Today I got a chance to sit down with David Drake and Katherine Morse, writers of The Adventures of Drake and McTrowell, an incredible series that began as a one-paragraph weekly and quickly developed into a high-traffic, Steampunk serial. The series follows the crime-fighting adventurers -airship pilot Dr. Sparky McTrowell and chief inspector of Scotland Yard, Erasmus Drake- as they solve monumental mysteries of the most exciting variety in Victorian London.

 

Speak Geeky To Me’s Adelaide Quagmire: Thanks for taking the time to meet with me today! I’ve been a long-time fan of the serial. How did The Adventures of Drake and McTrowell start out?

Katherine Morse: Our friend was going to Oakland for business and invited us to a “Steampunk” convention. It was like walking into a masquerade ball!

We hadn’t expected everyone to be so dressed up! We bought coats from Pendragon/Mad Girl, which turned into deciding to create characters for ourselves. I wanted to be an airship captain, and Drake wanted to be from Scotland Yard. He had a policeman’s whistle.

David Drake: Now that we had those personas, it was like “now what?”

KM: I was sitting in this really, really boring meeting, and decided to write one paragraph, the first episode. Our work friend, John “Redshirt” Schloman, bet me that I wouldn’t keep up with the series, so we decided to do this serialized writing thing and created a website.
DD: (laughs) The way that is started is really all from a bet. We didn’t want to lose, and it ended up just being so much fun because there’s no limit of what we could do.

AQ: Did you two always want to write? Why not westerns or science fiction, rather than Steampunk?

KM: I wanted to write as a kid, but back then I thought I’d write contemporary fiction. I thought of doing science fiction, but I can’t delude myself that the people who write that [genre] tend to have a background in “hard science”, and I just don’t have that. I’d want the science to be visionary.

DD: The thing about westerns, I grew up when they were the main things on TV. There was “Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke”, and you can just keep going. All of the things that could be said, I think, have been said already. What I like about Steampunk is you can go off and talk about social injustice or the positive side of diversity, or the other thing is that you can talk about is that people were traveling for the first time globally. They’d go to china and some natives would come back and then settle in England, and we get to really talk about that. We can make it the past we wish we had. It doesn’t have to be gritty or dystopian.

AQ: I’ve heard rumors that you might be transforming the serial into a radio play. Can you talk more about that?

KM: Krypton Radio is an online radio that streams content. They do Sci-Fi, and other geeky stuff. We met them in a Yahoo group called “SoCal Steam” and several months ago a woman who has a SP program sent out an email saying that she could mention our story on the show if I would send her a link. After I had listened to her show, I thought “What if we did actual readings of Drake and McTrowell?” She CC’d the guy who owns Krypton radio and half an hour later saying why not just do a radio-show?

It will be set in the Drake & McTrowell universe, but not directly part of their storyline. My brother is currently doing the recordings, along with sound effects and editing.

DD: We commissioned our young friend, Xander, to do the musical intro/outro for the show. In the end, it will be about ten minutes of adventure per episode.

KM: It’s very strange getting used to the sound of your own voice.

 

AQ: What sparked your interest to the Steampunk genre?

 

KM: I discovered Girl Genius at Comic-Con a decade or so ago, when it wasn’t even a webcomic. Something about it just… really clicked for me. About three years ago, the whole steam-punk thing took hold and I started seeing more of it and really got interested. Our friend was going to Oakland for business and invited us to a “Steampunk” convention.

DD: It was all over from there.

AQ: What do you do to keep things fresh and different from all of the other Steampunk stories out there?

KM: Well, everything is fair game. Something we decided from the stylistic perspective is that we’re more on the funny, madcap side as opposed to the dark side. With the darker side of steampunk, things have to keep escalating and get more and more horrible.”

DD: Sometimes we try to write the episode inside out, where we start in the middle and backtrack and explain, and by doing that, it really permits us to really feel like we’re doing something different each time. I’d say the most interesting thing we’ve done is, if we need to kill time, like if you’re in an airship, we have someone tell a story to pass those twelve hours. That way you can kind of take a breather and tell a funny or a scary story, and then come back.

KM: And I think, maybe wrongly, that a lot of people think it HAS to be in Britain and HAS to be in the same time period and HAS to be upper class. But the thing with that is that they travel. Little spoiler here: the next episode—they won’t be in the UK! Once you get past that story element, you have this enormous mountain of cool stuff!

DD: We do try to be kinda, sorta historically accurate. We put that restriction on ourselves. The more you restrict yourself, the better your writing ends up.

Below illustration by Tess Fowler.

AQ: Are any of these grand adventures based (however loosely) on real-life events? The characters in your stories are so well developed and relatable. Do you draw inspiration from people you know for characters?

 

KM: Our friends like to joke about that. “Where’s the fiction?”

DD: I want to say right up front, we try to write about places we’ve been. We’ve been to London, “Bavaria” (in the modern day region), and most of the other places we talk about.

KM: Actually the idea for the Bavarian Airship Regatta came from being at SteamCon2. Cheyenne Wright (Girl Genius) got a bunch of helium balloons made to look like airships, and you have to fan it through the obstacle course and at the end there are air pirates with nerf guns! Anyway, we won and we realized we had to include that in the story! Right afterwards we actually ended up going to Salzburg, Austria, and decided we had to do it there!

AQ: The question everyone wants to know: What’s the deal with the hot potato?

 

KM: What happens almost every time is we make a plan of all the plot points that need to be hit. We make a list of what each need to be done so, say Drake will write this about this person meeting the other person, and that explosion. But sometimes I’ll go off and instead of writing about catching the bad guys who stole clockwork parts, I decided to let them get away!

DD: Basically, it’s hey, I didn’t write that one thing and now the front wheels are off the cliff… Could you fix this? Sometimes what you can come up with is even better than the original plan, but you have to prune your way out of the situation. I literally wrote a part where Drake was hanging off the railing of an airship and didn’t know how to get down, so I threw it to Katherine.

KM: One of the side effects is that, I don’t know if you’ve done this, but we’ll go out to dinner and look around and you see these people completely ignoring each other. But we always come away with a new adventure to write, on a napkin or some butcher paper or something new to create together.

AQ: Do you have a favorite author from the Steampunk genre, or a favorite writer in general? What do you think makes their work stand out so much to you, as a fellow writer?

KM: I like Phil and Kaja Foglio (Girl Genius). J.K. Rowling. Hot potato!

DD: I’m much more visual so I go to graphic novels first. David Malki (Wondermark!) has to be my go to guy because I think he really grabs the fun side of it. He’s not this “Everything has goggles and gears,” kind of guy. It has that Victorian sensibility with some silliness.

KM: Both of us really like Harlan Ellison. One of the things we bonded over early in our relationship was something he wrote really early on: “Repent Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman.

DD: He’s the guy who rallied against the norm—that’s a nice way of putting it. He also did A Boy and His Dog, and a lot of other things.

KM: There are actually two local authors, too. David Summers—who’s an astronomer engineer—and he just wrote Owl Dance, which is really his first steampunk novel and he’s a funny guy.
KM: Also our good friend Jay Lake who wrote Mainspring. Also Paul Guinan who had a fictional robot called Boilerplate. Some teachers are actually using that in some of their lessons because it’s so much more fun to read about a robot.

KM: One of our readers is actually using some of our stories to homeschool their kids.

DD: My father was actually a teacher, so I try not to do “Here’s a historical fact to memorize”, I try to make it a lot more fun than that, but we do try to keep things historically accurate.

AQ: Do either of you have a favorite adventure from the serial, maybe one that was particularly exciting to write?

 

KM: I have a favorite story that I wrote and one that he wrote. I like “The Pecos Incident”. Pecos is a region in New Mexico with lots of trees, and as a matter of fact it is something of a western—narcoleptic donkeys and horse thieves and diplomats. It tells some of Sparky’s backstory along with the backstory of the coat. It was like a hot potato I threw at my own head. I was writing an early episode that was the genesis for the B.A.R. and I had to write something that make Sparky fly in the regatta, and I was like “Okay, I need to write this story, but because of the way it motivated this other story, it had to be really outrageous, maybe even black-mailable!”
My favorite one that he’s ever written is “Look Down” and I like it because of the way it ends. It’s so clever!

DD: My favorite one I’ve written is “Cult Pocket 1849”, where Drake is first exposed to Green Fantasy. The reason I like that one is because I got to investigate some of these deeper, darker psychological things without bogging things down. Drake, who’s usually pretty brave, is genuinely scared of this guy. Alastair Bennington Rutherford, we don’t know if he’s psychotic or a good guy—

KM: I think he’s a sociopath.

DD: Well, yeah. But it was fun because I’m writing a character who’s a bit rough around the edges. Gritty.

My favorite one she’s written is “The Essence of Romantic Comedy”, and I thought she was amazingly true with the Sparky character. She doesn’t want to be in the fancy dresses but she helps the plot move in exactly the right direction. It was funny and accurate and just a lot of fun to read.

 

AQ: If you could have any one marvelous invention from Drake and McTrowell’s adventures, which would it be?

 

KM: A racing airship would be cool. Or the mechanical surgical assistant!

DD: That would be way cool!

KM: But then you’d have to actually operate on people.

DD: I would want the electrical discharge pistol. Get squirrels off your lawn.

KM: Or the HMA Britannia, has flame cannons, a landing platform, AND stealth fabric.

 

AQ: What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to do something in the same vein? Are there any techniques or means of research you use to make the stories come alive in the way that they do?

 

KM: To rip off the legendary Eddy Merckx, “Write lots.” You just have to do it a bunch of times to see what you get and get better. I would also say don’t be constrained by what other people have written or by existing media.

DD: I heard some great advice from a teacher who once said that students come in and they ask “How do I do this?” And after that class is over, it’s not that you’ve given them the ability, it’s just like you’ve given them permission to be a writer. Along those lines, if I were to start now, what would have helped me to write was to say, sit down at a keyboard and write out some scenes that you would love to have in a story. Make a collection of those scenes and come up with a storyline that lets you have all of those together. And there you can go into other ways of writing, but that’s what I’ve found works best.

AQ: Can you tell us more about any future projects that you might be working on? Are you planning to turn this into a graphic novel?

 

KM: The e-book, the radio show, and we’ve also talked about doing some things for steampunk conventions where we would write down a lot of dialogue and have people from audience participating. Like an interactive radio show! Not necessarily Drake and McTrowell, but something outside of it. It would really be about audience participation, really fun and madcap, lots of corny jokes, bad puns.

DD: The other one is that we’re putting together an idea that we’re going to put to the Gaslight Gathering folks. “Drake and McTrowell’s Hot Potato School of Writing” where it’s more like a game show. You end up challenging people to create something that makes sense.

KM: So one team says part of the plot, then the next team adds to it, and there’s voting.

AQ: And where how is the e-book coming along? We haven’t heard a whole lot about that.

DD: We’re in the process of commissioning an artist to do some illustrations. It won’t be so much a graphic novel as an e-book with illustrations every couple pages.

AQ: Last but not least, will McTrowell accept Drake’s proposal??? Will she become the sort of bride who looks as though she “were attacked by sugar-crazed bakers and confectioners”???

 

KM: You will just have to tune into the next story to find out!

DD: The real question is will Drake survive long enough to get the answer??