Newsletter #24 mailed out 28 August 2004
Dear People,
Well, the end of September got interesting. I turned 59 on September 24; that was as expected. And I finished the plot outline for The Fortress of Glass, the first volume of the Crown of the Isles trilogy; that too was expected.
What I didn’t expect was that a woman in an econobox would try to pull into the left lane to get around a stopped bus without bothering to check whether a writer on a motorcycle was already in that lane. I laid on my horn, the only thing I could do (I was alongside her when she started to pull out); and she kept right on going.
Physically it wasn’t a big deal: I’ve got bruises and road rash from hitting the asphalt at about 25 mph, but I’ve known people to get much worse hurt by slipping on the stairs. I wear protective gear, which the lady’s insurance carrier was happy to replace: a Hein Gericke jacket and a premium helmet are a lot less expensive than what they were covering would be.
Mentally, it wasn’t a good thing: it put my mind back in a place I’ve been trying to get out of for thirty-odd years. When the lady began shouting at me that it was my fault, there could’ve been very bad results for both of us.
Still, that didn’t happen. I rode the bike to the shop (carefully, since most of what should’ve been on the right side wasn’t there any more), came home, and resumed work on my plot. I guess I’d tell somebody else that they ought to go to the ER (which is what the police and paramedics were telling me), but I knew that work was what I needed. My physical condition wasn’t anything like the problem that my mental state could’ve become.
The mass market of Goddess of the Ice Realm (Tor, August 2004) is out and is very attractive. This is the fifth Isles fantasy. The sixth, Master of the Cauldron, is a Tor November release. I haven’t seen copies myself yet but booksellers have gotten Advance Reading Copies (what we used to call bound galleys; I guess they changed the name because nowadays they use page proofs instead of true galleys). The cover is lovely with a central female character (thank you, Donato!).
Mountain Magic, an October paperback original from Baen, should be out by the time you see this. It has a new short novel by Eric Flint and Ryk Spoor, my Old Nathan stories, and all four Hogben stories by Henry Kuttner. They are possibly the funniest things which that very good, often very funny, writer ever wrote. Buy the book for them.
(Technically there are five Hogben stories, but the first isn’t SF and isn’t very good at all. Speaking of which, I’m not going to comment on the cover of Mountain Magic.)
I have an ARC of The World Turned Upside Down, a huge anthology edited by Jim Baen, me, and Eric Flint. (That’s how the names were supposed to appear. I’d suggested reverse alphabetical, since Eric did about two-thirds of the work. Nobody seems to know why my name’s first, at least on the ARC; it shouldn’t be for a lot of reasons.)
Folks, this is a truly wonderful volume. Buy it. Give it to smart 13-year-olds. Read and reread it. I’m about as proud of this one as I am of any book with my name on it.
I took a break from plotting my Isles fantasy to write an 8,000-word Hammer story, A Death in Peacetime, for an on-line magazine named Oceans of the Mind [http://www.trantorpublications.com/oceans.htm]. (I’ll bind the story in with the first of the three volumes of Hammer stories from Night Shade Books, too.) I still don’t have a contract from the publisher, but he’s located in Delray Beach, Florida. I sent it to him just before Hurricane Charlie and we’re working on Hurricane Jeanne as I write this. I figure I’ll cut him some slack. (Thinking about it, I hope he isn’t somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean right at the moment.)
Because this is for an on-line mag, I won’t put a PDF copy up on my own website as I normally would. The story’s about the murder of Joachim Steuben; many people over the years have asked me to write that one. I finally figured out how to do it in the course of telling a story that I wanted to tell. I’m pretty pleased with the result.
Speaking of the website, I’ve translated a couple more Ovid lyrics which Karen has put up (linked from http://david-drake.com/ovid.html). There are a couple of pictures from my 59th birthday dinner on the album page, and we added a link to an article about me published in June by the Iowa Alumni Association (linked at the bottom of http://david-drake.com/iowa.html ).
And a second Hammer’s Slammers miniature wargaming book is getting under way. This will have expansion rules by John Lambshead; more Tables of Organization and Equipment for potential enemies; lots more art by John Treadaway; and a Hammer timeline by the two Johns in combination, with me looking over their shoulders in bemusement.
I understand the need (from a wargame viewpoint) of a timeline, but I’m writing stories--not history. In the late ‘60s a fan created a timeline for Poul Anderson’s fiction, merging the previously-separate universes of Dominic Flandry and Nicolas van Rinj. Poul bought into the idea; mistakenly, I believe, and to the detriment of later work. I will look over the Hammer timeline and the two Johns will make as good a job of the available facts as can be made, but I very explicitly won’t be bound by it.
I guess I’ll close with a conclusion I came to on reviewing my recent accident. I haven’t driven a car since some time in the late ‘80s (when I had to take Larry Niven and his luggage to the airport). I’ve never kidded myself about the danger of riding a bike. Even if you do everything right, there’s a chance that somebody in a car will screw up bigtime and hit you. That’s exactly what happened to me this time.
But you know, I wouldn’t be either as alert or as physically healthy if I didn’t ride a motorcycle daily. It’s darned good exercise for both body and mind. Something like this (or something much worse than this) could happen tomorrow or any time in the future, and if it does, it does.
No matter how I live my life, some day I’m going to die. Until then, I’m going to live the life I want to live. I wish you all the same resolution.
Dave Drake
david-drake.com
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