The Many Deaths of Joe Buckley (11 page)

The Dead Man Speaks

JOE BUCKLEY

Back in the ’98-’99 timeframe, I wrote a couple of small Visual BASIC applications for my own entertainment—a date converter and an intercept calculator for use with David Weber’s Honor Harrington series. David was nice enough to give me input on how they should work and I gave him copies of the programs. Later, just after I started my website (thefifthimperium.com), when
Ashes of Victory
was in the early days of being snippeted, I got an email from David with the most lovely attachment: a copy of the manuscript for
Ashes of Victory
with the notation that he’d named a character after me. Of course, my character had
zero
lines of dialog, that rat!

I continued collecting the snippets, because I didn’t want anyone to know that I had a copy so early.

It was this first exposure to an early draft which led me to appreciate how a book develops: how scenes and “color” detail get added to more fully realize the story.

As to the whole story about being involved with David in a game or tournament of cutthroat spades, I had nothing to do with that. The
rest
of the unfortunate crew of HMLAC
Cutthroat
, now, they were pretty much the target of David’s literary wrath. It seems that David then decided that this was a golden opportunity to add my name to the casualty list! (As I usually tell the story, David killed off the rest of the crew of
Cutthroat
just to get at me.)

At about this same time, I was also conversing with Baen’s newest author, John Ringo.

John offered to let me read the manuscripts for
A Hymn Before Battle
and its sequel,
Gust Front
.
A Hymn Before Battle
was well on its way to publication and
Gust Front
was in the early stages of the publishing pipeline.

What I then did was something that quickly developed into a habit: I would load the stories into my Rocket ebook reader and use its notation ability to point out typoes, continuity errors and general questions about some minor points I noticed.

I don’t recall ever giving him
advice
on how to write something, along the lines of “Gee . . . this scene would work so much better from the younger Billy-Bob’s perspective.” Mainly typoes and continuity errors with a small smattering of “What the heck is
this
supposed to mean, since you said
that
several chapters ago?”

John never asked me for it. I just thought it would make life a little bit easier on John and his proofreaders if he could hammer out the small stuff before he turned in the manuscript.

He never told me to
stop
, either.

So it became an automatic action on my part.

Then came John’s collaboration with David Weber on
March Upcountry
.

The first copy of that I ever saw was under five chapters after a late-night AIM chat on space warfare tactics (in reference to the early loss of the
DeGlopper
). We quickly got into the habit of John’s sending me the manuscript after he’d added a few more chapters to it.

I’d read and read and reread the same things from the beginning and do my notation bit. I figure that by the end, I’d read parts of the book close to twenty times.

Sensibly, John was adding new material to the book and not bothering to go back and correct the small-fry issues that I kept pointing out to him.

Now, we have the book getting longer and longer and my list of questions, comments and typoes was getting longer each time.

By the time the story reached just past the point where John and David stopped the book (the first major event in what became
March to the Sea
), my list of uncorrected items was getting long.

It turns out that my Rocket eBook reader’s capacity for notations on a single title was
only
two hundred notes—I hit that before the end of the book! But I soon discovered that while the number of notes had a fixed limit, the number of items I could simply
underline
seemed to be effectively unlimited.

So the small-fry issues, like typoes, that are pretty obvious once pointed to, would get underlined, saving the limited notes for things that required some sort of questioning or explanation.

That week, John got a
big
list attached to his email. (To be fair, I trimmed it before sending, so I don’t believe the total of all points was over two hundred.) I heard later that John’s groan could be heard throughout the house. “What’d Joe do
this
time?” was how I heard the reaction to the groan phrased.

John saw the list. Got annoyed (honestly, we never really talked about it, but I think it was more in amusement, than anger), decided that
Something Must Be Done
and fired up his word processor and changed the name of the character “Peterson” in
Gust Front
(the unnamed “Lefty” in
A Hymn Before Battle
) to “Buckley.”

People took notice of how “Lefty’s Bad Day” in
A Hymn Before Battle
got so much worse in
Gust Front
and decided that I must have done something
really
horrible to John to deserve that sort of treatment.

People were also greatly amused with the whole concept.

Things
really
went off the rails with
1634: The Galileo Affair
by Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis. I remember Eric dropping broad hints that something was in store for “me” in the story. He was actually rubbing his hands with glee and cackling like some B-movie, moustache-twirling villain as he dropped his hints.

At that point, the meme had taken on a life of its own.

So . . . that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

David Weber did it first. John Ringo
industrialized
it.