David Drake's Blog, page 4

Newsletter #108

Dear People,

As of writing this I still haven’t finished TO
CLEAR AWAY THE SHADOWS, but it’s getting close. I’m on the final planet of the
plot, and I’m on course to meet my own deadline. When I got far enough into the
process to judge how things were going, I informed Baen Books; and I’m getting
there.

Toni (Baen publisher) has promised not to schedule
my future books without talking to me first. I think she may regret that she
did so this time. Certainly I do, but we’re getting there.

I think the cover of Shadows is pretty well set now. I was glad to see it on the Baen site. This is basically one of Steve Hickman’s original conceptions. I said I’d give him an exotic alien if he showed me what he wanted, so he did sketches.

When I got to that point in the plot, I wrote the
scene and sent it to him, saying I’d tweak it if he wanted a different color or
the like. Instead he redid the cover entirely to make it an illustration of my
scene.

This bothered me. I’ve known writers who’ve
demanded cover control. I don’t personally know of a case where it’s led to a
good result, and I know of a number of disasters: artists don’t see things the
way non-artists do. Putting the non-artist in charge is a bad idea.

Apparently Toni (who acts as Baen’s art director)
had a reaction similar to mine and it’s back to Steve’s original conception.
Thank goodness,

A fan recently sent me an academic paper
postulating a Canaanite source for portions of the Odyssey. Not only did this interest me (as he thought it might), it
made me think of another life in which I became an Academic.

I’m not a natural Academic: I’m an antiquarian,
which is a very different way of looking at similar material. The thing is, I
believe I could have learned to function as an Academic–I’m not a natural
novelist either: I’m a short story writer. I’ve learned to write novels,
however.

The Academic paper made me want to take down my
Oxford Classical Texts of the plays of Plautus to read the Menaechmi (one of the works discussed in the paper), but I realized
I wouldn’t do that: I’d return to finishing Shadow.
Another friend recently sent me an essay on the Aeneid which made me want to reread the Aeneid, but I hadn’t done that either: I’d resumed writing Shadow. (I don’t think I’ve ever read Menaechmi, but I think I’d go back to
Vergil before I read the Plautus.)

Writing novels is really an all-consuming job if I
do it right. I regret the freedom of my youth when I could do things like read
the Aeneid through, but if I’d become
an Academic (well, a reasonably successful one) I wouldn’t have any more
freedom than I do now.

And Academe wouldn’t have given me the crucial
thing that writing does: it wouldn’t have helped me handle the anger that I
came back from Nam with.

I don’t care about the status of being a writer;
and for that matter, I have more respect for many of the Academics whom I know
than I do for many of the writers. I’m really glad that I’m not dead or in
jail, though. Writing gave me that escape.

It brings me to what for me is a tangential point.
Many writers don’t turn in books which they claim to be writing. Sometimes
they’re very good and famous writers; generally they’re less good and less
famous. (Almost every writer in fantasy/SF is both less good and less famous
than George Martin, for example.)

Writing novels is very hard work. (It’s harder
than any other job I’ve had.) If somebody
decides it’s not worth his effort to do that, he’s almost certainly right. It’s
regrettable if he strings publishers along with repeated lies about progress,
as I watched Karl Wagner doing from 1975 through the rest of his life, but
lying to make people think better of you is a common human failing.

You’re not getting something that you want? That’s
a pity, but it’s not the writer’s problem. I’m sure he’d prefer to turn in a
book rather than to continue to lie about it.

What he wouldn’t
prefer is to buckle down and do the work. He’s got things which  much better repay his investment of time. In
Karl’s case that mostly involved watching football games and bad movies on
cable TV. (He discussed watching Xanadu
three times, for instance.)

Me, I have a novel to write. Thanks to Nam, I don’t have better things to do. Most
would-be writers are luckier than I am, however.

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #107

DRAKE NEWSLETTER #107:  January 4, 2019

Dear People,

I’m at work on To Clear Away the Shadows. I’ve got a good chunk (20 texts which average over a thousand each), but it sure isn’t racing along.  Getting back on track after the bike wreck hasn’t been easy, though I’m doing better since I’ve been able to start work properly. I use the writing to settle me, but I needed to be more nearly settled to start writing.

It’s good to be successful, but
there are complications. Audible queried my agent about the audio rights to
‘Shadow’. I told Kay they were probably asking about a recent Dave Weber book
with Shadow in the title.

No. In fact they were talking
about To Clear Away the Shadows. I
will happily sell them audio rights, but I’d sooner they waited until I’d
finished the darned book.

I then found that Baen has
already scheduled the book, which is probably what spurred Audible to query
me.  Nobody at Baen had said a word to me
about scheduling or when I was likely to turn the book in. I checked and
learned they were expecting it to come in toward the end of the year (2018). I
said that wasn’t going to happen and went back to writing.

The thing is, I’m generally very
steady–but I’m not fast. I can’t simply blast a book out in four weeks. If I
tried, the result would probably be very poor, but it just wasn’t going to
happen. Some of my books may not be as polished as I wish they were, but I will
not consciously turn out crap–which is what would come of rushing one out that
way.

I suspect that isn’t what my readers
want me to do either, but that doesn’t matter. If I put my name on it, it’s as
good as I think I can make it. I work hard, but pressing me to write fast just
makes me more despairing than I was to begin with. That isn’t a direction I
think I ought to go in.

I finally called Toni, the Baen
publisher. She said there wasn’t a problem at all: I should turn in the book
when it was done to my satisfaction.

This was a great weight off my
mind. I really don’t like to fail and to let people down. In this case I hadn’t
been consulted so I could reasonably have claimed that it wasn’t my fault, but
this is a world in which an awful lot of folks immediately shout, “It
wasn’t my fault!” when things go wrong. I don’t want to be another of
those people.

So: I’m working as fast as I
can, consistent with my own standards of quality. This is a different sort of
book from my usual, and I may fall on my face trying to do things in a
different way. But if I fail, it won’t be because I didn’t try.

The Storm is out from Baen. This is the second book in the Time of Heroes series (Toni wanted a series title and that’s what I came up with). You can call it a fantasy, or at least it has a fantasy feel. Compare it with the Dying Earth series by Jack Vance: the original stories from the ’50s were SF, but when Vance resumed with the Cugel the Clever stories in the same milieu, they were fantasy. This appeared to me to be a distinction without a difference.

Likewise The Storm. It would read the same if it were a fantasy: but just
for the record, the author considers it SF.

The cover is another by Todd Lockwood. It’s completely different from his painting for The Spark, but again it’s an entrancing piece of work and accurately puts across the feel of the book.

My primary transportation is a
motorcycle; actually, one of two motorcycles, day and day. This makes my daily
run into town for the mail a more eventful process than it would be in a car.
That’s at least part of the reason that I do it. I don’t need a lot of
excitement in my life (I had a period of that in the army and don’t want to
repeat it), but it appears that I do need some.

A few days ago I stopped at the
bank to deposit a check. I was on the Yamaha SR400. When I came out, I was
unable to restart the bike. I kicked multiple times, then moved the bike to a
flatter location in the lot and kicked some more with the same lack of effect.

A black man of 40 or so came
over and we chatted about the bike. He’d had the original version years ago (an
SR500) and had rebuilt it in his living room. “That was before you were
married?” I guessed. He laughed hard and agreed.

He got down on the ground and
watched from below as I kicked further, then asked my permission to try kicking
himself. “Be my guest.” We didn’t know one another from Adam. He was
educated and had a US (not Caribbean) accent; and he probably knew about the same
about me.

He suggested that I put her up
on the center stand. I did. I got life on the first kick; then it started on
the second. (I now know that sometimes the side-stand switch may stick; I’ll
try to have my mechanic disconnect that particular safety.) We shook hands and
I rode off.

Note that this had nothing to do
with the SR400 not having an electric starter. It happened to me once on a
Kawasaki Concours, I now realize.

The resolution wasn’t exactly a
surprise. Bikers are an out-group, and (like veterans) there’s a tendency for
one to help another of the group, even a stranger. Certainly I’d have done the
same for him and have done the same for others in a similar case.

But it made me feel good to
reflect on that: not just because the fellow who stopped was a nice guy, but in
the realization that I’m a nice guy too under most circumstances.

I basically don’t like myself
very much. The person I was in Nam
wasn’t a good person, and for a long time that person was still wearing my skin
and living in my head. I’m not a saint now and I can’t undo things that I’ve
done, but I can honestly say that on most days I don’t make the world a worse
place by being in it.

That’s a good thing to reflect
on as 2018 ends. None of my close friends died this year. I had some problems
as a result of the bike wreck, but I’m getting through them and I believe that
that I behaved about as well as I could have when things went wrong.

Happy 2019, everybody. And make
an effort not to make the world a worse place. Be courteous and polite as a
reflex; and when shit happens, just hunker down and slog on through it. It’s
not an inspiring goal, but if everybody did it, we’d all be better off.

All best,
Dave

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Newsletter #106

DRAKE’S NEWSLETTER #106: November 9, 2018

Dear People,

I’ve started writing TO CLEAR AWAY THE SHADOWS! Really writing it: not taking notes, not plotting, not even putting pieces of the plot together. I’ve done all those things, for much longer than the process should have taken.

Yesterday I started writing text. I also typed up the epigraph, the bit of poetry relating to the title which will go in the front of the book. I normally add the epigraph after I’ve finished the text, but after I finished The Storm. I was completely wrung out and couldn’t find the particular chunk of Tennyson I’d planned to use. (Yes, I’d copied it down–somewhere.) I sent the manuscript in without it.

Toni read the book and noted the lack of context for the title, so I (thanks to my webmaster!) found the verse and turned in a corrected manuscript. The Baen managing editor then sent the wrong manuscript to the typesetter, as she had done a number of times in the past. I caught it in the proofs, and it turned out to be any easy one to fix; thank goodness. (Some of her similar errors have proven unfixable.)

Incidentally, the managing editor has since been fired for reasons having nothing to do with me. To repeat myself: thank goodness.

Anyway, The Storm is coming out in January. I read the proofs (which were clean except the lack of epigraph–even cleaner than my original manuscript, which isn’t always the case). It’s a good book, in series with The Spark. Now that there are two of them, they needed a series title which is Time of Heroes.

I say ‘in series with’ rather than ‘sequel to’ The Spark, because most of my books (and certainly The Storm) can be read without knowledge of anything else I’ve written. That’s a practice I got into when I started out, writing short stories for magazines and one-shot anthologies. I couldn’t assume that potential readers had any context for my work.

Incidentally, I’m usually so wrung out at the end of a novel that all I want is to be shut of it forever. This is a common reaction for writers who’ve finished books. CS Forester’s editor wanted extensive changes in The African Queen–then wrote back to say that the book would be fine if they just dropped the final two chapters. Forester thankfully said to drop those chapters, and the book was published that way–completely changing the thrust of the novel.

Forester republished the novel as written when he’d gained stature in the literary marketplace, but the John Huston film made from the book with Bogart and Hepburn basically follows the truncated version and has a happy ending. It probably wouldn’t have been as successful if it had shown Forester’s own bleak vision of male-female relationships.

I’ve mentioned The Spark, the first book in the series. The paperback is out, and the cover is striking even without the special foil treatment which the hardcover got. I’m proud of the book.

I said in a previous newsletter that to get into the feel of To Clear Away the Shadows I had done a story for an anthology of stories by or about Davids. The anthology is now titled The David Chronicles and is being edited by David Afsharirad.

I mentioned this in passing to my friend Barry Malzberg, who greatly to my surprise wanted to do a story for it. I checked with Toni and DavidA (a big Malzberg fan) and got their approval. Barry did an extremely good story–actually, it was a good story up to the last line and became a stunning story with that.

Only then did I realize that Barry thought the anthology was a tribute to me, like Onward, Drake. I told him that I thought that one Drake tribute volume was excessive and a second one would be ridiculous; but if the result was the story he’d just turned in, I was glad of the mistake.

Since Newsletter 105, we’ve had two hurricanes. Neither was especially serious where we live 150 miles from the coast, but the power was off for two days with Florence. Michael brought only about half the rain here–however there was an hour of severe wind and the power was off for three days. (Lots of branches and even trees went through power lines.)

I said, ‘the power was off,’ but in fact just grid power went out. The whole-house generator I’d put in a couple years ago chugged flawlessly and everything was fine. (And it didn’t use nearly as much fuel as I’d feared.)

The hurricanes did complicate travel. A culvert on the road into Chapel Hill washed out during Florence and added a three mile detour for about a week. That was fixed shortly before Michael brought trees and powerlines down on the same road. For a couple days I went around a tree and moved some barricades so that I could edge to the side of the road and duck under the cables. (I was on the little bike.)

In all, the hurricanes were mildly disruptive, but never worse than that for us. The (Generac) generator was a godsend. Among other things, the (electric) well pump continued in service.

The other excitement of the period is that Jo and I went to the Grand Canyon region (Zion, Bryce, and the North Rim) with our very old friends Glenn and Helen Knight. These are the folks we recently went to Italy and Greece with, and in the past had visited in Algeria and Turkey. As always, they did all the planning; and Glenn drove. Our job was to pay half of the expenses, and to sit back and have fun.

We flew into Las Vegas and spent the first night there. In the morning we rented an SUV (a Nissan Rogue; it was so satisfactory that the Knights bought one like it when they got home) and drove to Zion; the next day to Bryce; and following that to an air B&B in Fredonia, Arizona where we stayed for two nights and saw the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, which had been Jo’s particular goal for the trip.

There were incidental sights along the way, including the Kodachrome Basin and the Grosvenor Arch. This last was off paved roads, as was the entire way to Fredonia. The Nissan behaved without reproach, even in crossing mudholes to and from Grosvenor Arch, and along the washboard surface on the way to Fredonia.

The four of us continue to get along well. The people we met (including the waiter in the Denny’s where we had breakfast in Las Vegas as we set out) were uniformly nice. When I’m flying, I generally wear a Blackhorse t-shirt (mostly for the TSA monkeys, not that I expect them to be capable of taking the point as they badger civilians). I had a number of people during the trip thank me for my service (to which I responded as always, “Thank you, but it sure wasn’t my idea”).

At Pipe Spring national monument I chatted with the manager, a Southern Paiute. He noted that the brochure photo of a dancer in full regalia (including face mask) was him, and that he wore a red blanket as part of his outfit because he was a veteran–which was a mark of honor in his tribe.

I recall my Cherokee friend years ago telling me that hers is a warrior culture. That’s true of the Southern Paiutes also, and very possibly of all Native American tribes (which is what Cory implied). It seemed to be a commonly held belief throughout the southwest; and the attitude pleases me.

In all a wonderful trip. Old friends are a great benefit in life.

Now, back to a novel. I still haven’t managed to train them to write themselves.

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #105

Dear People,

There’s only ordinary news this time: I’m seriously into the plotting of my new RCN novel TO CLEAR AWAY THE SHADOWS. I’d like to be farther along–indeed, I’d like to be well into writing the book–but things are finally moving in the right direction.

A friend commented, “You’ve got to expect some confusion after a life-threatening trauma,” but in truth I hadn’t thought of the wreck (see Newsletter 104) as life-threatening. It clearly was, but not in my mind.

But there’s another part of it: I don’t cut anybody else slack, and I’m not going to start with myself. If I’m writing, books appear. No amount of bullshit is going to change that.

I just glanced at the Wikipedia entry on Karl Edward Wagner (which is pretty good in general). It says however that Karl wrote a second Bran Mak Morn pastiche (Queen of the Night) which was never published. Karl told his Zebra editor for months that it was almost done, then got an answering machine to screen her calls to save himself the bother of lying. Zebra even had covers printed for the book because they believed him–he was a very good liar–and the lie lives on in Wikipedia.

In fact Queen of the Night wasn’t even started: Karl’s relatives weren’t able to find so much of a page of it after he died almost twenty years later. He’d kept some of the Zebra cover flats, though,

Bullshit doesn’t bring books into existence.

I guess I’m more antsy than usual about my progress because Baen just had me do catalog copy for To Clear Away the Shadows. It’s scheduled for publication in July, 2019. I haven’t even completed my plot yet. I may well be the only person worried thtat I’ll be able to turn the book in; but believe me, I worry enough for many.

I’ve alluded to the wreck. It genuinely messed me up mentally, at least partially because it brought Nam and my complete helplessness there to the top of my mind. I don’t think I have any remaining physical problems, but for the past couple of weeks I’ve been feeling weak and tired, and my balance is off. I turn 73 on September 24, however, and that by itself is a good enough explanation for how I’m feeling.

Certainly the wreck didn’t help me. I advise all of you out there to avoid similar events.

I’ve just had the initial service on my new motorcycle, a Yamaha SR-400. It’s a delight: light, handy, and perfect for my needs as a backup bike. (The Suzuki DL-650 remains my primary machine.)

The Yamaha isn’t fast but it’ll hold 70 comfortably on a divided highway and 80 without discomfort. Supposedly it’ll do 90, but I have no intention of testing that. My normal use is to run 17 miles into town and back on two-lane roads, and I couldn’t have a better bike for the purpose.

It’s a single cylinder bike and accelerates slowly, but that’s slowly by motorcycle standards. I suspect it compares favorably with most cars. It’s a trifle buzzy at speed, but not uncomfortably so on a short run. For a cross country trip I’ll use the bigger bike (or more likely an airline).

The Yamaha is kick-start only. Now that I’ve gotten the hang of it (and built up my right calf a bit), that’s no trouble in warm weather. I don’t know about winter, but I think I’ll be able to handle it.

An acqaintance (whom I know to be shallow) asked me how I liked the new bike. Without thinking I gave her the pros and cons, just as I would most people. She apparently thought that in answering her question I was asking her for advice. She said, “Couldn’t you just trade it in on a motorcycle with an electric starter?”

Yes, I could, but instead I learned the tricks of kickstarting it (which took a week or two, as expected). And I also realized that when dealing with shallow people, the correct answer would have been, “When I get used to it, I think I’m going to like it a lot. And it’s really pretty!”

I’ll admit that only a few days before she asked me, I’d stalled the brand new bike in traffic on a very hot day. As a result I was thinking–and probably describing with some determination–about how not to have to repeat that experience any time soon. A month later I might not have bothered to mention it.

Still, just as stalling in traffic was a learning experience, so was the result of being inappropriately detailed in answering a question.

The Storm, a sequel to The Spark, is due out in January, 2019. Todd Lockwood’s art on this one is again excellent. I thought of the hero’s new dog, Sam, as being rather larger; but that probably only matters to me and to Toni Weisskopf. (We’re both dog people.)

There’s also been some local news. The Jim Crow-era monument on the UNC campus was pulled over by a mob last week. I don’t blame anybody for being offended by the statue (Silent Sam). It was of a common Confederate soldier–a grunt–but the folks putting it up in 1913 were unusually frank about their cultural stance.

The dedication speech was given by Julian Shakespeare Carr, a major regional industrialist (Carrboro, the bedroom community adjacent to Chapel Hill, is named after him). In the speech Carr bragged about having on that spot horse-whipped a Negro woman who had insulted a White woman.

The thing is, I believe mob violence is a bad thing in a civilized society. Yes, I understand people believing that the authorities aren’t moving fast enough to deal with an Obviously Bad Thing.

But Kristalnacht should not have happened.

Lynchings should not have happened.

And a mob shouldn’t have pulled over Silent Sam.

Think about society as a whole, people. Don’t step outside it to right wrongs that you think are particularly heinous.

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #104

NEWSLETTER #104: June 27, 2018

Dear People,

For once, the big news hasn’t anything to do with writing. On May 9 I pulled up behind an old Jeep Cherokee at a traffic light in Carrboro. I was on my way home from my post office box, a trip I’ve made most weekdays for the 25 years we’ve lived in the current house. I was on the GS500F.

There was a long shriek of brakes behind me, concluding with an extremely loud BANG! as what turned out to be a 2013 Chevy Equinox hit me, followed shortly by a lesser bang as the bike was flung into the back of the Jeep. I’m not aware of being unconscious, but my next memory is of kicking my legs to get free of the bike. I don’t recall hitting the ground, though obviously I did. And the reason I felt trapped is that the bike was lying on my lower right leg, but I wasn’t aware of that either.

As soon as I got clear of the bike, I hopped to my feet, took off my helmet, and called to the considerable number of spectators, “I’m all right!” I suppose that was magical thinking, but the fact doesn’t bother me. I tried to pick up the bike and get it out of the road. That was crazy as it was squished, but I was trying to deal with things logically. (Logic doesn’t help if you start from an absurd premise.)

Lots of people were telling me what to do. Mostly this amounted to lie down on the grass and wait for the ambulance to take me to the ER. I had no intention of seeing a doctor, let alone a hospital. I wanted to get home.

Two police cars arrived shortly. (The station was within three blocks of the scene.) One of the cops told me I was really lucky. I replied that I didn’t think I’d ever count a day in which the bike I was on was crushed between a pair of SUVs as a really lucky one.

The girl driving the Chevy had moved it twenty feet back. (One of the spectators said that until she did, he hadn’t realized there was a bike involved. I guess it’s possible that I was under the overhangs of the two SUVs, but I’m not aware of that.)

The girl, a plump black of 21, was really sorry. She’d bought the car recently and the brakes had always been ‘funny’. From the sound as it sped toward me, I suspect the brake pads were worn down to the backing plates and I was hearing steel rubbing steel. For what it’s worth, it sounded exactly like incoming–right down to the bang at the end. There’s nothing for the guy in the impact area to do about either one.

A 65-year-old retired kindergarten teacher was driving the Cherokee. She was really freaked. When she got out of her car, she saw my leg waving in the air and thought she’d run over me. I kept telling her that I was fine and that she’d been even more innocent than I was, but it still upset her badly. (The next day I dropped by the place she volunteered–there was a sticker on the Jeep door–to reassure her.)

She offered me the water bottle she had in the car. I drained it: my mouth was really dry.

My wife was 30 miles away with a friend. They came and picked me up. I called my mechanic to pick up the GS500.

The bike had compressed to absorb the impact of a car moving at about 20 miles and hour, squeezing the bike into the SUV in front. Because I was stopped, I simply fell over instead of being skidded across the pavement. Other than falling onto the street (which I don’t remember), my body didn’t hit anything hard.

There were minor glitches over the next few weeks, but no physical injuries showed themselves. I had a touch on tendonitis in my lower right leg from levering the bike off it, but I regularly ache as badly after the heavy yard work I do. All the data the girl gave the cops–address, phone number, and insurance coverage–was wrong (she’d recently gotten married), but they were able to track her down, and she had insurance.

I wear top-end protective gear, an Arai helmet and a jacket from First Gear. That’s at least part of the reason things weren’t worse than they were. My shoulder hit the pavement, but at no point did I feel the impact. (I have a new helmet and jacket now.)

Things could have been a great deal worse. Similarly, I could’ve come back from Nam in a box. Neither of those things happened. That’s really all there is to say.

I continue to gather notes toward a plot for the next space opera in the RCN universe. The wreck didn’t improve my focus; but I’ll get there if I don’t die first.

So that’s the big news.

When I started working for the Town of Chapel Hill, WCHL-AM radio was a major part of the community and had a reporter at Board of Alderman meetings. WCHL is still there, and with changes in technology now has a local news website. A freelancer for the site (he’s a social worker in his day job) interviewed me recently. The result has come out here.

I will make only one comment on this very respectful article: I had gotten a haircut only a week before the guy came by. If he’d arrived a couple months later, it’s unlikely that he would have chosen the adjective ‘cropped’ for my hair.

Eugene Olson, the first freelance writer I ever got to know, just died at 83. He was my 11th grade English teacher, but he wrote on the side under the pen name Brad Steiger. Mr Olson was a very inspiring teacher. He also taught a one-semester creative writing course. I took the course but I don’t think it had much to do with my becoming a full-time writer.

What was crucial to that was the fact of Mr Olson himself. He proved to me that a kid from Iowa–he was from Decorah and only ten years my senior–could make it as a freelance writer. Without his example, I wouldn’t have attempted it myself.

After I knew Mr Olson, he went in directions I wouldn’t want to follow. If you’re into Forteana, you know that in the ’60s and ’70s Brad Steiger was a byword for phony sensation, and he also made decisions in his personal life which distressed me. That doesn’t take anything away from what Mr Olson taught in high school.

On Mother’s Day we got together with Jonathan and his family. There’s a new Three Drakes picture. I keep shrinking in fact as well as by comparison. Being something of a classicist, this puts me in mind of Tithonous.

Tristan is already at fifteen an impressive athlete and just competed in his first body-building contest. He didn’t get this from his grandfather. (Either one of us, come to think.)

I did an unexpected piece of writing recently. A professor from Minnesota, who in the ’70s was a high school fan of Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane series, has a contract from an academic publisher to do a book on that series. He asked me to do a short preface for the book and I did.

The job took me back to the ’70s when everything looked different. The world–our world and the speculative fiction world–was changing rapidly. Fiction magazines still existed and new ones were being started. Heroic fantasy was booming, Kirby McCauley was starting World Fantasy Con, and the future was bright.

I wrote about Karl starting out as a writer and trying to make a living. I kept the focus on him, not on me or on Karl’s interactions with me; nonetheless the little essay wound up being a pretty good picture of how the period felt from the inside. To that degree it’s about me and about all of us trying to write fifty years ago.

It was a rough time in a lot of ways (even, I suppose, for folks who hadn’t just gotten back from Nam), but there was hope and a great deal of good in the F/SF field then. One of those good things was the 1973 publication of Worse Things Waiting, a collection of fantasy stories by Manly Wade Wellman illustrated by Lee Brown Coye.

A near facsimile in paperback of the original Carcosa publication has just come out from Shadow Ridge Press at 20 bucks a copy. All the profits go to Lee’s family. Jim Groce and I, the surviving partners in Carcosa, decided they should have our share also. (Karl Wagner during his lifetime handled payments to Lee, and I’m afraid that matters may not have been done as I would have wished.)

Todd Lockwood did the art for The Storm as he did for The Spark, the previous book in the Time of Heroes series. This art catches the feel of what I described–which is explicitly not part of the sidereal universe.

I think it’s a wonderful job–and a perfect illustration of why I don’t tell artists what to paint on my covers (even when they call me to ask). My imagination isn’t visual the way a graphic artist’s is. I wouldn’t have come up with anything like what Todd did, let alone anything as good.

The book is due out from Baen in January, 2019. I’m very lucky.

Go do positive things, people. And try not to rear-end motorcycles: the life you save may be my own.

–Dave Drake

Newsletter #103

NEWSLETTER #103: May 8, 2018

Dear People,

This is slightly late because my webmaster (who does everything about the website except create original content) is off sharpening her genealogical skills.

I mentioned in the March newsletter (102) that Though Hell Should Bar the Way was coming out in April, and indeed it’s out. I changed various things in this most recent RCN novel. In particular, it’s told in the first person by a character new to the series. A writer has to keep changing his premises or he’ll get stale.

Some readers don’t like the change, others do; but neither of those things affects my decision. I’m writing the books, and what seems right for my head at the time is what I’m going to do. Of course I want everybody in the world to love everything I write, but that isn’t going to happen regardless. At least if I write for myself I can accurately judge how well I’ve succeeded. If it fails for me, I know to do it a different way the next time.

In fact, I think Though Hell etc succeeded pretty well. Though I’m planning to use a different setting and characters on the next space opera–the one I’m thinking about now.

Which is a good segue. Since I turned in a novel in March, it won’t surprise anybody who knows me that I’m gathering material for another one.

In the 19th century there were a number of governmental scientific voyages, the most famous of which is (in my judgment) the voyage of HMS Beagle on which Charles Darwin gathered the information and insights which enabled him to express the Theory of Evolution.

These voyages differed from those of Captain Cook who was concerned with discovering new lands and mapping them. The Beagle and her crew (and still more HMS Challenger and similar ships from other countries, including a number from the US) had broader purposes. They made extensive soundings of the sea bed, took formal ethnographic data and artifacts, and collected specimens of animals (including some they had netted or dredged from the sea).

A voyage like that provides a lot of fun story possibilities. I’m reading memoirs and considering ways of using the material.

Another thing I did was to write a short story in a similar milieu in order to see how it works. I did this when I was considering what became the RCN series. Dave Weber was putting together the first of his Honorverse shared-universe volumes (More Than Honor).

I wrote A Grand Tour for him. I didn’t (and didn’t intend to) go anywhere with the two focal characters from that story, but the story helped me understand the mechanics of a two-viewpoint space opera.

This time Toni Weisskopf and a couple of her editors were joking about doing an anthology of stories by writers named David–and Toni decided to do it. The editor, David Afsharirad, solicited me as a Baen author named David. (The cover artist is David Mattingly.) I told Toni I doubted the book would make money, but I said I’d do a story–because it was just the sort of silly thing that Jim Baen and I would talk ourselves into doing, and I really miss Jim.

Having done so, it struck me that the story would be a great way to test the new milieu. (I’d already promised to do it; the planned novel just gave me a reason beyond whimsy to do so.) It also struck me that Tony Daniel generally asks for a linked short story for the website to advertise the new novel. Worst case, if Toni comes to her senses and scraps the anthology idea, they can use this story on Baen.com. (That’s taking the long view, but I do take the long–in human terms–view.)

I buckled down to the story and have shipped it off at 7,500 words. I’m now returning to my note-taking and plotting, freshly inspirited. (The story is The Savage. I know nothing about the anthology beyond what I said above.)

I mentioned in Newsletter 102 that there would be a podcast interview and linked short-story connected with Though Hell etc. They’re now up. The interview is in two parts. I honestly don’t know whether or not anybody listens to the podcasts, but I try to be interesting and you may occasionally hear something about Baen history that you won’t get any other way.

In the intro to Though Hell etc I mention reading a book about pirates when I was a kid and said that I now suspected the striking illos were by NC Wyeth. A fan just informed me that the art is by Wyeth’s teacher, Howard Pyle. (I will shortly go down to my friendly local bookstore and order a copy of Pyle’s A Book of Pirates to reread after 60 years.) I have the best fans in the world.

I like to write short stories and I’m good at them, but I haven’t written many since I got seriously into novels. Novels provide better money for time spent (by about a factor of ten), and there aren’t many serious short-story venues any more.

Recently I thought about it. I don’t need money any more: I’m 72 years old and didn’t piss my money away when I started making it. Barring disaster, I won’t die in poverty; and disaster could overwhelm any savings or portfolio. There’s no reason I shouldn’t do a short story if I feel like it.

That’s why I agreed to do the story for the (untitled) Davids Anthology at 7-cents/word. And that’s why I was willing to do a story for an attempt to restart a print version of Amazing Stories when the projectors approached me. The offer was 6-cents/word, which is fair money for a short story; but as I said, the money didn’t matter.

I had a very bad experience recently with another newbie editor, however, so I put in a proviso: that when I handed in my story, they would accept it as-was and pay me at the agreed (6-cent) rate. They were incensed–that would mean they couldn’t even reformat it for printing!

Of course it wouldn’t have meant that–but the objection confirmed me in my belief that I’d been right to be wary of them. I do not think that my work is perfect, nor that no editor could improve it.

I didn’t think that this crew could improve it, however.

I am a competent professional. The projectors were not professionals, and they’d just given me proof that they weren’t competent either. I was asking them to commit about $350-500 of their money (I would happily write to any length they requested). They were asking me to commit some thousands of dollars worth of my writing time. (The story would take a couple weeks to do properly. My annual income varies widely, but $2K/week would be in the ballpark.)

I was unwilling to pay that much money in order to be aggravated, which is what happened when I wrote for an amateur last year.

Jeepers, I get mad just thinking back on that business. Live and learn.

BREAKING NEWS! Tor just reverted thirteen titles, which Baen will be bringing out in some fashion realsoonnow. Toni will discuss the plan with Marla and will tell me.

The titles include a number of series books–but not the first book in those series. Also, one that I’d very much like to see in Baen’s hands, The Forlorn Hope, is not included. I don’t have any cause for complaint: Tor paid me good money for those titles. If they’re still earning money for Tor, Tor has every reason (as well as the right) to keep them.

On the particularly good side, two of my self-standing early novels are included: Birds of Prey and Bridgehead. Birds is one of my best early books; Bridgehead has too many characters because I was still learning how to structure a novel, but there’s really a lot of good stuff in it. I’m glad to see it available again.

More as I know more, people.

Now I’ll return to taking notes from Log-Letters from the Challenger and similar material as I gear up to plot the next one.

Go off and be friendly and courteous to other folks! The world will be better for it, and so will you.

–Dave Drake

Newsletter #102

DRAKE’S NEWSLETTER #102: March 3, 2018

Dear People,

I have finished my novel: The Storm, a sequel to The Spark. (Both titles come from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, if you were wondering.)

I worried about this one more than I do most, which is saying something. I guess that’s in part because The Spark was the best thing I’d written (with the exception of Redliners, which is in a league by itself; and isn’t a book for everybody besides). I thought The Storm was coming out too short; the pacing was off; there wasn’t enough action; and lots of other things were wrong.

Now that I’ve gone over it in detail, it strikes me as fine. It’s 98K and, while I’ve written longer books than that, 98K is a thoroughly satisfactory length. (Anything over 90K is, I believe.) The pacing works, and though there isn’t a climactic duel as there was in The Spark, there’s no lack of action. The Storm is different from its predecessor, but I want every book to be different.

I guess the truth is I need to worry about things, especially when I’m writing. I assume that’s part of my writing process, and as a general rule I’m happy with the results of that process. I could still bitch that I’m uncomfortable most of the time I’m working–and that’s true; but I’m a volunteer. Nobody drafted me for the job, and I’m not being asked to kill people. I’ve been in worse situations.

Finishing the new book is the big news, but Though Hell Should Bar the Way, an RCN space opera, is due out in early April. It’s got a great Steve Hickman cover. (Gosh, I’ve been lucky with covers over the years. I attribute that mostly to not trying to micromanage artists, who have very different minds from my own.)

Hell is a considerable change of pace for the series. It’s told from a single viewpoint rather than two (as were all its predecessors) and it’s a different character–new to the series–besides. Most of the usual series characters are present, but you’re seeing them through unfamiliar eyes.

I think this works pretty well, but I did it for myself rather than for the effect on the reader. I need to keep myself from going stale, and looking at the characters and situation from an outside viewpoint forces me to rethink. Leary and Mundy are certainly heroes, but Odysseus was a hero also. Odysseus would look very different in a novel told from the viewpoint of Diomedes, let alone the viewpoint of the Greater Ajax.

It was a fun book to write. I hope readers will have fun with it also.

In support of Hell, I did a podcast interview for Baen (it’ll be up March 15) and also did a short story connected with the novel. The story focuses on the Bosun, Ellie Woetjans, ten years before she appears in the first of the RCN novels. Again, this isn’t quite up.

While recording the podcast at the Baen offices yesterday, I picked up the anthology Star Destroyers, for which I did a story, Superweapon. In glancing over the story again, I was struck by how much I’ve learned by reading classical authors. Very frequently while telling stories in verse, classical authors describe characters in a single line or two. This gives each character a personality and gives the story life.

In his 4th satire, Juvenal describes a meeting of Domitian’s Council to determine how a large turbot should be cooked; the capsule descriptions of the Councilors turn this scene into a snapshot of life under a savage autocracy. The talking heads have become people.

That’s the difference between a story and a phone book; and that’s what I’ve tried to do in Superweapon. I’ve written better stories, but the craftsmanship of this one is of a very high order.

At a recent con, a writer/friend asked me if I liked Mechs. I misunderstood, thinking he was asking about dinner plans, and said, “Well, I’m partial to chiles rellenos.” We got that sorted and I did an intro to an anthology about humanoid fighting machines, Mechs, in which my friend had a story.

My intro is about the relationship between soldiers, in particular mercenaries, and the civil government employing them, rather than about this anthology per se or the universe in which it’s set. The anthology, The Good, the Bad, and the Merc, is out now.

Ursula K. LeGuin, an exceptional writer who happened to write SF, died recently. I met her only once, when Tor sent me to Seattle for a book fair at which she was the keynote speaker.

She talked intelligently, of course, but then opened the floor to questions. Nobody jumped in for a time, so I did, asking, “What was it like to work with Don Wollheim?”

Wollheim was a leading SF fan in the ’30s and became a major SF editor in the ’40s through his death in 1990. He was responsible for the Ace SF line, which formed the basis of my own SF reading when I was getting into the field.

Wollheim was a towering figure in the SF field, but his personality caused many to dislike him. He was extremely smart and well-read, never pompous himself and displaying open contempt for pompous twits (of which the field has its share).

Among other things, Wollheim at Ace published LeGuin’s earliest SF novels. Her take on this man probably wasn’t what most in the auditorium came to learn about, but it was of interest to me.

LeGuin paused, then said, “It was like working with a lizard.” Pause. “A very old, very wise, lizard.” Pause. “A poisonous lizard.”

That was a perfect and succinct description. LeGuin spoke with exactly the sort of craftsmanship that I mentioned above when I was discussing Superweapon and the classics.

Another of the things I’ve learned from classical writers is to steal from the best. To Vergil, that meant Homer. He’s quoted as saying (I’m paraphrasing in English), “The man who can steal a line from Homer could steal Hercules’ club.”

For me “the best” definitely includes Ursula LeGuin. I stole her description of Don Wollheim for a characterization in Superweapon.

Go out and be nice to folks, people!

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #76

DRAKE NEWSLETTER 76: September 1, 2013

Dear People,

MONSTERS OF THE EARTH, the third of my Books of the Elements, is out from Tor. The Donato cover painting and the production treatment are just as good as they have been on the previous books in the series (The Legions of Fire and Out of the Waters).

I’m pleased with the book itself, too. The characters are members of a culture different from our own and I don’t gloss over the differences to the degree that some writers do when using historical settings (culturally, though not in terms of strict history, the Books of the Elements are set in the Rome of 30 ad). I suppose makes the books more difficult for many potential readers to get into, but I don’t see much point in writing for the lowest common denominator when I actually know better.

Come to think–if I didn’t know better, I’d write something else. (Which is a thought I often have when seeing Military SF written by folks who have no personal experience of either the military or war.)

I’m writing to entertain people, not to educate them, but I’m not willing to tell lies about things either. The slave-based economy of the Roman Republic and Early Empire was often brutal and sometimes savagely brutal. The same is true of war as I saw it in Viet Nam and Cambodia.

I caught a lot of flak in the ’70s and ’80s for telling my truth, and I shouldn’t wonder if the same were true nowadays as well. (In the intervening decades I’ve learned not to read reviews, so I don’t know that for a fact.) I have absolutely no regrets about writing things in what I believe to be the correct fashion.

Note that I’m not saying that I have The Truth. I’m saying that I will not consciously mislead readers about what I believe to be the truth.

The big news in Newsletter 75 was that I’d finished the rough of The Sea Without a Shore, the next RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera. Editing it was my first priority, as usual. I finished the editing to my satisfaction, sent the book in (to Baen Books’ satisfaction), and have happily banked the turn-in money.

So Sea is now old news and I’m gearing up for the final Book of the Elements: Air and Darkness. (The title is, as always, subject to my whim and the dictates of the Tor marketing people. I like it, and it accurately suggests the plot that I’m working on. I don’t think Tor will dislike it, but titles aren’t the sort of thing I’ll go to the wall for.)

It’s very early days on the plot, but at least I have a direction. (For the plot, that is. The cardinal direction of this one is East, and the element is of course Air.) I thought about the plot a great deal while I was in Italy, but getting it all to mesh together the way I want will be tricky. (It’s always tricky.)

The core situation to keep in mind is the invasion of India by Bacchus. I won’t be doing that, of course, but I’m working from that solid (a)historical point. We’ll see how it goes.

I didn’t dive straight into plotting (well, gathering plot notes) for Air as soon as I finished the space opera. Baen Books asked me to do a story for Baen.com to support the mass market release of Night&Demons in December (or maybe November), so I wrote The Virgin of Hertogenbosch between novels. (The only time I’d have been willing to do a story. I’m not going to willingly break off work on a novel to do a short story, because it would take me a month to get my head back into novel mode.)

I like to do short stories, but my time is much more profitably spent on novels and I like to write novels, too. (Baen is paying me a bonus rate for this story, but even so it’s way below what I would get for the same amount of effort on a novel. The high rate is a nice gesture by Toni, though.)

The neat thing about writing that’s wholly divorced from money is that I can experiment without feeling that I’ve cheated anybody if I fall on my face. The stories in Night&Demons were mostly written in the ’60s and ’70s, when I was learning my trade and wrote only short stories. That was also when I met and became friends with Manly Wade Wellman.

Manly had written a great deal for the pulp magazines, and the models for my own fantasy/horror fiction came from the pulps also. I wrote the Old Nathan stories as homage to Manly’s stories of John the Balladeer, written for F&SF in the ’50s, but I’d never tried to write a classic ghostbreaker (psychic detective) story of the sort Manly wrote in the ’30s and ’40s in Weird Tales magazine.

My Old Nathan wasn’t John the Balladeer, and Professor G T Field, the protagonist of Virgin, certainly isn’t Manly’s John Thunstone. They’re recognizably in the same sub-genre, though, and my story would have fit comfortably into WT in 1943. My very first sale, Denkirch (which is in Night&Demons, by the way), was modelled on 1938 WT fiction, so this is an advance.

I had a very good time with Virgin. I revisted the ’70s by writing the sort of story I was trying to do then and by describing the sort of people I knew then. And I didn’t fall on my face: the story is a darned good piece of work.

The Tor publicist asked me if I wanted to do local signings, etc, in connection with the release of Monsters on September 3. After a discussion with my management consultant, Mark Van Name (that’s kind of a joke–I couldn’t afford Mark if we weren’t  friends), we decided to do the signing at the Cary Barnes and Noble (which has strongly supported SF/fantasy for as long as I’ve been noticing such things) at 7 pm on September 3 (very possibly in the past by the time you read this newsletter), and to appear on The State of Things on WUNC-FM at noon on the same day.

WUNC-FM (91.5 FM) is the flagship NPR station in NC. A lot of people listen to the show, though I’m personally doubtful as to how many of them will suddenly run out and buy Monsters after hearing me. But as Mark said, “You’re going to be miserable anyway. You may as well be miserable in a fashion that might make you some money.”

You can’t buy that kind of advice. You only get it from a close friend.

On September 2, at 10 am, I’ll be talking with Sam Blinn on Carrboro Community Radio, 103.5 FM, WCOM. I’m pretty sure you can only pick up WCOM within Carrboro, and I wouldn’t want to guarantee that all Carrboro is covered. (Though it’s not very big. Carrboro is a bedroom community for UNC-Chapel Hill, with a governing board which passes resolutions on matters of international relations. You know the sort of place.)

I think both shows will be available as podcasts. I will try to be interesting. (I will also try not to use bad language. I make no promises on the latter.)

I finally finished an Ovid lyric which has been on deck for a very long time. I’ve started work on the Acteon section of the Metamorphoses, which I find a great deal more interesting than the lyric, which bored me.

As a last mention for this newsletter, on September 6 I’ll be going (with my wife Jo) to my 50th high school reunion in Clinton, Iowa. Boy, that seems a long time. (It is a long time.)

I’m not worried about the reunion, though travel is always stressful. I’m not entirely sure why I’m going, but I think it boils down to the fact that high school was the last time for decades to come that I felt secure.

I wasn’t a popular kid or an in kid or a good student or much of anything else, but I had a place. After that came college (the University of Iowa’s enrollment was almost half the size of the City of Clinton), Duke Law School in a different state with a wholly unfamiliar culture, and the Army: Viet Nam, Cambodia, and the permanent end of the kid I’d been before then.

I was a practicing lawyer for eight years, a job for which I was generally a bad fit, and then a full-time writer. Nobody starting out in self employment really feels secure (well, nobody with two brain cells to rub together). Eventually–basically since I wrote Redliners, though I won’t insist on a causal connection–I’ve managed to return to something close to the state in which I was in high school: generally uncertain and rarely anything that could be described as “happy,” but reasonably secure about my self and my place in the world.

I’m more depressed now than I was in 1963, but I’m less anxious. Now I think I know where it’s all going, which is depressing; but I’m also pretty sure that nobody’s going to be shooting at me along the rest of the way, so I’m less anxious about the things I might be facing down the road.

With luck I’ll let you know in the next newsletter how the reunion went. For now, though, I’m going to puzzle over my plot a little more.

Thoughtfully,

Dave Drake

***

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Newsletter #75

NEWSLETTER 75: July 8, 2013

Dear People,

I’m exhausted. In the past two months I’ve finished the rough of The Sea Without a Shore, the next RCN space opera, at 123,020 words; and I’ve spent two weeks in Italy. (I’ll take those in turn below.)

I didn’t fully appreciate how tired I was until I fell asleep while I was reading (Carl Sandburg’s life of Abraham Lincoln) aloud to my wife as she fixed dinner last night. (It was an interesting passage, too: Lincoln’s appointment of his political rival, Salmon P Chase, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

But the rough draft is done! Editing remains and is work, but it’s work that an outsider could do. (Not as well as I’ll do with my own text, but the result even then would be better than most of what gets published.) The cover is another exceptional piece by Steve Hickman.

The Sea Without a Shore is different from the others in the series, and at this moment I’m afraid that it’s boring crap. When I start editing, I’ll probably feel better about what I’ve written; at least I always have in the past, because I’ve generally felt miserable about books immediately after I finish them. Of course, I’ve been utterly exhausted after I finished earlier books also.

My goodness, who wouldn’t want to be a writer? It’s just a cup of joy at every step of the way!

I really do have fun, though some of it–much of it, certainly including the Italy trip–is pretty stressful also. Because I’m nuts, I have to have something which I treat as a job at all times. Otherwise I tend to think about the meaning of life, which doesn’t go in good directions when I do it.

I’ve written novels during foreign travel a number of times in the past, but that probably isn’t ideal for the novel or for me. This time I worked on my trip report itself, typing up my notes at night and the following morning.

This was a much better way to create an account that hints at the richness of what we did on the trip than it would have been had I typed up the notes after we got back. Even so, it’s just a hint.

A number of people who’ve read the report have commented that I describe everything. No, I don’t. It’s a tiny fraction of what we saw and did, the way I describe bits of a fictional scene instead of giving the full layout of the room and the appearance of everyone in it.

Another reader commented that she was exhausted just to read about the trip. Those two weeks were certainly part of the reason that I’ve collapsed after finishing the rough draft of the novel, but I couldn’t let up until I had the novel on paper. That took another month and a half.

I took over a thousand pictures on the trip, and my wife and Glenn took many hundreds each. The report on line is profusely illustrated, though that too is a fraction of what’s available.

I found that I didn’t have pictures of many of the things that I mention in the report because they struck me. Fortunately, Jo got many of those. Generally I seemed to take pictures of things which I feared I might forget the details of–but people simply reading the report didn’t have the original to be reminded of.

In the course of the trip, I did have another homepage picture taken as my webmaster directed. Actually, I tried a number of times. She picked the one in which I least looked like I wanted to tear out the throat of the photographer. (Which is a problem which would probably keep me from being a professional model.)

It was a wonderful trip. Truly wonderful. I hope at least some of that comes through in what I’ve written.

In the course of my trip report you will find me musing about a fantasy series for Tor to follow the fourth Book of the Elements (which I have yet to write). The third of the series, Monsters of the Earth, will be a Tor HC in September (with a lovely cover by Donato).

Incidentally, I credit the extremely high average quality of my cover art to the twin facts that I’m lucky and that I don’t interfere with the artists and art directors in a field of which I know less than they do. You can argue that my splendid covers are entirely a result of my good luck; but if so, it’s continued for thirty-odd years. It seems to me that my keeping out of the way has something to do with it.

I’m expecting to do a couple local promotional things for Earth: a signing (and reading or whatever the store wants) on September 3 at the Cary Barnes and Noble. The store pushes SF and has hosted quite a number of panels I’ve been on. And I’ve also asked the producer to put me on The State of Things, the noon show on WUNC-FM, which is the 100KW flagship station of NC Public Radio.

The radio appearance hasn’t been confirmed, but its a normal activity for writers in this area. (In fact I took up the producer’s long-standing invitation.) I’ve never pushed myself forward before, but I’m trying to get out more. (I’ve been on The State of Things, but that was to speak at their request on the relationship of SF to the real space program.)

I’m not, as my friends know, somebody who’s looking for his 15 minutes of fame. Oddly enough, though, part of the reason I decided to do some promotion this time was because I saw a striking piece of art in Rome which turned out to be by Andy Warhol. That showed me that determined self-promotion does not prove that you’re a bad artist.

Harlan Ellison is an example of that in the SF field. He’s written some excellent stories, but his hype makes you think that he’s trying to sell you the literary equivalent of a used car whose transmission is filled with oatmeal.

The State of Things will be–if it comes off, whenever it comes off–live radio. I’ve also done a number of podcasts for Baen Books in the past couple months. Two of them were sort of general–I know about a lot of stuff and I happily talked about whatever a round-table of Baen editors asked me, including about my friend Manly Wade Wellman. A third podcast was focused on AE Van Vogt, because Eric Flint and I had edited Transgalactic, a Van Vogt collection which has just come out in paperback.

The other podcast was something else again. Tony Daniel, the Baen editor who runs these things, has the writers he’s interviewing do a writing tip for wannabes. I prepared one on plotting with full notes.

But while I was chatting with the Baen staff during a break, I mentioned having written a fake page and a half which I sent in on top of a novella to freak the editor of the project. The fake was Screwing Bloody Dead Bodies, and it worked extremely well for the purpose. Tony had the recorder on while we were chatting, and that’s what he wound up using for a writing tip.

Tony asked if the fake still existed. I said that I’d done that back in 1987 and that I didn’t think I’d kept a copy. (I’m confident that the editor didn’t preserve it.)

Last week, however, I was looking for an old contract (which I didn’t find) and stumbled over Screwing Bloody Dead Bodies.

Mike Barker made a transcript of the tape in which I explain the situation. I’ve put that here. If, after you’ve read the explanation, you still want to see the fake story opening, it’s here. I warn you, though, I don’t pull punches generally, and Screwing Bloody Dead Bodies was intended to stun an editor. (It did. Boy, did it ever.)

I answered a short interview while I was in Naples. All interviews are different, and this was more different than most (though nothing about zombies).

One of the interview questions was on what I was reading. I’d loaded my Kindle with books by Arthur Conan Doyle (non-Holmes short stories) and E. Philips Oppenheim. Both were Turn-of-the-Century writers whose work I first encountered in bulk in the State University of Iowa Library when I was an undergraduate. They’re not well-known now (how many of you can name a book of Doyle’s that isn’t Sherlock Holmes?), but they were extremely popular in their day.

Further, both men are exemplary storytellers. Doyle’s short stories are models of adventure fiction, and Oppenheim invented the modern spy thriller. (John Buchan and Ian Fleming followed his lead.) I correctly figured that they would provide light reading for me after full days of tramping over portions of Italy.

Doyle and Oppenheim were also comforting because I had last read them as a freshman. That wasn’t exactly my childhood, but it’s far enough back for me to feel a bit nostalgic toward it. (The person I was in 1968 didn’t come back from Nam. The earlier me was no great shakes, but he had hope where since 1970 I’ve had only bleak despair.)

I now know more about writing than I did at 18, so I can appreciate the technical skill which both men demonstrate. In 1963 I knew I was reading great stories. Today I have a better appreciation of how they became great stories.

But I also notice that along with stories written to entertain readers, both men wrote pieces with the main purpose of influencing readers (they might have said “educating readers”): propaganda. The odd thing is that a story like Doyle’s The Last Galley or a novel like Oppenheim’s Nobody’s Man aren’t boring work. The writers are so skilled that the incident and detail kept me reading happily.

But the result is unsatisfactory. A story (as I understand it) has a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning of The Last Galley shows citizens of Carthage waiting tensely to learn the result of the great battle between their fleet and that of Rome. The middle is a fight between a Carthaginian ship and a pair of Roman vessels.

But the end is a clear warning that the same thing will happen to Britain if Parliament doesn’t increase funding for the Royal Navy. This is a fable, not a proper story. It’s no more historical fiction than The Fox and the Grapes is nature writing.

Nobody’s Man is a different sort of failure. The hero returns to his home on Dartmoor after losing his seat in Parliament. He tells his wealthy wife to leave: they are permanently separating. He adds that he has dismissed his male confidential secretary and that he doesn’t have any idea where the young man is.

The wife believes that the hero knows more about the secretary’s disappearance than he’s letting on; the police believe the same thing; and after a few chapters, it becomes clear to the reader that the hero does know more. Along with the secretary has vanished (from a locked safe) a paper which will destroy the hero’s political career if it becomes public.

This is a hell of a good opening to a novel! I could live with the political maneuvering that fills the middle of the book, because the mystery was still alive though generally off-stage. But at the end, the mystery is burked–smothered, as in Burke and Hare–but not explained. The secretary is somehow still alive and has married the estranged wife, freeing the hero to marry his soulmate.

I would be angry about what Oppenheim did to his story even if he hadn’t turned the book into a wish-fulfillment dream which can be understood only if you know a great deal about British politics in the 1918-22 period. (The conclusion may not have seemed as silly in 1921, when Nobody’s Man was published, as it does now. In fact it can’t have seemed as silly as it does now. But it was still pretty silly.)

This is wrong. The writer is cheating his book and he’s cheating his readers.

Now, I understand why a writer might consider some social cause to be more important than his craft, but there’s a better reason than craftsmanship not to write propaganda. You don’t need to propagandize for a cause you believe in. Just tell the story honestly and as forcefully as you can.

Human beings excel at pattern recognition–even where the pattern isn’t real, as with most conspiracy theories. If you tell your story, you don’t have to hit people with a hammer. They’ll get your point.

Here I can speak from experience. I came back from Nam completely shattered by dehumanizing horrors. I started to put myself together, into a different man than the one who’d gone over but nonetheless a socially acceptable man.

I used writing as my primary tool for keeping myself between the ditches. I described things which are the norm in a war zone but which most civilians can’t believe really go on.

Nobody read the Hammer stories and came away thinking that war is a good thing–but quite a few of them (judging from reviews) believed that I thought war is a good thing. The stories had done their job, even if the Locus crowd and Analog magazine hated me because I showed, rather than telling as a propagandist would have done.

I don’t regret my decision (and even the most viciously bad reviews didn’t make the situation in my head significantly worse). I wish Doyle and Oppenheim had decided to tell it straight also, because the worst sin a writer can commit is to sin against his craft.

Now, back to doing my job the best way I can. Go thou and do likewise!

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #74

NEWSLETTER 74: April 15, 2013

Dear People,

This is a trifle early, but Jo (my wife) and I are going off to Italy at the end of the month for two weeks with a couple we’ve known for about 40 years. If bandwidth and life generally cooperate, I will send a little electronic postcard when we get there.

Further, my webmaster has directed me to get a new home page picture in the course of things. There ought to be something available in Rome or Pompeii or goodness knows where.

Wish me luck, people: I’m not a happy traveller. On January 15, 1971, I walked off the plane from Oakland to Durham and said–I really said this–”I’ll never get on another airplane as long as I live.” Well, I have gotten on planes many times since then, but it’s a strain every time. PTSD is real, people, and it doesn’t go away.

I’ve been chunking away at The Sea without a Shore, the next RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera. I’m over 75K now, solidly into (beyond) the middle of the book. I’m convinced it’s boring crap, but that doesn’t bother me as much as it usually would because I’m so stressed about the coming weeks of travel. (It’s an ill wind that blows no good.)

In truth, the book is moving along pretty well. I genuinely like what I’m doing–that is, being a writer. The fact that I’m depressed and fearful most of the time shouldn’t be taken as an indictment of a writing career: it’s just how I am, at least since 1970.

On April 9 I went over to the Baen offices in Wake Forest (for the second time in the year!). Baen editor Tony Daniel developed The Heretic (just out) from my outline (in the General series), and we had a signing in Cary that night (there’s a picture on the website, courtesy of Baen editor Laura Haywood-Cory). Tony suggested that I come to the offices and tape a segment for the Baen Free Radio Hour (podcast); and also a writing tip; and also suggest a book to read. Then go to dinner as a group, then do the signing at the Barnes and Noble.

We did that; and let me tell you, it was a full day. Cary is about halfway between the Drake home and Wake Forest, so at least I was closer to home at the end than if it had been the other way around; but I’m not very social.

The podcast involved me with Baen editors Jim Minz, Tony Daniel (who sort of runs the podcasts), and Hank Davis; with Laura popping with the information on who did the art for The Heretic (Alan Pollock). These things (taping and the signing both) make me nervous and uncomfortable, but it all went well. They always go well, and I always worry. It’s about as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning.

The general podcast has been broken into two. I’ve listened to the first half. Tony left the digressions in, so listeners will get a feel for the way I burble when I’m asked a question.

The second half should go up at noon on April 19 (and may be up by the time this newsletter goes out). I suppose the writing tip (on stealing plots, a subject on which I’m an expert) and maybe the book suggestion (Night of Horror, a collection of stories by Joel Townsley Rogers) will go up then also.

There may also be a segment of me telling about Screwing Bloody Dead Bodies, an unpublished entry in the Hammer series. During a break I told a story about the very early days of Baen Books which even Betsy Mitchell finds extremely funny now. I’m not sure that Tony was taping during that; and I’m not absolutely sure that he would want to put it on the air even if he was.

Doggone, I’ve had a lot of fun as a writer. I still do, but I sorta miss the old days with Jim, who didn’t have any more common sense than I do. If all that matters in your job is that you’re collecting a paycheck, you probably ought to be doing something else.

A bunch of things, reprints and The Heretic, have come out recently, but I’ve mentioned them in previous newsletters. You can find them on the website (“Forthcoming and Recent Releases” in the right sidebar). The one thing I may not have mentioned is the mass market edition of Transgalactic, a collection of works by AE van Vogt.

Eric and I are listed as co-editors, but it was his idea and he negotiated with the van Vogt estate. (If there was an editorial payment, he got that too; which is fine.) I wrote the short introduction and chatted with Eric about the contents.)

I mention it (it’s not a big deal commercially, obviously) because it contains the original versions of what as the novel Mission to the Stars shares the honor of being the first SF book I bought. (I ordered it and Andre Norton’s The Stars Are Ours at the same time.) It was a good choice.

Van Vogt does a better job than anybody else I can think of in showing that there’s more going on in the story universe than you’ll find in the story. It’s a huge, wonderful world out there–and you’re getting just a peek through a window. That is what ‘Sense of Wonder’ means to me.

I don’t know how well I do in conveying that in my own fiction. I don’t make it a priority, and perhaps I should. There are hints of it in the RCN series, though, and I plan to continue dropping those hints.

And I guess that’s the thought I’ll go out with this time: it really is a wonderful universe. There are wonderful things to see and do and dream. Sure, there’s a lot of crap; and if you listen to the news a lot, you’ll find yourself convinced that it’s all crap.

No, it’s not all crap. Looking back over my own life–as I was doing above–I’m reminded of how much fun I’ve had and how much neat history I’ve been a part of. I expect that Italy, for all my dread, will bring more wonder and more good times with old friends.

Go thou and do likewise!

–Dave Drake

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