Dear People,

Jeepers, a new year yet again. I hope you all–and all of us–have a good one.

I’m at work on the plot for my next Tor fantasy, which at the moment I’m calling Demons from the Earth. By ‘working’ I mean that I have detailed (though not polished) scene-by-scene descriptions of the first five chapters (I hope more by the time you read this) as well as a pile of more or less organized material sufficient to fill the remaining two-thirds of the plot. I’ve got some 3K words at the moment.

I’ll polish the plot after I complete it; then I’ll write the book. Nothing is certain (after all, Elijah on good authority was translated directly to heaven without passing through death), but at this point I’d say that completing the novel is just a matter of time. (And a lot of work, of course, but I’ve never minded work.)

Getting to this stage is a considerable relief. Gathering material for a plot takes time. I go over old notes, make new ones, doodle possibilities (mostly in the form of letters to friends). At some point (and this is the magic) it starts to go together. After that the process is similar to working on a jigsaw puzzle: stuff has to fit properly, but there’s a form into which I’m fitting it.

But until the plot starts to gel, there’s the lurking fear in the back of my mind that maybe things aren’t going to start fitting this time. Since I don’t know (not really) how the process works, I’ll have no warning that it isn’t going to work for this book–for the rest of my life.

There was another factor on Demons: the immediately previous project wasn’t a novel but rather the plot for a novel, Into the Maelstrom. I’m good at plotting and I rather like to do it, but plotting a complex novel (all of mine for at least the past twenty years have been complex) takes ten-tenths mental effort. Writing, even at its most demanding, doesn’t take that much concentration.

So: this plot seemed like unusually hard work and it may have taken me longer than some have (I’m not sure that’s objectively true), but that didn’t mean that my brain had turned to sludge. Which of course was what I was afraid of before the parts started fitting together.

While plotting I’ve written two essays of which I’m rather proud. One will be an afterword to the new Baen edition of Heinlein’s Assignment in Eternity (I assume it’s due out in 2012). The task caused me to think of Heinlein as a working professional writer rather than the exalted figure he’s been to me ever since I began reading SF seriously.

I compared the book versions (which I assume are the author’s preferred texts) with the original magazine appearances of the stories. Heinlein in the ’40s was edited with the same callous contempt as I was thirty years later, which isn’t a conclusion I expected to reach.

The second essay was… well, odd. Barnes and Noble are doing a Military SF week some time in January (for all I know it’s happening now), and the Tor.com blog is echoing B&N. Tor.com (specifically Irene Gallo, Tor’s art director) asked me to do an essay for them. She said any connected subject was fine, but they thought I could do a history of the subgenre.

Well, I could do a history. The problem is that I work in the subgenre myself, and that could lead to all sorts of recriminations. My essay on Golden Age SF was controversial (among people who didn’t realize how ignorant they were), but nobody claimed that I was banging my own drum. Anything I said about Military SF as a whole would lay me open to that charge; and because I’m human, accusations of the author’s self-interest might have an uncomfortable amount of truth to them.

I flirted for a bit with discussing the EC war comics of my childhood (Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales) and reread a block of them, but then I got a better idea. I wrote my essay on The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears, a 1949 story by Keith Bennett, a one-shot author. I first read it when I was thirteen. I’ve reread it repeatedly, and it simply gets better each time.

I did my essay on that story, illustrating its implications with anecdotes from the 1970 US invasion of Cambodia. The result turned out to my satisfaction, but I was pretty sure that Tor wouldn’t print it. (Or whatever it is when something is published electronically. Published, I guess.)

To my surprise, Irene accepted it immediately without hesitation or cavil. Her actions throughout the process were decisive, intelligent, and–because I didn’t write pablum–showed courage.

The essay should be up at some point within the month. I’m proud of it.

Voyage across the Stars is probably out: at any rate, I’ve had my author’s copies for a couple weeks now. It’s an attractive package combining Cross the Stars and The Voyage, space operas set in the Hammer universe and based on Greek epics (The Odyssey and The Argonautica respectively).

The turn of the year makes me thoughtful if not precisely sad. I wrote Cross the Stars in the early ’80s: Jim Baen acquired it for Tor before he left to found Baen Books. It doesn’t seem that long ago, but it was thirty years–and Jim’s been dead for more than five.

Well, Jim isn’t dead in my heart or in my memories. And I have vivid memories of writing both the novels collected here, so maybe they weren’t so distant either.

I’ve read the proofs of The Road of Danger, the next RCN space opera. They were extremely clean, having been set from the electronic files over which I made multiple edit passes. I know that this level of polish doesn’t make my books sell noticeably better. In a strictly economic sense, I’ve wasted four days on proofs which I could have spent writing fresh material for which I would be paid.

But if I were thinking in strictly economic terms, I wouldn’t be a writer. My prose is important to me for reasons which have nothing to do with money: it’s something I can control, and it gives me the illusion that my life is to some degree under control.

So I do multiple drafts, and I read proofs… and I become irrationally angry when a copyeditor introduces error into something which I’ve done correctly. Mind, people should not be paid to make the world a worse place than it would be without them; and some copyeditors do just that.

I’ve added to the website (my webmaster has added) a short discussion of Manly Wade Wellman and the song Vandy, Vandy. Manly, like Jim, is still with me, thank goodness.

Bull Spec is a quarterly focusing on speculative fiction in the Research Triangle region of NC. The next issue (due out momentarily) has a review of Into the Hinterlands; an interview with me and John Lambshead about writing the book; and tributes to me by Mark, John, and Toni.

All I will say about those last is that I wish I were the man my friends think I am.

I get frequent queries as to why my books aren’t available in Kindle editions or more generally why they aren’t available electronically. They are, particularly from Baen Books. Yes, Kindle editions also.

Mentioning the fact here probably won’t help (I suspect splashing it in big red letters across my home page wouldn’t prevent people from peevishly asking the same question), but my webmaster suggests I note that the Baen.com sale site for Ebooks has recently become a lot easier to use.  It’s being handled now by a thoroughly professional outfit, Principled Technologies, which not-coincidentally is run by my friend (and Baen author) Mark Van Name.

Speaking of Baen, as I regularly do here and elsewhere, I just did a five-book extension with Toni to give me nine books under contract with Baen. The company is doing well by putting its first emphasis on storytelling, and I am doing very well for the same reason.

A couple things have occurred recently to make me think about the importance of appearance, to me and to humans more generally. I focus almost entirely on what I think is reality: how can I become a better writer? How can I become a better person? I’m not claiming that I’m particularly successful on those matters or similar ones, but I’m trying.

I was invited to participate in an Army War College Conference. The idea made me cringe: the two years I spent in close association with military officers were the worst in my life. While that wasn’t entirely because of those military officers, they had more to do with my misery than the NVA did.

For a while I considered going anyway, because… well, because I owed it to my country. Then I thought about that proposition and realized that I didn’t believe that any real good comes out of these conferences nor that I have anything useful to say to a gathering of colonels and the like. My country would get along fine without me at the Army War College, just as my country would have gotten along fine without me in Viet Nam. (Indeed, the US would have gotten along much better if there’d been 529,000 fewer of her citizens with me there in 1970.)

The only thing my attendance would have brought me was the ability to claim that I was important. That doesn’t matter to me: it wouldn’t make me more or less important (and neither a better writer nor a better man), it would just give me that appearance. It’s better that I save the government a modest sum of money by staying home and working. Just possibly I’ll manage to become incrementally better in reality. That would be important.

Happy New Year, everybody. May the future become a little brighter for all of us.

–Dave Drake

***
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Dear People,

I’ve finished the plot for Into the Maelstrom, which will be the sequel to Into the Hinterlands when John Lambshead writes it next year. (Next year isn’t nearly as far away as I think it ought to be.)

The series is a space opera based on the life of George Washington. Hinterlands took him through the French and Indian War (as it was in North America). Maelstrom picks up fifteen years later with the events leading up to the Revolutionary War and runs through the Battle of Trenton.

Research for the plot took time, and creating reasonable space-opera analogues to an Eighteenth century original is a lot trickier than it will look to a reader if I did it correctly. That said, the puzzles were fun–and time spent studying a man as extraordinary as George Washington is both education and pleasure.

Now I’m trying to get into the plot for Demons from the Earth, the third fantasy of my Books of the Elements for Tor. It isn’t moving any more quickly or easily than my plots have in the past, which I accept the same way I accept getting wet when I’m fifteen miles from the house as the storm breaks.

Based on past experience, the plot will come and the book will follow. I’ve got a lot of past experience. And it was hard every single time.

Incidentally, I’ve found that it helps me to get started if I translate a chunk of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. At present I’m working through the Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths, a lengthy section (325 lines), which is entirely ‘X killed Y and Z then killed X.’ Ovid makes the action consistently interesting and not repetitive, which is remarkable.

Craftsmanship of that standard gives me something concrete to shoot for. If Ovid could do that, I can find a path into what every morning seems to be a shifting mass (much like the Chaos which Ovid describes In the Beginning).

The Tor mass market reprint of Birds of Prey is out. Tor is working at doing better with reprints than has been the case for a long time. I learned this when a Tor editor asked me for SF quote to put on a new edition of Skyripper.

The problem here was that Skyripper was about to come out (and now has come out) as half the Baen omnibus Loose Cannon. The other half (the second Tom Kelly book) is Fortress, which Tom Doherty (Tor’s publisher) couldn’t get his staff to reprint a couple years ago. (Nobody refused. It just didn’t happen.) Therefore with Tom’s approval, Toni Weisskopf of Baen did the books instead… just in time for the Tor staff to change direction.

Baen had the rights to Birds of Prey, which was out of print. (And is one of my best novels, by the way.) We–Toni and I–transferred the rights to Tor, and everybody is happy.

I can work in the complex present world; but sometimes I miss the old days.

Take a look at the (now four) cover treatments for Birds of Prey, all of them using the same excellent Michael Whelan painting. If you’re in any doubt about how much difference cover design makes, this should convince you.

Speaking of omnibus editions, Baen is bringing out my two space operas based on Greek epics and set in the Hammer universe: Cross the Stars (the Odyssey) and The Voyage (the Argonautica). I had intended the combined title to be Voyages across the Stars to make clear that it was two books, but the cover appeared as Voyage [singular]across the Stars. I just left it that way. It’s a better title anyway.

Oh–the volume includes a very perceptive essay by Cecelia Holland, who blew me away when I read her Until the Sun Falls while I was in Cambodia. I am hugely honored to have become Cecelia’s friend in the forty-odd years since.

The nice cover is by Sam Kennedy. It’s the first time I recall seeing his work, and I wouldn’t mind more of it on my covers.

Baen Books will be bringing out my five time-travel novellas in a single volume. Four of the stories involve using a time machine to hunt dinosaurs; the fifth is Travellers, a very different piece set during the Great 1897 Airship Flap.

I happened to glance through the original edition of Time Safari recently and was struck by the fact that the stories were quite well-written–though none of the versions of the book sold especially well. I diffidently suggested a new, expanded edition to Toni, who snapped at the idea.

Negotiations with Baen Books today are just as easy and pleasant as they were during Jim’s lifetime.

The title was easy: Dinosaurs and a Dirigible. Tom Kidd is planned for the cover artist, but it’s still early days.

There are a few new pictures on the website. The Drake/Van Name entourage visited the NC State Fair with a lot of low key fun. So much of the best in life involves relaxing with friends and family. It doesn’t make exciting reading, but do be aware of how important it is to me.

I remembered to bring my camera to the fair and to charge its battery beforehand, but I didn’t remember to put the charged battery back in the camera. This shot of the 522.8 pound prize pumpkin came from Gina, who was much better organized.

I attended Constellation in Huntsville and there chatted with Joe Haldeman, in part about things in Nam blowing up. (Joe was a combat engineer, so some of his stories involved him blowing things up. I was an interrogator and therefore an observer, but I sure observed some doozies.)

This is us forty-odd years later. I find it hard to realize that I survived, and Joe had a much worse time In Country than I did. Oh, well.

As usual, I went to the World Fantasy Convention this year. It’s a business con and I did business besides spending time with friends. Despite real problems with programming (the rooms had poor acoustics and the con hadn’t bothered to arrange microphones for panelists), there were some interesting presentations.

The most fun was the one by the San Diego Zoo, which walked some neat animals through the auditorium. My favorite was the West African pangolin (a tree-climbing mammal which eats ants and is covered by scales of folded protein). If I got a decent picture of it (I did, but I’ll take requests for the armadillo), it’ll be here; if not, that will be another animal (maybe a three-banded armadillo).

My webmaster, Karen, is digitizing photographs I took in the ’70s and putting a few of them on the website. This one was taken (with my Minox) during the 1978 WFC in Maryland. Manly Wade Wellman and Sprague de Camp were very important to me as writers and as men. They had been close friends in the ’30s but had dropped out of contact for thirty years. They met again here and renewed their friendship in my presence.

And finally, one more photograph. I usually end newsletters with a little essay, but in this case I’ll let the picture (which my wife Jo took in fall of 1973) speak. By the time it was taken, I’d been back to the World for nearly three years. I’d graduated from Duke Law School, passed the bar exam, and was working as Assistant Town Attorney for the Town of Chapel Hill. I had bought a house and was a father.

That sounds as though I were functional, and I guess I was; but there wasn’t much of me left over. Nam had bulldozed me flat; what I am now was built up from the rubble, like the Byzantine fort I saw in Lambaesis which reused ashlars from the city which the Vandals had sacked and burned centuries earlier.

There are a lot of veterans returning to society again, now. Cut them some slack, people; because chances are, there’s no more left of them than there was of me when this picture was taken.

–Dave Drake

***
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I have a rough plot outline for the next RCN space opera, The Road of Danger. (The title is from a poem by A E Housman.) Whee! A rough plot may not seem very exciting to other people, but it certainly was to me after months of work to get there.

Almost four months, to be precise. I’ll refine and expand the plot; then there’s the real job of writing the book, but to a considerable degree the rest of the job is mechanical. Somebody else could take what I have now and turn it into a book. The result would be different from what I will do, but there are people who’d like someone else’s result better than mine.

I guess the other big news is that Donato’s cover for Out of the Waters (the second book in the Elements fantasy series for Tor) is up on the website. It’s both a wonderful piece of art and a wonderful cover (which aren’t by any means the same thing).

To my amusement, the cover is also a real illustration of the text. I’m one of the few authors I know (actually, I’m the only author whom I’ve heard say this) who doesn’t care if the cover illustrates the book so long as it sells the book to people who will like the contents. Donato’s cover will certainly do that, but he also mined my text for elements which he thought would be effective.

They are effective; Donato is a brilliant artist. I am very lucky.

The cover of Into the Hinterlands (now with a little description of the book) is also up; my friend John Lambshead has developed the book from my outline. The credit order is Drake and Lambshead.

Those of you who are familiar with my previous public (and published) statements about name order on novels know that I’ve been adamant that my name must go second when I did the outline but somebody else wrote the book. I’m not going to discuss the reasons for the change this time, because I become angry every time I think about it.

Nobody but me cares about it. (John is a senior scientist who has published 80 scientific papers. He expected and approves of this result.) I care very much, though, and it depresses the hell out of me.

Worse things happen in wartime.

Speaking of dust jackets, the other new thing on my website involves what is kind of my first book. In 1975 my friend John Squires took a bookbinding course. For my 30^th birthday he gave me a volume containing my first six war stories (tear sheets from digest magazines), bound in fabric from one of my fatigue shirts. It was a one-off, making it a very limited edition.

A couple months ago, John figured out how to make dust jackets and sent one. The image of that dj is up at http://david-drake.com/2011/like-the-man-said/.

The ’70s were a mixture of good and bad for me. John Squires is one of the unalloyed good things from that decade.

Site statistics show that there aren’t a lot of people interested in my translations of Ovid. Still, I become a much better writer of English prose by doing them. I finally finished the Hercules Cycle from the Metamorphoses. It’s posted, as is another lyric from the Amores (Book 2, number 14).

I expect my next translation project to be the Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths from the Metamorphoses, another long section. I was startled as I browsed through it to find that it’s graphically bloody: Ovid uses Greek household furnishings where a modern spatter film might use a chain saw. (For example, a Lapith stabs a Centaur very vividly in the face with deer horns which had been hung as a hunting trophy.) This sort of description is common in Lucan and Seneca, but I hadn’t remembered it from when I read the Metamorphoses some 40 years ago.

I’ve done a few interviews. Interviewers often go over the same ground, and there’s plenty of duplication in these. On the other hand, most interviewers have specialist interests of their own. For an extreme example, one of my recent interviewers wrote a Zombie novel, which gave a unique cast to his questions.

Over the years, a number of readers–usually but not always veterans–have thanked me for what my fiction has done for them while they were in hard places or after they had come through those places. This makes me a little uncomfortable, because I don’t think I deserve the thanks.

You see, I wrote the stories for myself. They kept me between the ditches, or at least close enough to the road that I was able to get back on again. I’m really pleased that they help other people who’ve been in their own version of the same places, but I didn’t write for those other people. Gosh, for a lot of years, I didn’t even admit that I was writing to help myself.

Recently Christof Harper–a custom knifemaker and a veteran–asked if he could make me a knife, the sort of thing Sgt Scratchard (from Counting the Cost) might have carried. I said sure, but that it wasn’t in any way necessary.

Christof mentioned that the knife would be similar to a Randall #2, if I knew what those looked like. As it chanced, I did. A friend of mine in the ’60s, a Texan, knew Bo Randall and had both a #1 and a #2. If I could have afforded it, I would have taken a Randall to Viet Nam with me.

I couldn’t afford a Randall, of course. I couldn’t even afford the mass produced $35 Gerber Mark I which came out at about that time; I carried a Buck General. Even the Buck’s cost of $22.50 was something of a strain on the budget.

As it turned out, I didn’t need a knife in Viet Nam. I was in an armored unit, and even our M16s were really back-up weapons. All the knife provided was a security blanket, an absolutely last-ditch defense which wouldn’t jam and wouldn’t run out of ammunition. It had no real purpose except to make me feel better, or anyway to make me feel just a hair less lost and doomed. I wasn’t quite alone.

That was damned important.

So now it’s 40 years later, and I have a knife which is wholly comparable to the Randall which I couldn’t afford back then. There’s a picture of it, but this doesn’t begin to do justice to the workmanship.

A writer working in the middle of 23 acres doesn’t need a fighting knife any more than an interrogator sitting on the loader’s hatch of a tank did, behind the M74 co-ax machine gun which had been moved up to a stub mount there.

But the kid who came back to the World in 1971 felt alone in a fashion that folks who haven’t been there (wherever the individual there is) can’t really imagine. The only things that have really helped that loneliness have been notes from other people who felt and feel the same things; notes, and now this superb knife.

That’s damned important.

Given my fans, a number of you reading this probably feel that you’re alone. You aren’t, no more than I am; but I know very well that that can be the hardest thing in the world to believe at 3 in the morning.

Hang in, people. I’m hanging in also.

–Dave Drake

***
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Written for the Tor/Forge May 2010 Newsletter

THE MOTORCYCLE WAY TO COMPLEX PLOTTING

Writers use various tools in their work. One of my tools is my motorcycle.

Well, plural: my motorcycles. Bikers learn quickly that if they expect to ride every day, they’d better have two. (And that’s if they’re Japanese, as both of my current rides are. More exotic bikes tend to be two-wheeled versions of owning a Lotus Elan.)

It’s a bit of an overstatement when I say I ride daily, but most weekdays I make a run from our home in the country to my post office box in the center of Chapel Hill, about a 40-mile round trip. My wife has a car and drives it whenever we go somewhere together, but I haven’t driven a car since 1986 or ’87. That was to carry Larry Niven and his luggage to the airport, something I couldn’t do on a motorcycle.

And there’s the real beauty of a bike for a writer: you’re alone. You know how rare it is to be really alone and how valuable that can be.

People who drive cars can do a lot of things that engage their intellects beyond their immediate physical surroundings. Cell phones and texting are modern examples, but fiddling with the CD changer, reading a newspaper (really), and chatting with a passenger (or screaming at the kids/dogs in the back seat) all take you out of the experience. A serious-minded driver can even zone out listening to recorded lectures on Greek philosophy.

A biker can get a helmet with a cell phone (or CB), just as most bikes will carry a passenger…but nobody expects you to do that. Windrush makes even an MP3 player doubtful at best. (My hearing loss from Nam makes it impossible.)

A (surviving) biker is in the moment at all times. Is that car at the intersection ahead going to start across? Will there be a garbage truck stopped around that curve, like there was last week? Is this rain starting to freeze?

Or even: Holy Crap! The woman beside me is pulling into my lane to get around the bus ahead of her!

Even when riding on a lovely day and a familiar road, my conscious mind is wholly focused on my immediate physical surroundings. It’s amazing how much complicated work your subconscious mind gets done under those circumstances. It’s even better than sleeping on problems.

I create complex plots and my prose structure tends to be very tight. Part of the reason I can accomplish those things is that when I pull off my helmet, I suddenly see how to combine three clumsy sentences into two clear ones, or I realize that if I transfer a bit of business from Hedia to Alphena, everything will work.

Cover art: Donato

Hedia to Alphena? They’re two of the four viewpoint characters in my new Tor fantasy, The Legions of Fire. This novel uses a setting very similar to that of Ancient Rome–and by that I mean the real Rome, not the cardboard fakery you get from Hollywood or HBO. I know the background pretty well (you can find my translations of Latin poetry on my website), but fitting my usual considerable amount of action into a world so complicated took all the help I could get. My bikes provided a lot of that help.

But besides those practical reasons, a long sweeping curve on a bright Spring day makes me a much happier writer than I would be otherwise.

–Dave Drake, May 2010

The Legions of Fire (0-7653-2078-9; $25.99) is available from Tor.

Cover art: Donato

My friend Mark Van Name is, among other things, a business consultant. After I sold the final trilogy in the Isles Series to Tor but before I started work on the three books, he asked me if I would like him to do a business analysis of the Isles fantasies. I said I would appreciate that. (It would never have occurred to me to ask.)

Mark shortly provided a written report, which he went over with me. I won’t describe his methodology, but even if it hadn’t seemed valid on its face, I would have accepted it anyway: Mark is an expert on the subject; I am not. I don’t argue with experts in their own fields.

Mark’s most significant recommendation was that I structure the final trilogy as a whole–that is, plotting all three books (at least in rough) before I started writing the first one. I have worked very hard to make every one of my books self-standing. Fantasy readers today are so used to trilogies, however, that they expect to have to read books in order of publication. My fantasies, therefore, didn’t have quite the right feel.

I thought about this for some while, then created a three-book arc in which the world of the Isles changes at the end of each volume. The result of the changes was explored in the next volume in the first two cases, and the whole nine-book series is completed with a crash at the end of the last. The individual volumes would have limited problems of their own which would be solved in that volume, but you would gain a great deal if you read the first volume before you read the second, and the trilogy’s third volume climax grows directly from events in the first.

Then I did a detailed plot of the first book, The Fortress of Glass, and wrote it.

This isn’t terribly different from the way I worked on the first six Isles novels (or for that matter, different from the way I’ve written most of my other series novels). Basically, I knew the situation and climax of the two following books, but I knew also that I would have to work out the details of those novels in the light of what actually appeared in the pages of the first one. I compose detailed outlines, but the personalities of the characters develop considerably from the sketches the outlines provide.

The plot background of The Fortress of Glass stemmed from two SF works which I read when I was 14: Spawn, a 1939 novelette by P Schuyler Miller, and Star Bridge, a 1955 novel by Jack Williamson and James E Gunn. I recommend both of these works strongly, though in the case of the novel, I doubt you’ll be able to determine what I stole and placed at the core of my own work.

Details of plot business came variously; I’ll mention one, but rest assured that it stands for many. The funeral early in the book is based on the funeral of Septimius Severus, as described by Herodian (who was present). I considerably simplified the real event. I’m well read in the classics, and I find it a great deal easier (and more satisfying) to steal from history than to invent things myself.

There’s one other thing to be said about this novel. When I plotted the three-book arc, I realized it would be necessary to kill two major supporting characters in order to justify the actions of the second and third volumes.

It frankly never crossed my mind that people would think that I had killed the characters casually. People, nothing in my writing is casual. It was necessary for the course of the trilogy that one of my major characters become a genocidal monomanic, so that she could come to terms with herself for the first time, and so that she could find happiness in the climax.

Well, as much happiness as her kind, which is pretty much my kind, can hope for.

What I did infuriated a lot of people, which I regret. I think the fact that I described the event and its immediate aftermath with an absolutely flat affect contributed to their sense of outrage.

Under the circumstances I describe, your emotions do shut down. Anybody who’s been in hard places can testify to that; but a lot of readers, particularly fantasy readers, don’t have that personal experience to draw from. To them, I was being casual and uncaring.

Would I do the same thing again? Yes, because I was absolutely correct in terms of the trilogy as a whole; and I’d do it the same way, because I will not fantasize when I’m writing about violence.

But if I do it another time, I’ll know from the beginning that many people won’t understand.

–Dave Drake

The Fortress of Glass. Crown of the Isles Trilogy. 2006, New York, NY: Tor. 384 p. 076531259X. $25.95.
————– 2007, New York, NY: Tor. 402 p. 978-0-765-35116-6 (pb) $7.99.

I do very heavy plots. I usually have at least 10% of the story/novel wordage in the plot. Here’s an example: the plot for The Far Side of the Stars, with the working title The Far Side of Heaven. Scenes were re-ordered numerically as I wrote the book.

I do plots beginning to end, and I do very long plots, but there’s not a right way.

No, I took the plot from Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, his first novel (a fixup from novellas he’d written for Black Mask magazine in the late 1920s). Kurosawa took Hammett’s plot for his fine Samurai film (I’m told there may have been a Japanese gangster novel as an intermediary, but I haven’t seen it myself), and Leone then turned Kurosawa’s film into the first of his Spaghetti Westerns. I’m familar with (and like) both films, but I read Hammett before I saw them and have reread him often since then. I’m a little surprised to be asked this question so often, because my credit to Hammett in the front of the novel is explicit. Apparently a lot of people expect more originality of the film industry than I do.

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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Moses Siregar III posted a YouTube video in four chunks of the panel “The Continued Viability of Epic Fantasy” recorded at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus OH October 30, 2010. Dave is on the panel with John R. Fultz, Blake Charlton, David B. Coe, and Freda Warrington.

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In 2008  Blackfive TV did a six-part series of video interviews, sponsored by Baen Books. They are all posted on the Baen Webscription site, and at the Blackfive TV blog site.  You can also find them on YouTube.

Dave talks about his background, writers who influenced him including early SF writers, his military service in the Blackhorse in Vietnam and Cambodia, how he started writing military SF, working with Jim Baen, and generally about his writing career.  He ends with a message for the troops.