Saturday Updates

For reasons we do not understand, in recent years summer has become for us a season of angst and trepidation. Mrs. Stroock taking the Stroocklettes to visit her dad in Indiana probably contributes to this. We say we're cut out for life as a hermit...[shakes head]. Oh hell, if Jordan Peterson can talk about this stuff...but we wonder what's the point.

We've had some success unplugging from events, but become aggravated once we plug back in at night. Realistically how many blogs to we really need to read? We say Instapundit, Ace of Spades, a check in with The Other McCain. We find Hot Air too aggravating. Good god, stop scrolling FB and Twitter. We're getting into FB flame wars out of frustration. Maybe we'll just reactivate our Twitter account so we can call the likes of Adrian Wojnarowski China's lickspittle. But what's the point of that?

We've taken to reading in the afternoon and night. We find this comforting. We're reading a series of short, 200 + page books about the Civil....er War between the States. Just finished the Mississippi/Vicksburg campaign.

On to business.

Another week another great week of sales. Overall book sales remain consistent and if the sales continue at this rate, we'll match or come close to matching what we did last month. Which is remarkable. Good news for us. Bad news for you. No book gets released until sales definitely and consistently decline. Ok, ok, we still anticipate1 September release.

We await the Nederland proof. This is taking longer than normal due to Amazon being slammed. We also did a test formatting of the Kindle version and it looks ok. Update! It will be here tomorrow.

We also await the short story compilation. Once received, we'll begin formatting right away. We've truncated the editorial process and this will only require a read through of the proof.

We have added a few more scenes to World War 1990: The Final Storm. Remember the Aussie F-111 drivers led by a Yank just come over from Europe? He shows up in Nederland as well. Reminder, we plan to finish one chapter this month, another in August before making a massive push to finish the novel by 1 January 2021.

The Great Nuclear War of 1975 is now 50,000 words. We pretty much have finished what we've written, that is, the chapters are more or less done. We want to finish the Alaska chapter and write a military chapter. Right now the low hanging fruit for a conflict is reigning in Gadhafi. The US is not going to war over the Falklands. Having something happen down there would be a good excuse for chapter about the UK.

We are now working on a chapter about the political reconfiguration of the United States in preparation for the election of 1976. Before you have an election, the state governments have to be reconstituted and that's only partially happened by the spring of '76.  After that, how do you have an election? You'd probably just have state legislatures choose the delegates, state-wide elections would be a logistical nightmare in this scenario. But first you'd have to reconstitute the state legislatures and then pass a law taking away the popular vote. Who runs against Rockefeller? Does Rockefeller even run? These are the questions that fascinate this blog. And while there is plenty of nuclear horror, The Great Nuclear War of 1975 is really about putting things back together.