With the Protestors and Novel Notes

Last Saturday the Bridgewater Raritan School District hosted a Covid vaccine clinic at Eisenhower Intermediate School. 

Across the street from Eisenhower was a small anti-vaccine protest. A FB notification made us aware of the protest a few days before the event. 

We drove over to Eisenhower and introduced ourselves to the protestors. One attendee asked what newspaper we were with. We held up our hands, said, 'Oh no. Were not a journo' and explained who we are. We held out our phone and showed a few pics of us at last summer's Bedminster Trump rallies. 

We spent about half an hour amiably chatting with the protestors.  Organizers said about 20 people showed up overall. Out of curiosity we asked a few protestors which GOP presidential contender they preferred in 2024. All said Trump. We asked if not Trump who?  We heard DeSantis a couple of times. We suggested Chris Christie. We were met with mocking laughter and scorn. 

Yesterday we worked on The Final Storm's Crimea scenes and came away wondering if we needed to work in a Soviet POV character, maybe two. In fact, we are wondering if we should work in some sort of Soviet submarine action against Task Force Gladius and Task Force Aigle. We began the Israeli scene but really have no idea where it's headed.

Also yesterday we read the first 50 pages of The Great Nuclear War of 1975. It looks good. We added a few things to make it look better. One reads an MS a dozen times, then on the 13th read one finally see's something one can do to make one's MS better. Winter 2022 for sure.

We plan. We hem and haw. We plan and god laughs at us. By our original plan we write one WW1990 novel that advances the plot forward, then we write one WW1990 novel that goes back and looks at something that happened before Arctic Storm. Via that plan the next WW1990 book should be The Final Storm. The previous WW1990 book was Nederland (back), the one before that Three Seas (forward). 

Then there's our bourgeoning ideas for World War 1990: Battle of the GIUK Gap. We need a merchant convoy POV for that....there's always something to write. What to write in 2022? GIUK Gap or Esercito Italiano?  

The fire of creation is the best part.

Powell on a Russian Wednesday

In which we collude with the Soviets using Colin Powell as cover: 'Colin Powell died October 18, killed by Covid-19. In truth he was already a very sick man and being treated for multiple myeloma, a kind of cancer that attacks the immune system. Despite being fully vaccinated, Powell was extremely vulnerable to Covid. America in 2021 being a nation lacking in empathy, partisans are using Powell’s death to argue over vaccine efficacy. he partisans will argue over Colin Powell's legacy as well. At his death, Powell is probably best remembered as President George W Bush’s secretary of state. In 2003 Powell made the Bush Administration’s case for war with Iraq before the United Nations General Assembly. He argued that Saddam Hussein possessed vast stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction and this could not be allowed in the post-9/11 world. We know now this was untrue.' Click on through....

Back in the 90's, plenty of GOPs wanted Powell to run for president. It's possible he could have won in 1996. He would have done better than Bob Dole. But Powell never had a presidential run in him. We doubt he was politically tough enough to weather a campaign. Powell spent most of his career being revered. How would he have responded to the Clinton/Gore attack machine? Politically speaking now, this blog doesn't think Powell was tough enough to win a presidential race. On the campaign trail he would have been Jeb Bush in uniform.

We are working on the Australian F-111 scenes in The Final Storm. Target: Svobodnyy (SS-11 missiles with a range of 11,000 kilometers.) We are writing and watching tons of F-111 interviews and docs on Youtube. As one of the characters remarks, the Assies and Yanks are taking orders from Japanese AWACs controllers. We have no idea how this raid goes. The 'vark' can carry some really big bombs, like 4,000 pounds. They could at least damage silo caps, no? 

Will Writes: We mentioned yesterday that Colin Powell is a character in the World War 1990 series. We wrote the man as we saw him and did the same with the rest of the Bush admin characters that transfixed us during Desert Storm. We didn't over think things. We didn't pour through memoirs and bios to learn how Dick Cheney liked his steak, or why Paul Wolfowitz wore socks with holes in them.* Like we said, we wrote 'em how we saw 'em. An Amazon reviewer claims to have worked with these men and says we nailed their personalities. Who can say? It didn't take a genius to figure out John Sununu was a conceited jerk. As for Jim Baker, he's a son-of-a-bitch, the kind of man any good admin needs. For The Great Nuclear War series, we've gone deeper into Rockefeller's personality as readers will see the man more intimately. He liked art, women**, couldn't remember names, demanded subordinates offer solutions to problems, and would do work in the car outside the officer before heading to work. Our overall message here is don't over think. Just write.

What Will's Watching: Loudermilk. Two episodes in. Ron Livingston (Office Space, Band of Brothers) plays a former rock journalist. In the 90's he was totally a thing, riding the tour bus with Nirvana, Pavement, REM and the like, and looking the part. Now he's four years sober and burnt out. Filled with Gen-X cynicism and nihilism. This is Gen-X in middle age, a Gen-X Archie Bunker with wit.  Why yes, yes we will finish this season. Why do you ask?

*You're just gonna have to look that up.

** Just look up how he died. Heh.

Monday Metal and GnR wrap up

Very little sportsball yesterday, though we did catch the end of the Pats and Bucs last night. Instead we took the girls to one of those 1770s reenactor thingies. There's plenty of that stuff here in New Jersey, as one might imagine. This one was held at Stirling Manor. Lord Stirling (William Alexander) was one of Washington's best generals and something of a swashbuckler. Stirling was extremely loyal to the general. Of course Stirling was a Scot. You don't mess with North American Scots. Ever. As General Gage once said of the Rebels gathering atop Bunker Hill, 'They're a crazy Presbyterian lot out of the woods.'

October is the home stretch month for The Great Nuclear War of 1975. We intend to put the MS in formal production on 1 November. Maybe 15 December for release? Maybe. We're a tad frustrated that we may not get a book out this year, and probably won't. Then again we got three books out last year and this just means we'll get four books out next year. You people will be fine. Time to put on that 80's training montage and get to work. 

Will Writes*: Don't ever listen to anyone who says, 'This is what all writers need to do.' That's total, absolute crap, probably given by someone who teaches creative writing (don't get us started on them). All writers are different. There's one rule, only one: write every day. You can take the weekends off if you want. Everything else is negotiable. 

Today is Monday which means Monday Metal, which means it's time to wrap up our Guns and Roses discussion. For our final video, here's You Could be Mine, the first track released from Use Your Illusion. YCbM was also included in the Terminator 2 soundtrack. The song was important enough for Schwarzenegger to appear in the video:

YCbM is another punch in the face from GnR. Behold the viciousness and ferocity. YCbM is a throwback and it'd be just fine on Appetite for Destruction. We'll have a few final thoughts on the band later in the week. 

*A new semi daily thing in which we parcel out wisdom accrued from 30ish years of writing. 

Will's Good Idea for the Week of June 6th

Yesterday we took the girls to the swimming pool we just joined. Everything was shockingly normal. Of course we were the best looking dad there. Everyone got away un-burned. Then we got dinner at the local diner. We topped the night off with an Arturo Fuente and a bottle. A nice day overall. 

Here's where The Fauci Flu stands in New Jersey: New Jersey on Saturday reported another 293 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and an additional eight confirmed deaths, as the virus continues to ebb and the state continues to return to normalcy 15 months after the pandemic began.

We have researched the Rebel Yell and even found footage of it on YouTube. The best we can come up with is 'Heeeyaaaaaaawwww!' We're not sure it can be rendered in print. We might simply write, 'He gave a rebel yell.' Demons from the gates of hell indeed. Longtime readers know this blog holds no truck with the CSA, but that's pretty cool. We'll be using it in The Weser.

We had a great day thinking about The Weser and we know how our NG ACR gets to France, why it's in Europe so early (politics) what it does, and what it's gonna do in battle. It'll advance up the left bank of the Weser and cross over to make the Soviets think that's the spot where the counterattack is headed. It's not. Also, we think our ACR has an emergency commander, a regular army officer, African American, from up north (Chicago?). Reader(s) can see where we're headed with this. Who really commanded the 278th ACR in 1990? We've no idea. We think we'll just make up a regiment. It's a nice creative opportunity.

The next big intellectual challenge...

[You're challenged alright, knobhead -Ed]

...thank you, is working out the East German division. Who's our POV character and how far up is he? Maybe just the CO?  The division is definitely attached to a Soviet army. What's they're arc?

Below, your supplemental Friday Flag for the 6th of June:

Saturday Updates

What a week. We blogged up a storm and wrote about Joe more than we meant to. But it was a good week of blogging. Next week, the GOP, Trumpism and some hard truths.

We hit our ego's sweet spot by publishing two things in two different places. Behold our regular bit of Russian disinformation at Inforos and another what if at 19fortyfive.  We titled it, 'What if Hillary Threw the Book at Bill?' But editors will edit, as is their wont. Oh well. By the way, the editor at 19fortyfive wants us to write a retrospective what if on Trump's second term. The clickbait potential is enormous but we feel it may come off as MAGA wish-casting. Only a writer of great talent and skill such as ourselves could pull this off. Challenge accepted.

Sales soar, like a Phoenix rising out of Arizona.  Nederland will top Battle of the Three Seas' best month. Overall January is on track to be our best month ever. Thank you, back list. You people really love World War 1990. It's almost as if the more you write, the more people read you. Huh.

We had a pretty rough week on the novel writing front. The Great Nuclear War of 1975 is now 66,000 words.* All of our work was about the UK, Argentina and the Falklands and the chapter is really shaping up nicely. Readers will see Whitehall, HMS Swiftsure, an Argentine task force, and a supply convoy bound for Los Angeles escorted by the Belgrano whose skipper is a war skeptic. See what I did there?

We only got a couple of rough scenes done in The Final Storm. We Lopped off the Georgia opening blockbuster so the MS is not so unwieldly. Georgia will go back in when the MS is done. Not blitzkrieg but trench warfare.

*We split the MS in two, remember. The other half is 55,000 words. If I can give you people a pair of 70,000 word novels at the regular $4.99, that's fair. And there will be a third. As Neil Gaiman has said, my only responsibility to the fans is to take their money.

Will goes Legit?

Since the spring of 2019 we've written, I dunno, nearly fifty columns for Inforos. That's a lot of Soviet....er, Russian disinformation. 

We have good reason to write for Moscow, the most important being they'll have us. Also, we like getting that email* from the editor (lets call him Vladimir) asking what we're going to write for him that week. It's nice to be wanted.

Our GRU handlers have remunerated us handsomely and we feel nothing but elation when 'Ivan' hands us the envelope full of rubles. But those midnight dead drops are really stressing us out.  We see strange cars in the rearview, there one moment, gone the next. We hear choppers in the sky but can't see them. Why would they fly with their running lights dark?

Maybe it's time to move on. We think we can get pieces published in other online venues, American ones. Maybe? Who wants a Russian stooge like us, right?

'Watch out for those weirdos,' they say. 'We are the weirdos,' we reply. We have degrees but both were earned online. We publish novels but do it ourselves. We have social media accounts, but they're at places like Gab. We've been quoted by major media outlets, heh, major Russian media outlets. See what we mean? So in our estimation, Inforos fits right into the Mos Eisley Cantina that is our career.

Why become respectable now?

*We used to FB message but Zuckerberg nuked everything Inforos

On Keeping Your Day Job

We have a good friend who is in the arts and the other day he asked us  how we went about leaving the work-a-day grind and pursuing  our passion. After hitting the laugh-track button because we didn't feel our own laughter was mocking enough, we said, 'Oh, my sweet summer child,' and told him we'd talk.

This weekend we met in the cool Saturday night, and over wine, whisky and cigars explained to our friend the facts of our writing existence. The facts are cruel. The facts are ugly. The facts are that we have two part time jobs, writer and Mr. Mom. Ok, writing is a full time job with the part time Mr. Mom work added to that. Still...we're writing this as we anticipate middle and youngest daughter getting home from school. We have to drop youngest daughter off at dance and then pick up the stuff we need for chicken Marsala tonight.

A lot of naïve fools have romantic ideas about the writing life. We know we did. We're not in a beach bungalow pounding away on our Olivetti while our beautiful young 'editorial assistant' edits copy.* ** We're a middle-aged suburbanite man who keeps house between paragraphs and operates a first rate taxi-service. 

We can live the 'writing life', out on the back deck, cigar and bottle of Chianti, perhaps once a month.

We advised our friend against quitting his day job and recommended he pursue his passion at night and on the weekends. We're glad to say that through the smoke and alcohol haze we saw him listening intently.

It's the smart play. And now we hear the bus...

*Thanks Robert Stacey McCain. Also, we used to have a beautiful editorial assistant.

Dear Critics: We Write what we Want

Over at Chris Brecheen's Writing about Writing, a controversy about writing and J.K. Rowling and a  critic who told her to stop writing Harry Potter.

First we're going to ask a question of ourselves and then answer it.

Why do we write?

Easy, we get an idea and think it would be cool to turn it into a novel. This gets us into a lot of trouble. World War 1990 was supposed to be one book. One. But the ideas just keep coming. Hmmm...Cuba...hmmm...The Netherlands...

And so we make that idea happen.

Besides, the WW1990 books sell. If you think we're working on books focused on a single nation to break into that nation's market, well, that's we're you're right...Esercito Italian...NL...

Israel Strikes did so well we wrote a sequel, which also sells.

Brecheen lays it down for critics:

First of all, JK Rowling doesn't write for other people. She loves her fans, but you can't rightly say that she writes for them. She doesn't write for her editors. She doesn't write for her critics. She doesn't write for money. She certainly doesn't write for the careers of upstart writers such as yourself.

Rowling writes for the same reason writers have written since the dawn of language. Because our soul burns to write and without it we would die. She writes because in a very real way, she doesn't have a choice. She sits down for eight to twelve hours a day (according to her own interviews) and creates something with the same impetus that drives artists the world over.

In the end, we write for ourselves. There just happens to be a lot of people like us who want to read the books we want to write because we write what we want to read.

This is how and why we wrote our first novel, begun with a sudden overwhelming drive to create:

I Appropriate Literally

Larry Correia  (PBUH) has a long and interesting post about sensitivity readers and the PC mob taking over young adult fiction.

Nut-sentence, a mob of screeching SJW harpies bullied an author into withdrawing his book.

There is a stupid idea floating around the lit community*, that one can only write about people if they are those kind of people. So if you're not Hawaiian you shouldn't be writing about an alternate history Hawaii, as we are this very moment.**

This idea is intentionally dumb. Willfully stupid.  Purposefully idiotic. It requires a hell of a lot of time in a women's study program to believe this. And you'd have to have an MFA in creative writing to cave to these Future Crazy Cat Ladies of America.

So far the FCCLAs don't seem to be aware that indy publishing exists, blessedly. Or maybe not. Just from a marketing standpoint drawing the ire of a dimwitted women's studies major seems like a good idea. We don't care what these people do to us on twitter. Our twitter account is suspended anyway.***

We did once get grief from a veteran of  73 Easting over A Line through the Desert. 

We don't care. We write what we want, about whomever we want.

*So glad we're not a part of it.
**We think there's a better than 50% chance our story contribution gets sandbagged for this very reason. Whatever.
***#learntocode.

That two Year Written Difference

We wrote large swaths of The Final Storm when a relative was getting a tumor zapped in 2016. Now were editing The Final Storm while that same relative is getting a different tumor removed.

The interesting thing about what we wrote in 2016 was that we liked it then, but not now.

[Whoa....awkward sentence-Ed]

Thanks.  These scenes have sat in limbo for over a year. As mentioned before we wrote them when two books were merely one. So the scenes in question just do not do what we need them to do. They need re-writing and beefing up.

This is what we did to Polish Storm, where the Battle of Point Wilderness was simply witnessed by a pair of grunts counting tanks advancing past their pos. 

This spring we wrote three new chapters to show that battle.

The bottom line is that work that satisfied us in 2016 does not satisfy us now.

Exit question: will work that makes us happy in 2018 make us happy in 2020?

Half Finished

Sarah Hoyt talks about half-finished novels:

Sometimes your novel dies.

You know precisely what I’m talking about. You’re standing there – well, usually sitting, but I do have a standing desk – typing away, the novel is going great guns, and suddenly… nothing.

There was life there, a spark of interest, you knew what was going to happen next chapter, and you were dying to write it and unfold every nuance. And suddenly there’s nothing you’d rather do than clean the kitchen, scrub the toilets, or even rotate the cat.

Worse, when the desire to write strikes, it’s always a new and shiny thing...

We know exactly what she means.

When we started Pershing's War:1919 we saw Chauchat armed Doughboys hammering away at German trenches. 30,000 words later... we see nothing.

This is when you find out if you're really a writer. When the gleam is gone, when the buzz has left, can you keep on going to the finish?

Fortunately, we've been at this a long time. So we're not really worried.

Writing Patton's combined arms attack in the Ruhr should be fun.

Writing and Selling

The prolific Sarah Hoyt talks about technology, change, and selling books. She makes a point which we endorse to the fullest extent possible. Of selling books Hoyt says, 'One thing that seems to work is writing a lot.'

Agreed.

The more you write the more you sell. We noticed this with magazine articles. The more we turned in work, the more work publishers wanted turned in. We'd write a piece on Orde Wingate, next thing we'd know a magazine would want a piece on Slim in Burma. Do a lot of work on the Israelis and the magazine would want a piece on 'the other side of the hill' which led to a fun article on the Arab Legion.

We write novels. We hire people to edit them. We have other people proof them. We hire people to design the covers, usually.*

As far as traditional publishing goes, don't know, don't care. 

Conventions? Never been to one.

We don't even advertise anymore. Not one dime. The Austrian Painter just got its 14th review, also 5-stars, so we must be doing something right.

*We did To Survive the Earth, War of the Red Sea, and Israel at War.

What Would we do, Exactly...

...If we weren't writing?

Over at Instapundit, the indefatigable Sarah Hoyt writes:

QUITTING DRINKING IS EASY, I’VE DONE IT HUNDREDS OF TIMES:   Heavy drinkers can’t quit booze even if they want to, study says.  (Of course, I’m not a heavy drinker.  But I’ve had similar issues with writing.  The longest I stayed quit was two weeks, at the end of which I had cleaned everything that stood still long enough, including boys and cats, and the entire family begged me to resume writing… and leave them alone.)

Uh, yeah.

It's 8:06 on a Sunday morning and we're writing this. After this we'll go to work on Pershing's War: 1919 for a while. We're also fighting off the urge to go finish up a pair of magazine articles we've been working on.

We're headed to Manhattan today and we'll spend that car time plotting, also ogling Mrs. Stroock in her skinny jeans and boots, but mostly plotting...

We do lot's of research at night in front of the TV with the kids. And in between bouts of cleaning we plot more.

Honestly, we don't feel very good at night unless we've given maximum writing effort.

That's how you get this job.

Creative Hell and the Fire of Creation

So we're going through the World War 1990: Anzacs proof.

This is the worst, absolute worst part of writing.

Making it worse is editing The Austrian Painter, not to mention Whatever Happened to Jake and Patricia Bloom, and World War 1990: The Final Storm.

They're all next and we're unwilling to start something new while those are sitting around.

So this means no percolation, that wonderful period of ideas where we sit around, in the car, at services or a kid's recital and think about the book. Battles swirl overheard, cabinet meetings play out, orders of battle come together.

It's a wonderful feeling, a creative fire, and right now its not happening.

We hate that.

Here's the Anzacs cover, for the hell of it:

The Grind

We write, all day, everyday. If we're not writing fiction we're working on history, or this blog, or the wargames we design.

We've gotten up, written for a couple of hours and then buried close relatives. 

It's what we do.

It may not be a real job, but man its a grind.

We could never work this hard at the job before. The implosion of our professorial career doubled the available time we had to write. We've taken advantage.

This year has been the hardest we've ever worked as a writer. Hard in that we've cranked out something like 300,000 words and hard in that its been tough to write those 300,000 words and tough to edit. ANZACs is done of course, so is the Final Storm, so is The Austrian Painter. Whatever Happened to Jake and Patricia Bloom is almost done.

Right now we're going through the last, absolute most final draft of World War 1990: ANZACs and it absolutely sucks. We've read this thing a hundred times. We've written, re-written, edited, re-edited, proofread, re-proofread and are now re-re-proofreading. All for a novel that did not turn out the way we wanted and frankly we have doubts about. And still a few typos will sneak through.

And when this is done we're going to turn around and it all over again for World War 1990: The Final Storm.

That's the gig.

This is pretty accurate

Percolating

One of the ways I write is to sit back and let the idea percolate in my head. It's images mostly, right now I'm seeing a line of Australian Leopard Tanks along the tarmac at Haiphong International Airport. Opposite the Aussies are masses of Vietnamese tanks readying for a desperate counterattack to reclaim the airport.

The idea bubbles and simmers and becomes solid and takes form and the battle unfolds.

I do this with plot and character too.

Also percolating is Patricia Bloom's thirty eight year old character, sitting on the back deck of her Sarasota home, sadly strumming her guitar, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. She's going through an epic conflict with her neighbor, worried about her teenage daughter who is absolutely smitten with her boyfriend, and wondering if the long times of separation with Jake will ever end. 'Don't ever fall in love with a soldier,' she says out loud.

It's really an all day, everyday process. If I'm sitting in a doctors office, I'll be imagining story lines. I've been doing this since I used to get sent to sit on the Black Cushions at Furnace Woods Elementary School. I am never bored.

Today my family and I will be driving into Manhattan for my Barbara Carroll's funeral, my grandfather's wife. Along the way,, well....

Looking into the Cabinet...

....That's actually a line from 'Shelter' by the 80's hair metal band Cinderella. Very underrated by the way but that's a subject for another post. Frankly I have no idea what 'To look into the cabinet it takes more than a key' is supposed to mean.

Anywho I've noted before that once again I'm writing about furious cabinet sessions and the like. I've sworn that one day I'll write a novel that doesn't have exploding tanks (hasn't happened yet) but it might be more interesting if I wrote a novel that doesn't have cabinet meetings.

Actually Castro's Folly doesn't have many, that's for sure. It was originally conceived as ground level view of things, and it is for the most part. We see Cubans on the ground in Nicaragua and Africa, South African tankers, Contra commanders, Honduran Army captains, and the like

I dunno, I just think a cabinet meeting is a good way to show what's happening and move the action along.

Another problem of redundancy is the combat itself. There are only so many ways to describe an exploding T-72. Doesn't the reader say to himself , 'Oh look, another turret spiraling into the air...' Maybe the reader doesn't. Its not like I said, 'What more X-wings! Goddamn it!' when I saw Return of the Jedi the first time.

In fact, back in the 80's and 90's, before the internet and Amazon or even Borders, I'd scower the book shelves looking for mil-sci fi. The 20 such novels I had read wasn't enough. I needed twenty one.

So maybe my readers need more furious cabinet sessions where President Bush is torn between the Hawkes like Kristol and Wolfowitz and the doves like Baker, where Maggie Thatcher is berating her poor subordinates, where the Politburo sees events slipping out of their control.

Enjoy!