. Not too shabby.

Posted 03/21/2009 22:42 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2861 | Since last entry: 2861

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

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

Apart from that...

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

I have a short essay in the latest "Mind Meld" at SF Signal. This one's about taboos in SF.

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

Posted 03/18/2009 17:01 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted 03/10/2009 11:14 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

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

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

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

Posted 03/08/2009 22:55 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 6844 | Since last entry: 2637

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

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

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

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

Posted 02/26/2009 16:19 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

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

Posted 02/26/2009 08:25 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 4207 | Since last entry: 1323

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

Starring Jerry Lewis as Captain Kirk.

Punch in the gut, right?

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

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

Feh, I say. Feh and feh.

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

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

Posted 02/22/2009 16:08 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

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

Posted 02/18/2009 16:26 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2884 | Since last entry: 557

To-do list management is always an issue around here, as I suspect it is for most people. Even the professional organizer we work with has admitted she has problems keeping up with her many things to do.

One of the biggest problems I have with to-do lists is that if you keep your list online, in any form, it tends to silt up with unloved items (things that you really want to have done, but just can't be bothered to do). On the other hand, if you keep your list on paper, it becomes messy, or it isn't there when you need it, or you have to recopy it, and things get lost.

I have used a variety of different techniques over the years. One of my favorites is to keep the list on paper and recopy it to a new sheet every day. This gives me a daily opportunity to reprioritize, including dropping items that I'm sick of copying over and over and realize I'm never going to do. But this technique becomes unweildly when the list gets too long.

The list of things I wanted to do right away when we got back from Germany was huge, and I spent much of January unsuccessfully battling it. It was so big that I was actually stymied sometimes -- so unable to decide what to do that I did nothing.

In the last week of January I hit upon a way to break this list paralysis. I printed out the list and numbered each item, 0 to 68. These numbers were arbitrary, not in priority order. Then I rolled percentile dice to determine what to do next. There was no cheating allowed -- once I had rolled an item, I couldn't do anything else until I did it. If I rolled a number greater than 68, something I had already done, or something that was impossible at the moment, I rolled again.

Sometimes I rolled a number and, staring at the task, realized that the task simply wasn't worth the effort it would take to do, and never would be, so I scratched it off. That counts. Sometimes I would notice other items that would dovetail well with the selected item (e.g. running several errands on the same side of town) and do those too.

This technique worked well. In a week I scratched off 41 of the 69 items, and made some kind of progress on several more. Some of the crossed-off items were perennials, like washing the dishes, but it still provided positive feedback to see the list getting shorter.

An important part of the technique was having one physical piece of paper that only ever got tasks crossed off, never added. New tasks that arose during the week were added to the online version of the list for future attention. Anything more urgent than that would be done immediately.

Well, between our trip to Chattanooga and the following trip to Radcon just a few days later, my list got huge again, so I'm going to use the same technique between now and Potlatch. The list has 93 items this time, and several of them have hard deadlines so I'm going to have to find some balance between "do something that's urgent" and "roll dice to do something you might otherwise put off." Wish me luck.

16. Blog about to-do list

Posted 02/18/2009 15:41 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Last weekend I attended Radcon, an SF convention in Pasco, WA. The name and theme of the convention are derived from the Hanford nuclear reservation that dominates the town, which sports plenty of cafes, drycleaners, and high school sports teams with "atomic" in their names.

Last year some of the attending pros got a tour of the nuclear waste clean-up project, including a nifty folding robot bulldozer. I was fortunate enough to get another tour this year, a visit to the "In Vivo Radiobioassay and Research Facility." This is where Hanford workers are scanned for radioactive exposure. It includes several small rooms shielded with a foot or more of steel and concrete, in which the person under test sits quietly while sensitive radiation detectors listen for low levels of radiation in their lungs, bones, or other body parts. A rank of television monitors, each showing the quiet closed-eyes visage of an anonymous Hanford worker waiting for his test to be over, looked to me like an art installation. Also very cool were the plastic body parts they use to calibrate the equipment. Most of these are solid plastic, but a few include bones from people who suffered radioactive exposure during their lives. I took lots of pictures, but haven't posted them yet; for now you can check out Jay Lake's blog and Flickr set.

The convention was heavily populated with young people (mostly gamers, I think) who looked just like the fans at Orycon except that I didn't know any of them. Most of them were in costume, a motley assortment of furry, steampunk, video game, and Insane Clown Posse. I felt terribly underdressed, and on several occasions I had to stop myself from running into one of the costume dealers who had set up shop in guest rooms and shouting "Give me sometihng that fits! Ears, goggles, faerie wings, I don't care, I just need a costume!" But I stayed cool and professional and writer-like. Mostly.

I spent most of the time hanging out with writers and editors, including C.S. Cole and Kamila Miller (who gave me a ride to and from the con, thanks!), Janna Silverstein, Jay Lake, Julie McGalliard, Alma Alexander, Ken and Jen Scholes, Beth Meacham, Patrick Swenson, John A. Pitts, Miki Garrison, Elizabeth Coleman, Keffy Kehrli, Joyce Reynolds-Ward, Tina Connolly, Sara Mueller, Camille Alexa, Anthony Pryor, Beth Peters, and no doubt many others whose names I've neglected to remember.

I was on a lot of programming. My favorite was the "Who's Line Is It Any Way" [sic] hour right after opening ceremonies, which was actually a series of theatre games ring-led by GoH Joe Kucan. I'd never done most of those games before and it was a real hoot. I also participated in Pictionary and Charades. Pictionary was, as usual, highly biased by MC Radcon Bob. The writers had to sketch words such as "smiley face" and "dog," while the artists were stuck with "the Louvre" and "the Pythagorean Theorem." Mind you, I could have done either of those in thirty seconds myself, but the artists were handicapped by a desire to draw properly rather than executing a quick sketch. The order in which the lines are laid down on the page is also key. Charades was cut short after two rounds due to lack of participants. The first round was a movie, which we quickly guessed was Star Wars. The second was announced to be a TV show; I said "Star Trek" and got it before the first gesture. I can name that song in no notes.

There was some kind of bug going around. I caught it, but never had any symptoms worse than sniffles and a slight sore throat. I'm almost completely better already.

Bottom line: Radcon is not very organized, but really knows how to show its guests a good time.

Posted 02/17/2009 15:34 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 2327 | Since last entry: 2880

The word count figures above make no sense, I know. The "word count" is the count for the current story in process ("the vampires-in-suburbia story," sequel to the previous witches-in-suburbia and werewolves-in-suburbia stories). The "since last entry" figure above is the total words generated on this story and the previous one ("the pupa story") since my last post with a wordcount, which was 2/7. It doesn't count 2719 words of notes and outline on the vampire story.

I've been maintaining my streak of 500 words a day since January 1, though that includes notes and outline and on a couple of those days I've had to state that 350 words is close enough to 500 for my purposes.

Apart from the daily grind of generating new words, I have a couple of pieces of writing news to report: there's a great review of Space Magic in the upcoming (and final, alas) issue of Realms of Fantasy; and the online anthology Diamonds in the Sky has been released, including my story "Galactic Stress." The anthology is free to read online, so go check it out. The hope is that this anthology will be used as a text by astronomy teachers looking for engaging SF stories to help their students understand astronomy concepts.

This is the first post with a new back-end script that should make it easier for me to post more than once a day. I know I don't usually, but that's been partly because it's a pain. I hope that this will encourage me to do more brief posts rather than the big catch-up posts I usually do.

And with that... I'm going to post it! I hope to have another small post soon.

Posted 02/17/2009 14:44 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

You may recall that last year I attended the Launch Pad astronomy workshop. Well, applications are now open for this year's workshop. It will be held July 14-21, 2009.

Launch Pad is a week-long crash course for modern astronomy held annually in Laramie, Wyoming, and combines traditional lecture, experiment, activities, discussion, and telescope visits that include a trip to the 2.3 meter telescope at WIRO.

Launch Pad is NASA-funded, and the workshop pays for lodging, travel, and some additional expenses (most but not all meals, textbooks). Attendence is limited to about a dozen participants, who are selected based on audience size and audience diversity. That’s a fancy way of saying they don’t just admit a dozen white male hard sf novelists who write for pretty much the same audience. They would love to see more applications from writers of all genres, non-fiction writers, screen writers, playwrights, editors and anyone with the ability to put more and better quality astronomy in front of interested eyes, although they expect many participants to continue to be science fiction novelists as they have dominated the applicant pool.

The special guest instructor this year is Joe Haldeman, science fiction novelist, who has a degree in physics and astronomy and is an avid amateur astronomer. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy is also scheduled to present. Regular presenters Mike Brotherton and Jim Verley will do their thing as usual, and there will be other astronomers guest-lecturing in their specialties.

The application form, more information about the workshop, a history, and detailed reports from previous Launch Pad participants Alma Alexander and me are available online. Applications will be open until March 15 and final decisions should be made by March 31.

I had a blast last year, and I encourage any SF writer with an interest in astronomy to apply.

Posted 02/15/2009 23:33 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 7203 | Since last entry: 561

All the writing I did today, I did first thing this morning.

Around lunchtime we went to the Tennessee Aquarium, which is a very fine aquarium. Highlights included seahorses, penguins, turtles, alligators, a caiman, cuttlefish, jellyfish, nautiluses, and otters.

The rest of the day was spent planning, shopping for, preparing, eating, and judging the Iron Chef Pear Battle. Steven Gould selected the theme ingredient, pears, and picked the names for the teams out of a hat. As it happens, all the couples present were split across the two teams. Mary, whose family home this is, handicapped herself by taking the smaller, less-well-equipped kitchen. Her sous-chefs were Steve, Kate, and Sean. I was on Althea's team along with Laurel and Beth.

We had a lot of fun playing with food, cooking things we'd never even heard of before (Beth's dad is a chef and told us how to prepare a gastrique), and both meals came out fabulous. Eight courses all told: soup, salad, entree, and dessert from each team, judged by Mary's parents and a couple of her cousins. The competition was close -- our team won the soup and salad courses, but Mary's won entree and dessert, and her entree was Best in Show so her team took the overall competition.

Our team's menu:

1. Pear and brie soup (served with thinly sliced pears and croutons on top)
2. Campari-poached pear and spinach salad with goat cheese, with house-roasted macadamia nuts and a pear reduction vinaigrette
3. Duck breast with pear-basalmic gastrique (aka Awesome Sauce), served over couscous with chopped pears
4. Oven-roasted Anjou pears with frozen pear-cognac mush

All served with kiwi-pear tea.

Some photos from the battle are available on Steve's Flickr photostream, with more to come.

Posted 02/07/2009 20:00 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 6642 | Since last entry: 2390

Still in Chattanooga, at Mary Robinette Kowal's writing retreat. In addition to Mary, Kate, and myself we are Steve Gould, Beth Wodzinski (editor of Shimmer), Sean Markey, Alethea Kontis, Laurel Amberdine, Chris Boros (Laurel's husband), and Mary's parents. A few more people may yet appear before Monday.

I talked with Mary and some others about the issues I raised in my last post and now feel somewhat better about the situation. Also, several people have popped up with suggestions for markets, though I still don't know where I'm going to send that story next. Thanks to everyone who's tried to help.

It's been a good several days' writing. I wrote 1700 words yesterday on what I'm calling for now "the pupa story", and 600 words today. I'm not sure how good it is -- I tried a bit of stunt writing which may or may not have worked -- but it's in the home stretch and should be a finished first draft, probably around 7500 words, before we go home. I thought I was getting better at making them shorter, and I guess I need to concentrate on that again.

We've been eating very well here. We went to Couch's for barbecue last night, and otherwise have been dining well at Mary's home: trout, curry, strata, various soups, and fabulous homemade baked goods including baklava, dark chocolate cookies, and two pecan pies. I got a Twitter account so that I would not miss out on the announcements of what new goodies had been laid out for our delectation. (We are divided among several rooms in two houses here, and Twitter is the method of choice for communication among the group. I am now daviddlevine (note the extra "d" in the middle) on Twitter. Can anyone suggest a good Twitter client for a PalmOS Treo?)

Today, many of us took in a matinee of Coraline, in 3-D (see photo below of the polarized-shades Mafia). The consensus of the group seems to be that it is visually very impressive (though a couple of us got sick from the 3-D), but the changes that were made to the original book's plot were not improvements.

More writing tomorrow, and perhaps a little Chattanooga-area touristing.

Posted 02/06/2009 20:48 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 4252 | Since last entry: 2949

We're in Chattanooga, at the home of Mary Robinette Kowal's parents, for Mary's birthday writing retreat. The countryside is beautiful, the house is elegant and hospitable, and I'm surrounded by delightful and talented writers who are selling all over the place. Mary herself just got namechecked in the Guardian (the Guardian!) as one of the glittering stars in the SF firmament.

Me? I managed to force out 750 words yesterday and they were crap.

I also just received a rejection on a 7200-word fantasy that I'm really proud of. It has bounced off of F&SF, Asimov's, and Strange Horizons and I'm having a hard time finding anywhere else to send it. Realms of Fantasy just died; it's too long for Clarkesworld; it's not SF enough for Interzone or horrific enough for Apex; Black Gate and Aberrant Dreams are "temporarily closed"... I've got a query out at a market that it's a bit too long for, hoping they'll make an exception, but the state of the market is depressing.

I'll get over this. But for right now, color my mood black.

Posted 02/05/2009 08:36 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 1303 | Since last entry: 1303

Wow, it's been a while since my last progress report. Sorry about that. Here's what's happened since January 15...

I wrote at least 500 words every single day since January 1 (this is not a new year's resolution for me, but it is a goal). However, I've been a terrible procrastinator, putting off the writing until the end of the day every day, and often don't finish until well after midnight. This habit is costing me sleep and I want to change it. However, that's not going to happen today. Maybe tomorrow.

I completed the story I was working on in my last post. The first draft was8588 words, which I immediately whacked back to 7199 words. I sent it to my critique group and the reactions were quite positive, though I do have some changes to make before I submit it. To be honest, though, between changes in my writing and changes in the critique group, I wonder how much they can do to help my stories any more. They're great at spotting big problems, but I'm not sure they can make the difference between "publishable" and "no editor worth her salt would possibly pass this one up," which is what I'm shooting for these days.

I started another story immediately after completing that one (that's the 1303 words above). Because I was unsatisfied about the lack of brainstorming and outlining I'd done on the previous story, I decided that notes and outline count toward my 500 words per day goal. This may have been a mistake, as I spent 11 days writing 6000 words of notes and outline, which feels like too much. I need to find some kind of middle ground. (This particular story may have suffered from some other things going on that made me reluctant to commit to the story and begin drafting. I think I have overcome that now.)

We spent MLK Day Weekend in Seattle, doing a belated Christmas present exchange with Kate's family. We also had a delightful brunch with Janna Silverstein and visited the exhibit about Lucy at the Science Center. The compressed history of Ethiopia that made up the first part of the exhibit felt tacked on ("okay, we'll let you take this unique artifact on the road, but you have to tell something about our country"), the hands-on section in the middle on the practice of paleoanthropology and the structure of Lucy's skeleton was fascinating, and the final room, where Lucy's actual skeleton was accompanied by a standing reconstruction of the same bones and a full-size sculpture of what she might have looked like, was excellent. I think the sculpture was the best part... somehow the artist managed to give Lucy chimp-like features but put a human soul in the eyes.

I spent Inauguration Day in the hospital. Don't worry, it was just a minor medical procedure for Kate. She came home the same day and has had no problems since.

We saw three plays, Apollo (a kind of collage of a performance piece, combining multimedia, dance, and words in a story of Nazi scientists, African-American civil rights, and the race to the moon), The Seafarer (a bunch of messed-up drunk Irishmen beat the Devil at his own game), and Vitriol and Violets (a "play with music" about the Algonquin Round Table, with a superb local cast). We also attended a performance by musician Jonathan Coulton, who was great fun as always (though the opening act, Paul and Storm, were good, they did an awful lot of the same material we've seen before).

And our neighborhood book group met to discuss Podkayne of Mars. Oh my god, the sexism! And the plot, practically nonexistent! And the supposed lesson of the book comes out of nowhere! What an awful, awful book. How far we've come since it was written.

I'll try not to let so much time pass before my next update.

Posted 01/31/2009 18:21 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

In December of 2008 we traveled to Europe for a Danube river cruise featuring Christmas markets. Kate spent a year in Munich in college and has long wanted to return to Germany for the holiday traditions, including Glühwein (hot mulled wine) and gebrannte Mandeln (sugar-coated roasted almonds). We had a great time on the trip, although traveling in winter weather has its downsides.

We flew Lufthansa direct from PDX to Frankfurt, then took a train to Nuremberg where the cruise started. After we'd booked the cruise, Kate was rather startled to look at a map and realize that Nuremberg is not actually on the Danube; however, it is on the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal. Arriving in Nuremberg and transferring to the U-Bahn (subway), we found that unlike NYC or London, where you have to pay or show payment to get in every time, in Germany and Austria there are no turnstiles in the subway station -- just a small validator and a sign saying that you must have a valid ticket past this point. We hardly ever saw anyone buying or validating tickets (probably most locals have passes) and never saw a fare inspector. It was incredibly civilized.

We had booked one night in the Hotel Luga before the cruise, and found it pleasant and welcoming but slightly shabby. But there were Oblaten-Lebkuchen (gingerbread cookies) on the pillows, a Nuremberg specialty that turned out to be a bit of a theme for the trip. We napped a couple hours, on top of sleeping most of the way on the train... I'd forgotten how enervating and disorienting jet lag is.

After we'd napped and eaten our Lebkuchen, we bundled up and went out to see some sights. I hate the cold, but I had my down jacket, polar fleece scarf, Keen boots, and Tilley Winter Hat and was comfortable enough. (I love my fabulous Tilley Winter Hat. I bought it especially for this trip, and Kate was so impressed by it she bought one too.) "So this is what 7° C feels like," we said to each other, and spent most of the rest of the trip using Celsius to plan our wardrobe for the day (even though much of the available information was in Fahrenheit as well). Even though my only German lessons had been a few night classes in about 1987 (when I worked for an Intel-Siemens joint venture), and I'd barely used the language since, I found that it all came back when I needed it. I wasn't nearly as fluent as Kate, but I had enough of the language for basic touristing.

We took the Strassenbahn (tram) to the Museum Industrielkultur, where we saw lots of keen vehicles and machines including some very strange early bicycles, a miniature steam engine with little railings so your imaginary engineers don't fall off, and two cars with front- and rear-facing bench seats and large doors in front and back (not on the sides). I kept thinking that Jay Lake would love this place.

From the museum we took another tram downtown and walked to the Christmas Market, finding it energetic and very crowded. Nuremberg's Christkindelsmarkt fills the square in front of the cathedral, with neat rows of booths selling gingerbread, mulled wine, hot citrus punch, bratwurst, Christmas ornaments, handcrafts, and quite a bit of cheap manufactured tat. It was more commercial and uniform than many of the others we saw later, but a good introduction to the phenomenon. All of the mulled wine vendors used a system where you paid a deposit of 2 euros for the mug (a "souvenir" mug for this specific market and year, pink and incredibly ugly) and could refill it as many times, at as many different vendors, as you liked before returning it to any vendor for the deposit. The same system was used at all the other Christmas markets we visited.

We had dinner at Bratwurst Röslein, "the biggest bratwurst restaurant in the world," sharing a table with a family who'd come into town to visit the market and do some shopping. Every town in Germany has its own characteristic sausage, which locals insist is the finest sausage in the world. The Nuremberger bratwurst is about the size of my index finger, and is generally served three in a bun ("drei in Weckla"), or six or eight or ten on a plate. I had a plate of six, with warm potato salad and Christkindelsuppe (a special Christmas soup with little strips of pancake in it). Yum. After dinner we stopped at the International Market, another Christmas market just around the corner from the main one, for mulled wine and gingerbread for dessert. Back at the hotel, I sat on the radiator for a while to warm up before going to bed.

The next day, after a very nice breakfast in the hotel, we visited the Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände, a fascinating museum built inside the Nazi Congress Hall (an enormous arena and conference center built by the Nazis, incomplete at the war's end but still standing in its unfinished state). Exhibits in the hall cover the period from the Beer Hall Putsch to the Nuremberg Trials, with an emphasis on the Party's and Hitler's rise to power and the huge annual Party rallies held here in Nuremberg. It's appalling how quickly Hitler came to power, and interesting that the cult of personality was so consciously crafted. And I have to say that, bad as Bush and the Republicans were, they weren't nearly as bad as the Nazis.

Returning downtown by tram, we had some difficulty getting past the old city wall even on foot. We had lunch at the Heilig Geist Spital Restaurant, all dark wood and animal heads on the wall, 600 years old... though it was competely destroyed in WWII and rebuilt in 1951. Lots of Germany is like that. It's almost impossible to tell which buildings are really old and which are 50-year-old reconstructions. After lunch we returned to the Christkindlesmarkt, where we met the Christ Child herself.

Um, that may require some explanation. The Nuremberg Christmas Market is overseen by the Christ Child, who is for some reason portrayed by a young woman in a long blonde wig and a golden angel gown -- kind of like the Dairy Princesses at the Wisconsin State Fair. She is selected for a two-year term and must be Nuremberger born, of good character, and free of vertigo. This last is necessary because one of her official duties is to proclaim the opening of the Christmas Market each year... from the cathedral's balcony... standing on on a box that raises her up where everyone can see her... above the railing. Two strong guys are holding onto her belt when she does this, but I've stood on that balcony and I wouldn't take the job even if I were eligible. Anyway, we saw her greeting the crowd and handing out autographed postcards.

Then we shifted our bags from the hotel to our cruise ship. The Viking Spirit is a long, narrow ship, small by ocean cruise standards --150 passengers on three decks -- but as big as it can be and still fit through the canal's locks. In fact, for the first part of the cruise, where there were some low bridges, the boat folded itself up like a Transformer, with the smokestacks, the radar mast, the railings on the top deck, and even the wheelhouse retracting to make a tidy little rectangular package. Our cabin was comfortable and well-equipped, and not the smallest hotel room we've ever had by any means. The one aggravation was the incessant Christmas muzak, which we could at least turn off in our own cabin.

That night we had a welcome and safety lecture, which was mostly about fire alarms and how to avoid plugging the toilets. There was no need for a lifeboat drill, as the ship is 6 meters tall and the river's only 4 meters deep. This was followed by dinner, where both the food and our table companions were... well, perfectly nice, if a bit mundane. Our fellow travelers were generally only a little older than us, and tended to be very well traveled. They were almost all from the United States, and for some reason most of them were Southerners. (Kate speculated "Who else would choose to take a cruise in the snow?") The crew, most of whom hailed from Eastern Europe, all spoke English.

Breakfast on the boat was a buffet with a nice variety of American-style and European- style foods. Then we all piled onto three buses for a bus tour of Nuremberg, with stops at the Zeppelin Field (Nazi rally grounds, named for a zeppelin that landed there during WWI), Nuremberg Trials courthouse, and of course the Christmas Market, where we were released on our own recognizance. Having already seen the market itself, we hit a local handicrafts market, cathedral, and bookstore before returning to the market to catch the bus back to the boat. Some of the other passengers were already getting into the Jaegermeister.

Between ongoing jet lag and a hard afternoon of touristing I fell asleep immediately, and when I awoke we'd already set sail. "Hey, our hotel's moving!" But not all that fast... I noticed bicycles passing us on the canal-side bike trail. It was weird to be sleeping with the landscape going by outside, and the occasional BOOMP in the night as we lightly bumped the wall of a lock. (The ship fit in the locks with inches to spare, but was equipped with rubber baby buggy bumpers.)

We awoke as the boat was docking in Regensburg. We walked out on deck to watch the operation and -- BRR! -- immediately returned to our cabin for long underwear. I wore those damn long undies every remaining day of the trip. I'm glad I had them but I really got sick of them.

In the smaller towns we had walking tours rather than bus tours, using little radio gizmos so the guide (the boat hired enough local guides in each town that each walking group was only 10-15 people) could speak directly into each passenger's ear without raising his or her voice. This meant that the tour group wasn't obnoxious to other people nearby, and you could hear even if you weren't right next to the guide; in fact, you could even wander off quite a ways. But I found the earpiece very uncomfortable, and many of the guides didn't understand that the microphone was voice-activated... if they didn't speak directly into the mike they couldn't be heard at all.

Regensburg is a spiffy medieval town, featuring the first permanent bridge over the Danube (which, of course, has a story about it involving the Devil... every bridge, cathedral, and other major structure built during the Middle Ages has a story involving the Devil). We had lunch at the Historiches Wurstküche right next to the bridge... there's been a fast-food joint on this spot ever since the first lunch break of the workmen who built the bridge in the 1100s. We also stopped for an afternoon snack and warm-up at a restaurant specializing in Dampfnudel (steamed dumplings, served with vanilla sauce) located in a tiny medieval chapel. In German, delicious is a verb.

Regensburg, despite its small size, has three Christmas Markets, the most interesting of which was the Romanticher Weinachtsmarket at the Schloss Thurn und Taxis (readers of Pynchon will recognize that name). This one was on the grounds of an actual castle, had strolling medieval musicians, the greatest quality and variety of handcrafts of any of the markets on our trip, and a huge variety of wonderful-smelling foods for sale (unfortunately we'd just had lunch). There were also campfires burning here and there around the grounds for the warming of hands and feet, which was very welcome because it was freaking cold! The only Christmas Market we visited with an admission charge, but well worth it.

When we went back into town after dinner to see the town's third Christmas Market, we found that all of the booths had just closed except for those selling Glühwein, which were doing a brisk business. All of the town's hip young people were standing around shoulder-to-shoulder in the cold, drinking mulled wine and "punsch" and having a grand time. It was a happenin' outdoor singles bar, is what it was. Who knew?

The next day found us in the town of Passau, smaller and steeper than Regensburg. Passau is located at the intersection of three rivers, and many buildings had high-water marks on them. They have serious floods even today, and our guide (who reminded me of my mother) said that when the floods hit you just stay in your house for a few days. Our walking tour included an interesting demo of gingerbread making (three generations of gingerbread bakers) with samples of gingerbread and punsch. We also stopped into the local art museum (the castle on the hill and its museum were closed for the season, alas), which had a very nice exhibition of Toulouse-Lautrec posters and Edo-period Japanese prints. It hurt my head to read about the Japanese "floating world" and how its posters influenced a French artist... all in German.

That night at dinner (on the boat en route from Passau to Linz), one of our female table companions reminded me of Lois Carmen d'Nominator. And if you don't catch that reference, believe me, you're happier that way.

Our first stop in Austria was the bustling town of Linz, which is very excited (and very much under construction) about being the European Capital of Culture for 2009, and as the boat was not departing until midnight we decided to take in an operetta. After obtaining tickets, and sampling Linzer Torte, Kate and I went our separate ways for the day. I was the only person in the Linz Genesis museum, and found it eerie that the display cases of skeletons and swords would illuminate themselves as I entered each room, and darken as I departed (an energy-saving measure, but disturbing). I was also the only one at the tiny, and rather scary, museum of dentistry. And then I went to the Schlossmuseum, the city's main historical site, where I was not alone but the collection was even weirder. Mary Magdalene Bigfoot. A Victorian breast pump. Frightening "updated" loden outfits from the 50s. Disturbing saints. And one room, deep in the stone roots of the ancient castle, containing nothing but a skeleton in a glass case (unlabeled) in one corner. Brr.

Kate and I met up for a quick dinner of döner kebap (typical local fast food) before the operetta. Der Vögelhandler was basically Gilbert & Sullivan in German. I could hardly understand the singing at all, and Kate not much better, but through diligent perusal of the program book we managed to follow the plot, what there was of it. It was definitely extremely silly and lightweight. The weird thing was that, although the audience laughed a lot, we were the only ones laughing at the broadest physical comedy bits.

The next day at 10am we arrived at Melk, a tiny town with a famous abbey, notable for its library and amazing trompe l'oeil ceiling paintings. What would Jesus think of this opulence? The abbey also had an intriguing little modernistic museum about St. Benedict and the Benedictine monks, as well as the Tomb of the Unknown Saint. ("We don't know who this saint is; we call him Fred.") The actual town of Melk was so small that its one tiny Christmas Market wasn't even open on a weekday; we sailed for Vienna at 4pm.

Vienna was amazing, like Paris only unfamiliar. This city was the capital of the civilized world for the better part of a century, and was the highlight of the trip for me. And as this was where we departed the boat and took off on our own, I think I will stop this entry here. To be continued in part 2: Vienna and Munich.

Posted 01/29/2009 22:28 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 7916 | Since last entry: 3670

15 days in a row of 500 words a day. I believe I've heard it takes 30 days to "set" a new habit. One thing I hope to do differently in the future, though, is to stop leaving the writing until the very end of the day (I got in the habit when I had a day job, of course, but there's really no reason to do it now). The Internet gets kind of quiet and lonely in the late evening here on the West Coast, especially on a weekday. Europe and most of North America is asleep and there's not much west of here but ocean.

At least I've finally figured out where this story (currently titled "Teaching the Pig to Sing") is going. At nearly 8000 words already, with one or two major scenes yet to go, it's way too long, but once it's done I'm pretty sure I can easily cut a couple thousand words. I've been reluctant to trim as I go, since I'm trying to make wordcount. I'm also going to slice and splice and rearrange to get the information on the page before it's needed (rather than "oh by the way, did I mention that...") and properly build tension. The great thing about writing, as opposed to life, is that you can go back and change the past to make the present what you want it to be.

It's been an interesting experience, learning about the world and the characters while writing the story. I think I prefer my usual technique of completely outlining before beginning the draft, though.

Heading to Seattle tomorrow for belated holiday get-together with Kate's family; we also hope to see the Lucy exhibit.

(Even though it's just a short drive, I'm still a little twitchy about travel after the problems we had coming back from Germany.

We'll be okay.)

Posted 01/15/2009 23:19 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 4246 | Since last entry: 519

Yoga class today; first one since November. It's good to stretch and move in those ways again. We've also moved up from a level 1 to a level 1-2 class, with a fun instructor I really like. The only downside is that it's almost too many people for the space, but I bet some people will drop out as the term goes on.

On the recommendation of 21st Century Geeks, we've been watching Leverage on TNT. Lightweight, lots of fun, sharply written, reminds me of a non-SF version of Firefly. Others have compared it with The A-Team but I never watched that.

Tonight marks eight days of writing 500 words every day, though I know that's not much by some people's standards and I suspect that once I finish this story I will edit out just about everything I wrote tonight. I didn't outline this story before I started (a downside of the "must write 500 words of actual prose every day, notes and outlines don't count" plan... might need to re-think that detail) and that means a certain amount of false starts, blind alleys, rewriting, and cutting. I think I know the climactic scene now, but I'm still not sure how to get my protagonist into the situation where the climactic decision is forced, nor which way he'll jump (well, I have my suspicions but I don't yet know why). This is a different process for me and it's probably a good thing to try something different every once in a while, but it's kind of frustrating.

Also frustrating is waiting for submission responses to arrive and publications to appear. Why does publishing have to be soooo sloooow? I want my instant gratification, and I want it now!

Posted 01/08/2009 22:49 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 3727 | Since last entry: 559

The story keeps chugging along (the streak now stands at seven days). It's still awfully talky and I am certain the first draft will be far too long for the story's weight, but I can already see places to trim it. I also begin to see a possible ending, though not how to get there.

Kate thought the new hot water heater was set a bit too high, and I agreed, so I went to turn it down. The temperature control knob is labeled as follows: a dot, LOW, another dot, another dot, a triangle, A, B, C, VERY HOT. I turned it down from B to A.

We're looking into health insurance options. I had resisted the idea of a Health Savings Account, but after our insurance broker explained how it works it might actually be simpler (no claims to process... you just pay all your medical bills with the HSA debit card) and, as long as we stay generally healthy, cheaper. Has anyone reading this used an HSA? Any opinions on US Health Group as an insurer? The other option is a conventional plan with ODS. Any opinions on them?

Posted 01/07/2009 23:23 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 3168 | Since last entry: 2657

I've been horribly discombobulated since we returned from our trip. While we were in Europe, and then stranded in Washington, my regular life was on hold... we weren't even doing the usual holiday things. I was, for example, looking at my email but setting all the action items aside for later. We had so many false starts and disappointments on the way home, followed by additional bad weather once we finally got here, that somehow I never really got back to my everyday life.

In the past couple of days I've tried to address the issue by making to-do lists each day and trying real hard to do everything on them -- on the theory that the best way to make yourself feel good is to do stuff. Results have been mixed -- I've accomplished some stuff and when I'm doing it I feel more in control. But three weeks away from home have made those to-do lists so daunting that even good progress feels inadequate (and I haven't made good progress every day).

I have managed to stick to my 500-words-per-day goal (thus making my streak six days long and counting), though most days I've left the writing until the last thing and haven't finished writing until midnight or later, struggling to keep my eyes open. The story so far is awfully talky (the viewpoint character is tied up, so there's not a lot of scope for action) and I'm not certain where it's going. Oh well, that's what rewrite is for. Better to have a shitty first draft than nothing.

I've been spending more time than I really should on Facebook, mostly searching my friends' lists of friends for people I know (I've managed to accumulate almost 300 friends in just a few days). I'm favorably impressed with the user interface, but the overall experience is somewhat lacking. There are lots more people I know on Facebook than LJ, but the site seems to encourage a broader, shallower interaction than LJ, with brief status updates, links, photos, and cute little applications as the currency rather than the essay-based blog culture of LJ. Facebook started out as a student thing, of course, and in many ways it reminds me of high school writ large, with crowds of users poking each other in the lunch room, scribbling on each other's locker walls, and vying to amass the largest collection of charm bracelet charms or baseball cards. There's a lot to do with your friends on Facebook, but it's all very facile. I suspect I will settle into a mode like the one I have on LinkedIn, where I maintain my network but don't participate much, and I will continue to have LJ as my primary social networking site. (Unless LJ implodes, of course, which frankly I doubt will happen.)

Oh well. With any luck I will be fully recombobulated soon.

Posted 01/06/2009 21:56 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Word count: 511 | Since last entry: 511

On a New Year's Day a bit more laid-back than our usual, as Kate's still too sick for parties (though definitely improving), I took care of a number of chores, went for a walk, and attended a brunch (by myself) at the home of a former work colleague. Dinner was take-out Thai. I whacked back the email a bit (and if you've sent me any mail in the last month, my apologies for lack of response). And then, finally, at the very tail end of the day, I stopped procrastinating and sat down and wrote. First words of fiction since October, I think. This is the story I'd wanted to write for the "Federations" anthology, but what with one thing and another (most of which, I must admit, were completely under my control) I didn't even begin it until after the deadline. And I'm not sure where it goes from here. But still, it's another story and it's finally under way.

That's one day in a row. Let's see how long we can keep the streak going.

Posted 01/01/2009 22:24 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

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