Newsletter #21 mailed out 12 April 2004

Dear People,

My wife and I leave for a week in London and Kent on Sunday, April 18, which is the real news (and it hasn't happened yet). I'm having my usual pre-trip jitters. I don't worry about planes crashing--I've never been on one that did. But I sure have had a lot of other awkward things happen, including getting places without my luggage. One of those places was Adana, Turkey, which wasn't great; but in 1970 I arrived at Oakland Army Receiving Station without my dufflebag, and that was a good deal worse. I had visions of arriving in Nam in my Class A uniform but unshaven. (To be honest, I can't say it made me more depressed than I already was; and the bag did catch up with me in Oakland.)

Still, I'm looking forward to seeing things, including friends I've made by phone and e-mail but whom I've never met. If any of you are at Salute, the big miniature wargaming show, on April 24, please do look me up. I'm supposed to have a table (though I expect to wander some of the time). Other than that, we'll probably be traipsing about a variety of castles, Roman ruins, and museums. (The Soane, a tiny little thing, is supposed to have two sets of Hogarth oil paintings. More on this in the next newsletter, I hope.)

The Hammer's Slammers miniature wargame book is to be launched at Salute. It's got various graphics (for the people who want to know what the tanks and combat cars really look like, this is as close as I and a very skilled designer, John Treadaway, can come to what was in my head), and (by John Lambshead) a capsule background and playing system (a cavalry skirmish game) with other hints for wargaming. I'm looking forward to seeing the completed package myself. (See http://david-drake.com/hswargame.html)

Apart from that... well, I guess the major thing is that Baen Books will be running Master of the Cauldron, the sixth Isles fantasy, as a November webscription title even though the hardcopy will be published the same month by Tor. I believe this is a first in publishing. It was my idea, but both publishers--Tom Doherty and Jim Baen--are behind it as an experiment.

My thinking is this: there are very few places nowadays where somebody can buy a book on impulse. Independent distributors have been merged in a fashion that effectively ends the drugstore bookrack as a way of hooking somebody by whim. The chains destroyed independent bookstores, and the chains are now phasing out their mall stores in favor of freestanding bookstores. That's fine for somebody who's going out to buy a book, but it doesn't grab somebody who's getting light bulbs or a sweater and happens to see a book that might be interesting.

Will giving folks a chance to see the book cheaply on-line (or free--my friend Eric Flint is putting up snippets of Master at regular intervals on Baen's Bar, and a Barfly is collecting the snippets on his site) do that? Dunno, but I'm going to try. I may very well wind up as road kill, but I'm not going to stand still watching the headlights bear down.

The new three-book contract with Tor is signed and the money's in the bank. These will be Isles fantasies, but I'm going to write a genuine trilogy this time instead of three novels in series. That is, each book will have a beginning, a middle, and an end; but they'll build directly from one to the next rather than each recapitulating the pattern of the previous books of the series.

Personally, I'd rather have three single novels with the same characters than a true trilogy, but the latter (a story arc extended over three novels) appears to be what most people want. I don't argue with reality. (And it's what Tolkien, the bedrock of the genre, wrote.)

If the books go the direction I'm sketching now, the series (as it exists at present) will end with book nine. We'll see. (And hey, I learned in 1970 not to take anything for granted. Especially not that you'll wake up tomorrow.)

The fourth RCN novel, tentatively titled The Way to Glory (from Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington) is moving quite happily toward the climactic battle. I won't be turning it in till September (to avoid the sort of scheduling problems that occurred when The Far Side of the Stars came out on top of Goddess of the Ice Realm), but it's going well. I'm having fun with it, and I have about 100K in draft.

Speaking of which, the pb of Goddess of the Ice Realm is due out from Tor in August. It's got a lovely cover, probably the best art ever on a cover of mine. Let me assure everybody that the novel has my usual mix of strong female characters, even if none of them show up on the cover.

On the editing front--though I should note that Eric did the lion's share of the work on these--The World Turned Upside Down is a Baen hardcover for January, 2005, and Mountain Magic will be a paperback original in October, 2004.

World is a huge, fat volume [TOC listed on the news page] of the stories that Eric Flint, Jim Baen, and I read when we were young and which turned us first into SF readers and now SF professionals. I don't believe there's been a book really to compare with this since Boucher's A Treasury of Great Science Fiction Stories in 1959.

Because of the editors' age, none of these stories are recent. Do you need to read them? Well, wearing a particular type of shoe isn't going to make you play basketball like Michael Jordan; similarly The World Turned Upside Down isn't a passport to a career in SF. But reading this book will show you how Eric, Jim, and I learned what a good story was, and we've all three got respectable records in putting that knowledge to work.

Mountain Magic is just fun. Eric read Henry Kuttner's Hogben stories (which have never before been collected) and wanted to get them back in print. He also wanted my Old Nathan stories in print. (Old Nathan (http://david-drake.com/nathan.html) is the book I point to when somebody calls me a Military SF writer; and yes, I'm that too.) And Eric had a notion for a short novel of his own (which he wound up writing with a protege, Ryk Spoor) with a similarly backwoods setting. Thus the volume.

There'll be an oddity in the publication of this one: for reasons concerned with Kuttner's agent, the Hogben stories won't be in the webscription volume. Instead we're running John the Balladeer by Manly Wade Wellman. I don't regret getting the John stories out in another form--they're quite wonderful and Manly was a close friend--but if you haven't read the Hogben stories (and most people nowadays haven't), they are side-splittingly funny.

Incidentally, we don't have electronic rights to a few of the stories in The World Turned Upside Down either. We'll probably run additional Keith Laumer in the webscription to replace them.

As for other news, I expect to be attending Leprecon in Phoenix May 7-9 as GoH. The folks running it are not only nice people (which is the norm for the cons I've attended) but are also organized, which is another thing entirely. (And no, I don't intend to carry a bell and call, "Unclean! Unclean!" in a sepulchral voice.)

In March I had a very good time at SheVaCon, particularly the group familiarization shoot at a nearby range. (Well, all right, it wasn't that near.) It involved a couple dozen people with 60-70 guns of many varieties. I shot some for the first time (including loading and firing a matchlock, which is much easier and faster than I'd been told) and also shot Armalite variants like those I'd gotten to know pretty well at one time. There were a number of attending writers and editors who're friends as well as colleagues, and a lot of fans of the sorts of thing I write. (A few photos are up at http://david-drake.com/shevacon04.html)

In passing I'll mention that the tone of Southern cons like SheVaCon and Liberty Con is different from those of the Northeast, but it was at a Boskone in Copley Plaza that I passed a fellow in Star Wars costume walking down the hall with a Sterling sub-machine gun. "Christ!" I said, turning. "That's a Sterling!"

"Yep," he said, marching down the hall; surrounded by people who didn't have a clue that the sucker was real.

That's the same convention from which I have a less happy memory: Tom Easton, the Analog reviewer, venting his spleen at Nam vets during a panel he was moderating, by making me (on his right) the example of pornographic violence in SF and Joel Rosenberg (on his left) as the example of the proper way to depict violence. I hadn't met Joel till that panel, but he earned a right to my first-born when he immediately said, "Everything I know about writing violent scenes I learned by reading David Drake."

Well, that's not really news now, is it? That was fifteen years ago. But perhaps it's worth mentioning to remind people who've forgotten or chosen to forget that not so very long ago veterans were pariahs to people like Tom Easton.

Wish me luck getting to and from England, people. I'm looking forward to being there, if not to the 'trip' portion itself.

Dave Drake
david-drake.com

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