DRAKE NEWS: May 1, 2019
Dear People,
TO CLEAR AWAY THE SHADOWS, the latest RCN novel, is complete! Thank goodness. This has been a very rough passage.
The problems basically go back to the wreck in May, 2018. [Newsletter 104] I had no physical injury from that one, but it turned out to keep me for about six months from the full-on concentration I need to do my plots. This didn’t matter because I have no deadlines and I’ve got enough money for my needs for the foreseeable future. (I’m 73 and ride a motorcycle.)
I was getting a bit worried because things didn’t start to go together sooner than they did. It crossed my mind more than once that maybe the wreck had smashed my higher faculties for good and all. That wasn’t the case: it had just stunned them, sort of a lesser equivalent of what had happened to me when I came back from Viet Nam. It had been seven or eight years before I was able to write a novel, though I continued to sell short stories as I’d done before I was drafted.
The chaos in my mind jelled and I switched from taking notes to organizing them into a plot. This is the normal progression–it was just considerably delayed. I started the actual writing. It was a different book in form from previous ones; and though it was set in the RCN universe, it had a wholly new cast of characters.
Furthermore, the book has an episodic structure which I’ve used infrequently in the past. (Ranks of Bronze and Starliner were built that way, but not most of my recent ones.) This takes a bit more work than a unitary plot because the physical and human environment change every time the setting does, but if a writer doesn’t practice different techniques, he gets stale. (And so does his work, which is what matters for readers.)
All was going fine until I hit a glitch: Audible, Amazon’s audiobook line, contacted Kay, my agent, to buy rights to my new Baen release, Shadows. I told her that it must be a mistake; they were confusing me with Dave Weber whom I thought had used Shadow in a recent title.
Kay came back with the full title from Audible: To Clear Away the Shadows. That was the one I was working on, all right, and I’d be happy to sell Audible the rights–but I was hoping to finish the book first.
At that point (last November) I phoned Baen, the Wake Forest office, and asked Tony Daniel if the book really was scheduled. Yep, and they were expecting it toward the end of the year. I told Tony, “That’s not going to happen,” and went back to work.
I had the outline and was working on the text, but I didn’t have much and I wasn’t getting as high a daily rate as usual. That was probably because of the unusual structure, but at the time I had to consider that the bike wreck had caused permanent damage. All I could usefully do was to keep on working. Surrendering to despair wasn’t a useful or an attractive option.
Finally in January I did a word count and found I had 60K. For the first time I was confident I had enough plot to be sure to finish the book, so I phoned Toni and said I needed a few months but I’d be able to get the book in. She said that would be no problem, so I resumed working.
I should say here that apart from scheduling the book without first discussing it with me, Toni didn’t make a mistake. She explained that she’d needed a lead title for the June, 2019, slot and figured I could make it without a problem. If it hadn’t been for the bike wreck, I certainly could have–but she wasn’t factoring the wreck into her estimate.
If she’d talked to me (as she obviously should have done), what would have happened? Probably I’d have said, “Oh, hell, I can make that deadline.” I didn’t realize how badly the wreck had scrambled me either. That makes it seem as though it didn’t matter that the publisher hadn’t informed me of the schedule….
It made one huge difference. It kicked me straight back into Nam where matters of my life or death were decided without anyone consulting me or even informing me of the decisions. If I’d agreed to the schedule, even under pressure, it would’ve been my choice. As it was, I was giving up a couple months of my life–because the process of writing the book on this schedule precluded normal pleasure reading, exercise, and the other activities that make life worth living–for no reason having anything to do with me.
Some mornings at 2 am I thought of retiring from the field. That gives you a notion of how far down I was, because writing is just about as important to me as reading as an activity that gives me pleasure.
More realistically in daylight hours I considered my future writing projects. I had a number of friends volunteer advice on the subject. They used varied language depending on whether their background was primarily writing or primarily business, but as one of the latter put it, “You have value in the marketplace.”
Believe me, I knew I had options. I love Baen Books and have as much history with the company as anyone alive, but if I had the faintest belief that it might happen again, I’d be gone.
Fortunately Toni, when she realized what she’d done, apologized fully and promised it wouldn’t be repeated. Furthermore she handled her end of things flawlessly following that first (horrible) misstep. She explained later that when she realized the situation, she had two options: to cancel the book, or to let me get on with it and have production lined up to handle a late delivery.
Cancelling the book would have been disastrous for my career. I know of a few cases in which a book missed its ship date, but I don’t know of any in which the author has had a significant writing career afterward. In most cases the problem has been the author’s own fault, but that doesn’t matter: if you’ve stiffed the distributors–and this is true of Amazon in spades–they’re not going to give you another chance. Computers don’t care about fault.
Toni kept her own people off my back. I’m sure some of them were nervous about the timing, but they didn’t tell me about it. The situation was none of my doing and telling me it was bad wasn’t going to improve matters.
I finished the book before April 1, which was my own deadline (for myself). I did fewer polish passes than I normally would, but the book isn’t unedited. I’m sure there are errors I would have caught in another edit pass–but judging from earlier books, there are errors I would’ve missed also.
The book is about 97K words long. I was planning to hit over 100K, but this is a full-length novel. A worse problem is that I had plotted in several ‘expansion slots’ which because of the crunch in which I wrote it, I didn’t have time to use. This is not the book it would have been under normal circumstances–but I honestly think it’s a good one.
Baen got the proof pages to me promptly, aided by the fact I’d turned in the final draft in thirds as I finished each section. I realized when I’d read the proofs that the things I’m most proud of in life are the ways I’ve reacted when I was dropped into horrible solutions unfairly.
To Clear Away the Shadows is an example of this. The career and personality I’ve built out of the angry rubble I was when I returned from Nam are even better examples. But it sure isn’t fun while it’s going on.
So now I’m relaxing and reading for fun. This includes epics which I’m mining for notes which may wind up in the next novel, but there are a couple works of naval history and a lot of other things as well. Pulp fiction in particular. I just read a 1939 fantasy by Henry Kuttner involving African crocodiles as did my own 1981 King Crocodile. Kuttner handled the subject in a very different fashion than I did. Kuttner was a better writer than I, but mine isn’t a story which embarrasses me now.
So, thoughtfully–
Dave Drake
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