DRAKENEWS For November 2020
Dear People,
I hope y’all have voted. My wife and I waited to vote on election day for tradition’s sake. I hadn’t been worried about the result (I never worry about that; I did my part and I expect other people to do theirs) but worried for the first time that the incumbent would decline to accept the result if he lost. The closest America has come to that result in the past was in 1800 when John Adams, a small man in all respects, lost the election to Thomas Jefferson. Adams did leave office, but he refused to shake the hand of his successor.
I suddenly decided that system would work as it always has, and stopped worrying about it. I hope the fear-mongers were wrong yet again. By now we know.
My publishing news is odd. New editions of two of my old books have come out: Killer in German hardcover translation (cover image), and Old Nathan in trade paper from Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire press. There’s a video interview with me up on the RoF website. I work outdoors in good weather, which the day of the interview was. As a result the interview is largely a silhouette of my face against a bright sky. Joy Ward is a great interviewer though, and I’m reasonably pleased with the way it turned out.
For new work, I wrote a story about robots in my former Military Occupationl Specialty in the army. I was an interrogator, so I wrote about robots in support of interrogation. I don’t think it’s my best story ever, but the editor was pleased.
I mentioned Killer. A German firm asked me for rights to republish it and emphasized they were only bringing out a translated edition so I agreed. Killer is a book about which I have bad feelings as I discuss on the website. At WFC just finished one the moderators of the panel I was on told me how he’d loved the book in college and had read it five times.
I had good reason to be negative about the way things worked with writing the book, but maybe not about the book itself. That could be true of other books and stories. When I’m emotionally invested I may not be the best judge of my own work.
I mentioned attending WFC 2020. A virtual con. I’ve done a number of Zoom interviews (see above) and I wasn’t worried about that.
It was a horrible experience, largely because I didn’t know how to navigate the WFC site.
Furthermore you needed a different code every time you logged onto the site and they didn’t update immediately–just told me I had the wrong code. I missed my first panel as a result. The next morning my geek son came over, bless his heart. I was able to get to other panels because my webmaster gave the con my correct data and they sent me prompts.
The panels themselves had excellent moderators and went well but I still couldn’t bounce around the site. CrowdCompass seems to have emphasized security at the cost of accessibility. In all I had a bad experience. If I have to do it again, I’ll make sure I’m accompanied by somebody who spends more time online than I do.
Toni accepted The Serpent and paid me for it. This really did make me feel good. I don’t have much confidence in my own work and the world generally has been a rough place.
Now I’m starting to plot the next RCN novel. It’s very early days so I can’t talk about because it’s too unstructured. I’ll tell you more when there’s more to tell.
I did a fair amount of research for a sword and planet story, then decided I didn’t want to write one after all. The editor very kindly let me out of the deal. I suspect that if I’d been in a better mood I’d have had fun doing it.
That’s a useful thing to remember: going into a project with a good attitude conduces to a good result. I try to do that, but this year has been rough.
Keep slogging on. This won’t necessarily lead to a good result, but it’ll probably be better than if you just quit. And good luck to everybody.
–Dave Drake
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