August Derleth died in 1971. His small press, Arkham House, was the only market to which I’d sold fiction. F&SF published some fantasy but not (as I learned by trying) heroic fantasy; so when I wrote Hunter’s Moon, a heroic fantasy set in Italy under the Emperor Domitian, I sent it to the other possible market: Fantastic. Ten years earlier under Cele Goldsmith/Lalli, Fantastic had been a very good magazine. That was no longer the case, but beggars can’t be choosers.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if the story’d been rejected, but in fact it didn’t come back at all. Letters and self-addressed reply cards to the editor over the next couple years had no effect whatever. (Knowing more about the editor than I did thirty years ago, I’m not surprised at what happened.)

I hadn’t kept a copy of the final draft, a remarkably stupid mistake even for a newbie writer like me. Hunter’s Moon was gone forever.

In 1974 a fan decided to put out a Karl Wagner fanzine and gave Karl carte blanche over the contents. To add variety to his own work, Karl asked if he could rewrite my second draft (a typescript with extensive holograph interlineations) and use it in the fanzine. I was too disgusted with what had happened to the story (and my own stupidity!) to revise the story again, so I cheerfully agreed.

Karl rewrote Hunter’s Moon, added a major character, expanded the text by 50%, and retitled it Killer. It was published in the fanzine, Midnight Sun, as by Karl Edward Wagner and David A Drake, still in 1974.

Karl’s career had a spectacular but brief fluit before dissolving in alcohol and missed deadlines; his last novel, a Conan pastiche, came out in 1979. Then in 1983 Jim Baen started Baen Books and needed material badly. Jim, knowing I was worried about Karl, asked me to collaborate with him on a horror novel based on the story Killer. Payments would be structured to encourage Karl to perform.

I agreed. Karl agreed. Then things started to get very bad.

Normally the authors of collaborations are billed in alphabetical order. Karl insisted that because he was the more important author, his name had to come first. I wasn’t going to quarrel about it, but Jim went ballistic and absolutely refused. The agent Karl and I shared asked me to beg Jim to let Karl’s name come first as Jim’s personal favor to me; otherwise Karl would nut.

I did it. Jim, fuming, agreed. Over the next couple months I pointed out to Karl exactly what it meant to piss off a publisher as badly as that business had pissed off Jim (and me too; believe me, me too). Karl had a sudden change of heart and decided the billing should be alphabetical.

I wrote a complete rough draft of the novel longhand, then keyed it into my early word processor. I gave the typescript to Karl. Then, for a long time, nothing happened.

Afterwards it turned out that Karl had begun by moving scenes around and changing motivations. (As an aside, in my draft characters occasionally said something snide about the medical profession; all of those comments were struck out.) By the time Karl was two-thirds of the way through, he’d had to scrap a goodly chunk of text because the action of it no longer followed the revised early chapters. In order to have a novel of contract length, Karl would have to write 10-15,000 words himself… and he couldn’t.

The book was scheduled; time was running very short. Karl finally managed to grind out the wordage in a chase through the sewers and sent in the book. The last 15,000 words were xeroxes of my rough draft with some of the typos corrected.

I was furious when Baen Books described the state of the manuscript. I certainly didn’t consider my drafts to be publishable at the time (and even now, with a lot more experience, I always do at least three edit passes after the rough). Jim pulled the last section from production and gave me a chance to give it a degree of polish.

A lot of people like Killer. I had fun researching the Roman backgrounds; my earliest stories were horror, and Killer was the only time I returned to that milieu at novel length. But you know, I have really bad feelings about the whole long history of the piece. Sometimes things work out that way.

–Dave Drake

Killer. With K. E. Wagner. 1985, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 270 p. 0671559311 (pb). $2.95.
————– 1990, New York, NY: Tor. 270 p. 0812509846 (pb). $3.95.
————– 2002, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 270 p. 0743435869 (pb). $6.99. (This edition differs from earlier editions of the novel.)

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

I’m going to start with something positive: I’ve now seen a cover comp for THE LEGIONS OF FIRE, the first of four books in my new fantasy series, due from Tor as a May, 2010, hardcover. I’d seen a black and white version, but that gave me no inkling of how very impressive the cover would be in color.

The layout (shrinking the cover painting to a banner in the middle) is what my friend Mark explains to me is the new Big Book look for major publishers. Now: if I’d been asked how to use a stunning piece of Donato art like the present one, I’d have said to run it full-height as a wrap-around. I (usually) don’t get involved in cover art or design, however–I don’t know squat about either subject. This treatment (which wouldn’t have crossed my mind) turns out to be extremely effective, besides being a coded message to buyers that Tor is pushing the book.

I’m really pleased. I hope people will like the book.

LEGIONS is the first book of a series set in a city called Carce, which is very similar to Rome in 30 AD. I’ve been asked repeatedly why I call the city Carce when it obviously _is_ Rome.

Well, it isn’t Rome. I’m not writing historical novels with fantasy elements added, I’m writing fantasy novels. This fact will be significant at the conclusion of the series, which I hope will add to more than the sum of its parts. (I tried, I think successfully, to accomplish the same thing in the Isles fantasy series for Tor.)

That’s one reason for the name Carce. Another stems from a panel about writing books with Roman settings that I was on many years ago. I commented in passing that the quickest way to tell that an author didn’t understand the classical world was if they gave the dates AUC–ab urbe condita; that is, from the founding of Rome. Greek and Roman historians didn’t use that system, not least because there was no agreement on what the actual date of Rome’s founding was. (There were at least three dates in serious contention.)

I then learned to my embarrassment that everybody else on the panel gave dates AUC in their novels. I hadn’t been wrong, but I’d been unconsciously unkind.

I know enough about ancient Rome to know how very much I _don’t_ know. Calling the city Carce instead of Rome is an explicit acknowledgment of my limitations.

Further goodish news is that I’m finally getting somewhere in plotting the second book of the series, with the current working title MONSTERS OF THE SEAS. This has taken several weeks longer than I think it should have. I gathered material in the usual fashion, but it wasn’t coming together properly.

I think the problem may have been the unusually cold weather we were having at the time I started laying out the plot. I had to leave the furnace on overnight, which messed up my sinuses just enough to keep the topmost registers of my brain from working the way I expect them to. I can take notes and even write when I’m not absolutely 100%, but apparently I can’t weave together the very complex plots I’ve been using for the past twenty years.

I have all the scenes sketched in rough order now. I reasonably expect to be well underway on the book by the time of my next newsletter.

Baen has moved the hardcover of WHAT DISTANT DEEPS, the next RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, back from August, 2010, to September and has moved the paperback of the immediately previous RCN volume, IN THE STORMY RED SKY, from July to August. This may have been done to increase the distance from Tor’s release of LEGIONS, but there’s a whole slew of factors going into a publisher’s schedule. Things can change abruptly.

One of the changes was that Tor moved the pb of THE GODS RETURN from November, 2009, (as I said in Newsletter 54) to December. It’s out now, however. This is the climax and conclusion of my nine-book Isles fantasy series.

It’s odd to look back on the Isles series. I was about to say, “it was a life-changing event for me,” but that isn’t quite true.

My life was changing regardless in the mid-’90s. The Military SF for which I was known was taking a hit because the US military was being downsized, and space opera (which I wrote a lot of, though mine was generally reviewed as Military SF) was still smothered by the weight of the Star Trek media tie-in juggernaut.

What writing the Isles series did was to gain me a reputation as a successful writer of high fantasy, rather than allowing me to slip into the ranks of people who’d been major players in previous decades. There are fashions in the F/SF genre as surely as there are in any other aspect of human existence. I’m very lucky to have weathered a major change–

But I assure you that I worked my butt off to capitalize on the chances I got. To be honest, I didn’t expect to succeed; but there was never any question but that I was going to try.

Baen has brought out the second volume of THE COLLECTED HAMMER’S SLAMMERS as an omnitrade (think of it as a shrunken trade paperback), reprinting the Night Shade hardcover. HS2 collects the four Hammer short novels and adds the short story THE DAY OF GLORY, which I wrote for a tsunami-relief anthology. I guess it sort-of fit there, since it’s certainly about a disaster.

Kurt Miller’s excellent art for the third volume of THE COLLECTED HAMMER’S SLAMMERS has been up since Newsletter 54, but the final now can be viewed at larger size along with a close-up of the turret of the central tank. This is the kind of little joke that I frequently put into my prose. I was pleased and amused to see it in the cover art.

I think HS3 comes out in June as a Baen omnitrade. It incorporates the two full-length Hammer novels and the newer novelette THE DARKNESS, which in its way may be the most accomplished piece of fiction I’ve ever written. The story is, for those who understand it, unusually bleak for me also.

Bragalonne in France has listed the third volume of the Isles series, SERVANT OF THE DRAGON, for February, 2010. I don’t ordinarily bother to mention foreign sales, but these large-format French editions have simply the most beautiful covers I’ve ever seen. Images are up at http://david-drake.com/wordpress/2010/french-edition-isles/, so you can judge for yourselves.

Matthew Peterson interviewed me by phone shortly after World Fantasy Con, for a podcast on Military SF. The interview is available (in pieces) with interviews on the subject with Ben Bova, Joe Haldeman, and Dave Weber at http://theauthorhour.com/david-drake/. As I write this, the very lengthy interview Rick Kleffel did at the con still hasn’t been posted.

And I haven’t finished editing my next foray into Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Hercules Cycle. My rough translation did give me the opening for MONSTERS, however. It’s all grist for the mill.

My webmaster, Karen, is planning a complete redesign for the tenth anniversary of david-drake.com in April, 2010. My part in this is to comment on some of my recent novels the way I did on my backlist when we started the website. I want to be deeply into MONSTERS before I start looking back, however.

One unfortunate thing that happened recently is that C Bruce Hunter, a friend of some thirty-five years, died: on November 13, 2009, though I didn’t learn of it until the middle of December. We were closer than that implies, however, and generally spoke at least once a week.

The thing is, the contacts were almost invariably Bruce calling me: to ask a question about Latin or Greek for his books on Masonic ritual, to tell me of a TV show that was worth my attention, to tell me a joke, or–very frequently–to tell me of some exotic food that was being marked down at the local gourmet store.

Bruce was one of the quietly kindest men I’ve ever met. When I needed a ride to get our dog to the veterinary school in Raleigh, he immediately dropped what he was doing and carried me there. Bruce saw Karl Wagner daily even at the end, when the situation was very difficult. He went to the drugstore to bring Karl milk of magnesia on the last night of Karl’s life, and he found Karl’s body the next morning when he dropped in again to check.

Bruce travelled frequently from his Carrboro home to relatives in Asheville and in eastern NC, so it wasn’t a great surprise not to hear from him for a while. When he didn’t arrive for Thanksgiving dinner, my wife checked the hospital (they had no record of him), and the next day I ran out to his house. His car wasn’t in the drive, so I figured he’d forgotten and gone back to Asheville. He’d told my wife that his health had been a bit dicey, and I knew he’d had some memory lapses. In fact he’d been discharged dead from the hospital and taken to Asheville for burial.

Bruce was a good guy. I’ll miss him.

Now, back to expanding and polishing my plot!

–Dave Drake

***
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HAMMER’S SLAMMERS is a short story collection, not a novel, and my first book. It made it possible for me to become a full-time writer, though I didn’t realize it at the time.

I’d sold a story as an undergraduate, another story after I started law school, and even one while I was in Nam. After I came back I continued writing at a faster rate, in part because I became friends with two writers in the Triangle area: Manly Wade Wellman and Karl Edward Wagner. Manly and Karl suggested that I use Southeast Asian settings instead of writing historical fantasies. I wrote a fantasy, Arclight, and an SF story, Contact! and both sold. These were set in Nam (come to think, both were based on things that happened in Cambodia), but there was no military theme to the stories.

Then I wrote The Butcher’s Bill: an sf story about soldiers and war rather than an sf story with soldiers as characters. It didn’t sell to quite a number of markets. One of the editors rejecting it was Fred Pohl who said it required too sophisticated a knowledge of the military for the entry-level anthology he was buying for. I immediately wrote Under the Hammer in which the reader could view the milieu through the eyes of a young recruit who got on-the-job training in somewhat the same fashion as I did in Cambodia.

Fred rejected that one also; but pretty much by chance I’d used the same unit, Hammer’s Slammers, as the setting for both stories even though I was only trying to sell the second story at the time. I had a series.

Jim Baen bought those two stories for Galaxy and another in the series besides. He rejected two more, but when he took over as sf editor of Ace Books he asked my agent for a collection of Hammer stories which would include the five already written and additional wordage to bring the book up to length.

All that was important, but the stories were more important to me as self-therapy than they were as the start of a career. They gave me a chance to write about what I’d seen and heard; about the men I’d served with and person I’d become in that time. Being able to get that out on paper helped me keep it between the ditches and (from what they’ve told me) helped other veterans by showing them that they weren’t alone.

At one point I hoped the stories would help civilians understand also. I don’t think that can happen. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just a matter of people not having the background to hear what the words mean to people who’ve been there.

That’s OK. I’ve still been able to do something for myself and my people.

Contents of the original HAMMER’S SLAMMERS book, with note as to which omnibus volume reprints the stories:

• Intro: Mercenaries and Military Virtue by Jerry Pournelle
• But Loyal to His Own (The Butcher’s Bill)
• The Butcher’s Bill (The Butcher’s Bill)
• Under the Hammer (The Tank Lords)
• Cultural Conflict (The Butcher’s Bill)
• Caught in the Crossfire (Caught in the Crossfire)
• Hangman (The Butcher’s Bill)
• Standing Down (The Butcher’s Bill)
• Interludes: Supertanks, The Church of the Lord’s Universe, Powerguns, Backdrop to Chaos, The Bonding Authority, and Table of Organization and Equipment, Hammer’s Regiment (The Tank Lords, as Appendix) The Baen (1987) edition adds The Tank Lords (The Tank Lords)

–Dave Drake

Hammer’s Slammers. Hammer’s Slammers Series. 1979, NewYork, NY: AceBooks. 274p.0441315933 (pb) (There were nine printings at five prices from $1.95 to $2.95 of this edition.)
————– 1987, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 318 p. 0671656325. $3.50.
————– 1989, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 318 p. 0671656325. $3.95.

These aren’t necessarily my best stories (though The Barrow Troll comes pretty close), but they’re very dear to my heart.

Contents of VETTIUS AND HIS FRIENDS

• Introduction: Source Materials
• The False Prophet
• Black Iron
• The Mantichore
• The Shortest Way
• From the Dark Waters
• Nemesis Place
• Dragons’ Teeth
• The Barrow Troll
• Killer (with Karl Edward Wagner)
• Ranks of Bronze
• Dreams in Amber
• King Crocodile

–Dave Drake

Vettius and His Friends. 1989, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 304 p. 0671698028 (pb). $3.95.

Contents of FROM THE HEART OF DARKNESS

• Introduction by Karl Edward Wagner, MD
• Men Like Us
• Something Had to be Done
• The Automatic Rifleman
• Than Curse the Darkness
• Firefight
• The Red Leer
• The Shortest Way
• Best of Luck
• Dragons’ Teeth
• Out of Africa
• The Dancer in the Flames
• Smokie Joe
• Children of the Forest
• Blood Debt
• The Barrow Troll
• The Hunting Ground

 –Dave Drake

From the Heart of Darkness. 1983, NY: Tor. 320 p. 081253607X. $2.95.