Dear People,
We have a pond and also have redone the gravel drive after construction equipment drove over it. This has been a long run but we seem to have gotten somewhere. I joked with my trainer that as soon as I’m dead it’ll be broken up into half acre lots but that’s somebody else’s choice, but while I live I’ll have a pond. Maybe even migratory water fowl.
When we started the project years ago, we planned to have fish but the bottom didn’t hold water. I’m hoping that what we’ve got now will, but I’m not jinxing it by making assumptions.
That does make me think about what’s worth while. Writing well was important to me but writing as a vocation wasn’t. It became important after I came back from Nam and I needed writing to deal with my anger.
I am very proud to be a Nam vet but believe me I didn’t want the experience. I thought it was my duty as a citizen. I also think the war was very badly run in a military sense. There were guys who opposed the war for good moral or religious reasons. I had a good friend in high school who fled to Canada. I didn’t feel that way at the time. I just wanted to avoid having my life disrupted and maybe get killed. After I’d been there a while, I came to believe that the US involvement was a very bad thing for everyone involved, but I hadn’t cared enough to really learn about the situation before I got there.
I wouldn’t have become a writer if I weren’t a Nam vet. I’ve been asked if you can write military sf if you’ve never served. Of course you can, but I don’t know why you’d want to. John Scalzi was explicit that he thought there was a market. I suspect the same is true of other people. The result is rarely fully satisfactory as military sf. (It may sell fine and enhance the writer’s status (Mr. Scalzi became President of SFWA.)
The thing is, I had never had a dream of being a fulltime writer. I came back from Nam really screwed up and knew I was. I wanted to place stories. There was no market for historical fantasies, so I began writing military SF because that was another unususal background I knew well.
When I started writing seriously, military sf wasn’t a commercial subgenre. Joe Haldeman–writing at about the same time as I was–created it. I wrote it seriously to try to make sense of my experience. Maybe Joe did the same. If so Joe and I have good reasons to write military sf. The folks who do it for a paycheck don’t have a good reasons. They may be good writers–Kuttner is one of the field’s best–but as a general rule, I wish they wrote something else.
There’s an aspect to this that I hadn’t considered at the time: folks who want to write msf but don’t have personal experience to draw from have a moral right to do so and they may be very good writers, but somebody who’s been there will be able to tell the difference. I even know cases where a careful writer gets something right but folks in the field always got it wrong.
I’m reading a biography of J Edgar Hoover. It was well known in the underworld that Hoover was gay. This doesn’t bother me one way or another. I’m straight, but who somebody else screws is his own business. Hoover hit on his own staff though, and this does bother me. The difference in power makes this unfair even if it’s consensual. Friends of mine have hit on their staff so I know it happens, but it’s wrong and overspent a lot of time posing as a moral authority to America.
Don’t be full of yourselves, people, and be nice to other folks.
–Dave Drake
Please use the contact form to send email to Dave