I am in the stage now in which the current book (this time it’s The Road of Danger, the next Leary/Mundy space opera) moves forward about as steadily as Juggernaut’s Carriage. The process is about that graceful also, but I’ll be editing the heck out of my rough draft, as usual.

I’ve been averaging a hair over a thousand words a day since Newsletter 61, a process which I expect to continue until I get to the end of my outline. I strongly suspect the final draft will be about 130K, but I don’t swear to that.

This doesn’t mean, by the way, that I write about a thousand words every day in about the same fashion. I have a life (and I’m very glad to have a life).

I go to social gatherings–not many, but I’m not a recluse. I get a great number of incoming phone calls (I rarely make outgoing calls because I spend so much time on the phone anyway). Most calls are business-related in one fashion or another; but since I prefer to do business with friends, even the most business-oriented conversation is likely to be a chat between friends.

Maintenance people arrive to check the furnace. The lawnmower moves around to where I’m working. I need to get the taxes to our accountant, or I have a dental appointment. Life, in other words.

And of course, work goes more smoothly some days than other days. When it’s not going well, I’m likely to still be working after the time I’d normally be in bed. But easy or hard, I keep chunking away till the job is done.

If I didn’t like the work I do, I wouldn’t be doing it. Nonetheless, it is work.

Audible.com has been doing the RCN series very well in streaming audio. They have just released most of the Hammer series as well, which I think is neat.

I say most: the four short novels are paired in two audio “volumes,” and the two full length novels are done separately. Steve Feldberg (the CEO) says they’ll wait to see how the longer pieces do before he decides whether to produce the short stories.

He knows his own market (and is a delight to deal with, by the way), but I suggested that he do a set of short stories in place of one of the other volumes. The Hammer pieces seem to me to do best in small chunks, because they are very intense (in various ways). Since my prose style is also dense, I suspect the series would be something of a challenge to listen to in large blocks.

Note that I am not knocking my own work: I think the Hammer stories are good and in some ways uniquely good. The things that make them good come with a cost, however.

The paperback of The Legions of Fire (the first of The Books of the Elements, my four-volume fantasy series for Tor) is out.  I think it’s lovely. Tor’s new designer is very skilled. (Whereas the UK editions of the Isles series–using the same art–were consistently better, and sometimes much better, than the Tor originals.)

The second volume of The Books of the Elements, Out of the Waters, should appear in hardcover in July. This is a really fun series to do because I’m able to give free rein to my knowledge of–and love for–the Roman world. Like most people, I find it a delight to burble to others about my expertise.

The paperback of What Distant Deeps, the latest RCN space opera, should be out in June.  I’ve always loved SF adventures, but I didn’t start writing seriously until after my military service. My space operas therefore had a sharper edge than I intended (The Reaches Trilogy being the most striking example of this) until I wrote Redliners and really came to terms with where my head had been for the previous 25 years.

Better late than never, though. The RCN series and the fantasy novels that I’ve been writing since I completed Redliners are exactly what I wanted to write in the first place: not stupid and certainly not saccharine, but basically positive stories set in a basically positive universe.

I live in a basically positive universe, but for a long time my head was back in Nam. There was very, very little positive about Nam.

Toni Weisskopf, publisher of Baen Books, did indeed like Into the Hinterlands which I mentioned in Newsletter 61 had just been delivered to her. (John Lambshead wrote it from my outline.)  She liked it so much that she wants the remaining two books of the planned trilogy (whose template is the life of George Washington through the end of the Revolutionary War).

The problem is that Toni thought I’d written the remaining two outlines and phrased her initial request based on that misconception. Things settled down after I went briefly ballistic. I will plot the first book (or less probably both books) as soon as I have finished The Road of Danger.

I’m feeling crunched. In a perfect world… no, let me rephrase that; a perfect world wouldn’t have any use for me. Say rather that if I were as skilled as I would like to be, I would be finishing the third Book of the Elements now instead of working on a space opera before I start that third fantasy. I don’t believe I’m a failure to anyone except to myself, but I certainly don’t meet my own standards.

I’m also doing a number of short essays to introduce electronic republications of classic (1950s) novelettes and novellas from Galaxy Science Fiction. My friend Barry Malzberg is overseeing this project for Rosetta Books, the successor in interest to the Scott Meredith Literary Agency where Barry worked for many years.

I’m doing this because I love the field. There’s also ego involved: I know quite a lot about the history of magazine SF, and I’m arrogant enough to believe that I can bring things to the project that few others could.

The first essay (of maybe four or five) was on Robert Silverberg’s The Iron Chancellor; it took me a day to write. The rest should be comparable, and I can do them as breaks over the next couple months.

Though the actual time I spend writing them isn’t much, it’s very focused time; and proper research (rereading not only the story concerned but other stories and contemporary comments that have bearing on the discussion) soaks up a lot of time during which I might have been reading (for example) a Gladys Mitchell mystery novel. I just reread Lester del Rey’s Nerves in preparation for doing an introduction to his The Wind between the Worlds, for example.

And of course the essay project contributes to me feeling crunched, but I decided a long time ago that if I wanted a lazy, relaxed life, I would have one. Therefore, this is the life I have chosen for myself.

My Suzuki GS500F is a year old and has been a very satisfactory bike. It turns out that some of the styling differences from the GS500E which it replaced are because this is the European model and was actually built in Spain.

Which brings me to the last item for this newsletter, since it’s also bike related. I’ll give the necessary background first: alcohol is hygroscopic; that is, it sucks moisture out of the air. This becomes significant in a vehicle’s gas tank if you’re using gasohol.

Because pipelines run various petroleum products at various times (and the trucks which fill gas stations also use the same compartments for different fuels over time) fuel oil contaminates every refill you put in your vehicle. Fuel oil and water become a white, sticky emulsion on the bottom of your gas tank. (I learned all this later, after my Bandit 1200′s carbs had been rebuilt and its petcock replaced.)

Later, meaning after I had gotten about two miles from home before the bike died and wouldn’t restart. I knew I had gas, and the battery cranked fine. The engine wouldn’t fire, however.

The first problem was to get back home. I didn’t want to leave the bike where it was, so I started pushing it back. The rural road is paved but narrow; the saving grace was that there wasn’t much traffic. The Bandit weighs something over 500 pounds, and the first half mile was up a gentle slope. (It was drizzling, though that wasn’t necessary to make it a miserable business.) By the time I’d gotten to the top of the hill, enough fuel had seeped past the gunk to get me almost home.

I said there wasn’t much traffic; I think there were about ten cars and trucks in both directions. Three of them, driven by strangers, stopped:

A young white guy in an SUV asked if he could do anything to help. (No, but thank you very much.)

A middle-aged black guy in an econobox said he had a little lawnmower gas back at his house and he’d be happy to bring it to me. (I have gas–I think it’s electrical [wrong]–but thank you very much.)

A white guy who had to be over 70 (okay, I’m 65 myself now that I think about it) in an old Oldsmobile asked if he could help me push. (No, there really isn’t a good way on a road so narrow, but thank you very much.)

Let me repeat that these were total strangers, they weren’t bikers, and they constituted 30% of the sample. Sure, the sample is too small to be other than anecdotal evidence, but to me it indicates that given half a chance, human beings are pretty decent.

I get very depressed at times. Heck, I suppose you could say that since 1970, depression is my resting state. But my bottom line is that human beings are pretty decent.

That thought encourages me to try to be more decent myself, which I think might be a useful practice for everybody.

–Dave Drake

***
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I’m obviously not a technophobe, let alone a Luddite; but neither do I find anything magical to technology. Some of the stories that I wrote longhand and typed on a portable I bought in Nam (electric but with a manual carriage return; very cheap) are still in print after thirty years.

Since 1987 I’ve used Word for DOS on increasingly old computers. That changed in March of 2001, when my last DOS machine died in mid-project and I converted to Word for Windows (which, for a professional writer as opposed to a desktop publisher, is significantly less useful than the old system). I’m now working on sub-notebooks with Pentium 90 CPUs. I’ve killed one of them and will doubtless kill the rest, as I’ve killed literally dozens of computers in the past; and will replace with something else obsolete but more than adequate for my purposes.

After a stretch of working with small Pentium90 Toshibas (I basically wore three of them out), I’ve been buying new, basic Compaq/HPs. They’d don’t have bells and whistles–I do word processing, period–and while they’re not quite as small as the Toshibas they replaced, they’re easy to carry. (I don’t care about weight, but size is a problem while travelling.) By being careful and using an external fan when the temperature is over 80o F, I’ve gotten good service till they wear out (as opposed to breaking in startling fashions).

I think it’s necessary for a successful writer to be a reader, but literature classes are if anything contraindicated for a writer. There are people who swear by writing classes/courses/groups, but my opinion is that at best they’ll teach you how to write a particular sort of story for which there isn’t a mass market.

I didn’t have a mentor, but I modeled my own work on the work of other writers whom I admired. I’ve wound up mentoring several writers who were already at a high level of skill and who were close friends. It’s not something I do for fun. I’m not any kind of teacher, and I’m uncomfortable even coming close to that role.

There’s no secret handshake. Writing is like playing basketball: it helps if you have talent, but even Michael Jordan practiced (practiced his butt
off).

And there’s nothing specially wonderful about being a writer/basketball player. No one need feel they’ve failed just because they’re not (at
core) willing to put in the enormous effort it requires to become good in either field.

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.

A BELATED THANK-YOU

Eugene Olson, my 11th grade American Literature teacher, read and wrote fantasy fiction. I really wanted to read fantasy, but in 1961 the genre was hard to find in Clinton, Iowa. (I didn’t dream of writing professionally at the time.) Over the Christmas holidays, Mr Olson loaned me a copy of the September, 1950, issue of Weird Tales (a legendary magazine which I’d never seen).

The magazine changed my life. It wasn’t the fiction (though that issue included The Pineys, the subject of my first contact with the author, Manly Wade Wellman) but rather the small display ad for Skull-Face and Others by Robert E Howard.

I’d read Conan the Conqueror, the abridged version of Howard’s Conan novel, and I really wanted to read more of his work. It didn’t seem likely that Skull-Face was still available, but it would only cost me a stamp to learn: I wrote the publisher, Arkham House, in Sauk City, Wisconsin.

I got back an immediate reply on Arkham House stationery, saying that Skull-Face was long out of print but that many other titles were available in the enclosed catalog. The note was signed by August Derleth, a name I was familiar with as editor of anthologies which I’d read in the library.

There were indeed other titles available. I bought some, then bought more; and I began to buy new books as they were published.

I exchanged occasional notes with Mr Derleth. For example, I translated a distich by Lovecraft (That is not dead which can eternal lie/And with strange eons, even death may die) into Latin (I was a Latin major). Mr Derleth thanked me and said that the only way he’d passed Latin at the University of Wisconsin was by blackmailing the instructor. “I didn’t care that he was homosexual, but I needed a passing grade.”

Sauk City wasn’t far from Eastern Iowa, where I was born and raised. In the summer of 1965 I gathered my courage and asked Mr Derleth if I could visit. He agreed, so shortly before the start of classes in the fall my fiancée and I drove north to Sauk City.

Finding Sauk City was easy enough, but then what? We stopped at the post office. I went in and asked in a loud voice, “Excuse me? Can someone direct us to Arkham House?”

The handful of people present stared at me blankly.

“Ah…,” I said. I remembered that Mr Derleth had named his house, so I said, “That is, Place of Hawks?”

More blank looks.

Wondering if somehow I’d gotten to the wrong town after all–Sauk City’s present population is about 3,000 people, and it didn’t seem larger then–I said, “Ah, Mr August Derleth’s–”

“Oh!” said the clerk. “You’re looking for Augie Derleth’s place!” And gave us very simple directions to the house.

April Derleth–she would have just turned 11–opened the door to my knock; her brother Walden, a couple years younger, stood behind her. Mr Derleth boomed for us to come upstairs; he was in the office. (I won’t keep repeating the word ‘boomed’, but feel free to substitute it any time I say, ‘Mr Derleth said.’)

The office was to the right of the stairs. Bookshelves were built around the outer curve of the vast semicircular desk, and the top was littered with more books and papers.

Mr Derleth had just gotten up from a huge typewriter. I asked if it was an electric (I’m not sure I’d ever seen an electric typewriter, but I knew they existed.) Mr Derleth said (boomed, remember) that it was an Olivetti manual machine, the only decent typewriter made; electric typewriters didn’t hold up!

Mr Derleth gave us a capsule tour, displaying his files of comic strips as well as Lee Brown Coye’s art for Three Tales of Terror and the cover proofs for Colonel Markesan. I commented that I didn’t like the color of the latter (Musk Green). Mr Derleth assured me that it was the correct color; and that since he’d written the stories, he should know.

We then went into the stock room (to the left as you came up the stairs) where we chatted further. He waved a copy of the Ballantine paperback of The Survivor and Others (stories which Mr Derleth had written from plot germs gleaned from Lovecraft) and said he didn’t plan to bother with more paperbacks: “There’s no money in it for us.”

And he showed me the book that had just come in from the printers: The Inhabitant of the Lake, by J Ramsey Campbell. He gave me the background.

A British teenager named John Campbell had sent Mr Derleth a Mythos story set in Lovecraftian New England. He’d written the youth back, telling him to change his name (the famous SF editor and writer John W Campbell was still very much alive) and not to use an American setting of which he was ignorant. Campbell (he dropped the J also after this first book and has for more than forty years been simply Ramsey Campbell) had rewritten the story as directed. It still had serious problems, but Mr Derleth had done a massive edit and bought it for an original anthology he’d published through Arkham House.

The next thing he knew, Campbell had sent him a book-length collection of stories. Mr Derleth said he’d groaned, “… because I simply didn’t have time to edit all those stories.” To his surprise and delight, the stories didn’t need editing. Mr Derleth had taken one for the next AH anthology, and he’d published the rest as the book which I now held in my hands.

I looked at the biographical sketch on the back flap. Ramsey was a year younger than me (he was eighteen at the time; sixteen when he’d sold his first story) and looked no more than fifteen in the accompanying photo. I’d always told myself that when I was old enough, I’d sell a story; quite obviously, I was more than old enough.

I didn’t say anything at the time, however. I went home with the books I’d bought (I’d set aside fifty dollars for the purpose) and started my third year at the University of Iowa. Only then did I write Mr Derleth a note, asking whether I might send him a story for the series of original anthologies he was doing. He agreed, though without enthusiasm.

I prepared to write the story by reading Mr Derleth’s third collection of fantasy short stories, Not Long for This World. (I’d bought it before I visited.) I figured that was an ideal way to learn what the editor really thought a fantasy/horror story ought to be.

On its face that was a clever notion, but I ignored the forward to the collection in which Mr Derleth stated explicitly that the stories were fillers intended for the back pages of Weird Tales. They were mediocre pieces which he’d rejected from the two previous AH collections of his work. I read the forward, but the clear meaning of the words doesn’t seem to have penetrated my understanding.

I wrote with determination until I’d finished my story. It was 1,800 words long (roughly seven typed pages) and titled Post Mortem. (Remember, I was a Latin major.) Mr Derleth sent it back, saying that all right, I had a pretty good plot outline: now I needed to write the story. And by the way, the title was terrible.

I buckled down to expanding the story to 3,500 words. (I don’t think it was really quite that long, but I told myself that it was.) I changed the title to After Death.

The story came back again, but this time Mr Derleth said that I was almost there. I should edit out the purple passages and then he would buy it.

At that point I hit a brick wall: I didn’t know what a purple passage was. Remember, I was modeling the story on Mr Derleth’s own work; as a fillip, I even concluded with a line of Italics.

The letter this time didn’t accompany the returned manuscript. Mr Derleth told me that the story still wasn’t right; that he’d have to give it a heavy edit. I should compare the printed version with my carbon and learn how not to write a story the next time. He was enclosing a check for $35 for this purpose; if that wasn’t acceptable, he’d return the story and have nothing further to do with it.

I was devastated. I accepted the offer, but it was over a year before I tried again to write for publication. The final insult was realizing that I was so naive that I hadn’t known I was supposed to keep a carbon.

To this day I don’t know what Mr Derleth changed (not much, I suspect) beyond cutting a reference to The Bride of Frankenstein and (again) the title. The story came out as Denkirch, the name of the lead character, in the 1967 anthology Travellers by Night.

All this should have been a sidelight to the career of a moderately successful attorney. I sold Mr Derleth three more stories, the last on July 3, 1971–the day before he died of a heart attack. If things had gone in a normal fashion, that would probably have been my last fiction sale.

Things weren’t normal for young American men in the late ’60s, however, especially after Mr McNamara, the Secretary of Defense who had been overseeing the Viet Nam War, provided a final gift to the American people by eliminating the draft deferment for graduate students. I was drafted out of the middle of Duke Law School.

Like many other veterans, I came back to The World with no physical injuries but in a very disordered frame of mind. Mr Derleth had given me the tool which I’ve used to keep myself between the ditches all of those years since: the ability to write.

Sure, he was rough as a cob–but if Mr Derleth hadn’t given his time to the incredibly naive kid (which should be obvious to anybody who reads this account) who visited him in August, 1965, I don’t know what would have become of me. The result wouldn’t have been as good, and it might have been very bad indeed.

So thank you, Mr Derleth. If we’d become friends over the next fifteen years (as I did with Manly Wade Wellman) I might call you Augie, but we weren’t on informal terms in life. I’m not going to change that now.

There’s nobody who has done more to earn my thanks.

–Dave Drake, October 2008

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.

If you decide to write about far-famed Achilles, make him active, hot-tempered, inexorable, and fierce; let him deny that laws were made for him, let him think his sword rules all. –Horace, The Art of Poetry (lines 120-2)

My undergraduate double major was history and Latin, and I continued to take Latin courses while I was in law school in a laughable attempt to stay sane.  Reading Latin centers me. (Note “laughable” in the previous sentence.)

A story doesn’t depend on the language in which it’s told, and a story that’s been around for several thousand years is likely to be a very good story.  While rereading The Odyssey (in translation; Ben Jonson would be even more slighting about my Greek than he was about Shakespeare’s) I remarked to a friend that the story would make an excellent Western.

And as I said that, a light dawned.  The Odyssey would make a heck of a space opera as well, though translating Homer’s story to an SF idiom would take some subtlety if I were to avoid being absurd. For example, I couldn’t just have my hero land on a planet of one-eyed giants who shut him and his crew in a cave. But what about an automated city that . . . ?

I did a precis of The Odyssey and plotted my story around that armature, focusing always on situations that would serve the same structural purposes that Homer had achieved in his medium.  Then I wrote Cross the Stars.

By the way, the Cyclopes appear twice in The Odyssey: once in direct conflict with Odysseus (which everybody remembers) and once as the creatures whose savage attacks drove the Phaecians out of their original home. If you’ve just finished reading Cross the Stars, you may recall a passing reference to giant one-eyed mutants. The latter, like the local creature called the argus and other asides in my novel, is homage to the man/men/woman who wrote The Odyssey; and who is, for my money, the greatest literary genius of all time.

As I was writing Cross the Stars I commented to the same friend that while The Odyssey translated easily to other media, The Iliad (perhaps an even greater achievement) was too fixed in its own cultural idiom to be used the way I did the other. For a long time I believed that I couldn’t use The Iliad at all in my fiction.

One day I was rereading Horace’s Ars Poetica and came to the quotation I’ve translated as the epigraph to this essay. Homer is the only source for the character of Achilles (which Horace summarizes with his usual succinct brilliance), but the character can have a life outside the cultural confines of The Iliad. There are and always have been men (and here I mean “male human beings”) like Achilles; Alexander the Great made a conscious attempt to model his life on the character (and succeeded, in my opinion, only too well).

So I thought about the problem for a long while, then wrote The Warrior. I set the piece (a short novel) in the Hammer universe, as I had Cross the Stars before it, but The Warrior was straight military–as surely as The Iliad is. I used the milieu of modern warfare, of tanks rather than armored spearmen, and the background has no connection with the Siege of Troy.

But remember, Homer didn’t say he was writing about the Siege of Troy: I sing the wrath of Achilles. . . .

Not all of my plots come from classical (or even historical) sources, but most of them do. That’s not only because of my personal taste, but because I believe (with Shakespeare) that literature wich survives the buffeting of time is worth a second or thirty-second look.

I opened with a quote from Horace. I’ll close with another one:  I have builded a monument more lasting than bronze. . . . Horace did; and Homer did, and Apollonius did, and so many others did. I’m proud to be able occasionally to stand on their magnificent structures.

–Dave Drake, 1994

Cross the Stars. Hammer’s Slammers Series. 1984, New York, NY: Tor. 342 p. 0812536142 (pb). $2.95.
————– 1994, New York, NY: Tor. 342 p. 0812509994 (pb). $2.95.
————– 1999, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 309 p. 0671578219. $1.99.

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

I work on a notebook computer outside, then edit the hardcopy and go through at least three drafts.

I work on one thing at a time. Other people like multiple jobs, but for me I concentrate very heavily and I get crazy when I’m taken off it.