We only realized a few weeks ago that the end of another decade was upon us, literally.
[He's not kidding folks-Ed]
We recall a lonely New Years in 1989, and surprise at seeing a news report on what people were worried about in 1979, oil shocks, commie aggression. New Years 1999 was an utter Y2K bust. We don't remember 2009.
In 2010 we had one novel in print and were cranking out a dozen or so magazine articles a year. That same year we determined to get published in periodicals owned by someone other than Decision Games. Reader(s) can see the result on the right. We designed three war games, Green Hell: Battles for Burma, Lebanon '82, and Meuse-Argonne, Decision games stiffed us for the last one. We've severed all ties with the magazine who published our first piece way back in 2003. Let that be a lesson to all you young free lancers out there: you don't pay, we don't play. That DG still publishes stuff we sent them five, ten, fifteen years ago is their incompetence, not ours. No other magazine does business that way. Since then we've published in Military History Matters, Military Heritage, Civil War Quarterly, WWIIQ, History, Medieval Warfare, Ancient Warfare, Against the Odds, Counterfact… We're not really interested in magazine writing anymore.
Ten years ago we got a phone call from Raritan Valley Community College about doing some adjunct teaching. We had just stopped substitute teaching at Bernards High School. Our middle-daughter was a month old in our arms when we looked at the caller ID and said, 'Seriously? Now?' We loved every minute of it. Five years ago that all blew up.
Since then we retreated into our imaginary world, not for the better. We became, we think, borderline agoraphobic. We just didn't want to go anywhere. We combated that in a big way with trips to Europe. Take that, agoraphobia!
In 2015 we started this blog, ironically, to write about teaching. Honestly, William Stroock dot BlogSpot dot com is kind of a flop, but we do it anyway.
We've written ten(?) novels in the last decade. We write and write and write, but learned you never get ahead. We'll have some resolutions on that.
We were urged to write a history book to which we replied, 'No one's going to publish a history book from me.' We were right. We published Pershing in Command ourselves and no one really buys it.
Our social media forays are mostly failed.
We learned the mystery of book advertising. It is an art not a science. One will waste half the money one spends on ads, and there's no way to determine which half until it's already spent.
We're becoming a semi-prominent person who appears in alternate media (Inforos, Global Research picked up one of our articles) and get interviewed by off-beat people (Radio-Hussar, Cindy Sheehan). We're just a tweak away from appearing on RT. We're hanging out with a lot of political weirdos...
[Hey, you are a weirdo, pal-Ed]
...We suspect this is our eventual fate.
We damn near had a heart attack in 2015 and have been to the ER three times since with chest pains. We weigh about 15 pounds less than what we weighed in 2009. We've managed to keep up our guitar playing, barely. We've picked up French, also barely.
We're a calmer, more mellow man than in 2010. We're a better man to our family and ourselves. Maybe one day we'll write about how that came about. We're a better father and husband. We've been trying to open a bit, being a bit more emotive.
We can safely put aside our long held fear that we would become fat. We can also safely put aside our long held fear that we would emulate certain imperious family members. It's a daily struggle, but we're not him.
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