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December 2010 Main Page Mexican-American War Mark II
A big bunch of AH Challenges this time. Soviet-Japanese War in 1939
Comments Section Point Of Divergence is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. Here is my comment section. |
So
What Have I
Been Up To? I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to
promote Exchange. It’s a tough market out there. People who read it
tend to really like it, but the market is glutted and people are not
jumping at the opportunity to read something from a new author from a
small press. Oh well. Hopefully word will get around. I’m doing what I
can to help that out, but it’s important to keep writing too. Windycon was interesting. I volunteered to be on some panels, and ended up on no less than five of them, including two with Jim Rittenhouse, one with Steven Barnes, and one with Mike Resnick. Being on a panel with a big name is still a tad intimidating for me, but it’s getting easier. My goal was to get both Mars Looks Different and Snapshot completed—at least the rough drafts, before about October 10, spend three weeks prepping for NanoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and then write the bulk of a novel in November. None of those thing quite happened, though I wrote 84,945 words in November, which is enough words for a novel. The resulting novel is nowhere near done, so now I have 3 incomplete novels in the 75-80% done range. Oh well. I was probably being way over-optimistic. I did manage to rewrite most of Mars, taking out a bunch of characters and subplots, which reduced the word count by 17,000, then wrote another 15,000 odd words on it. Somehow that feels a lot like treading water. Snapshot was even worse word-count wise. I edited out a little over 12,000 words and wrote maybe 6000. All of this is progress, but it doesn’t always feel like it. I’m going to hold off on showing you new Mars stuff for a couple of issues, until I get it stabilized. The new novel I wrote on during NaNoWriMo is probably the weakest one of the three NaNo novels I’ve written. I didn’t spend enough time plotting it because I was on a roll with Mars Looks Different and wanted to keep going while the muse was in the mood. The new novel isn’t awful, at least in my opinion. It just needs lots and lots of work, including much more work on characters and a lot of research to get the little details of the time periods involved right. I needed at least two more weeks to be ready plot-wise. I don’t even have names for all of the minor characters yet. Oh well. Here’s my first try at an ‘elevator pitch’ (fifty word summary) for the new novel—tentatively named There Will Always Be An England: Twelve days after D-Day, the Germans send Britain back in time to before the last ice age. Three guys from a small US town have to reverse what the Nazis have done before the Germans overrun the Normandy beachhead, but their biggest obstacles may be on their own side. That sounds like a cross between a super-ISOT and a Nazis win World War II thing, but that’s not necessarily the way I go with it. Among the things I figured out is that even with Britain totally out of the war and even with a similar thing happening to a hunk of the Soviet Union, the Germans don’t necessarily do all that well. Then there is the little matter of where the Germans got the technology to pull off their stunt, and the price they have to pay for that tech, and how Britain changes while it is back in the Eemian. All in all this thing has potential, but needs a lot of thought and rewriting. I’ll show you a few pages of it this issue, somewhat edited. The rough draft isn’t ready for even friendly public consumption.
Posted on January 3, 2012.
More Stuff For POD Members Only What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA. POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.
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