Cover art: Steve Hickman

I learned with the first book of the RCN series, With the Lightnings, that I have to explain that I use English and Metric weights and measures as a convenience to readers, not because I think the same systems will be in use three millennia hence. To me, that went without saying. Here as often, I was wrong.

There are many snatches of song in this novel, as generally in my work. They’re all my paraphrases of real music ranging from The Handsome Cabin Boy to the Carmen Saeculare of Horace. I do this for my own amusement–but people do sing, and I think it gives the work resonance to use pieces that people have sung instead of pieces that I’ve invented.

My fantasies are generally based on folk tales. My science fiction (and this is true of both Military SF and Space Opera) almost always grows from historical events, more often than not from ancient history.

That’s certainly true of In the Stormy Red Sky, where I weave together three separate incidents which took place in the Mediterranean Basin during a five-year period (216 bc to 211 bc):

1) The death of Dionysius II, whose grandson Hieronymos succeeded to the throne of Syracuse.

2) The successful revolt (or coup, if you prefer) of a group of young aristocrats in Tarentum, aided by Hannibal.

3) The successful assault by Scipio (later Scipio Africanus) on the fortress city of Cartagena.

On the face of it these events had nothing in common, but in another sense they’re woven about one another like strands in a sweater. They were aspects of the war which decided who would rule the Mediterranean Basin for the next thousand years.

The unseen impetus of all three situations was the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal’s crushing defeat of a large Roman army in 216 bc. Cannae was the epitome of the decisive battle except in one crucial aspect: it decided nothing, beyond the fact that certain individuals would die that day instead of dying later.

Cannae affected the attitude of the teenaged boy who suddenly became the Tyrant of Syracuse. It affected political calculations within the Greek cities of Southern Italy. It affected the choice of an initial field of operations made by perhaps the best Roman strategist of all time.

What Cannae didn’t do was determine the outcome of the Second Punic War, any more than the Battle of Chancellorsville determined the outcome of the American Civil War.

In history as in life, big events aren’t as important as the way people react to those events. Rome couldn’t go back and undo the mistakes that led to the disaster at Cannae, but the Republic could and did buckle down and deal with the consequences, both good and bad.

I write about people who deal with consequences. I try to be one of those people as well. I don’t hold myself out as a role model generally, but I think the world might be better off if more people accepted responsibility and dealt with consequences.

–Dave Drake

In the Stormy Red Sky. RCN Series. 2009, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 378p. 9781416591597. $25.00 [added 1 June 2009]
————– 2009, Newark, NJ: Audible Frontiers [Audiobook]. 14 hours 29 mins.[Available for download from Audible.com]
————– 2010, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 480 p. 1439133646 (pb). $7.99

Quite a lot has been happening. First and foremost in my mind, I turned in WHAT DISTANT DEEPS, the latest RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, to Baen Books the day after I got back from World Fantasy Con. I’d carried hardcopy of my second draft with me and edited it while sitting on planes and in parks in San Jose. My first priority on getting home was to key in the final changes and ship the book off. 

It totalled 131,103 words. I’d been convinced during the writing that this one was both short and bad. I’ve written longer books, but 131K isn’t short; and having gone over the whole thing repeatedly during the editing, I’m confident that it isn’t bad either.

I’m probably the only person in the world who thought there would be a problem with the book’s quality… but I really did think that, people. Oh, well. I’m glad to be wrong yet again.

The other big excitement was getting the page proofs for THE LEGIONS OF FIRE, the first (of four books) in my new Tor fantasy series. I was somewhat surprised, because proofs usually arrive about six months before the book comes out. I had been repeatedly told (and have passed on to you) that LEGIONS is scheduled for July, 2010.

When I got the proofs, I learned that the book is now scheduled for May, not July. This isn’t a bad thing (it’s quite good, in fact), but I really wish somebody had told me what the plan was.

Oh well. I wish world peace would come in my lifetime, too.

LEGIONS has a Donato cover, which delights me even before I’ve seen it. The painting is finished, but the designer is still working on the layout. If that changes before this newsletter goes out, there’ll be a URL here.

The cover of WHAT DISTANT DEEPS, another striking painting by Steve Hickman with design by Jennie Faries, is right here. This is a good time to repeat something that I’ve mentioned before: cover paintings are to advertise my books, not to illustrate them. The “dragons” of my novel swim rather than flying like the ones in the painting. That doesn’t matter even a little bit. Steve has the right feel for the book. If he decided he had to transfer the critters from one element to another to achieve that result, I couldn’t be happier.

The paperback of IN THE STORMY RED SKY will be coming out from Baen in August, 2010. Regular readers of this newsletter will know that according to Jennie (designer and friend), the printer used The Wrong Foil on the hardcover. (You couldn’t have proved it by me: I thought it was lovely.) Since then, I have gotten a threatening email from the General Counsel of the firm making the “correct” foil, because I used their proprietary name without adding an ugly trademark squiggle.

I have a high opinion of the firm’s engineers. Their legal department can stand as an illustration of why I stopped working as a lawyer myself.

Tor is scheduled to release the paperback of THE GODS RETURN this month.

Baen will release the second volume of THE COMPLETE HAMMER’S SLAMMERS in February, 2010, as an omnitrade paperback. This volume collects the four shorter novels in the series and “The Day of Glory,” a story which hasn’t been in a Hammer collection before. Omnitrades (now that I’ve seen them) look like regular trade paperbacks but really are smaller. (Compare a British hardcover to its US equivalent for a similar relationship.)

That’s the publishing news. On the website are a few pictures from San Jose. I had a good time, often a very good time, but it was a couple days longer than I’m comfortable being away from home. The weather was nice and San Jose has pleasant parks near the hotel, which made a great deal of positive difference to me. Still, I missed my nest (as I did when we were in the Southwest earlier this year). I’m very much a homebody.

I noticed flags hanging (as often) under the porte cochere at the convention hotel’s entrance. I wouldn’t have paid much attention, except that one flag was that of the Republic of Viet Nam (South Vietnam) which of course hasn’t existed since 1975. The taxi starter explained that the flags are those of the nations of origin of all the hotel staff. I pass this on, because some of you may have wondered also.

I did two interviews as a result of the con. One was audio with Rick Kleffel (one of my con pictures shows him), there in the hotel. It’ll come out as a podcast or a couple podcasts, and (if I understood correctly) there may be bits on the local NPR station. It was interesting to do and ran about three times as long as he said it would. (I’m a good interview subject, perhaps because I say things that most folks will not.)

There was also a written question-and-answer interview after I got back. The result is up at http://travisheermann.com/blog/?p=488 but I should note that the interviewer (Travis Heermann) sent one set of questions, then followed up with a second and intermixed the results. I realized in reading the complete version that I had structured each set of responses into a rhetorical whole. (No, I don’t think anybody else in the world would notice the difference.)

I’ve roughed out a translation of the Hercules and Achelous, and the Hercules and Nessus, sections of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but I want to complete the Hercules Cycle before I put anything up on the website. That’ll be a while yet.

And I’m flailing about in early stages of plotting the second volume of the Tor fantasy series. My working title is MONSTERS FROM THE DEPTHS, but it’s really early days yet.

I’ve been diving into classical texts which range from obscure (Nonnos) to extremely obscure (Avienus). They’ve given me settings, but the trick is developing neat bits into a real plot. I keep digging and scribbling notes, hoping that suddenly everything is going to become crystal clear. Hope is a fine thing….

The interviews and some other stuff that’s been going on–I finished a book, so my mind has too much free time–have gotten me thinking about appearances. This leads me to two stories from my past.

Many years ago, I was buying onyx bookends in a rock shop. It was kind of a New Age place, but they had fossils, bookends, and various other stuff I’m interested in.

I was on a motorcycle with built-in saddlebags; I’d locked my helmet in one while I was shopping. I carried a bookend out to make sure I could pack them in a satisfactory fashion, then walked back inside with my helmet to get the remainder of my purchases. The clerk said, “Oh! That explains it.”

Of course I wanted to know what she meant. After some pressing (and with obvious embarrassment) she said, “Well, I could tell from your aura that you’re in touch with your sensitive, feminine side, so I couldn’t understand why you dressed in such an aggressive fashion.” (I was wearing a motorcycle jacket, boots, and jungle fatigue trousers.) “When I saw the helmet, I realized that you really _were_ on a motorcycle.”

Without going into all the ways that exchange puzzled me (nobody else has suggested that I have a sensitive, feminine side, let alone that I was in touch with it), it did drive home the fact that what people see and hear isn’t necessarily going to be what I think I’m showing and telling. There isn’t a heck of a lot I can do about that, but it kinda disturbs me.

What I think is this: folks, what you see with me is what you get. I’m reasonably smart, quite well educated, and I work hard. There are no mysteries about me, there’s no romance. I do not have a secret key to the door of writing success: I just tell stories and meet my professional obligations. I’m a Nam vet, but I wasn’t any kind of hero. My dad was an electrician; my grandfather was a sheet metal worker; and my great grandfather was a farmer.

What I’ve said in the paragraph above is the absolute truth, but I’m reminded of another story from my past. When I got back to the World in 1971, I said and believed that I was perfectly normal. Viet Nam hadn’t been a lot of fun, but it hadn’t done me any lasting harm.

Five years later, I realized that I certainly hadn’t been normal when I first returned, but I believed–loudly–that I had by then settled back to normal. I was wrong about that too.

Nearly forty years on, I’ve given up claiming to be normal (though I do think that I’m generally safe to be around). And I certainly don’t believe that Nam didn’t do permanent damage to me.

So maybe there’s more to the writing as well. I look at the shelf (shelves, actually) of my books. There still doesn’t seem to be any big deal to it to me (hard work and a focus on storytelling), but realistically there aren’t many people who have equaled my record. Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing, just as I didn’t see (didn’t let myself see) how much Nam had done to me. Heck, maybe it’s the same thing.

But the work is the work, with me as with every other writer. Focus on that, because I try very hard to make it more interesting than I am myself.

–Dave Drake

***
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I intended to start this newsletter by saying that I’d completed the plot of the next RCN space opera and am at work on it. Those things are true (we’ll get back to them), but in my mind the big news is that I’ve returned from BookExpo America (BEA) in the Javits Center on Manhattan. 

Because gosh! I’m glad to be back. I thought of myself as an ambassador for Baen, but I was also becoming a face rather than just a name to people on the sales end from the distributor right down through individual bookstore personnel. This is clearly good stuff for a professional writer to be doing, and Toni (Weisskopf; Baen publisher) wasn’t asking me to be anything but myself. (Cheerful, friendly, but not even close to being politically correct.)

I had time to myself. The hotel was only 30 blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, allowing me to walk through Central Park (lovely in itself) and spend an afternoon there. (To my amazement, they have a sirrush–a dragon–from the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. I’d seen a considerable portion of the gate in the Museum of Oriental Antiquities in Istanbul, but those tiles included only lions and bulls.)

So there was lots of neat stuff, both professionally and personally; I don’t regret doing it. But.

To start out with, travel is irrationally tough on me. (Arriving at the airport and learning that I didn’t have a ticket after all–travel agent screw-up–would’ve stressed even a normal person, I suspect.) The Iowa cities where I was born and raised weren’t much bigger than even this ‘small’ BEA–not to mention the population of NYC itself. And though the socializing wasn’t unpleasant in itself, there was a lot of it, including at meals. I never lost sight of the fact that this was business.

So I’m sitting on my lower deck now. The birds are singing up a storm, especially the wren on the clothesline beside me. My dogs are sleeping to right and left. The meadow beyond the Rose-of-Sharon and the mimosa is lush and green, and very shortly I will get back to writing a novel.

This is where _I_ belong.

And speaking of that novel: WHAT DISTANT DEEPS, the next RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera. (I took the title from William Blake’s poem The Tiger.) I have a plot of 9,500 words, which allows me to be very steady in the actual process of writing; and as of this moment, I have 851 words of actual rough draft. When I get going I average a solid thousand words a day, but believe me, BEA was a disruption.

The process of plotting this one differed from any of my previous books–and each of them differed as well. You wouldn’t think there were that many ways to come up with a plot and complications, but it turns out there are. I don’t consciously do things differently; it just happens. I have a very skilled subconscious, and I’ve learned not to get in its way; but doggone, I wonder at myself a lot of the time.

In the April newsletter I said that the hardcover of IN THE STORMY RED SKY, the next RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, would be out from Baen realsoonnow. In fact it’s now out from both Baen (in hc) and Audible (downloadable audio). I’m extremely pleased by both versions.

The reaction of the cover designer (AKA my friend Jennie) to the cover of SKY was “Ack!” or words to that effect. The printer used the wrong metallic foil. All I can say is that it looks really spiffy to me.

The mass market of BALEFIRES, my collection of fantasy/horror stories from Night Shade, is supposed to be out on June 30. You’ve heard that before? Yes, but that was in 2008… or maybe 2007. This time the book is really at the printers.

One good thing about the delay is that the mass market cover has had time to grow on me. I kinda like it now. The stories are very close to my heart–this really is where I started out–and the background notes I’ve attached to each story provide a good deal of autobiography and history.

The third Belisarius omnibus, FLAMES OF TWILIGHT, is scheduled from Baen in hc and trade paper in August. This volume combines The Tide of Victory and The Dance of Time and wraps up the saga. (The epic? Well, the series anyway.) I wrote the plots and Eric Flint expanded them into very good novels.

Eric was supposed to do the intro for this volume (I did Bel 1 and Bel 2). Things happened. He’s out of the hospital now and is doing fine (proceeding in the direction of fine, anyway), but I wound up writing the third intro also.

The Baen mass market reissue of PATRIOTS is due out from Baen in September. I don’t ordinarily reread my own stuff, but when I went over the proofs for the new edition I was pleased. It’s a YA, so I needed to keep the length down. There are more ellipses than there normally would be in a book of mine, but I think it’s easy to follow the action.

Let me repeat: Patriots is a Young Adult novel. When it was first published, an online reviewer said that if the book were twice as long and had more sex and violence, he might find it worth reading. I don’t think it’s _necessary_ to be a moron with a tin ear in order to put book reviews online.

Gordon R Dickson really liked Patriots. Gordy and I weren’t close, but we were on friendly terms and I greatly respect some of his work. I thought of him as I read the proofs.

I mentioned the Mongoose Hammer’s Slammers RPG book in Newsletter 50; it’s coming off the presses even as I type. To repeat what I said before, I’m struck by how well the author understood both my work and the reality of the military. I’m not a gamer myself, but if you are you might take a look at it.

There’s another Ovid lyric up on the website. It’s not a terribly interesting one in my opinion, but I did it. I’m feeling in the mood for more translation, but if I get properly going on the new novel, I probably won’t have the mental headroom to polish my Ovid well enough to put it out in front of other people. We’ll see.

The website hasn’t changed much, but there’s a picture of me with my agent Kay McCauley in Central Park after we had lunch.  That was another plus for the BEA trip, come to think. I’ve been represented by Kay (and her brother Kirby) since 1972. My business relationships are friendships also, which makes life less difficult.

Though sometimes it seems difficult enough. This Memorial Day was hard on me, though not for any particular reason I’m conscious of. I’m not religious, and I came to terms with the certainty of non-existence back in 1970. (I’m not trying to convince anybody else of this; I’m just explaining where I stand.) But then I came to a realization:

I exercise daily. I used to listen to BBC News while I exercised, but knowing a great deal about the world made me (even) more depressed, not a direction in which I need to go. Jo (my wife) got me some tapes of old radio programs (I listened to radio drama from a very early age), and for some decades I’ve exercised to them.

The other day I was listening to a 1950 episode of a CBS mystery: Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. Hero enters club before opening hours; somebody’s playing jazz on a piano in the background. Hero interacts with villain’s henchman, then knocks him down. Piano stops. Hero asks where the boss’s office is, then says thanks. Piano resumes.

This was a perfect bit of business for radio, using silence as effectively as words. I like the show generally, but this was really exceptional.

In the credits, I learned the episode had been written by Blake Edwards, who of course has gone from strength to strength in the years since. (I think SOB was even better than “10″ or The Pink Panther, but whatever your tastes, nobody can doubt Edwards’ ability today.)

Craftsmanship is real. It’s real to me, at any rate: it flashed from the middle of that 1950 radio show, as obvious as it was unexpected. So while I may not believe in a Supreme Being or the Rights of Man or the Republican Party (let the parts stand for the whole), I do believe in craft.

I can say honestly that I will dedicate myself to improving my craftsmanship as a writer… and indeed, I did so dedicate myself when I began writing for publication. Maybe sixty years from now somebody will say, “Wow! That was nicely done,” as I just did with Blake Edwards.

Yours optimistically–

–Dave Drake

***
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I’m well into (about 60K) the rough draft of THE LEGIONS OF FIRE. This is the first book of the new fantasy series for Tor. When asked, I picked The Books of the Elements as the series title because I thought it sounded good and I sincerely hoped that it would fit the series as it developed. Now that I’m this far along, it seems to be fitting pretty well. 

Of course Fire is an easy element. It remains to be seen whether I’m going to be as happy about the title when I get to Air, but there’s always a chance that a giant asteroid will have struck the Earth before then. I’ll deal with problems as they arise.

LEGIONS is set in a place that’s very similar to the Roman Empire in about 30 AD. The capital city (where the action begins) is Carce, however, not Rome. The series is in no sense Alternate History: it’s about a place where the legends of our world may be real, and where the myths of other cultures impinge on the civilized folk of Carce.

The rough draft is moving along very nicely. It took a long time to create the outline (which meant creating the world); but with that done, the writing has been smoother than most of my books. As I said, the background is very similar to Rome, and I know a great deal about Roman history and culture.

Those of you who’ve been reading these newsletters for a while (let alone those who know me personally) know that there’s going to be a catch, however; and so there is: I’m afraid that people are going to find the lavish background details to be silly and boring, of interest only to specialized antiquarians like me. (There are other people like me, kinda, I’m sure; but not enough of us to build a writing career on.)

Furthermore, the novel has completely different feel from the Isles series and from anything else that I’ve written. There’s a lot of characterization, but the characters aren’t the sort of people I used in the Isles series. These are urban, not rural, folk, and individually as well their personalities have little in common with the characters of the Isles.)

So maybe folks are going to hate it. Maybe I’m doing it completely wrong. Maybe the giant asteroid won’t come in time to save me from the results of my failure.

I’d be a different person if I didn’t worry about that sort of thing. Perhaps I’d fail more often if I worried less–but it doesn’t matter: this is how I am.

THE GODS RETURN, the last volume in the Isles series, is out from Tor with yet another wonderful cover painting by Donato. The final three books of the series (the Crown of the Isles Trilogy) is an honest-to-goodness trilogy which will gain if you read the books consecutively.

Though each book is in most fashions self-standing, there are some plot threads which start in THE FORTRESS OF GLASS and are not resolved until the climax of RETURN. The people who wrote me in horror when they’d finished FORTRESS (you know who you are) will find the planned resolution. I personally find it satisfying, and I think most readers will agree. (Those who’ve commented to me about the whole trilogy are pleased.)

Tor released the second book of the Crown of the Isles, THE MIRROR OF WORLDS, in mass market at the beginning of November, just before they brought out the hardcover of RETURN. The Donato cover of this one is effective even in the smaller paperback format. It has wyverns, by the way, the heraldic animal of the Drakes of Ashe, my distant ancestors.

A friend commented to me after he’d picked up RETURN that I must feel relieved (to have completed the nine-book series). In fact I didn’t have much feeling about that at all. What relieved me was the fact that I’d finally begun writing LEGIONS.

Once a book is done, I move onto the next thing. Since I finished RETURN, I’ve written the RCN space opera, IN THE STORMY RED SKY, and begun the brand new fantasy series. The Isles series was, if not the farthest thing from my mind, at least well down the list.

But I am really proud of the Isles. I built the nine-book arc carefully and ended it both thoroughly and on a high note.

I mentioned IN THE STORMY RED SKY, which will be a Baen hardcover in May, 2009. Steve Hickman’s striking image is up at [http://david-drake.com/news.html]. When the cover is printed, it (like its RCN predecessor, WHEN THE TIDE RISES) will have Holotrans foil where the holographic image is in the painting. I’m very fortunate, both in my cover art and in the production which Baen and Tor have given my books.

Speaking of the SKY cover, I have advertising postcards for it. I haven’t done a postcard giveaway for a while, so: anybody who sends a request with their address label and a standard postcard stamp (27 cents as I write this) to Drake/PO Box 904/Chapel Hill, NC 27514, will get a signed postcard by return post. (I’m not sure where I’ll sign it, but somewhere.) The card has the cover image on one side and a list of the previous six books in the series.

I mentioned in the newsletterette last month that Audible has brought out the first six RCN (Leary/Mundy) space operas in MP3 audio format for download. There’s a possibility that Brilliance Audio (they’re both now part of Amazon) will bring out the series in physical form (MP3 CDs, I suppose), but they haven’t contacted me yet. I hope they do.

There are new pictures on the website  from the Walden West Festival and from World Fantasy Con. The former is in Sauk City, Wisconsin, and is dedicated to the life and work of August Derleth. Derleth gave me my start in writing by buying my first four stories, so I was really pleased to get the invitation to speak there.

I was struck by the fact that many–and I think most–of those attending had never met Derleth during his lifetime. He was a complex man–and yes, that means there was a bad side to him–but he helped many would-be writers. Some of us–Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and me–have gone on to respectable writing careers as a result of his encouragement.

A large number of his fantasy stories will be reissued in four volumes on the centennial of his birth, February 24, 2009, by the August Derleth Society in conjunction with Arkham House, the small press which Derleth founded and which his daughter now operates. The volumes have new introductions. I did one, and for the heck of it I’m going to put it up.

I like doing little essays. We’ve started a new little corner of the website for my essays, musings and interviews. There’s not much there yet, but we’ll keep adding to it as we can.

Speaking of odd things on the website, I have completed a rough translation of the Pyramus and Thisbe section of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but the edit stalled halfway through because LEGIONS began absorbing all my time. Which is as it should be, but I really need to bring those star-crossed lovers to their miserable ends.

I’ve been chatting with my friend, Mark Van Name, about scenes in the book he’s writing. He’s decided to do them right instead of slanting them to what he thinks the potential readership will want.

I’m pleased, because that’s always been the choice I made. Oh, I don’t mean that I’ll never modify a bit of literature or history that I’m using as a template for my story. After Odysseus comes home, he slowly strangles all the female servants who have been sleeping with the suitors whom he and his allies have shot. That was a satisfying conclusion for an Iron Age Greek, but it wasn’t one that I personally liked or which I thought would be popular with modern readers of my CROSS THE STARS.

But many years ago I read a very good first novel which had a scene that bothered me. A couple was about to undertake a mission which carried a high risk of death for one or both of them. They spend the brief interval in an ecstasy of romantic love.

I remembered the day and night before I got on the first of a series of planes that would take me to Viet Nam. My wife and I were both under great stress. It was not a good time. When I met the author shortly after reading the book, I mentioned that to him. (I’m not going to name him here. It’s getting toward Christmas, and I don’t feel like making an instantly searchable attack on somebody I don’t dislike.)

He explained that initially he’d written a scene in which the couple ends up sitting on opposite sides of the room, each acting as though the other party didn’t exist. He’d decided that was a downer for readers, though, so he’d changed it to a scene of bliss and happiness.

He hadn’t been ignorant. He had deliberately concealed what he believed (correctly, in my experience) to be the reality of human nature, because he thought the book would sell better if he lied.

I was appalled, but I didn’t argue with him. I knew that I would never do what he had done (I make plenty of mistakes, but I don’t lie), but I figured he might be right.

And maybe he _was_ right. From the vantage of hindsight, though, I wonder if his attitude about ‘doing the commercial thing’ is at least part of the reason that someone with his great natural ability has had only a shadow of the career I would have predicted for him at the time. If you don’t respect the truth, you can’t respect your readers. They’ll pick up on that.

Mark is making a different decision. That pleases me a lot.

Merry Christmas, people. Try to be nice to others. I’m not as good at that as I should be, but I try–and you can too.

–Dave Drake

***
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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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The major news item is that while I haven’t yet finished IN THE STORMY RED SKY, the next RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, I’m getting darned close. As I write this I’m in the midst of the climactic battle, and I hope I’ll have gotten into the conclusion by the time you read it. 

Anybody who’s seen one of these newsletters before knows that I worry about things. Right now I’m worrying that SKY will put readers to sleep, that I’ve lost all the skills I used to have, and that folks would find their local phone book more exciting.

Actually, I’ve probably said those very words before. You may think I’m being very silly, and intellectually _I_ think I’m being very silly. But it’s honest to goodness how I feel.

Part of the problem in my head is that my books differ one from the next. As a result, as I reach the end of each it subconsciously doesn’t feel “right” because it isn’t what I did the time before or the time before that (going back quite a ways by now).

In the case of SKY, my first reader (Dan) told me how positively impressed he’s been with the first third of this one because I’m writing a novel of character rather than a shoot’em-up. It’s good that somebody likes it, but what if nobody else wants a novel of character? Have I blown it this time by doing something different from my norm?

Well, maybe. But I’m not going to stop doing different things just because some of them probably won’t work. And the book after this one will be a different thing yet.

Mind, I’m writing a major space battle (series of space battles) right now, and there’ve been action scenes earlier in the book. SKY may be different, but I haven’t suddenly become Henry James.

In Newsletter 44 I said that Night Shade told me that the pb of my fantasy/horror collection, BALEFIRES, would be out on May 15. They’re now saying June 15 if all goes well. And as I also said in #44, I’ve been a small press publisher. They’re doing a lot better with release dates than my partners and I did.

A lot of the book stuff that follows is a rehash of #44, but some of you won’t have seen previous newsletters. I apologize for the duplication, but there are new bits also.

The pb of OTHER TIMES THAN PEACE, my most recent collection of (mostly) Military SF will be out from Baen in August. The one unique item in it is the original version of A GRAND TOUR, the novella I wrote for Dave Weber and which he edited into the Honorverse. The original hasn’t appeared before this collection.

I wrote TOUR as a dress rehearsal for my idea of structuring a space opera the way Patrick O’Brian did his Napoleonic War novels. The main thing I learned from the exercise was that to properly bring out the relationship between the two lead characters, I needed more space than a 26K word novella gave me. The specific differences between the characters in TOUR and those in WITH THE LIGHTNINGS were mostly a matter of bringing the series closer to O’Brian in detail as well as in concept.

And speaking of LIGHTNINGS, Audible (which is now an arm of Amazon) has bought audio rights to the existing RCN novels. They’ll be releasing them as downloadable audio streams, as I understand. (I’ll provide more details, including release dates, when I have them.) I’ve written and hope shortly to record a 2 minute 20 second introduction to go with LIGHTNINGS, and I expect to do the same with the later volumes as well.

THUNDER AT DAWN will be a Baen hc in September. It’s the first of the three omnibus volumes for the Belisarius series, collecting AN OBLIQUE APPROACH and IN THE HEART OF DARKNESS. I plotted the books which Eric Flint wrote (expanding my concept considerably). Each omnibus has a new intro either by me (the first two) or by Eric (the third) which gives background on how the series happened.

The Belisarius series is fun, and it’s Not Stupid. The books may not make you love history, but you should get a notion of why Eric and I love history.

THE GODS RETURN, the final book is the Isles fantasy series, will be a Tor hc in November. I’m proud both of the series and of GODS, which has another wonderful Donato cover; the full wraparound version of it is now up. I’m so amazingly lucky in my cover art!

And to reinforce that thought, Steve Hickman is doing the cover for IN THE STORMY RED SKY also. I haven’t seen the art, yet, but I’ll put it up as soon as I do.

The pb of the most recent Isles fantasy, THE MIRROR OF WORLDS, comes out from Tor in November also. The trilogy does best if you read it from the beginning (that is, start with THE FORTRESS OF GLASS and then read MIRROR), but I hope you’ll get a good book even if you start with a later volume.

The Easton Press signed and limited leatherbound edition of WHEN THE TIDE RISES proceeds apace. I’ve signed the limitation pages and had lengthy discussions with the studio doing the jacket and interior artwork.

That got a little weird. The studio is in Quebec and the artists are Francophone. The scenes they wanted to illustrate were from a docudrama and a poster, not things that were happening in the novel itself; I’m not sure they understood my attempted explanations. It’ll be interesting to see how things work out.

I am (by which I mean my agent Kay is) in the process of licensing a Hammer’s Slammers board game to Mongoose Publishing (a large UK gaming company). They’d like to do a miniatures game also, but I told them they would have to deal with Pireme (which has the rights) themselves. Back in the ’80s Mayfair brought out a board game; I have no idea how what Mongoose does will differ.

Kay tried to get creative control for me, by the way, which Mongoose refused to grant. They were right. I haven’t done serious board gaming in more than 40 years. My proper role is to pick competent experts and let them get on with their business. (This is true in most aspects of life, in my opinion. And I wish more people felt the way I do.)

I’m not actively plotting the new Tor fantasy series (I never start a new book until I’ve really finished the immediately previous one), but I’m excited about it already. In reading Nonnos (a Fifth century AD Egyptian epic poet), I ran into mention of Britomart (a Cretan goddess, maybe) and got to wondering if I could connect her with the Celtic goddess Fand; and I could, but that wouldn’t be the first book of the new series as I’ve sort of roughed the sequence out. But maybe….

I love my job, I really do. Some of it’s frustrating, a lot of it’s depressing, and there are occasional flashes of panicked gloom–those will come when I start _seriously_ working on the series structure. But I wouldn’t trade being a writer for anything.

On April 8 the Citadel dedicated a display cabinet in the university library to Jim Rigney, a graduate and a man who (as Robert Jordan) significantly remade fantasy publishing. Jim’s Wheel of Time series was left unfinished at his death.

Jim’s widow, Harriet McDougal (my Tor editor for over 12 years before she quit editing in order to reduce her blood pressure) asked me to come down to Charleston for a panel in connection with the dedication. I happily agreed. [Pictures]

While I was there, I watched as Brandon Sanderson (who’s been hired to complete the final volume of the Wheel), two of Jim’s assistants, and Harriet herself worked on that project. Jim left an outline, extensive (but not organized) notes, and some of the actual writing. The team is putting the outline into final form, whereupon Brandon will write the book and Harriet (the best line editor I’ve ever had) will edit it.

Brandon is not only a fine writer with a successful fantasy series of his own, he’s a long-time fan of the Wheel of Time. The series is in good hands, which is a better monument to Jim Rigney than a glass case.

Not much has happened on the website, and I haven’t done any new Ovid translations for the moment. The next project there will be the Pyramus and Thisbe section of the METAMORPHOSES, I think. I’ve read it over and I’m looking forward to doing the translation, but I’ve really been concentrating on SKY to the exclusion of most other things.

I’ll close with a bit of history which I wouldn’t mention had PUBLISHERS’ WEEKLY not resurrected it. The April 7 issue had an article on Military SF which struck me as amazingly knowledgeable until I noticed that it was by Scott Connors, whereupon I was no longer amazed. (Scott knows his stuff.)

The article quotes Bruce Sterling, a journalist who at one time was also a significant SF writer, as saying (I think in 1983) that writers of Military SF have an “ideological solidarity, which gives them the sort of shock-troop discipline that Lenin instilled in the Bolsheviks.” If you believe that Jerry Pournelle, Janet Morris, and I (to pick three writers whom I recall Mr Sterling named specifically) have _any_ ideological similarity, then there’s a bridge in Brooklyn that I’d like to offer you a good deal on.

Twenty-five years ago I was more naive than I’ve become since, however, so I thought Mr Sterling had just made a mistake. I called him to say that I’d never met Jerry and I certainly wasn’t a disciple of his. I thought that similar things were true of most of the other people Mr Sterling mentioned.

Mr Sterling replied, “I don’t care about facts. People can get facts anywhere. What I’m doing is molding public opinion.”

We ended the phone call on the same polite basis that we’d conducted it to that point. There really wasn’t any response I could make to someone whose view of facts differed so sharply from mine.

But it’s something you might keep in mind when you read the PW article, and more generally if you read Mr Sterling’s journalism.

Back to finishing IN THE STORMY RED SKY!

–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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