It was 20 Years Ago Today

It was 20 years ago this afternoon, I've always remembered the date, that I finished my last paper at American Military University. The subject was the Duke of Marlborough and Professor Douglas Streussand gave me an A. He taught me a lot about history writing. Ten years after graduating high school, I'd finally earned my BA. 

Later I turned that Marlborough paper into a magazine article, the cover of Strategy &Tactics #238. This was one of dozens I'd publish within the Decision Games Magazine empire over the next decade. Other magazine article examples may be found on the right sidebar.

It'd been unseasonably hot all that week, well into the 80's. Mrs. Stroock was away for some reason and I had our rustic farmhouse in bucolic Peapack, New Jersey all to myself. I wrote 5,000 words on Monday and Tuesday and edited the paper on Wednesday. Don't ask me how I did that. At 28 I was still young enough to be too stupid to understand it couldn't be done. Yet it was done. 

This was an existential week, a transformative week. It's always stuck with me. I was utterly exhausted from a long weak capping a long year of academic endeavor and rigor.

The next day Mrs. Stroock and I drove into NYC and watched the Blue Jays play the New York Yankees. Here's the game. We sat in the leftfield seats next to a nice couple that came down from Toronto. 'You have a good knowledge of the Yankees, eh?' The husband said, and asked if anyone had ever hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium. An old timer said Mickey Mantle once hit the top of the rightfield foul poll. Euro readers, that's impressive. 

We drove up to my folks that night. Later I lay down on the couch watching TV and listened to my wife and mother whisper about me in the kitchen. Something about school.

It felt good, I had to admit, and feels good till this day.

But you won't believe what would happen the next week...

Will's Good Idea for the Week of 11/14/21

The big maple tree out front is a collage of fiery red and orange leaves.  The autumnal weather here in New Jersey has been unseasonably warm, then cool, then warm again. This has wrecked havoc on the leaves. Today is the first really pretty autumn Sunday, and probably the last. 

Well, here's something I submitted to Strategy & Tactics Magazine a decade ago, published just this week:

We found the original source word doc, last edited in 2011. I really thought S&T had run out of stuff submitted in decades past to print. We've published a tonne of military history articles in a dozen magazines. Nobody else does business this way. 

One of the advantages of colluding with the Ruskis is they publish the day after submission and pay the next month. Many a night we have turned in an article and woken the next morning to see it online. Which is nice. Actually, we published a trio of military history articles with Artofwar.ru back in the 2000s. We've been colluding for a long time. We can find no evidence that these articles exist. Anyway, don't ever change Strategy and Tactics Magazine and parent company Decision Games.

Yesterday we scrolled through The Great Nuclear War of 1975 and gave all the chapters proper headings. We scrolled through an intro chapter. A couple of chapters dealing with the immediate aftermath of the war. A couple of chapters dealing with the winter prep. The Falklands chapter. Then finally the brutal winter of 1975-76. Close. 80,000 words. The Great Salvation of 1976 ain't far behind.

Which brings us to Will's Good Idea for the Week of 11/14/21. With The Final Storm taking shape, why not put it down and let it stew in December and go back through World War 1990: The Weser? That ought to about take care of things.

For that matter, we might just be in position to start something new on 1 January 2022. What would that be?

The Monday Writer

What a month. KU reads of all books for the month of January exceeded our best month, June of 2020 by about 20%. KU reads of World War 1990 Nederland beat Three Seas' best month by about 30%. Arctic Storm had a great month too, our number two seller for January 2021. As Arctic Storm is a gateway book, that's great, great news. There's a few external factors lifting Arctic Storm sales and it's ironic as hell. Heh. Heh again. As always the Amazon markets resemble the Normandy invasion, with some Aussie's going along for the fun of it. Below, the last three months of sales. That spike is the release of Nederland. 

A few weeks ago we got a credit memo from Decision Games for an upcoming article. The memo said the article was 3,000 words long and we had a hunch which one it was. No, Decision Games can't be bothered to tell you which article they're publishing. Our hunch was right:

A decade ago we really got into the war in Burma and wrote a bunch of articles on it. A few of them are on the sidebar at right. This includes articles on the over all campaign (we designed the wargame Green Hell: Battles for Burma), Orde Wingate, Mad Mike Calvert and 77 Chindit Brigade, Merrill's Marauders, and Slim's final Burmese campaign. The culmination of our Burma effort was our fourth novel, A March Through Hell, which follows Captain Kim Taylor as he leads a combat team in the Marauders.

Decision Games stiffed us after we designed their Meuse/Argonne folio game and put someone else's name on our work. We've refused to write for them ever since. Anything of ours that Decision Games publishes was written a long, long time ago. Our last piece about the Canadians at Vimy (we think) we wrote in 2007. Before that, they published an article of ours submitted during Bush's first term. We wrote the above Stilwell article about a decade ago. A year or so ago Decision Games sent out a new writer's contract but we never returned it. Yet here they are, still publishing our stuff. That just twixes our nethers no end. In case reader(s) are wondering, no other magazine does business this way.

Which is why we've been looking for other places to write. Yesterday we asked reader(s) if they'd fork over $10 a month to read us on Substack. That's probably too high. Five bucks [or quid-Ed]. A reader asked what content we'd be generating and to be honest, we weren't too sure. Last night we had a great idea, though. Why not republish our military history articles at Substack? Five bucks sounds about like what we'd be willing to pay. There'd be motivation to write new pieces too. We could get maps from the West Point Atlas of Wars (it's a Fed publication so no copyright. Everybody does it) or have our friend Shourabh Mukherji do them. We must dwell on this.

By the way, Stilwell was a really good tactician who used pin and hold tactics to maneuver the Japanese out of their positions in the Hukawng Valley. 

Stroock to Decision Games: Drop Dead

Well, well, well...look what meandered out of the mists of time:

That's Strategy & Tactics Magazine issue #320, published by Decision Games, available now!

I wrote that piece...god I can't believe I'm about to write these words....I wrote that piece in 2003. Not the first time those...people...have pulled this.

Also they stiffed me for $400 after I designed the Meuse-Argonne Folio Game. Screw them, I'm not linking.

Just a few days after I saw the magazine this arrived in the mail:

Decorum and memories of our past relationship prevent me from unleashing a full-on broadside, but let me just say, yeah, no.

Certainly not at Decision Games' proposed rates (have they seen my fucking CV?) and certainly not after they stiffed me and lied about it. For the record, they claimed they rejected my Meuse-Argonne folio game. No, they published it. Also for the record, I contacted DG in 2015 about backlogged articles and they said everything had been withdrawn, yet still they publish me, which is, I assure readers, typical of DG's disorganization.

Just to recap, George W. Bush was still in his first term when I submitted that article. His first goddamn turn.