Dave Answers Some Frequently Asked Questions

What are you working on now?
I've finished an RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera and am in the process of plotting the second Carce (think Roman) fantasy for Tor. It's early days, but I'm inclining toward THE MONSTERS OF THE DEEP as a title.

Who should I contact about sub-rights (including film and TV) to David Drake's work?
My literary agent, Kay McCauley, at kaymcc25@aol.com should get the initial query. She will redirect it if and as required.

What say do you have in your cover art?
I'm frequently asked what control I have over cover art. The short answer is, all I want. There's nothing about cover control written into my contracts, but I'm on terms of friendship with both my publishers. If I said, 'I want Smith to paint the cover, and this is the scene I want him to illustrate,' that's what I'd get.

I never do that, and I think that writers who do are being foolish. (Unless there are other factors: I know of cases where writer and artist were in a relationship, in which case the writer got benefits which perhaps counterbalanced the cost to the book.)

I'm neither an artist nor an art director. Even if the artist and art director were bad at their jobs, they'd still be better at their jobs than I would be at their jobs.

Is the painting the way you envisage your character/tank/ship?
This time the short answer is, it doesn't matter.

The cover does not illustrate my book, it advertises my book. A good cover sells the book to people who will like the book. A bad cover either doesn't sell the book to the right people or (worse) does sell it to the wrong people.

The worst sin an art director can commit is to forget that the purpose of a cover is to sell the book. There are books which would be better served with a garishly colored pulp cover--for example, a blonde in a torn dress being threatened by an Oriental with a dagger--than they would by a brown-and-gray wash of sad people in a grimy alley. Nonetheless there are art directors who would be embarrassed to put the right cover on that book, because their artistic friends would laugh at them.

In this case as with the writer/artist relationship above, the book loses because of personal benefits to one of the parties involved. That's the way life is.

I generally have opinions about art and covers, but I almost invariably keep them to myself because I know that I'm ignorant. The flip side of my attitude is that I have a broad vocabulary and know quite a lot about prose. Editors (and more often copyeditors) who meddle there are likely to find that they have a problem.

What advice do you have for a beginning writer?
I sold my first story when I was an undergraduate. I'd always liked to tell stories; in high school I started writing them down, and at age 19 I
started submitting them.

I think it's necessary for a successful writer to be a reader, but literature classes are if anything contraindicated for a writer. There are people who swear by writing classes/courses/groups, but my opinion is that at best they'll teach you how to write a particular sort of story for which there isn't a mass market.

I didn't have a mentor, but I modeled my own work on the work of other writers whom I admired. I've wound up mentoring several writers who were already at a high level of skill and who were close friends. It's not something I do for fun. I'm not any kind of teacher, and I'm uncomfortable even coming close to that role.

There's no secret handshake. Writing is like playing basketball: it helps if you have talent, but even Michael Jordan practiced (practiced his butt
off).

And there's nothing specially wonderful about being a writer/basketball player. No one need feel they've failed just because they're not (at
core) willing to put in the enormous effort it requires to become good in either field.

Why aren’t any of your continuing Isles series offered in unabridged audio format?
The short answer is that nobody's bought the rights. My own agent got things going with Brilliance. Tor insisted on taking control of the audio subrights, then screwed things up in a fashion that my agent hasn't been able to retrieve even now that Tor has surrendered the rights again.

What’s the connection between the novella A Grand Tour and the RCN series?
Dave Weber asked me for a novella for his first shared universe anthology set in the Honor Harrington universe (Worlds of Honor). I’d been thinking of doing a series of space operas based on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, so I decided to use this novella as a chance to test the concept of two dissimilar friends as dual leads.

For a setting I used a young nobleman making a grand tour with his tutor and personal servant. The action stemmed from real events in the Greek islands in 1795: a Russian nobleman determined to take a Greek temple back to St. Petersburg in the warship he borrowed from the Czar--and who bombarded it in fury when he couldn’t manage to dismantle it; and a French frigate whose crew murdered their officers in harbor when they were ordered to fight a (much smaller) British sloop.

Incidentally, I’d arranged with Dave Weber that he would edit my story to bring it firmly into the Honorverse. (I wasn’t going to memorize the 70 pages of physics he’d invented for the series, for example.) He did a heavy edit for that purpose. I still get complaints about mistakes I made in ranks and technology. No, Dave Weber made the final decision on every one of those choices.

I was pleased with the way A Grand Tour worked out, but I felt it needed the length of a full novel to do the concept justice. I used a similar pairing (a young naval officer and a librarian) in With the Lightnings--not at all the same characters but the same sort of characters--and think the result is some of the best work I’ve ever done.

Will you ever write more books in the Northworld Series?
Probably not. I’m proud of the existing trilogy; in some ways they’re my best and most subtly complex books (observe, for example, the way in Vengeance and Justice that words are echoed either from the end of a section to the beginning of the next, or from the end of one thread to the resumption of that thread), but they’re also harsh in a fashion that I no longer feel a need to be.

I actually did rough the plot for a fourth book. It’d have been Ragnarok, with Hansen taking the place of Vithar and surviving to ‘the new earth and the new sun’. I decided not to do it at the time because I’d come to like the characters—yes, even North—and decided they were in a good place so I’d leave them.

That was a good decision.

Is there a place where fans can get together to chat about your work?
I stick my head in on Baen's Bar regularly (http://bar.baen.com), but I don't have (and don't want) a conference of my own. I'll generally find a question or comment with the words David Drake in it on the bar and respond to it.

In addition, there's a fan-run site that my webmaster looks in on, but I don't do so myself. (I have the wrong personality for that sort of thing.) Redliners at Yahoo Groups was formed to talk about David Drake's works particularly, and military fiction in general. To subscribe, send e-mail to redliners-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

There is also now a David Drake fan club on Facebook, organized by fans.

I'll cheerfully answer any question put to me e-mailed from the form below, and anything I say to anybody is said for publication if that person wants to publish it.

Why are so many of your despicable characters named "Platt?"
There's a person named Charles Platt who's lived in the US for many years but who has all the attributes that go into the term 'Chinless Wonder' for the British upper classes. (His uncle was in the House of Lords.) He produced a supercilious review of Hammer's Slammers suggesting that if I'd really seen war I wouldn't write such queasy voyeurism. I didn't respond directly--you don't respond to reviewers, in my judgment--but I haven't forgotten that either.

Have any movies been made from your books?
Years ago I had a few TV options on short stories, none of which were ever picked up.

While I would be delighted to have somebody buy the right to make a movie from my fiction, I've never made it a priority; I write books. They'll really have to come looking for me--and to date nothing in that line has gotten to the point of signed paper and a check in my hand.

Has there been any gaming interests in your books?
Yes, in several fashions.

Mayfair Games brought out a Hammer's Slammers board game back in the '80s.

Intracorps licensed electronic game rights to Hammer's Slammers in the mid '90s. They got seriously into development, but they were overextended and went bankrupt well before they completed the game. (They paid me part of the money. The business was frustrating in a number of respects, but I was paid well enough to justify the hassle.)

In 2000 Mattel paid a bundle up front for electronic game rights to Hammer's Slammers. So far as I know the game hasn't gotten beyond the preliminary concept stage--but their check cleared.

And greatly to my surprise, the Hammer stories are important texts in British miniature wargaming circles. There's a website dedicated to one club's vision of Hammer's Slammers [http://www.salute.co.uk/slammers3/index.htm].

The club's vehicles weren't quite what I had in mind, but I worked with John Treadaway (the club's webmaster) and John Lambshead, the British Museum's expert in marine nematodes, to bring out a history and campaign book on Hammer's Slammers for the miniature wargaming market. Ground Zero Games has done 25-mm and 15-mm miniature figures, and Old Crow has done combat vehicles in both scales(http://www.oldcrowmodels.co.uk/hammers.htm). The book is out from Pireme Publications. This was a lot of fun. Check our Hammer's Slammers gaming web page.

Mongoose published a Hammer's Slammers role-playing game, available June 2009. I've seen the material they're creating and have been really amazed. The fellow who did the writing really understood the military and (I think) got the feel of the Hammer series. I'm delighted with the result.

How long does it take to write a book?
That depends on how long the book is. I started jotting plot notes for Lt Leary, Commanding on May 26, 1999. I finished the plot on July 8, 1999. I started writing on July 11, 1999. I finished writing the rough draft on December 22, 1999--a novel of 153K. I did two more complete passes, running off drafts of each and editing on hardcopy (which works better for me than editing on the screen). I finished and mailed off the final draft on January 11, 2000. It's worth mentioning that I was so fried that what I really mailed was a blank disk that I thought I'd copied the novel onto, but the e-mailed version reached Jim Baen himself safely and he distributed it to his production people. During the period I was writing the book, all the usual things occurred: holidays, birthdays, two weeks at the beach, and computer problems. (Unfortunately computer problems are quite usual for me.) Lt Leary, Commanding is my longest sf novel by a goodly ways, but all three of the recent fantasy novels (the Isles series) are over 200K words. They take correspondingly longer to write.

How complete do you make the plot of a story before you write it?
I do very heavy plots. I usually have at least 10% of the story/novel wordage in the plot. Here's an example: the plot for Far Side of the Stars, with the working title Far Side of Heaven. Scenes were re-ordered numerically as I wrote the book.

Do you write sequentially, from beginning of the plot to the end?
I do plots beginning to end, and I do very long plots, but there's not a right way.

How do you go about writing your drafts?
I work on a notebook computer outside, then edit the hardcopy and go through at least three drafts.

At any one time, how many stories are you working on?
I work on one thing at a time. Other people like multiple jobs, but for me I concentrate very heavily and I get crazy when I'm taken off it.

What novel have you personally enjoyed the most writing?
Once I apparently answered this question, 'Northworld.' I can't imagine why I did that, because I was so stressed while writing Northworld that I was having back spasms that made it difficult for me to walk some days. I'm very proud of the book and the series, but they're enormously complex works--note the way words are echoed within and among the interwoven plot strands, for example--and the first one darned near crippled me.

Now I'd say Lord of the Isles. I've always loved fantasy, but because I'd been successful with military SF I wasn't able to do as much as I'd have liked to. Getting the chance to write Lord of the Isles was a wonderful change of pace. You can take the series as homage to Tolkien and to Robert E Howard both if you like; I do.

Do you use a computer for your work?
I've been composing on a computer since 1986, when IBM came out with its first laptop. From 1981 I was using a dedicated word-processor for second and third drafts, but I was composing with a pencil on legal pad. (Many legal pads.) As soon as there was a computer I could take out in the yard and work as I had with pencil and paper, I switched to computer first drafts.

I'm obviously not a technophobe, let alone a Luddite; but neither do I find anything magical to technology. Some of the stories that I wrote longhand and typed on a portable I bought in Nam (electric but with a manual carriage return; very cheap) are still in print after thirty years.

Since 1987 I've used Word for DOS on increasingly old computers. That changed in March of 2001, when my last DOS machine died in mid-project and I converted to Word for Windows (which, for a professional writer as opposed to a desktop publisher, is significantly less useful than the old system). I'm now working on sub-notebooks with Pentium 90 CPUs. I’ve killed one of them and will doubtless kill the rest, as I've killed literally dozens of computers in the past; and will replace with something else obsolete but more than adequate for my purposes.

After a stretch of working with small Pentium90 Toshibas (I basically wore three of them out), I've been buying new, basic Compaq/HPs. They'd don't have bells and whistles--I do word processing, period--and while they're not quite as small as the Toshibas they replaced, they're easy to carry. (I don't care about weight, but size is a problem while travelling.) By being careful and using an external fan when the temperature is over 80o F, I've gotten good service till they wear out (as opposed to breaking in startling fashions).

Which genre do you feel is your best to write in?
Best is tricky. I don't know really. I can do some things in the military that others who've had different lives can't, but I personally think some of the Old Nathan stories are as close to a unique thing as I've done.

Who were your influences?
One strand is pulp fiction--literally, stories from the '30s and '40s collected into anthologies in the '50s when I started reading SF and fantasy. Robert E. Howard in particular, then when I got to college the Tolkien trilogy in the SUI Library before the books came out in paperback.

The other strand is Latin authors and the classics more generally (though the Greek mostly in translation). I've got a separate section on this site on the classics, but the short version is that Tacitus and Caesar in their different ways are models for prose in any language, and the ability of some of the poets (Ovid and Juvenal spring first to mind) to handle tricky problems like continuous action and capsule description can teach any writer. They certainly taught me.

What's your best book?
Again, that's a matter of definition. Personally I'd say Redliners, but that's not a book for everybody. It's a very tough story about war and redemption. With the Lightnings--a space opera--and the Isles Series, my Tolkienesque fantasies, have characters that more people are going to find attractive. I think maybe writing Redliners did something positive for me. At any rate, it probably isn't chance that the books I've written after that one are--I won't say softer, exactly, but peopled with characters who haven't done so many things that they can't forgive themselves for.

How did you come up with the magic in the Isles Series?
It surprises me to be asked this so frequently since I thought I'd covered it in the introductory notes to each volume. Classical peoples were heavily involved in magic (as opposed to religion). This seems to have been mostly Egyptian in origin, though there are mixtures of classical religion as well as Judaism and Christianity.

Spells could be for any purpose: revenge on a thief or strayed lover, gambling success, and good health are among the range of typical examples. The person making the spell spoke it or wrote and buried it. A lot of those buried (often in a graveyard) have been discovered in modern times.

The person making the spell would get the attention of the spirits (demiurges, not the Great Gods) by addressing them in their own language. He would then tell them what he wanted them to do in common (human) language.

For the Isles series, I've used the 'spirit language' (voces mysticae in modern parlance) from real spells for the spells the wizards speak.

What are the books in the Hammer series?
The original Hammer's Slammers was published by Ace, but republished in an expanded fashion by Baen. The rest of the series was also Baen--At Any Price, Counting the Cost, Rolling Hot, and The Warrior. In addition to these, The Sharp End is post-Hammer Hammer. (There's no particular order to the first five books.)

The most recent book in the series is Paying the Piper (Baen, 2002), which again is in no particular order with the first five books. The notion of doing a follow-on series (with The Sharp End) was a bad idea.

The entire contents of the first five books in the series, plus a new story per volume, have been reprinted in the three Baen omnibus collections: The Tank Lords, Caught in the Crossfire, and The Butcher's Bill. These are still in print. Cross the Stars (Tor, later Baen) and The Voyage use the Hammer universe to retell classical Greek epics (with some of the Hammer characters in the form of Gods).

Night Shade Books brought out the Complete Hammer's Slammers, which is just that. Baen is publishing a paperback edition of the set.

Are you going to write more Hammer stories?
I'll probably do more, but I don't have current plans.

What's the relationship between Joachim Steuben of the Hammer series and Johann Vierziger?
Vierziger is named in a manner of speaking after the Mifune character in Sanjuro where he takes an obvious alias from the chrysanthemum trees growing in the garden. My intent was to do something that had no obvious natural explanation in a work that was otherwise straight SF/adventure. In a degree I was playing off the myth of the Vegan Orbital Fort in Blish's Earthman, Come Home.

The other part of what I was doing there was offering a chance at redemption to a very damaged person. I was finally able to address that directly in Redliners; I guess I was working up to it.

Who do you read for pleasure?
In the field--I read a lot of stuff out of the f/sf field--I read Vance and Pratchett among living authors, and have a particular affection for Kuttner, Kornbluth, and Jack Williamson's work from the '30s and '40s. Hmm; and I regularly reread R.E.Howard and C.A.Smith; I should mention them.

How many books comprise the ISLES series?
There are nine novels in the complete series. Each of the first six Isles novels is intended to be a self-standing work that can be read alone. (This is true of all my books; and, for that matter, my stories.) The final three books are written as a trilogy to end the series. All volumes are currently available.

The titles are (in order): Lord of the Isles, Queen of Demons, Servant of the Dragon, Mistress of the Catacombs, Goddess of the Ice Realm, Master of the Cauldron, Fortress of Glass, The Mirror of Worlds and The Gods Return.

Why is the hardcover edition of Servant of the Dragon so poorly proofread?
This is a sore subject with me. I did three drafts of the novel (as usual). My friend Dan Breen read each section after I'd gone over it the first time, and my wife read the final typescript. By the time I sent electronic copy to my Tor editor (whom I won't name here) it was very clean.

Tor ran off hardcopy, which went to Terry McGarry for copyedit. Terry did her usual excellent job on it. The copyedited mss was sent to me for a final proofing. I returned it.

My editor should then have sent the electronic copy to the production department, along with the copyedited hardcopy for final corrections. Instead he sent only the hardcopy. (He later assured me that the Tor production department wasn't set up to accept electronic copy. This statement is untrue and utterly amazed the production manager when I repeated it to him.)

The production department reset the whole manuscript of over 200,000 words. There were fewer errors than I would have expected in such a process, but there were lots of errors. I went ballistic when I got the proofs, but I buckled down and made all the corrections I could and sent them back.

The production department then lost the corrections. Nobody at Tor is sure how this happened. The book as published is as typeset, without proofing.

I didn't realize how bad it was (I assumed they'd entered my corrections, which I knew couldn't be complete) until the volume of complaints from both friends and total strangers caused me to look at the text. I found things that I knew I'd corrected (for example, 'a field of barely' in place of 'a field of barley') that were wrong in the printed version. At this point I wrote the publisher instead of making another attempt to go through editorial. The paperback is largely corrected, in part due to the efforts of two long-time friends, Sharon Pigott and Rick LaBach. (Sharon read the galleys on my first book as well, many years ago.) For Mistress, the new head of production and I made sure she got electronic copy to work from and produced it accurately.

This is one I feel bad about. But I swear to goodness, it wasn't my fault.

Did you take the plot of THE SHARP END from Kurosawa's Yojimbo or from Leone's A Fistful of Dollars?
No, I took the plot from Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, his first novel (a fixup from novellas he'd written for Black Mask magazine in the late 1920s). Kurosawa took Hammett's plot for his fine Samurai film (I'm told there may have been a Japanese gangster novel as an intermediary, but I haven't seen it myself), and Leone then turned Kurosawa's film into the first of his Spaghetti Westerns. I'm familar with (and like) both films, but I read Hammett before I saw them and have reread him often since then. I'm a little surprised to be asked this question so often, because my credit to Hammett in the front of the novel is explicit. Apparently a lot of people expect more originality of the film industry than I do.

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