DRAKENEWS 111: September. 2019
Dear People,
This is a bit early because my webmaster, Karen, is going on a genealogical trip to get in touch with her German roots. (These, by the way, are in Hesse, not Bavaria, so I’m not worried about her returning humming the Horst Wessel Lied. The only prominent Nazi from the general region I can think of is Joseph Goebbels.) (She may want to invade New Jersey, however.)
I was hoping to report major progress on plotting the next novel, but I can only say that I’m getting bits down: forward progress, but not as much as I’d like. Marla at Baen checked with me recently to see what my schedule was. (This is perfectly proper and if it had been done last year before To Clear Away the Shadows was scheduled, I would be in better shape now.)
This made me actually analyze the situation. I decided that the unexpected rush on Shadows had kicked me back about a year in my recovery from being hit by a car [Newsletter 104]. By October, 2018, I’d started to plot seriously and by November I was actually writing. Although right at this instant I feel that I’m flailing and will never again be able to plot a novel, I can reasonably hope that by October I’ll have gotten myself together again. Therefore I can expect to turn in a new novel in June, 2020, without abnormal stress.
I told Marla and I’m telling y’all–that it’s actually possible that by reinjuring my psyche by the crunch on Shadows when I wasn’t fully recovered from the shock of the bike wreck–that I’ll never be able to write another novel. I don’t think that’s the case and Marla insists that it isn’t, but I’m not the guy I was in 2017.
An obvious question is, “Why do I still ride a bike?” I can give (and have given) various answers to that, but here’s what it really boils down to: I was never a very good driver. I never had a serious accident in a car but it was only a matter of time. When I got back from Nam, I didn’t become a pacifist or a pushover; but I really didn’t want to kill somebody unless I meant to kill them. If I were riding a motorcycle, it was extremely unlikely that anybody but me would be killed in a vehicular accident.
As it turns out, being on a bike probably makes me a more careful driver also. At any rate, I’ve had a number of serious accidents since 1987 (when I last drove a car), but none of them were my fault.
I don’t have any new novels coming out, but The Chronicles of Davids, a Baen anthology, is due out in September with my story The Savage in it. This is a story I wrote to get myself into the milieu of the novel which became To Clear Away the Shadows. (I thought it would be out long before the novel was, but boy! was I wrong.) It’s a good story, but the scarring is on the opposite side of Joss’ face from what it becomes in the novel because of the haste with which the novel was completed. (My continuity error doesn’t detract from the story.)
It might be a good time to address some of the comments I’ve gotten on To Clear Away the Shadows. I was consciously doing something quite different from my usual novel. A change always pisses some readers off, but this may have been worse than usual because the book was prominently billed as the new novel in the RCN series. Technically that’s true, but a number of readers were certainly expecting something different from what they got. I usually have more input into the cover layout than I did this time, but I honestly don’t know whether or not I would have requested a change if I’d seen it. (I certainly would have credited the photographer: who was Karen Zimmerman, my webmaster. Because of the rush, nothing was run by me; and that’s one of the really obvious things that was screwed up.)
I was very clear in the most recent newsletter about the deficiencies in editing on the novel, but very few of the people who wrote me through the website appear to have read my description. (Goodness only knows what the comments on Amazon are like. I don’t read Amazon reviews because he writers of those I’ve seen tend to strike me as thick.) Most of those writing me were more concerned than angry, but there was one who suggested that maybe I was just past it. (Which, as I said above, had already gone through my mind.)
On the credit side, I’ve written two quite good short stories recently: one for the Weird World War III volume I mentioned in the most recent previous newsletter, and now also one as a tribute to Uncle Timmy Bolgeo and Libertycon. The latter is a fairy tale of the sort that the Brothers Grimm collected. (In other words, it’s not cutesie.) Writing short stories isn’t the same as novels, though. The jury is still out on my ability to write further novels until I do one.
I mentioned in Newsletter 110 that our house phone had been out for a number of weeks. I implied that I blamed the carrier, CenturyLink. CenturyLink didn’t cover itself with glory in the whole business, but when they finally got a technician to the house he instantly diagnosed the problem as a short in one of our phone jacks and then corrected it. A disused jack hidden behind a dresser in the bedroom (and a darned good thing my wife got back and remembered it) had developed slight contact between the outgoing and incoming lines. Dialing out through another jack was no problem, but an incoming call starts with a ringing current–which is full line voltage. That caused a dead short and shut the call off instantly.
So: that’s it for now. I will go back to making plot notes
Oh–I usually close these hoping folks will be nice to other people. That’s still good general advice, but some people’s responses to Shadows makes me want to emphasize it now. Rudeness, nastiness, really does make the world a worse place. Be nice to people, folks!
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–Dave Drake