Newsletter #18 mailed out 15 September 2003

Dear People,

I'm going to start off with the plan (and fervent hope) that the final book of the Belisarius series, The Dance of Time, will be finished in a year--September, 2004. Eric and I are both aware that it's been too darned long.

The situation's been exacerbated by the fact that the third book in the series, Destiny's Shield, is OP. That volume was snakebit, primarily by the fact that Jim Baen changed to doing the series in hardcover with it. That was a good decision, but it had bad short-term consequences: sales and sell-through both dropped (to rise again with the next book in the series). I don't pretend to understand the mechanism by which that happened, but it did.

The obvious answer is to bring the early volumes back in omnibus form as Jim did with the General series. I'm unwilling to allow that until we have the final volume out. Jim has been pulling Eric off Dance to do other projects for some while now. Eric and I are planning to fight for the chance to finish the series. (I won't tell you how long the outline's been complete.)

Actually, this might be a good place to mention a pet peeve of mine: people (not infrequently reviewers) who say, "You should've done this instead of that with your book/series/career," without realizing there might be considerations of which the speaker knows nothing.

To give one example that can stand for many: Karl Wagner and I edited Manly Wade Wellman's John stories into John the Balladeer. Manly had written a number of stories for F&SF, then revised them for publication as Who Fears the Devil? which Arkham House published as a novel. At that time he added a number of interstitial pieces, short-shorts of a page or two each. Most of these were published in a block in F&SF just before book publication.

In John the Balladeer these short pieces are collected in two blocks, those from F&SF and the rest, instead of being run between stories. A number of people have complained about this arrangement--which in a strictly literary sense is less good than splitting the short shorts between longer stories.

But this isn't a strictly literary world. Arkham House had a well-deserved reputation for being litigious, going back to its founder, Mr Derleth, who bragged to me about having hired the meanest lawyer in the county to threaten anybody who complained about the way he conducted his business or personal affairs. Arkham House claimed rights in perpetuity to Who Fears the Devil? We'd gone back to the original stories, not the edited versions, but I felt there was still a risk Arkham House would sue Manly's widow (for whom we were getting the stories back in print) if we copied the AH arrangement of the stories. So we pointedly didn't.

It doesn't seem to occur to folks in general that if Karl and I did something that made no sense on the known facts, that perhaps they didn't know all the facts. It's easier for them to shake their heads at our amazing foolishness.

Having delivered myself of that polemic, there really is news. Goddess of the Ice Realm, the fifth of the Isles fantasies, is out in stores. I've never had a more beautiful book. I think it's also the best-written of the series, but that sort of thing is entirely personal taste (and the author is just another person at this point).

Renaissance Audio, the audiobook arm of St Martins, is doing (or has done?) a 50% abridgment of the book. I really miss Brilliance, which did the first three books (and I still get angry at the incompetent stupidity--two different things--of the Tor sub-rights department, which doesn't appear to have improved recently), but the folks from Renaissance appear to be real pros themselves.

I'll be doing a couple local signings on Goddess. The tour through Ohio and Kentucky I was told to expect won't eventuate because the NYC blackout paralyzed the Tor publicity department. (That was their explanation, at any rate.) Because I prodded, I may be going to Chicago (I was born in the Midwest, after all) later, but I don't have any certain information. I'll post whatever I learn (and if there's something real, I may send out a mini-newsletter.)

I'm of two minds about all this. I find touring very uncomfortable, but it's my job and I do my job regardless. Our power was out for six days last December from an ice storm, so I know how unpleasant it is... but I averaged a thousand words a day longhand during that period.

As I write this, I haven't seen copies of The Far Side of the Stars, the third RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, but they might well arrive today. I do have the CD-ROM to be bound with it: The Drake Disk. The contents are listed on my website at http://david-drake.com/news.html, but it's basically all of my books that Baen Books had in electronic form, plus Lord of the Isles courtesy of Tom Doherty of Tor, plus some other neat stuff (including Manly's John the Balladeer)--and a complete audio version of The Far Side of the Stars.

The fact that it's complete is due to Jim's webmaster, Arnold Bailey, and Jim's managing editor, Danielle Turner. The team doing the audio production missed the deadline as a result of shooting themselves in the feet several times in succession. Danielle got the extra time from Simon and Schuster, and Arnold produced a complete (and cleaned-up) master in an unbelievably short time.

The Reaches--the combined Baen volume of the trilogy Igniting the Reaches, Through the Breach, and Fireships--has a great cover by Steve Hickman. It'll be a January hardcover. I did commentary for the bibliography section of the website and then adapted it as an intro to the combined volume. (See http://david-drake.com/reaches.html)

Incidentally, on the subject of how publishing really works, it took a year from my formal request to get a reversion on the out of print volumes from the original publisher. I'd have defended on grounds of laches if they'd protested the reprint, but of course it wasn't a subtle plan on the publisher's part--it was just somebody in an office not getting around to doing her job. (I'm tempted to wonder if the NYC blackout paralyzed her....)

The paperback of Paying the Piper, the latest Hammer book, is due out from Baen in December. I find I like the (identical) cover and layout better on the pb than I did on the hardcover. Maybe I've just gotten used to it.

March, 2004, brings the Baen paperback of Seas of Venus (which had been in trade paper). This includes The Jungle and Surface Action, my two short novels set in the Kuttners' pulp Venus, and the travelogue of my family trip to Belize.

Apart from that, I'm charging forward on the sixth Isles fantasy, Master of the Cauldron. It's going well, but I'm still about 40K short of completing the rough draft. There'll be several edits after that, but the process speeds up then. Edits (though a brutal job) can be done in long stretches. I just can't write raw text for twelve hours a day.

My wife Jo and I will be at Salute, the British wargame convention, on April 24 at the Olympia in Kensington, London. (I'm told it's the same venue as the London Motor Show--wargaming is big business in Great Britain.) The team creating the Hammer's Slammers miniatures and book have done a marvelous job, and it'll be good to meet them. They asked if they could provide me with a table to sit at and meet fans while not wandering, and I cheerfully agreed. I don't have much conception of what it'll be like, but I guess I'll learn.

On the website front, I've put up more Ovid. (I should mention that I glanced over my translation of Amores I-10 and was very dissatisfied with the opening. I may have to redo the whole thing. The Eurotas is a river, not a strait, for pity's sake!) Our web page on the Hammer's Slammers wargame includes links to the painted miniatures and pages from the Handbook (http://david-drake.com/hswargame.html). My webmaster, Karen, is working on a way to note my connections with Iowa but that may not happen for a bit.

I hope this finds all of you well; and now I will get back to those 40K words I need to write. All best,

Dave Drake
david-drake.com

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