I’m well into the third Book of the Elements, Demons from the Earth, for Tor.

• Baen Books
• Authorized electronic versions through BaenEBooks.com
• The Tor.Com Store
• Tor-Forge at Macmillan
• Night Shade Books
• Audible.com
• AudiobookStand.com
• AddALL.com In Print Book Search
• AddALL.com Used and Out of Print Search

My available e-book titles are listed at http://www.baenebooks.com/s-32-david-drake.aspx.  Instructions for downloading for the Kindle, the Nook, and other devices are at http://www.baenebooks.com/t-ereaderinstructions.aspx.

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).

Mayfair Games brought out a Hammer’s Slammers board game back in the ’80s.

Intracorps licensed electronic game rights to Hammer’s Slammers in the mid ’90s. They got seriously into development, but they were overextended and went bankrupt well before they completed the game. (They paid me part of the money. The business was frustrating in a number of respects, but I was paid well enough to justify the hassle.) 

In 2000 Mattel paid a bundle up front for electronic game rights to Hammer’s Slammers. So far as I know the game hasn’t gotten beyond the preliminary concept stage–but their check cleared.

And greatly to my surprise, the Hammer stories are important texts in British miniature wargaming circles. John Treadaway has created an official site of the Hammer’s Slammer’s Rules Systems Handbooks.

The club’s vehicles weren’t quite what I had in mind, but I worked with John Treadaway (the club’s webmaster) and John Lambshead, the British Museum’s expert in marine nematodes, to bring out a history and campaign book on Hammer’s Slammers for the miniature wargaming market. Ground Zero Games has done 25-mm and 15-mm miniature figures, and Old Crow has done combat vehicles in both scales. The book is out from Pireme Publications. This was a lot of fun.

Mongoose published a Hammer’s Slammers role-playing game, available June 2009. I’ve seen the material they’re creating and have been really amazed. The fellow who did the writing really understood the military and (I think) got the feel of the Hammer series. I’m delighted with the result.

While I would be delighted to have somebody buy the right to make a movie from my fiction, I’ve never made it a priority; I write books. They’ll really have to come looking for me–and to date nothing in that line has gotten to the point of signed paper and a check in my hand.

In addition, there’s a fan-run site that my webmaster looks in on, but I don’t do so myself. (I have the wrong personality for that sort of thing.) Redliners at Yahoo Groups was formed to talk about David Drake’s works particularly, and military fiction in general. To subscribe, send e-mail to redliners-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

There is also now a David Drake fan club on Facebook, organized by fans.

I’ll cheerfully answer any question put to me e-mailed from the contact form, and anything I say to anybody is said for publication if that person wants to publish it.

I actually did rough the plot for a fourth book. It’d have been Ragnarok, with Hansen taking the place of Vithar and surviving to ‘the new earth and the new sun’. I decided not to do it at the time because I’d come to like the characters—yes, even North—and decided they were in a good place so I’d leave them.

That was a good decision.