We've spent a lot of time reading Pershing's War: 1919 thinking, what the fuck is this? Who the fuck are these people?
Here's an interesting paragraph:
Lange, a large man in his youth, had gone fat during the war. The result of stress, worry, and time around the HQ with nothing to do but anticipate events and snack. He’d lost a few kilos like everyone else during the Turnip Winter and Von Ledebur noticed the man was back to the original holes on his belt.
We thought we needed to eliminate the part about Lange losing a few pounds during the Turnip Winter as it seemingly contradicted the notion of him having grown fat. But the last bit about him being back to the original belt holes validated everything.
Pershing's War is coming along swimmingly. It's at 40,000 + words and we have the Battle of the Moselle Heights set up. We need to write a day's worth of action and then the decisive moment. We expect more good work to follow.
We'll be submitting another op-ed to our Ruski friends at Inforos.
Blog traffic up a lot in the last week. Sales, not so much.
We landscaped the hell out of the this place with various power tools and have kept our appendages.
[Bravo!-Ed]
The Fami de Stroock is returning HQ tomorrow. Which we give us lots of time to plot.
Here's the map battle for the Moselle Heights:
General Robert Lee* Bullard's 2nd Army is occupying the map from the middle south as General Hunter Liggett's 1st Army is coalescing around Briey in the north.
That's a line of low, wooded hills in front of Metz. Those yellow pins represent high ground of 100-150 feet. A good position but not insurmountable. Not as bad as the Romagne and Cunel Heights, anyway.
At center-right is a gap in the hill line. Rushing that would be suicidal, which would be just what Pershing would want Bullard to do. I think Liggett is going to turn the Bosch's right flank though. He already proved himself capable of such action in the Argonne. Turn the flank, get behind the hills and then march on Metz from the north. Then Bullard can rush the gap.
The Bosch will be defending with five divisions on a 15 mile front + whatever's at Metz.
We think we'll be telling this battle from Jerry's POV.
*You're welcome, Harris.
For the Those in Peril sequel, we'll be doing a short story about American fliers in the Pershing's War universe.
We've been reading Pershing's War:1919, slowly, casually, about a section a day, just to try to get things cleaned up by the time we're ready to finish. Right now we have 30,000 words. About halfway, maybe less depending on how things go.
As noted before we more or less like what we see. We've been more descriptive, the scenes are longer, usually 750-1000 words or more.
One problem, though.
The Austrian Painter was about the world of 1964 if the Great War turned out differently. Its purpose was to describe that world and how much better the course of history would have been. So far, all we really have with Pershing's War: 1919 is a clever idea, well executed, a 'what if?' that Pershing himself wondered about the rest of his life.
Aside from that, what is the purpose of this book?
With the first round of edits on the Jake in Iraq-2008 chapter of Blooms we've been looking at Pershing's War.
We have written the first part of this book, about 30,000 words, and are so far quite pleased with what we see.
Once we get Polish Storm and Blooms done, we'll be in really good shape to wrap up Pershing's War.
