Our work used to be motivated by hope. But now it's fear that keeps us going. Fear that we're not showing soldiers interacting with their environment enough. Fear that we have the 12th Guards Tank Division advancing down CORRIDOR when we meant to have the 47th Guards Tank Division advancing down CORRIDOR. Fear that we missed opportunities. Fear that details are wrong. Which is why we're considering reading through World War 1990: The Weser again this week. Yesterday we discovered we need to add an Apache scene. No biggie. We'll write it this morning.
For that matter, we gave The Great Salvation of 1976 a print readthrough last week. What are we waiting for? Why haven't we turned it over to the editor? Reading the print copy left us with a nagging feeling that the ending wasn't all it could be. We shrug. We don't know what else to add.
The Great Salvation of 1976 is not as bleak (a word used by more than one Amazon reviewer) as The Great Nuclear War of 1975. There's hope in the beginning of 76, a sense of people climbing out of the rubble and rebuilding. Why the weather is warming up in Casper. Readers will see vignettes on same, the Alaskan pipeline operation, the Korean War, the presidential committee, Matt getting to where he's going. What else? As we've said before, at some point, one has done all one can with one's project and one must needs be done with it.
Hmmm...our 3rd nuke book concept of one story for each year doesn't look like it's going to work. We may have to expand that to one theme each year: Warlords, a foreign war, etc etc. Here's an idea, empty houses, squatters, and who owns what? We even have a scene, a sheriff patrolling an abandoned suburban housing development. We can't build an entire chapter around squatter's rights, can we?
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