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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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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The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, Volume 3. Hammer’s Slammers Series. 2007, San Francisco, CA: Night Shade Books. 500 p. 1892389800. $35.00.
————– Limited ed. 2007, San Francisco, CA: Night Shade Books. 500 p. 1892389819. $60.00.
————– 2010, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 738 p. 9781439133965. $12.00

Foof. I _did_ finish IN THE STORMY RED SKY, the latest RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, as I said in #45 that I hoped to do soon. Usually by the time I’m three-quarters of the way through the rough draft, I start to come out of the Slough of Despond (“This book is crap. People would find a phone book more interesting. My career is doomed.”) This book was more of a stretch than most, and it depressed me more and longer than most do. 

But I finished it anyway. The friends who’ve read the final all say that it’s one of my best (and no, they don’t always say that). I hope they’re right; but regardless, I’m busy plotting the new Tor fantasy series (about which more below).

Steve Hickman’s sketch for the cover of SKY is up. Gee, I’m lucky in the art my publishers give me!

In #45 I mentioned that I needed to do oral introductions for the Audible audio downloads of the RCN series. Having now completed the first one, I know that the business is much more difficult than it seems to me that it should be.

Writing the pieces is tricky but rather fun. Audible asked me to provide a bit of unique information in each one. I’ve been doing that, and in the course of writing them I’ve learned new things about my own work.

Recording the intros without excessive background noise is a big problem, though. A worse problem for me is that the whole business makes me very uncomfortable. I’m capable of effective public speaking (in high school, I got a One at state level in Extemporaneous Speaking), but it sure isn’t my idea of a good time.

By now I’ve written three more of the five intros I need, but I haven’t yet called my friend with the equipment to record them. Soon, soon. I hope.

Easton Press has sent me copies of their edition of WHEN THE TIDE RISES. It’s leather-bound with gold embossing and gold page edgings. Each volume has my original signature and a copy of the certificate of limitation. There’s a new color frontispiece which is striking and phallic. Strikingly phallic, in fact.

I don’t have a clue as to what this edition costs. I hope it’s a success for Easton, as they’ve treated me in a very professional manner.

I have various books coming out from November, 2008, through April, 2009. Since I went over them in #45, I don’t need to repeat myself here.

The pb of my latest Baen short story collection, OTHER TIMES THAN PEACE, is in my hands and should be in stores momentarily. (And maybe is in stores now.)

Which brings me to the pb of BALEFIRES, my fantasy/horror collection from Night Shade. I think it may be their first mass market edition; or anyway, it will be when it finally appears. Jeremy says that will be realsoonnow.

I’m looking forward to seeing it. I’m proud of both the book and the stories included in it.

There are also a couple pieces of news which aren’t about me but which please me a lot. BREAKFAST IN THE RUINS by my friend Barry Malzberg has won the Locus Award for the best related book in the SF field. I hope it will shortly win the Hugo also. It’s a wonderful, funny, provoking, and deeply educational work.

And THE BOOKS OF THE WARS, an omnibus by Mark Geston, will be out as a Baen pb in March, 2009, with a great Alan Pollack cover. These books had an enormous impact on me, in Viet Nam and in the difficult years after I came back to the World. I recommend the omnibus highly.

I mentioned that I’m plotting my new Tor fantasy series. More accurately, I’m taking notes toward a plot. Right now, I’ve just completed reading Valerius Maximus and excerpting bits which I think may be useful in this novel or later novels.

As an example of what I mean: Page 59: Seated in a shrine, an aunt holds a marriage divination for her niece who is standing behind her. They are waiting for a word which will give them direction.

When I read that bit, I started thinking about Alphena, the teen-aged girl I’m planning to use as a viewpoint character. Instead of an aunt, what if her stepmother Hedia, a very worldly woman in her early Twenties, was conducting the divination? And what if the voice they hear in the sanctuary says something really dire? What specifically would that prophecy be?

As I say, these are notes toward a plot. They spring directly from original sources, though. It’s a lot of fun, but believe me it wouldn’t happen without concentrated effort on my part also.

This isn’t my first attempt at writing the series. Back in 1995 I created 4,000 words of plot notes, but when I looked at them (immediately after I shipped off SKY) I found them less useful than I’d hoped. I’m much more experienced at plotting a complex series now than I was all those years ago, of course, but there’s another factor which I think is even more important. In 1995 I wasn’t really plotting a novel: I was creating a show piece to convince publishers who hadn’t worked with me in the past that I was capable of writing epic fantasies.

I failed miserably in my aim. No new publisher would touch me.

Instead, Tom Doherty encouraged me to do LORD OF THE ISLES on a pre-existing Tor contract. He got behind the book and then behind the Isles series. As a result, I have a reputation now as a fantasy writer.

When Tom called to chat the other day, I thanked him for having given me that chance. He insisted it wasn’t a big thing: it had been a good business decision for Tor.

Yes, it was–after the fact. Before the fact, Tom was the only publisher who was able to see that. I’m lucky, and the whole SF field is lucky, that Tom Doherty is head of Tor Books.

Life is a lot easier with friends to help. I hope all of you have something like the kind of support that helps me get through each day.

–Dave Drake

***
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Baen Books sent me copies of WHEN THE TIDE RISES just before newsletter 43 came out, so by now it’s thoroughly on sale. This is the latest RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, and it’s a lovely production.

The splendid Steve Hickman painting is complemented by a transparent foil imprinted with a hologram, here showing the actual holographic display of the story. Steve and the cover designer, my friend Jennie Faries, championed the process, and Toni Weisskopf, the Baen publisher, gave it a shot. 

The result was a triumphant success. My bank manager was going through a Barnes and Noble with his four-year-old son. The boy stopped, entranced by the “really cool book!” His father realized he knew the author, which didn’t impress the four-year-old nearly as much as the hologram did.

So go to your local bookstore and look at the cover. Hold it to the light and play with the hologram. The on-line image, though great in itself, can’t give you the full effect.

I haven’t said anything about the contents, have I? A number of people have told me that TIDE is my best book. Personally, I’d say there were a couple scenes in the previous RCN novel, SOME GOLDEN HARBOR, that would be difficult to top. (HARBOR is available in pb, now. Feel free to make your own comparison test.)

It isn’t that a writer is necessarily a bad judge of his/her own work, but the writer is likely to care about different things than the normal reader does. My personal favorite of the Isles series was the fifth book, GODDESS OF THE ICE REALM, but folks who’ve written me would generally pick the third, SERVANT OF THE DRAGON. Again, I’d be delighted if y’all went out and bought the whole set to decide for yourselves. Mostly, though, I mention it to show that tastes differ, and the writer’s tastes are likely to differ from a reader’s.

There is going to be an Easton Press signed, leather-bound, edition of Tide, by the way. This is really very nice, but I’ll bet they won’t have a hologram inlay on the leather.

Speaking of the Isles fantasies, the ninth and final volume of the series, THE GODS RETURN, should be out from Tor in November, 2008. (I’ve gone over the copy-edited manuscript but I haven’t seen proofs yet.). I am amazingly lucky with my covers.

Simultaneously, THE MIRROR OF WORLDS, the eighth Isles fantasy, will be released in pb. The final three books of the series really are a trilogy, so the situations set up in THE FORTRESS OF GLASS are resolved in the two books following. The good guys win and things work out pretty reasonably well for the individuals. In odd ways.

Last I heard, the pb of BALEFIRES, my fantasy/horror collection from Night Shade, was to come out this spring. I figure I’ll learn it’s out when somebody sends me a copy to sign… which could be this afternoon or some time in late July. My bet would be July, but we’ll see. Update: I’ve just been told the pb will be out around May 15. Keep your fingers crossed.

I’m not disturbed, by the way. We at Carcosa (I was a partner) missed our first pub date by a year. Small press publishing is darned hard.

Returning to Baen for a moment, the pb of my (mostly military) collection OTHER TIMES THAN PEACE is scheduled for August, 2008. The cover was actually from Kurt Miller’s portfolio. Jim Baen had him modify the existing painting by adding the alien’s head. Doggone, I miss Jim.

The first hardcover Belisarius volume, THUNDER AT DAWN, is scheduled for September, 2008, release from Baen. I plotted the series as three novels. Eric Flint, who very skillfully wrote them, has a more diffuse style than mine. (Just about everybody has a more diffuse style than mine, which is a problem for me.) The three outlines became six (longish) novels.

Now Baen is bringing the series back in three fat hard hardcovers under the titles I came up with before I actually wrote the outlines. I find that rather funny.

The main thing that’s been happening since the most recent newsletter is, of course, that I’m working on the next RCN novel–IN THE STORMY RED SKY. I’m just under 60K in draft, which is more than far enough for me to be convinced that it’s all complete crap, boring and pointless.

Well, you’ve heard that before. And intellectually, I know that the craftsmanship of my work over the most recent ten years is higher than that of the decade before that–and the decade before that, right back to 1966. I don’t think SKY will embarrass me, but right now I’m just charging ahead in the hope that the guy who made the plan knew what he was doing. The technique didn’t work out real well in Viet Nam in 1970, but this time I wrote the plot.

Barry Malzberg’s sharply written, idiosyncratic view of SF, BREAKFAST IN THE RUINS, is up for a Hugo (for Best Related Book, I believe). It’s a brilliant work. If you’re eligible to vote for it, do so. (I’ll come back to that a little later on.)

Continuing on the subject of books which I’ve prodded Baen into doing, THE BOOKS OF THE WARS by Mark Geston will collect three novels (LORDS OF THE STARSHIP, OUT OF THE MOUTH OF THE DRAGON and THE SIEGE OF WONDER) which blew me away when I was starting to write.

I’ve been rereading them in preparation for doing an introduction to the omnibus, and they’ve amazed me all over again. Geston is a little younger than me, so LORDS was written when he was twenty. I’m not surprised that a twenty-year-old can be erudite (I was amazed at the erudition of my CODEX, written when I was about that age; it isn’t a good story, but it certainly was erudite). I _am_ surprised at Geston’s sophistication, though.

The omnibus is slotted for April, 2009. Look forward to it. Join me in amazement.

Mostly I’ve been working hard on SKY, but I do have another of Ovid’s lyrics up. Even if you’re not interested in urbane wit (these aren’t love poems in any real sense), take a look at the concluding images contrasting the deaths of a soldier or a merchant with that of a lover. Ovid is as good a craftsman as you’ll find, a writer from whom any other writer can learn.

There are also some pictures from (the first) Omegacon up. It was good chatting at length with Ben Bova, who bought three stories (including NATION WITHOUT WALLS) from me at ANALOG, and bought MEN LIKE US for OMNI. The folks running the con were nice people, but they would have to improve a great deal to be described as disorganized.

Maybe next year will be better. I hope any of you who attend will let me know.

I said I was going to talk more about the Hugos. There’s been discussion on Baen’s Bar about the fact that Baen Books gets shorted for awards though the books themselves are successful, and that this is unfair. If more Baen fans (and many of the Barflies are rabid Baen fans) would buy (at least) supporting memberships to Worldcon and vote, this would change.

I had to think about that. I agree in principle, and certainly I would like an award, but–and this is a big but–I don’t as a matter of faith believe that it matters. The books matter, the awards don’t.

I emphasize that this is faith with me, not reality: awards are a quick guide to the ignorant, for example to Hollywood types looking for properties to buy for large sums of money. In that commercial sense, it would be good to have awards.

In former years, awards could delude publishers into spending large sums of money on books which very few people would buy. I know writers whose books (in the early ’80s) sold about the same as (or a little less well than) mine did, but who were paid five times as much. That’s changed since publishing computerized. In the long term this worked to my advantage, since my books were commercial successes whereas theirs were disasters. The few of those cachet writers who are still writing are doing so for much lower advances than I now get. At the time it galled me, but not enough for me to go after awards.

Instead, I decided to believe that awards didn’t matter, knowing intellectually that my belief was in part false. It served me pretty well, though; and I can’t join the chorus on the Bar begging folks to go out and vote for Hugos.

Nonetheless I will mention that my collection BALEFIRES is eligible for a World Fantasy Award. The stories in it were largely written back when I thought that some day I might win an award but never dreamed of being a commercially successful writer. It therefore wouldn’t be completely inconsistent if I said that if BALEFIRES got on the WFA short list, I would be happy about the fact.

Pretty please?

–Dave Drake

***
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For a moment I thought was going to start somewhere else, but no: the big news this time is still that I’ve finished the plot for the next RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera and expect to begin writing very soon. My working title is IN THE STORMY RED SKY, but that may change. Possibly to CRUISER CAPTAIN. I’ll run options by my demon support staff soon. 

The plot comes to a hair over 7K words, by the way–a middling length and I hope the Golden Mean for my purposes. I’m continually tinkering with a balance between time spent plotting and the actual writing. There isn’t really a correct answer–or an incorrect one, if you want to put it that way. I’ve always succeeded, after all. But it’s something to worry about, which I seem to require.

I created this plot from three incidents which took place in the period 215-210 BC. I took all of them from the same few books of Polybius, but they were unconnected and geographically separated. I’d never built a plot in quite that fashion before. Though I don’t think anybody could tell from the outside, there’s always variation in the way I work even on superficially similar books. I don’t do that consciously, but an awful lot of my writing goes on at a subconscious level. Maybe it helps to keep my stories fresh.

The other major thing that occurred recently is that my wife Jo and I had dinner with son Jonathan (whose birthday it was), daughter-in-law April, and grandson Tristan (whose birthday was the next day). When were returning home, a drunk in a 1979 Ford F-150 pickup crossed the centerline and hit us.

We’re fine, and Jo will have a new Ford Fusion soon (we’d bought this one in October, 2007). Problems that go away when you throw money at them aren’t real problems (if you have the money). And by the way, I can’t speak too highly of the way the Fusion behaves in a collision with a much bigger vehicle.

The driver blew .25 on the Breathalyzer. This at 6:30 PM on a Thursday evening. White Trash isn’t just a term of abuse in rural North Carolina.

Jonathan picked us up and brought us home, commenting that if we’d been killed it would’ve made his birthday really memorable. He’s his father’s son.

Speaking of which, there’s a new picture of three Drake generations up. Tristan continues to be cute. Jonathan continues to be big. I continue to be old.

I also finished my translation of the Calydonian Boar episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I’ve been talking about doing this for several years, so it’s about time. (Well, actually, I was talking about the Erymanthian Boar, which doesn’t appear in Ovid. For a full explanation, see Newsletter 42.)

I do these translations because I take pleasure in them, but I gain a great deal from the necessarily close readings of the work of a master craftsman. Ovid had several problems here which may not be obvious to a modern reader. Because the episode was one of the best-known Greek myths, many communities claimed that a local hero was a member of the hunting party. (The crew of the Argo is a similar instance.)

Thus Ovid had important heroes like Theseus and Jason to deal with, but they couldn’t be allowed to kill the giant boar or to be killed/seriously injured themselves. It’s very hard to write interestingly about things that the reader knows aren’t important.

Furthermore, Ovid has to deal with over a dozen named characters, all doing more or less the same thing in a brief compass. This is enormously difficult to do well. For examples of it being done badly, read the Walterius, a Dark Age epic, or great deal of what passes for modern adventure fiction. (The Walterius has one good scene. Unfortunately, it’s repeated twelve times.)

Ovid succeeds, here and elsewhere in the Metamorphoses. He’s a wonderful model for a writer who may (for example) have to describe six combat cars overrunning an enemy camp.

There are two new FAQ answers up on the website, discussing cover art and writing. Mentioning the FAQs reminds me that sometimes a question will spark musings which wind up as a little essay for David Hartwell’s NY Review of SF. (The cover art question did.) It might be worth putting those essays somewhere on my site also.

The paperback of BALEFIRES, my fantasy/horror collection, will be out from Night Shade this Spring. (They say March, but they said November for HS3–volume three of THE COMPLETE HAMMER’S SLAMMERS.) The cover painting by David Palumbo is up on the news page. Jim Baen always emphasized to me that a cover should have a strong central image–but read my answer to the FAQ on cover art.

By the way, HS3 is out now. It’s another lovely book. I was a small press publisher myself (a partner in Carcosa) and we missed our first release date by a year. I know what it’s like.

THE GODS RETURN, the ninth and final book of the Isles fantasy series, will be a Tor hardcover in November, 2008. Donato is doing the cover again. (He told me at World Fantasy Con that he thought he owed me another with lots of figures. Given the amazing quality of all the covers he’s done for me, he doesn’t owe me a darned thing.) I’ll put it up when I have it.

The pb of SOME GOLDEN HARBOR, the fifth RCN space opera, is out now with the same Steve Hickman cover as the hc. I’m amazingly fortunate in my covers.

Hmm. I’m amazingly fortunate in life. I’ll get back to that.

When BREAKFAST IN THE RUINS by my friend Barry Malzberg came out as a Baen trade paperback, I mentioned that it was a unique and excellent blend of history, biography (including autobiography) and opinion by a man who lives (as I do) in the world of science fiction. That continues to be true.

The book is eligible for a Hugo. If you have a voting membership to the World SF Con, please nominate BREAKFAST IN THE RUINS. You will not find a better, or better written, book on the cultures of SF and of professional writing.

Sometimes good fortune doesn’t look like that at the time. Being drafted out of law school screwed up both me and my life beyond anything I could imagine before it happened. The decent kid I was before my tour in Viet Nam and Cambodia was gone, just as dead as if he’d stepped in front of a truck.

I’d started writing as a hobby in the ’60s when I was an undergraduate. If the army hadn’t sent me the places it did–and I don’t mean just the physical places, here–I’d probably have sold a few more stories in the ’70s. They’d have been competent and more intelligent than most, but they wouldn’t be any better remembered today than the stories of (say) Wyman Guin are.

Nam forced me to write to keep myself between the ditches. (As I’ve said before, I wasn’t consciously aware of what I was doing at the time. That’s another debt I owe to my subconscious.) More to the point, I had to write things that were more than just clever stories, even though for a year and a half nobody was willing to buy what I wrote.

Thus today I’m a writer instead of being a lawyer. There’s nothing intrinsically good about the one or bad about the other, so in itself that doesn’t matter.

There are lawyers who make the world a better place, who save innocent people from death row and suchlike; but I won’t have been one of them. I’m not a crusader now and I certainly wasn’t one before I was drafted. I’d just have been an ordinary citizen doing a necessary job which many thousands of other people could do as well.

Because of Nam, I’ve written fiction which has helped other people out of places as bad as the places my head’s been in. I didn’t do it out of generous impulse, I did it to recover part of myself. In fact, the most surprising thing I learned from the exercise was that I’m not alone in being screwed up in the ways I am. My stories told other people that they weren’t alone, and their response showed me that I’m not alone either.

One of these days I’m going to die. (It could easily have happened last Thursday night.) But even after I’m dead, there’ll be something I’ve created that’ll help other poor, screwed-up bastards for a time to come. I like to think that helping other people matters.

Hang in, folks; and please–don’t drink and drive. Nobody’s son needs a birthday quite as memorable as Jonathan’s almost was.

–Dave Drake

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Dave and his friend Barry Malzberg, in Raleigh during Deep South Con.