Dear People,

INTO THE HINTERLANDS, the space opera which John Lambshead wrote from my outline, should be out by the time you read this. I’m ridiculously pleased with the book. John’s style is nothing like mine, but the style of Hinterlands is quite different from the style of Lucy’s Blade (for example), also. I think the combination–this book really was a collaboration, though it’s taken me a while to see that–fits very well into John’s and my mutual view of our model.

Our model is the world of George Washington. The more I learn about the man, the more impressed I become. The Thirteen Colonies might have gained their independence without Washington, but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have remained united if somebody other than he had been Commanding General and then our first President.

The Revolutionary War was conducted in the South as a civil war with irregulars on both sides using brutal guerrilla tactics. The same thing would have happened in the Northeast had not Washington been present to protect civilians; to protect civilization.

I wish there’d been somebody like him in Nam.

I should mention a few items associated with Hinterlands. First, John has written an essay for Baen.com about science and culture in the universe of the novel and why we made some of the choices we did in adapting history to our project. He thinks it’s too academic, but I thought it was very good. Of course, I’m the guy whose law school class gave him a plaque for being Pedant of the Year.

Second, John and I have a joint author photo, but it didn’t get onto the dust-jacket because the double author bios didn’t leave space. It’s here on my website in case any of you want to print it and paste it onto the half-title or something.

I mentioned the biographies. John had written his own. When I saw a draft of the flap copy, I completely rewrote John’s myself, giving (I think) a better view of him as a friend and as a world-class scientist.

When the book itself arrived, I read over John’s bio, which pleased me; and then read my own, which did not. I think the person it describes is more similar to Heinlein than I hope I am.

After thinking about it, I’ve completely recast my flap bio into a form similar to what I did with John’s. The fellow in the original bio isn’t the way I see myself or somebody I really want to know (though it was accurate enough).

Since I’m speaking of the dust-jacket, contrast the original art (visible on the ARC) with the final treatment which Jennie Faries, Baen’s graphic designer and my friend, came up with. The cover is much more effective than the original art was. (I’ve had wonderful cover paintings from Bob Eggleton. This one puzzled me, however.)

My major project since Newsletter 63 has been plotting Into the Maelstrom, the sequel to Hinterlands. The first stage of the process was research, during which I compiled 8500 words of notes. I’m now mining those notes for a plot.

It’s going pretty well. After I complete and polish it, I’ll send it to John (who will be developing both sequels from my outlines, as he did Hinterlands) for his comments and corrections. When I’ve incorporated those, I’ll send the final back to John and to Toni Weisskopf (Baen Books’ publisher).

Whereupon I’ll start the next project, the third Book of the Elements (the new fantasy series for Tor). My working title is Demons from the Earth, but that could change. (Though you’ll notice that I have covered the objection of the Tor sales force to the title of the second volume: the element Earth is prominently displayed in this one.)

That second Book of the Elements, OUT OF THE WATERS, is on sale right now with a wonderful Donato cover. Tor is treating me very well. I am very fortunate in my covers as in many, many other fashions.

I’ve just received the short list of entries for The Galaxy Project prize contest. I’ll be judging them along with Robert Silverberg and Barry Malzberg (who made the initial cull). Reading the five finalists and making a decision will be work, but not nearly as much work as it was to write the three essays I did.

And it’s worth a great deal more to me than what it costs. The SF field and Galaxy magazine itself, which brought Jim Baen and me together, have been of enormous importance in my life. If Rosetta Books continues the project, as I hope they will, I expect to write more essays. The project isn’t live quite yet, but I hope when that happens (I think in a couple weeks) you’ll take a look at the offerings and buy something. You’ll gain by it.

A dump is a prepack of books from a publisher with a banner on top and a floor stand; a mini-dump with fewer pockets and no floor stand is intended for counter display, generally beside the cash register. My friend Mark walked into his local Barnes and Noble the other day and found this.

It pleased me very much to see. Instead of pushing the latest RCN mass market (What Distant Deeps), these are all older titles which Baen is reissuing at considerable profit to all concerned. Toni and Corinda Carfora (Baen’s sales liaison) are working very hard on behalf of their authors and are keeping the company healthy in a tough time.

There’s a new whimsical picture on the website as well. Every summer the Van Name and Drake extended family rents a large beach house. This year Glenn and Helen Knight were part of the group. Glenn and I are on the Holden Beach fishing pier, pointing out to our wives a pelican (off camera) which had just dived.

Glenn and I met through writer Manly Wade Wellman in 1974, and we’ve been friends ever since. The backgrounds of many of my books, including the recently republished Tom Kelly thrillers (Loose Cannon), came from visiting Glenn while he was in the Foreign Service.

I’ve gained a great deal from being a writer: it’s made me a good living over the years, and it kept me from going too badly off the rails after I got back to the World in 1971. A less obvious benefit is that in one fashion or another I’ve met most of my close friends, Glenn included, through my writing.

I’d be in a really bad place without friends.

Now, back to work. I’m about to plot the climactic battle. There have been various criticisms of my fiction, but I don’t recall anybody claiming that it lacked action.

–Dave Drake

***
Please use the contact form to subscribe to the newsletter or to change your e-mail address.

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

***
Please use the contact form to subscribe to the newsletter or to change your e-mail address.

Well, I haven’t completed the rough draft of THE LEGIONS OF FIRE, the start of my new fantasy series for Tor, but I’m close. And I’m darned consistent: two months ago I had about 60K; now I’ve got a bit over 125K, so I’m averaging a hair over a thousand words a day regardless of holidays, crises (the water line froze; on the other hand, about this time last year a drunk in a pickup crossed the road and hit us, so I’m not complaining), birthdays, colds and flu. 

I’m in the ‘colds’ part of that catalog at present. I blow my nose a lot and feel as though I’d been dragged by a horse, but I continue to beaver away, following my outline. I’m well into the climax now. Unless the asteroid strikes very soon, I should have a completed rough draft.

This plot keeps a lot of balls in the air. The book (at core) is very different from anything I’ve written in the past. And as usual I’m convinced that I’ve blown it: that nobody will notice the things that I consider to be particularly neat, and that most of it will strike even me as silly and boring when I read the completed manuscript. Part of me is pretty depressed.

But Sunday morning I was sitting outside reading the paper and about to start work. The temperature hadn’t gotten up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit yet, but it was already a pretty day.

A wren landed on my right calf and worked her way up my legs in short hops. Eventually she came around my back, paused on my right hip, and hopped down to continue her search for bugs on the deck.

Very few people have jobs in which that happens to them. Therefore you can think of me as depressed in idyllic circumstances, which is really the truth.

I mentioned a few months ago that Audible had released audio streaming versions of the first six RCN (Leary/Mundy) space operas. [Go to http://audible.com and search David Drake.] To my great delight, sales have been good enough that they’re taking the new one, IN THE STORMY RED SKY, which is due out in hardcover from Baen in May, 2009. I’ve already written and recorded a 2-minute audio introduction for SKY, thanks to the good offices of Mur Lafferty.

When I mentioned SKY, I realized that I should have seen dustjackets by now. The lovely Steve Hickman art is up. The designer–my friend–Jennie Faries tells me that it will have another swatch of neat Holotrans foiling, so I’ve got my fingers crossed.

To mention something that’s already on the stands–the Baen paperback of Mark Geston’s trilogy, THE BOOKS OF THE WARS, is out. I didn’t write these novels (though I contributed an introduction), but they were formative for me and for a lot of writers of my generation. I won’t pretend that you’ll get fuzzy good feelings from them, even in comparison with (say) my own REACHES TRILOGY, but they’re enormously powerful books. Try them; I guarantee that you’ll be impressed.

According to Amazon, the pb of BALEFIRES, my Night Shade horror/fantasy collection will be out at the end of this month. According to Amazon last month, it was going to be out in January. According to the nice people at Night Shade a year and a half ago, it would be out in January, 2008.

This reminds me powerfully of WORSE THINGS WAITING, the first book we (Carcosa) published. It came out something over a year later than we’d planned (and announced). When I chatted with Jeremy Lassen of Night Shade at WFC, he assured me that they really would bring out the paperback, and I believe him. (Toni Weisskopf, bless her heart, had already promised me that Baen would do it if Night Shade couldn’t.)

I guess I can wait; I’ve been waiting a long while already. BALEFIRES is what would probably have been my first (and perhaps only) book some thirty years ago if Mr Derleth hadn’t died in 1971. The included stories and the 12K of introductions I wrote to them are the beginning of my writing life and my career (as it became).

I’ve seen the trade paperback of STORM AT NOONTIDE, the second Belisarius compilation (DESTINY’S SHIELD and FORTUNE’S STROKE, novels written by Eric Flint from my outline and bound together with an intro by me). Jennie says there’s supposed to be a hardcover edition also, but I don’t swear to that. They should be in stores in March, 2009, or a little before.

Gosh, I remember working on the plots for this series (specifically, polishing the first outline and drafting the second one–this volume) while I was at Kipling’s house in Brattleboro, Vermont, with friends and family for my fifty-first birthday back in 1996. All the people with me that week are still in my life, certainly including Jim Baen (though he’s been dead for a couple years). I could use the Belisarius series as a poster of why I’m incredibly fortunate.

And after a long delay, I finally polished the Pyramus and Thisbe section of Ovid’s METAMORPHOSES so that Karen, my webmaster, could put it up. It will show you where Shakespere got some of his ideas–and if you’re a fan of THE FANTASTICKS, as I have been for an awful lot of years, you’ll catch one of the references that wonderful little play makes also.

While I was at it, I translated the next of Ovid’s lyrics also. This is an apparently simple piece on a standard theme–the dangers of sea travel–which at the end gets very tricky indeed. I wound up comparing my translation with several others and found a wide variety of responses. There are several lines whose vocabulary is completely standard but whose meaning is not. The answers I came up with are here on record, so feel free to second guess me.

Finally, here’s a story which you can view as autobiography, or history, or just possibly a cautionary tale of sorts. I’ve been musing about Mark Geston’s trilogy, but I don’t’ need external reasons to think about the Viet Nam War.

In early 1970 my 30-man unit completed Vietnamese language school in Ft Bliss, Texas, and was assigned to Ft Meade, Maryland, for two months of interrogation training. We were all college graduates and all draftees. When we ‘graduated’ from language school, we were promoted to Spec 4–the equivalent of an army corporal.

One of the exercises involved breaking us into groups of five or so and giving each group a real map sheet of War Zone C in Viet Nam. The terrain on these sheets was not only rural but almost entirely jungle. We were told what we, as the American commanders, had in the way of material assets (basically helicopters, bombers and artillery), and what material assets the enemy would oppose us with (basically small arms). Our task was to devise a plan for defeating the enemy and clearing the map area.

Our groups all came to the conclusion that our objective was unattainable. The instructors, senior NCOs, were taken aback. They insisted that artillery fire and bombing would smash enemy concentrations, and our helicopter-borne infantry would encircle and destroy the enemy in lesser numbers.

We pointed out that triple canopy jungle, as covered most of the area, made it next to impossible to locate the enemy from the air, and that the canopies also greatly reduced the effectiveness of shells and bombs. Helicopters could land troops most places, granted; but that the enemy could disengage at will through the jungle, which made a really tight encirclement impossible. In other words, that the NVA would fight only when they considered themselves to be strong enough to win.

The only way we could succeed was for the enemy to give up. Given that they had been fighting since 1945 already, it was unrealistic to expect them to give up now.

The instructors kept repeating the official line: that we could win through technology… but we Spec 4s were right and they were wrong. Everything I saw In Country and everything I’ve read in the memoirs of other veterans reinforces what my class knew at the time.

Now: we were smart people or we wouldn’t have been in that program–but we weren’t smarter than, say, McGeorge Bundy and Robert S McNamara, two of the major architects of the war. We were looking at the facts before us without a filter of ideology, however.

So that’s one aspect of the situation. The other aspect is this: all thirty of us, knowing the utter futility of the war we were being thrown into, went where our country sent us. For twenty-nine of the thirty that meant Viet Nam, where we served to the best of our ability.

I wish that the leaders of our country would generally be less callously arrogant than the Bundys and McNamaras and their ilk–’the Best and the Brightest’–who gave us the Viet Nam War. Recent history doesn’t give me much hope on that point.

But I have more confidence that our country will continue to raise people like my interrogation school class: citizens who will do their duty even though they know their leaders have betrayed them.

–Dave Drake

***
Please use the contact form to subscribe to the newsletter or to change your e-mail address.

On April 17, 2007 Toni Weisskopf hosted a Baenish dinner at the chef’s table (which turned out to be a work table in the prep room; we were sitting on bar stools) of the Angus Barn in Raleigh. From left are Mark L Van Name (Baen consultant and author), Jo Drake, Dave, Jennie Faries (Baen graphic designer), Hank Reinhardt (Mr Toni Weisskopf) and Toni. It was both fun and delicious. Most of us are teetotal so we didn’t do justice to the wines, but the wine steward’s descriptions of the choices for each course were neat anyway.

The menu included: Lump crab on cucumber rounds, Coconut shrimp on a bed of jalapeno cheese grits with a Thai pepper sauce, Duck confit and goat cheese raviolis in a roasted tomato sauce, Field greens with marinated mozzarella in a balsamic vinegarette, Mango sorbet palette cleanser, Six week aged beef tenderloin over saffron risotto and grilled asparagus, Pears poached in red wine and cinnamon with chocolate mousse and berries

There are jokes in the copy that very few people are going to get, but the whole room found them side-splittingly funny. People may have different favorites–mine was probably the western, Jim especially liked the children’s book, and my son thought the parenting book was a scream–but ‘favorite’ in this company is a matter of first among equals.

Oh, and I should probably mention that all the author photos are real. The one on the thriller is me smiling at my birthday cake, I swear to goodness….

These are not real Baen books; but you know, I’ll bet if I wrote Maddy and the M-1 Amphibious Assault Vehicle, Jim would publish it….

Click on the images below to see the larger covers

Children's Book	Cookbook	Diet Book
Mystery	Parenting	Politics
Religion	Romance	Self-Help
Travel	Western

Jennie Faries (a friend who's now doing some of the cover and brochure design for Baen Books) and Jim Baen going over cover designs for Grimmer Than Hell July 4, 2002.

Cover art: Donato

QUEEN OF DEMONS, my second Isles fantasy, uses the structure of Lord of the Isles, so it was simpler to write than if I’d had to construct an entire world. Nonetheless there was the challenge of how much of the first book to recapitulate in the new one. In the event I repeated very little.

With the exception of Standing Down (written to close the first Hammer collection) every one of my novels and stories has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That means basically that I have to reintroduce continuing characters at the opening of each book, but I don’t give any more of their backgrounds than readers need to know to understand the current plot.

This isn’t a new situation for me: I’ve been writing stories in series since 1971, starting with the Vettius-Dama fantasies and in 1973 the first of the Hammer’s Slammers series which is still humming along today. (For what it’s worth, I didn’t expect Black Iron or The Butcher’s Bill to start series when I wrote them. That just happened.) Because the Isles series is deliberately open-ended–that is, I started with the intention of writing in the series for as long as the market wanted more books and I wanted to write them–it was doubly important that each installment be self-standing.

Queen of Demons , like the other books in the series, is told from four interwoven viewpoints. I’m just not the guy to write a 200,000 word novel–but I can write four 50K novels and draw them very tightly together at the climax.

I didn’t want more than four viewpoint characters, however. Steve Stirling and Eric Flint are both very skilled writers, but they consistently take about twice as many words as I would when they develop one of my plots. There are various reasons for the difference, but I believe the most important one is their tendency to use more viewpoint characters than I would.

Queen draws plot elements are from varied sources–I have eclectic tastes and will steal ideas from almost anybody. The outline of the Beast whom King Valence III serves came from the Shah Nama . The germ of the inhuman body in the wine cask was from Trader Horn , of all things. (The book, that is, not the mediocre movie. Oddly enough it actually does repay reading; though I might have said the same thing about Finnegan’s Wake if I’d devoted as much effort to Joyce as I did Horn/Lewis.)

The intelligent ape Zahag (a chimp, not a gorilla) had been bubbling in the back of my mind ever since I read the Greek story (maybe ascribed to Aesop?) of a fellow who taught apes to dance: all went well till somebody tossed nuts onto the dance floor. Intelligence and culture aren’t the same thing, and a beast remains a beast however intelligent it may be.

And the scale-hunter Hanno was based on Mountain Men like Liver-Eating Johnson, though Hanno is a very cleaned-up version of the real thing. Remember the point I made above? I could amplify it by saying that a beast remains a beast even if it happened to have been born in Boston before moving to the Rockies to hunt scalps.

I frequently use the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch (and occasionally those of the elder Breughel) either directly as settings or indirectly for what they kick off in my mind while I look at them. I did some of both while I was plotting and developing Queen.

As a general rule, I plot books scene by scene. That is, what you read is arranged in the order I composed the plot. With Queen I decided to vary my technique. I created the plot by following each of the four characters for the requisite number of scenes, then braiding them together.

I won’t say the technique didn’t work–I mean, there’s a book, after all–but it resulted in a lot of waste effort. I wound up reassigning business between characters–from Sharina to Ilna in particular–and I still had a lot of great ideas left over. (Waste not, want not: business intended for Queen wound up in Servant of the Dragon and Goddess of the Ice Realm . Very possibly it’d been improved by fermenting longer in the back of my brain.)

Oh–one more thing before I close: my friend Jennie Faries read the novel in mss. She phoned one afternoon and said, “Killer penguins?” No, no, no: those are giant versions of the Creataceous swimming bird Hesperornis … which, okay, you could think of as a penguin with teeth.

I learned a lot in the process of writing Queen ; and I had an enormous amount of fun. I decided I was beginning to get the hang of writing Big Fat Fantasies… and that was a particularly good thing, because I intended to write a lot more of them.

–Dave Drake