Will's Good Idea for the Week of 12/18/22

The stacks:

Yesterday we catalogued 20 years of magazine writing. In the  stacks above are hard copies of almost every magazine article we've ever published. That's not counting half a dozen digital-only pieces we can think of, including three in a Russian magazine called Art of War. Look at us, colluding in the late 2000s. There was a long, agonizing gap after our first few articles were published in 2003 and December 2004. We didn't have another piece in print till summer 2006 and it drove us crazy. Our prime magazine publishing years were 2007-2012, when we averaged 10 pieces a year. 

The majority of our articles were published in Decision Games' three magazines (Strategy & Tactics, World at War, and Modern War). Sometimes we had two articles in an issue of S&T and once even three, which was nice. We had a couple streaks of a half dozen issues with at least one of our articles. Six times we've written the cover article. Sometimes we'd obsess about when the latest issue would come out. We'd go to Borders or Barnes and Noble daily to see if the magazine had hit the shelves. It was fun to buy a couple copies and say we were doing so because we wrote one of the articles. No one was really impressed though. Publishers would send one complimentary copy. 

During our prime years we learned to specialize. Early on we wrote a lot of Medieval stuff (The Norman Conquest, the Crusades, etc). We've written half a dozen articles about the AEF (obviously), half a dozen articles about the Indo-Pak Wars, and half a dozen articles about the World War II in Burma. During the 2000s we wrote a lot of pieces on Iraq and Afghanistan, from Task Force Viking to the emerging Iraqi Army. We also learned to just say yes when the editor asked for an article. 'Sure we can write it,' we'd say without ever having heard of the battle before. We'd figure it out.

In the late 2000s we worked very hard to diversify, and we busted our butt to get into Sovereign Media's magazines (see right sidebar).  Our work has appeared in American, British, Canadian, and European magazines. We published 30 articles in non-Decision Games magazines in total.

In 2015 Decision Games stiffed us after we designed the Meuse/Argonne game and put someone else's name on our work. Decision Games still publishes our articles, but they've been holding on to those pieces for years, decades even. In 2016 we decided magazine publishing had taken us as far as we could go. We spent the next two years writing Pershing in Command. We haven't written anything from scratch in a few years. Our last piece was about the Trent Affair for Military History Matters, in which we used our research about The Blue and the Red: Palmerston's Ironclads to speculate about what a US/UK war would have looked like.

Over two decades we've 84 magazine articles in print. 

Tonight the New York Giants play the Washington Foreskins. Have we ever mentioned that we hate the Redskins*? The Giants haven't won a big game in a decade. 

Below follows a few good ideas, or ideas anyway for the week of 12/18/22. Not all of them will or are good.

We'll write about writing magazine articles this week. 

The second alternate history novels we ever read was Robert Harris' Fatherland. Ever since we've been fascinated by the notion of a US/Nazi Germany cold war. We could never make it work though.

For a long time we've had an idea about a novel where Hitler makes a pact with France and invades Russian in 1940. Think of it. All those extra resources aimed at Russia. It'd be a one-off novel. [Yeah, sure-Ed].

Instead of writing, for a few days we should just sit down and research World War 1990: Norway. We had planned to be write something new with the new year. We are not at all mentally prepared to do so. Maybe we shouldn't. We shall see.

*Commanders is such a stupid name. Danny Snyder should have renamed the team The Red Tails and put a P-51 Mustang on the helmet. Idiot. I hate the Redskins. Oh yes I do. And Danny Snyder. Go to hell, fuck you.