David Drake's Blog, page 5

Newsletter #73

NEWSLETTER 73: March 5, 2013

Dear People,

I am chunking ahead on the next RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, THE SEA WITHOUT A SHORE. More accurately, for the past couple days I’ve been slogging through mental mud on the novel, but I’m still moving forward.

I’m into mid-book–over 40K at present–and as usual I’m convinced that it’s crap. Readers will be bored, it lacks all the sparkle and action that have made previous books in the series so successful, the characters and settings are flat.

All same-same, GI, as we used to say in Nam. And I keep going (as we also did in Nam); and at the end I’ll edit the whole novel and realize that it really works quite well. (That wasn’t how things worked out in Nam.) The part I can control is that I keep going.

I don’t write these newsletters as sell-copy, but I should mention that the mass market of THE ROAD OF DANGER (the RCN space opera immedately preceeding the one I’m working on; but you should be able to read the series in any order without much difficulty) has just hit the stands. It has the same nice Hickman cover as the hardcover.

Also HOPE REBORN, the omnitrade volume collecting the first two novels of The General series, is out. These are books I plotted using the life of the Byzantine general Belisarius as a template (at Jim Baen’s direction), and which Steve Stirling very ably developed. Again a nice cover, this one by Alan Pollack.

And finally one on which I have something new to say. I just got my author copies of THE HERETIC, the most recent volume in The General series. Tony Daniel developed the outline for which I had been paid in 1992. This wouldn’t have made commercial sense with most series, but The General in its various forms has remained in print ever since the first book appeared in 1990.

As a marketing ploy (actually a marketing save, since the Heretic mss was turned in too late for bound proofs [advance reading copies] to go out with the solicitation in normal form), Corinda (Baen’s marketing person) asked me and Tony Daniel to sign 60 copies which will be sent to the major accounts. Tony works for Baen, so it wasn’t a problem for him; and I live 65 miles away, so it wasn’t an insuperable problem for me.

It was drizzling, though, and I’d never been to the new Baen office so I was bound to get lost. (Actually, I was bound to get lost regardless; I have skills, but a sense of direction isn’t among them.) Reading a map, on a motorcycle, in the rain, isn’t a practical proposition, so my wife Jo carried me in the car, bless her heart.

I have now seen the offices, which are very nice. I left a note on Toni’s desk; she even has a window! And I’ve seen the archives. It’s been a heck of a run over the past thirty years, and the business bids fair to keep on growing. (Boy, it doesn’t seem like thirty years!)

There’s a nice audio production set-up: a table with four hanging mikes screened to catch plosives, and a copy of Kipling’s collected poems. I picked up the book to see how it differed from my copy (besides being fifty years more recent) and learned that Toni wants to start a program of Baen authors reading Kipling poems for a podcast. Did I have a favorite Kipling poem?

Yes, many; but the first to come to the top of my mind was The ‘Birds of Prey’ March, and I read it straight off. That is, I didn’t go over it to myself first: what you get is a sight reading (albeit of a poem I’ve read scores of times in the past).

The poem is a perfect evocation of boarding a troopship for foreign service. I went to Nam by plane, and because it was from Travis AFB, California, rather than Southhampton, it wasn’t raining. It felt pretty much the way Kipling describes, though: … they will carry us away, and you’ll never see your soldier any more.

Circle City Books, a start-up (used) bookstore in Pittsboro, asked me to do a reading and signing on March 2. I agreed, basically because they’re close and I would rather be a nice guy than not. I’m not expecting this to be a very well-attended thing, but what the hell. (I told the owner that I could probably pack the place with my friends, but that I didn’t see benefit to either of us if I did that.)

The reason I’m mentioning it now, though, is that I read the announcement in the local paper. My first reaction was the analysis I always give the published description of a writer I’ll be sitting with on a panel or the like: okay, this guy’s a heavyweight.

The second reaction was: Christ, this is supposed to be me. That’s not me!

Factually, the data was accurate. But that’s not the me who lives in my head.

By the way, the store has a bookshelf mural on the outside wall. I’ve gotten pictures of it, but it’s too long for a single photo to be of much use. It includes, I was amused to see, my With the Lightnings.

Just as Newsletter 72 came out, Haffner Press sent me The Complete John Thunstone, Manly Wade Wellman’s ghost-breaker series Manly developed for Weird Tales. The book is wonderful, just wonderful. Carcosa (I was one of three partners) published in 1980 the Thunstone short stories existing at that time. Stephen Haffner has added an additional story and the two novels which Manly wrote about the character in the ’80s.

I provided the original George Evans art from the Carcosa collection (with the approval of the Evans estate; Stephen does things right). The new cover painting and end papers by Raymond Swanland are first-rate also.

I bought Manly’s literary estate when his widow Frances died, so I guess that would be a reason to mention the book here. It isn’t my reason, though. Manly was my close friend. I miss him still, and I’m thrilled that this book (which he would have loved) has come out. So long as I live, some of Manly is still alive.

Spurred by seeing the Thunstone collection, I wrote up a few of Manly’s reminiscences about his time as a newspaperman in the ’20s and ’30s. These are stories that Manly told over the years when our families got together for dinner.

Gosh, those were good days. Well, my current life if very good also–but I miss Manly.

Yard work continues to be my daily exercise. Part of that involves during fallen branches and trees into firewood with a handsaw. The next part of the problem is to find somebody to take the wood: I work outdoors and don’t want the woodsmoke hanging over me as I write, so we don’t have a fireplace or woodstove.

I took a picture of the current pile, and of me with the saw. (It’s a bull saw, not an Circordinary carpentry saw; the blade is very sturdy.)

I’ll close with an insight from a writing career of nearly fifty years, now. (I sold my first story in 1966.) I got the copyedited mss of Monsters of the Earth, the third of my Tor fantasy series, The Books of the Elements. This is my manuscript marked for production, with errors corrected in pencil.

The copyeditor was careful and intelligent; good. But she had harmonized the use of pronouns among the novel’s four threads, which blurs the contrasting personalities of the four viewpoint characters.

I became extremely depressed, then extremely angry in addition to being depressed. Somebody had been paid $15/hour (or so) to screw up prose I had spent long hours getting exactly the way I wanted it.

It got sorted with no difficulty, though with a lot more angst than was necessary. (The problem may have been that the folks at Tor didn’t realize how very angry I was about the situation and therefore didn’t project sufficient urgency to calm me down.)

When things had settled, I for the first time really thought of the whole of publishing rather than just about writers and writing. Sure, writers are screwed up. If we weren’t damaged people, we’d be doing something else. Everybody knows that.

But it isn’t just writers. Everybody in the business is damaged. A lot of editors (and most reviewers) are failed writers; again, that’s pretty well known. But what about the copyeditors? If they were ordinary human beings, they would be doing something else, given that their work requires considerable education.

Back when I got into SFWA in the ’70s, there was a lot of fulminating about the iniquity of copyeditors. Some of them were using their own political beliefs to ‘correct’ the writers they were working on; others were changing correct grammar, or conflating characters with similar names into one character. I remember becoming furious when andy offutt, who was a particular champion of writers over copyeditors, himself changed my correct octopuses into octopi in the ignorant belief that he was dealing with a Latin word (octopus is English).

It’s not worth anger. Correction, absolutely. But people screw up for all sorts of reasons. Copyeditors aren’t The Enemy, editors aren’t The Enemy. We’re all damaged. Writers (this writer certainly) should have more charity for fellow cripples.

So after many decades I’m learning to avoid undeserved anger at people who screw up, just as I don’t get angry any more when a machine breaks.

Which doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore mistakes that make my prose worse: just that I’ll try to deal with them more calmly.

–Dave Drake

***

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Newsletter #72

NEWSLETTER 72: January 6, 2013

Dear People,

The big news from my viewpoint is that I’ve completed a plot outline for the next RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera. My working title is The Sea Without a Shore, from The Barrel Organ by Alfred Noyes. I read pretty much all of Noyes when I was in junior high school; brought to him by The Highwayman, of course.

The Barrel Organ didn’t stick until I reread it recently, though. I didn’t have enough knowledge of the poem’s setting when I was 13 to understand it; and perhaps even more important, I wasn’t old enough to understand the poem. I’m certainly old enough now to understand regret.

I said ‘completed’ the outline, but as I write this I’m still editing it. (I expect to be finished by the time the newsletter goes out.) I’m pleased with what I’ve got, though the book may run long. The plot shows 32 chapters, which is about right for the RCN series–but there’s usually chapter creep from my outlines to the final. If necessary, I’ll trim it as I go along; and worst case, I may turn in a slightly longer book than the 120-130K that I’m shooting for.

Monsters of the Earth, the third of the Books of the Elements (my four-book fantasy series) will be out in September, 2013, from Tor. I am enormously fortunate to have Donato doing my Tor covers; this is another example of my good luck.

There’s an additional fillip with this cover: Donato describes on a blog the way he went about creating it. I was struck by the degree to which he and I work in similar fashion on our completely different tasks. There’s a lot of painstaking background work before either of us starts the piece that the audience is going to see.

In 1990, Jim Baen was reading a book on strategy by Basil Liddell-Hart, one of the theorists who came out of the First World War determined to avoid the mindless slaughter of positional warfare the next time. Liddell-Hart argued for a strategy of indirect approach instead of head-on attack, illustrating this with examples from the campaigns of the Byzantine general Belisarius. Jim asked me to plot a series of SF novels, using the campaigns of Belisarius as my model and thus demonstrating Liddell-Hart’s views.

I’d already read the original sources on Belisarius, Procopius’ Histories of the Wars, when I was getting background for my first novel. I reread (and this time précised) Procopius, then wrote the plots. Steve Stirling developed the novels from those plots.

I’ve said all that a number of times, because the books have been in print pretty much continuously (save for the out-of-stock situations inevitable in a five-book series) since they first appeared. Baen Books is bringing them back, this time in omnitrade editions binding together two of the original mass-market novels. They start with Hope Reborn in March, 2013. The new covers are by Alan Pollack.

I’ll add something that I haven’t said before. As a general rule, I don’t read the proofs of books unless I’ve written the actual text. I’ll spot things that aren’t right in my own prose which a professional proofreader might miss, but rereading a book by Steve Stirling or Eric Flint or whoever would be a waste of time which I could otherwise be using to create new work.

I happened to glance over the proofs of Hope Reborn, however; probably the first time I’ve looked at those books (The Forge and The Hammer) in over 20 years. They’re extremely good. You could do a lot worse with SF/adventure fiction than these, which is probably why they’ve remained in print for decades. Full marks to Steve, and the plots are complex and realistic as well.

Jim Baen wanted us to educate readers, and I think we did that. But Jim never forgot the importance of a good story, and these are good stories too.

Also due out in March from Baen is the mass market of The Road of Danger, the most recent RCN space opera. I’m very pleased with the book and the cover and the series–and with life generally, I’d have to say. I’m not especially pleased with myself since I got back to the World, but that’s life. (Drugs might change my mindset, but you’ll note that I didn’t say that I thought they’d help.)

Jim was so pleased with the General Series that he asked me to plot a series of follow-on books using the same premise (returning a collapsed world to civilization) in varied settings. These will be part of Baen’s reissues in omnitrade format; and there is now a new addition: The Heretic, written from my outline by Tony Daniel.

This outline just got left behind when Steve Stirling and Eric Flint got busy on other stuff. Toni Weisskopf (Baen Publisher) found it and asked if (her friend and employee) Tony Daniel could develop it. That was fine with me: I’d been paid, so it was her business. (I have a veto over my name appearing on the cover if I’m not satisfied with the result–following an unfortunate experience with Jim).

The result is quite good, though it’s only half my plot. (I seem to write tighter than most other people, so this has happened with Steve and Eric also.) The Heretic will appear as a Baen hc in April, 2013; the second half (The Savior) will appear at some time after the book is written.

The only glitch with The Heretic was that it was late. If there’d been significant problems, it would have been a pain in the ass to fix them in the short time available. (And they would have been fixed, because the covers–painted by Kurt Miller–had already been printed with my name on them.) Fortunately, the problems were very minor (and they’re being fixed too).

In general news that certainly affects me, Amazon is now selling Baen e-books in its Kindle store. It’s always been possible to buy them via baenebooks.com and send them to a Kindle, but a remarkable number of (presumably) intelligent people have asked me (in varying degrees of dudgeon) why there were no Kindle editions of my books.

Negotiations between Baen and Amazon were lengthy and complicated. Common sense will show you that if you don’t take your time with a juggernaut like Amazon, you wind up as grease beneath the stone sled.

I never cease to be amazed at the people who think that complex problems have simple answers. Well, they do; but the simple answers are wrong.

Baen did it right. Way back when, while Jim Baen and I were chatting, he decided to put e-book royalties (which weren’t important) at twice basic hardcover royalties: thus 20%. Now that Baen e-books are in the Amazon pricing structure, Toni Weisskopf has raised the authors’ royalties on (all) e-books to 25%.

I continue to like working for Baen Books.

There’s another Ovid lyric (about abortion, of all things) up, and I’ve just finished the Baucis and Philemon section from the Metamorphoses. I wasn’t sure I’d have it it quite ready (I’ve been working hard on my plot, of course), but it’s a gentle change from the over-the-top violence of The Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths.

I’ve had people ask me how much of the imagery and color of my translations is Ovid and how much I’ve added. It’s all his. I not infrequently change sentence structure because the compound sentences and passive voice (which are the norm in Latin) weaken English prose to a degree that would not be true in the original. Similes and metaphors, though, are Ovid’s own–including (for example) brains spraying from a crushed skull like whey from a cheese press.

I will be the celebrity judge in the 2013 Jim Baen Short Story contest. The details are here but basically we’re looking for stories of 8K or less publicizing near future space exploration. Have at!

Finally, since the most recent newsletter, I attended the funeral of my friend John Squires. John and I weren’t exactly close, but we’d stayed in touch (and occasionally visited) ever since he came to Chapel Hill for law school some 40 years ago.

I don’t go to many funerals (I don’t see the point of them), but I went to John’s mostly to support his daughter. He’d moved to Ohio after law school, and I wasn’t sure how many friends remained here. (Not many of us.)

The minister, who hadn’t known John, preached a very positive sermon which must have been comforting to the traditional Christians present. He spent some time on the miracle of Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead. It suddenly struck me that of the thirty-odd people in the chapel, the only two who would think of MP Shiel’s story This Above All (in which all those returned to life by Jesus and his disciples are still living at the present day) were me and John himself.

But all the normal people present, the CPAs and schoolteachers and firemen, had accepted John as family; and they accepted me as his friend. Sure, we were different, but they weren’t offended that we talked about Shiel and Walter Owen and Visiak and lots of other people whom they’d neither heard of nor cared about.

A world in which normal folk accept weirdoes–and vice versa–isn’t such a bad place, people. Let’s all work to keep the world around us that way, whichever side of the line we personally fall on.

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #71

NEWSLETTER 71: November 6, 2012

Dear People,

I fully intended when I wrote the immediately previous newsletter (70) to simply relax for a month. Believe me, I needed it.

But my main form of relaxation is to read stuff, and I take notes when I’m reading something which might provide fodder for my own work. One of the books I was reading was part of the history of Diodorus Siculus (a Sicilian–obviously–Greek of the first century BC), the portion leading up to the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. This is largely material which Thucydides covers in much greater detail (and with a far more impressive literary style).

I’d read Thucydides as an undergraduate, but now I was reading with a more mature knowledge of the world and with the eye of an experienced writer for useful details. The day after I’d sent back the handful of editorial correction pages on Monsters of the Earth, I stumbled over a description of the Egyptian revolt from Persia in the fifth century BC, the Persian response, and how the situation affected the tensions among the Greek city-states in the aftermath of the defeat of Persia at Salamis and Platea.

Immediately I realized that the revolt would be a great setup for an RCN space opera. The question was how to structure it: who’s the equivalent of the Egyptians, who provides the Persian analogue, and how do my characters get involved?

By now I have partial answers to all those questions, and I’m having a lot of fun refining, elaborating, and interweaving. I’ve never plotted a novel in quite this fashion before… which was true of the way I plotted Monsters from the Earth also, and for the way I plot pretty much everything. There’s no ‘normal’ process.

What I’m doing this time is genuinely fun, as I said. What I did to get to the same point with Earth was really hard work. I don’t mean to imply anything about what this portends for the finished product: Northworld is one of my best books and also one of my most successful, but plotting it literally came close to crippling me. I prefer to have a gentle, fun time during the plotting, though.

Night & Demons, my horror collection, is out in trade paper from Baen Books. This, rather than the Hammer stories (though they too appeared early in my career), is what I think of as me in the ’70s. When Hammer’s Slammers came out in 1979, it gave me a stature (a short story collection that sold 300,000 copies was about as unusual then as it would be today) but also notoriety.

I was viewed as being pro-war (at a time US culture was vehemently anti-war) because I wrote about soldiers without implying that I thought they were evil (I didn’t think soldiers were evil, though they–though we–certainly did evil things). The fact I was successful made me even more of a target than I would have been if the opinion makers could have dismissed me as a lightweight.

The thirty-odd years since 1979 have taken me in a commercially successful direction which is wholly different from anything had I imagined in my first 10-15 years of serious writing. (The success was as unexpected as the direction it came from.)

That said, the author of Night & Demons is the writer I thought I’d always be, and there’s a lot about that guy and the camaraderie of his world that I miss. I hope that comes out in my notes to each of the stories, a total of 12K words. There’s also a bibliography of all my work published in the US, in which my webmaster, archivist Karen Zimmerman, was able to use her MLS in the fashion her professors expected her to.

Doggone, I’ve written a lot over the years. And I’ve done it pretty much without thinking any farther ahead than the project to follow whatever it is that I’m working on.

Audible, the on-line audiobook service, has been doing my RCN space opera series for quite a while and more recently has added much of the Hammer series of military SF. I’ve just signed contracts for the fantasies of both the Isles series and the Books of the Elements. I’m really pleased at this. Quite apart from the additional money and exposure (which are major good things, sure), Steve Feldberg of Audible is just as pleasant as are the people at Tor and Baen Books with whom I deal.

There have been a couple oddities since Newsletter 70. I was interviewed again, this time by a Libertarian website. If anything, the experience felt stranger than being interviewed by a zombie website had been. Mulling the questions before I answered them convinced me that if I had to have an ideology, it would be not-Libertarian.

Sam Blinn puts an amazing amount of effort (and I suspect money) into Bull-Spec, his magazine tying the Research Triangle Region into the wider world of speculative fiction. He asked me for a short essay discussing the hardest aspect of writing Night & Demons. I immediately did one, a very small repayment for Sam’s own generosity.

The questions asked by other people send my mind to places I wouldn’t go on my own; this was no exception. If nothing else, the question made me think.

I also loaned photographer Britt Taylor Collins the use of my Blackhorse patch so that he could put together a photo montage on the 11th ACR. He doesn’t have the result up on his website yet (that I could find. His website confuses me a bit, which those who know me will realize isn’t a reflection on his web designer), but the version he sent me is very good. I’m looking forward to seeing the hardcopy print.

I’ve done a rough read-through of the next Ovid lyric (it’s amazing how similar arguments against abortion from two millennia ago sound to those of the present day), but I’m not ready to put my translation on the site yet. I may work on Baucis and Philemon next, but I’m not promising that.

There’s a set of seasonal pictures added to the website.

WFC is a business convention for me, but having gone to so many of them (starting with the first in 1975) I also have a lot of friends there. Here’s to friends!

Finally, a few thoughts about people and how we behave toward one another. In part this comes from musing on the Libertarian interview I mentioned above, but it also involves my getting interested in some unusually whimsical books. I’ve been reading The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green by Edward Bradley (as Cuthbert M Bede), sketches of a very rural (though wealthy) youth at Oxford in the 1850s; and also The Football Eleven Series by Ralph Henry Barbour, YA books about the football players at a NY prep school in the WW I period.

The tone is completely different, of course. Bradley was writing satirical sketches for adults, while Barbour was writing to entertain and educate boys who were interested in sports. Barbour wasn’t a very good writer; Bradley, though certainly a Victorian novelist, was quite skillful as well as being a close observer. Relative writing ability doesn’t affect the tone, however.

Barbour’s boys are generally decent kids. There are bullies and sneaks, but they’re the exceptions.

Uniformly, the attitude of Bradley’s Oxford undergraduates toward anyone who doesn’t meet their standards of sophistication–in dress, in speech, in anything–is one of insult and sneering condescension. They’re simply nasty to their inferiors–and inferiority is determined by degree of sophistication, not wealth or rank in society.

Green’s father is a wealthy squire; not titled, but clearly one of the top men in the county. There’s no suggestion that the youths sneering at the Greens are nobles, and the likelihood is that many of them are less well off than their victims. (The Greens, by the way, are so unsophisticated that they only partially realize that they’re being insulted.)

Now, I don’t suppose that all boys at Eastern prep schools in 1914 were as clean-cut as the depictions in the Football Eleven. (I’ve met more recent graduates of Exeter who I suspect would have fit in just fine with their predecessors in Barbour’s generation. They weren’t all princes among men, save perhaps in their own minds.)

Similarly, I realize that Bradley was writing satire and that many Oxford undergraduates must have behaved more like Tom Brown and his friends than like those whom Verdant Green meets. On the other hand, Bradley’s accounts appear to me to have the ring of truth and have been accepted as authoritative in secondary sources.

Which got me to thinking about Oscar Wilde. Wilde was a brilliant scholar who took a Double First at Oxford without, according to his contemporary letters, working very hard at it. He was then as later the leader of the Aesthetic Movement, which involved reclaiming the aesthetic ideals of Greek and Roman classicism.

For a view of how the Aesthetics looked to the wider public, watch (or read) the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Patience; the character of Reginald Bunthorne is based so closely on Wilde that Wilde supported himself for some time with a lecture tour launched in tandem with the touring company of Patience. The emphasis on flowers, delicate colors (Gilbert’s ‘greenery-yallery’) and so on made the Aesthetes an easy target.

While Wilde was at Oxford, a group of athletes decided to turn him out of his room. Wilde met them in his doorway and hurled the leader down the stairs, ending the trouble. Wilde was certainly gay, but imagining that he was a limp-wristed pansy would be a mistake (as it proved to be for the jocks).

When I first ran into that story (in a memoir by Wilde’s elder son, Vivian Holland), the incident seemed clear enough: a group of jocks picked the wrong queer to bully. After reading Verdant Green, however, I wonder if there might not have been more going on.

Not all members of the Aesthetic Movement were gay. Robert S Hichens, for example, was clearly horrified when he understood (and wrote an apologia in the form of the novella The Green Carnation). I strongly suspect that they were, however, loudly certain of their own superiority to those who hadn’t reached their level of sophistication; just as the undergraduates of Verdant Green were.

Wilde himself demonstrated similarly contemptuous superiority when he sued the Marquis of Queensbury for libel–and thus doomed himself. The crucial factor in Wilde’s decision was not that Queensbury had called him homosexual, but rather that Queensbury was a buffoon who didn’t know how to spell Sodomite. (He wrote “Somdomite.”)

What are the chances that Wilde made loud comments about Gorillas or Pongoes when he and his coterie passed by the rugby field? Pretty good, I suspect.

Does that justify responding by a physical attack? Well, not in my mind, but I’m comfortable replying to verbal insults in kind. That may not be generally true of jocks.

Bullying is a bad thing; and the sort of verbal sneering described in Verdant Green is certainly bullying even if the people doing it wouldn’t describe it in those terms. It makes other people likely to repeat the behavior, and that makes the world a worse place; particularly the bully’s own world, because he’s surrounding himself with a miasma of nastiness.

We’re none of us saints. I’m not going to tell you to go out and be nice to people (though of course that would be great).

I will suggest, however, that you make an effort not to be nasty. Saying nothing is a harmless alternative to volunteering, “Where did you get such a stupid haircut?” or “I’ve never liked anything you’ve written.”

It’s worth a try, anyway.

Dave Drake

david-drake.com

Newsletter #70

NEWSLETTER 70: September 18, 2012

Dear People,

I finished the novel! The title is now MONSTERS OF THE EARTH. I changed the title at the last moment from Demons from the Earth because I realized that though there were demons, they didn’t come from the Earth; and they really weren’t the bad guys anyway. And Earth had to be there because of Tor Marketing, this being the third of The Books of the Elements–following The Legions of Fire and Out of the Waters.

The change in title came after I’d written the front matter, and I forgot to go back and correct it before I sent the book off. Well, that’s what proofs are for. I regret making mistakes, but I’ve never turned in a book that didn’t have errors in it.

The wordage (on recount) is 134,329. I was shooting for 130K-135K, so it was on the money. I think it’s a good book, by which I mean that I have executed what I was trying to execute.

Should I have written something else? Well, that’s always the question. The Books of the Elements are set in a milieu–in effect, the early Roman Empire–which is unfamiliar to most readers but which most readers think they are familiar with.

I’m using the real thing, which has a lot of unpleasant aspects. I’m not describing the worst aspects of slavery, for example, but I’m not pretending they didn’t exist, either.

There’s a scene in the movie Spartacus in which a Roman noble (I think he’s Crassus) tries to seduce a slave (played, I think, by Tony Curtis), who rejects him in disgust. This is bullshit.

A Roman slave had no more right to reject his master than a chair could decide who would sit in it. (The Roman legal definition of “slaves” was “furniture with tongues”.) In the unlikely event that a slave tried to reject the master, his or her fellow slaves would execute their master’s will–which might well be to gang-rape the idiot after they had held him/her down for the master.

Did the screenwriter, Howard Fast, know this? I’m sure he did, just as the screenwriter of Titanic knew that the liner’s two-tier class structure (as shown in the movie) was nonsense. For their own artistic reasons, the writers chose to hide the reality from film viewers. (In the case of Fast, a Marxist, he may have been concerned with ideology also. Those who wish to depict a corrupt ruling class are often embarrassed to admit that a corrupt system means that those at the bottom are corrupted also.)

I’m describing Roman society based on my reading of contemporary Greek and Roman authors. Those who are offended by what I think is reality are likely to claim that I’ve invented the offensive aspects when they differ from what Hollywood has depicted.

This isn’t a new problem for me. Tom Easton of Analog wasn’t unique when he accused me of being a pornographer of violence because my version of war wasn’t as clean as Sands of Iwo Jima. I didn’t stop telling the truth (as I saw it) about war, and I’m not going to stop telling my view of the truth about Roman society–one aspect of which is slavery.

To clean up the horrors of war is to make war more palatable to those who haven’t seen the sharp end. To clean up the horrors of slavery is to make slavery more palatable to those who haven’t been slaves.

And slavery still exists, even in this country. At one end, there are brothels staffed by illegal immigrants controlled by gangsters are cruel as the worst overseers of the Antebellum South. At the other, professors at elite universities are found to have “servants” who don’t speak English, and who don’t have passports or money or hope.

I don’t have any ideology, but I do have principles. If they get in the way of sales, I suppose I can go back to driving a bus; I still have a chauffeur’s license. There’s no immediate danger of that happening, thank goodness.

Monsters has occupied me for much of the year. Next on my agenda is an RCN space opera, but I’m not really thinking about it yet. I’m completely wrung out, from the novel and even more from construction of the library addition which I described in Newsletter 69.

It’s a wonderful, wonderful library, and it permits me for the first time in at least a decade to pick up my piles of books from tables and floors; but doggone, it was wearing for me to have workmen present every week day (and sometimes on weekends as well). I’ve made only slight stabs at moving books over, because the process takes a degree of intelligence; and I don’t have a lot of brain left till I come up from my present exhaustion.

I edited the Ovid translation I had just finished at the time of Newsletter 69: The Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths (the subject of the Parthenon Metope, by the way). Ovid is rightly thought of as a writer of sophisticated (not sentimental) love poetry, but there’s another aspect to his work. There are scenes in this excerpt from the Metamorphoses which would have fit him to write Splatterpunk horror in the ’80s. I learn a great deal about clear expression and vivid decriptive passages by translating a writer as skilled as Ovid.

Speaking of horror, I should mention (though I have before) that Night & Demons, my expanded horror collection from Baen, will be released before my next newsletter. The story introductions total around 12,000 words and are as much autobiography as you’re likely to get from me.

These stories, some of them at least, really are horror. Though they’re not particularly bloody, they don’t pull punches. I don’t say you’ll like them, but some you’ll never forget.

The fairly serious depression that I also mentioned in Newsletter 69 is starting to lift now that I’m done with the novel and am having part of many days completely to myself. I wasn’t in real danger, but I was pretty far down.

A friend commented that I’m fortunate to be able to work when I’m seriously depressed. Most people (herself included) cannot. I thought about that for a while.

I think the ability came from spending 1970 in Viet Nam (and Cambodia). By that time I don’t think anybody In Country believed it was possible to win the war. The people I knew in the Blackhorse believed that the politicians (including the politicians in uniform) had given up years before–an opinion amply supported by information which has come out since 1970.

The job we were doing in the field was always dangerous and occasionally extremely dangerous. And it was always miserable.

The infantry had it even worse than we (armored cavalry) did, but trust me: tents aren’t ideal living quarters during the monsoon, even six days a week. The seventh day, Thursday, was when we took our anti-malaria pills; which gave everybody the runs. Then you had the further problem of trying to keep toilet paper dry during a monsoon.

On a good day, my job was boring. On a bad day, and there were some very bad days, it was awful beyond anything I had even imagined life could be when I was a civilian.

I was depressed during my whole tour. I’d never had any faith in the war, but now I lost my faith in pretty much everything else also. Life seemed not only miserable but utterly pointless. That belief hasn’t really changed in the decades since.

But I kept doing my job. Everybody I knew in the Blackhorse did his job, and few if any of them had more belief in our mission than I did. The Blackhorse was an elite unit, and everybody around me was a self-starter–as was I. It wasn’t so much peer pressure as just what you did; the way you don’t need peer pressure to keep you breathing along with everybody else.

I came back to the World and continued doing my job regardless of how I felt. Mostly I was depressed, but sometimes I was depressed and angry. The anger has sunk deeper into the background over the past 40 years, thank goodness.

So I get a lot of work done even when I’m seriously depressed, as I’ve been for the past six months or so. This is a valuable skill which I probably wouldn’t have had were it not for my wartime service with the Blackhorse.

The thing is, though… if I’d managed to miss the war, I wonder if I’d have been chronically and sometimes acutely depressed? I’d sure trade my ability to work while depressed for a chance to feel like a normal human being again, but nobody’s offering me the choice.

I hope your lives are going well, people. Certainly mine is in every objective fashion.

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #69

NEWSLETTER 69: July 16, 2012

Dear People,

This is late, not because anything awful has happened, but because I’ve been dropping stitches. Lots of stitches.

The big news in this period is that we’ve gotten a Certificate of Occupancy for the library addition whose construction started at the end of December, 2011. I was overflowing the house with books and decided to do something about it once and for all. (As a GM executive said regarding the firm’s recent restructuring, “We don’t want to do this again.”)

The design (by the original architect of the house) is wonderful and blends with the non-standard original in a fashion that amazes everybody. The work, by a crew the architect picked, is truly first rate. There was a real effort not to disturb me any more than was necessary (I work at home).

That said, I was getting pretty close to the edge after six months of it. I like–I won’t say need–to be alone part of every day, and that just wasn’t going to happen until the construction was done.

And while I didn’t say “need” in an absolute sense, I certainly needed the time alone for mental equilibrium, never really my strongest suit. I was getting close to the edge; probably closer than I’ve been since the late ’70s when I was starting to get my head up from Nam. The first five years after I got back to the World, I was pretty much shut down except for the moments of rage. I’m intellectually present now, and therefore I’ve been extremely depressed.

I’m hoping that I’ll get back to normal over the next couple months. I’m really hoping that.

My major effort over the past couple months has been Demons of the Earth, third in the four-book fantasy series for Tor. In a perfect world, I would’ve completed the novel by now. (Well, in a more nearly perfect world. I wouldn’t have any place in a truly perfect world.) I’m into the climax, but I’m certainly not finished.

It takes a while to write a long novel, and various things happen that affect my work schedule. Unusually for me, I had to break off with the novel to write a short story for a Gene Wolfe tribute anthology. I didn’t mind doing the story–Gene is a wonderful writer and has been a friend to me–but I bitched about the timing.

Well, I bitch about a lot of things; and I did the job anyway. (All same-same, GI.) Gene’s story Straw had greatly impressed me when I read it in Galaxy (the January, 1975, issue; in the midst of the first three Hammer stories also appearing in the magazine). I used the same setting for my story, Bedding, but reversed the sequence. I’m quite pleased with the result, so I decided to read it at Deep South Con 50 in Huntsville.

I attended three conventions in June, which is about three more than my usual. (There was a reason for each one, but they’re also part of why I feel so wrung out and depressed.) When I decided to read Bedding, I hadn’t expected Gene to be at the convention, and I certainly hadn’t expected him to be in the middle of the front row in the audience.

Gene liked the story a lot. That was both a relief and a great honor.

There is a picture of Gene and me in Huntsville on the website. We had just eaten Sunday brunch at 3 Skillets, the restaurant in the background, owned by Ruth Mercado, the wife of Lance Larka–who set up the David Drake fan site on Facebook.  (We all cleaned our plates, which is the best recommendation for a meal that I know of.)

I got some value from each of the three cons, particularly DSC. Socializing–being in public–costs me a good deal, but if I didn’t force myself to get out in public, I’d sink increasingly deep into myself and wall off the world. That way lies (greater) madness.

The problem with the construction and other disruption isn’t that I don’t get work done (I always get work done) but rather that other things–life generally–tend to slide. I finally got back to my translation of the Centaurs and Lapiths portion of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I’ve now completed the rough draft, though it’ll be a while before I get a polished version up on the website. It’s really amazing how subtle Ovid’s work is, and how much a writer can learn from his clear diction and crisp characterizations.

These newsletters aren’t intended as sell-copy, but I should mention that I’ve read the proofs for Night & Demons, my horror collection, which will be coming out as an omnitrade from Baen Books in October (that is, for Halloween). Most of the stories in the collection are quite old; it includes my very earliest published work and, in Codex, an early story which wasn’t published until 2003.

Rereading these stories put me back in mind of my early career and of the time before I dreamed of having a writing career. I’ve done extensive introductions for each of the stories, but I don’t think the ambiance–both the circumstances of my mind and of the times thirty, forty, fifty years ago–can really come through from my notes.

I’ve got a good memory, a better memory than most people do. That isn’t an altogether positive thing, because I remember a lot of bad stuff vividly along with good things. Still, they were all steps to here; which is an excellent place everywhere but in my head on a bad day.

In addition to the stories, N&D will include a 25-page Drake bibliography created by my webmaster, Karen Zimmerman. You can view the full version, fitfully updated, at the website.

The paperback of Into the Hinterlands, the space opera modeled on the life of George Washington which John Lambshead wrote from my outline, will come out in October also. John is (well, he ought to be) starting work on the sequel, Into the Maelstrom, right about now. Because of the way John’s background (world-class biologist) meshes with mine, there’s a great deal for the reader besides an intricate plot and lots of action.

Tony Daniel is at work on The Heretic, a sequel to The General series. I’ve read the first portion and thought Tony was doing an excellent job.

For what it’s worth, Jim (Baen) and I referred to the four novels I outlined to follow The General (Raj and Aide are disembodied spirits) as The General Follow-On series. I think at this point Baen Books is going to refer to the whole batch as The General series and leave it at that.

There are a few new photos on the website. My wife and I visited the grave marker that gave the title to Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. Although the angel was sold at Wolfe’s father’s shop in Asheville, NC, it was erected some thirty miles south in the cemetery of Hendersonville, NC. We saw it because we’d missed our turn for Flat Rock and Carl Sandburg’s farm, making this the best result I can remember for me being lost. (And I get lost a lot.)

Finally because of the coincidence of me rereading stories from the ’80s and before in Night & Demons, and The Heretic moving toward publication, I’m going to discuss name order–credit–on books. Not for the first time, but it deserves to be revisited because it’s important to me.

In the ’80s, I collaborated on two separate occasions with writers who made a point that their name had to come before mine on the cover because they were Big Names and I was not. In both cases the (also separate) publishers disagreed and decided to run the names in alphabetical order, which would have put mine first. The other writer (both times) went ballistic.

In the first case, the other writer’s agent was handling the book and forced the publisher to back down. (As a sidebar, when we got proofs I read and corrected the portions–a little more than half–which I had written. The other writer switched the name order in the folio line of every single page of the proofs but didn’t otherwise read them.)

I kept my mouth shut: if it mattered that much to her, let her have it.

The second instance was if anything more galling. This time the other writer and I shared the same agent. The agent tried to get the other writer’s name first, but the publisher–Jim Baen–refused. (Again, I kept my mouth shut.) Our agent told me he would explain the situation to the other writer, who was very determined that his name had to come first.

The upshot of the discussion between our agent and the other writer was that our agent told me that I had to go to Jim, my close friend, and ask him as a personal favor to me to give the other writer first credit. I did that.

Jim was furious, but he complied. I was both furious and disgusted.

This time I didn’t just lie back and take it. Over a period of weeks I made it clear to the other writer exactly what it meant to have the publisher that angry about a book. Among other things, I suggested that we would be lucky to get a cover painting, let alone a good painting. The other writer decided that because Jim was going to be so unreasonable, the names could run in alphabetical order (and they did). (Jim was greatly amused.)

The upshot of these experiences was that when Jim asked me to do plot outlines for other writers to develop into novels, I refused unless my name followed that of the person who was doing the actual writing. I simply wouldn’t be involved in the project otherwise.

Jim argued hard and continued to argue all his life against my stipulation, but he’d made a deal. Jim’s worst enemy (and there could’ve been a long line for that title) never claimed that he went back on a deal he’d made.

There are various arguments about whether I’m correct in my position, but they tend to boil down to, “Everybody makes more money if David Drake comes before Unknown.”

In the short term, maybe. (I don’t care, but I grant the point.) In the longer term, both Steve Stirling and Eric Flint are NYT bestselling authors (and Eric is making a lot of money for Baen Books), which is at least in part because of the exposure they got in developing novels from my outlines and appearing before me on the result. Publishing is normally just as short-sighted as any other aspect of the American corporate world, but in this case my (whimsical, if you wish) principle has had enough time to prove itself in the marketplace.

But as I said, I don’t care. What I really care about is that gut-wrenching anger I felt in having to ask my friend Jim to treat me badly because a third party was cripplingly concerned about his status. I will never put myself in a place which would allow anyone to claim that I acted similarly to another writer.

To quote a greater man facing a difficult ethical situation: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

–Dave Drake

***

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Newsletter #68

NEWSLETTER 68: May 15, 2012

Dear People,

The third of the Books of the Elements fantasy series for Tor, DEMONS FROM THE EARTH (or another title that has Earth, and probably Demons, in it somewhere), is chunking along happily. More happily than I am as I write it.

The middle of a book (and the middles extend farther in both directions as I gain more experience) is always a miserable time for me. I’m convinced that I’m writing boring crap–well, you know the drill. I’ve been saying the same thing for much longer than I’ve been doing newsletters; and indeed, I felt the same way in the middle of stories and novelettes (It’s boring crap!) before I started writing novels.

Come to think, I still feel that way about shorter fiction. I just don’t do much of it since I’m backed up on novels.

Thus far, my finished work hasn’t been boring. I expect that will continue to be the case. (“Crap” is a matter of individual definition.) Success in the past doesn’t help much with present depression, unfortunately.

The Road of Danger, my latest RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, is just out as a Baen hardcover. To my utter amazement, according to Bookscan (which tracks book sales from pretty much all outlets) Road was the bestselling SF book for the week following its release.

Let me give you a pair of caveats before you decide that I ought to be dancing around the yard lighting my cigars with hundred-dollar bills. First, these are relative numbers rather than absolute numbers. Absolute sales in a big week (say, in the run-up to Christmas) will be much higher than for a week in the middle of April.

Second, the number two book in that week was Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Game appeared in book form in 1985 and probably hasn’t failed to be in the top ten bestselling SF titles for a single week in the 27 years since. (Incidentally, Jim Baen signed the contract for Ender’s Game before he left Tor in 1983. The advance was $14K. I’m not sure an SF publisher has ever made a better deal.)

Those things said: I’m very happy to have beaten Ender’s Game for one week of those many hundreds of weeks. The Baen crew and Steve Hickman, the cover artist, have really pulled out the stops for me. Pretty much as usual, bless their hearts.

And lest anybody wonder: I don’t smoke cigars (and wish nobody else did either, though nowadays most of my contact with cigar smoke comes from riding behind a vehicle with its windows open). Furthermore, I doubt a hundred-dollar bill would make a good spill for lighting a fire.

The second Book of the Elements, Out of the Waters, is out in mass market from Tor now. (Well, I’m sure it is, though I haven’t actually seen a copy.) It has the same wonderful Donato cover as the hardcover.

Baen’s Halloween release for 2012 will be Night & Demons (note the ampersand), a collection of my shorter horror fiction. Mostly horror, anyway. There are lighter pieces and some that are really adventure, but trust me: the horror is horrible, and there’s enough of it to set the tone for the collection. The cover, by Alan Pollack, fits the mood perfectly.

Night includes the entire contents of Balefires, which in turn included the entire contents of From the Heart of Darkness. There are four additional stories in Night. I wrote an extensive intro for each about how I came to write the piece and sometimes about life more generally as

I’m proud of the collection. This is where I started as a writer. The reason that I stopped writing horror isn’t that I wasn’t good at it.

There are various new pictures on the website. Jonathan and Tristan came over for dinner, so there’s another view of the three Drake men. It doesn’t strike me was weird to be 66; but let me tell you, I shake my head at the notion of having a 39-year-old son and a 9-year-old grandson. Seeing is believing, though.

There are also a couple of views of me working. Well, in one case I’m on the phone but I had been working before an incoming call. Our architect took that picture when he came to check work on the addition we’re building; Jonathan took the other the night he came for dinner.

This really is how I work. There are disadvantages–a gust of wind at the wrong time can do very bad things to my notes, and it suggests why I go through a lot of computers. But we’ve got a lovely property with flowers and insects and birds and frogs (I’ve really come to like frogs!) and the occasional mammal. Deer are common, squirrels and rabbits are not uncommon, the occasional raccoon; and once, to my amazement, a wandering beaver.

My life is idyllic, every place but in my head.

Which leads, more or less directly, to the last thing I’ll talk about this time. I started Duke Law School with the Class of 1970. There were 100 men and 2 women in the class. Dean (Emeritus) Latty told us that almost all of us would graduate, unlike UNC Law School where two-thirds of the class would drop out during the three years.

In fact the class of 1970 graduated only 80 people. There were various reasons for the high dropout rate, but I was one of ten guys drafted in 1968. I came back to Duke after two years in the army and graduated with the Class of 1972. Others graduated with me or later, or graduated from other law schools; or simply did something else with their lives.

Recently the new class representative decided to put together a class directory that wasn’t simply answers from a questionnaire. He went on line and compiled a very striking PDF directory, covering everyone he could find who started with the Class of 1970.

It was an impressive group in many ways. It includes 7 judges; the co-owner of the Seattle Mariners (who had been Microsoft’s attorney; talk about lucking into a job with potential in the ’70s); a General Authority of the Latter Day Saints (a member of the Quorum of the 70, for those of you who follow these things); and I was pointed out as a successful SF writer. There were many other classmates with respectable careers, as one would expect from Duke Law School.

The thing that stood out to me in going over the list is that I was the only listed member the class who’d been in a combat unit in Nam. The list was only partial, of course, and it strikes me that any other Nam vets were disproportionately likely to be among the dozen or so classmates whom the compiler couldn’t find.

I’ve been extremely lucky to have come back as far as I have. That said, I’m a long way short of being back to normal.

Coincidentally, I got a questionnaire from a fellow (a former platoon leader) who’s doing a history of the Blackhorse in Viet Nam and Cambodia. I answered the questions honestly. I didn’t have to dig very deep down to do that.

Maybe because the questions covered most aspects of what was going on, but maybe just because I came back to the World over 40 years ago and had some distance, I found myself analyzing the whole experience in a way I hadn’t done before. I’ve generally said–and believed–that nothing much had happened to me, that I was rarely in serious danger, and that the experience was unpleasant but not awful.

Looking back on it now–it was pretty awful. (The fact that I’d gotten so used to it was possibly the most awful thing of all.) And believe me, I did have an easier time than a lot of the people who were over there at the same time… and a lot of the people in Afghanistan and in Iraq and in too damned many other places.

People, I’m not a pacifist. I’m not saying we ought to disarm or disband the army or any such thing. But when some politician stands up and tells you that the national security and national honor demand that we send troops to a mudhole in SE Asia, really think about what that means for the troops–who will be coming back some day, one way or the other.

And after you’ve thought about the troops for a moment, think about voting for whoever’s running against the cowardly blowhard who wants to start another war.

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #67

NEWSLETTER 67: March 5, 2012

Dear People,

I’m hard at work on the next Tor fantasy, Demons from the Earth; the third of the Books of the Elements. When I first start writing a novel, that’s always the big news in my mind.

I think that would be true even if I suddenly got a multi-million dollar movie contract (and no, there’s no glimmer of that to the best of my knowledge). Writing books is what I do. What happens after that (or before that, in the case of contracts) is important, but it isn’t me. If movies/TV were what interested me, I’d be a screenwriter or something of the sort. And if business were what interested me, I’d still be a lawyer.

Jeepers. Thinking about it, I’m not sure which of those possibilities strikes me as less pleasant.

Stuff is coming out. The pb of Out of the Waters, the second Book of the Elements, will be out from Tor in May. The pb cover treatment expands the art (another superb Donato) above the banner as they did with the pb of The Legions of Fire (the first of the series). I’m amazingly lucky to have the cover art that I regularly get.

And speaking of covers, The Road of Danger is a Baen hc in April. I’ve said that before, but this is another chance to point you to the fine Steve Hickman painting. I suspect that there will be places on the hardcopy which glitter or shimmer or something, but I haven’t seen the treatment yet.

To support the release, Toni asked me to do an essay for Baen.com. I asked her for a selection of suitable topics, then decided to write about the various elements which have gone into the series.

I’m pleased with the result. When I really get into an essay, I teach myself quite a lot about the subject–even if the subject is basically my own past history, as this one in part was. It isn’t up at this instant, but I think it will be in a within the next two weeks. (Karen will put a link on my website, or you can just check Baen.com.)

The other essay I’ve done recently–and I hope y’all are noticing how smoothly this newsletter segues from point to point–was most unexpected. David Hartwell and Jacob Weisman (Tachyon’s publisher) are doing a swords and sorcery anthology for Tachyon Publications.

I learned about this some time ago because David asked me for help; in particular he wondered if I knew of a good introduction to the genre, because he wouldn’t have time to write one. I checked many introductions by Karl Wagner and Sprague deCamp without finding anything which I thought was really suitable. (I didn’t bother checking Lin Carter’s work.)

A couple Thursdays ago Jacob (whom I know to say “Hi” to; we don’t move in the same circles) called. The anthology was going to press on Tuesday. He’d written an introduction. His managing editor had rejected it. Ah–this was really short notice, but–

I broke in to ask how long he wanted the intro and when I needed to submit it. And sent the finished essay off on Saturday.

The thing is, I love the heroic fantasy (AKA sword and sorcery) genre. It (in particular Robert E Howard’s work) is a lot of the reason I started writing fiction. Because I knew and loved the field, it wasn’t hard for me to write an anecdotal overview of it from the appearance of Conan (the point at which the editors started selecting) up through the time in the mid-’70s when Whispers (the little magazine of which I was assistant editor) ran heroic fantasy by my friends Karl Wagner and Ramsey Campbell and by me.

Jacob said they would pay me; which is fine, but I did the job for love. That’s why you should do any job. And this one was easy, because I did know and love the field.

I’m not sure when the anthology will be out, but I’ll put the essay up on my website as soon as I’m cleared to do so. Writing it made me nostalgic for a past which, I emphasize, wasn’t nearly as good as my present… but of which I have many fond memories.

As publisher of Baen Books, Toni Weisskopf (who most certainly knows and loves SF) is doing some innovative things. One which took me aback is a study guide for teachers and students on Into the Hinterlands, the novel which John Lambshead wrote from my outline. I was amazed to see the guide, though it made perfect sense after the fact.

That it made sense to Toni before somebody else came up with the idea is why (well, is one of the reasons) she’s good at her job. I suppose the fact that Baen Books is growing while many other publishers are having a hard time is an even better recommendation of her job performance.

Back in 1983, Jim Baen heard a junior congressman speak on space policy. He was so taken by the speech that he signed the congressman up for a book setting out his view of a bright, clean future for America and the world. I was brought in as rewrite man, partly as a favor to my friend Jim but also in part because there was a chance we’d all make a lot of money. (There was a chance. It didn’t happen that way, however.)

Under normal circumstances this would have been another of the odds and ends that any full-time freelance writer has in the course of his career. (For example, I scripted a graphic novel.) It was different on this occasion because the book was Window of Opportunity, and the congressman was Newt Gingrich.

Every time Newt returns to the spotlight, I get calls from reporters. I was pleased that this time the focus of the articles (in Politico, Foreign Affairs, and New Republic) was on Window rather than on either Newt himself (whom I personally liked and respected) or on the way the book’s promotion was financed.

I was also pleased that the reporters had read and liked the book, picking up on its hopeful optimism. Whatever you think of Newt in his present persona, Window of Opportunity is a thoroughly positive work. His visions for the future (and they were his, not mine) may have been impractical and even silly, but it would be a better world today if they had been implemented thirty years ago.

I’ll close by discussing Manly Wade Wellman. He was my friend for the fifteen years before his death in 1986 and I still very much miss him. I acted as… dunno. Basically a support structure for his widow Frances from 1994 to her death in 2000.

That meant the business stuff in part, but I was also a presence to her caregivers. I never had to take action, but that was at least in part because they were all terrified of me. The one time there might have been a problem, both parties (Frances needed 24-hour care at the end) phoned me separately to say that they’d worked it out and I didn’t need to get involved.

Part of me regrets that I come through as a ruthless bastard. On the other hand, my concern was for my aged friend; and the caregivers weren’t wrong about how I would have dealt with anyone whom I thought was taking advantage of her.

When Frances died, I bought the Wellmans’ literary estate from their son. I did this because I thought I was in a better place to keep their work alive than the son was (he didn’t have a telephone) rather than to make a profit on the investment, but it has been profitable.

In addition to the many individual story reprints, at least some of Manly’s books have been in print every year since Frances’ death. There’s a hardcover volume of all his John Thunstone (a psychic detective/ghost breaker) series due out soon, and we’re in negotiations for more hardcovers. It suddenly struck me that Manly, who’s been dead for 25 years, has a more active writing career than most living people who define themselves as writers.

Manly has a great agent and I’m in a good position to support her, but that wouldn’t really matter if he hadn’t been such a wonderful storyteller to begin with. Storytelling is the key to why Manly is doing better commercially than so many workshop graduates. It seems to me that this would be something for writing courses to take notice of, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Which is their choice. From my standpoint, it just means that much more for Manly–and for me.

My best wishes to all of you.

–Dave Drake

***

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Newsletter #66

NEWSLETTER 66: January 5, 2012

Dear People,

Jeepers, a new year yet again. I hope you all–and all of us–have a good one.

I’m at work on the plot for my next Tor fantasy, which at the moment I’m calling Demons from the Earth. By ‘working’ I mean that I have detailed (though not polished) scene-by-scene descriptions of the first five chapters (I hope more by the time you read this) as well as a pile of more or less organized material sufficient to fill the remaining two-thirds of the plot. I’ve got some 3K words at the moment.

I’ll polish the plot after I complete it; then I’ll write the book. Nothing is certain (after all, Elijah on good authority was translated directly to heaven without passing through death), but at this point I’d say that completing the novel is just a matter of time. (And a lot of work, of course, but I’ve never minded work.)

Getting to this stage is a considerable relief. Gathering material for a plot takes time. I go over old notes, make new ones, doodle possibilities (mostly in the form of letters to friends). At some point (and this is the magic) it starts to go together. After that the process is similar to working on a jigsaw puzzle: stuff has to fit properly, but there’s a form into which I’m fitting it.

But until the plot starts to gel, there’s the lurking fear in the back of my mind that maybe things aren’t going to start fitting this time. Since I don’t know (not really) how the process works, I’ll have no warning that it isn’t going to work for this book–for the rest of my life.

There was another factor on Demons: the immediately previous project wasn’t a novel but rather the plot for a novel, Into the Maelstrom. I’m good at plotting and I rather like to do it, but plotting a complex novel (all of mine for at least the past twenty years have been complex) takes ten-tenths mental effort. Writing, even at its most demanding, doesn’t take that much concentration.

So: this plot seemed like unusually hard work and it may have taken me longer than some have (I’m not sure that’s objectively true), but that didn’t mean that my brain had turned to sludge. Which of course was what I was afraid of before the parts started fitting together.

While plotting I’ve written two essays of which I’m rather proud. One will be an afterword to the new Baen edition of Heinlein’s Assignment in Eternity (I assume it’s due out in 2012). The task caused me to think of Heinlein as a working professional writer rather than the exalted figure he’s been to me ever since I began reading SF seriously.

I compared the book versions (which I assume are the author’s preferred texts) with the original magazine appearances of the stories. Heinlein in the ’40s was edited with the same callous contempt as I was thirty years later, which isn’t a conclusion I expected to reach.

The second essay was… well, odd. Barnes and Noble are doing a Military SF week some time in January (for all I know it’s happening now), and the Tor.com blog is echoing B&N. Tor.com (specifically Irene Gallo, Tor’s art director) asked me to do an essay for them. She said any connected subject was fine, but they thought I could do a history of the subgenre.

Well, I could do a history. The problem is that I work in the subgenre myself, and that could lead to all sorts of recriminations. My essay on Golden Age SF was controversial (among people who didn’t realize how ignorant they were), but nobody claimed that I was banging my own drum. Anything I said about Military SF as a whole would lay me open to that charge; and because I’m human, accusations of the author’s self-interest might have an uncomfortable amount of truth to them.

I flirted for a bit with discussing the EC war comics of my childhood (Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales) and reread a block of them, but then I got a better idea. I wrote my essay on The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears, a 1949 story by Keith Bennett, a one-shot author. I first read it when I was thirteen. I’ve reread it repeatedly, and it simply gets better each time.

I did my essay on that story, illustrating its implications with anecdotes from the 1970 US invasion of Cambodia. The result turned out to my satisfaction, but I was pretty sure that Tor wouldn’t print it. (Or whatever it is when something is published electronically. Published, I guess.)

To my surprise, Irene accepted it immediately without hesitation or cavil. Her actions throughout the process were decisive, intelligent, and–because I didn’t write pablum–showed courage.

The essay should be up at some point within the month. I’m proud of it.

Voyage across the Stars is probably out: at any rate, I’ve had my author’s copies for a couple weeks now. It’s an attractive package combining Cross the Stars and The Voyage, space operas set in the Hammer universe and based on Greek epics (The Odyssey and The Argonautica respectively).

The turn of the year makes me thoughtful if not precisely sad. I wrote Cross the Stars in the early ’80s: Jim Baen acquired it for Tor before he left to found Baen Books. It doesn’t seem that long ago, but it was thirty years–and Jim’s been dead for more than five.

Well, Jim isn’t dead in my heart or in my memories. And I have vivid memories of writing both the novels collected here, so maybe they weren’t so distant either.

I’ve read the proofs of The Road of Danger, the next RCN space opera. They were extremely clean, having been set from the electronic files over which I made multiple edit passes. I know that this level of polish doesn’t make my books sell noticeably better. In a strictly economic sense, I’ve wasted four days on proofs which I could have spent writing fresh material for which I would be paid.

But if I were thinking in strictly economic terms, I wouldn’t be a writer. My prose is important to me for reasons which have nothing to do with money: it’s something I can control, and it gives me the illusion that my life is to some degree under control.

So I do multiple drafts, and I read proofs… and I become irrationally angry when a copyeditor introduces error into something which I’ve done correctly. Mind, people should not be paid to make the world a worse place than it would be without them; and some copyeditors do just that.

I’ve added to the website (my webmaster has added) a short discussion of Manly Wade Wellman and the song Vandy, Vandy. Manly, like Jim, is still with me, thank goodness.

Bull Spec is a quarterly focusing on speculative fiction in the Research Triangle region of NC. The next issue (due out momentarily) has a review of Into the Hinterlands; an interview with me and John Lambshead about writing the book; and tributes to me by Mark, John, and Toni.

All I will say about those last is that I wish I were the man my friends think I am.

I get frequent queries as to why my books aren’t available in Kindle editions or more generally why they aren’t available electronically. They are, particularly from Baen Books. Yes, Kindle editions also.

Mentioning the fact here probably won’t help (I suspect splashing it in big red letters across my home page wouldn’t prevent people from peevishly asking the same question), but my webmaster suggests I note that the Baen.com sale site for Ebooks has recently become a lot easier to use.  It’s being handled now by a thoroughly professional outfit, Principled Technologies, which not-coincidentally is run by my friend (and Baen author) Mark Van Name.

Speaking of Baen, as I regularly do here and elsewhere, I just did a five-book extension with Toni to give me nine books under contract with Baen. The company is doing well by putting its first emphasis on storytelling, and I am doing very well for the same reason.

A couple things have occurred recently to make me think about the importance of appearance, to me and to humans more generally. I focus almost entirely on what I think is reality: how can I become a better writer? How can I become a better person? I’m not claiming that I’m particularly successful on those matters or similar ones, but I’m trying.

I was invited to participate in an Army War College Conference. The idea made me cringe: the two years I spent in close association with military officers were the worst in my life. While that wasn’t entirely because of those military officers, they had more to do with my misery than the NVA did.

For a while I considered going anyway, because… well, because I owed it to my country. Then I thought about that proposition and realized that I didn’t believe that any real good comes out of these conferences nor that I have anything useful to say to a gathering of colonels and the like. My country would get along fine without me at the Army War College, just as my country would have gotten along fine without me in Viet Nam. (Indeed, the US would have gotten along much better if there’d been 529,000 fewer of her citizens with me there in 1970.)

The only thing my attendance would have brought me was the ability to claim that I was important. That doesn’t matter to me: it wouldn’t make me more or less important (and neither a better writer nor a better man), it would just give me that appearance. It’s better that I save the government a modest sum of money by staying home and working. Just possibly I’ll manage to become incrementally better in reality. That would be important.

Happy New Year, everybody. May the future become a little brighter for all of us.

–Dave Drake

***

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Newsletter #65

NEWSLETTER 65: November 7, 2011

Dear People,

I've finished the plot for Into the Maelstrom, which will be the sequel to Into the Hinterlands when John Lambshead writes it next year. (Next year isn't nearly as far away as I think it ought to be.)

The series is a space opera based on the life of George Washington. Hinterlands took him through the French and Indian War (as it was in North America). Maelstrom picks up fifteen years later with the events leading up to the Revolutionary War and runs through the Battle of Trenton.

Research for the plot took time, and creating reasonable space-opera analogues to an Eighteenth century original is a lot trickier than it will look to a reader if I did it correctly. That said, the puzzles were fun–and time spent studying a man as extraordinary as George Washington is both education and pleasure.

Now I'm trying to get into the plot for Demons from the Earth, the third fantasy of my Books of the Elements for Tor. It isn't moving any more quickly or easily than my plots have in the past, which I accept the same way I accept getting wet when I'm fifteen miles from the house as the storm breaks.

Based on past experience, the plot will come and the book will follow. I've got a lot of past experience. And it was hard every single time.

Incidentally, I've found that it helps me to get started if I translate a chunk of Ovid's Metamorphoses. At present I'm working through the Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths, a lengthy section (325 lines), which is entirely 'X killed Y and Z then killed X.' Ovid makes the action consistently interesting and not repetitive, which is remarkable.

Craftsmanship of that standard gives me something concrete to shoot for. If Ovid could do that, I can find a path into what every morning seems to be a shifting mass (much like the Chaos which Ovid describes In the Beginning).

The Tor mass market reprint of Birds of Prey is out. Tor is working at doing better with reprints than has been the case for a long time. I learned this when a Tor editor asked me for SF quote to put on a new edition of Skyripper.

The problem here was that Skyripper was about to come out (and now has come out) as half the Baen omnibus Loose Cannon. The other half (the second Tom Kelly book) is Fortress, which Tom Doherty (Tor's publisher) couldn't get his staff to reprint a couple years ago. (Nobody refused. It just didn't happen.) Therefore with Tom's approval, Toni Weisskopf of Baen did the books instead… just in time for the Tor staff to change direction.

Baen had the rights to Birds of Prey, which was out of print. (And is one of my best novels, by the way.) We–Toni and I–transferred the rights to Tor, and everybody is happy.

I can work in the complex present world; but sometimes I miss the old days.

Take a look at the (now four) cover treatments for Birds of Prey, all of them using the same excellent Michael Whelan painting. If you're in any doubt about how much difference cover design makes, this should convince you.

Speaking of omnibus editions, Baen is bringing out my two space operas based on Greek epics and set in the Hammer universe: Cross the Stars (the Odyssey) and The Voyage (the Argonautica). I had intended the combined title to be Voyages across the Stars to make clear that it was two books, but the cover appeared as Voyage [singular]across the Stars. I just left it that way. It's a better title anyway.

Oh–the volume includes a very perceptive essay by Cecelia Holland, who blew me away when I read her Until the Sun Falls while I was in Cambodia. I am hugely honored to have become Cecelia's friend in the forty-odd years since.

The nice cover is by Sam Kennedy. It's the first time I recall seeing his work, and I wouldn't mind more of it on my covers.

Baen Books will be bringing out my five time-travel novellas in a single volume. Four of the stories involve using a time machine to hunt dinosaurs; the fifth is Travellers, a very different piece set during the Great 1897 Airship Flap.

I happened to glance through the original edition of Time Safari recently and was struck by the fact that the stories were quite well-written–though none of the versions of the book sold especially well. I diffidently suggested a new, expanded edition to Toni, who snapped at the idea.

Negotiations with Baen Books today are just as easy and pleasant as they were during Jim's lifetime.

The title was easy: Dinosaurs and a Dirigible. Tom Kidd is planned for the cover artist, but it's still early days.

There are a few new pictures on the website. The Drake/Van Name entourage visited the NC State Fair with a lot of low key fun. So much of the best in life involves relaxing with friends and family. It doesn't make exciting reading, but do be aware of how important it is to me.

I remembered to bring my camera to the fair and to charge its battery beforehand, but I didn't remember to put the charged battery back in the camera. This shot of the 522.8 pound prize pumpkin came from Gina, who was much better organized.

I attended Constellation in Huntsville and there chatted with Joe Haldeman, in part about things in Nam blowing up. (Joe was a combat engineer, so some of his stories involved him blowing things up. I was an interrogator and therefore an observer, but I sure observed some doozies.)

This is us forty-odd years later. I find it hard to realize that I survived, and Joe had a much worse time In Country than I did. Oh, well.

As usual, I went to the World Fantasy Convention this year. It's a business con and I did business besides spending time with friends. Despite real problems with programming (the rooms had poor acoustics and the con hadn't bothered to arrange microphones for panelists), there were some interesting presentations.

The most fun was the one by the San Diego Zoo, which walked some neat animals through the auditorium. My favorite was the West African pangolin (a tree-climbing mammal which eats ants and is covered by scales of folded protein). If I got a decent picture of it (I did, but I'll take requests for the armadillo), it'll be here; if not, that will be another animal (maybe a three-banded armadillo).

My webmaster, Karen, is digitizing photographs I took in the '70s and putting a few of them on the website. This one was taken (with my Minox) during the 1978 WFC in Maryland. Manly Wade Wellman and Sprague de Camp were very important to me as writers and as men. They had been close friends in the '30s but had dropped out of contact for thirty years. They met again here and renewed their friendship in my presence.

And finally, one more photograph. I usually end newsletters with a little essay, but in this case I'll let the picture (which my wife Jo took in fall of 1973) speak. By the time it was taken, I'd been back to the World for nearly three years. I'd graduated from Duke Law School, passed the bar exam, and was working as Assistant Town Attorney for the Town of Chapel Hill. I had bought a house and was a father.

That sounds as though I were functional, and I guess I was; but there wasn't much of me left over. Nam had bulldozed me flat; what I am now was built up from the rubble, like the Byzantine fort I saw in Lambaesis which reused ashlars from the city which the Vandals had sacked and burned centuries earlier.

There are a lot of veterans returning to society again, now. Cut them some slack, people; because chances are, there's no more left of them than there was of me when this picture was taken.

–Dave Drake

***

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Newsletter #64

NEWSLETTER 64: September 7, 2011

Dear People,

INTO THE HINTERLANDS, the space opera which John Lambshead wrote from my outline, should be out by the time you read this. I'm ridiculously pleased with the book. John's style is nothing like mine, but the style of Hinterlands is quite different from the style of Lucy's Blade (for example), also. I think the combination–this book really was a collaboration, though it's taken me a while to see that–fits very well into John's and my mutual view of our model.

Our model is the world of George Washington. The more I learn about the man, the more impressed I become. The Thirteen Colonies might have gained their independence without Washington, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have remained united if somebody other than he had been Commanding General and then our first President.

The Revolutionary War was conducted in the South as a civil war with irregulars on both sides using brutal guerrilla tactics. The same thing would have happened in the Northeast had not Washington been present to protect civilians; to protect civilization.

I wish there'd been somebody like him in Nam.

I should mention a few items associated with Hinterlands. First, John has written an essay for Baen.com about science and culture in the universe of the novel and why we made some of the choices we did in adapting history to our project. He thinks it's too academic, but I thought it was very good. Of course, I'm the guy whose law school class gave him a plaque for being Pedant of the Year.

Second, John and I have a joint author photo, but it didn't get onto the dust-jacket because the double author bios didn't leave space. It's here on my website in case any of you want to print it and paste it onto the half-title or something.

I mentioned the biographies. John had written his own. When I saw a draft of the flap copy, I completely rewrote John's myself, giving (I think) a better view of him as a friend and as a world-class scientist.

When the book itself arrived, I read over John's bio, which pleased me; and then read my own, which did not. I think the person it describes is more similar to Heinlein than I hope I am.

After thinking about it, I've completely recast my flap bio into a form similar to what I did with John's. The fellow in the original bio isn't the way I see myself or somebody I really want to know (though it was accurate enough).

Since I'm speaking of the dust-jacket, contrast the original art (visible on the ARC) with the final treatment which Jennie Faries, Baen's graphic designer and my friend, came up with. The cover is much more effective than the original art was. (I've had wonderful cover paintings from Bob Eggleton. This one puzzled me, however.)

My major project since Newsletter 63 has been plotting Into the Maelstrom, the sequel to Hinterlands. The first stage of the process was research, during which I compiled 8500 words of notes. I'm now mining those notes for a plot.

It's going pretty well. After I complete and polish it, I'll send it to John (who will be developing both sequels from my outlines, as he did Hinterlands) for his comments and corrections. When I've incorporated those, I'll send the final back to John and to Toni Weisskopf (Baen Books' publisher).

Whereupon I'll start the next project, the third Book of the Elements (the new fantasy series for Tor). My working title is Demons from the Earth, but that could change. (Though you'll notice that I have covered the objection of the Tor sales force to the title of the second volume: the element Earth is prominently displayed in this one.)

That second Book of the Elements, OUT OF THE WATERS, is on sale right now with a wonderful Donato cover. Tor is treating me very well. I am very fortunate in my covers as in many, many other fashions.

I've just received the short list of entries for The Galaxy Project prize contest. I'll be judging them along with Robert Silverberg and Barry Malzberg (who made the initial cull). Reading the five finalists and making a decision will be work, but not nearly as much work as it was to write the three essays I did.

And it's worth a great deal more to me than what it costs. The SF field and Galaxy magazine itself, which brought Jim Baen and me together, have been of enormous importance in my life. If Rosetta Books continues the project, as I hope they will, I expect to write more essays. The project isn't live quite yet, but I hope when that happens (I think in a couple weeks) you'll take a look at the offerings and buy something. You'll gain by it.

A dump is a prepack of books from a publisher with a banner on top and a floor stand; a mini-dump with fewer pockets and no floor stand is intended for counter display, generally beside the cash register. My friend Mark walked into his local Barnes and Noble the other day and found this.

It pleased me very much to see. Instead of pushing the latest RCN mass market (What Distant Deeps), these are all older titles which Baen is reissuing at considerable profit to all concerned. Toni and Corinda Carfora (Baen's sales liaison) are working very hard on behalf of their authors and are keeping the company healthy in a tough time.

There's a new whimsical picture on the website as well. Every summer the Van Name and Drake extended family rents a large beach house. This year Glenn and Helen Knight were part of the group. Glenn and I are on the Holden Beach fishing pier, pointing out to our wives a pelican (off camera) which had just dived.

Glenn and I met through writer Manly Wade Wellman in 1974, and we've been friends ever since. The backgrounds of many of my books, including the recently republished Tom Kelly thrillers (Loose Cannon), came from visiting Glenn while he was in the Foreign Service.

I've gained a great deal from being a writer: it's made me a good living over the years, and it kept me from going too badly off the rails after I got back to the World in 1971. A less obvious benefit is that in one fashion or another I've met most of my close friends, Glenn included, through my writing.

I'd be in a really bad place without friends.

Now, back to work. I'm about to plot the climactic battle. There have been various criticisms of my fiction, but I don't recall anybody claiming that it lacked action.

–Dave Drake

***

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