NEWSLETTER 36: Thanksgiving, 2006
Dear People,
I've completed a rough plot for the next RCN space opera, When the Tide Rises, and've gone over it to make little tweaks. I haven't keyed in those last changes yet; that'll be the final stage before writing the novel. As usual, that step--committing to about six months of demanding daily work--scares me. Sure, I've done it before; and sure, I'll do it this time.
But first I thought I'd do this newsletter.
The title comes from The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll. I was surprised to find the stanza there, but Carroll's verse has many extremely evocative flashes. I recall Fredric Brown commenting (in Night of the Jabberwock, I believe) that the first stanza of I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls was terrifying, making the rest of that minor poem a great disappointment.
Back to business: Donato's final art for The Mirror of Worlds, the second book of the Crown of the Isles fantasy trilogy, is complete and stunning, as usual. He's amazingly good. The painting is illustrative of the book, but that doesn't matter to me particularly: the purpose of the cover art is to sell the book to people who will like the book, period. The cover of The Fortress of Glass (which isn't an illustration) accomplishes that end just as well as this one (which is). Both are posted at http://david-drake.com/news.html.
Donato has a lot of different ways of doing his job superbly. I find him not only a great benefit to the books his art appears on but also an inspiration to me not to get into a rut.
I said in September that I thought the release of the second volume of Night Shade's The Complete Hammer's Slammers was going to slip from the announced November. That's even more true now, but the Berkey cover art [http://david-drake.com/news.html] is in and I've gone over the proofs. The book should be out very soon, if not this month.
Actually, I went over 60% of the proofs. I found a few problems with layout but only three or four actual copyediting errors in 300 pages. I decided that my time was better spent working on my plot than reading the remaining proofs. I've never in my long experience of publishing seen proofs so clean. Night Shade doesn't do everything the way major publishers do, but they do some things better. It's a pleasure to deal with them.
Night Shade is also doing my horror/fantasy collection Balefires. The contents are almost all in their hands now (I need to copy The Song of the Bone and mail it off), so the current release date of April, 2007, seems workable. (I suspect that'll turn out to be ballpark rather than chiseled in stone; but I also suspect the proofs will be clean and the production of very high quality.)
My webmaster, Karen, is doing a detailed bibliography for the limited edition (and I suppose for the website). I've written an amazing amount over forty years. (And I'm not dead yet.)
Tor brought out the new edition of The Forlorn Hope. It's nearly identical to the second edition, which was darned similar to the first edition. The new Tor edition of Bridgehead ought to be out realsoonnow too.
I don't feel that I'm any different from the person who wrote those books 25 years ago, but I am; and in most senses, I'm a much better person. (I'm a better writer, too, but my mistakes as a writer aren't the things that wake me up in the wee small hours.)
I've mentioned the Donato covers on the Isles series, but I've also had some excitement with Steve Hickman's art. Out of the blue arrived an extremely sturdy packing case (my second thought, while opening it, was that Steve owns a power screwdriver and I do not). In it was a birthday gift from Baen Books and Steve together: the framed cover painting for The Way to Glory.
But that's only half the neat stuff. When Toni took over as publisher of Baen Books, she asked me if I'd like additional contracts. I said I wouldn't, because a few weeks before he died Jim had pushed me into a three-book contract over my protests. (I still had two books on the previous three-book. I don't like to get too far ahead, and I didn't need more money this year.)
After the fact, I realized that there are ill-natured people who would claim (and possibly even believe) that I'd refused to do a new contract with Toni out of dissatisfaction. (For the record: I regret Jim's death a great deal, but I am very satisfied with the new management of Baen Books.)
I still didn't need more money this year, so I proposed something else. Jim had commissioned Steve Hickman to do a cover for The Northworld Trilogy. Steve did a wonderful painting, but it wasn't suitable for the book. Jim bought the original (I think as a kill fee) and cobbled together a book cover from portions of two other artists' work in a great hurry. I asked for the Hickman painting as my on-signing advance for another book, and Toni cheerfully agreed.
For a picture of me with both paintings at my birthday party and a picture of me with Steve at Constellation in Huntsville (a fun con with a trip to the Rocket and Space Center) and two more paintings for books of mine, see http://david-drake.com/album.html.
Since I'm mentioning new images on the website, Jim's family decided to get a stone for him. Pictures of the stone are at http://david-drake.com/baen.html and of Toni, me, and Comet with the stone (and with the oak tree, which is all I'd want for myself) are at http://david-drake.com/album.html.
At Conestoga (in Tulsa) I was interviewed by/with MT (Matt) Reiten, who was recently back from Afghanistan. The podcast of that interview is now up at http://www.sftulsa.org/conestoga/2006/11/07/program-18-david-drake-mt-reiten/.
Conestoga has an unusually high percentage of newbie and wannabe writers. Matt is one of the two I met whom I believe has what it takes to really go places.
I've done two more bits of Ovid [http://david-drake.com/ovid/amoresII-6.html and http://david-drake.com/ovid/4ages.html], another lyric and the Four Ages of Man from the Metamorphoses. I was struck on rereading the latter that the first evidence Ovid gives of a Golden Age is that there are no lawyers. In this context, remember that Ovid (like me) was trained as a lawyer rather than a litterateur.
Which brings me to the thought with which I'll close. I got an update request from Contemporary Authors, asking me among other things to state the most surprising thing I'd learned as a writer. I realized it was this: critics and academics are dazzled by literary technique, which leads one--led me--to assume it was important to a writer's career.
In fact, general readers don't care about technique. They want story, plot. A writer who doesn't start with a good story will fail commercially, no matter how skilled his or her technique is.
I don't mean that technique isn't important to me: it's hugely important. That's why I do multiple drafts, for pity's sake! But this polish, these subtleties of vocabulary and phrasing, don't increase my sales by any noticeable degree.
As quick evidence of this (without any emotional loading), consider Vergil, possibly the most technically skilled writer of all time. After two millennia we're still discovering new things about Vergil's style. When I was an undergraduate, scholars had just noticed his alternation of ictus and accent on the penult of each line, and I'm sure someone up on recent scholarship would have a similar new-found wonder to relate.
But Vergil's Aeneid isn't and never has been as popular as Homer's Odyssey, which is storytelling at its highest level. If you doubt me, go to Amazon and count the number of English translations of each.
This is a good thing to keep in mind for those of you who write or want to write. For those of you who're just readers--well, you already knew it, didn't you?
My report on our trip to England in August is up at http://david-drake.com/england2006report.html and the photos are at http://david-drake.com/england2006.html.
Happy Thanksgiving, friends!
Dave Drake
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