NEWSLETTER 35: September 22, 2006

Dear People,

Having gotten off cycle (not that there's officially a schedule, but there sorta is in my head), I thought it'd be useful to do a little newsletter now that I have a moment to do so. The major news (and the reason I have a moment) is that I turned in The Mirror of Worlds to Tor through my editor David Hartwell.

You can think of Mirror as either the eighth novel of the Isles fantasy series or the middle book of the Crown of the Isles trilogy. In passing, I know that the middle book of a trilogy often sags; it appears that the author's just filling pages to bridge a gap from an exciting beginning to a blazing climax. Trust me: this one doesn't lack action, nor does it lack its own beginning, middle and end.

Having said that, it really is the second book in the trilogy. You could read it alone, but it'll have more impact if you've read The Fortress of Glass first.

Oh, and Donato's doing the cover again. I've seen the rough [http://david-drake.com/news.html]. The layout is as good as his always are, and since his execution is as good as that of any artist working today, I have high hopes for the final.

It occurs to me to mention a point that's never come up when I'm asked about writing. When I'm writing a scene, I almost always have a picture of the setting (or sometimes the animal involved) sitting open beside me. These may be paintings or photographs, and the photography can be either from a book or something I took myself.

I don't mean I copy details exactly (because I'm always in my solo work creating fictional settings; when I've collaborated with other people, I've occasionally used real-world settings). Nonetheless, looking at--as one example--Thomas Cole's A Notch in the White Mountains Called Crawford Notch gave me not only the exact background I wanted but also two dead oak trees and a distant woman in a red garment.

I found it by leafing through a volume of Hudson River School paintings (the catalogue of an exhibition I'd been privileged to see a few years ago). The scene was right; and it was only later that I learned the little cabin in the foreground (which doesn't appear in my novel) had been occupied by the family wiped out by an avalanche as Hawthorne describes in his story The Ambitious Guest.

Does that matter? Probably not very much. But everything about writing is incremental. The story's written word by word and read in little increments also, even if the reader is skimming. Creating something that's solid in my mind, even if the details don't appear in my prose, adds--I think--something. And since the business is all a matter of tiny somethings, then every bit of this sort is that much in my favor.

And again, this may be my equivalent of the pair of socks the fighter pilot always wears when he goes up. It makes me feel a little more confident, and that counts for something even if all my friends think I'm a superstitious twit. (In fact I don't believe they think that, though they may be dissembling very well. They tend to be kind people.)

Some Golden Harbor, the fifth RCN novel, came out as a Baen hardcover. For those who're wondering, I'm jotting notes toward the next book in the series (though at the moment this is primarily a way to keep my brain from spinning completely out of control at the end of a novel).

The reprint of The Forlorn Hope, a non-Hammer military SF novel, is out from Tor. It's been OP for at least a decade and was getting hard to find. The book has an interesting history, for which (and for commentary on most of my older titles) see the bibliography page of my website. It will be interesting to see how Tor does with reprints compared to what Baen does.

Night Shade still hasn't sent me the proofs of volume 2 of The Complete Hammer's Slammers, which makes me suspect the November, 2006, release date is more than a little optimistic. On the other hand, I've gotten queries from the copyeditor, so I know that it really is under way.

As for Balefires, the collection of fantasy/horror stories from Night Shade, I don't know any more than I did in Newsletter 34. It's slotted for March, 2007, but I'm not absolutely sure even of the contents.

There've been little updates to the website, but the only striking one is the home page image of me at Stonehenge in August. Goodness, but we had a wonderful time on our trip to England!

Enough people have asked me why there was nothing from me in the Jim Baen tribute in Locus that I'm going to be explicit. While Jim was in the ICU I got a chatty e-mail from a stranger on the Locus staff, telling me that Jim Baen wasn't likely to recover from his stroke so they were getting together a tribute issue. He then gave me the subjects and length of the note they wanted from me.

I replied him more politely than I might've done that in the event it became necessary, I would write the obituary Jim asked me for, and that Locus was welcome to reprint it. I would not be doing anything for the magazine, however, because they had displayed open contempt for Jim throughout his career.

They chose not to run anything by me if they couldn't have an exclusive.

Doggone, I really miss Jim. But that's not news, is it?

Podcasting is still rather Terra Incognita for me, but I did another podcast interview recently, this time on the subject of being a writer [http://shouldwrite.blogspot.com/]. The interviewer, Mur Lafferty, is a friend of Dan Breen, my friend and first reader. This particular podcast is sent without compression, so it's a huge file (don't even think about it unless you have broadband).

It is, however, rather interesting. I first asked Mur why she wanted to be a writer so that I could see where she was coming from. That wound up telling her things about her own motivations which she'd been concealing from herself.

I'm a person who takes stock of things around my birthday, and I turn 61 on the 24th of September. It was hard losing Jim this year, but losing one close friend underscores the fact that I have wonderful friends and family around me still. Other than what goes on in my head, life is very good indeed. I hope the same is true for every one of you.

All best,
Dave Drake

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