Saturday Updates

Good morning, Stroock's Books devotees. It's almost May but the morning temp feels like mid-October. What the hell?

American weapons are heading to Ukraine. The war will gone, Colonel Hessler style, and on and on. The behind the lines strikes on oil depots and Sevastopol make for great stories, but will that stop the Ruskis? To our eye, viewing both Russian and Western news, it seems Russian forces continue making great progress. The arrows all point west. 

Israel had a much better week than we expected. It is said Israel has made its final offer to Hamas. Military preparations for the attack on Rafah are complete. Israel won several small victories on the diplomatic front. A good week indeed. That's three in a row. What does next weak hold? 

The things.

It was a long, distracted week filled with our standard news fix, contractors, repairmen and attempts to fix the Lexington and Razorback-1 short stories in War Night and other Stories of the Great Nuclear War of 1975.  

We've made progress with Razorback-1, and we feel like the story is about as good as we can make it. The themes are all there: waiting, not knowing, walking around a $10 million facility that's useless and realizing you no longer have a job...Razorback-1 may actually need some truncating and feels like a cut or two away from greatness. 

Lexington is in a great place to get finished. We've written all the way to the Emergency Broadcast System going active. Shortly thereafter Frankfurt (about 15 miles west) goes up, as does the Blue Grass army depot about 60 miles southeast. Lexington is spared. Temporarily.  This is one of those stories where we'll think of details to fill in and fill them in. We're good. 

As noted previously, we've two new ideas for War Night. The first is about Canadian NORAD. So we'll be writing about hockey loving CF-101 Voodoo pilots shooting down Soviet bombers over the Yukon. We've got the book for it. There's gonna be a YouTube vid on these guys, right? Right.

We'll also be doing a story about SACEUR, General Alexander Haig, fighting the war from a bunker. We're quite hung up over what bunker Haig is in, and how many people are around him. We don't think that many, actually. SHAPE in Belgium is going to be one of the first things to get hit. Haig would have to be moving around, no?  We've ordered the man's memoirs. Just wait till we post the pic. Gonna be based AF.

The editor still has World War 1990: Norway. We're getting notes from others, including our Grognard who really knows how to make a nuisance of himself. That's his job. June.