DRAKE’S NEWSLETTER #106: November 9, 2018
Dear People,
I’ve started writing TO CLEAR AWAY THE SHADOWS! Really writing it: not taking notes, not plotting, not even putting pieces of the plot together. I’ve done all those things, for much longer than the process should have taken.
Yesterday I started writing text. I also typed up the epigraph, the bit of poetry relating to the title which will go in the front of the book. I normally add the epigraph after I’ve finished the text, but after I finished The Storm. I was completely wrung out and couldn’t find the particular chunk of Tennyson I’d planned to use. (Yes, I’d copied it down–somewhere.) I sent the manuscript in without it.
Toni read the book and noted the lack of context for the title, so I (thanks to my webmaster!) found the verse and turned in a corrected manuscript. The Baen managing editor then sent the wrong manuscript to the typesetter, as she had done a number of times in the past. I caught it in the proofs, and it turned out to be any easy one to fix; thank goodness. (Some of her similar errors have proven unfixable.)
Incidentally, the managing editor has since been fired for reasons having nothing to do with me. To repeat myself: thank goodness.
Anyway, The Storm is coming out in January. I read the proofs (which were clean except the lack of epigraph–even cleaner than my original manuscript, which isn’t always the case). It’s a good book, in series with The Spark. Now that there are two of them, they needed a series title which is Time of Heroes.
I say ‘in series with’ rather than ‘sequel to’ The Spark, because most of my books (and certainly The Storm) can be read without knowledge of anything else I’ve written. That’s a practice I got into when I started out, writing short stories for magazines and one-shot anthologies. I couldn’t assume that potential readers had any context for my work.
Incidentally, I’m usually so wrung out at the end of a novel that all I want is to be shut of it forever. This is a common reaction for writers who’ve finished books. CS Forester’s editor wanted extensive changes in The African Queen–then wrote back to say that the book would be fine if they just dropped the final two chapters. Forester thankfully said to drop those chapters, and the book was published that way–completely changing the thrust of the novel.
Forester republished the novel as written when he’d gained stature in the literary marketplace, but the John Huston film made from the book with Bogart and Hepburn basically follows the truncated version and has a happy ending. It probably wouldn’t have been as successful if it had shown Forester’s own bleak vision of male-female relationships.
I’ve mentioned The Spark, the first book in the series. The paperback is out, and the cover is striking even without the special foil treatment which the hardcover got. I’m proud of the book.
I said in a previous newsletter that to get into the feel of To Clear Away the Shadows I had done a story for an anthology of stories by or about Davids. The anthology is now titled The David Chronicles and is being edited by David Afsharirad.
I mentioned this in passing to my friend Barry Malzberg, who greatly to my surprise wanted to do a story for it. I checked with Toni and DavidA (a big Malzberg fan) and got their approval. Barry did an extremely good story–actually, it was a good story up to the last line and became a stunning story with that.
Only then did I realize that Barry thought the anthology was a tribute to me, like Onward, Drake. I told him that I thought that one Drake tribute volume was excessive and a second one would be ridiculous; but if the result was the story he’d just turned in, I was glad of the mistake.
Since Newsletter 105, we’ve had two hurricanes. Neither was especially serious where we live 150 miles from the coast, but the power was off for two days with Florence. Michael brought only about half the rain here–however there was an hour of severe wind and the power was off for three days. (Lots of branches and even trees went through power lines.)
I said, ‘the power was off,’ but in fact just grid power went out. The whole-house generator I’d put in a couple years ago chugged flawlessly and everything was fine. (And it didn’t use nearly as much fuel as I’d feared.)
The hurricanes did complicate travel. A culvert on the road into Chapel Hill washed out during Florence and added a three mile detour for about a week. That was fixed shortly before Michael brought trees and powerlines down on the same road. For a couple days I went around a tree and moved some barricades so that I could edge to the side of the road and duck under the cables. (I was on the little bike.)
In all, the hurricanes were mildly disruptive, but never worse than that for us. The (Generac) generator was a godsend. Among other things, the (electric) well pump continued in service.
The other excitement of the period is that Jo and I went to the Grand Canyon region (Zion, Bryce, and the North Rim) with our very old friends Glenn and Helen Knight. These are the folks we recently went to Italy and Greece with, and in the past had visited in Algeria and Turkey. As always, they did all the planning; and Glenn drove. Our job was to pay half of the expenses, and to sit back and have fun.
We flew into Las Vegas and spent the first night there. In the morning we rented an SUV (a Nissan Rogue; it was so satisfactory that the Knights bought one like it when they got home) and drove to Zion; the next day to Bryce; and following that to an air B&B in Fredonia, Arizona where we stayed for two nights and saw the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, which had been Jo’s particular goal for the trip.
There were incidental sights along the way, including the Kodachrome Basin and the Grosvenor Arch. This last was off paved roads, as was the entire way to Fredonia. The Nissan behaved without reproach, even in crossing mudholes to and from Grosvenor Arch, and along the washboard surface on the way to Fredonia.
The four of us continue to get along well. The people we met (including the waiter in the Denny’s where we had breakfast in Las Vegas as we set out) were uniformly nice. When I’m flying, I generally wear a Blackhorse t-shirt (mostly for the TSA monkeys, not that I expect them to be capable of taking the point as they badger civilians). I had a number of people during the trip thank me for my service (to which I responded as always, “Thank you, but it sure wasn’t my idea”).
At Pipe Spring national monument I chatted with the manager, a Southern Paiute. He noted that the brochure photo of a dancer in full regalia (including face mask) was him, and that he wore a red blanket as part of his outfit because he was a veteran–which was a mark of honor in his tribe.
I recall my Cherokee friend years ago telling me that hers is a warrior culture. That’s true of the Southern Paiutes also, and very possibly of all Native American tribes (which is what Cory implied). It seemed to be a commonly held belief throughout the southwest; and the attitude pleases me.
In all a wonderful trip. Old friends are a great benefit in life.
Now, back to a novel. I still haven’t managed to train them to write themselves.
–Dave Drake
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