The most exciting news this time has very little to do with me. I am therefore turning the stage over to my webmaster, Karen Zimmerman:

The new web site is up at http://david-drake.com.  Our very simple original web site went live April 2000 and since then outgrew its ability to handle Dave’s very extensive, rich content.  I hope the new site helps users find things more easily—there are a lot of cross references and access points.  Please be aware that I’m still tweaking things, so you might see changes in appearance once in a while, and I’m still uploading some of the old archival content, including past newsletters and photos.

I’d greatly appreciate it if you would let me know if you see any glitches.  Tell me what error you see and what operating system and browser you’re using.

For those among you who care, this web site is built with WordPress, most commonly known as blogging software.  I found the post function and various plug-ins extremely adaptable for our content.  Thanks to my daughter, Ali Zimmerman, for helping me adapt the design and function the way I wanted it, especially the Ovid section.  I think we might be pushing WordPress to its limits in some cases.  I suppose we could say that Dave’s entire site is one big blog, eh?

Because we moved to a new web host, I have not yet set up new mailing list software, so this newsletter is going out from a third party which may or may not prove satisfactory.  That will explain some of the automatic footer and other oddities you might notice.  I apologize for the formatting on this one. On the other hand, there seem to be some interesting options I might try the next time.  Watch this space!

Anyway, enjoy the site!

–Karen

As I implied above, I was mostly a spectator. My primary function was lowest-common-denominator testing. “I can’t find that.” ‘But it’s right there, at the top of the page!’ “That says Internet Explorer.” ‘No, the top of the web page!’ “Oh, there it is.”

Yes, that’s a real exchange. One of quite a number of similar exchanges. I have my virtues; but believe me, skill in the design and construction of websites is not among them. I am in awe of my site.

Oh–I did add a little essay about the way the final Isles trilogy (The Crown of the Isles) was structured. That’s up as a note to The Fortress of Glass, the first of the three volumes.

And since I’m speaking of essays, I did one on motorcycling for the Tor/Forge blog, which led to me doing a pair of essays on the classics as an aid to writing for Tor.com, which is a wholly separate entity.

Essays of this sort are hard work to write correctly. I gave myself (the blog didn’t set a limit) 750 words for each of the classics pieces. They came in at 749 and 743 words respectively, after very darned careful changing and tightening. By the end I was pleased at the results, but the work took a lot out of me.

Whether or not the work was worthwhile depends on one’s definition of worth. I doubt that I’ll sell one additional book because I wrote them, so commercial considerations certainly didn’t apply. On the other hand, I really love the classics. Like the Blackhorse, classical literature has had a big, positive impact on my life. (Wholly positive in the case of the classics. That wouldn’t be true for the Blackhorse.) I’m proud to be able to say so in public.

I don’t expect I’ll do it again, though. The psychic cost was pretty high.

Speaking of Tor–in the most recent newsletter, I mentioned that Tom Doherty, Tor’s publisher, and I had wanted Tor to reprint Fortress, my 1987 Tor thriller, but that his bureaucracy wouldn’t permit that to happen. Toni, publisher of Baen Books and apparently a newsletter subscriber (hi, Toni) told me that she would be pleased to reprint both Fortress and the first book in the (kinda) series, Skyripper, as an omnitrade.

So I called Tom to make sure it was all right with him–and learned that nobody had told him what had happened about the (non) reprint of Fortress. He was okay with Baen doing it, though. It just seemed simpler to both of us.

THE LEGIONS OF FIRE, the Tor fantasy whose publication led to the three essays I mentioned above, has appeared and is beautiful, just beautiful. Donato did two versions of the cover: the book as printed, in which the painting is shown as a banner from Trajan’s Column (which he repainted with additions from the novel, you’ll notice if you look carefully), but also as a full-bleed cover with lots of fire demons. (Donato is not only good, he’s amazingly hard working.) Both versions are on the website. I guess I agree with the designer’s choice, but jeepers! what an embarrassment of riches!

Next up will be the two latest RCN space operas from Baen. The pb of IN THE STORMY RED SKY is due in August, with the hc of WHAT DISTANT DEEPS following in September. These, like all books of the series save for the first, have Steve Hickman covers–wonderful Steve Hickman covers.

I’ve been thinking about those covers a lot recently, because Steve has asked me to write an introduction to a (second) volume of his art which he’s putting together now. That’s a problem for me, because I can’t even draw a straight line with a ruler. (The ruler always slips.)

The thing that really struck me when I looked hard at the covers Steve did for the RCN series is this: they’re perfect for the works, but they aren’t what I would have picked if somebody had forced me to choose a subject. I couldn’t ask for a better illustration of why I generally refuse to comment on cover art.

Okay, there are a few things I’ve said. A fantasy with strong female characters in the text should have at least one woman in the cover image. (My Military SF generally has strong female characters also, but there putting a tank on the cover with only a teensy helmeted figure visible at the TC’s hatch isn’t going to mislead anybody about the contents.) And it’s generally good to have a strong central image, particularly on a paperback cover, though I generally bite my tongue rather than saying that.

But if someone insisted I pick a scene for the cover of (say) What Distant Deeps, I’d probably have put a giant Plesiosaur charging down the slope at a small human figure with her pistol raised. Which would have been completely _wrong_ or at least wrong for Steve to paint. He correctly focused on the fact that the series is about the two central characters, not about shooting monsters or blowing up spaceships or subverting governments (granted, that would be a hard one to illustrate) or any other of the many aspects of the plot.

But I wouldn’t suggest that another artist paint the central characters even though that was the right choice for Steve, because not every artist is as comfortable painting human figures as he is. (Paul Alexander’s covers had a great deal to do with the success of the Hammer series, but I wouldn’t have wanted him to do the cover of What Distant Deeps in the fashion Steve did it.)

I do my best work when somebody tells me the desired result and gets out of my way while I execute it in the fashion I’m most comfortable doing. I think most artists–the best ones, anyway–are similar to me.

I see that I’ve mentioned a lot of items peripheral to my main work, but I haven’t commented on how MONSTERS FROM THE DEEP, the second book in the new Tor fantasy series, is coming. It’s chugging along; I’m at just under 90K and rising. That’s still mid-book (I’m near the end of chapter 11 of 19), so I’m convinced that it’s crap and that I’ve lost all the skill I may once have had and a lot of other depressing things; but that’s a problem in my head, not with the book.

I sometimes wonder if I would get this depressed about the quality of my works in progress if it weren’t for Nam. I think I probably would. Even before I was drafted, I was in the habit of stopping in the middle of a story because I was sure the idea was crap. When I look back over those scraps, I find a number of them which were perfectly workable. I guess it’s just the (sad, miserable) way I’m constructed.

What follows can be construed as a political comment, at least if one lives in Connecticut. I don’t ordinarily do this (I vote every time, a right I’ve paid for; but I don’t tell other people how to vote), and anybody who wants to skip the rest of this newsletter will not offend me in any way.

First: a year ago, I could not imagine circumstances in which I would hope that Linda McMahon would become a US Senator.  However….

The Army and Marine Reserves were a significant factor in the First Gulf War and are even more important in the present quagmire. (Quagmires.) Reservists are being treated shabbily and put into extreme danger for uncertain periods of time with inferior equipment. Nothing I say below should be taken as an attack on present-day reservists.

Something similar was true during WW II–though since what was then the Department of War was run better than Mr Rumsfeld ran Defense, the Reserves weren’t as badly treated relative to regular troops. Reserve troops fought in many of the critical battles both in Europe and the Pacific.

1970, when Mr Blumenthal served in Washington, DC, and I served in Cambodia and Viet Nam, was different. The Army and Marine Reserves both had “Six and Six Programs” in which the recruit served six months active duty in the US, then spent the rest of his six-year term in the Reserves. Theoretically, the Reserves could have been called up. In reality they never were, and the Reserve recruiters used this fact quite openly to boost their numbers.

When I got back to the World, I immediately reentered Duke Law School. As I sat in the lounge, I heard two of my new classmates talking about the relative virtues of the ways they were staying out of Nam. One had gotten into the National Guard; the other had been accepted into the Six and Six Reserve Program.

I wanted to kill them both. They were unquestionably right–why should they have been screwed up just because I had been?–and intellectually I knew that, but for an instant I was furious.

It isn’t that Mr Blumenthal didn’t serve in Nam or that he got into the Six and Six Program that bothers me. Both those things showed better luck and perhaps better judgment than I showed. If that were the whole story I would happily vote for him under many circumstances, just as I voted for Bill Clinton the first time around even though he lied to stay out of Nam.

Clinton and I both made decisions and didn’t pretend otherwise. He has no reason to regret his choice any more than have to I regret mine.

What Mr Blumenthal did, however, was to claim something that he worked _very_ hard to avoid in 1970. He stole something that he could have had as a gift in 1970; hell, he could have had my seat on the back deck of an M48 tank, holding a bloop tube and wearing a bandolier of grenades, if he’d even hinted that he wanted it.

Mr Blumenthal might make a very good Senator. But he’s no kind of man.

Sorry for the rant. I hope I never feel compelled to do it again.

–Dave Drake

***
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I’m in the middle of the third chapter of MONSTERS OF THE SEAS, the second (of four) novels in my new fantasy series for Tor. It’s moving along at the usual comfortable rate… which as usual isn’t nearly as fast as I wish were the case.

The problem that’s particularly concerning me at the moment is that I’m writing the second book in a new series. I want to open with sufficient background for a reader who hasn’t read the first novel (THE LEGIONS OF FIRE) but without boring the reader who _has_ read LEGIONS.

Now, I’ve faced this general problem many times in the past–since July, 1971, in fact, when I started writing a second Roman-period fantasy story involving Vettius and Dama, the heroes of the final story I sold to August Derleth. This is the first time I’ve had to address the situation with _this_ series, however. I’m still getting a feel for how much to tell and what to pass over.

If I get the pacing wrong, well, I’ll be repeatedly editing my text. Eventually I’ll come to what I think is the correct balance.

I’ve learned to live with the fact that the writing never goes as quickly as I’d like it to. I just keep plodding forward. Plodding forward isn’t a bad philosophy of life; for me, at any rate.

I mentioned THE LEGIONS OF FIRE, due out from Tor in May. As I write this I haven’t even seen dust jackets, but the cover treatment (with art by Donato) is stunning. I don’t view these newsletters as sell-copy, but I do suggest that in a month or so you go down to your local bookstore and look at a copy. If it’s as pretty as the jpg leads me to expect, you’ll get a visual treat.

I’m worried that nobody will like LEGIONS because it’s genuinely different. I’m using a setting very like that of Early Imperial Rome, and the characters behave like men and women of their time and place. That means they–my heroes–don’t always behave in fashions that modern Americans would approve.

I’m an American and proud of it… but I’m not telling any secrets if I say that we Americans tend to be parochial. It often crosses my mind that I’d sell more books if my characters had the attitudes and sensibilities of the largest possible number of potential readers.

The thing is, I couldn’t write that sort of thing if I tried, and there’s no reason I _should_ try. If money were my primary goal, I’d still be a practicing attorney. LEGIONS is the book that appealed to me to write, and I’m hoping it will appeal to a considerable number of readers. That’s what I’ve done ever since I started writing for publication. Sometimes things work out better commercially than they do on other times.

If a writer isn’t willing to take a chance, he’ll never grow, never improve. The downside of taking chances is that sometimes you fall on your face; I’ve certainly fallen on my face in the past. Wish me luck, people.

The paperback of IN THE STORMY RED SKY, an RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, is due out from Baen in August, with the hardcover of its sequel, WHAT DISTANT DEEPS, to follow in September. The lovely Steve Hickman covers for both are up on the news page.

I’ve had questions about availability on SERVANT OF THE DRAGON, the third volume in the Isles fantasy series which I did for Tor (recently completed with THE GODS RETURN, the ninth book in the series). You should be able to read any of my books without even knowing that it’s part of a series, but general readers may not expect that to be true. Furthermore, SERVANT appeared to be out of print, not just out of stock. I therefore checked with Tor as to whether it would be reprinted.

After discussion with Tom Doherty, the Publisher, a reprint of SERVANT has been slotted for December, 2010. This is good, but it sort of bemuses me.

You see, I’m old enough to remember the days before Corporate Publishing, when a publisher would reprint 5K copies of a successful book for stock without thinking anything about it. That’s no longer the case at any house I know of, except for Baen Books.

A couple years ago, Tom and I were chatting. He asked if he should reprint my Tom Kelly thrillers (which he really likes). I told him SKYRIPPER was pretty dated, but that FORTRESS had technically been an alternate universe novel and had some good stuff in it. He said he’d reprint FORTRESS.

The Tor legal department got in a tizzy: they couldn’t find the contracts from 1983 and were sure they didn’t have the rights after 25 years. Well, I couldn’t either–they’re with some very old tax records, I suspect–but I told them just to go ahead and pay me on the standard royalty schedule. They weren’t willing to do anything so simple, and the business obviously wasn’t worth the rigmarole of a complete new contract.

So despite both the author and the publisher wanting the book to be reprinted, the corporate bureaucracy was unwilling to do so–and the book wasn’t reprinted. I understand this–I’m an attorney, after all–but I miss the old days when Tom and I would verbally shake hands and the thing would happen.

And as I said, Baen Books is still that way. I’m sure this makes lots of bookkeeping problems, but you know–the business of a publishing house is to publish books. Everything else should be subordinate to that purpose.

I believe I said in a previous newsletter that the third volume of THE COMPLETE HAMMER’S SLAMMERS would come out from Baen as an omnitrade pb in July, 2010. It’s really going to be November, 2010. The fine Kurt Miller art is up on the news page, and copies of the Night Shade hardcover are still available.

Speaking of me being wrong, I had told people I expected to be at NASFiC. It now looks as though I will be in England on or about that time, so I will _not_ be at NASFiC. I’m not at my best at large, general cons, so I don’t regard missing this one as much of a burden.

We’re approaching ten years since my website went live. My webmaster, Karen Zimmerman (who has hired her daughter Ali for some specialized matters) is at work on a complete rebuild using modern software. We aren’t sure of the timing, but it ought to happen within the next two months.

The main purpose of the changes is to make site navigation easier. The sheer bulk–I’ve really got a lot of content–means that’s still going to be a challenge, but by now we have a better idea of what people will want to learn from the site.

And possibly within the next two months, I’ll finish my translation of the Hercules Cycle of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It’s a long section, and I’m doing it in chunks of twenty or so lines at a time.

I find translating settles me usefully on mornings when I just don’t feel like working because I think what I’ve been doing is crap. The Roman(ish) setting of the book I’m working on (and indeed, the fact that the action opens with scenes from the life of Hercules) make these passages particularly appropriate, but there’s more to it than that.

Ovid raised craftsmanship to the level of art. His work is a constant reminder of how good somebody can be if he simply buckles down and does his job to the best of his ability.

I recently attended CoastCon in Biloxi. People couldn’t have been nicer, and I had a pleasant time. (There are a couple pictures up, though none of the con itself.)

Perhaps because of the large gaming presence, there was a lot of emphasis on my Military SF. The subject of one panel was “Why is Military SF So Popular Today?”

The truth is, Military SF isn’t and never has been terribly popular. In a place like Biloxi, with many military bases in the immediate vicinity, one can imagine that it is, but in truth my fantasies and my space operas outsell my Military SF by a considerable margin.

Now–there are battles of various sorts in my RCN space operas, just as there are in Dave Weber’s Honor Harrington space operas, Eric Flint’s 1632 Alternate Universe novels, and John Ringo’s near-future techno-thrillers. None of these series are Military SF in my opinion.

John’s Posleen series _is_ Military SF and sells very well, but that’s the exception in the Baen list. My Hammer’s Slammers series is Military SF and has a consistent, respectable sale for over 30 years, but not an enormous sale in any single year.

I have just listed the major players in the Baen list, a group that Lois Bujold will (re)join when her new Miles Vorkosigan space opera is published. Baen is the house most identified with Military SF–and even at Baen, it isn’t a critical factor.

But it’s instructive to note the consistency of sales of the modern Military SF category (starting basically in the mid-’70s with Jerry Pournelle’s Falkenberg series, Joe Haldeman’s Forever War series, and my Hammer’s Slammers). While I was writing the early Hammer stories, I also wrote quite a lot of horror. I stopped writing horror in about 1980, shortly before Category Horror took off.

My agent quite reasonably pushed me to write horror novels in the ’80s. I refused because I didn’t want to put my head back into that place, but I assumed I was giving up a chance to write more commercially successful books.

In the ’90s Category Horror crashed, taking with it some careers. Military SF continued to trundle along, and I patted myself on the back for my decision.

But recently I’ve come to realize that I couldn’t possibly have written a commercially successful horror novel even if I’d been willing to try. My mindset–the mindset I brought back from Nam–was far too harsh for a genre intended to sell to an educated but not literary female readership.

The problem isn’t that I wasn’t good at writing horror, it was that my version of real horror simply horrified people. (_Smokie Joe_ is capable of doing that still today.) I pushed the wrong buttons, and I pushed them very hard.

My mindset was commercially acceptable in Military SF, however, which sold largely to soldiers and veterans. These were people who’d been the places I had been, many of them. Some, like me, were still there. They understood and accepted the truth of a story like _The Interrogation Team_, whereas even my agent admits that he’d been unwilling to publish _Smokie Joe_ when he was editing what he claimed was a no-holds-barred horror anthology.

I’m a nicer, better balanced person now than I was 40 years ago. I write novels that relatively larger numbers of people can appreciate.

But I owe a lot to Military SF. It was, and I think it remains, the only genre which allows a writer to explore the truly darkest corners of his heart without a serious commercial penalty.

Now back to my current life as a happy-go-lucky Pollyanna, as all my friends will testify.

–Dave Drake

***
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WHAT DISTANT DEEPS, the next RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, isn’t quite finished. It’s coming along fine and I’ve got well over 100K words in draft–but it just flat isn’t done. I’ll be a lot happier when it’s finished. Or–realistically; this is me we’re talking about–I’ll be a lot less miserable. 

Each of my books is different in structure and in the process of creation. (This may not be obvious to anybody who isn’t in my head while it’s all going on.) Each one therefore feels as though it’s going badly wrong as I write it, because it isn’t exactly the same as the ones before it. Certainly that’s how I’m feeling about this one.

Much of life is like riding a motorcycle: you learn what the limits of cornering traction are by exceeding them and going down. I’m a very placid biker, so almost all my serious problems have been the result of somebody else doing something that I couldn’t avoid.

As a writer, however, I’m not placid. One of these days, and maybe this very day, I may skid completely off the road. Whereupon I’ll pick myself up, limp home on the current book, and do it a different way the next time.

I tend to think that What Distant Deeps is going slowly. In fact it’s not: my average daily rate (a little over a thousand words of rough draft) is right where it usually is on normal days. There’ve been a lot of non-normal days during the past two months, particularly a neat family vacation to the Four Corners Region, but the book is really moving right along.

The thing is, the progress is hard even if it isn’t slow. The first climax of this one is a complex naval battle for which my plot outline is very sketchy. Every morning I had to choreograph the action as well as writing it, rather than just checking what I planned four months ago and proceeding.

Furthermore, as I got into the writing I realized that I needed an additional scene for artistic reasons, wrapping up a sequence earlier in the book. (This is very unusual for me. Usually I would have caught the problem in the outline stage.) So I’m in the process of mortising in new material, which is harder than it would have been to do the job right the first time. When I screw up, I _should_ be punished; nonetheless, the situation hasn’t helped my mood.

The mass market of THE GODS RETURN, the final volume in the Crown of the Isles trilogy and the Isles series more generally, is due out from Tor in December, 2009. I’m proud of the series for what it says, for how it says it, and not least for the fact that it really is a connected series which goes from point A to point B through nine volumes, all of which are basically self-standing. (Though if you read 7, The Fortress of Glass, I _really_ hope you’ll read 9, The Gods Return. The final trilogy has a number of strands which run through all three books and which will be disconcerting until followed to their conclusion.)

And the first omnitrade volume of THE COMPLETE HAMMER’S SLAMMERS is out from Baen Books this month (October, 2009. They reprint the contents (including John Treadaway’s interior art) of the Night Shade hardcover volumes (which are still available from Night Shade).

Omnitrades are somewhat bigger than traditional mass markets but are smaller than traditional trade paperbacks. Nobody’s sent me cover flats–I should ask–so I can’t tell you more than that. Kurt Miller’s striking art for all three volumes, however, is on my website.

Karen, my webmaster, is planning a major revision to the website for its tenth anniversary in April, 2010. Apparently the problem for people trying to navigate the site is that there’s really a lot of material there. This is a Good Thing, but it makes information retrieval difficult. I don’t know that the problem is solvable, but it’s being worked on. Currently, though, there’ve been only minor additions, which I’ll detail below.

Besides writing (and life generally) I’ve been going through the considerable number of photographs which I’ve taken over the years. This is an interesting process, because it takes me thirty and forty years into the past. That’s not always a good thing, but there are good aspects to it.

I’m really struck by the fact that I didn’t take enough pictures of people. There are more or less interesting buildings (the Dubuque Country Courthouse appears repeatedly over a period of thirty-odd years; it doesn’t change a heck of a lot in that time), and many, many pictures of (largely Roman) ruins, some of which I can identify.

None of these particularly matters to me now. For example, when I wanted a picture of the so-called Tomb of the Christian Woman built by Juba II in the First Century AD, it was easier to have Karen find it on line than to dig out the photos I took with my Minox in Algeria in 1980.

The pictures of friends (some of them writers) and family, many of whom are now dead–those I wish I’d taken more of. Still, there were some pleasant surprises: I’d shot a roll of slide film of Lee Brown Coye during a visit to his house in 1975. At some point these (or a selection of them) may appear on my website. For the future, though, I’m going to take more people pictures.

And I’ve had some recent opportunities to do so. As I mentioned above, my wife Jo and I spent nine days with the Knights, old friends, in the Four Corners Region. We saw many pueblos, cliff dwellings and rock formations, which I duly photographed [example at http://david-drake.com/2009/southwest-trip/]; but I made sure I was getting pictures of my companions also. Their presence was more important to me that the scenery even at the time, and I know that if I live another ten or twenty years, the memory of them will have grown out of all proportion to that of Spider Rock. (Which I’m glad to have seen, however.)

There’s an odd, short interview with me for WritingRaw.  I answer whatever questions I’m asked, but sometimes my personal mindset is enough different from that of the interviewer that I’m not sure of the context.

And I had my birthday, which tends to depress me. Not because I’m 64–I’m in good physical and mental shape for a man of my age, and my emotional condition hasn’t gotten worse over the past 40 years or so. I tend around my birthday to take stock of the things in general, though, and even a bouncier person than I am would agree that the present world has its share of problems.

Nonetheless, my birthday has been an excuse for a pigpicking every year since the early ’70s. This year’s was great–perfect weather, perfect pig, and some of the best friends any man ever had. Cleverly (remember, I’d just gone through a lot of photographs) I gave my camera to a couple friends and told them to use it, so there are even pictures of me this time. Two of them are up on the web site.

I went to Constellation in Huntsville. The con was fun, though (as happened the previous time I’d gone there) the airline (different airlines) cancelled one leg of the flight. This time a NASA engineer drove me from Memphis to the door of the hotel, bless his heart.

In Huntsville, Lance Larka (who runs the David Drake Fan site on Facebook) gave me a tour of the gene lab he manages. It was amazing to see cutting-edge science at industrial scale. (The building is striking also, but I don’t suppose you need a picture of Eric Flint providing scale for a pair of fig trees in the atrium. I’ll go with a picture of Lance, Eric and me in the lab.)

I don’t have any new Ovid translations up at the moment, but I’ve read through the Hercules Cycle of the Metamorphoses and expect to do something serious with it as soon as I’ve finished the current space opera. I’m getting back into a Roman frame of mind. (The next project will be a Roman-based fantasy in series with The Legions of Fire, coming out from Tor in July, 2010.)

There have been a number of mentions of photos in this newsletter; here’s one more. I sent the essay I did as a forward for the Hammer’s Slammers role-playing game to the quarterly of my veterans’ group to reprint. When they ran it, I got notes from a couple buddies from 1970. One of them (Roger Brownell; he also took the picture of me at the top of the Nam section of my website,) sent an additional picture which is now included there.

As background, Viet Nam has a very high water table. My unit, the Blackhorse (and this may have been true of the US Army generally), disposed of human feces by burning it. You pull the tub (a cut-down 54-gallon drum) from under the hole of the latrine, pour in diesel fuel, and light it. After it burns down somewhat, you stir the remnants with an engineer stake to ensure adequate combustion.

I say “you.” In the rear base at Di An, we hired locals to do the job. In the field, it was the duty of the enlisted men–like me. Roger sent a picture of me on shit-burning detail in the field with First Squadron in July, 1970.

There are a number of things to note about the picture. It shows what I mean when I say I used to be thin. I’m not especially heavy now, but I’m a lot heavier than I used to be. And you can also see in the background the jungle in which we operated.

But the main thing is simply the job. I must’ve just lighted the tubs and was ducking out of the smoke until it was time to start stirring. Most people don’t have a notion of what it’s like to live in the expectation that in the next instant a bullet will zip by or a mine will go off under your vehicle, but if you’ve ever cleaned a catbox or stepped in the wrong place in the dark, you’ve got some feeling for this.

And this wasn’t the bad part. The permanent expectation of sudden death or maiming was the bad part.

1970 had a number effects on me. Many writers get remarkably full of themselves if they’ve had a little success (and in some cases when they haven’t). One of the reasons that didn’t happen to me was that I knew very well what the measure of my worth was in the world’s terms: a person suitable for burning human feces in the hot sun while occasionally getting shot at.

Another aspect is that the experience made me very hard to bully when I got back to the World. No matter what this editor or that reviewer might do, I would remain in a better place at the end of their abuse than I had been in the past.

Those are both valuable things, and they’ve contributed considerably to my success as a writer.

The downside is that I pretty well gave myself up for dead in 1970. That has affected me in a number of ways, generally bad ways. It presumably has a good deal to do with my ongoing depression.

But I’m functional, and I’m intellectually aware of how very good my life really is. And you know? I’ve come a really long way from July, 1970.

–Dave Drake

***
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