DRAKE NEWSLETTER #107: January 4, 2019
Dear People,
I’m at work on To Clear Away the Shadows. I’ve got a good chunk (20 texts which average over a thousand each), but it sure isn’t racing along. Getting back on track after the bike wreck hasn’t been easy, though I’m doing better since I’ve been able to start work properly. I use the writing to settle me, but I needed to be more nearly settled to start writing.
It’s good to be successful, but there are complications. Audible queried my agent about the audio rights to ‘Shadow’. I told Kay they were probably asking about a recent Dave Weber book with Shadow in the title.
No. In fact they were talking about To Clear Away the Shadows. I will happily sell them audio rights, but I’d sooner they waited until I’d finished the darned book.
I then found that Baen has already scheduled the book, which is probably what spurred Audible to query me. Nobody at Baen had said a word to me about scheduling or when I was likely to turn the book in. I checked and learned they were expecting it to come in toward the end of the year (2018). I said that wasn’t going to happen and went back to writing.
The thing is, I’m generally very steady–but I’m not fast. I can’t simply blast a book out in four weeks. If I tried, the result would probably be very poor, but it just wasn’t going to happen. Some of my books may not be as polished as I wish they were, but I will not consciously turn out crap–which is what would come of rushing one out that way.
I suspect that isn’t what my readers want me to do either, but that doesn’t matter. If I put my name on it, it’s as good as I think I can make it. I work hard, but pressing me to write fast just makes me more despairing than I was to begin with. That isn’t a direction I think I ought to go in.
I finally called Toni, the Baen publisher. She said there wasn’t a problem at all: I should turn in the book when it was done to my satisfaction.
This was a great weight off my mind. I really don’t like to fail and to let people down. In this case I hadn’t been consulted so I could reasonably have claimed that it wasn’t my fault, but this is a world in which an awful lot of folks immediately shout, “It wasn’t my fault!” when things go wrong. I don’t want to be another of those people.
So: I’m working as fast as I can, consistent with my own standards of quality. This is a different sort of book from my usual, and I may fall on my face trying to do things in a different way. But if I fail, it won’t be because I didn’t try.
The Storm is out from Baen. This is the second book in the Time of Heroes series (Toni wanted a series title and that’s what I came up with). You can call it a fantasy, or at least it has a fantasy feel. Compare it with the Dying Earth series by Jack Vance: the original stories from the ’50s were SF, but when Vance resumed with the Cugel the Clever stories in the same milieu, they were fantasy. This appeared to me to be a distinction without a difference.
Likewise The Storm. It would read the same if it were a fantasy: but just for the record, the author considers it SF.
The cover is another by Todd Lockwood. It’s completely different from his painting for The Spark, but again it’s an entrancing piece of work and accurately puts across the feel of the book.
My primary transportation is a motorcycle; actually, one of two motorcycles, day and day. This makes my daily run into town for the mail a more eventful process than it would be in a car. That’s at least part of the reason that I do it. I don’t need a lot of excitement in my life (I had a period of that in the army and don’t want to repeat it), but it appears that I do need some.
A few days ago I stopped at the bank to deposit a check. I was on the Yamaha SR400. When I came out, I was unable to restart the bike. I kicked multiple times, then moved the bike to a flatter location in the lot and kicked some more with the same lack of effect.
A black man of 40 or so came over and we chatted about the bike. He’d had the original version years ago (an SR500) and had rebuilt it in his living room. “That was before you were married?” I guessed. He laughed hard and agreed.
He got down on the ground and watched from below as I kicked further, then asked my permission to try kicking himself. “Be my guest.” We didn’t know one another from Adam. He was educated and had a US (not Caribbean) accent; and he probably knew about the same about me.
He suggested that I put her up on the center stand. I did. I got life on the first kick; then it started on the second. (I now know that sometimes the side-stand switch may stick; I’ll try to have my mechanic disconnect that particular safety.) We shook hands and I rode off.
Note that this had nothing to do with the SR400 not having an electric starter. It happened to me once on a Kawasaki Concours, I now realize.
The resolution wasn’t exactly a surprise. Bikers are an out-group, and (like veterans) there’s a tendency for one to help another of the group, even a stranger. Certainly I’d have done the same for him and have done the same for others in a similar case.
But it made me feel good to reflect on that: not just because the fellow who stopped was a nice guy, but in the realization that I’m a nice guy too under most circumstances.
I basically don’t like myself very much. The person I was in Nam wasn’t a good person, and for a long time that person was still wearing my skin and living in my head. I’m not a saint now and I can’t undo things that I’ve done, but I can honestly say that on most days I don’t make the world a worse place by being in it.
That’s a good thing to reflect on as 2018 ends. None of my close friends died this year. I had some problems as a result of the bike wreck, but I’m getting through them and I believe that that I behaved about as well as I could have when things went wrong.
Happy 2019, everybody. And make an effort not to make the world a worse place. Be courteous and polite as a reflex; and when shit happens, just hunker down and slog on through it. It’s not an inspiring goal, but if everybody did it, we’d all be better off.
All best,
Dave
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