By far the strangest review copy I've received in ages is the hardcover copy of Dan Simmons's Drood that showed up yesterday from Little Brown. The book sounds great but I have no idea when I'll get to it and really - it's going to be reviewed by every big reviewer in the country. It's beyond odd that one would be sent my way.

I am knee deep in fixing my flying novel, cutting passages I love that don't fit and finding new passages to serve as bridges between the chapters. Most of the later chapters require little work (two of them ran on the web already as standalone short stories) but I need to link them better - develop the characters in small ways throughout the book. It's not difficult writing but more subtle then I'm used to. The heavy lifting is done I guess, and now it is time for the finesse. Some of it is just funny though - because it so clearly does not work and I wonder how I ever thought it did. (Which is good but still rather startling to read.)

The big question, the constant question, is if any of this book is really relevant or readable to other people. I know that some of it will be amazing to others - the dead body contract is always a shock, and the former co-worker who ran out of gas and barely got it down on the sea ice off the coast of Nome with a girl's basketball team onboard is hard to believe. They should have all gone into the ocean and it wasn't his great flying that saved them, but only the grace of God or whoever those girls were making promises to in the back of that plane.

And no, he has never flown again or forgotten what could have been.

There is the friend who cleared a mountain top by 50 feet, if that, and the friend who nearly froze to death trying to get a plane off the ground in a village in the middle of nowhere. There are my friends who hauled the frozen seal (a parting gift for another basketball team charter), the ones on all the sled dog charters, the medevac story that was pointless and the dear friend who was nearly broken by being pushed too hard, too far and too often. I still look at him in amazement when we see each other. He should be dead and everyone knows it.

Those are all good stories, it is just that I must tell them the right way so they will be read by anyone who wasn't there. My pool of people who know this world is small; it will have to appeal to a wider audience to survive and I just don't know if it can.

Beyond all this drama though, it was not all tragedy - if it was I would have lost my mind ages ago. Here is a bit from the beginning of the fun insanity of it all, the good insanity. And yes - the quote is true although it was used in a slightly different setting. That pilot is still alive also; flying for Southwest now. (And clearly more than capable of dealing with ice.)

There were pitot tubes that clogged with ice killing the airspeed indicator, forcing them to guess how fast they were going. Windshield heat failed putting them in the dark behind a sheet of ice, prop heat failed and the prop iced up or the deicing boots got so buried under ice that the leading edge of the wing looked like the rim of a margarita. Again and again and again ice built up on the wings and the tail and no matter how hard they tried to climb out of it, the ice dragged against them, stalling out the airplane over mountains and tundra and God knows what else. Scott once flew for thirty solid minutes with the stall indicator going off over the White Mountains. Lowering the nose increased the speed, but as soon as he dropped the slightest bit in altitude the plane wanted to keep going down. He held it at just the right attitude until he landed in Arctic Village and then started chipping away at the ice all over his airplane. When Frank asked him later how bad it got, Scott shook his head and said, “Peggy Fleming could have skated on my wings.”

And Frank laughed about that for days because it really was funny wasn’t it?

Ice can screw-up an airplane in countless ways and the guys I worked with had seen all of them. It makes for good stories, as long as I get this right.