David D. Levine

So that was Guadalajara. All in all, even if I hadn't gotten sick I think I would give it a mixed review. ( Read more... )

After another fabulous breakfast, we walked downtown toward the Museo de la Ciudad (City Museum) with stops at the Templo Expiatorio (a lovely church whose spire is completely done in stained glass, also featuring the Delta-Winged Queen of Heaven), a bakery, and some weird-ass sculptures of creatures with turtle bodies, twelve-foot tentacles, and baby heads. The museum told us a bit of Guadalajara history, though the text of the exhibits was written in more complex language than the House of the Dogs and thus was harder for me to understand.

We had lunch at La Chata (as seen on Rudy Maxa's PBS TV show, though we didn't realize this until we arrived) where we split the "house special platter," then went to catch a #706 express bus to Tlaquepaque, but when a #707 came by Kate changed her mind and said "okay, we're going to Tonalá instead." On the way I kind of panicked, because as I tracked our progress using the Maps app on my phone, the bus (for which we had nothing resembling a route map) didn't seem to be heading anywhere near Tonalá, in fact it was heading off into the wilds of nowhere. Then I discovered that there are at least three and possibly as many as five towns and localities called Tonalá in this vicinity, and though we were not heading for the one Google Maps found for me, we were heading right for the one that Kate wanted.

It wasn't a market day in Tonalá (we had avoided that deliberately, because it's jammed on market day) but for this reason many of the shops were closed. Nonetheless, we had a good time browsing many small shops selling handicrafts, furniture, and art. Curiously, we saw no postcards, T-shirts, or any of the other usual tourist kitch at all. Then we visited the ceramics museum (where we saw an exhibit of tiles showing various concepts of the Nahual, the mythical totem animal of Tonalá; amazingly detailed ceramic sculptures; and dozens of ceramic masks from the annual ceremony of St. Santiago Whips the Indigenous Peoples Into Submission Day -- you can't make this shit up) and the Regional Museum (a tiny place with a small exhibit of ceramics including a bunch of interesting funeral urns).

After a brief stop for some kiwi-strawberry iced tea, we caught a bus to Tlaquepaque for dinner. But on the way, Kate checked her guidebook and discovered that two of the things she wanted to see there would be closed by the time we got there, so we just stayed on the bus until it got back to Guadalajara. Had dinner at the 9 Corners Bierria, yummy carne asada al carbon and barbacoa, then caught another bus back to the B&B, where I wrote up my notes for the day and enough words of fiction to satisfy my new year's resolution. No promises about whether or not it's going to be worth keeping...

Brain dead now. G'night!

As you can see from the word count above, I've been sticking to my resolution of at least 1000 words per day on weekdays, 100 words per day on weekends and travel days. But it's been hard. This project is set in a historical period that requires a different voice from my usual, and I sometimes have to look up two or three words per sentence. That slows me down, which means that to get my 1000 words in I have to work for three or four hours, and I've often been sacrificing sleep to do it. I hope that as I settle into the voice and become more comfortable with the vocabulary it will go faster. But right now I am very tired.

At the moment we are off to sunny Mexico for a few days. I will keep writing every day -- in fact, I anticipate I'll get a lot done on the plane today -- but I'm not going to worry about word count until we return.

We're taking a trip to Guadalajara this month (in fact, we leave in less than a week, aiee) and we've been studying Spanish with the Pimsleur CDs since Thanksgiving. I've never studied Spanish before, but I do have a couple of years each of Latin and French and a little Italian under my belt... which helps in some ways (I've already been exposed to concepts like grammatical gender) and hinders in others (when I reach for a Spanish word, my brain rummages in the "Romance languages I kind of know" bag and hands me something which may or may not be correct). I feel rather overwhelmed, but my experience with Japanese tells me that even a little bit of the local language helps enormously.

Yesterday our Spanish lesson included phrases such as "Yo estoy enfermo" (I am sick) and "Necesito un médico" (I need a doctor). It's sometimes kind of strange when a CD makes me lie in a foreign language (e.g. making me say "Me gusta la cerveza"), but as I was saying those things I realized that I was, in fact, feeling a bit of a scratchy throat coming on. It was as though I was actually getting sick from exposure to the concept in Spanish. Language is a virus, indeed. I took a bunch of vitamin C and sambucus before going to bed.

I felt somewhat better this morning, and I hope to be completely recovered in a day or two. But I don't have a lot of energy.

The trip to Eugene to speak to the Wordos writing group went well. There were something over a dozen people present, including Nina Kiriki Hoffman and Jerry Oltion, and they seemed pleased with my talk about the various workshops and research trips I've taken for my writing and the Q&A afterwards. The trip also included several nice meals, a view of three volcanoes, and listening to Alan Cumming read Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan. Not too shabby a day, all told.

Worked at Case Study Coffee today from about 3:00 to 5:00, making 850 words or so, and finished my thousand after dinner and a movie (The Artist) with friends janetl and ronlunde. I hope that the words will come more quickly as I become more confident in the voice and I don't have to check vocabulary and other historical details several times per sentence.

I'm not promising to blog every day, by the way, but I find it helps with accountability.

Today we'll be attending a couple of New Year's Day brunches, one of which marks the 27th anniversary of the New Year's Day brunch at which we met, and I swear I will begin drafting my new novel (even though I did not write the outline last week as I had intended to). I can write the first thousand words without an outline, ferpitysake.

But first, a little blog-maintenance coding. God help me, I just wrote this AND UNDERSTAND IT: sed -e 's;\([[:punct:]]*\)<[Ii]>;_\1;g' -e 's;</[Ii]>\([[:punct:]]*\);\1_;g'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

scarlettina

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

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

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

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

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

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

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