Will's Good Idea for the Week of 11/28/21

The second Stroock Thanksgiving with Mrs. Stroock's sisters is complete. We can put the fancy wedding china away once more. Back in '98 Mrs. Stroock and I thought we'd be a respectable couple and put that stuff on the wedding registry. We got fancy china alright, plenty of it. But we started out in a condo in Northern Virginia and then a rustic farmhouse in the pastoral New Jersey horse country. We had no place to put the china and it remained in boxes till we bought our current home in 2005. Since then, we've used it half a dozen times. We've suggested breaking out the fancy china for skeet shooting, but Mrs. Stroock said no. 

We have sent The Great Nuclear War of 1975 to the editor. January 15? Maybe. February 1 is more like it. March 1 certainly. 

While the editor edits, we're going through the Great Salvation of 1976. Probably one time only this round. This process always feels excruciatingly slow to us, and probably you too. But experience tells us that one should read one's MS and then put it down for a while. Even so, 76 shouldn't be too far behind 75. April 1 is a stretch. May 1 is possible. 

These novels are a huge risk. They're a long, winding, 150,000 word walk through a dystopian hell scape.

We feel like Gregory Peck in MacArthur, standing on the wing, bathed in red light, watching the assault transports head for Inchon and fighting off feelings of dread and trepidation. Of course that worked out. But we experimented with a lot of our nuke ideas in To Survive the Earth, and that book flopped. Maybe we're Gob in Arrested Development, 'I've made a huge mistake.'

The audience is fickle and inflexible. As is their right. So are we. Jerry Pournelle wrote a series of LA crime novels and we couldn't care less about them. No, sir. When we pick up a Jerry Pournelle novel we expect to see CIA mercs kidnapped by aliens and dropped on a medieval planet. 

There's every reason to believe readers will get the William Stroock book alert and think, 'Great, the next World War 1990 blow 'em up is out and...what the actual fuck is this? Nuclear war aftermath...Nelson Rockefeller...Who is this Matt Cooper guy trekking across the continent? What the fuck is this? Who the fuck are these people? Why the fuck do I care? Has Nuttall put out anything new this month?'

We are very good at what we do. Among the best. In fact We've even been nominated for an award. Take that, critics. We have the means to write whatever we want. Watch out for our bodice ripper in 2022, The Jaded Liverpudlian Editor's Revenge [Knobhead-Ed]. 

What we mean, is that regardless of what happens, we will write the third novel in the nuke series. This will be a collection of short stories taking the reader out to 1981, with a final wrap up story going to 2025. Maybe this summer? Maybe in just a few days? Inshallah, we shall all eat lamb in paradise.