The ongoing saga of David D. Levine's writing and other adventures.
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I'm a geek, fan, and writer who lives in Portland, Oregon.
For more information about me, please see my
web page. If you have questions, comments, or just want to chat, you can send me e-mail. Or you can post a comment on my LiveJournal. |
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Writing a novel is like going to college
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]
Looks like they believed me when I said I enjoy moderating!
- 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.
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]
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dlevine@spiritone.com.
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