Saturday Updates

Gout is like a crazy ex-girlfriend who won't go away. Our case never really healed and now it's back. For those who don't suffer, it's hard to put into words just how demoralizing gout can be. It makes doing even little things so flippin' difficult. Boy were we ever in a humanistic mood yesterday. Between gout and our heart thing and various other ailments we took ten different pills last night. That's normal, right? We think we finally nailed the bastard, though.

Business.

Our new computer is great. Our computer guy is extracting the data from our old computer, which we quietly euthanized yesterday. We should have everything back on Monday. For the record, if he can't extract the data that means The Final Storm and The Great Nuclear War of 1975 are, er...nuked. We suppose these could be treated as rough drafts and re-written. We suppose we could also jump out a window.

Seven Stories is in a weird place. In our experience a book takes off right away, like Three Seas, or dies right away, like Blooms. We had to blackmail you people to move a few copies of Blooms. Seven Stories is selling in dribs and drabs, a steady trickle. We've done so well this year, the sales may just be because of sheer volume of the rest. Seriously, yo, 2020 might be our best sales year ever.

Once peaking, sales of a new book usually decline by half. But Three Seas sales are only dropping by about 20% per month, which explains the success. We think sales will finally tank this month. But as noted before, the entire series is just surging with the other five books combined outselling Three Seas by over 20%. At this point we're seriously considering moving up Nederland's release date by at least a month. As reader(s) will surmise, there's really no reason not to write in this universe indefinitely.  What's the list look like these days?: The Weser, Before the Weser, Combined Arms Army, Esercito Italiano, The Managua Campaign, Election '92, Saddam's War. We forgetting anything?

On The Final Storm front, things make much more sense if we organize chapters by nation, so there's now a France chapter, and Italian chapter, an Israeli chapter. This is all in the set up part of the book, laying the ground work not only for the rest of The Final Storm, but the post-WWIII books in the series. 

We've only written one new scene for The Great Nuclear War of 1975. We really need the MS to look at.  This is gonna be a big book. It's 80,000 words right now, and we don't want to rush the ending. The narrative will run from The Night through the second winter. The government will decided once it survives that, the nation is in the clear. From there it's a chapter dedicated to each year, we think 1977 to 1980 and that election. We think Al Haig wins. Then a future history written in 2026 commemorating the war's 50th anniversary, and a final chapter where two air Force guys reconstruct the actual war. We know the book's last line.

Our social media forays are complete failures. But now we're experimenting with doing more stuff on FB. We have a page, Stroock's Books, we'll talk about writing issues and snark on Hidin' Biden.

We think our study of The War of the Rebellion ends with the latest batch of books. Maybe in October we'll find a new subject. We need inspiration for this, a seed planted, a spark, ju-ju. We must dwell on this....