Newsletter #109

DRAKE NEWS: May 1, 2019

Dear People,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, thoughtfully–

Dave Drake

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