Dear People,

I’m hard at work on the next Tor fantasy, Demons from the Earth; the third of the Books of the Elements. When I first start writing a novel, that’s always the big news in my mind.

I think that would be true even if I suddenly got a multi-million dollar movie contract (and no, there’s no glimmer of that to the best of my knowledge). Writing books is what I do. What happens after that (or before that, in the case of contracts) is important, but it isn’t me. If movies/TV were what interested me, I’d be a screenwriter or something of the sort. And if business were what interested me, I’d still be a lawyer.

Jeepers. Thinking about it, I’m not sure which of those possibilities strikes me as less pleasant.

Stuff is coming out. The pb of Out of the Waters, the second Book of the Elements, will be out from Tor in May. The pb cover treatment expands the art (another superb Donato) above the banner as they did with the pb of The Legions of Fire (the first of the series). I’m amazingly lucky to have the cover art that I regularly get.

And speaking of covers, The Road of Danger is a Baen hc in April. I’ve said that before, but this is another chance to point you to the fine Steve Hickman painting. I suspect that there will be places on the hardcopy which glitter or shimmer or something, but I haven’t seen the treatment yet.

To support the release, Toni asked me to do an essay for Baen.com. I asked her for a selection of suitable topics, then decided to write about the various elements which have gone into the series.

I’m pleased with the result. When I really get into an essay, I teach myself quite a lot about the subject–even if the subject is basically my own past history, as this one in part was. It isn’t up at this instant, but I think it will be in a within the next two weeks. (Karen will put a link on my website, or you can just check Baen.com.)

The other essay I’ve done recently–and I hope y’all are noticing how smoothly this newsletter segues from point to point–was most unexpected. David Hartwell and Jacob Weisman (Tachyon’s publisher) are doing a swords and sorcery anthology for Tachyon Publications.

I learned about this some time ago because David asked me for help; in particular he wondered if I knew of a good introduction to the genre, because he wouldn’t have time to write one. I checked many introductions by Karl Wagner and Sprague deCamp without finding anything which I thought was really suitable. (I didn’t bother checking Lin Carter’s work.)

A couple Thursdays ago Jacob (whom I know to say “Hi” to; we don’t move in the same circles) called. The anthology was going to press on Tuesday. He’d written an introduction. His managing editor had rejected it. Ah–this was really short notice, but–

I broke in to ask how long he wanted the intro and when I needed to submit it. And sent the finished essay off on Saturday.

The thing is, I love the heroic fantasy (AKA sword and sorcery) genre. It (in particular Robert E Howard’s work) is a lot of the reason I started writing fiction. Because I knew and loved the field, it wasn’t hard for me to write an anecdotal overview of it from the appearance of Conan (the point at which the editors started selecting) up through the time in the mid-’70s when Whispers (the little magazine of which I was assistant editor) ran heroic fantasy by my friends Karl Wagner and Ramsey Campbell and by me.

Jacob said they would pay me; which is fine, but I did the job for love. That’s why you should do any job. And this one was easy, because I did know and love the field.

I’m not sure when the anthology will be out, but I’ll put the essay up on my website as soon as I’m cleared to do so. Writing it made me nostalgic for a past which, I emphasize, wasn’t nearly as good as my present… but of which I have many fond memories.

As publisher of Baen Books, Toni Weisskopf (who most certainly knows and loves SF) is doing some innovative things. One which took me aback is a study guide for teachers and students on Into the Hinterlands, the novel which John Lambshead wrote from my outline. I was amazed to see the guide, though it made perfect sense after the fact.

That it made sense to Toni before somebody else came up with the idea is why (well, is one of the reasons) she’s good at her job. I suppose the fact that Baen Books is growing while many other publishers are having a hard time is an even better recommendation of her job performance.

Back in 1983, Jim Baen heard a junior congressman speak on space policy. He was so taken by the speech that he signed the congressman up for a book setting out his view of a bright, clean future for America and the world. I was brought in as rewrite man, partly as a favor to my friend Jim but also in part because there was a chance we’d all make a lot of money. (There was a chance. It didn’t happen that way, however.)

Under normal circumstances this would have been another of the odds and ends that any full-time freelance writer has in the course of his career. (For example, I scripted a graphic novel.) It was different on this occasion because the book was Window of Opportunity, and the congressman was Newt Gingrich.

Every time Newt returns to the spotlight, I get calls from reporters. I was pleased that this time the focus of the articles (in Politico, Foreign Affairs, and New Republic) was on Window rather than on either Newt himself (whom I personally liked and respected) or on the way the book’s promotion was financed.

I was also pleased that the reporters had read and liked the book, picking up on its hopeful optimism. Whatever you think of Newt in his present persona, Window of Opportunity is a thoroughly positive work. His visions for the future (and they were his, not mine) may have been impractical and even silly, but it would be a better world today if they had been implemented thirty years ago.

I’ll close by discussing Manly Wade Wellman. He was my friend for the fifteen years before his death in 1986 and I still very much miss him. I acted as… dunno. Basically a support structure for his widow Frances from 1994 to her death in 2000.

That meant the business stuff in part, but I was also a presence to her caregivers. I never had to take action, but that was at least in part because they were all terrified of me. The one time there might have been a problem, both parties (Frances needed 24-hour care at the end) phoned me separately to say that they’d worked it out and I didn’t need to get involved.

Part of me regrets that I come through as a ruthless bastard. On the other hand, my concern was for my aged friend; and the caregivers weren’t wrong about how I would have dealt with anyone whom I thought was taking advantage of her.

When Frances died, I bought the Wellmans’ literary estate from their son. I did this because I thought I was in a better place to keep their work alive than the son was (he didn’t have a telephone) rather than to make a profit on the investment, but it has been profitable.

In addition to the many individual story reprints, at least some of Manly’s books have been in print every year since Frances’ death. There’s a hardcover volume of all his John Thunstone (a psychic detective/ghost breaker) series due out soon, and we’re in negotiations for more hardcovers. It suddenly struck me that Manly, who’s been dead for 25 years, has a more active writing career than most living people who define themselves as writers.

Manly has a great agent and I’m in a good position to support her, but that wouldn’t really matter if he hadn’t been such a wonderful storyteller to begin with. Storytelling is the key to why Manly is doing better commercially than so many workshop graduates. It seems to me that this would be something for writing courses to take notice of, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Which is their choice. From my standpoint, it just means that much more for Manly–and for me.

My best wishes to all of you.

–Dave Drake

***
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Me, Manly Wade Wellman and Dave Shelton, 1971

On March 17, 1970, I met Manly for the first time, in his writing office above a drugstore in the center of Chapel Hill. According to my journal for the day:

Talked to Mr. Wellman (“My parents wrote my great-uncle Manly to say they were naming me after him. He wrote back ‘Forget about me; name him Wade Hampton!’ So I got the full load.”): heavy, iron-grey with a brush mustache, wearing a sport coat, dark blue shirt & tie.

We talked about the John stories, about Charles Fort (Manly said that Orlin Tremaine, the first editor of Astounding after Street and Smith Publishing took over the magazine, bought the rights to Fort’s third book, Lo!, to serve as plot germs which he would farm around to his table of trained seals–including Manly. Tremaine wound up publishing the whole volume as a serial in the magazine, however); about North Carolina folklore; about Lord Dunsany (whom Manly had met) and about Oscar Wilde.

In range and and choice of subjects that conversation was pretty typical of the hundreds of others I had with Manly in later years. He also mentioned the young friend who’d sold a novel (‘That Robert E Howard stuff’) and dropped out of medical school to write full time. The young friend was Karl Edward Wagner, and Karl too became a major part of my life after I got back to the World.

I was under orders to go to Vietnam in two weeks. I had read and loved Manly’s work since 1958, but although I knew he lived in Chapel Hill I hadn’t looked him up when we moved down to the area in 1967 when I started law school. I was embarrassed and didn’t want to seem pushy to such a great figure. I phoned to set up a meeting in the awareness that there was a very good chance I was going to die in the next year and that I’d feel like an idiot in my last moments if I hadn’t taken the chance to meet Mr Wellman when I could have done so.

When I got back, Jo and I socialized with Manly and his wife Frances, and with Karl Wagner both before and during his marriage. We’d all get together several times a month. I wouldn’t say Manly and I were close friends, but I heard a lot of stories about his marvelously varied life: birth and boyhood in Portuguese West Africa, now Angola; tramping through Arkansas with Vance Randolph, the pioneer folklorist; interviewing celebrities whose trains passed through Wichita when Manly was a reporter in the early ’30s; meeting in Steuben’s Delicatessan with other professional writers in the ’40s; befriending a Navy veteran, Mac McKenna and travelling with him to the Milford writers’ conferences in the ’50s before Mac wrote The Sand Pebbles.

Manly was a lot smarter than I in my arrogance (my stupid arrogance) gave him credit for. As one example that can stand for many (this, by the way, is a peril of a memory as good as mine is: I remember many things that embarrass me with the eyes of hindsight), Manly was adamant that cocaine was an addictive and destructive drug, based on his experience as a police reporter in Wichita. Karl was sneeringly certain of the medical opinion that cocaine was non-addictive.

I bought into the ’scientific truth’. Now, after watching a very close friend as well as a number of acquaintances in the writing community (including Stephen King) lose years and nearly their lives to cocaine, I can only nod to Manly’s memory. Now I know there’s psychological addiction as well as physiological addiction. Manly was right; I was wrong. And that was generally true when we differed on matters of opinion.

In 1985 Manly fell and broke his elbow. The wonderful UNC orthopedics department fixed that injury, but because Manly stubbornly refused to move for several days while convalescing he got bed sores on his heels. Over the next ten months those bed sores killed him by inches. He lost his heels; then his legs; and finally he died.

Because I had reliable transportation and a flexible schedule, I was the only one of Manly’s many friends who was able to visit Manly more days than not. He used me, consciously I believe, as a dump for his memories about old girlfriends, books he’d known and loved, and all the other fragments of his long life that were most vivid to him in what he knew were his last months.

I wouldn’t wish anyone go through the pain that Manly did during that time, but if he’d died quickly and peacefully I wouldn’t really have known him despite the previous fifteen years and the enormous influence his writing had on me. If it had to happen, I’m glad I was there; and Manly was glad to have me.

So long as I live, so does a little bit of Manly Wade Hampton Wellman.

–Dave Drake

Manly and Frances Wellman

On May 7, 2000, my friend Frances Obrist Wellman died peacefully at home; she was 92. On the 14th we scattered her ashes in the sideyard of her home of fifty years where they joined the remains of her late husband Manly. Frances said she still saw Manly around the house with her, so I don’t think much has changed.

Freelance writers are difficult people to live with. Frances was as good a wife for Manly as I can imagine existing. They were married 55 years at the time of his death, including the difficult last ten months while she nursed him.

Frances always did her best. As I get older I realize how rare, and how great, a virtue that is. I miss her.

–Dave Drake