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Dear People,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Dave Drake

***
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Santa, with Wild Mistletoe

from Dave

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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Dear People,

INTO THE HINTERLANDS, the space opera which John Lambshead wrote from my outline, should be out by the time you read this. I’m ridiculously pleased with the book. John’s style is nothing like mine, but the style of Hinterlands is quite different from the style of Lucy’s Blade (for example), also. I think the combination–this book really was a collaboration, though it’s taken me a while to see that–fits very well into John’s and my mutual view of our model.

Our model is the world of George Washington. The more I learn about the man, the more impressed I become. The Thirteen Colonies might have gained their independence without Washington, but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have remained united if somebody other than he had been Commanding General and then our first President.

The Revolutionary War was conducted in the South as a civil war with irregulars on both sides using brutal guerrilla tactics. The same thing would have happened in the Northeast had not Washington been present to protect civilians; to protect civilization.

I wish there’d been somebody like him in Nam.

I should mention a few items associated with Hinterlands. First, John has written an essay for Baen.com about science and culture in the universe of the novel and why we made some of the choices we did in adapting history to our project. He thinks it’s too academic, but I thought it was very good. Of course, I’m the guy whose law school class gave him a plaque for being Pedant of the Year.

Second, John and I have a joint author photo, but it didn’t get onto the dust-jacket because the double author bios didn’t leave space. It’s here on my website in case any of you want to print it and paste it onto the half-title or something.

I mentioned the biographies. John had written his own. When I saw a draft of the flap copy, I completely rewrote John’s myself, giving (I think) a better view of him as a friend and as a world-class scientist.

When the book itself arrived, I read over John’s bio, which pleased me; and then read my own, which did not. I think the person it describes is more similar to Heinlein than I hope I am.

After thinking about it, I’ve completely recast my flap bio into a form similar to what I did with John’s. The fellow in the original bio isn’t the way I see myself or somebody I really want to know (though it was accurate enough).

Since I’m speaking of the dust-jacket, contrast the original art (visible on the ARC) with the final treatment which Jennie Faries, Baen’s graphic designer and my friend, came up with. The cover is much more effective than the original art was. (I’ve had wonderful cover paintings from Bob Eggleton. This one puzzled me, however.)

My major project since Newsletter 63 has been plotting Into the Maelstrom, the sequel to Hinterlands. The first stage of the process was research, during which I compiled 8500 words of notes. I’m now mining those notes for a plot.

It’s going pretty well. After I complete and polish it, I’ll send it to John (who will be developing both sequels from my outlines, as he did Hinterlands) for his comments and corrections. When I’ve incorporated those, I’ll send the final back to John and to Toni Weisskopf (Baen Books’ publisher).

Whereupon I’ll start the next project, the third Book of the Elements (the new fantasy series for Tor). My working title is Demons from the Earth, but that could change. (Though you’ll notice that I have covered the objection of the Tor sales force to the title of the second volume: the element Earth is prominently displayed in this one.)

That second Book of the Elements, OUT OF THE WATERS, is on sale right now with a wonderful Donato cover. Tor is treating me very well. I am very fortunate in my covers as in many, many other fashions.

I’ve just received the short list of entries for The Galaxy Project prize contest. I’ll be judging them along with Robert Silverberg and Barry Malzberg (who made the initial cull). Reading the five finalists and making a decision will be work, but not nearly as much work as it was to write the three essays I did.

And it’s worth a great deal more to me than what it costs. The SF field and Galaxy magazine itself, which brought Jim Baen and me together, have been of enormous importance in my life. If Rosetta Books continues the project, as I hope they will, I expect to write more essays. The project isn’t live quite yet, but I hope when that happens (I think in a couple weeks) you’ll take a look at the offerings and buy something. You’ll gain by it.

A dump is a prepack of books from a publisher with a banner on top and a floor stand; a mini-dump with fewer pockets and no floor stand is intended for counter display, generally beside the cash register. My friend Mark walked into his local Barnes and Noble the other day and found this.

It pleased me very much to see. Instead of pushing the latest RCN mass market (What Distant Deeps), these are all older titles which Baen is reissuing at considerable profit to all concerned. Toni and Corinda Carfora (Baen’s sales liaison) are working very hard on behalf of their authors and are keeping the company healthy in a tough time.

There’s a new whimsical picture on the website as well. Every summer the Van Name and Drake extended family rents a large beach house. This year Glenn and Helen Knight were part of the group. Glenn and I are on the Holden Beach fishing pier, pointing out to our wives a pelican (off camera) which had just dived.

Glenn and I met through writer Manly Wade Wellman in 1974, and we’ve been friends ever since. The backgrounds of many of my books, including the recently republished Tom Kelly thrillers (Loose Cannon), came from visiting Glenn while he was in the Foreign Service.

I’ve gained a great deal from being a writer: it’s made me a good living over the years, and it kept me from going too badly off the rails after I got back to the World in 1971. A less obvious benefit is that in one fashion or another I’ve met most of my close friends, Glenn included, through my writing.

I’d be in a really bad place without friends.

Now, back to work. I’m about to plot the climactic battle. There have been various criticisms of my fiction, but I don’t recall anybody claiming that it lacked action.

–Dave Drake

***
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Dear People,

I have written a(nother) novel! The Road of Danger, the latest RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera went off to Baen Books at 124,889 words. For the moment it feels good, but I’ll shortly start to be antsy that I’m not accomplishing anything, I’m sure.

I don’t think I’m exactly a workaholic–I don’t think that everything hangs on me or anything like that. But I’m most content when I’m working and the project is going well. Work structures my existence and keeps me from thinking too much about the meaning of life. (I figure I know the meaning already, and it’s not something that makes me happier to dwell on.) 

I did the third (and probably last for this batch) essay for The Galaxy Project which Barry Malzberg is putting together for Rosetta Books. These are classic novelettes from Galaxy magazine in the ’50s, republished on Kindle with introductions by Barry, me, and I think Robert Silverberg. Barry’s intros are very informative; that is, they teach me a great deal about a subject on which I’m pretty knowledgeable to begin with. Barry has been very positive about my intros as well. I’ve taught myself a lot by doing the research to write them.

The ’50s are really the time that magazine SF–which is what brought me into the field, though through anthologies rather than the magazines directly–reached its peak. The three top magazines had distinct personalities:

Astounding under John Campbell probably had the highest proportion of the really top stories, though they appeared as a continuation of the past. (Astounding‘s past defined the Golden Age of Science Fiction, of course).

F&SF (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) under Anthony Boucher and J Francis McComas (later Boucher alone) had the highest literary standards and was the most eclectic, often reprinting off-trail material as well as new material. F&SF is the magazine which is closest to my personal taste (which might be a surprise to some people).

Galaxy under HL Gold was the cutting edge of SF at the time. While Astounding and F&SF in their different ways looked to the past, Galaxy saw itself as the future. Galaxy brought an excitement which the field hadn’t known since the early days of Amazing; and which, sadly, has been missing more recently as well. Writing my essays and reading Barry’s have made me a part of that excitement; and I think that reading our essays and the stories themselves can excite you too.

When The Galaxy Project goes live (I think toward the end of this month), browse the offerings and maybe spend a few bucks to try a story or two. And open already for any of you who are interested is a contest to write the best Galaxy-style novelette.

The paperback edition  of The Legions of Fire, the first novel in my four-volume fantasy series for Tor (The Books of the Elements) is out and is beautiful. Donato, the (wonderful) artist, provided a full-bleed image as well as the banner image that Tor put on the hardcover. The pb uses the upper portion of the complete version. (The very detailed frame at the bottom remains.) Both treatments are quite lovely. I find it interesting that they’re continuing to play with design on the paperback.

What Distant Deeps, the most recent RCN space opera, is also out in paperback with its fine Steve Hickman cover–which hasn’t changed from the hc (except that it doesn’t have the swatch of holographic foil). Steve is doing the cover for The Road of Danger; I haven’t seen anything, but I’m told that he’s submitted roughs. I will (Karen will) put something up on the website when we have it.

Loose Cannon, the omnibus of the two Tom Kelly technothrillers (Skyripper and Fortress) is out as a Baen omnitrade with a very good Dave Seeley cover. These are harsh, angry books; they’re not stupid, though, and there’s a lot of stuff in them that isn’t fiction.

They probably give a better view of where my head was for a long while after I got back to the World (that is, returned from Viet Nam) than most of my fiction does. That isn’t an altogether good thing, but it’s a fact.

I mentioned that Steve is working on the cover of the next RCN. The Donato cover of Out of the Waters, the second of The Books of the Elements, is just as wonderful as the cover for Legions. The book is supposed to be out on July 19. I haven’t seen a copy yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

Tor did send me a couple dust jackets, though. Unless they’ve changed the caption–and I don’t think there was time to do so–it says under my picture that I’m an NYT Bestselling Author. That’s a mistake. Not mine: I asked folks at Tor (including Tom Doherty) as soon as I saw that statement, since I thought it must be wrong. My sales at both Tor and Baen are quite good, but they aren’t that good.

I was glad to learn that the caption got there through honest error (which can happen to anybody) rather than being a deliberate lie by somebody in marketing. This is a business in which an awful lot of people lie about advances and about sales. I’ve made it a point over the years not to be one of those people. One of the reasons I’ve never publically announced my new contracts: my honest figures would be compared with the bloated claims of others.

My next real project is to plot Into the Maelstrom,the second novel of The Citizen series (the first is Into the Hinterlands, which will be out in September from Baen). These are space operas (sorta) which use the life of George Washington as a template. John Lambshead developed my outline into Hinterlands and will dothe same with the remaining two, god willing.

This is a neat idea (which Jim Baen originally came up with) and John handled it extremely well; I’m pleased to be doing the remainder of the series. That said, it’s been more than a decade since I plotted the first book in that idiosyncratic universe. I’m going to be earning my money on these outlines.

I’m writing this over the July 4 weekend, which is as good a time as any to think about… I won’t say patriotism; that means things to some people which it doesn’t mean to me. Say rather, the rights and duties of citizenship.

I was drafted in 1968. I didn’t want to go (and I didn’t believe any good was coming from US involvement in Viet Nam), but I believed that it was my duty as a citizen to serve when I was called. Then I came home and started writing about war.

I don’t think people who weren’t at least teenagers in the ’70s can imagine how much scorn and hatred were directed at Nam vets. Jane Fonda spoke for a large and very vocal portion of the population when she attacked American servicemen.

Personally, my own worst experience with this came in Boston in 1990 when Tom Easton, moderating a panel, called me a pornographer of violence. He then read from his upcoming Analog review which amplified his personal attack.

The review duly appeared. To Mr Easton and his editor, Stanley Schmidt, it was morally reprehensible to try to describe war from where I had seen it: the loader’s hatch of an M48 tank in Cambodia.

But things have changed; in my opinion for the better. The Guardian is a British paper which serves the segment of the UK electorate which most nearly resembles that of the California Democratic Party. A Guardian blogger, discussing Military SF, paired me with Joe Haldeman as Nam vets writing from personal experience–instead of calling me a pornographer, as Analog had.

And in the June, 2011, issue of Analog itself, the new reviewer, Don Sakers, intelligently reviewed several Military SF books and referred to me as the father of the modern MSF category. Joe Haldeman, Jerry Pournelle and I all started writing about combat from personal experience at about the same time in the early ’70s, so I think that gives me too much credit; but it’s a nice change. (Mind, I don’t think that Mr Sakers is the sort of person who would descend to personal attacks even if he didn’t like a book.)

I hope that it will never again be socially acceptable to vilify other people simply for trying to be good citizens, even if you don’t like the direction their citizenship leads them. That’s a wish for every American on this Independence Day.

–Dave Drake

***
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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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In the immediately previous newsletter I said that I’d finished my rough plot for The Road of Danger (the next RCN space opera). The book is now at 32K and rising at the usual steady rate.

This is all good, but I don’t feel happy or even content about it; which is also usual. I frequently stop and think, “Jeepers, I need to fix the bit in chapter two when the character first appears.” And of course the work generally isn’t as good or as fast or as easy as I think it ought to be.

Based on past experience, I will fix the bit in chapter two when I edit, and I will make the book generally better; I work fast enough to have created an unusually large body of work; and “easy” simply doesn’t matter. But the book will never be good enough, and I will never be good enough to meet my own standards.

That is a personal problem. My strong suspicion is that if I were a ditch digger, my ditches wouldn’t be as straight as I thought they should be and I’d be painfully aware that I should be able to achieve the same result more quickly and with fewer shovel strokes. As I say, it’s a personal problem.

Shortly before this newsletter goes out, the final draft of Into the Hinterlands, the space opera John Lambshead wrote from my outline, should have reached Toni’s inbox (Toni Weisskopf, Publisher of Baen Books). I don’t do line edits on other people’s books, though I’ll sometimes rewrite a couple paragraphs and say, “Do it this way throughout.” Mostly I see my job as standing outside and making general comments in the order of, “Focus on just what the viewpoint character sees in this scene.”

I went over John’s second and third drafts. The fourth (this one) is John’s polish draft. He says he caught a lot of clumsy phrasings but that the book isn’t perfect.

That’s the reality of every good writer’s life. Vergil, who was a genius, was still polishing the Aeneid when he died eleven years after he’d started. He told his literary executor to burn the manuscript if he didn’t think it was publishable.

Into the Hinterlands is a pretty darned good book. It’ll be a Baen hardcover in September, 2011.

Speaking of things coming out, the paperback of The Legions of Fire, the first book in my new Tor fantasy series, is scheduled for May, 2011. The paperback of What Distant Deeps, the latest book in the RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera series, will be out from Baen in June, 2011.

This isn’t ideal timing–three months separation would be better–but a lot of things in life aren’t ideal. If this were the worst thing that ever happened, even to me, we’d be back in the Garden of Eden.

In the more distant future, there will be omnitrade omnibuses (that is, books the size of the Baen Collected Hammer’s Slammers volumes) of The General and The General Follow-On series. The five out of print paperback volumes of the General series have already been combined as two fat hardcovers (Warlord and Conqueror), which to my surprise are also now out of print.

The omnitrade volumes will contain two original volumes in each: HOPE REBORN will combine General 1&2; HOPE REARMED will be General 3&4; HOPE RENEWED will be General 5 and The Chosen, the first of the General Follow-On series (which is my name for them, but I haven’t heard a better one); and finally, HOPE REFORMED will be the remainder of the Follow-On series, The Reformer and The Tyrant.

I wrote the outlines for all of them. Steve Stirling executed the novels from those outlines, with the exception of The Tyrant (which Eric Flint wrote). (Reformer and Tyrant were the two halves of one original outline.)

Combining the last of the General series with The Chosen isn’t ideal (there’s that word again!) but I didn’t see much practical option. And I pulled the titles out of my ear, just as I did with the paperbacks and hardcovers of the General series. (The titles for the Follow-On series actually mean something.)

Hmm. I have to do intros for the four new volumes. Well, in good time.

I’m not a great deal farther in my next Ovid translation project, the Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths from the Metamorphoses. I’ve run into an amusing problem, though. Quite a lot of a battle of this sort is “A killed B and was in turn killed by C.”

The Lapiths are Greek mountaineers; the Centaurs are, well, centaurs: horses with a human head and torso in place of the equine horse and neck. If you were watching a movie of it, you’d know exactly what was going on. When all you have is the characters’ names (which Ovid mostly invented, for both groups), it isn’t immediately obvious whether it was a Centaur or a Lapith who used the lampstand to dash out the brains of his opponent (and so on).

I’ll make sure it’s clear in my translation. There are certain fixed points, the characters whom Ovid brought in from pre-existing mythology, like Perithous and Nessus. But it’s unexpectedly tricky.

SF SIGNAL has put up a podcast interview with me. As usual, I have no recollection of what I said. The answers will be the same if the questions were the same, but each interviewer has a thrust of his own so they aren’t auditory cookie-cutter productions, exactly.

I’ve been thinking recently about fame, and success, and about writing as a career generally. My agent, Kirby McCauley, had met writer Jerzy Kosinski in 1979, while Kosinski was touring with his new novel, Passion Play.

Passion Play had come out the month before my own first novel, The Dragon Lord. I remember looking at Passion Play and thinking despairingly, “Why on Earth would anybody buy my book, when for only a dollar more they could get this one by Kosinski?” (I had many problems as a new writer. An inflated opinion of my own work was not, however, one of those problems.)

The Dragon Lord is a badly flawed book, but Passion Play isn’t Kosinski’s best either. Both books were (amusingly) last reprinted in 1998.

But Kosinski’s remarkable and powerful first novel, The Painted Bird, was last reprinted in the ’90s also. There were many things wrong with Kosinki as a human being, including the fact that he lied about the genesis of The Painted Bird (which is not autobiographical) and that in it he libeled the people who had been responsible for saving his life, but the book itself is a masterpiece. Despite that, it appears to be on the edge of oblivion.

Whereas the contents of Hammer’s Slammers, my first book (it came out in April, 1979, six months before The Dragon Lord), have been continuously in print. The latest edition (the Baen omnitrade) came out last year and is selling very well. (Thank you, by the way.)

I don’t know what that means. It doesn’t mean that I am a more important writer than Jerzy Kosinski, or that Hammer’s Slammers is a better book than The Painted Bird. (And incidentally, neither book would be described as a feel-good reading experience.)

You could argue that it means that being dead is bad for a writer’s career, but Kosinski’s career had pretty well gone down the tubes by the time he committed suicide in 1991. (The two facts are presumably linked.)

I don’t believe that anybody in 1979 expected Hammer’s Slammers to be regularly reprinted (I didn’t) or The Painted Bird to be forgotten by all but specialists. I don’t think Kosinski’s masterpiece should be forgotten; but that appears to be the case, based on publication history.

The only thing I am pretty sure of is that we all should be careful about making pronouncements about our own importance. In the world’s terms, no individual is really important. The quicker we learn that, the less opportunity we will give the world to embarrass us.

Back to a space opera!

–Dave Drake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worse things happen in wartime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was damned important.

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

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

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

That’s damned important.

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

Hang in, people. I’m hanging in also.

–Dave Drake

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Mistletoe, Nandina, and Flying Pig in a setting of asparagus

From Dave