David Drake's Blog, page 3

Newsletter #118

DrakeNews 118: January 11, 2021

Dear People,

I hope you’re well and not too bent outa shape about the election (regardless of the result you wanted). We’ve got to get along with one another people. The US Civil War is an example of what happens if we don’t. (I think the partition of India is an even worse example.)

I have been plotting with difficulty. It was going all right, but a friend suggested I do a short story as a break. About then an editor solicited me for a Baen anthology Chicks in Tank Tops.

I took this to imply a humorous story about warrior maids. It would be a perfect place to do a sequel to Airborne All the way! a story I wrote to get out of a bad mental state after a long time friend finished drinking himself to death some time ago. It involved warrior goblins under a female crew chief in a fantasy universe (the original was based on Fantasy: the Gathering owned and trade-marked by Wizards of the Coast). If necessary I can put my crew chief in a mail tank top but I don’t think that should be necessary. (The crew goblins in the previous one are shown as wearing mail jock straps.)

I hope the story will be suitable for the collection. Regardless, writing it put me in a good mood and I’m back to plotting the novel.

One of the things I’ve been doing a lot of the past few months is watching lecture series from the Teaching Company. Recently that includes George Orwell. One of the things that reminded me of was the fact that the appraisal in his essays and reviews a scrupulously fair. He may fiercely oppose a person or his viewpoint, but if he thinks something is a work of art he says so.

I thought of this because a couple freelancers recently released a documentary on Karl Wagner. They filmed interviews with many people who knew Karl, myself included. Karl had many virtues. There were lots of things wrong as well, but I made a point of being fair and honest. Orwell would have approved.

My wife and I recently attended a Zoom birthday party for Glenn, an old friend out of state. This was put together by his daughter and was really a lot of fun. It included entertainment–dance, music, a monologue and even a tarot reading. It was certainly a case of something innovative and good in the present awful situation.

The beach is coming soon. It’ll be back to the original pattern from the 80s: I rent a beach house and invite congenial friends to join me and my family. One friend commented “It’ll be on your rules.” In fact there’ll be no rules beyond common politeness. I have nothing to prove.

It’s a group of folks who like to do things. Among other things I’m hoping to take a swamp tour and also visit the Navy cruise-missile test sites from the late ’40s.

Recently I’ve been reading Nathaniel Hawthorne short-stories. He was a great writer, but not one I got into in high school, though many of my classmates did. I appear to have actively avoided improving works out of sheer obstinacy. (This was stupid and cost me in the longer term.)

I am really struck by how much of 17th century US history I imbibed from Hawthorne. He provided the feel of early New England for me. In a very real sense I am recovering my own history as well as America’s.

I’m looking forward to the vaccine. Now that Biden is president, I hope release and distribution will go ahead.

Best of luck and health to all of you

And continue to remember that everyone is frazzling (you, and certainly me, included)

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #117

DRAKENEWS For November 2020

Dear People,

I hope y’all have voted. My wife and I waited to vote on election day for tradition’s sake. I hadn’t been worried about the result (I never worry about that; I did my part and I expect other people to do theirs) but worried for the first time that the incumbent would decline to accept the result if he lost. The closest America has come to that result in the past was in 1800 when John Adams, a small man in all respects, lost the election to Thomas Jefferson. Adams did leave office, but he refused to shake the hand of his successor.

I suddenly decided that system would work as it always has, and stopped worrying about it. I hope the fear-mongers were wrong yet again. By now we know.

My publishing news is odd. New editions of two of my old books have come out: Killer in German hardcover translation (cover image), and Old Nathan in trade paper from Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire press. There’s a video interview with me up on the RoF website. I work outdoors in good weather, which the day of the interview was. As a result the interview is largely a silhouette of my face against a bright sky. Joy Ward is a great interviewer though, and I’m reasonably pleased with the way it turned out.

For new work, I wrote a story about robots in my former Military Occupationl Specialty in the army. I was an interrogator, so I wrote about robots in support of interrogation. I don’t think it’s my best story ever, but the editor was pleased.

I mentioned Killer. A German firm asked me for rights to republish it and emphasized they were only bringing out a translated edition so I agreed. Killer is a book about which I have bad feelings as I discuss on the website. At WFC just finished one the moderators of the panel I was on told me how he’d loved the book in college and had read it five times.

I had good reason to be negative about the way things worked with writing the book, but maybe not about the book itself. That could be true of other books and stories. When I’m emotionally invested I may not be the best judge of my own work.

I mentioned attending WFC 2020. A virtual con. I’ve done a number of Zoom interviews (see above) and I wasn’t worried about that.

It was a horrible experience, largely because I didn’t know how to navigate the WFC site.

Furthermore you needed a different code every time you logged onto the site and they didn’t update immediately–just told me I had the wrong code. I missed my first panel as a result. The next morning my geek son came over, bless his heart. I was able to get to other panels because my webmaster gave the con my correct data and they sent me prompts.

The panels themselves had excellent moderators and went well but I still couldn’t bounce around the site. CrowdCompass seems to have emphasized security at the cost of accessibility. In all I had a bad experience. If I have to do it again, I’ll make sure I’m accompanied by somebody who spends more time online than I do.

Toni accepted The Serpent and paid me for it. This really did make me feel good. I don’t have much confidence in my own work and the world generally has been a rough place.

Now I’m starting to plot the next RCN novel. It’s very early days so I can’t talk about because it’s too unstructured. I’ll tell you more when there’s more to tell.

I did a fair amount of research for a sword and planet story, then decided I didn’t want to write one after all. The editor very kindly let me out of the deal. I suspect that if I’d been in a better mood I’d have had fun doing it.

That’s a useful thing to remember: going into a project with a good attitude  conduces to a good result. I try to do that, but this year has been rough.

Keep slogging on. This won’t necessarily lead to a good result, but it’ll probably be better than if you just quit. And good luck to everybody.

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #116

Dear People
 
I sent off The Serpent, third book in Time of Heroes Series and it has been accepted by Toni for Baen Books. My submission wasn’t nearly as clean as mine usually are. I’ve been having printer issues too.
 
I had many versions of the book getting in the way of one another. I finally got to the point that I couldn’t remember what I’d already moved or otherwise edited. I really had filled up my buffer. Everyone has been supportive: the problem has been my doing.
 
I hope to get a proper plot on the next one which I plan to base on the War of the Pacific of the 1870s. I need to do a lot of background thought to set up the situation but at least I’ve got a template
 
Weird World War III is due out in October with a story of mine in which I used my time in Cambodia as a setting. Let me emphasize: this was the setting, not what I was doing in Cambodia (which was normally pretty boring).
 
The setting was real though and it probably wasn’t a great idea for me to use it the way I did. I didn’t have anything like a bad war compared to what a lot of guys had, but the mental place I was in wasn’t a good one and going back to it for a setting meant going back to it mentally.
 
This was 50 years ago, people. It really shouldn’t be so close to my surface. It is though. Most successful people were doing much more important things 50 years ago than I was. The whole Cambodian business was so trivial in the greater scheme of things that during the 2016 presidential campaign Hilary Clinton could forget all about it and brag that her mentor in foreign affairs was Henry Kissinger, who’d planned it.
 
I can’t forget it though. I probably dwell on it far too much. In a way I’ve never gotten on with my life, and I regret that a great deal. It gave me a vivid setting, though.
 
The immediate next task is a short story involving military use of robots in my former MOS (military occupation specialty). I was an interrogator, a job for which the dispassion of robots is contraindicated. I don’t know how this is going to work out. I’m doing a great deal more backstory than is required for this story. I don’t know whether or not that’s a good thing, but as usual I let my gut deal with the details
 
As I mentioned the War of the Pacific is the next major project. Latin America was involved in many wars during the 19th century. the War of the Pacific had some of the most significant results. (It transferred much of the seacoast of Peru and Bolivia to Chile and with it the valuable guano deposits.)
 
I expect this to be a real RCN novel. Roy Olfetrie from Though Hell Should Bar the Way may be a central character. It occurs to me that it might be a good idea to read some more Alfred Noyes’ poetry. Wish me luck, people. There’s a long way to go.
 
Covid-19 continues to be daunting and unpleasant for me and I suppose everybody else in the world. Four of Mark’s relatives in Florida who’d been at the beach with us last summer have caught the virus itself, and have recovered. I hope all of you have been at least equally lucky.
 
Continue to be nice to people as we struggle to get through this bad time.
 
All best,
Dave Drake

Newsletter #115

DRAKENEWS #115: July 3 2020

Dear People,

I hope you’re all doing okay. I am but I sure wish I were doing better. A friend has taken to slugging her e-mails In this time of plague. This is a useful reminder that we are not in a unique problem, but it’s sure an unpleasant one.

I continue to batter ahead on The Serpent. A few weeks ago I came to the end of my plot and added up my texts, hoping that I was finished. I was still way short of novel length. I started writing before I had a proper plot. Nobody was pushing me to do that; it was all on myself. The crash schedule on which I wrote the previous one, To Clear Away the Shadows, did my ability to concentrate serious harm. I seem to be getting back to normal, but jeepers! I wish it hadn’t happened.

I was badly disappointed that my book wasn’t longer and responded by doing more research and plotting another scene which I am writing now. It may take more than this, in which case I will do more (or die trying).

The covid-19 business doesn’t directly affect me, but the pall it casts over all human endeavors certainly doesn’t help.

I have an enlarged prostate and went to a urologist. He sent me off for an MRI, saying that if surgery was required it would help guide the surgeon. Boy! was I glad when he called back to say there was no cancer. (That was definitely one of the things which went right in the past couple months. I’ve had several friends on chemotherapy in the past few years, and even the one who survived had a really difficult time with the treatment. I’m having a hard enough time concentrating as it is.)

I’ve agreed to do a couple short stories after I’ve turned in the novel. I like short stories–reading as well as writing them. That still looks a good ways in the future, I fear.

What recent news hasn’t been covid-19 has been about how police treat  outgroups, particularly blacks, in this country. I suspect Hispanics and Native Americans have similar problems, but the current riots are largely black, and George Floyd, who was choked to death on video, was black. I’m a WASP, but I ride a motorcycle, which gives me some slight insight into the problem.

The Chapel Hill police force doesn’t have a bad reputation for brutality (the way the Minneapolis police have since I lived in the Midwest decades ago). Some years ago a fellow ran a red light and just about killed me. Instead of letting it go, I called the police  from the mall where I was going to pick up a rose for my wife on our anniversary. (This was before I had a cell phone. It was a stupid over reaction on my part, but I thought of the police as my friends–and I was hot about the driver’s behavior.)

Officer Steve Riddle wasn’t one of the policemen I knew personally but when he pulled up to the curb I walked over to greet him. His response was to shout, “Back up Cowboy!” and arrest and handcuff me.

In the magistrate’s office Officer Riddle lied that I was carrying a concealed weapon. (Most bike riders carry a folding knife on their belt. I instead had an AG Russell  Sting with a 3″ fixed blade clipped to the side pocket of my trousers.)

I went a lawyer whom I knew and liked. The case was dismissed in court.

I don’t mean all Chapel Hill police would have behaved that way (in fact a couple of them looked me up to apologize for Steve Riddle’s behavior).

I was wearing a motorcycle jacket rather than a business suit. But a black can’t change his skin color because he expects to come into contact with the police, and Steve Riddle isn’t unique among the police you’re going to meet. There are some who are willing to choke to death someone who committed no crime. (George Floyd attempted to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.  There was no evidence of intent. Do you have a dud twenty in your wallet? I’m damned if I know whether all of mine are good.)

So that’s my story. It doesn’t involve any brutality: just a policeman who jumped to conclusions and  arrested a man who’d called for police help. That’s not a mistake I’ve made since. Incidentally I was very polite throughout the business. Officer Riddle had already demonstrated his willingness to lie; if he shot me in the back I was sure he could find an exculpatory lie for that also.

I am neither liberal nor PC, but I have quite a lot of sympathy for black people who live in Minneapolis. Or for that matter, in Chapel Hill, NC.

One last point. I was just looking for a card to send to a friend who lost her business due to covid-19 and I found one with a picture I took in a 19th century shopping arcade in Naples. Right out the back door was a building with a historical marker saying that Rossini lived there–but the palazzo was owned by his employer, the impressario of the Naples opera.

The marker commemorates Rossini, though, not the rich man who employed him. I told my friend not to regret going into the arts instead of focusing on making money: the rich impressario is forgotten but Rossini will be remembered for further centuries to come.

Think positively people. And be nice to other folks in this difficult time.

Please use the contact form to subscribe to the newsletter or to change your e-mail address.

–Dave Drake

Newsletter #114

Drakenews  #114 May 4, 2020

If you are well, it is good. I too am well.        

Above is the standard opening for a Roman letter, frequently reduced to initial letters like an acronym (Actually, I guess it is an acronym). It seemed a fitting formula for today.  In fact COVID-19 hasn’t changed my life very much directly, but when I go out I’m surrounded by a miasma of discomfort and fear.

I made the decision to buy land out in the country and build in the middle of it because I didn’t want neighbors. I don’t have serious PTSD from Nam but… well, I didn’t want neighbors. I go in town daily, to the post office and to the bank if there’s a check to put in. I carry a facemask to put on when I dismount.

At home I work or do yard work. The yard work is going fine: with 22.5 acres there’s always enough windfalls or trash trees in the wrong place  (generally sweet gums and evening olive) to keep me in wood chip mulch and my neighbor in wood for his stove–and me exercised. Real work–creating words on paper is going much slower–but about the same as before COVID-19. I continue getting a bit done every day except the day  somebody knocked my bike down in a parking lot and drove off. I was a block away when it happened and even the bike was uninjured.

Best bet is, the person backed into my bike and shoved it over a concrete curb onto a grass strip, where it fell over. It spilled a little gas and I had to go to the bank and get the manager who helped me get it upright and back over the curb, but I rode home with no trouble. Probably just as well I hadn’t been close enough to have a personal interaction with the driver. Even so I didn’t get any work done after I was home.

My major work problem isn’t my own situation but that of my wife, Jo. She’s been retired since age 62 but she’s been doing a full schedule of volunteer work until now. It’s a big house and a huge yard, but I’m used to being alone a significant part of the day.

We continue to have very good meals. Also a lot of excellent baked goods which nobody’s forcing me to eat.

I mentioned mulch. Fire ants have built in the pile. The area on top  has become crusted. If broken open, it swarms with ants who must have carried dirt at least 3 feet up from the ground to build their tunnels and chambers. (The ants work in the wood chips but not with them.) I don’t know how this is going to work out in the long term.

I continue one with nature in other ways. I work on a wooden picnic table. The other day I felt somebody climbing my leg under the table, when the wren got high enough it stopped, met my eyes, and flew off.

I was listening to BBC, waiting for the news to come on, and heard their regular program Witness History interviewing a woman who as a 9-year old girl in India had lived through  a previous pandemic: the 1957 Asian Flu. This really struck me because I’d had it also, but probably in 1958, in Clinton, Iowa. I was feeling really sick in 7th grade algebra class. I raised my hand to go out to the men’s room. The teacher, a stickler for discipline, ignored me. I vomited over my desk and the girl seated in front of me. The teacher asked why I hadn’t gone out; I said, “I’d raised my hand!” which seemed enough reason to me.

I went down to the school nurse who found I had a temperature of 103. It took a good while for my mother to get to school to pick me up and I was snappish about the delay. (The nurse pointed out to mom that I was running a fever, which probably explained my bad temper. Mom was quite smart and would have figured that out by herself.)

I stayed in bed the next couple days. I was weak and had hallucinations. I don’t remember any special  treatment: I’d seen This Island Earth, about an interplanetary war in which one planet was bombarding the other with meteors. That’s what I was hallucinating, except that the aggressor was driving cars up a ski jump on our moon to fly off and hit the Earth with great damage. I couldn’t do anything about it except feel despair, which I did.

Then I got better and went back to school. I don’t remember ever being afraid, just very sad about the damage all those 1957 Chevies were doing when they hit the Earth. (Incidentally, This Island Earth is quite a good movie, though the special effects aren’t up to modern standards.) I’m sure people died from the Asian flu, but I don’t remember any mention of it.

That was what the woman from India was saying also: she went back to school and life went back to normal. The media didn’t make a big thing about it.

That experience colors how I’m reacting to COVID-19. I think it was absurd that the US didn’t get airport testing in place immediately, and the shortages of really basic testing, etc, are unworthy of a developed country.

I’m now going to make a comment that can be taken as political. I know this is able to peeve some people so if you’re of that sort just stop reading now.

I have absolutely no ideology but I do speak my mind pretty directly. My comments about how the Viet Nam War was being fought when I got back to the World had my father in law wondering if I was a Commie.

I worked in local government for eight years and I saw some very stupid  behavior. The old public works area was being converted to the new bus garage. One of the major problems was the sewage digester, a massive brick dome which had simply been abandoned when the sewage plant moved decades before. It was full of sewage.

The town engineer, Joe Rose, was quite able and came up with an engineering solution. The town and county had recently bought (through condemnation ) a new landfill area. It was a poor black district and Chapel Hill makes a big thing of its liberalness, but we needed a landfill.

The engineer had the digester contents reliquified and hauled in tanker trucks out to the new landfill, where he dug a large trench and dumped the digester contents. The area residents had been promised various amenities in exchange for siting the landfill. What they got was 40,000 gallons of liquid shit.

The engineer resigned at the emergency board meeting the night after the aldermen and county commissioners viewed the trench; the town manager, Chet Kendzior, left before very long also. Obviously they were capable of real public stupidity.

But neither Joe nor Chet did anything nearly as dumb as suggesting the internal use of disinfectants.

Stay well, people. And be nice to other folks; they’re having a tough time too.

–Dave Drake

Newsletter #113

Dear People,

No really exciting news this time, which isn’t entirely bad
(given the content of my excitement the past couple years). Basically I have
been writing The Serpent, a novel in
sequence with The Spark and The Storm (in the Time of Heroes; a series title I’m not thrilled with).

Basically these are SF novels based on the legends of Dark
Age Britain;
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. (I’ll get back to that later.)
They have a fantasy feel, but they’re technically SF.

The work is crawling 
along. The best I can say about it is just about every day sees more
words on paper. I’m not sure they’re the right words or that my phrasing is all
it could be, and I’m sure not getting
long daily runs, but day by day the book is coming closer to the end.

Part of the problem is that ever since Nam, writing
has been how I got through difficult periods. It was my refuge.

The need to crash out To
Clear Away the Shadows before I was ready meant that writing changed from a
refuge to the major stress point I was facing. That’s no longer the case–Baen
Books is absolutely not putting any
pressure on me now–but my psyche has already been bruised.

A much worse example of this is my year in Viet Nam,
during which period I gave myself up for dead. I was really convinced that I
wasn’t going to come back alive (though as it turned out, I didn’t have a bad
war).

It was about 25 years before I internalized the fact that I
really had survived and should get on with life. That probably sounds silly,
but if things didn’t get to me I wouldn’t be much of a writer.

Anyway, I’m grinding my way forward on the next book.
Goodness only knows when it’s going to be done.

Mention of King Arthur (the Matter of Britain) made me think. andy offutt hired me to do a plot (the whole story) for a Cormac mac Art series he was doing. I picked a subject I didn’t care about (King Arthur) so it wouldn’t bother me to turn the plot over to somebody else. I did a great deal of background work. Among other things, I read and took notes from Saxo Grammaticus and made a precis of the entire Histories of the Wars by Procopius.

Because of this work, I was able to turn in a plot that was as
historically accurate as I could make it. The information which has come out
since 1978 proves that almost all my 
bases of the book were wrong. Arthur did not exist. Much more
surprising, there was never an Anglo-Saxon invasion in the sense of Germanic
warbands under their tribal chiefs. All my careful research didn’t get me close
enough to the truth that I could edit the plot now into something I could be
happy with having written.

Does that matter? This is fiction, after all, not a research
paper.

It turns out that it matters to me. I don’t claim to know
the truth, but I do claim to tell the truth as I know it, in fiction or
non-fiction. In my experience that behavior is pretty unusual in most groups of
people whom I know. The exception is journalists, to whom the truth is
something of a religious duty. That’s something that’s always bothered me about
Trump’s ranting about Fake News. Journalists have opinions and biases like anybody
else–and sometimes they make mistakes, but the notion that any significant
number of them are faking or spiking news to suit their biases is untrue in my
experience. As a group they really care about the truth, maybe even more than I
do.

Thus Michael Bloomberg telling his staff how politics are to
be reported is just wrong, regardless
of what your own politics are. Fox News has as been accused of similar
behavior, but the Fox people (while probably biased) are still journalists.
Folks who continue to work for Bloomberg are not. (And I’m told they started
losing top people as soon as the boss’ intentions became clear.)

I’m going back to slowly writing a book.  Wish me luck people.

And be nice to other folks.

All best,
–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #112

Dear People,

Parkinson’s Disease runs in my family. I’m showing active signs myself and am now on a light dose of levodopa. My bigger bike (a Suzuki DL650) is not especially heavy but it has a high seat. Coming back from Chapel Hill I fell over three times when I cornered at a stop. My strength and balance are both poorer than they should be.

This is extremely bad (though not unexpected) news. Being me, I went instantly to end game. Looking up from there I began considering ways to find a livable solution for me. I expect that to be an ongoing process, probably for a long time. My aunt (dad’s younger sister) died recently at age 96.

One interesting part of the Parkinson’s business is that I’m in contact with health professionals more often than I usually am. They’re invariably struck by how good my health is. I don’t get annual physicals because statistically they have no effect on longevity (though they shift the cause of death to a degree; they catch some treatable conditions but iatrogenic [medically caused] conditions kill just as many people as the testing saved). Doctor visits are stressful to me (and I think to most people), so avoiding them has real health benefits.

The neurologist suggested a blood test to give them a base line. This was reasonable so I agreed. When the results came back, everything was excellent: “We never see profiles this good!” the nurse said.

That’s because I eat reasonably and exercise. Which everybody can do.

Having just come back from a convention, it strikes me that avoiding restaurant food is probably a major factor in eating reasonably. Tom Doherty is ten years my senior but he exercises heavily every day. At dinner his wife made a point that he’s heavier than I am. I think that the major difference is that he generally eats out and I generally eat at home.

My wife cooks very well. We have simple food of high quality, and when eating at home I find it easy to limit my intake. It won’t do anything to prevent genetic problems like Parkinson’s, but obesity and run-down condition are optional.

We’re back from a trip to Italy! Tuscany this time. I’m at work on a trip report, but there’s been a lot going on. The Parkinson’s diagnosis cast a mental malaise over me, but I still saw some really neat things.

I mentioned the convention: World Fantasy Con, in Los Angeles this year. I normally go to this one when it’s in North America. My agent, Kirby McCauley, started it in 1975, promising it wasn’t going to be like the SF Worldcon (which had been a horrible experience for me the year before). WFC quickly became the premier professional gathering in the F/SF field. Because of the number of professionals attending, the panels are generally excellent and broad ranging.

When the programming people send around a questionnaire early on asking about backgrounds and particular interests, I normally tell them to put me wherever they need me. There’s a lot of competition for panel slots. I have a wide background in the field and in WFC itself, so there are very few WFC panels on which I’d be unable to contribute usefully.

This year there was no questionnaire. My webmaster tried to contact programming, without result. When the program schedule came out, I wasn’t on it. This was very disappointing but I was just going to take it: I’ve always said they could put me wherever they wanted me. Apparently they’d decided they didn’t want me. On top of the Parkinson’s, I was really feeling that I’d lived too long.

My webmaster contacted programming again, making me out to be more pitiable than I’d have put it myself (I’m not saying she was wrong) and that I’d been on panels at WFC since 1975. She suggested two possibilities. (The various options were disappointingly slim.) This time the programming person responded and I was added as a seventh panelist on Fairy Tales. (I’ve always used them as source material and the first books I remember checking out myself from the Dubuque Public Library were Andrew Lang’s Color Fairy Books.)

I felt a lot better, but the other party to a negotiation always has a right to say no.

I thought (on looking at the panels generally) that programming had done an exceedingly bad job. Indeed all aspects of the con were poorly done (with the exception of the con suite.) There was excellent jewelry in the dealer’s room, but books and art were less well represented than is normal at WFC.

People involved in the Salt Lake City WFC next year assured me I would be on programming there. Furthermore at the banquet a member of the WFC board came up to me and apologized that I hadn’t been put on a panel (until Karen had gotten on them). Apparently my belief that the con committee hadn’t been up to the job was widely echoed.

Despite the glitches, it was good to see friends, many but not all business acquaintances. Outside the con I was able to see something that had fascinated me for 70 years: Rancho La Brea–the Tar Pits. The museum was about 10 miles from the hotel, too far to easily walk but I was sure I’d find somebody at the con with a car. In fact Karen thought to ask Mark Van Name ahead of time. He too was interested in going but the only time he could go was after the banquet Sunday (the site closed at 5 pm) but he assured me there’d be no trouble.

At the end of the banquet at 3:30 he’d learned that that it might be an hour to the site and the line there might be an hour long, but he’d go if I still wanted to. I did want to go. In fact traffic was very light and there was no line. The museum was a wonderful experience.

The displays include mounted skeletons and also life-sized models of many animals from the site. There are saber-toothed tigers, the huge American lion (25% bigger than the African lion of today, a display of dire wolf skulls (part of the 4,000 of the species found there), and many herbivores. Besides the well-known mammoths and mastodons, there are shovel tuskers with extended jaws and tusks top and bottom (which I didn’t recall had made it to the New World, though I should have known). Plus there were many horses and camels and bison (Bison antiquus, much larger than the familiar bison of today).

There was also Merriam’s teratornis, a huge bird like a condor but a third larger. All this was really a thrill to me. It was particularly nice because I found myself quite excited and perky, which I really hadn’t been since learning about the Parkinson’s. I’m coming back, people.

At the Baen dinner at WFC I chatted some while with Tim Powers who thanked me for the intro I’d done for his collection, Down and Out in Purgatory. I was particularly glad to hear that because when I’d asked Toni if he’d liked it; she said she wasn’t sure he’d seen it. He’d been effusively thankful to her, but that hadn’t been passed on to me. (Communication isn’t one of the strong points at Baen.)

While waiting in the hotel hallway for the maid to finish cleaning the room, Robert Silverberg came wandering up a cross-hall looking for the elevators. We chatted for half an hour, mostly his stories about working with John W Campbell in the ’50s. It’s wonderful to be on friendly terms with a writer whom I’ve been reading since I was thirteen. Certainly one of the high points of the con.

I think I have finally accumulated enough material for a plot of the next book (working title The Serpent). I hope to shortly get back to that. Wish me luck,

And be nice to other people, folks—

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #111

DRAKENEWS 111: September. 2019

Dear People,

This is a bit early because my
webmaster, Karen, is going on a genealogical trip to get in touch with her
German roots. (These, by the way, are in Hesse, not Bavaria, so I’m not worried about her returning
humming the Horst Wessel Lied. The
only prominent Nazi from the general region I can think of is Joseph Goebbels.)
(She may want to invade New Jersey,
however.)

I was hoping to report major progress on plotting the next novel, but I can only say that I’m getting bits down: forward progress, but not as much as I’d like. Marla at Baen checked with me recently to see what my schedule was. (This is perfectly proper and if it had been done last year before To Clear Away the Shadows was scheduled, I would be in better shape now.)

This made me actually analyze the situation. I decided that the unexpected rush on Shadows had kicked me back about a year in my recovery from being hit by a car [Newsletter 104]. By October, 2018, I’d started to plot seriously and by November I was actually writing. Although right at this instant I feel that I’m flailing and will never again be able to plot a novel, I can reasonably hope that by October I’ll have gotten myself together again. Therefore I can expect to turn in a new novel in June, 2020, without abnormal stress.

I told Marla and I’m telling
y’all–that it’s actually possible that by reinjuring my psyche by the crunch
on Shadows when I wasn’t fully
recovered from the shock of the bike wreck–that I’ll never be able to write
another novel. I don’t think that’s the case and Marla insists that it isn’t, but I’m not the guy I was in 2017.

An obvious question is, “Why
do I still ride a bike?” I can give (and have given) various answers to
that, but here’s what it really boils down to: I was never a very good driver.
I never had a serious accident in a car but it was only a matter of time. When
I got back from Nam,
I didn’t become a pacifist or a pushover; but I really didn’t want to kill somebody unless I meant to kill them. If
I were riding a motorcycle, it was extremely unlikely that anybody but me would
be killed in a vehicular accident.

As it turns out, being on a bike
probably makes me a more careful driver also. At any rate, I’ve had a number of
serious accidents since 1987 (when I last drove a car), but none of them were
my fault.

I don’t have any new novels coming
out, but The Chronicles of Davids, a
Baen anthology, is due out in September with my story The Savage in it. This is a story I wrote to get myself into the
milieu of the novel which became To Clear
Away the Shadows. (I thought it would be out long before the novel was, but
boy! was I wrong.) It’s a good story, but the scarring is on the opposite side
of Joss’ face from what it becomes in the novel because of the haste with which
the novel was completed. (My continuity error doesn’t detract from the story.)

It might be a good time to address
some of the comments I’ve gotten on To
Clear Away the Shadows. I was consciously doing something quite different
from my usual novel. A change always pisses some readers off, but this may have
been worse than usual because the book was prominently billed as the new novel
in the RCN series. Technically that’s true, but a number of readers were
certainly expecting something different from what they got. I usually have more
input into the cover layout than I did this time, but I honestly don’t know
whether or not I would have requested a change if I’d seen it. (I certainly
would have credited the photographer: who was Karen Zimmerman, my webmaster.
Because of the rush, nothing was run by me; and that’s one of the really
obvious things that was screwed up.)

I was very clear in the most
recent newsletter about the deficiencies in editing on the novel, but very few
of the people who wrote me through the website appear to have read my
description. (Goodness only knows what the comments on Amazon are like. I don’t
read Amazon reviews because he writers of those I’ve seen tend to strike me as
thick.) Most of those writing me were more concerned than angry, but there was
one who suggested that maybe I was just past it. (Which, as I said above, had already
gone through my mind.)

On the credit side, I’ve written
two quite good short stories recently: one for the Weird World War III volume I
mentioned in the most recent previous newsletter, and now also one as a tribute
to Uncle Timmy Bolgeo and Libertycon. The latter is a fairy tale of the sort
that the Brothers Grimm collected. (In other words, it’s not cutesie.) Writing
short stories isn’t the same as novels, though. The jury is still out on my
ability to write further novels until I do one.

I mentioned in Newsletter 110 that
our house phone had been out for a number of weeks. I implied that I blamed the
carrier, CenturyLink. CenturyLink didn’t cover itself with glory in the whole
business, but when they finally got a technician to the house he instantly
diagnosed the problem as a short in one of our phone jacks and then corrected
it. A disused jack hidden behind a dresser in the bedroom (and a darned good
thing my wife got back and remembered it) had developed slight contact between
the outgoing and incoming lines. Dialing out through another jack was no
problem, but an incoming call starts with a ringing current–which is full line
voltage. That caused a dead short and shut the call off instantly.

So: that’s it for now. I will go
back to making plot notes

Oh–I usually close these hoping folks will be nice to other people. That’s still good general advice, but some people’s responses to Shadows makes me want to emphasize it now. Rudeness, nastiness, really does make the world a worse place. Be nice to people, folks!

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–Dave Drake

Newsletter #110

DRAKENEWS #110: July 9, 2019

Dear People,

I’ve been relaxing the past two months, which sounds like a more pleasant business than it’s been in my head. The trouble is that rushing the most recent book put me so far down that it takes a very long time to come to the surface. I’m not there yet.

I don’t want to sound like, “Poor, poor me.” I wasn’t drafted into this business. I generally love what I’m doing, and I’m paid well for my efforts. But sometimes as with any other job, things get stressful. This was an extreme case, and I’m probably not over the bike wreck either.

So I’ve been a bit fragile for the past while, enough that distant friends have been worrying about me. I regret this, but there’s not a damned thing I can do about mentally broadcasting distress. I’m okay, and I’m not in immediate danger of doing anything really dumb.

In terms of productive work, I’ve done a short story and I’m well into another short story. This doesn’t make significant money–in fact the one I’m still working on is for a tribute and I’m donating it to the cause–but I like short stories. I entered the field through reading short stories, and I’d been selling short stories for about 13 years before my first novel.

Because short stories are no longer a paying proposition, the most skilled and experienced writers rarely write them. When they do one as a favor for a friend or a publisher, it doesn’t get their full attention.

That’s certainly been true of me. When the editors of Star Destroyers pitched the concept to me, I said I wasn’t interested. (The initial working title was Boomers; I did for an instant consider writing about a dominance battle between male red kangaroos.)

They came back to me six months later and asked me as a favor to do a story so that they could put my name on the cover. I agreed because they’re nice people and I was sure I could find a story in the concept.

I wasn’t best pleased about the situation, however, and the first three ideas I came up with involved genocide. What I eventually did avoided genocide, but it’s not a good-hearted story. It’s not a bad story–it’s technically quite a good one–but it’s not a story which makes me happy to have written.

I try to learn from my mistakes. The story I just wrote for a Weird World War III anthology is as good as I could make it. That doesn’t mean that it’s a great story or that you’ll love it: just that I did my job to the best of my ability. From now on, that will be the case: either I’ll turn the proposal down flat or I’ll give it the best I’ve got. And if I do allow my arm to be twisted on a project I didn’t really want to do, I’ll still give it the best I’ve got.

This is kind of embarrassing to admit, but what you get in these newsletters is the real me. I haven’t always met what I think should be proper standards.

There’s a new podcast up at Baen.com in which Tony Daniel and I discuss To Clear Away the Shadows. We did the interview by phone and the sound quality isn’t (I think) very satisfactory. (My landline has been completely out for the past week, and our carrier–CenturyLink–is having trouble throughout the area.) I’m considering going in to the Baen offices if and when I do another podcast.

On a more positive note than most of this newsletter, I’m well into reading Democracy in America by Alexis de Toqueville. I’ve had the two-volume set for probably 30 years but I hadn’t seriously started into it earlier.

De Toqueville published his analysis in 1835 after travelling extensively in the America of his day and had done an enormous amount of documentary research. For example, when he contrasts the American federal constitution with those of other federal nations like Switzerland and Germany, it’s clear that he’s familiar with all of them. De Toqueville was a working politician rather than an ivory-tower philosopher. He certainly has his biases, but he makes it a goal to be fair and objective in all he says.

By seeing America analyzed from the outside I’m seeing effects from history which I’d never considered before. For example, most of Latin America broke from its colonial rulers about the some time we did from ours. We established a strong federal union, whereas what happened in Brazil and Colombia (to pick two states whose history in the 1820s I know a little about) was a series of coups and revolutions amounting to little better than anarchy.

The British North American colonies differed among themselves in population, culture, and economies. All had strong political classes by the late 18th century, but they were all ruled from London and had no independent foreign policy. Their individual political classes were used to accepting outside control, and they were willing to substitute federal control for royal control.

In most of Latin America newly freed provinces revolted against the new central governments–and also invaded neighboring provinces. These differing outcomes certainly occurred, but the fact doesn’t prove Anglo-Saxons are superior to Hispanics. Differing colonial history and culture are better ways to understand the different results.

I recently had a complaint from a reader that my attack on Fox News in the intro to Though Hell Should Bar the Way made it impossible for him to read the book. I should stick to writing books instead of political commentary.

My first thought was that I didn’t attack Fox News. I then realized that I was quibbling: I’d be perfectly willing to attack Fox News and to a lesser degree to attack the news from any of the other US networks. I listen to BBC News, not because it’s without bias but because it tries to be without bias.

The fact that to many Americans (not just my correspondent), the choice of a news source is a political act distresses me. As an extreme example look up the interview of Ben Shapiro, a Fox News commentator, by Andrew Neil.

Neil is probably the most right-wing (reputable) journalist in the UK (he’s high up in the councils of Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News among other things), but he is a journalist. Shapiro made a complete fool of himself (an assessment with which he would probably agree, judging from his statements  after he’d cooled down) by assuming that anyone who didn’t accept his position at face value was a liberal and unworthy of his own time.

Folks, there’s real information out there. Make an effort to find people whose priority is data, not sound bites and Revealed Truth. If you really care about something, you’ll probably want to check multiple sources even when they’re individually good.

And you could do worse than read Democracy in America. If nothing else, de Toqueville will show you that the news in the US has always been pretty much the way it is now.

Go out and be nice to other folks, people. We don’t all have to think alike.

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #109

DRAKE NEWS: May 1, 2019

Dear People,

TO CLEAR AWAY THE SHADOWS, the latest RCN novel, is complete! Thank goodness. This has been a very rough passage.

The problems basically go back
to the wreck in May, 2018. [Newsletter 104] I had no physical injury from that
one, but it turned out to keep me for about six months from the full-on
concentration I need to do my plots. This didn’t matter because I have no
deadlines and I’ve got enough money for my needs for the foreseeable future.
(I’m 73 and ride a motorcycle.)

I was getting a bit worried because
things didn’t start to go together sooner than they did. It crossed my mind
more than once that maybe the wreck had smashed my higher faculties for good
and all. That wasn’t the case: it had just stunned them, sort of a lesser
equivalent of what had happened to me when I came back from Viet Nam. It
had been seven or eight years before I was able to write a novel, though I
continued to sell short stories as I’d done before I was drafted.

The chaos in my mind jelled and
I switched from taking notes to organizing them into a plot. This is the normal
progression–it was just considerably delayed. I started the actual writing. It
was a different book in form from previous ones; and though it was set in the
RCN universe, it had a wholly new cast of characters.

Furthermore, the book has an
episodic structure which I’ve used infrequently in the past. (Ranks of Bronze and Starliner were built that way, but not most of my recent ones.)
This takes a bit more work than a unitary plot because the physical and human
environment change every time the setting does, but if a writer doesn’t practice
different techniques, he gets stale. (And so does his work, which is what
matters for readers.)

All was going fine until I hit a
glitch: Audible, Amazon’s audiobook line, contacted Kay, my agent, to buy rights
to my new Baen release, Shadows. I
told her that it must be a mistake; they were confusing me with Dave Weber whom
I thought had used Shadow in a recent title.

Kay came back with the full
title from Audible: To Clear Away the
Shadows. That was the one I was working on, all right, and I’d be happy to
sell Audible the rights–but I was hoping to finish the book first.

At that point (last November) I
phoned Baen, the Wake
Forest office, and asked
Tony Daniel if the book really was scheduled. Yep, and they were expecting it
toward the end of the year. I told Tony, “That’s not going to
happen,” and went back to work.

I had the outline and was
working on the text, but I didn’t have much and I wasn’t getting as high a
daily rate as usual. That was probably because of the unusual structure, but at
the time I had to consider that the bike wreck had caused permanent damage. All
I could usefully do was to keep on working. Surrendering to despair wasn’t a
useful or an attractive option.

Finally in January I did a word
count and found I had 60K. For the first time I was confident I had enough plot
to be sure to finish the book, so I phoned Toni and said I needed a few months
but I’d be able to get the book in. She said that would be no problem, so I
resumed working.

I should say here that apart
from scheduling the book without first discussing it with me, Toni didn’t make
a mistake. She explained that she’d needed a lead title for the June, 2019, slot
and figured I could make it without a problem. If it hadn’t been for the bike
wreck, I certainly could have–but she wasn’t factoring the wreck into her
estimate.

If she’d talked to me (as she
obviously should have done), what would have happened? Probably I’d have said, “Oh, hell, I can make that
deadline.” I didn’t realize how
badly the wreck had scrambled me either. That makes it seem as though it didn’t
matter that the publisher hadn’t informed me of the schedule….

It made one huge difference. It
kicked me straight back into Nam
where matters of my life or death were decided without anyone consulting me or
even informing me of the decisions. If I’d agreed to the schedule, even under
pressure, it would’ve been my choice. As it was, I was giving up a couple
months of my life–because the process of writing the book on this schedule
precluded normal pleasure reading, exercise, and the other activities that make
life worth living–for no reason having anything to do with me.

Some mornings at 2 am I thought of retiring from the field.
That gives you a notion of how far down I was, because writing is just about as
important to me as reading as an activity that gives me pleasure.

More realistically in daylight
hours I considered my future writing projects. I had a number of friends volunteer
advice on the subject. They used varied language depending on whether their
background was primarily writing or primarily business, but as one of the
latter put it, “You have value in the marketplace.”

Believe me, I knew I had
options. I love Baen Books and have as much history with the company as anyone
alive, but if I had the faintest belief that it might happen again, I’d be
gone.

Fortunately Toni, when she
realized what she’d done, apologized fully and promised it wouldn’t be
repeated. Furthermore she handled her end of things flawlessly following that
first (horrible) misstep. She explained later that when she realized the
situation, she had two options: to cancel the book, or to let me get on with it
and have production lined up to handle a late delivery.

Cancelling the book would have
been disastrous for my career. I know of a few cases in which a book missed its
ship date, but I don’t know of any in which the author has had a significant
writing career afterward. In most cases the problem has been the author’s own
fault, but that doesn’t matter: if you’ve stiffed the distributors–and this is
true of Amazon in spades–they’re not going to give you another chance.
Computers don’t care about fault.

Toni kept her own people off my
back. I’m sure some of them were nervous about the timing, but they didn’t tell
me about it. The situation was none
of my doing and telling me it was bad wasn’t going to improve matters.

I finished the book before April
1, which was my own deadline (for myself). I did fewer polish passes than I
normally would, but the book isn’t unedited. I’m sure there are errors I would
have caught in another edit pass–but judging from earlier books, there are
errors I would’ve missed also.

The book is about 97K words
long. I was planning to hit over 100K, but this is a full-length novel. A worse
problem is that I had plotted in several ‘expansion slots’ which because of the
crunch in which I wrote it, I didn’t have time to use. This is not the book it
would have been under normal circumstances–but I honestly think it’s a good
one.

Baen got the proof pages to me
promptly, aided by the fact I’d turned in the final draft in thirds as I
finished each section. I realized when I’d read the proofs that the things I’m
most proud of in life are the ways I’ve reacted when I was dropped into
horrible solutions unfairly.

To Clear Away the Shadows is an example of this. The career and
personality I’ve built out of the angry rubble I was when I returned from Nam are even
better examples. But it sure isn’t fun while it’s going on.

So now I’m relaxing and reading
for fun. This includes epics which I’m mining for notes which may wind up in
the next novel, but there are a couple works of naval history and a lot of
other things as well. Pulp fiction in particular. I just read a 1939 fantasy by
Henry Kuttner involving African crocodiles as did my own 1981 King Crocodile. Kuttner handled the
subject in a very different fashion than I did. Kuttner was a better writer than
I, but mine isn’t a story which embarrasses me now.

So, thoughtfully–

Dave Drake

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