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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An Oblique Approach. 1998,  Baen.
In the Heart of Darkness.  1998, Baen.
Destiny’s Shield.  1999, Baen.
Fortune’s Stroke.  2000, Baen.
The Tide of Victory. . 2001, Baen.
The Dance of Time.  2006, Baen. 

Belisarius I: Thunder at Dawn. 2008,  Baen.  Contains An Oblique Approach and In the Heart of Darkness.
Belisarius II: Storm at Noontide. 2009, Baen.  Contains Destiny’s Shield and Fortune’s Stroke.
Belisarius III: The Flames of Sunset. 2009, Baen.  Contains The Tide of Victory and The Dance of Time.

Cover art: Kurt Miller

Cover art: Kurt Miller

Cover art: Kurt Miller

In the most recent newsletter I said that I’d just started the rough draft of the next RCN space opera, WHAT DISTANT DEEPS. I now have a hair under 60K in draft. As usual, I’m very depressed about it–though I’ve found an interesting evolution in my thinking over the years. 

For a long time, when I was in the middle of a project (this is true of short stories as well as novels, but of course I get through the middle more quickly) I thought that I was writing badly and that the result would be incredibly dull. As I got into this one, I found that I no longer think that I’m writing badly: I’m subconsciously aware that my line-by-line writing skills are of a high order, as they darned well should be after forty-odd years of practice.

But jeepers, does the book seem dull! And when I do get to an action scene, it’s not going to be as exciting as previous action scenes that I’ve written. Furthermore, I become depressed about the project much more quickly than I used to and stay depressed deeper into the climax.

So I guess you could say that I’m refining my misery. I don’t think this is necessary to the process of writing, but it _might_ be. That is, if I didn’t worry so much about the quality of my work, maybe the work wouldn’t be as good. That isn’t a testable hypothesis, however: the worry isn’t something I can change, any more than I can change the color of my eyes. (Hazel, if you were wondering.)

Over the years, many people have told me how lucky I am to be a writer: I’m my own boss, I can decide my own schedule, I get to work at home… lots of things along those lines. All of that is true, but it isn’t the whole truth.

I really am lucky to be a writer, though.

The Hammer’s Slammers role-playing book from Mongoose is out. It’s a very attractive package with an enormous amount of information in it. I find the amount of effort other people put into my creation–my world, if you prefer–to be kind of boggling.

I tend to see my stories in microcosm–the way, basically, that the characters themselves are seeing things. I don’t have a future history in mind; I don’t really believe in a future history in the sense that ‘we start here and we end there’ because we don’t end except in the sense that human life will vanish from the universe at some point. (Having grown up in the ’50s with the Cold War and nuclear holocaust an accepted possibility, I’m conditioned to believe that the end may be within a century rather than within a billion years.)

But until then, human history just goes, rather than going somewhere. Event follows event. Very rarely, in my opinion, does event cause event–at least not in the simple fashion one would use to describe a chemical reaction. A more organized viewpoint is valid, though, and the game book is really neat.

I should mention that the proofs were sent me in the form of a pdf so large that a friend downloaded it from an FTP site and burned it to disk for me. I proofed it on-screen instead of printing it out as I would have done with my own prose. I’ve always felt that I lose a lot of comprehension by reading on-screen; and boy! did this example prove the matter for me.

My introduction, Five Firebases, was about natural phenomena which I still remember vividly from my time in Southeast Asia. Mongoose had dropped an incident for length, which was fine. They hadn’t changed references in the introductory text from five to four, however, and I didn’t catch the mistake.

Live and learn: next time I will run off at least the bits that I’ve written. And for those of you who want the essay uncut, it’s on the website.

The paperback of BALEFIRES, my horror/fantasy collection from Night Shade, is out. Whee! As of this writing I haven’t actually seen the edition, but when I asked for author’s copies they shipped some which reach me soon. I’m really proud of this book; a lot of my life is in it.

And the entire Belisarius series is now out in three hardcover omnibus editions for which I did new introductions. I plotted the series as three novels; Eric Flint wrote them very ably as six novels; and now they’re back to my original design under my original titles to the outlines and with new, uniform covers by Kurt Miller. (Quite nice ones.)

The Baen reprint of my Young Adult novel PATRIOTS is due out in September. I won’t repeat what I said about it in Newsletter 51, but I will say that I genuinely like the book.

In October Baen brings out volume one of the COLLECTED HAMMER’S SLAMMERS as an omnitrade paperback. This is sort of an intermediate size between mass market and trade paperback. Having read novels by Clavell and Michener as mass-market paperbacks, I’m rather glad the Hammer volumes are getting a somewhat larger page size. The first one is long, and each succeeding volume gets longer.

Baen is giving the paperbacks new cover art. The first two (by Kurt Miller) are very good.

When I saw the sketch of volume two (February, 2010), I liked the detail but wished that there was more color contrast. I suggested to Jennie (Faries, my friend and Baen graphic designer) that perhaps the tank in the foreground could be magenta. Toni (Weisskopf, my friend and Baen publisher) had similar thoughts but brightened the gray shades with explosions instead of a frou-frou tank. Her way is better.

I had a horrible realization when I started checking when books were coming out before I did this newsletter. Tor had moved the first book of my new fantasy series from November, 2010, to July. That pleased me. But Baen has the new RCN novel (the one I’m working on) scheduled also and I didn’t know when that was.

As it turns out, it’s September, 2010, a two month separation which shouldn’t hurt much. Believe me, it’s really bad for the books, the author, and the publishers to have two novels come out on top of one another. I’ve got personal experience, but so has Dan Simmons and I’m sure a lot of other writers.

I was remiss in not thinking about the possibility sooner. Okay, I’m busy writing books; but I should have thought about it.

My friend Mark Van Name lightly revised the Wikipedia article on me, correcting minor errors and changing the tone, and my webmaster Karen Zimmerman put it up. I told Mark that I didn’t want a puff piece, but neither was I comfortable with something that made me sound like a Neocon. Thanks to both of them and to the friends who’ve been prodding me to do something about the article.

Nothing much has changed with the website. I’ve read over a chunk of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (the Hercules Cycle), but I’m not ready to do a serious translation yet. I have a novel to write.

I frequently read military memoirs, most often from Viet Nam. I recently read several more, which got me to thinking as such things usually do. Dunno, maybe I’m trying to make sense of 1970. I haven’t succeeded yet.

But it did remind me of something. In April, 1970, I flew from Travis AFB (near San Francisco) to Bien Hoa in a DC-8/Super 61, owned and operated by United Airlines under charter to the Army. It was a standard civilian aircraft with stewardesses.

Until quite recently airlines had retired stewardesses at age 35, but new legislation had prevented them from continuing the practice. (Not everything Lyndon Johnson did was bad, though the Viet Nam War was bad enough to lower his average a very long way.)

Stewardesses bid on runs (cabin attendants probably still do), and it was very noticeable that all those on our flight were older women with a great deal of seniority. They had chosen to fly with us.

After we landed at Bien Hoa (after the steepest approach I’ve ever experienced; I’ll swear I was looking straight down through the portside window before we started our dive toward the runway), the stewardesses stood by the exits and cheerfully wished us good luck as we disembarked.

And every once in a while, one would turn her face away and wipe her tears.

God bless those women. Civilians didn’t have a lot of use for American soldiers back in 1970, but our stewardesses cared.

–Dave Drake

***
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Cover art: Kurt Miller

Contents:

• Lambs to the Slaughter
• Men Like Us
• The Day of Glory
• The Interrogation Team
• A Death in Peacetime
• Dreams in Amber
• Safe to Sea
• The Murder of Halley’s Comet
• The Hunting Ground
• The False Prophet
• A Grand Tour

Other Times Than Peace. 2006, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 331 p. 1416520767. $25.00.
————– 2008, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 472 p. 1416555667 (pb) $7.99