Newsletter #23 mailed out 1 August 2004

Dear People,

I've read the proofs of Master of the Cauldron, the sixth Isles fantasy, and seen the excellent cover Donato did for it. It'll be out as a November, 2004, Tor hc, and is also a Baen Webscription title: that is, the book is being released in installments in a variety of electronic forms (none of them encrypted) to people who have signed up for the month's releases.

Don't ask me precisely how it's done because I've never done it myself, but lots of people do and I'm assured that it's very easy. If this (Webscriptions, that is) seems like something you'd be interested in, go to Baen.com and take a look. (Me, I'm entirely a dead tree person. My house is the Trees' Graveyard.)

The combination of a Tor hardcover coming out as a Baen electronic release is a first. It was possible because Tom Doherty and Jim Baen have been friends of each other and of me for a long time. I wanted to try it because it's a form of advertising, increasing interest in the book among people who spend a lot of time on-line and are in a position to spread the word if they like what they read. I suppose there'll be some payment to me also for the electronic publication, but that's a trivial consideration compared to the word of mouth advertising.

I should mention that this is a handshake deal for all three parties. Tom asked me to send him an e-mail outlining the plan so that he could agree for the record in case he was hit by a truck. I did so, but the three of us trust one another and trust our mutual ability and willingness to work out any glitches.

There are writers who go where the money looks best for the current project. That's fine--more power to them. But I continue to work with people I trust implicitly, because then I can focus on what I want to do: writing books. For me at least, this works much better than trying to maximize short term gain would.

I've also sent in the final version of The Way to Glory, an RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, to Baen Books. It'll be a May, 2005, Baen hc release. Steve Hickman is doing the cover, as he's done for so many of my books over the years. I haven't seen it yet, but we'll (that is, my webmaster Karen will) put up a .jpg when we have one.

The pb of Goddess of the Ice Realm, the fifth Isles fantasy, is out from Tor now. I think it's my favorite of the series, but that doesn't appear to be a universal reaction. I get the impression--this is merely anecdotal evidence, of course--that Servant of the Dragon would probably be the favorite of fans who feel strongly enough to comment. There really is no accounting for taste, my own or that of humanity in general.

And the pb of The Far Side of the Stars, the third RCN space opera, is due out from Baen as a December release (which means probably the end of October). There's a comfortable spread between the two paperbacks, which there wasn't between the hardcovers of those titles. There are pitfalls for a writer who works for two houses. (Note that I waited three months after I had The Way to Glory effectively complete before I turned it in. Fool me once, shame on you....)

Masters of Fantasy, edited by Bill Fawcett and Brian Thomsen, is out now as a Baen hc. It contains my short story The Elf House, an Isles fantasy (featuring Cashel and effectively set between the end of Goddess of the Ice Realm and the beginning of Master of the Cauldron. It's the story's only printed appearance (though you can read it on my website) and I have no present plans to use it elsewhere. It's a tight little piece, completely self-standing, and I'm proud of it as a piece of craft.

The anthology itself is sort of a companion to The Warmasters, stories (or in at least one case, a novel excerpt) set in the individual author's fantasy worlds. It's a nice concept, but I'm less impressed by the execution.

Mountain Magic, an anthology of backwoodsy fantasies--a new short novel by Eric Flint and Ryk Spoor, the Hogben stories by Henry Kuttner, and my Old Nathan--will be an October pb from Baen Books. (I had the date wrong in the previous newsletter, which understandably distressed Mr. Spoor.) You should get the volume for the hilarious Hogben stories if nothing else--this is the first time they've been collected, and none of them have been in print for way too long.

By the way, because of our contract with the agent for Kuttner's stories, these will not be offered as webscriptions (at least now that somebody told Eric and me that they'd mistakenly been put up). The complete John the Balladeer stories by Manly Wade Wellman will fill the electronic gap. These are wonderful stories too but they're more generally available, so buy the tree version of Mountain Magic. (And I say this as the owner of my late friend Manly's literary estate.)

My Sprague deCamp pastiche, A Land of Romance, will finally be coming out in The Enchanter Completed, a May, 2005, Baen pb edited by Harry Turtledove. (My novelet is up on the website also.)

Sprague's fiction was a huge influence on me when I started reading SF. When I became a writer myself, I became friendly with him. Sprague and I differed on many of the things we valued, but he was the epitome of politeness and gentlemanly reserve. I prize those virtues, and I hope I embody them to a degree.

Night Shade Books has been doing well-produced hardcovers of things that I'm very glad to see in print (including the newly-discovered third Captain Volmar space opera by Clark Ashton Smith). I've worked with them in the past, over their five-volume series of Manly's fantasies (initially by helping Frances Wellman and later as the owner of the estate) and as a facilitator of their reprints of Karl Edward Wagner's Kane stories.

Now they've proposed a three-volume series of all the Hammer's Slammers stories to date. This had more of an effect on me than I would've expected it to. Apparently in my head I felt that limited editions were for other people. Anyway, I'm enthusiastically behind the project.

The current plan is for the first volume to contain all the fiction below the length of a short novel, with the interstitial material from the original Hammer's Slammers (my first book) and probably graphics of vehicles developed by John Treadaway between the stories. I've written an essay (probably an afterword) for the volume, and Gene Wolfe has written a wonderful introduction. (Most people forget that Gene is a Korean War veteran. He doesn't forget that, any more than I forget Nam.)

The second volume will be the four shorter novels: At Any Price, Counting the Cost, Rolling Hot, and The Warrior. Dave Hartwell has agreed to write an intro for that one. The two most recent novels, The Sharp End and Paying the Piper, are planned for the third volume, along with an intro by Barry Malzberg.

Some of you will have noted that the intros are being written by people who are better known for their impeccable literary credentials than for their associations with action/adventure fiction. Homer would've been non-plussed by the notion that an action/adventure story can't have literary merit, but that attitude has been prevalent in Academe for a long time. I'd like to see it change.

Right now I'm doing detailed plotting on the next Isles book as well as very general plotting for the whole trilogy covered by the present contract. As I said in Newsletter 22, I'm going to write a real trilogy this time instead of three self-standing novels involving the same characters.

Things are falling into place, but believe me there's a lot of work left to do. I have the feeling that I'm in a grain elevator while it's being filled, and if I climb as fast as I can I may possibly avoid being buried. Everything's under control, though--at least it always has been in the past at this point in the process, even though I can't pretend it's under conscious control yet.

And you know, I love what I'm doing. I don't mean there aren't glitches, though they tend to involve the business side more than the job. The writing itself is the only thing besides my own behavior which I can control. If it's wrong, that's my fault; and if it's right, well, that's me too.

This is the reason that although I'm generally very easy to deal with (I don't complain about bad covers or lack of promotion or late checks, for example), I go ballistic when some copy editor changes a word or phrasing that was right the first time. This is one of the things that fall on the business side. (I'm sure the irritation is good for me at some level. Like my riding a motorcycle instead of driving a car, it prevents me from becoming soft and sitting around eating lotus all day.)

Apart from updating the books on the news page, the major change on the website is that I've added another Ovid lyric [http://david-drake.com/ovid/amoresI-12.html]. I hadn't done that in too long. And I may do another one shortly as well, as it certainly wrenches my mind out of the circles it spins in while I'm working into a very complex plot.

Actually, that brings up something worth mentioning. Plotting the Northworld trilogy was an extremely difficult task for me a decade ago. I spun my wheels for months before I was able to find a way into the project, even though I had the advantage there of working with preexisting stories.

Nowadays I take it for granted that I can plot Isles novels with four separate interlinked threads. Any one of them has a more complex structure than the whole Northworld trilogy did. Sure, plotting them is work, but filling sandbags is work too; I know how to do both things. The wonderful thing about being a writer is that you never run out of new things to learn or ways to do an old thing better. I'm proud of things I wrote ten, twenty, thirty years ago; but I'm a better writer now than I was then.

My webmaster, Karen Zimmerman, has moved from Iowa City and the U of Iowa Libraries to Indianapolis and the IUPUI library. She continues to be the main reason the website is clean and efficient, easy to use even for those of us on phone lines.

As an example of what her skill means, our website turned out to be the target of choice for people doing Google searches to find an image of Ovid. This was true not only of high school and college students doing projects for Latin class, but also for a researcher doing a segment for The Discovery Channel. Karen immediately checked the provenance of our image so that those asking would have something better to cite than david-drake.com (although to our amazement they were apparently willing to do that).

As an aside, for heaven's sake do not get information on something you care about from television. There's a lot of good stuff available on TV, but the guy from TDC was wrong on two basic statements about Ovid in his explanation of why he wanted the image. The Discovery Channel is, I would've said, one of the better TV sources.

Back to plotting! Though I might pause to rough out another of Ovid's Amores.

Dave Drake
david-drake.com

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