The Monday Writer

What a month. KU reads of all books for the month of January exceeded our best month, June of 2020 by about 20%. KU reads of World War 1990 Nederland beat Three Seas' best month by about 30%. Arctic Storm had a great month too, our number two seller for January 2021. As Arctic Storm is a gateway book, that's great, great news. There's a few external factors lifting Arctic Storm sales and it's ironic as hell. Heh. Heh again. As always the Amazon markets resemble the Normandy invasion, with some Aussie's going along for the fun of it. Below, the last three months of sales. That spike is the release of Nederland. 

A few weeks ago we got a credit memo from Decision Games for an upcoming article. The memo said the article was 3,000 words long and we had a hunch which one it was. No, Decision Games can't be bothered to tell you which article they're publishing. Our hunch was right:

A decade ago we really got into the war in Burma and wrote a bunch of articles on it. A few of them are on the sidebar at right. This includes articles on the over all campaign (we designed the wargame Green Hell: Battles for Burma), Orde Wingate, Mad Mike Calvert and 77 Chindit Brigade, Merrill's Marauders, and Slim's final Burmese campaign. The culmination of our Burma effort was our fourth novel, A March Through Hell, which follows Captain Kim Taylor as he leads a combat team in the Marauders.

Decision Games stiffed us after we designed their Meuse/Argonne folio game and put someone else's name on our work. We've refused to write for them ever since. Anything of ours that Decision Games publishes was written a long, long time ago. Our last piece about the Canadians at Vimy (we think) we wrote in 2007. Before that, they published an article of ours submitted during Bush's first term. We wrote the above Stilwell article about a decade ago. A year or so ago Decision Games sent out a new writer's contract but we never returned it. Yet here they are, still publishing our stuff. That just twixes our nethers no end. In case reader(s) are wondering, no other magazine does business this way.

Which is why we've been looking for other places to write. Yesterday we asked reader(s) if they'd fork over $10 a month to read us on Substack. That's probably too high. Five bucks [or quid-Ed]. A reader asked what content we'd be generating and to be honest, we weren't too sure. Last night we had a great idea, though. Why not republish our military history articles at Substack? Five bucks sounds about like what we'd be willing to pay. There'd be motivation to write new pieces too. We could get maps from the West Point Atlas of Wars (it's a Fed publication so no copyright. Everybody does it) or have our friend Shourabh Mukherji do them. We must dwell on this.

By the way, Stilwell was a really good tactician who used pin and hold tactics to maneuver the Japanese out of their positions in the Hukawng Valley.