When the Tank Goes Boom

This blog oft quotes Neil Gaiman who said when someone reads your thing, they want to read another thing just like it. True indeed. When we finished our first military sci-fi book we wanted to read another military sci-fi book. Of late we have an insatiable appetite for The Critical Drinker. 

We're thinking about that this morning because reviews of World War 1990: Nederland are piling on. Readers like the book. That's the 7th novel in the series and folks just can't seem to get enough of it. Boom goes the tank one might say, but readers like tanks going boom. Who are we to deny the reader their exploding tank? Giving readers what they want is just good business. We are very good at what we do.

Still, writing World War Three can get repetitive. There's only so many ways one can describe an exploding tank. Ammo explodes, burns off, cooks off....And writing the same thing can get dull for the artiste, especially one of our talent and renown*. So as the World War 1990 series has progressed we've experimented with the way we write it. In Battle of the Three Seas, Soviet side characters see and describe events to us. Boris in Crimea, the mayor in Vladivostok. 

We wrote Nederland as a collection of short stories all organized around a single day. We showed the people of Klazineaveen fighting off Soviet paratroopers, PM Ruud Lubbers dealing with the crisis, etc etc. These were different ways to describe World War Three. And of course readers get more than their fair share of tanks going boom. Nederland was a bit of a risk, but going by sales and reviews** readers like it. We like it too. Look at that, we got to do something a little different while writing about World War Three.

*We think we're using renown properly.

**There's no such thing as a bad review.