Will's Good Idea for the Week of 1/8/23

We awake this morning having dreamt of our ancestral home, burial sight of our maternal grandparents, Livermore Kentucky. Livermore is a sleepy town on the Green River, a tributary of the mighty Ohio, pronounced Ohia. It's about 15 minutes south of city of Owensboro, pronounced Owensbura. Alert readers may remember Owensboro from The Great Nuclear War of 1975. At one time Livermore was a commerce head, home to a furniture company, a tobacco works, and river shipping. All that was gone by the time we got there in the late 1970s. Our last close relative in Livermore died 20 years ago this month. But our cousins are still there, and we're in touch. There's talk.

It's Livermore week this week at Stroock's Books. Prepare to be regaled with tales of our Southern experience and a few ideas we had/have about the town. 

Randomly looking at the Ukraine situation...there's tonnes of skirmishing on the eastern border. Random thought. Ruskis keeping Uke forces pinned down in the east preparatory to a spring drive down the Dnieper toward Kiev? The Ukes have no doubt thought of this as well. As Dennis Franz said in Die Hard II, whatever we can think of, they can think of. Gee look, Ruskis are mobilizing. 

We spent way too much time yesterday thinking of ways to grow the readership. We've always thought European expansion was a good way to grow. We did a deep dive on our sales stats and found we have a decent base in Germany. Decent considering not everyone speaks English. Germany is a distant 5. Interestingly, Canada lags and is 4th out of the four English speaking nations. As of this writing 76 is ranked #97 in Canada and #14 in the US. We don't know why. Exit question. Israel Strikes is ten years old this week. What if we ran an old ad in a military history magazine? Might there be new readers to snag?

Will's Good Idea for the Week of 1/8/23. A nuclear war short story collection. We've set the stage for further novels if we want. An Indo-Pak war. A Franco-Israeli War, weird, we know, but could be fun. A short story compilation was probably always going to happen. We had ideas that were too large for 75, 76, and TNAO. Anyone else remember how the Arkansas missile base survived? Here's  afirst class tour. of a Titan II silo.* A story about those guys during and a few weeks after launch might be interesting, no? Maybe a story about the Cooper family in the year 2000? How about a story dealing with a region/area we hadn't discussed in the previous three novels. There's plenty of possibilities here and no financial reason not to do it. 

Will's Other Good Idea for the Week of 1/8/23. We might do a vignette about Matt Jr. in the year 2000. 

*She's cute, isn't she?