DRAKENEWS #110: July 9, 2019
Dear People,
I’ve been relaxing the past two months, which sounds like a more pleasant business than it’s been in my head. The trouble is that rushing the most recent book put me so far down that it takes a very long time to come to the surface. I’m not there yet.
I don’t want to sound like, “Poor, poor me.” I wasn’t drafted into this business. I generally love what I’m doing, and I’m paid well for my efforts. But sometimes as with any other job, things get stressful. This was an extreme case, and I’m probably not over the bike wreck either.
So I’ve been a bit fragile for the past while, enough that distant friends have been worrying about me. I regret this, but there’s not a damned thing I can do about mentally broadcasting distress. I’m okay, and I’m not in immediate danger of doing anything really dumb.
In terms of productive work, I’ve done a short story and I’m well into another short story. This doesn’t make significant money–in fact the one I’m still working on is for a tribute and I’m donating it to the cause–but I like short stories. I entered the field through reading short stories, and I’d been selling short stories for about 13 years before my first novel.
Because short stories are no longer a paying proposition, the most skilled and experienced writers rarely write them. When they do one as a favor for a friend or a publisher, it doesn’t get their full attention.
That’s certainly been true of me. When the editors of Star Destroyers pitched the concept to me, I said I wasn’t interested. (The initial working title was Boomers; I did for an instant consider writing about a dominance battle between male red kangaroos.)
They came back to me six months later and asked me as a favor to do a story so that they could put my name on the cover. I agreed because they’re nice people and I was sure I could find a story in the concept.
I wasn’t best pleased about the situation, however, and the first three ideas I came up with involved genocide. What I eventually did avoided genocide, but it’s not a good-hearted story. It’s not a bad story–it’s technically quite a good one–but it’s not a story which makes me happy to have written.
I try to learn from my mistakes. The story I just wrote for a Weird World War III anthology is as good as I could make it. That doesn’t mean that it’s a great story or that you’ll love it: just that I did my job to the best of my ability. From now on, that will be the case: either I’ll turn the proposal down flat or I’ll give it the best I’ve got. And if I do allow my arm to be twisted on a project I didn’t really want to do, I’ll still give it the best I’ve got.
This is kind of embarrassing to admit, but what you get in these newsletters is the real me. I haven’t always met what I think should be proper standards.
There’s a new podcast up at Baen.com in which Tony Daniel and I discuss To Clear Away the Shadows. We did the interview by phone and the sound quality isn’t (I think) very satisfactory. (My landline has been completely out for the past week, and our carrier–CenturyLink–is having trouble throughout the area.) I’m considering going in to the Baen offices if and when I do another podcast.
On a more positive note than most of this newsletter, I’m well into reading Democracy in America by Alexis de Toqueville. I’ve had the two-volume set for probably 30 years but I hadn’t seriously started into it earlier.
De Toqueville published his analysis in 1835 after travelling extensively in the America of his day and had done an enormous amount of documentary research. For example, when he contrasts the American federal constitution with those of other federal nations like Switzerland and Germany, it’s clear that he’s familiar with all of them. De Toqueville was a working politician rather than an ivory-tower philosopher. He certainly has his biases, but he makes it a goal to be fair and objective in all he says.
By seeing America analyzed from the outside I’m seeing effects from history which I’d never considered before. For example, most of Latin America broke from its colonial rulers about the some time we did from ours. We established a strong federal union, whereas what happened in Brazil and Colombia (to pick two states whose history in the 1820s I know a little about) was a series of coups and revolutions amounting to little better than anarchy.
The British North American colonies differed among themselves in population, culture, and economies. All had strong political classes by the late 18th century, but they were all ruled from London and had no independent foreign policy. Their individual political classes were used to accepting outside control, and they were willing to substitute federal control for royal control.
In most of Latin America newly freed provinces revolted against the new central governments–and also invaded neighboring provinces. These differing outcomes certainly occurred, but the fact doesn’t prove Anglo-Saxons are superior to Hispanics. Differing colonial history and culture are better ways to understand the different results.
I recently had a complaint from a reader that my attack on Fox News in the intro to Though Hell Should Bar the Way made it impossible for him to read the book. I should stick to writing books instead of political commentary.
My first thought was that I didn’t attack Fox News. I then realized that I was quibbling: I’d be perfectly willing to attack Fox News and to a lesser degree to attack the news from any of the other US networks. I listen to BBC News, not because it’s without bias but because it tries to be without bias.
The fact that to many Americans (not just my correspondent), the choice of a news source is a political act distresses me. As an extreme example look up the interview of Ben Shapiro, a Fox News commentator, by Andrew Neil.
Neil is probably the most right-wing (reputable) journalist in the UK (he’s high up in the councils of Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News among other things), but he is a journalist. Shapiro made a complete fool of himself (an assessment with which he would probably agree, judging from his statements after he’d cooled down) by assuming that anyone who didn’t accept his position at face value was a liberal and unworthy of his own time.
Folks, there’s real information out there. Make an effort to find people whose priority is data, not sound bites and Revealed Truth. If you really care about something, you’ll probably want to check multiple sources even when they’re individually good.
And you could do worse than read Democracy in America. If nothing else, de Toqueville will show you that the news in the US has always been pretty much the way it is now.
Go out and be nice to other folks, people. We don’t all have to think alike.
–Dave Drake
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