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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A West African pangolin in the hands of a keeper from the San Diego Zoo

Mark Van Name's photo of the pangolin, showing the tail

Manly Wade Wellman and L. Sprague de Camp at World Fantasy Con: Halloween, 1978

Just as I predicted in Newsletter 58, I’m completely wrung out. Most of that is connected with the one major thing in this newsletter: I completed OUT OF THE WATERS, the second (of four) fantasies in my new Tor series. It’s scheduled to come out in July, 2011, with a Donato cover. 

I haven’t seen the cover painting, but I believe Donato is using a scene with high cliffs and a sea serpent–a scene which I wrote while thinking about Donato’s cover for MISTRESS OF THE CATACOMBS, the fifth book of my Isles fantasy series. Everything in the world really fits together. Sometimes the connections are more obvious than at other times, but they’re always present. The musings of Ilna in my Isles series aren’t a million miles away from those of her creator in a reflective mood.

I shipped off WATERS on September 17; why am I still exhausted? Well, I did two complete drafts after I finished the rough on September 1; this included keying in the very extensive changes I’d made in holograph on the rough typescript, followed by the less extensive changes I made in holograph on the second draft. I was on the verge of despair after two days of brutal work had only gotten me fifty pages into the 560 page manuscript, but the edits slacked off (generally) after that. The early portion of a book always needs a lot of work, but this time it seemed extreme.

Those of you who know something about the business will realize that the book was scheduled before I finished writing it. This is a token of Tor’s confidence in me and for that reason was welcome. On the other hand, it certainly didn’t reduce my stress.

Over Halloween I attended the World Fantasy Convention, as I’ve done more years than not. This is the major professional convention in the SF/fantasy genre. (The world SF con and regional cons–many of which have greater attendance than WFC–are fan/social gatherings.) Everything went fine: my panels were good ones and I didn’t embarrass myself as best I recall. (Moses Siregar III put a YouTube video of one of them on his blog so you can judge for yourselves if you want to.)

The reason I go to WFC, however, is to meet the people I do business with; this time including Steve Feldberg of Audible for the first time. Speaking of which, the audio version of WHAT DISTANT DEEPS, my latest RCN (Leary/Mundy) space-opera, is out from Audible right now.

Throughout my career, I’ve chosen to work for people whom I like rather than with the people who might pay me the most for a particular book. (In the longer term, I think working for people I like has also led to me earning more than if I had gone for short-term income.) Meals and just general chats with the folks I work for were therefore friendly affairs; but four days of face-to-face business contact is still stressful for a guy whose chosen milieu is the deck of a house in the middle of 23 acres with his dogs and a keyboard.

Also in July, 2011, Baen Books is reprinting the paired Tom Kelly thrillers (SKYRIPPER and FORTRESS) as an omnitrade under the combined title LOOSE CANNON. Tom Doherty really liked Tom Kelly; I didn’t, not least because Kelly could have been me if things had gone wrong (or anyway, had gone wrong in a different fashion).

Kelly is a very angry man. I’m less angry now than I was in the ’80s when I wrote the novels; that said, I can still see Kelly when I look far enough back inside myself. That’s a good reason to have refused to write more books in the series when Tom wanted them; and it’s an even better reason not to look very deeply inside myself.

The cover is by Dave Seeley. I think he did an excellent job. A mockup of the cover is at http://david-drake.com/2010/loose-cannon/.

It’s not ideal to have books coming out from two different publishers in the same month, but I don’t think there’ll be too much crossover between a new fantasy and a pair of 25-year-old thrillers. (Except for completists, I suppose, if there are Drake completists. Presumably a true completist will buy both with only a slight twinge at the expense.)

What would have been bad is if INTO THE HINTERLANDS, which John Lambshead wrote from my outline, were coming out from Baen in July. Thank goodness, it’s a September book. The cover by Bob Eggleton catches the novel’s theme of spiritual growth instead of focusing on shoot’em-ups on exotic planets (which would also be a valid description of the book).

Ever since the glory days of John Campbell’s _Astounding_, there have been a lot of engineers writing SF; there haven’t been nearly as many real scientists. My friend John Lambshead is a world-class scientist (a molecular biologist), and I am delighted with the way his knowledge enlivens my plot.

There are a few new pictures up on the website. Our hound Sam died at age 15 (or so; all our dogs have been rescues). We now have Red, probably 2, and (mostly) a Jack Russell, to keep company with Comet, our old part-sheepdog. Sam was a wonderful dog, but so is Red; and a dog weighing something over 20 pounds is a lot easier to convince to do something than a dog of over 100 pounds is.

While at WFC I visited not only the Columbus Art Museum but the house in which James Thurber lived with his family while he was at Ohio State. This is the setting of _The Night the Bed Fell_, and I found it very evocative.

There’s also an example of visual bragging: a picture of me with a pile of roots and the tools with which I ripped them up as the final stage in my land clearing. Every time I get a sufficient pile, I burn them; this was one pile of over a dozen. Land-clearing is darned good whole-body exercise.

I said above that I’ve gone to most WFCs. That includes the first one, and this was the thirty-sixth. _That_ realization brought me up short.

The first WFC was at a Holiday Inn in Providence, RI, in 1975. My agent, Kirby McCauley, booked the space and told me I had to come: it would be very different from the 1974 worldcon which I’d just experienced (and which was one of the more unpleasant events of my life which did not involve uniforms).

WFC _was_ different: a few hundred people, and fewer of the really unpleasant ones. We shared the hotel with two other conventions: an association of handicapped people, and a legal secretaries’ group. (Let me tell you, legal secretaries know how to party.)

I was on a New Voices in Horror panel. I’d been professionally published nine years before; Ramsey Campbell had been published eleven years before; and even the two relative newbies, Karl Wagner and Charlie Grant, had made their first sales seven years back.

I don’t know that I’ve said anything in print about the second one (a disaster in Manhattan; the only time the convention has been held in NYC). I was placed as an afterthought on a panel on heroic fantasy. The stars on the panel were Roland Green and Christopher Stasheff.

I recall quite a bit of the wisdom I was offered at that con. I proceeded in my own fashion; not because I disagreed with what I was being told, but because it was my life. As things turned out, I might reasonably have disagreed as well.

In 2010 I’m one of the seniors at WFC… but I don’t _feel_ any different, even when I’m chatting with people about things which I suddenly realize took place before they were born. I’m nervous before panels and extremely nervous before the autographing session–even though now I know that I won’t be sitting there with a fixed smile as people bustle past with books for others to sign. (The organizers actually set me at a solo end table because they didn’t want my line to get in the way of other writers. Friends brought over tables to join mine, thank goodness.)

I’m still me, still the scared kid who in his heart expects people to make a point of insulting him (as goodness knows happened often enough in the ’70s). If you were there and met me, I hope I was courteous; I really try to be. But whatever I may have said or done, remember you weren’t seeing a senior writer/editor/publisher (I’ve been all those things); it was the kid from Dubuque who writes as well as he can.

–Dave Drake

***
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Quite a lot has been happening. First and foremost in my mind, I turned in WHAT DISTANT DEEPS, the latest RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, to Baen Books the day after I got back from World Fantasy Con. I’d carried hardcopy of my second draft with me and edited it while sitting on planes and in parks in San Jose. My first priority on getting home was to key in the final changes and ship the book off. 

It totalled 131,103 words. I’d been convinced during the writing that this one was both short and bad. I’ve written longer books, but 131K isn’t short; and having gone over the whole thing repeatedly during the editing, I’m confident that it isn’t bad either.

I’m probably the only person in the world who thought there would be a problem with the book’s quality… but I really did think that, people. Oh, well. I’m glad to be wrong yet again.

The other big excitement was getting the page proofs for THE LEGIONS OF FIRE, the first (of four books) in my new Tor fantasy series. I was somewhat surprised, because proofs usually arrive about six months before the book comes out. I had been repeatedly told (and have passed on to you) that LEGIONS is scheduled for July, 2010.

When I got the proofs, I learned that the book is now scheduled for May, not July. This isn’t a bad thing (it’s quite good, in fact), but I really wish somebody had told me what the plan was.

Oh well. I wish world peace would come in my lifetime, too.

LEGIONS has a Donato cover, which delights me even before I’ve seen it. The painting is finished, but the designer is still working on the layout. If that changes before this newsletter goes out, there’ll be a URL here.

The cover of WHAT DISTANT DEEPS, another striking painting by Steve Hickman with design by Jennie Faries, is right here. This is a good time to repeat something that I’ve mentioned before: cover paintings are to advertise my books, not to illustrate them. The “dragons” of my novel swim rather than flying like the ones in the painting. That doesn’t matter even a little bit. Steve has the right feel for the book. If he decided he had to transfer the critters from one element to another to achieve that result, I couldn’t be happier.

The paperback of IN THE STORMY RED SKY will be coming out from Baen in August, 2010. Regular readers of this newsletter will know that according to Jennie (designer and friend), the printer used The Wrong Foil on the hardcover. (You couldn’t have proved it by me: I thought it was lovely.) Since then, I have gotten a threatening email from the General Counsel of the firm making the “correct” foil, because I used their proprietary name without adding an ugly trademark squiggle.

I have a high opinion of the firm’s engineers. Their legal department can stand as an illustration of why I stopped working as a lawyer myself.

Tor is scheduled to release the paperback of THE GODS RETURN this month.

Baen will release the second volume of THE COMPLETE HAMMER’S SLAMMERS in February, 2010, as an omnitrade paperback. This volume collects the four shorter novels in the series and “The Day of Glory,” a story which hasn’t been in a Hammer collection before. Omnitrades (now that I’ve seen them) look like regular trade paperbacks but really are smaller. (Compare a British hardcover to its US equivalent for a similar relationship.)

That’s the publishing news. On the website are a few pictures from San Jose. I had a good time, often a very good time, but it was a couple days longer than I’m comfortable being away from home. The weather was nice and San Jose has pleasant parks near the hotel, which made a great deal of positive difference to me. Still, I missed my nest (as I did when we were in the Southwest earlier this year). I’m very much a homebody.

I noticed flags hanging (as often) under the porte cochere at the convention hotel’s entrance. I wouldn’t have paid much attention, except that one flag was that of the Republic of Viet Nam (South Vietnam) which of course hasn’t existed since 1975. The taxi starter explained that the flags are those of the nations of origin of all the hotel staff. I pass this on, because some of you may have wondered also.

I did two interviews as a result of the con. One was audio with Rick Kleffel (one of my con pictures shows him), there in the hotel. It’ll come out as a podcast or a couple podcasts, and (if I understood correctly) there may be bits on the local NPR station. It was interesting to do and ran about three times as long as he said it would. (I’m a good interview subject, perhaps because I say things that most folks will not.)

There was also a written question-and-answer interview after I got back. The result is up at http://travisheermann.com/blog/?p=488 but I should note that the interviewer (Travis Heermann) sent one set of questions, then followed up with a second and intermixed the results. I realized in reading the complete version that I had structured each set of responses into a rhetorical whole. (No, I don’t think anybody else in the world would notice the difference.)

I’ve roughed out a translation of the Hercules and Achelous, and the Hercules and Nessus, sections of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but I want to complete the Hercules Cycle before I put anything up on the website. That’ll be a while yet.

And I’m flailing about in early stages of plotting the second volume of the Tor fantasy series. My working title is MONSTERS FROM THE DEPTHS, but it’s really early days yet.

I’ve been diving into classical texts which range from obscure (Nonnos) to extremely obscure (Avienus). They’ve given me settings, but the trick is developing neat bits into a real plot. I keep digging and scribbling notes, hoping that suddenly everything is going to become crystal clear. Hope is a fine thing….

The interviews and some other stuff that’s been going on–I finished a book, so my mind has too much free time–have gotten me thinking about appearances. This leads me to two stories from my past.

Many years ago, I was buying onyx bookends in a rock shop. It was kind of a New Age place, but they had fossils, bookends, and various other stuff I’m interested in.

I was on a motorcycle with built-in saddlebags; I’d locked my helmet in one while I was shopping. I carried a bookend out to make sure I could pack them in a satisfactory fashion, then walked back inside with my helmet to get the remainder of my purchases. The clerk said, “Oh! That explains it.”

Of course I wanted to know what she meant. After some pressing (and with obvious embarrassment) she said, “Well, I could tell from your aura that you’re in touch with your sensitive, feminine side, so I couldn’t understand why you dressed in such an aggressive fashion.” (I was wearing a motorcycle jacket, boots, and jungle fatigue trousers.) “When I saw the helmet, I realized that you really _were_ on a motorcycle.”

Without going into all the ways that exchange puzzled me (nobody else has suggested that I have a sensitive, feminine side, let alone that I was in touch with it), it did drive home the fact that what people see and hear isn’t necessarily going to be what I think I’m showing and telling. There isn’t a heck of a lot I can do about that, but it kinda disturbs me.

What I think is this: folks, what you see with me is what you get. I’m reasonably smart, quite well educated, and I work hard. There are no mysteries about me, there’s no romance. I do not have a secret key to the door of writing success: I just tell stories and meet my professional obligations. I’m a Nam vet, but I wasn’t any kind of hero. My dad was an electrician; my grandfather was a sheet metal worker; and my great grandfather was a farmer.

What I’ve said in the paragraph above is the absolute truth, but I’m reminded of another story from my past. When I got back to the World in 1971, I said and believed that I was perfectly normal. Viet Nam hadn’t been a lot of fun, but it hadn’t done me any lasting harm.

Five years later, I realized that I certainly hadn’t been normal when I first returned, but I believed–loudly–that I had by then settled back to normal. I was wrong about that too.

Nearly forty years on, I’ve given up claiming to be normal (though I do think that I’m generally safe to be around). And I certainly don’t believe that Nam didn’t do permanent damage to me.

So maybe there’s more to the writing as well. I look at the shelf (shelves, actually) of my books. There still doesn’t seem to be any big deal to it to me (hard work and a focus on storytelling), but realistically there aren’t many people who have equaled my record. Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing, just as I didn’t see (didn’t let myself see) how much Nam had done to me. Heck, maybe it’s the same thing.

But the work is the work, with me as with every other writer. Focus on that, because I try very hard to make it more interesting than I am myself.

–Dave Drake

***
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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.

—– 

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.

I’ve turned in THE GODS RETURN, the final book of the Crown of the Isles trilogy and of the whole Isles series. I hadn’t fully appreciated that till a friend congratulated me on completing my largest project thus far. That took me aback, because though GODS is a substantial book at 145, 595 words, I’ve written novels of over 200K. Then I realized that he meant the nine-book series as an entity–and that he was right. 

No wonder I’m exhausted. And a little depressed too, I suppose, but that isn’t so rare with me that I’m going to blame it on a book or a series or anything outside my own head.

I think GODS works well, both on its own and as a cap for a long, complex series. Gosh, I remember working on the plot for QUEEN OF DEMONS (the second volume) while staying at Kipling’s house in Brattleboro for my 51st birthday.

I’ve been asked already (this is probably going to take the place of, “Why did you switch to fantasy from Military SF?” which I was constantly asked ten years ago) whether I’ll miss the series. I don’t think so. I left the characters and their world in a good place. (Well, a variety of good places; the series is complex, and therefore the conclusion is very complex.)

And I’m looking forward to the new Tor series. Instead of being a purple-black blur which fills me with dread, it’s a kaleidoscope of bright images. Either is a way of describing an uncertain future, but the fact this one is a positive description is a Good Thing.

But the next thing on my plate is an RCN space opera. I’ve got various factors bouncing around on this one–things to consider, necessary background, possibilities–but nothing that I’d want to call a plot germ. I was beginning to think that my brain had turned to mush and I’d never write again. (I said I’m a bit depressed, right?)

I went back to Polybius, reading his description of the evolution of different political systems. I realized that the problem wasn’t in the details of his systemization but rather in the very fact of it: he was treating a pile of sand as though it were a block of granite. Each polity (though similar to scores of others) is unique, and a system which denies that is wrong on its face.

While this doesn’t give me a plot (and you’re welcome to disagree with my assessment of Polybius), it did prove to my satisfaction that my brain hadn’t turned to mush. I figure the plot will start to come when I’ve had more than two days without urgent work to do.

Hmm. What if I used the occasion of the Roman embassy to the Illyrians in ca 230 BC? You know, I think I’ve got my plot germ!

The urgent work I mentioned was the proofs of WHEN THE TIDE RISES, a Baen hc for March. I shipped off the Isles novel and dived straight into the proofs, which are now shipped off as well. Actually, reading the proofs for the most recent RCN space opera was a darned good preparation for getting into writing the next one.

Those of you who read Newsletter 41 may recall that I said that I’d been told that John Berkey would be doing the cover for volume 3 of The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, not that I believed he would be doing so. Unfortunately my caution was justified by the event. David Martin has done the cover art  (very much in the style of Berkey), and the book should ship by late December. I’m sorry for the delay, but I’m much sorrier that John Berkey, a wonderful artist, had an incapacitating stroke.

If you look at the news page of my website, you may note that I’m going to three conventions in October, 2008. This isn’t because I love cons. World Fantasy Con is the big professional (as opposed to fan) convention in the SF/fantasy field. That’s straight business. Walden West is dedicated to August Derleth, the editor who gave me my professional start. I’d been invited as GoH some while ago, but this is the first year the timing has been possible.

Leaving Conjecture in San Diego. Years ago I said in a newsletter that I’d like to do a few cons on the West Coast. Again timing didn’t work out, but the Conjecture folks tried again with Military SF as their theme and a possible if not ideal date. They’d done their part, so I’ve accepted. Travel is difficult for me at best, and three weekends of travel in a month is not an experience I’m looking forward to… but it’s worth a little discomfort to show folks on the West Coast that I’m not a ravening monster.

I mentioned that WFC is the professional con. One of the things I look forward to is chatting with Tom Doherty there, generally the only time we see one another. That was fun this year too, but I was given a mission. Betty Ballentine was the SF mind behind Ballentine Books from its inception in the ’50s and the person who created the Ballentine Adult Fantasy Series (Lin Carter was merely a consultant) which made possible the huge presence of fantasy in today’s literary marketplace. Tom believes she should get a retro Hugo while she’s still alive. He tasked Lee Modesitt and me to start beating the drums for this to happen.

Lee and I completely agree about Betty getting the Hugo, but it would be hard to find two successful writers who have less to do with awards than the two of us do. (It bothers Lee more than it does me. I don’t need anybody else to tell me when I’ve done a good job–or when I fall on my face, which I certainly do on occasion.) We both agreed we’d do what we could, though.

So: if any of you out there know people concerned with the Hugos, please put a bug in their ear. I’ll burble about why it’s justified if you like, but the short version is that Betty Ballentine and Don Wollheim created the paperback SF/fantasy genre in America.

There are no new Latin translations up, but I’m working on one. A couple years ago I said I was going to do the section on the Erymanthean Boar from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Last month I started to do so–and couldn’t find it.

Suddenly–not soon, but suddenly–the light dawned: there was an Erymanthean Boar (which Hercules killed as one of his twelve labors), but Ovid wrote about the Calydonian Boar. They behaved in similar unpleasant fashions and both were killed by heroes, but not the same heroes.

I’m therefore at work on the Calydonian Boar, but the text isn’t ready to go up yet. And I feel pretty silly. (I submit that I make a higher order of silly mistake than most fantasy writers would be able to do, however.)

I’m writing this just before Thanksgiving; it’ll probably go out shortly after the holiday. I have a lot to be thankful for, but nothing more than my friends and family. I hope you and the world generally can say as much.

–Dave Drake

***
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Arkham House panel: Walden Derleth, Scott Connors, Dwayne Olson, Drew Smith and Dave