Newsletter #26 mailed out 1 March 2005
Dear People,
The big news is that I’ve finished the rough draft of The Fortress of Glass, Volume 1 of The Crown of the Isles. For those of you who’ve come in late, I’m doing a trilogy (The Crown of the Isles) to cap my Isles fantasy series.
There’ve been six Isles fantasies thus far, but The Crown of the Isles amounts to more than merely three more books in the series: it’s a true trilogy, with the action extending over the whole three-book arc. The previous six books (and all my other novels) have been completely self-standing, so this is (for me) an enormous change.
Frankly, it makes me uncomfortable. As I neared the end of Fortress, I felt a nagging unease which I finally realized was because there were plot issues that weren’t going to be resolved with the final chapter of the book. This is deliberate-and I think the correct thing for fantasy readers in general-but it’s not what I personally prefer. My intellect is struggling with my emotions, and while the intellect wins with me-always-I pay the price for it in the wee small hours. (Sometimes I suspect a biography of me would be subtitled The Writer as Basket Case; though I’m not sure I’m unusual as writers go.)
Still, I have a draft of 144,029 words, and I think they’re good words for the most part. They’ll be better when I send them to Tor after several edit passes, but they’ll still be the first volume of a three-book arc.
I suspect I ought to warn people: one of the issues that won’t be resolved till the third volume (The Gods Return) is going to make a lot of readers uncomfortable. For what it’s worth, I’m not very pleased with it either; but it’s necessary, and it will be resolved. Just not for a while.
My Hammer story, A Death in Peacetime, is supposed to be out this month in the on-line magazine Oceans of the Mind [http://www.trantorpublications.com/]. According to the editor, the military issue will be distributed over the second weekend of March 2005. Single copies can be obtained there at $4.00 each.
I’ve never used an on-line magazine myself, and my request for information from the editor apparently showed too much ignorance for him to understand what I was asking, but if you go to the site maybe it’ll make more sense to you than it does to me. It’s a good story-and it’s one I haven’t been able or willing to write until now. (I’ve had a number of requests over the years to write it. Well, to those of you out there who asked how Joachim Steuben died: here it is.)
The World Turned Upside Down is out from Baen Books and will be an SF Book Club release as well. This is a huge collection of stories which made Jim Baen, Eric Flint, and me SF readers and later SF professionals. I strongly recommend it to you. (Which you’ve not heard me say about anything I wrote, remember.) The cover and table of contents are on the news page (http://david-drake.com/news.html).
Speaking of Eric, he’s at work on The Dance of Time, the sixth and final volume of the Belisarius series. It should be finished in weeks rather than months. It’s been a long wait, but it’s going to be over and you can bug us about other things instead. (Honest to goodness, we both work very hard; but there’s just two of us, and publishers sometimes have opinions at variance with those of our most vocal fans. That’s certainly been the case in the present instance.)
The Way to Glory will be out in May as a Baen hc. The cover (also on the news page) is stunning, a Steve Hickman to equal his for Lacey and His Friends from lo! these many years ago. I’m very pleased with the book. Sample chapters are up at http://www.baen.com/scheduleXML.asp. Eric is also putting up snippets in one of his conferences on the bar (Mutter of Demons) and in the Authors conference. I’m told that Joe Buckley has collected these on his site as well. I’m very pleased with the RCN Leary/Mundy) series and this one in particular.
In May also will be The Enchanter Completed, a pb collection of stories in honor of Sprague deCamp edited by Harry Turtledove. It contains my novelet, A Land of Romance. Sprague was a formative writer for me; I hope and believe my pastiche is worthy of the man who gave us The Undesired Princess and Solomon’s Stone and The Stolen Dormouse and-well, you get the idea. (Hey, I like The Stolen Dormouse.)
I don’t think I mentioned last time (as I meant to) that there’s a nod to the Hammer series in the online cartoon Schlock Mercenary http://www.schlockmercenary.com/ October 13-18, 2004. I was sent this by a couple friends even before somebody posted it on Baen’s Bar. I’m amused.
On the website, there’ve been a couple new FAQs, including one on the relationship between my Honorverse novella A Grand Tour and the RCN series, which I thought I’d done a couple years ago. (Sorry.) And some more Ovid, including my response to the South Asian tsunami (a translation of the description of Deucalion’s Flood from the Metamorphoses) and Amores II:2. There’s a picture of Tristan in my high chair at the same age as me in 1947 at the top of the album page [http://david-drake.com/album.html].
I plan to be at Millennicon [http://www.millennicon.org/] in March and Libertycon [http://www.libertycon.org/] at the end of July. Cons I’m planning to be at are usually up on my website [http://david-drake.com/news.html], but a friend suggested I might mention them here too.
If you see me and want to say, ‘Hi,’ just do. I’m very approachable; albeit a lot more nervous in public than you probably think I am.
Incidentally, I was asked to be GoH at Mile-High Con in Denver in October and cheerfully accepted. That brought to mind the fact that I haven’t been to many (maybe any?) West Coast Cons. If I got invitations from that end of the country, I would at least think seriously about them.
The Fortress of Glass has gone smoothly, perhaps as smoothly as any novel of mine of comparable length. Oddly enough, that’s resulted in me being really tired. Normally there are glitches that prevent me from working a portion of the time and make me very frustrated. That didn’t really happen this time, so there were none of the usual enforced breaks. I’m therefore in a good mood but utterly exhausted.
Writing’s an odd business, but nobody drafted me and told me I had to do it. That’s a thing I recall when I hear some writers whine about how hard it is. Yes, but you’re not pulling guard at three am in the rain, wondering if that sound you just heard was the bolt of an AK closing. Considering the options, my life is very good; and I do consider the options quite frequently when I listen to the news.
I may wish we had better leaders, just as I wished in 1970 and before; but our troops in the field are as good as any in the world. I’m proud to have been one of them a very long time ago.
All best,
Dave Drake
david-drake.com
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