DrakeNews 127: August 2, 2022
Dear People,
A problem with getting old is that you’re increasingly likely to die. If you don’t die, you’re likely to lose old friends.
I’ve just lost two, most recently Eric Flint, whom I met in 1999. I had plotted a series for Jim Baen. The first one, the Raj Whitehall series, had been successful. Jim wanted a second one based directly on Count Belisarius (the model for Raj Whitehall). I plotted one.
Steve Stirling, the writer who’d developed the plots for Jim, had gotten crossways with him before starting Belisarius. Jim told me he’d found a guy to write the Belisarius books but he was a commie–a Trotskyite. I didn’t care about his politics–would he follow an outline? We talked on the phone and I learned the term was Trotskyist [not Trotskyite].
I was impressed and he started work. He sent me the first chunk. It was good but I told him to stop using passive voice. I forget his reason for thinking it was a good technique, but he didn’t argue–and he stopped doing it. In one of the later books, he started with a new scene which threw the pacing off and demanded a major change later on. I told him there wouldn’t have been a problem if he hadn’t added the opening scene.
Damned if he didn’t go back and delete about 20,000 words back to where he’d added the scene figuring that was the easiest way to solve the problem. Thais was remarkable self-abnegation.
At a later point I had the Indian villains of the series worshipping the demigod of the planet Mars. Eric called me and said he couldn’t find anything about the worship of that deity. I laughed and said I’d made it up because of my bad experience with a previous writer of Jim’s. Eric could and did do research.
We got along very well and I regret his death.
***
Another old friend died a couple weeks ago–Bobette Eckland–a woman whom I met shortly after I started working for the town of Chapel Hill. She’d just been hired by the new finance director who filled the slot with non-traditional hires. The previous agent–also non-traditional–had resigned because the setting drove her nuts.
Bobette could certainly do the work, but her personality struck some sparks from existing department heads. She was an educated Midwesterner (her previous husband had been a sociology professor). The heads were generally local men from rural background who were not pleased to be told by a small woman that she couldn’t do something because it wasn’t legal. In fairness to them, Bobette had a tongue.
One tried to get Bobette fired. The finance director enlisted my help in saving her job. We succeeded and things more or less settled down, but Bobette’s relationship with senior staff was never an easy one.
She was very proud of her fitness. At age 85 she could still hold a plank pose for five minutes. She was coming back after working out when she fainted walking to her front door. Her husband took her to the hospital where an MRI found a mass in a lung which turned out to be cancer. It had metastasized. They sent her home where in two days she died in her sleep.
She was a good lady and I’m sorry she’s gone
Hoping your lives are going well. It’s never a bad time to be nice to other people.
–Dave Drake
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