David Drake's Blog, page 6

Newsletter #63

NEWSLETTER 63: July 4, 2011

Dear People,

I have written a(nother) novel! The Road of Danger, the latest RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera went off to Baen Books at 124,889 words. For the moment it feels good, but I'll shortly start to be antsy that I'm not accomplishing anything, I'm sure.

I don't think I'm exactly a workaholic–I don't think that everything hangs on me or anything like that. But I'm most content when I'm working and the project is going well. Work structures my existence and keeps me from thinking too much about the meaning of life. (I figure I know the meaning already, and it's not something that makes me happier to dwell on.) 

I did the third (and probably last for this batch) essay for The Galaxy Project which Barry Malzberg is putting together for Rosetta Books. These are classic novelettes from Galaxy magazine in the '50s, republished on Kindle with introductions by Barry, me, and I think Robert Silverberg. Barry's intros are very informative; that is, they teach me a great deal about a subject on which I'm pretty knowledgeable to begin with. Barry has been very positive about my intros as well. I've taught myself a lot by doing the research to write them.

The '50s are really the time that magazine SF–which is what brought me into the field, though through anthologies rather than the magazines directly–reached its peak. The three top magazines had distinct personalities:

Astounding under John Campbell probably had the highest proportion of the really top stories, though they appeared as a continuation of the past. (Astounding's past defined the Golden Age of Science Fiction, of course).

F&SF (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) under Anthony Boucher and J Francis McComas (later Boucher alone) had the highest literary standards and was the most eclectic, often reprinting off-trail material as well as new material. F&SF is the magazine which is closest to my personal taste (which might be a surprise to some people).

Galaxy under HL Gold was the cutting edge of SF at the time. While Astounding and F&SF in their different ways looked to the past, Galaxy saw itself as the future. Galaxy brought an excitement which the field hadn't known since the early days of Amazing; and which, sadly, has been missing more recently as well. Writing my essays and reading Barry's have made me a part of that excitement; and I think that reading our essays and the stories themselves can excite you too.

When The Galaxy Project goes live (I think toward the end of this month), browse the offerings and maybe spend a few bucks to try a story or two. And open already for any of you who are interested is a contest to write the best Galaxy-style novelette.

The paperback edition  of The Legions of Fire, the first novel in my four-volume fantasy series for Tor (The Books of the Elements) is out and is beautiful. Donato, the (wonderful) artist, provided a full-bleed image as well as the banner image that Tor put on the hardcover. The pb uses the upper portion of the complete version. (The very detailed frame at the bottom remains.) Both treatments are quite lovely. I find it interesting that they're continuing to play with design on the paperback.

What Distant Deeps, the most recent RCN space opera, is also out in paperback with its fine Steve Hickman cover–which hasn't changed from the hc (except that it doesn't have the swatch of holographic foil). Steve is doing the cover for The Road of Danger; I haven't seen anything, but I'm told that he's submitted roughs. I will (Karen will) put something up on the website when we have it.

Loose Cannon, the omnibus of the two Tom Kelly technothrillers (Skyripper and Fortress) is out as a Baen omnitrade with a very good Dave Seeley cover. These are harsh, angry books; they're not stupid, though, and there's a lot of stuff in them that isn't fiction.

They probably give a better view of where my head was for a long while after I got back to the World (that is, returned from Viet Nam) than most of my fiction does. That isn't an altogether good thing, but it's a fact.

I mentioned that Steve is working on the cover of the next RCN. The Donato cover of Out of the Waters, the second of The Books of the Elements, is just as wonderful as the cover for Legions. The book is supposed to be out on July 19. I haven't seen a copy yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

Tor did send me a couple dust jackets, though. Unless they've changed the caption–and I don't think there was time to do so–it says under my picture that I'm an NYT Bestselling Author. That's a mistake. Not mine: I asked folks at Tor (including Tom Doherty) as soon as I saw that statement, since I thought it must be wrong. My sales at both Tor and Baen are quite good, but they aren't that good.

I was glad to learn that the caption got there through honest error (which can happen to anybody) rather than being a deliberate lie by somebody in marketing. This is a business in which an awful lot of people lie about advances and about sales. I've made it a point over the years not to be one of those people. One of the reasons I've never publically announced my new contracts: my honest figures would be compared with the bloated claims of others.

My next real project is to plot Into the Maelstrom,the second novel of The Citizen series (the first is Into the Hinterlands, which will be out in September from Baen). These are space operas (sorta) which use the life of George Washington as a template. John Lambshead developed my outline into Hinterlands and will dothe same with the remaining two, god willing.

This is a neat idea (which Jim Baen originally came up with) and John handled it extremely well; I'm pleased to be doing the remainder of the series. That said, it's been more than a decade since I plotted the first book in that idiosyncratic universe. I'm going to be earning my money on these outlines.

I'm writing this over the July 4 weekend, which is as good a time as any to think about… I won't say patriotism; that means things to some people which it doesn't mean to me. Say rather, the rights and duties of citizenship.

I was drafted in 1968. I didn't want to go (and I didn't believe any good was coming from US involvement in Viet Nam), but I believed that it was my duty as a citizen to serve when I was called. Then I came home and started writing about war.

I don't think people who weren't at least teenagers in the '70s can imagine how much scorn and hatred were directed at Nam vets. Jane Fonda spoke for a large and very vocal portion of the population when she attacked American servicemen.

Personally, my own worst experience with this came in Boston in 1990 when Tom Easton, moderating a panel, called me a pornographer of violence. He then read from his upcoming Analog review which amplified his personal attack.

The review duly appeared. To Mr Easton and his editor, Stanley Schmidt, it was morally reprehensible to try to describe war from where I had seen it: the loader's hatch of an M48 tank in Cambodia.

But things have changed; in my opinion for the better. The Guardian is a British paper which serves the segment of the UK electorate which most nearly resembles that of the California Democratic Party. A Guardian blogger, discussing Military SF, paired me with Joe Haldeman as Nam vets writing from personal experience–instead of calling me a pornographer, as Analog had.

And in the June, 2011, issue of Analog itself, the new reviewer, Don Sakers, intelligently reviewed several Military SF books and referred to me as the father of the modern MSF category. Joe Haldeman, Jerry Pournelle and I all started writing about combat from personal experience at about the same time in the early '70s, so I think that gives me too much credit; but it's a nice change. (Mind, I don't think that Mr Sakers is the sort of person who would descend to personal attacks even if he didn't like a book.)

I hope that it will never again be socially acceptable to vilify other people simply for trying to be good citizens, even if you don't like the direction their citizenship leads them. That's a wish for every American on this Independence Day.

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #62

Dear People,

I am in the stage now in which the current book (this time it's The Road of Danger, the next Leary/Mundy space opera) moves forward about as steadily as Juggernaut's Carriage. The process is about that graceful also, but I'll be editing the heck out of my rough draft, as usual.

I've been averaging a hair over a thousand words a day since Newsletter 61, a process which I expect to continue until I get to the end of my outline. I strongly suspect the final draft will be about 130K, but I don't swear to that.

This doesn't mean, by the way, that I write about a thousand words every day in about the same fashion. I have a life (and I'm very glad to have a life).

I go to social gatherings–not many, but I'm not a recluse. I get a great number of incoming phone calls (I rarely make outgoing calls because I spend so much time on the phone anyway). Most calls are business-related in one fashion or another; but since I prefer to do business with friends, even the most business-oriented conversation is likely to be a chat between friends.

Maintenance people arrive to check the furnace. The lawnmower moves around to where I'm working. I need to get the taxes to our accountant, or I have a dental appointment. Life, in other words.

And of course, work goes more smoothly some days than other days. When it's not going well, I'm likely to still be working after the time I'd normally be in bed. But easy or hard, I keep chunking away till the job is done.

If I didn't like the work I do, I wouldn't be doing it. Nonetheless, it is work.

Audible.com has been doing the RCN series very well in streaming audio. They have just released most of the Hammer series as well, which I think is neat.

I say most: the four short novels are paired in two audio "volumes," and the two full length novels are done separately. Steve Feldberg (the CEO) says they'll wait to see how the longer pieces do before he decides whether to produce the short stories.

He knows his own market (and is a delight to deal with, by the way), but I suggested that he do a set of short stories in place of one of the other volumes. The Hammer pieces seem to me to do best in small chunks, because they are very intense (in various ways). Since my prose style is also dense, I suspect the series would be something of a challenge to listen to in large blocks.

Note that I am not knocking my own work: I think the Hammer stories are good and in some ways uniquely good. The things that make them good come with a cost, however.

The paperback of The Legions of Fire (the first of The Books of the Elements, my four-volume fantasy series for Tor) is out.  I think it's lovely. Tor's new designer is very skilled. (Whereas the UK editions of the Isles series–using the same art–were consistently better, and sometimes much better, than the Tor originals.)

The second volume of The Books of the Elements, Out of the Waters, should appear in hardcover in July. This is a really fun series to do because I'm able to give free rein to my knowledge of–and love for–the Roman world. Like most people, I find it a delight to burble to others about my expertise.

The paperback of What Distant Deeps, the latest RCN space opera, should be out in June.  I've always loved SF adventures, but I didn't start writing seriously until after my military service. My space operas therefore had a sharper edge than I intended (The Reaches Trilogy being the most striking example of this) until I wrote Redliners and really came to terms with where my head had been for the previous 25 years.

Better late than never, though. The RCN series and the fantasy novels that I've been writing since I completed Redliners are exactly what I wanted to write in the first place: not stupid and certainly not saccharine, but basically positive stories set in a basically positive universe.

I live in a basically positive universe, but for a long time my head was back in Nam. There was very, very little positive about Nam.

Toni Weisskopf, publisher of Baen Books, did indeed like Into the Hinterlands which I mentioned in Newsletter 61 had just been delivered to her. (John Lambshead wrote it from my outline.)  She liked it so much that she wants the remaining two books of the planned trilogy (whose template is the life of George Washington through the end of the Revolutionary War).

The problem is that Toni thought I'd written the remaining two outlines and phrased her initial request based on that misconception. Things settled down after I went briefly ballistic. I will plot the first book (or less probably both books) as soon as I have finished The Road of Danger.

I'm feeling crunched. In a perfect world… no, let me rephrase that; a perfect world wouldn't have any use for me. Say rather that if I were as skilled as I would like to be, I would be finishing the third Book of the Elements now instead of working on a space opera before I start that third fantasy. I don't believe I'm a failure to anyone except to myself, but I certainly don't meet my own standards.

I'm also doing a number of short essays to introduce electronic republications of classic (1950s) novelettes and novellas from Galaxy Science Fiction. My friend Barry Malzberg is overseeing this project for Rosetta Books, the successor in interest to the Scott Meredith Literary Agency where Barry worked for many years.

I'm doing this because I love the field. There's also ego involved: I know quite a lot about the history of magazine SF, and I'm arrogant enough to believe that I can bring things to the project that few others could.

The first essay (of maybe four or five) was on Robert Silverberg's The Iron Chancellor; it took me a day to write. The rest should be comparable, and I can do them as breaks over the next couple months.

Though the actual time I spend writing them isn't much, it's very focused time; and proper research (rereading not only the story concerned but other stories and contemporary comments that have bearing on the discussion) soaks up a lot of time during which I might have been reading (for example) a Gladys Mitchell mystery novel. I just reread Lester del Rey's Nerves in preparation for doing an introduction to his The Wind between the Worlds, for example.

And of course the essay project contributes to me feeling crunched, but I decided a long time ago that if I wanted a lazy, relaxed life, I would have one. Therefore, this is the life I have chosen for myself.

My Suzuki GS500F is a year old and has been a very satisfactory bike. It turns out that some of the styling differences from the GS500E which it replaced are because this is the European model and was actually built in Spain.

Which brings me to the last item for this newsletter, since it's also bike related. I'll give the necessary background first: alcohol is hygroscopic; that is, it sucks moisture out of the air. This becomes significant in a vehicle's gas tank if you're using gasohol.

Because pipelines run various petroleum products at various times (and the trucks which fill gas stations also use the same compartments for different fuels over time) fuel oil contaminates every refill you put in your vehicle. Fuel oil and water become a white, sticky emulsion on the bottom of your gas tank. (I learned all this later, after my Bandit 1200′s carbs had been rebuilt and its petcock replaced.)

Later, meaning after I had gotten about two miles from home before the bike died and wouldn't restart. I knew I had gas, and the battery cranked fine. The engine wouldn't fire, however.

The first problem was to get back home. I didn't want to leave the bike where it was, so I started pushing it back. The rural road is paved but narrow; the saving grace was that there wasn't much traffic. The Bandit weighs something over 500 pounds, and the first half mile was up a gentle slope. (It was drizzling, though that wasn't necessary to make it a miserable business.) By the time I'd gotten to the top of the hill, enough fuel had seeped past the gunk to get me almost home.

I said there wasn't much traffic; I think there were about ten cars and trucks in both directions. Three of them, driven by strangers, stopped:

A young white guy in an SUV asked if he could do anything to help. (No, but thank you very much.)

A middle-aged black guy in an econobox said he had a little lawnmower gas back at his house and he'd be happy to bring it to me. (I have gas–I think it's electrical [wrong]–but thank you very much.)

A white guy who had to be over 70 (okay, I'm 65 myself now that I think about it) in an old Oldsmobile asked if he could help me push. (No, there really isn't a good way on a road so narrow, but thank you very much.)

Let me repeat that these were total strangers, they weren't bikers, and they constituted 30% of the sample. Sure, the sample is too small to be other than anecdotal evidence, but to me it indicates that given half a chance, human beings are pretty decent.

I get very depressed at times. Heck, I suppose you could say that since 1970, depression is my resting state. But my bottom line is that human beings are pretty decent.

That thought encourages me to try to be more decent myself, which I think might be a useful practice for everybody.

–Dave Drake

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DrakeNews – Dave’s Newsletter

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DrakeNews – Dave's Newsletter

DrakeNews is Dave's occasional newsletter (think of it as a long blog entry) distributed by e-mail subscription and posted here on the website.  The first newsletter was distributed November 14, 2000, and all of them are archived here (or will be soon).

If you are interested in subscribing to the newsletter mailing list, please sign up through the Contact Form.

This is a subscription list for Dave's occasional announcements only, not a general discussion list.

Enjoy!

Newsletter #61

Dear People,

In the immediately previous newsletter I said that I'd finished my rough plot for The Road of Danger (the next RCN space opera). The book is now at 32K and rising at the usual steady rate.

This is all good, but I don't feel happy or even content about it; which is also usual. I frequently stop and think, "Jeepers, I need to fix the bit in chapter two when the character first appears." And of course the work generally isn't as good or as fast or as easy as I think it ought to be.

Based on past experience, I will fix the bit in chapter two when I edit, and I will make the book generally better; I work fast enough to have created an unusually large body of work; and "easy" simply doesn't matter. But the book will never be good enough, and I will never be good enough to meet my own standards.

That is a personal problem. My strong suspicion is that if I were a ditch digger, my ditches wouldn't be as straight as I thought they should be and I'd be painfully aware that I should be able to achieve the same result more quickly and with fewer shovel strokes. As I say, it's a personal problem.

Shortly before this newsletter goes out, the final draft of Into the Hinterlands, the space opera John Lambshead wrote from my outline, should have reached Toni's inbox (Toni Weisskopf, Publisher of Baen Books). I don't do line edits on other people's books, though I'll sometimes rewrite a couple paragraphs and say, "Do it this way throughout." Mostly I see my job as standing outside and making general comments in the order of, "Focus on just what the viewpoint character sees in this scene."

I went over John's second and third drafts. The fourth (this one) is John's polish draft. He says he caught a lot of clumsy phrasings but that the book isn't perfect.

That's the reality of every good writer's life. Vergil, who was a genius, was still polishing the Aeneid when he died eleven years after he'd started. He told his literary executor to burn the manuscript if he didn't think it was publishable.

Into the Hinterlands is a pretty darned good book. It'll be a Baen hardcover in September, 2011.

Speaking of things coming out, the paperback of The Legions of Fire, the first book in my new Tor fantasy series, is scheduled for May, 2011. The paperback of What Distant Deeps, the latest book in the RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera series, will be out from Baen in June, 2011.

This isn't ideal timing–three months separation would be better–but a lot of things in life aren't ideal. If this were the worst thing that ever happened, even to me, we'd be back in the Garden of Eden.

In the more distant future, there will be omnitrade omnibuses (that is, books the size of the Baen Collected Hammer's Slammers volumes) of The General and The General Follow-On series. The five out of print paperback volumes of the General series have already been combined as two fat hardcovers (Warlord and Conqueror), which to my surprise are also now out of print.

The omnitrade volumes will contain two original volumes in each: HOPE REBORN will combine General 1&2; HOPE REARMED will be General 3&4; HOPE RENEWED will be General 5 and The Chosen, the first of the General Follow-On series (which is my name for them, but I haven't heard a better one); and finally, HOPE REFORMED will be the remainder of the Follow-On series, The Reformer and The Tyrant.

I wrote the outlines for all of them. Steve Stirling executed the novels from those outlines, with the exception of The Tyrant (which Eric Flint wrote). (Reformer and Tyrant were the two halves of one original outline.)

Combining the last of the General series with The Chosen isn't ideal (there's that word again!) but I didn't see much practical option. And I pulled the titles out of my ear, just as I did with the paperbacks and hardcovers of the General series. (The titles for the Follow-On series actually mean something.)

Hmm. I have to do intros for the four new volumes. Well, in good time.

I'm not a great deal farther in my next Ovid translation project, the Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths from the Metamorphoses. I've run into an amusing problem, though. Quite a lot of a battle of this sort is "A killed B and was in turn killed by C."

The Lapiths are Greek mountaineers; the Centaurs are, well, centaurs: horses with a human head and torso in place of the equine horse and neck. If you were watching a movie of it, you'd know exactly what was going on. When all you have is the characters' names (which Ovid mostly invented, for both groups), it isn't immediately obvious whether it was a Centaur or a Lapith who used the lampstand to dash out the brains of his opponent (and so on).

I'll make sure it's clear in my translation. There are certain fixed points, the characters whom Ovid brought in from pre-existing mythology, like Perithous and Nessus. But it's unexpectedly tricky.

SF SIGNAL has put up a podcast interview with me. As usual, I have no recollection of what I said. The answers will be the same if the questions were the same, but each interviewer has a thrust of his own so they aren't auditory cookie-cutter productions, exactly.

I've been thinking recently about fame, and success, and about writing as a career generally. My agent, Kirby McCauley, had met writer Jerzy Kosinski in 1979, while Kosinski was touring with his new novel, Passion Play.

Passion Play had come out the month before my own first novel, The Dragon Lord. I remember looking at Passion Play and thinking despairingly, "Why on Earth would anybody buy my book, when for only a dollar more they could get this one by Kosinski?" (I had many problems as a new writer. An inflated opinion of my own work was not, however, one of those problems.)

The Dragon Lord is a badly flawed book, but Passion Play isn't Kosinski's best either. Both books were (amusingly) last reprinted in 1998.

But Kosinski's remarkable and powerful first novel, The Painted Bird, was last reprinted in the '90s also. There were many things wrong with Kosinki as a human being, including the fact that he lied about the genesis of The Painted Bird (which is not autobiographical) and that in it he libeled the people who had been responsible for saving his life, but the book itself is a masterpiece. Despite that, it appears to be on the edge of oblivion.

Whereas the contents of Hammer's Slammers, my first book (it came out in April, 1979, six months before The Dragon Lord), have been continuously in print. The latest edition (the Baen omnitrade) came out last year and is selling very well. (Thank you, by the way.)

I don't know what that means. It doesn't mean that I am a more important writer than Jerzy Kosinski, or that Hammer's Slammers is a better book than The Painted Bird. (And incidentally, neither book would be described as a feel-good reading experience.)

You could argue that it means that being dead is bad for a writer's career, but Kosinski's career had pretty well gone down the tubes by the time he committed suicide in 1991. (The two facts are presumably linked.)

I don't believe that anybody in 1979 expected Hammer's Slammers to be regularly reprinted (I didn't) or The Painted Bird to be forgotten by all but specialists. I don't think Kosinski's masterpiece should be forgotten; but that appears to be the case, based on publication history.

The only thing I am pretty sure of is that we all should be careful about making pronouncements about our own importance. In the world's terms, no individual is really important. The quicker we learn that, the less opportunity we will give the world to embarrass us.

Back to a space opera!

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #60

Dear People,

I have a rough plot outline for the next RCN space opera, The Road of Danger. (The title is from a poem by A E Housman.) Whee! A rough plot may not seem very exciting to other people, but it certainly was to me after months of work to get there.

Almost four months, to be precise. I'll refine and expand the plot; then there's the real job of writing the book, but to a considerable degree the rest of the job is mechanical. Somebody else could take what I have now and turn it into a book. The result would be different from what I will do, but there are people who'd like someone else's result better than mine.

I guess the other big news is that Donato's cover for Out of the Waters (the second book in the Elements fantasy series for Tor) is up on the website. It's both a wonderful piece of art and a wonderful cover (which aren't by any means the same thing).

To my amusement, the cover is also a real illustration of the text. I'm one of the few authors I know (actually, I'm the only author whom I've heard say this) who doesn't care if the cover illustrates the book so long as it sells the book to people who will like the contents. Donato's cover will certainly do that, but he also mined my text for elements which he thought would be effective.

They are effective; Donato is a brilliant artist. I am very lucky.

The cover of Into the Hinterlands (now with a little description of the book) is also up; my friend John Lambshead has developed the book from my outline. The credit order is Drake and Lambshead.

Those of you who are familiar with my previous public (and published) statements about name order on novels know that I've been adamant that my name must go second when I did the outline but somebody else wrote the book. I'm not going to discuss the reasons for the change this time, because I become angry every time I think about it.

Nobody but me cares about it. (John is a senior scientist who has published 80 scientific papers. He expected and approves of this result.) I care very much, though, and it depresses the hell out of me.

Worse things happen in wartime.

Speaking of dust jackets, the other new thing on my website involves what is kind of my first book. In 1975 my friend John Squires took a bookbinding course. For my 30th birthday he gave me a volume containing my first six war stories (tear sheets from digest magazines), bound in fabric from one of my fatigue shirts. It was a one-off, making it a very limited edition.

A couple months ago, John figured out how to make dust jackets and sent one. The image of that dj is up at http://david-drake.com/2011/like-the-man-said/.

The '70s were a mixture of good and bad for me. John Squires is one of the unalloyed good things from that decade.

Site statistics show that there aren't a lot of people interested in my translations of Ovid. Still, I become a much better writer of English prose by doing them. I finally finished the Hercules Cycle from the Metamorphoses. It's posted, as is another lyric from the Amores (Book 2, number 14).

I expect my next translation project to be the Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths from the Metamorphoses, another long section. I was startled as I browsed through it to find that it's graphically bloody: Ovid uses Greek household furnishings where a modern spatter film might use a chain saw. (For example, a Lapith stabs a Centaur very vividly in the face with deer horns which had been hung as a hunting trophy.) This sort of description is common in Lucan and Seneca, but I hadn't remembered it from when I read the Metamorphoses some 40 years ago.

I've done a few interviews. Interviewers often go over the same ground, and there's plenty of duplication in these. On the other hand, most interviewers have specialist interests of their own. For an extreme example, one of my recent interviewers wrote a Zombie novel, which gave a unique cast to his questions.

Over the years, a number of readers–usually but not always veterans–have thanked me for what my fiction has done for them while they were in hard places or after they had come through those places. This makes me a little uncomfortable, because I don't think I deserve the thanks.

You see, I wrote the stories for myself. They kept me between the ditches, or at least close enough to the road that I was able to get back on again. I'm really pleased that they help other people who've been in their own version of the same places, but I didn't write for those other people. Gosh, for a lot of years, I didn't even admit that I was writing to help myself.

Recently Christof Harper–a custom knifemaker and a veteran–asked if he could make me a knife, the sort of thing Sgt Scratchard (from Counting the Cost) might have carried. I said sure, but that it wasn't in any way necessary.

Christof mentioned that the knife would be similar to a Randall #2, if I knew what those looked like. As it chanced, I did. A friend of mine in the '60s, a Texan, knew Bo Randall and had both a #1 and a #2. If I could have afforded it, I would have taken a Randall to Viet Nam with me.

I couldn't afford a Randall, of course. I couldn't even afford the mass produced $35 Gerber Mark I which came out at about that time; I carried a Buck General. Even the Buck's cost of $22.50 was something of a strain on the budget.

As it turned out, I didn't need a knife in Viet Nam. I was in an armored unit, and even our M16s were really back-up weapons. All the knife provided was a security blanket, an absolutely last-ditch defense which wouldn't jam and wouldn't run out of ammunition. It had no real purpose except to make me feel better, or anyway to make me feel just a hair less lost and doomed. I wasn't quite alone.

That was damned important.

So now it's 40 years later, and I have a knife which is wholly comparable to the Randall which I couldn't afford back then. There's a picture of it, but this doesn't begin to do justice to the workmanship.

A writer working in the middle of 23 acres doesn't need a fighting knife any more than an interrogator sitting on the loader's hatch of a tank did, behind the M74 co-ax machine gun which had been moved up to a stub mount there.

But the kid who came back to the World in 1971 felt alone in a fashion that folks who haven't been there (wherever the individual there is) can't really imagine. The only things that have really helped that loneliness have been notes from other people who felt and feel the same things; notes, and now this superb knife.

That's damned important.

Given my fans, a number of you reading this probably feel that you're alone. You aren't, no more than I am; but I know very well that that can be the hardest thing in the world to believe at 3 in the morning.

Hang in, people. I'm hanging in also.

–Dave Drake

***

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Holiday Greetings 2010

Happy Holidays

(your choice)

Mistletoe, Nandina, and Flying Pig in a setting of asparagus

From Dave

Newsletter #59

Dear People,

Just as I predicted in Newsletter 58, I'm completely wrung out. Most of that is connected with the one major thing in this newsletter: I completed OUT OF THE WATERS, the second (of four) fantasies in my new Tor series. It's scheduled to come out in July, 2011, with a Donato cover. 

I haven't seen the cover painting, but I believe Donato is using a scene with high cliffs and a sea serpent–a scene which I wrote while thinking about Donato's cover for MISTRESS OF THE CATACOMBS, the fifth book of my Isles fantasy series. Everything in the world really fits together. Sometimes the connections are more obvious than at other times, but they're always present. The musings of Ilna in my Isles series aren't a million miles away from those of her creator in a reflective mood.

I shipped off WATERS on September 17; why am I still exhausted? Well, I did two complete drafts after I finished the rough on September 1; this included keying in the very extensive changes I'd made in holograph on the rough typescript, followed by the less extensive changes I made in holograph on the second draft. I was on the verge of despair after two days of brutal work had only gotten me fifty pages into the 560 page manuscript, but the edits slacked off (generally) after that. The early portion of a book always needs a lot of work, but this time it seemed extreme.

Those of you who know something about the business will realize that the book was scheduled before I finished writing it. This is a token of Tor's confidence in me and for that reason was welcome. On the other hand, it certainly didn't reduce my stress.

Over Halloween I attended the World Fantasy Convention, as I've done more years than not. This is the major professional convention in the SF/fantasy genre. (The world SF con and regional cons–many of which have greater attendance than WFC–are fan/social gatherings.) Everything went fine: my panels were good ones and I didn't embarrass myself as best I recall. (Moses Siregar III put a YouTube video of one of them on his blog so you can judge for yourselves if you want to.)

The reason I go to WFC, however, is to meet the people I do business with; this time including Steve Feldberg of Audible for the first time. Speaking of which, the audio version of WHAT DISTANT DEEPS, my latest RCN (Leary/Mundy) space-opera, is out from Audible right now.

Throughout my career, I've chosen to work for people whom I like rather than with the people who might pay me the most for a particular book. (In the longer term, I think working for people I like has also led to me earning more than if I had gone for short-term income.) Meals and just general chats with the folks I work for were therefore friendly affairs; but four days of face-to-face business contact is still stressful for a guy whose chosen milieu is the deck of a house in the middle of 23 acres with his dogs and a keyboard.

Also in July, 2011, Baen Books is reprinting the paired Tom Kelly thrillers (SKYRIPPER and FORTRESS) as an omnitrade under the combined title LOOSE CANNON. Tom Doherty really liked Tom Kelly; I didn't, not least because Kelly could have been me if things had gone wrong (or anyway, had gone wrong in a different fashion).

Kelly is a very angry man. I'm less angry now than I was in the '80s when I wrote the novels; that said, I can still see Kelly when I look far enough back inside myself. That's a good reason to have refused to write more books in the series when Tom wanted them; and it's an even better reason not to look very deeply inside myself.

The cover is by Dave Seeley. I think he did an excellent job. A mockup of the cover is at http://david-drake.com/2010/loose-cannon/.

It's not ideal to have books coming out from two different publishers in the same month, but I don't think there'll be too much crossover between a new fantasy and a pair of 25-year-old thrillers. (Except for completists, I suppose, if there are Drake completists. Presumably a true completist will buy both with only a slight twinge at the expense.)

What would have been bad is if INTO THE HINTERLANDS, which John Lambshead wrote from my outline, were coming out from Baen in July. Thank goodness, it's a September book. The cover by Bob Eggleton catches the novel's theme of spiritual growth instead of focusing on shoot'em-ups on exotic planets (which would also be a valid description of the book).

Ever since the glory days of John Campbell's _Astounding_, there have been a lot of engineers writing SF; there haven't been nearly as many real scientists. My friend John Lambshead is a world-class scientist (a molecular biologist), and I am delighted with the way his knowledge enlivens my plot.

There are a few new pictures up on the website. Our hound Sam died at age 15 (or so; all our dogs have been rescues). We now have Red, probably 2, and (mostly) a Jack Russell, to keep company with Comet, our old part-sheepdog. Sam was a wonderful dog, but so is Red; and a dog weighing something over 20 pounds is a lot easier to convince to do something than a dog of over 100 pounds is.

While at WFC I visited not only the Columbus Art Museum but the house in which James Thurber lived with his family while he was at Ohio State. This is the setting of _The Night the Bed Fell_, and I found it very evocative.

There's also an example of visual bragging: a picture of me with a pile of roots and the tools with which I ripped them up as the final stage in my land clearing. Every time I get a sufficient pile, I burn them; this was one pile of over a dozen. Land-clearing is darned good whole-body exercise.

I said above that I've gone to most WFCs. That includes the first one, and this was the thirty-sixth. _That_ realization brought me up short.

The first WFC was at a Holiday Inn in Providence, RI, in 1975. My agent, Kirby McCauley, booked the space and told me I had to come: it would be very different from the 1974 worldcon which I'd just experienced (and which was one of the more unpleasant events of my life which did not involve uniforms).

WFC _was_ different: a few hundred people, and fewer of the really unpleasant ones. We shared the hotel with two other conventions: an association of handicapped people, and a legal secretaries' group. (Let me tell you, legal secretaries know how to party.)

I was on a New Voices in Horror panel. I'd been professionally published nine years before; Ramsey Campbell had been published eleven years before; and even the two relative newbies, Karl Wagner and Charlie Grant, had made their first sales seven years back.

I don't know that I've said anything in print about the second one (a disaster in Manhattan; the only time the convention has been held in NYC). I was placed as an afterthought on a panel on heroic fantasy. The stars on the panel were Roland Green and Christopher Stasheff.

I recall quite a bit of the wisdom I was offered at that con. I proceeded in my own fashion; not because I disagreed with what I was being told, but because it was my life. As things turned out, I might reasonably have disagreed as well.

In 2010 I'm one of the seniors at WFC… but I don't _feel_ any different, even when I'm chatting with people about things which I suddenly realize took place before they were born. I'm nervous before panels and extremely nervous before the autographing session–even though now I know that I won't be sitting there with a fixed smile as people bustle past with books for others to sign. (The organizers actually set me at a solo end table because they didn't want my line to get in the way of other writers. Friends brought over tables to join mine, thank goodness.)

I'm still me, still the scared kid who in his heart expects people to make a point of insulting him (as goodness knows happened often enough in the '70s). If you were there and met me, I hope I was courteous; I really try to be. But whatever I may have said or done, remember you weren't seeing a senior writer/editor/publisher (I've been all those things); it was the kid from Dubuque who writes as well as he can.

–Dave Drake

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Newsletter #58

Dear People,

I'm completely wrung out, but I'm going to be even more exhausted soon. I finished the rough draft of OUT OF THE WATERS, the second fantasy in the new Tor series at 154,384 words and have just completed making manuscript changes in my hardcopy mss. 

Anything you do with a book that long takes a lot of time and effort. The next stage is to key in those myriad changes. This is truly a brutal job, and the fact that I've done in many times only means that I know what it's going to feel like for the next couple weeks. (For you fellow pedants, a myriad is 10,000. And since my first stage changes involve in the order of 5-10% of the rough draft wordage, I will literally be keying in a myriad changes.)

OUT OF THE WATERS wasn't one of my working titles. The Tor sales force decided that because the series title is The Books of the Elements, I should have the word 'water' in this title as 'fire' was in the first.

If the sales force requested I pose in a pink tutu for the jacket photo, I would be calling friends who know something about ballet. (Hmm: no, I would be calling the friend who is an expert seamstress, because I really doubt I'm going to find an off-the-shelf tutu that would fit me.) Anyway, I came up with a number of 'water' titles and they picked the one that best satisfied them.

Stacy, the truly wonderful editor who handles my liaison with Tor, suggested DOWN TO EARTH for the third book. That works for me.

I don't know if WATERS is any good. I'm laughing frequently as I read it, but I'm not sure that most of the humor will appeal to anybody but veterans and people who can appreciate the literary minutiae which two of the scholarly characters use to center themselves in a crisis. (And I don't expect the two categories will be laughing at the same jokes. Though I'm a veteran who used to carry Horace in the cargo pocket of my fatigues.) It's got some good stuff in it; and I sure hope that other people will like it.

Incidentally, it's 30K words longer than Tor needed to be and at least 15K longer than I originally intended. I think readers gain by the expansion, but it's been a darned heavy rock I've rolled uphill for the last long while.

We're (my wife Jo and I are) back from a wonderful and relaxing week in England. More precisely, a week in Kent. One of the wonderful things about Southeastern England is that you could spend much longer than the time we had making day-trips to amazing and historical places.

We got lots of pictures, a few of which will be on the website by the time this goes out. I have something of a travelogue, but I need to personalize it before I put it up. I'll mention only one thing here: I've now seen the Romney Marshes and Dymchurch, a center of smuggling during the Eighteenth century and the setting of the Dr Syn novels by A Russell Thorndike–written in the '30s but which I read in the '70s.

These are remarkable books, and in some ways remarkably good. The visit has caused me to start rereading the series and to begin thinking about the RCN novel which I hope to plot as soon as I've put WATERS to bed. There's so much neat stuff in the world, and it's all grist for a writer's mill!

The latest RCN space opera, WHAT DISTANT DEEPS, has been in my hands for several weeks and will probably be in stores by the time you see this. Steve Hickman's cover is lovely. There is foiling, but the foil used isn't as striking as some versions. (It's apparently the printer's proprietary foil rather than the foil Jennie [designer and friend] and Steve [artist and friend] wanted.) I cannot advise you to buy DEEPS for the foiling, though of course I hope you'll buy it anyway.

And the paperback of IN THE STORMY RED SKY, the immediately previous RCN space opera, is certainly out. I'm taking a lot of pleasure in the series and indeed in writing generally. Varying what I write (at present between fantasy and space opera) keeps me from becoming either stale or bored.

I mention that I'm having fun with what I'm doing in part because I turn 65 on September 24 (2010). Judging from the mail and phone calls (despite being on a no-call list!) I'm getting, most people my age are retiring and desperately afraid of their medical situation.

I like what I'm doing. Besides, writing has kept me (more or less) between the ditches since I got back to the World in 1971. I'm nowhere near the danger to myself and those with whom I come in contact that I was at one time, but it still isn't a system that I'm in a hurry to change.

And I'm in good physical shape for a man of my age in a sedentary occupation. For the past couple years now, I've been clearing brush on our 23-acre yard. This involves cutting the trunks/stems with an axe or heavy loppers; grinding the small stuff up in a (5-horse) chipper/shredder and cutting the heavier pieces to firewood length with a collapsible buck-saw; and then grubbing out the roots with a pick-mattock.

The emphasis on hand tools (the chipper/shredder is the exception) is for two reasons. First, I hate and fear power tools. Second and more important, I'm doing this not to clear the property (though that's a useful byproduct) but to keep fit. Believe me, it works.

I'm not pretending I'm not old: I am old. But you don't have to give up and let yourself go physically to hell just because you (like me) make your living in front of a computer.

I replaced my back-up motorcycle, a 2000 Suzuki GS500E with a 2009 Suzuki GS500F. The main difference between the two is that the new one has 42K fewer miles on it. The new one also has a fairing (which I figure is a wash–greater weight against better streamlining–for my usage, commuting) and a significantly larger gas tank (a real advantage). There's a picture of me with it in the showroom on the website.

WUNC-FM, the flagship public radio station in the state, asked Baen Books to provide a writer who could join a panel on space with a philosopher and the head of the NC Space Initiative. The writer turned out to be me. This didn't strike me as any big deal (I've been on lots of panels in my lifetime), and at some level I wondered if anybody was listening. (It aired at noon on a 100KW station that covers the whole center of the state, so intellectually I knew that somebody was listening.)

What I didn't expect is that friends who didn't know I was going to be on the air (I didn't bother to tell anybody) would be excited to hear me. I guess it was a special case of the fact that non-writers think it's a bigger deal that I am a writer than it is to me.

It went all right. The link is at http://wunc.org/tsot/archive/The_Final_Frontier.mp3/view , but my portion starts at the 40+ minute mark.

Finally, an odd datum which nonetheless brings up a useful point. I got an email through Baen Books from a guy who claimed to have read most of my books. I had gratuitously and unrealistically added  homosexuality to (one of the RCN novels) in order to be Politically Correct, however. Therefore he would never read anything of mine again.

Given that some of the characters in my stories (as in my life) for as far back as 1974 have been gay, I suspect his claim to have read a lot my stuff to be as dishonest as the burden of his comment is silly. (Mind, other characters in my stories are likely to refer to the gay ones as queers, which I don't think counts as Politically Correct.)

But there's a deeper implication, which is that writers slant their fiction to suit their market (which starts out being their editor, note). Some writers probably do; I don't.

Now–I make decisions based on what I think will sell. That may well change what I write, but it won't change how I write it. That is, some years ago I had a notion for an adventure story set in Africa. I pitched it to Tom Doherty, who explained that historically, books set in Africa didn't sell well. I therefore wrote something else. (The Lord of the Isles, as it turned out.)

Furthermore, I made the conscious decision that the major villains in my fantasy novels were going to be non-human. The field after the climactic battle was going to have piles of giant rats, insects, zombies, or whatever; but not human beings. I've described tens of thousands of human corpses in the past, but I wasn't going to do that in my new fantasies.

I don't think that makes me PC, though. As a matter of fact, that accusation still makes me giggle.

Now, to start keying in the holographic edits. Forward the Light Brigade….

–Dave Drake

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Greetings from England

August 7, 2010: Hello from Rainham-- Dave is in Kent, seeing neat stuff. He hopes to get a newsletter off next month--after the novel is done. --Dave