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Enjoy!

I’m completely wrung out, but I’m going to be even more exhausted soon. I finished the rough draft of OUT OF THE WATERS, the second fantasy in the new Tor series at 154,384 words and have just completed making manuscript changes in my hardcopy mss. 

Anything you do with a book that long takes a lot of time and effort. The next stage is to key in those myriad changes. This is truly a brutal job, and the fact that I’ve done in many times only means that I know what it’s going to feel like for the next couple weeks. (For you fellow pedants, a myriad is 10,000. And since my first stage changes involve in the order of 5-10% of the rough draft wordage, I will literally be keying in a myriad changes.)

OUT OF THE WATERS wasn’t one of my working titles. The Tor sales force decided that because the series title is The Books of the Elements, I should have the word ‘water’ in this title as ‘fire’ was in the first.

If the sales force requested I pose in a pink tutu for the jacket photo, I would be calling friends who know something about ballet. (Hmm: no, I would be calling the friend who is an expert seamstress, because I really doubt I’m going to find an off-the-shelf tutu that would fit me.) Anyway, I came up with a number of ‘water’ titles and they picked the one that best satisfied them.

Stephanie, the truly wonderful editorial assistant who handles my liaison with Tor, suggested DOWN TO EARTH for the third book. That works for me.

I don’t know if WATERS is any good. I’m laughing frequently as I read it, but I’m not sure that most of the humor will appeal to anybody but veterans and people who can appreciate the literary minutiae which two of the scholarly characters use to center themselves in a crisis. (And I don’t expect the two categories will be laughing at the same jokes. Though I’m a veteran who used to carry Horace in the cargo pocket of my fatigues.) It’s got some good stuff in it; and I sure hope that other people will like it.

Incidentally, it’s 30K words longer than Tor needed to be and at least 15K longer than I originally intended. I think readers gain by the expansion, but it’s been a darned heavy rock I’ve rolled uphill for the last long while.

We’re (my wife Jo and I are) back from a wonderful and relaxing week in England. More precisely, a week in Kent. One of the wonderful things about Southeastern England is that you could spend much longer than the time we had making day-trips to amazing and historical places.

We got lots of pictures, a few of which will be on the website by the time this goes out. I have something of a travelogue, but I need to personalize it before I put it up. I’ll mention only one thing here: I’ve now seen the Romney Marshes and Dymchurch, a center of smuggling during the Eighteenth century and the setting of the Dr Syn novels by A Russell Thorndike–written in the ’30s but which I read in the ’70s.

These are remarkable books, and in some ways remarkably good. The visit has caused me to start rereading the series and to begin thinking about the RCN novel which I hope to plot as soon as I’ve put WATERS to bed. There’s so much neat stuff in the world, and it’s all grist for a writer’s mill!

The latest RCN space opera, WHAT DISTANT DEEPS, has been in my hands for several weeks and will probably be in stores by the time you see this. Steve Hickman’s cover is lovely. There is foiling, but the foil used isn’t as striking as some versions. (It’s apparently the printer’s proprietary foil rather than the foil Jennie [designer and friend] and Steve [artist and friend] wanted.) I cannot advise you to buy DEEPS for the foiling, though of course I hope you’ll buy it anyway.

And the paperback of IN THE STORMY RED SKY, the immediately previous RCN space opera, is certainly out. I’m taking a lot of pleasure in the series and indeed in writing generally. Varying what I write (at present between fantasy and space opera) keeps me from becoming either stale or bored.

I mention that I’m having fun with what I’m doing in part because I turn 65 on September 24 (2010). Judging from the mail and phone calls (despite being on a no-call list!) I’m getting, most people my age are retiring and desperately afraid of their medical situation.

I like what I’m doing. Besides, writing has kept me (more or less) between the ditches since I got back to the World in 1971. I’m nowhere near the danger to myself and those with whom I come in contact that I was at one time, but it still isn’t a system that I’m in a hurry to change.

And I’m in good physical shape for a man of my age in a sedentary occupation. For the past couple years now, I’ve been clearing brush on our 23-acre yard. This involves cutting the trunks/stems with an axe or heavy loppers; grinding the small stuff up in a (5-horse) chipper/shredder and cutting the heavier pieces to firewood length with a collapsible buck-saw; and then grubbing out the roots with a pick-mattock.

The emphasis on hand tools (the chipper/shredder is the exception) is for two reasons. First, I hate and fear power tools. Second and more important, I’m doing this not to clear the property (though that’s a useful byproduct) but to keep fit. Believe me, it works.

I’m not pretending I’m not old: I am old. But you don’t have to give up and let yourself go physically to hell just because you (like me) make your living in front of a computer.

I replaced my back-up motorcycle, a 2000 Suzuki GS500E with a 2009 Suzuki GS500F. The main difference between the two is that the new one has 42K fewer miles on it. The new one also has a fairing (which I figure is a wash–greater weight against better streamlining–for my usage, commuting) and a significantly larger gas tank (a real advantage). There’s a picture of me with it in the showroom on the website.

WUNC-FM, the flagship public radio station in the state, asked Baen Books to provide a writer who could join a panel on space with a philosopher and the head of the NC Space Initiative. The writer turned out to be me. This didn’t strike me as any big deal (I’ve been on lots of panels in my lifetime), and at some level I wondered if anybody was listening. (It aired at noon on a 100KW station that covers the whole center of the state, so intellectually I knew that somebody was listening.)

What I didn’t expect is that friends who didn’t know I was going to be on the air (I didn’t bother to tell anybody) would be excited to hear me. I guess it was a special case of the fact that non-writers think it’s a bigger deal that I am a writer than it is to me.

It went all right. The link is at http://wunc.org/tsot/archive/The_Final_Frontier.mp3/view , but my portion starts at the 40+ minute mark.

Finally, an odd datum which nonetheless brings up a useful point. I got an email through Baen Books from a guy who claimed to have read most of my books. I had gratuitously and unrealistically added  homosexuality to (one of the RCN novels) in order to be Politically Correct, however. Therefore he would never read anything of mine again.

Given that some of the characters in my stories (as in my life) for as far back as 1974 have been gay, I suspect his claim to have read a lot my stuff to be as dishonest as the burden of his comment is silly. (Mind, other characters in my stories are likely to refer to the gay ones as queers, which I don’t think counts as Politically Correct.)

But there’s a deeper implication, which is that writers slant their fiction to suit their market (which starts out being their editor, note). Some writers probably do; I don’t.

Now–I make decisions based on what I think will sell. That may well change what I write, but it won’t change how I write it. That is, some years ago I had a notion for an adventure story set in Africa. I pitched it to Tom Doherty, who explained that historically, books set in Africa didn’t sell well. I therefore wrote something else. (The Lord of the Isles, as it turned out.)

Furthermore, I made the conscious decision that the major villains in my fantasy novels were going to be non-human. The field after the climactic battle was going to have piles of giant rats, insects, zombies, or whatever; but not human beings. I’ve described tens of thousands of human corpses in the past, but I wasn’t going to do that in my new fantasies.

I don’t think that makes me PC, though. As a matter of fact, that accusation still makes me giggle.

Now, to start keying in the holographic edits. Forward the Light Brigade….

–Dave Drake

***
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August 7, 2010: Hello from Rainham-- Dave is in Kent, seeing neat stuff. He hopes to get a newsletter off next month--after the novel is done. --Dave

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, enjoy the site!

–Karen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Dave Drake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Dave Drake

***
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I’m going to start with something positive: I’ve now seen a cover comp for THE LEGIONS OF FIRE, the first of four books in my new fantasy series, due from Tor as a May, 2010, hardcover. I’d seen a black and white version, but that gave me no inkling of how very impressive the cover would be in color.

The layout (shrinking the cover painting to a banner in the middle) is what my friend Mark explains to me is the new Big Book look for major publishers. Now: if I’d been asked how to use a stunning piece of Donato art like the present one, I’d have said to run it full-height as a wrap-around. I (usually) don’t get involved in cover art or design, however–I don’t know squat about either subject. This treatment (which wouldn’t have crossed my mind) turns out to be extremely effective, besides being a coded message to buyers that Tor is pushing the book.

I’m really pleased. I hope people will like the book.

LEGIONS is the first book of a series set in a city called Carce, which is very similar to Rome in 30 AD. I’ve been asked repeatedly why I call the city Carce when it obviously _is_ Rome.

Well, it isn’t Rome. I’m not writing historical novels with fantasy elements added, I’m writing fantasy novels. This fact will be significant at the conclusion of the series, which I hope will add to more than the sum of its parts. (I tried, I think successfully, to accomplish the same thing in the Isles fantasy series for Tor.)

That’s one reason for the name Carce. Another stems from a panel about writing books with Roman settings that I was on many years ago. I commented in passing that the quickest way to tell that an author didn’t understand the classical world was if they gave the dates AUC–ab urbe condita; that is, from the founding of Rome. Greek and Roman historians didn’t use that system, not least because there was no agreement on what the actual date of Rome’s founding was. (There were at least three dates in serious contention.)

I then learned to my embarrassment that everybody else on the panel gave dates AUC in their novels. I hadn’t been wrong, but I’d been unconsciously unkind.

I know enough about ancient Rome to know how very much I _don’t_ know. Calling the city Carce instead of Rome is an explicit acknowledgment of my limitations.

Further goodish news is that I’m finally getting somewhere in plotting the second book of the series, with the current working title MONSTERS OF THE SEAS. This has taken several weeks longer than I think it should have. I gathered material in the usual fashion, but it wasn’t coming together properly.

I think the problem may have been the unusually cold weather we were having at the time I started laying out the plot. I had to leave the furnace on overnight, which messed up my sinuses just enough to keep the topmost registers of my brain from working the way I expect them to. I can take notes and even write when I’m not absolutely 100%, but apparently I can’t weave together the very complex plots I’ve been using for the past twenty years.

I have all the scenes sketched in rough order now. I reasonably expect to be well underway on the book by the time of my next newsletter.

Baen has moved the hardcover of WHAT DISTANT DEEPS, the next RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, back from August, 2010, to September and has moved the paperback of the immediately previous RCN volume, IN THE STORMY RED SKY, from July to August. This may have been done to increase the distance from Tor’s release of LEGIONS, but there’s a whole slew of factors going into a publisher’s schedule. Things can change abruptly.

One of the changes was that Tor moved the pb of THE GODS RETURN from November, 2009, (as I said in Newsletter 54) to December. It’s out now, however. This is the climax and conclusion of my nine-book Isles fantasy series.

It’s odd to look back on the Isles series. I was about to say, “it was a life-changing event for me,” but that isn’t quite true.

My life was changing regardless in the mid-’90s. The Military SF for which I was known was taking a hit because the US military was being downsized, and space opera (which I wrote a lot of, though mine was generally reviewed as Military SF) was still smothered by the weight of the Star Trek media tie-in juggernaut.

What writing the Isles series did was to gain me a reputation as a successful writer of high fantasy, rather than allowing me to slip into the ranks of people who’d been major players in previous decades. There are fashions in the F/SF genre as surely as there are in any other aspect of human existence. I’m very lucky to have weathered a major change–

But I assure you that I worked my butt off to capitalize on the chances I got. To be honest, I didn’t expect to succeed; but there was never any question but that I was going to try.

Baen has brought out the second volume of THE COLLECTED HAMMER’S SLAMMERS as an omnitrade (think of it as a shrunken trade paperback), reprinting the Night Shade hardcover. HS2 collects the four Hammer short novels and adds the short story THE DAY OF GLORY, which I wrote for a tsunami-relief anthology. I guess it sort-of fit there, since it’s certainly about a disaster.

Kurt Miller’s excellent art for the third volume of THE COLLECTED HAMMER’S SLAMMERS has been up since Newsletter 54, but the final now can be viewed at larger size along with a close-up of the turret of the central tank. This is the kind of little joke that I frequently put into my prose. I was pleased and amused to see it in the cover art.

I think HS3 comes out in June as a Baen omnitrade. It incorporates the two full-length Hammer novels and the newer novelette THE DARKNESS, which in its way may be the most accomplished piece of fiction I’ve ever written. The story is, for those who understand it, unusually bleak for me also.

Bragalonne in France has listed the third volume of the Isles series, SERVANT OF THE DRAGON, for February, 2010. I don’t ordinarily bother to mention foreign sales, but these large-format French editions have simply the most beautiful covers I’ve ever seen. Images are up at http://david-drake.com/wordpress/2010/french-edition-isles/, so you can judge for yourselves.

Matthew Peterson interviewed me by phone shortly after World Fantasy Con, for a podcast on Military SF. The interview is available (in pieces) with interviews on the subject with Ben Bova, Joe Haldeman, and Dave Weber at http://theauthorhour.com/david-drake/. As I write this, the very lengthy interview Rick Kleffel did at the con still hasn’t been posted.

And I haven’t finished editing my next foray into Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Hercules Cycle. My rough translation did give me the opening for MONSTERS, however. It’s all grist for the mill.

My webmaster, Karen, is planning a complete redesign for the tenth anniversary of david-drake.com in April, 2010. My part in this is to comment on some of my recent novels the way I did on my backlist when we started the website. I want to be deeply into MONSTERS before I start looking back, however.

One unfortunate thing that happened recently is that C Bruce Hunter, a friend of some thirty-five years, died: on November 13, 2009, though I didn’t learn of it until the middle of December. We were closer than that implies, however, and generally spoke at least once a week.

The thing is, the contacts were almost invariably Bruce calling me: to ask a question about Latin or Greek for his books on Masonic ritual, to tell me of a TV show that was worth my attention, to tell me a joke, or–very frequently–to tell me of some exotic food that was being marked down at the local gourmet store.

Bruce was one of the quietly kindest men I’ve ever met. When I needed a ride to get our dog to the veterinary school in Raleigh, he immediately dropped what he was doing and carried me there. Bruce saw Karl Wagner daily even at the end, when the situation was very difficult. He went to the drugstore to bring Karl milk of magnesia on the last night of Karl’s life, and he found Karl’s body the next morning when he dropped in again to check.

Bruce travelled frequently from his Carrboro home to relatives in Asheville and in eastern NC, so it wasn’t a great surprise not to hear from him for a while. When he didn’t arrive for Thanksgiving dinner, my wife checked the hospital (they had no record of him), and the next day I ran out to his house. His car wasn’t in the drive, so I figured he’d forgotten and gone back to Asheville. He’d told my wife that his health had been a bit dicey, and I knew he’d had some memory lapses. In fact he’d been discharged dead from the hospital and taken to Asheville for burial.

Bruce was a good guy. I’ll miss him.

Now, back to expanding and polishing my plot!

–Dave Drake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Dave Drake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Dave Drake

***
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In the most recent newsletter I said that I’d just started the rough draft of the next RCN space opera, WHAT DISTANT DEEPS. I now have a hair under 60K in draft. As usual, I’m very depressed about it–though I’ve found an interesting evolution in my thinking over the years. 

For a long time, when I was in the middle of a project (this is true of short stories as well as novels, but of course I get through the middle more quickly) I thought that I was writing badly and that the result would be incredibly dull. As I got into this one, I found that I no longer think that I’m writing badly: I’m subconsciously aware that my line-by-line writing skills are of a high order, as they darned well should be after forty-odd years of practice.

But jeepers, does the book seem dull! And when I do get to an action scene, it’s not going to be as exciting as previous action scenes that I’ve written. Furthermore, I become depressed about the project much more quickly than I used to and stay depressed deeper into the climax.

So I guess you could say that I’m refining my misery. I don’t think this is necessary to the process of writing, but it _might_ be. That is, if I didn’t worry so much about the quality of my work, maybe the work wouldn’t be as good. That isn’t a testable hypothesis, however: the worry isn’t something I can change, any more than I can change the color of my eyes. (Hazel, if you were wondering.)

Over the years, many people have told me how lucky I am to be a writer: I’m my own boss, I can decide my own schedule, I get to work at home… lots of things along those lines. All of that is true, but it isn’t the whole truth.

I really am lucky to be a writer, though.

The Hammer’s Slammers role-playing book from Mongoose is out. It’s a very attractive package with an enormous amount of information in it. I find the amount of effort other people put into my creation–my world, if you prefer–to be kind of boggling.

I tend to see my stories in microcosm–the way, basically, that the characters themselves are seeing things. I don’t have a future history in mind; I don’t really believe in a future history in the sense that ‘we start here and we end there’ because we don’t end except in the sense that human life will vanish from the universe at some point. (Having grown up in the ’50s with the Cold War and nuclear holocaust an accepted possibility, I’m conditioned to believe that the end may be within a century rather than within a billion years.)

But until then, human history just goes, rather than going somewhere. Event follows event. Very rarely, in my opinion, does event cause event–at least not in the simple fashion one would use to describe a chemical reaction. A more organized viewpoint is valid, though, and the game book is really neat.

I should mention that the proofs were sent me in the form of a pdf so large that a friend downloaded it from an FTP site and burned it to disk for me. I proofed it on-screen instead of printing it out as I would have done with my own prose. I’ve always felt that I lose a lot of comprehension by reading on-screen; and boy! did this example prove the matter for me.

My introduction, Five Firebases, was about natural phenomena which I still remember vividly from my time in Southeast Asia. Mongoose had dropped an incident for length, which was fine. They hadn’t changed references in the introductory text from five to four, however, and I didn’t catch the mistake.

Live and learn: next time I will run off at least the bits that I’ve written. And for those of you who want the essay uncut, it’s on the website.

The paperback of BALEFIRES, my horror/fantasy collection from Night Shade, is out. Whee! As of this writing I haven’t actually seen the edition, but when I asked for author’s copies they shipped some which reach me soon. I’m really proud of this book; a lot of my life is in it.

And the entire Belisarius series is now out in three hardcover omnibus editions for which I did new introductions. I plotted the series as three novels; Eric Flint wrote them very ably as six novels; and now they’re back to my original design under my original titles to the outlines and with new, uniform covers by Kurt Miller. (Quite nice ones.)

The Baen reprint of my Young Adult novel PATRIOTS is due out in September. I won’t repeat what I said about it in Newsletter 51, but I will say that I genuinely like the book.

In October Baen brings out volume one of the COLLECTED HAMMER’S SLAMMERS as an omnitrade paperback. This is sort of an intermediate size between mass market and trade paperback. Having read novels by Clavell and Michener as mass-market paperbacks, I’m rather glad the Hammer volumes are getting a somewhat larger page size. The first one is long, and each succeeding volume gets longer.

Baen is giving the paperbacks new cover art. The first two (by Kurt Miller) are very good.

When I saw the sketch of volume two (February, 2010), I liked the detail but wished that there was more color contrast. I suggested to Jennie (Faries, my friend and Baen graphic designer) that perhaps the tank in the foreground could be magenta. Toni (Weisskopf, my friend and Baen publisher) had similar thoughts but brightened the gray shades with explosions instead of a frou-frou tank. Her way is better.

I had a horrible realization when I started checking when books were coming out before I did this newsletter. Tor had moved the first book of my new fantasy series from November, 2010, to July. That pleased me. But Baen has the new RCN novel (the one I’m working on) scheduled also and I didn’t know when that was.

As it turns out, it’s September, 2010, a two month separation which shouldn’t hurt much. Believe me, it’s really bad for the books, the author, and the publishers to have two novels come out on top of one another. I’ve got personal experience, but so has Dan Simmons and I’m sure a lot of other writers.

I was remiss in not thinking about the possibility sooner. Okay, I’m busy writing books; but I should have thought about it.

My friend Mark Van Name lightly revised the Wikipedia article on me, correcting minor errors and changing the tone, and my webmaster Karen Zimmerman put it up. I told Mark that I didn’t want a puff piece, but neither was I comfortable with something that made me sound like a Neocon. Thanks to both of them and to the friends who’ve been prodding me to do something about the article.

Nothing much has changed with the website. I’ve read over a chunk of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (the Hercules Cycle), but I’m not ready to do a serious translation yet. I have a novel to write.

I frequently read military memoirs, most often from Viet Nam. I recently read several more, which got me to thinking as such things usually do. Dunno, maybe I’m trying to make sense of 1970. I haven’t succeeded yet.

But it did remind me of something. In April, 1970, I flew from Travis AFB (near San Francisco) to Bien Hoa in a DC-8/Super 61, owned and operated by United Airlines under charter to the Army. It was a standard civilian aircraft with stewardesses.

Until quite recently airlines had retired stewardesses at age 35, but new legislation had prevented them from continuing the practice. (Not everything Lyndon Johnson did was bad, though the Viet Nam War was bad enough to lower his average a very long way.)

Stewardesses bid on runs (cabin attendants probably still do), and it was very noticeable that all those on our flight were older women with a great deal of seniority. They had chosen to fly with us.

After we landed at Bien Hoa (after the steepest approach I’ve ever experienced; I’ll swear I was looking straight down through the portside window before we started our dive toward the runway), the stewardesses stood by the exits and cheerfully wished us good luck as we disembarked.

And every once in a while, one would turn her face away and wipe her tears.

God bless those women. Civilians didn’t have a lot of use for American soldiers back in 1970, but our stewardesses cared.

–Dave Drake

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I intended to start this newsletter by saying that I’d completed the plot of the next RCN space opera and am at work on it. Those things are true (we’ll get back to them), but in my mind the big news is that I’ve returned from BookExpo America (BEA) in the Javits Center on Manhattan. 

Because gosh! I’m glad to be back. I thought of myself as an ambassador for Baen, but I was also becoming a face rather than just a name to people on the sales end from the distributor right down through individual bookstore personnel. This is clearly good stuff for a professional writer to be doing, and Toni (Weisskopf; Baen publisher) wasn’t asking me to be anything but myself. (Cheerful, friendly, but not even close to being politically correct.)

I had time to myself. The hotel was only 30 blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, allowing me to walk through Central Park (lovely in itself) and spend an afternoon there. (To my amazement, they have a sirrush–a dragon–from the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. I’d seen a considerable portion of the gate in the Museum of Oriental Antiquities in Istanbul, but those tiles included only lions and bulls.)

So there was lots of neat stuff, both professionally and personally; I don’t regret doing it. But.

To start out with, travel is irrationally tough on me. (Arriving at the airport and learning that I didn’t have a ticket after all–travel agent screw-up–would’ve stressed even a normal person, I suspect.) The Iowa cities where I was born and raised weren’t much bigger than even this ’small’ BEA–not to mention the population of NYC itself. And though the socializing wasn’t unpleasant in itself, there was a lot of it, including at meals. I never lost sight of the fact that this was business.

So I’m sitting on my lower deck now. The birds are singing up a storm, especially the wren on the clothesline beside me. My dogs are sleeping to right and left. The meadow beyond the Rose-of-Sharon and the mimosa is lush and green, and very shortly I will get back to writing a novel.

This is where _I_ belong.

And speaking of that novel: WHAT DISTANT DEEPS, the next RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera. (I took the title from William Blake’s poem The Tiger.) I have a plot of 9,500 words, which allows me to be very steady in the actual process of writing; and as of this moment, I have 851 words of actual rough draft. When I get going I average a solid thousand words a day, but believe me, BEA was a disruption.

The process of plotting this one differed from any of my previous books–and each of them differed as well. You wouldn’t think there were that many ways to come up with a plot and complications, but it turns out there are. I don’t consciously do things differently; it just happens. I have a very skilled subconscious, and I’ve learned not to get in its way; but doggone, I wonder at myself a lot of the time.

In the April newsletter I said that the hardcover of IN THE STORMY RED SKY, the next RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, would be out from Baen realsoonnow. In fact it’s now out from both Baen (in hc) and Audible (downloadable audio). I’m extremely pleased by both versions.

The reaction of the cover designer (AKA my friend Jennie) to the cover of SKY was “Ack!” or words to that effect. The printer used the wrong metallic foil. All I can say is that it looks really spiffy to me.

The mass market of BALEFIRES, my collection of fantasy/horror stories from Night Shade, is supposed to be out on June 30. You’ve heard that before? Yes, but that was in 2008… or maybe 2007. This time the book is really at the printers.

One good thing about the delay is that the mass market cover has had time to grow on me. I kinda like it now. The stories are very close to my heart–this really is where I started out–and the background notes I’ve attached to each story provide a good deal of autobiography and history.

The third Belisarius omnibus, FLAMES OF TWILIGHT, is scheduled from Baen in hc and trade paper in August. This volume combines The Tide of Victory and The Dance of Time and wraps up the saga. (The epic? Well, the series anyway.) I wrote the plots and Eric Flint expanded them into very good novels.

Eric was supposed to do the intro for this volume (I did Bel 1 and Bel 2). Things happened. He’s out of the hospital now and is doing fine (proceeding in the direction of fine, anyway), but I wound up writing the third intro also.

The Baen mass market reissue of PATRIOTS is due out from Baen in September. I don’t ordinarily reread my own stuff, but when I went over the proofs for the new edition I was pleased. It’s a YA, so I needed to keep the length down. There are more ellipses than there normally would be in a book of mine, but I think it’s easy to follow the action.

Let me repeat: Patriots is a Young Adult novel. When it was first published, an online reviewer said that if the book were twice as long and had more sex and violence, he might find it worth reading. I don’t think it’s _necessary_ to be a moron with a tin ear in order to put book reviews online.

Gordon R Dickson really liked Patriots. Gordy and I weren’t close, but we were on friendly terms and I greatly respect some of his work. I thought of him as I read the proofs.

I mentioned the Mongoose Hammer’s Slammers RPG book in Newsletter 50; it’s coming off the presses even as I type. To repeat what I said before, I’m struck by how well the author understood both my work and the reality of the military. I’m not a gamer myself, but if you are you might take a look at it.

There’s another Ovid lyric up on the website. It’s not a terribly interesting one in my opinion, but I did it. I’m feeling in the mood for more translation, but if I get properly going on the new novel, I probably won’t have the mental headroom to polish my Ovid well enough to put it out in front of other people. We’ll see.

The website hasn’t changed much, but there’s a picture of me with my agent Kay McCauley in Central Park after we had lunch.  That was another plus for the BEA trip, come to think. I’ve been represented by Kay (and her brother Kirby) since 1972. My business relationships are friendships also, which makes life less difficult.

Though sometimes it seems difficult enough. This Memorial Day was hard on me, though not for any particular reason I’m conscious of. I’m not religious, and I came to terms with the certainty of non-existence back in 1970. (I’m not trying to convince anybody else of this; I’m just explaining where I stand.) But then I came to a realization:

I exercise daily. I used to listen to BBC News while I exercised, but knowing a great deal about the world made me (even) more depressed, not a direction in which I need to go. Jo (my wife) got me some tapes of old radio programs (I listened to radio drama from a very early age), and for some decades I’ve exercised to them.

The other day I was listening to a 1950 episode of a CBS mystery: Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. Hero enters club before opening hours; somebody’s playing jazz on a piano in the background. Hero interacts with villain’s henchman, then knocks him down. Piano stops. Hero asks where the boss’s office is, then says thanks. Piano resumes.

This was a perfect bit of business for radio, using silence as effectively as words. I like the show generally, but this was really exceptional.

In the credits, I learned the episode had been written by Blake Edwards, who of course has gone from strength to strength in the years since. (I think SOB was even better than “10″ or The Pink Panther, but whatever your tastes, nobody can doubt Edwards’ ability today.)

Craftsmanship is real. It’s real to me, at any rate: it flashed from the middle of that 1950 radio show, as obvious as it was unexpected. So while I may not believe in a Supreme Being or the Rights of Man or the Republican Party (let the parts stand for the whole), I do believe in craft.

I can say honestly that I will dedicate myself to improving my craftsmanship as a writer… and indeed, I did so dedicate myself when I began writing for publication. Maybe sixty years from now somebody will say, “Wow! That was nicely done,” as I just did with Blake Edwards.

Yours optimistically–

–Dave Drake

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