Newsletter #113

Dear People,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And be nice to other folks.

All best,
–Dave Drake

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