NEWSLETTER 39: June 1, 2007
Dear People,
The exciting news this time is that I've roughed out a complete plot for The Gods Return, the final part of the Crown of the Isles trilogy and of the Lord of the Isles series. Here a little background is useful.
For quite a while I wrote very long plot outlines. The plot for what became The Dragon Lord (my first novel) was 16K, and I eventually worked up to 26K for Servant of the Dragon (with a couple more coming close to that length). Recently I decided that this was a misapplication of effort; that I'd do better with a sketchier outline and slightly more time spent in development each day of writing the rough draft.
The outline for When the Tide Rises, my most recent RCN space opera, was only 4,200 words. That's somewhat misleading, as when I got to tricky sections I usually did a separate outline of 2-300 words before beginning to write.
Because The Gods Return is such an important book, I went back to a fuller process. I've got 12.5K in the outline so far and I'll probably add another 500-1,000 words to the final (developing sections from the viewpoint of the villains). I don't want it to look to anybody as though I thought I could skimp on the capstone of the series.
Incidentally, don't anybody take what I'm saying above as my recommendation for how other authors should prepare to write novels. This is what I do; it works for me. Now, I do think that many writers would benefit from having at least a sketch plot showing the scenes of their novel in sequence (the sketch of Gods was five pages), but Stephen King and Cecelia Holland are examples of very, very good writers who work in a completely different fashion.
In publishing news, the paperback of The Way to Glory is out from Baen. Finally out, in fact; the hardcover was published two years ago and has been out of print for a while.
Though the paperback market's collapsed, it remains much more important to me than it is to most authors (very possibly because I'm popular with folks in uniform). I think it'd have been a good idea to've brought Way out sooner than this... but if you recall what was going on with Jim Baen last year (and I recall it very vividly), you can understand why strictly commercial matters might've slipped through the cracks of everybody's mind.
The Mirror of Worlds, the second book in the Crown of the Isles, is out in hardcover from Tor in July. There are trilogies whose middle book sags. My middle books do not sag. (None of my books sag. There are many different ways to write a good novel; the particular virtue I claim for my novels is that Things Happen Throughout.)
Incidentally, one plot element of The Fortress of Glass, the first book of the Crown of the Isles, shocked (and angered) a number of readers. Folks, this is a trilogy; you have to read the whole thing to see where I'm going with it. I honestly don't think that you'll be dissatisfied with the final result (which I've just plotted in detail).
Speaking of The Mirror of Worlds, it's available for download as an electronic ARC from Baen's Webscriptions [http://www.webscription.net/] either separately or as a package with Balefires, my collection of (mostly early) fantasy/horror short stories from Night Shade. The downloads are in standard formats without encryption (DRM; I hate the term as much as I hate the concept).
Note that both these titles are from publishers other than Baen Books. I believe this is a harbinger of the future: other publishers are noticing that Baen has an electronic distribution system that works and are cutting deals with Baen to use it.
That isn't quite what happened in my case, though: I simply asked the hardcopy publishers if they minded me doing this for advertising. (That was a courtesy, not a requirement, since I own my electronic rights. For me, courtesy is normally a requirement. I wish that were more generally true.)
I say 'for advertising.' That was how Jim conceived webscriptions and their various electronic spin-offs. By now there's a respectable amount of money to be made, but my focus is (properly, I think) still on the advertising aspect.
I realized how true that was when I looked at my Baen royalties a couple weeks ago and realized there wasn't an accounting for the Isles series novels that've been sold electronically for the past several years. It turns out that some of the money had been sent to Tor by mistake, but mostly nobody else'd paid any more attention to it than I had. It'll be coming to me at some point in the future, but it isn't anybody's priority. (We're not talking about a fortune, though it's into five figures.)
This shows also how much Baen Books is a family. I asked if I should've been paid something, and immediately people started digging to correct what turned out to have been an error. No going through channels, no defensive behavior, no anger on anybody's part. Just, "Oops, we'll get to that." I like that sort of relationship.
I've mentioned Balefires in previous newsletters; I'm going to mention it again because it's truly a lovely book. I'm blessed to have it on my shelves. (The electronic version includes the 20-odd page bibliography which my webmaster created for the limited hardcover. You don't get my signature on the eARC, though.)
I mentioned in a recent newsletter that a Russian cactus magazine was going to use my photograph of a crested saguaro. They did, and it's up at http://www.cultivar.ru/N38/saguaro-e.htm.
There's now a picture of the Triangle Baenish Dinner and a recent picture of me with grandson Tristan and son Jonathan on the website [http://david-drake.com/album.html].
There’s another Ovid lyric up [http://david-drake.com/ovid/amoresII-8.html], and also the section of the Metamorphoses dealing with Daedalus [http://david-drake.com/ovid/daedalus.html]. I noted with surprise that Brueghels' painting Landscape with Fall of Icarus (the subject of Auden's poem Musee de Beaux Arts) is not an illustration of Ovid but rather a response to this section. The common people of Brueghels' world are untouched by the wonders which leave their counterparts in Ovid thunderstruck.
I don't know that these translations do much for other people, but they certainly teach me a lot. The next one may take a while, however, because I'm working on Juvenal's 14th Satire.
My notes to Balefires reminded me of this piece, and it's been decades since I seriously translated Juvenal. (I think the most recent time may've been when I was giving Karl Wagner background for The Dark Muse.) Not only is Juvenal tricky, the work is 330 lines long. In order to translate I read each text carefully, then go through again making a rough translation, and then do a couple edits. It's a lengthy process, but it's the only way I can be sure of doing the job as well as I'm capable of doing.
I apply the same standards to my fiction, of course: it'll never be perfect, but it'll be as good as I can make it with a full plot and multiple edits. I just got confirmation that the process works, at least in my terms.
Jennie Faries, Baen's in-house graphics designer and my friend, called my attention to the Text Stats feature on Amazon. (Karen, my webmaster, explains that you find it by hovering over a book image that has the “Search Inside” option.) It calculates various measures of difficulty for books on the Amazon site.
I have (and use) a very broad working vocabulary, and I don't think anybody would claim that I write down to my audience. Despite that, my work falls very much into the easy-to-read-and-understand range of all the scales.
The measure that most struck me was the average of syllables per word. I asked Tom Doherty and David Hartwell (Tor publisher and my Tor editor; both of them friends and well familiar with my work) to guess what the figure would be for my fiction. They individually guessed an average of 3 syllables/word.
The actual figure was 1.4/1.5 syllables/word on my recent fiction, a lower ratio than 80% of all books on Amazon (which I assume includes children's books). Achieving that clarity is every bit as hard as it is to translate (for example) Ovid's description of Arachne's tapestry, and I'm very darned proud to have done it.
(Well, I'm proud of both, but there are a lot of people capable of translating Ovid well. Nobody else can write a David Drake novel.)
Now, go off and do well the things you want to do, while I start writing a fantasy novel!
Dave Drake
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