Memory of Light Backpack Sweepstakes

We are offering the chance to win one of five Memory of Light backpacks! Each backpack will include a copy of Forge of Darkness by Steven Erikson, The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, Lamentation by Ken Scholes, Prospero Lost by L. Jagi Lamplighter, Spellwright by Blake Charlton, and The Legions of Fire by David Drake. Comment below to enter for a chance to win.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. You must be 18 or older and a legal resident of the 50 United States or D.C. to enter. Promotion begins December 10, 2012 at 10 a.m. ET. and ends December 14, 2012, 12:00 p.m. ET. Void in Puerto Rico and wherever prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules go here. Sponsor: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

New Releases: 5/22/2012

See upcoming releases.

New Releases: 7/19/11

See upcoming releases.

Another Method

By David Drake

Last year when Tor asked me for an essay to accompany the publication of The Legions of Fire, the first of my Books of the Elements fantasy series, I explained that riding a motorcycle focuses my conscious mind and thus frees my subconscious. Plotting isn’t simply an intellectual activity for me. The really subtle, really complex structures come from my subconscious.

For this year’s essay to accompany Out of the Waters, the second book of the series, I’m going to write about how translating Latin helps me plot.

Okay, I know that motorcycles are sexier than Latin translation. Bear with me, though, because where I’m going with this may not be the place you expect.

I like to base my fiction on existing literature and historical events. Because I read Latin (basically to take myself out of the present) I frequently use classical settings. Sometimes I do it directly, as when I turned the Odyssey into the plot for the space opera Cross the Stars, but mostly it’s indirect. For example, Philip the Fifth’s invasion of Southern Greece at the end of the Third century bc became the template for my Military SF novel Paying the Piper.

But that sort of thing is minor: my interest in history and literature isn’t limited to the Classical Period. I based the Northworld Trilogy (an SF—basically space opera—series) on the poems of The Elder Edda, and many other non-classical sources have given me plots and settings.

Because The Books of the Elements are set in a world very similar to Rome in 30 ad, it’s only reasonable to assume that there’d be a direct connection between the plot and the Latin translations I’m working on at the same time. With a tiny exception, though, that hasn’t been the case.

Ovid is the only author I’m translating on my website. Specifically, I’m working with lyric poems from the Amores and also with sections of the Metamorphoses.

The lyrics are witty and often self-mocking. They’re not so much love poems as poems about love (broadly defined). They show the first-person viewpoint character (he certainly isn’t a hero) courting a woman, watching her go off with another man after a night of hard drinking, seducing the woman’s maid, and many similar slices from the life of a man who likes women.

Now, this gives me bits of business for my fiction (and not just my Rome-based fiction). Clearly, though it doesn’t help with plots for the action/adventure stories that I write.

The Metamorphoses is a wonderful ramble of epic length through Classical mythology. The title comes from the fact that the stories generally involve a change of some sort, but Ovid allows himself as much leeway in definition as the editor of a modern theme anthology would. For example, the attempt of Nessus to carry off Deianira, the wife of Hercules, doesn’t involve any change whatever (unless you want to count Nessus changing from centaur to fertilizer).

The Metamorphoses contains many connected narratives of some length. The Hercules Cycle runs for almost three hundred lines, and there are a number of longer threads. Even so, none would serve as the plot for an entire novel.

The unique thing which I gain from translating Ovid over reading an author in English of comparable quality (Kipling, say; or if I were a different person, Henry James) is the concentration which the task demands. When I put translations on line, I’m displaying my level of skill for the world to see–and to mock me if I screw up.

That doesn’t mean I won’t screw up, but it does mean that I’ll put everything I’ve got into the job. I kept working for a week on the description of Arachne’s tapestry until finally I realized that the rainbow wasn’t a literal image: Ovid was using it as a simile for the subtlety with which the weaver blended colors together.

When my conscious mind is focused that sharply on a translation, my subconscious can get on with working out plot problems. That’s how the Hercules Cycle helped me to plot Out of the Waters.

I said there was a tiny direct connection between my plot and the translation I was doing at the time. I needed an opening scene for Out of the Waters to set up the action to come. It occurred to me that I could use a stage show, a lavishly expensive mime of the sort that was popular in the Early Empire… and come to think, episodes from the life of Hercules–though not the same ones as in the Metamorphoses–would work perfectly for the purpose.

And so they did. Thank you, Ovid.

…………………………

From the Tor/Forge July newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

…………………………

More from our July newsletter:

• Got A Job in Magicland? By L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
• A Brief Interview with Rhiannon Frater
• At the Abyss by David Hagberg

Lord of the Isles eBook now available for $2.99

Lord of the Isles e-book by David Drake is currently on sale for only $2.99!*

About Lord of the Isles: With Lord of the Isles, David Drake returns to fantasy with a towering and complex epic of heroic adventure in an extraordinary and colorful world where the elemental forces that empower magic are rising to a thousand-year peak.

In the days following an unusually severe storm, the inhabitants of a tiny seaport town travel toward romance, danger, and astonishing magic that will transform them and their world.

*on sale for a limited time only

Look for the new novel by David Drake, Out of the Waters, the second novel of The Book of Elements releasing on July 19th, 2011.

Summer Reading 2011 Sweepstakes

Sign up for the Tor/Forge Newsletter for a chance to win the following prize pack of mass-market books from Tor. They may not be your traditional beach reads, but we know that you’ll enjoy them all the same.

About our newsletter: every issue of Tor’s monthly email newsletter features original writing by, and interviews with, Tor authors and editors about upcoming new titles from all Tor and Forge imprints. In addition, we occasionally send out “special edition” newsletters to highlight particularly exciting new projects, programs, or events.

If you’re already a newsletter subscriber, you can enter too. We do not automatically enter subscribers into sweepstakes. We promise we won’t send you duplicate copies of the newsletter if you sign up for the newsletter more than once.

Sign up for your chance to win today!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. You must be 18 or older and a legal resident of the 50 United States or D.C. to enter. Promotion begins June 13, 2011 at 12 a.m. ET. and ends July 19, 2011, 11:59 p.m. ET. Void in Puerto Rico and wherever prohibited by law. For Official Rules and to enter, go to tor-forge.com/tor/promo/summerreading2011. Sponsor: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

New Releases: 4/26

See upcoming releases.

What’s Your Favorite Heinlein Novel, David Drake?

Starship Soldier

My parents gave me a subscription to an SF magazine for my 14^th birthday, September 24, 1959. Rather than to choose the magazine themselves or to spoil the surprise by asking me, they bought the current issue of each SF magazine on the local newsstand and gave them to me so that I could pick the one I wanted. The October, 1959, issue of F&SF was among the options.

October, 1959 was F&SF‘s tenth anniversary issue; possibly the best issue of what I now believe was (during the ’50s) the best SF magazine of all time. There was a lot to like in it, but the first part of Heinlein’s Starship Soldier (the serialized version of Starship Troopers) was what convinced me that I wanted a subscription to F&SF.

In 1973 I was writing what became the first story in the Hammer’s Slammers series. (I didn’t intend it as a series at the time.) I had arrived at opinions about society which were different from those which Heinlein advocated; and I knew things about ground war which Heinlein, whose military service was that of a peacetime naval officer, would never know.

Due to what was probably a subconscious warning, I picked up a paperback copy of Starship Troopers and reread the opening chapter. I then went back over my story to make sure that none of it was flatly plagiarized from Heinlein.

I don’t know how obvious it is to anyone else, but it was extremely obvious to me: I could not have written The Butcher’s Bill had I not read Starship Soldier so long before.

David Drake can be found online at http://david-drake.com

…………………………

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1 (1907-1948): Learning Curve (978-0-7653-1960-9 / $29.99) will be available from Tor Books on August 17^th 2010.

…………………………

Related Links:

• Space Cadets and Starship Troopers
• David Brin: Beyond This Horizon
• David Hartwell: Double Star
  
• L.E. Modesitt, Jr.: Starship Troopers
• Rudy Rucker: Starman Jones, Citizen of the Galaxy, and Tunnel in the Sky
• Joan Slonczewski: Have Space Suit—Will Travel
• Charles Stross: Glory Road
• Michael Swanwick: Have Space Suit—Will Travel
• Vernor Vinge: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
• Robert A. Heinlein: The Tor.com Blog Symposium

The Motorcycle Way to Complex Plotting

By David Drake

Writers use various tools in their work. One of my tools is my motorcycle.

Well, plural: my motorcycles. Bikers learn quickly that if they expect to ride every day, they’d better have two. (And that’s if they’re Japanese, as both of my current rides are. More exotic bikes tend to be two-wheeled versions of owning a Lotus Elan.)

It’s a bit of an overstatement when I say I ride daily, but most weekdays I make a run from our home in the country to my post office box in the center of Chapel Hill, about a 40-mile round trip. My wife has a car and drives it whenever we go somewhere together, but I haven’t driven a car since 1986 or ’87. That was to carry Larry Niven and his luggage to the airport, something I couldn’t do on a motorcycle.

And there’s the real beauty of a bike for a writer: you’re alone. You know how rare it is to be really alone and how valuable that can be.

People who drive cars can do a lot of things that engage their intellects beyond their immediate physical surroundings. Cell phones and texting are modern examples, but fiddling with the CD changer, reading a newspaper (really), and chatting with a passenger (or screaming at the kids/dogs in the back seat) all take you out of the experience. A serious-minded driver can even zone out listening to recorded lectures on Greek philosophy.

A biker can get a helmet with a cell phone (or CB), just as most bikes will carry a passenger…but nobody expects you to do that. Windrush makes even an MP3 player doubtful at best. (My hearing loss from Nam makes it impossible.)

A (surviving) biker is in the moment at all times. Is that car at the intersection ahead going to start across? Will there be a garbage truck stopped around that curve, like there was last week? Is this rain starting to freeze?

Or even: Holy Crap! The woman beside me is pulling into my lane to get around the bus ahead of her!

Even when riding on a lovely day and a familiar road, my conscious mind is wholly focused on my immediate physical surroundings. It’s amazing how much complicated work your subconscious mind gets done under those circumstances. It’s even better than sleeping on problems.

I create complex plots and my prose structure tends to be very tight. Part of the reason I can accomplish those things is that when I pull off my helmet, I suddenly see how to combine three clumsy sentences into two clear ones, or I realize that if I transfer a bit of business from Hedia to Alphena, everything will work.

Hedia to Alphena? They’re two of the four viewpoint characters in my new Tor fantasy, The Legions of Fire. This novel uses a setting very similar to that of Ancient Rome–and by that I mean the real Rome, not the cardboard fakery you get from Hollywood or HBO. I know the background pretty well (you can find my translations of Latin poetry on my website), but fitting my usual considerable amount of action into a world so complicated took all the help I could get. My bikes provided a lot of that help.

But besides those practical reasons, a long sweeping curve on a bright Spring day makes me a much happier writer than I would be otherwise.

The Legions of Fire (0-7653-2078-9; $25.99) is available from Tor this May.  David Drake can be found online at david-drake.com.

…………………………

From the Tor/Forge May newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

…………………………

More from our May newsletter:

• It’s not World of Warcraft, but… by Cory Doctorow
• Imposter Syndrome by J.A. Pitts