NEWSLETTER #104: June 27, 2018
Dear People,
For once, the big news hasn’t anything to do with writing. On May 9 I pulled up behind an old Jeep Cherokee at a traffic light in Carrboro. I was on my way home from my post office box, a trip I’ve made most weekdays for the 25 years we’ve lived in the current house. I was on the GS500F.
There was a long shriek of brakes behind me, concluding with an extremely loud BANG! as what turned out to be a 2013 Chevy Equinox hit me, followed shortly by a lesser bang as the bike was flung into the back of the Jeep. I’m not aware of being unconscious, but my next memory is of kicking my legs to get free of the bike. I don’t recall hitting the ground, though obviously I did. And the reason I felt trapped is that the bike was lying on my lower right leg, but I wasn’t aware of that either.
As soon as I got clear of the bike, I hopped to my feet, took off my helmet, and called to the considerable number of spectators, “I’m all right!” I suppose that was magical thinking, but the fact doesn’t bother me. I tried to pick up the bike and get it out of the road. That was crazy as it was squished, but I was trying to deal with things logically. (Logic doesn’t help if you start from an absurd premise.)
Lots of people were telling me what to do. Mostly this amounted to lie down on the grass and wait for the ambulance to take me to the ER. I had no intention of seeing a doctor, let alone a hospital. I wanted to get home.
Two police cars arrived shortly. (The station was within three blocks of the scene.) One of the cops told me I was really lucky. I replied that I didn’t think I’d ever count a day in which the bike I was on was crushed between a pair of SUVs as a really lucky one.
The girl driving the Chevy had moved it twenty feet back. (One of the spectators said that until she did, he hadn’t realized there was a bike involved. I guess it’s possible that I was under the overhangs of the two SUVs, but I’m not aware of that.)
The girl, a plump black of 21, was really sorry. She’d bought the car recently and the brakes had always been ‘funny’. From the sound as it sped toward me, I suspect the brake pads were worn down to the backing plates and I was hearing steel rubbing steel. For what it’s worth, it sounded exactly like incoming–right down to the bang at the end. There’s nothing for the guy in the impact area to do about either one.
A 65-year-old retired kindergarten teacher was driving the Cherokee. She was really freaked. When she got out of her car, she saw my leg waving in the air and thought she’d run over me. I kept telling her that I was fine and that she’d been even more innocent than I was, but it still upset her badly. (The next day I dropped by the place she volunteered–there was a sticker on the Jeep door–to reassure her.)
She offered me the water bottle she had in the car. I drained it: my mouth was really dry.
My wife was 30 miles away with a friend. They came and picked me up. I called my mechanic to pick up the GS500.
The bike had compressed to absorb the impact of a car moving at about 20 miles and hour, squeezing the bike into the SUV in front. Because I was stopped, I simply fell over instead of being skidded across the pavement. Other than falling onto the street (which I don’t remember), my body didn’t hit anything hard.
There were minor glitches over the next few weeks, but no physical injuries showed themselves. I had a touch on tendonitis in my lower right leg from levering the bike off it, but I regularly ache as badly after the heavy yard work I do. All the data the girl gave the cops–address, phone number, and insurance coverage–was wrong (she’d recently gotten married), but they were able to track her down, and she had insurance.
I wear top-end protective gear, an Arai helmet and a jacket from First Gear. That’s at least part of the reason things weren’t worse than they were. My shoulder hit the pavement, but at no point did I feel the impact. (I have a new helmet and jacket now.)
Things could have been a great deal worse. Similarly, I could’ve come back from Nam in a box. Neither of those things happened. That’s really all there is to say.
I continue to gather notes toward a plot for the next space opera in the RCN universe. The wreck didn’t improve my focus; but I’ll get there if I don’t die first.
So that’s the big news.
When I started working for the Town of Chapel Hill, WCHL-AM radio was a major part of the community and had a reporter at Board of Alderman meetings. WCHL is still there, and with changes in technology now has a local news website. A freelancer for the site (he’s a social worker in his day job) interviewed me recently. The result has come out here.
I will make only one comment on this very respectful article: I had gotten a haircut only a week before the guy came by. If he’d arrived a couple months later, it’s unlikely that he would have chosen the adjective ‘cropped’ for my hair.
Eugene Olson, the first freelance writer I ever got to know, just died at 83. He was my 11th grade English teacher, but he wrote on the side under the pen name Brad Steiger. Mr Olson was a very inspiring teacher. He also taught a one-semester creative writing course. I took the course but I don’t think it had much to do with my becoming a full-time writer.
What was crucial to that was the fact of Mr Olson himself. He proved to me that a kid from Iowa–he was from Decorah and only ten years my senior–could make it as a freelance writer. Without his example, I wouldn’t have attempted it myself.
After I knew Mr Olson, he went in directions I wouldn’t want to follow. If you’re into Forteana, you know that in the ’60s and ’70s Brad Steiger was a byword for phony sensation, and he also made decisions in his personal life which distressed me. That doesn’t take anything away from what Mr Olson taught in high school.
On Mother’s Day we got together with Jonathan and his family. There’s a new Three Drakes picture. I keep shrinking in fact as well as by comparison. Being something of a classicist, this puts me in mind of Tithonous.
Tristan is already at fifteen an impressive athlete and just competed in his first body-building contest. He didn’t get this from his grandfather. (Either one of us, come to think.)
I did an unexpected piece of writing recently. A professor from Minnesota, who in the ’70s was a high school fan of Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane series, has a contract from an academic publisher to do a book on that series. He asked me to do a short preface for the book and I did.
The job took me back to the ’70s when everything looked different. The world–our world and the speculative fiction world–was changing rapidly. Fiction magazines still existed and new ones were being started. Heroic fantasy was booming, Kirby McCauley was starting World Fantasy Con, and the future was bright.
I wrote about Karl starting out as a writer and trying to make a living. I kept the focus on him, not on me or on Karl’s interactions with me; nonetheless the little essay wound up being a pretty good picture of how the period felt from the inside. To that degree it’s about me and about all of us trying to write fifty years ago.
It was a rough time in a lot of ways (even, I suppose, for folks who hadn’t just gotten back from Nam), but there was hope and a great deal of good in the F/SF field then. One of those good things was the 1973 publication of Worse Things Waiting, a collection of fantasy stories by Manly Wade Wellman illustrated by Lee Brown Coye.
A near facsimile in paperback of the original Carcosa publication has just come out from Shadow Ridge Press at 20 bucks a copy. All the profits go to Lee’s family. Jim Groce and I, the surviving partners in Carcosa, decided they should have our share also. (Karl Wagner during his lifetime handled payments to Lee, and I’m afraid that matters may not have been done as I would have wished.)
Todd Lockwood did the art for The Storm as he did for The Spark, the previous book in the Time of Heroes series. This art catches the feel of what I described–which is explicitly not part of the sidereal universe.
I think it’s a wonderful job–and a perfect illustration of why I don’t tell artists what to paint on my covers (even when they call me to ask). My imagination isn’t visual the way a graphic artist’s is. I wouldn’t have come up with anything like what Todd did, let alone anything as good.
The book is due out from Baen in January, 2019. I’m very lucky.
Go do positive things, people. And try not to rear-end motorcycles: the life you save may be my own.
–Dave Drake