Saturday Updates

Blood, Frogs, Lice, Wild Animals, Cattle Disease, Boils, Hail, Locusts, Darkness, Death of the First Born...One dips a finger in red wine and touches a plate with each plague. Never ceases to give me chills. The recitation of plagues sounds even cooler in the original Hebrew*, like you can actually feel God smiting the Egyptians. When the Israelis launched their final offensive against Egypt in 1948, they called it Operation Ten Plagues. The Jews have a knack for really cool sounding operational code names. As the Imams say...

A fine, and shockingly fast Seder last night. Those dishes didn't wash themselves. We have a couple of teenagers in the family now, and per tradition they're allowed wine on Passover. Between that and the post-dinner sweets, the teens got a little punchy. We sent them away.

This is post 4902. According to calculations made by the Stroock families' crack mathematics team, at the current pace post 5,000 will be made on 24 July. You people know what happens then.

On to the things.

A frustrating and disappointing week working on The New American Order. The novel's opening chapter takes place at The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Here the president will be sworn in for his second term and give his inauguration address. The three scenes we want to write are written, but we have not written the fourth and concluding scene we wanted to write. In fact, we don't know what we want to write because we're not sure how to transmit the president's four points without showing a speech. We don't want to show a speech.

That being said we made a lot of progress on TNAO this week, writing, re-writing, and adding to scenes, packing those scenes with more info and detail.  

We think TNAO's foreign plot will be about India, Pakistan, and the Commonwealth leading to Will's Good Idea for the Week of 4/16/22, which we'll write about tomorrow. You people know where this is headed. 

The question arises, do we want to write several novels in the universe? We know we're writing three. In fact, we sent The Great Salvation of 1976 to the editor this week. And we have a fifth idea for a novel. It all depends on sales. As of this morning 75 is still in the top 25 of its Amazon category. In theory this post-nuclear universe could be as big as the World War 1990 universe...

...Speaking of...people still have World War 1990: The Weser. More people will have it next week.

*Even cooler in Klingon, no?