You are the Lightening....a Spark Acorss the Sky....

At the moment we're reading about Yugoslavia, but thinking about 2543.

We've actually had something of an intellectual breakthrough on the later.

The first act ends with the Martian and UE fleets battling each other to a draw over the wormhole, though with the Martians gaining the upper hand thanks to some tactical wizardry by Martian Admiral Son Wing.

Then the aliens show up.

Admiral Wing is something of a hard case, and as the war develops he's going to have to get along with the Earthers he despises. We think the final battle will involve a hated UE Admiral holding open the wormhole while Wing leads his squadron through to the other side.

An awful lot of this job is just sitting around, staring into space and Processing...Processing....Nothing but staring into space and thinking. That's why 2019 is an either or proposition. Either we write 2543, or we write World War 1990: Ensercito Italiano. There's no third option.

This is almost exactly what it feels like:

Always there is the fire of creation. That spark, that flair across the creative night that makes one think, 'Now that's a hell of an idea.' 

There follows the buzz. The idea percolates in a pot. The idea is a hive of bees swarming in a closed space...Two divisions advancing south from Hungary....a combined amphibious/airborne landing on Tirana...the 173rd Airborne Brigade held back for the big show in Belgrade...The notion if Italian military redemption. That character whose grandfather spent the war in an Indian POW camp...That's pretty good army they have there, let's do some good with it.

Down by the Adriatic Sea....there's a place called Kosovo...that's where you don't want to go...if you're Albanian at all...bodies in the sand....Slobo waring with a heavy hand...Tanks rolling through town...bringing Muslims down....way down in Kosovo...

Let's do this.

But at one point we thought 'Let's do this' about a previous idea, and that one is already in the hopper. To be true to the idea, to ensure that wonderful spark of creation is fulfilled, one has to be true to it, and stick it out, even if the buzz is long gone.