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What if Columbus Hadn't Made it Back? What if France Had Fought On From North Africa? Part II
POD is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. A lot of the comments don't make sense unless you've following the dialogue, but a whole lot of AH ideas get thrown around.
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ISSUE NOTES
January 2004?
My calendar says
May. Um
yeah. Sorry about that. This is the non-fiction
part of the
zine I did for POD back in January. Life has gotten
considerably
more hectic for me in the last year or so, a lot of it due to my
volunteer computer support efforts, and part of it due to letting
myself get distracted. For the last five months I've
been concentrating most of my very limited writing time on finishing a
novel called Char.
It's
an alternate reality/murder mystery cross-over that I've had about
ninety percent done for nearly two years. I
finally resolved to
give Char
absolute priority
and get it out. As a result, other
writing tasks like putting this newsletter on-line went undone, though
I did manage to get the print versions for both January and March out
on time. That last ten percent of Char proved very
demanding but I
finally got it finished
this past week and have started trying to market it. With
that
out of the way I can finally in good conscience spend a little time
putting up the backlogged newsletters. Fair warning: they're
a
little skimpy because of the concentration on Char. The
forward from the print version: Most of my spare time for
the
last couple of months has been taken up by my volunteer computer
efforts. I’ve been trying to get a Apache server set up using
Windows so that the kids can learn PHP and MySQL on it without having
to deal with Linux. I finally managed to get that working,
but
only after far too much frustration. I’ve also spent a lot of time trying to get back into reasonable shape. I have a sedentary job, sedentary hobbies, and I like to eat. That’s always been somewhat of a problem, but controllable. Then I lost a lot of muscle mass during the three months I couldn’t move around because of my knee injury, and suddenly it wasn’t controllable anymore because that muscle mass wasn’t burning calories. The weight went up frighteningly fast, sapping my energy and probably not doing my recovering knee much good either. For the last several weeks I’ve been working out at least forty-five minutes and more often close to two hours per day to get things back under control. It is making a difference, but I still have a long ways to go. When you spend two hours exercising in the evening, and an hour trying to figure out computer issues, that doesn’t leave a lot of time for writing, spending time with the family, or much of anything else. Oh well. It’s something I have to do. I did find time to do a little web
surfing, and
read Turtledove’s
“Ruled Britannia”. I also stumbled across an interesting new
research tool. Amazon has started a program called “Search
Inside
the Book”. They’ve been working with publishers to digitize
books, and make them searchable. Enter a phrase, and if it is
in
any of the books that are part of that program the book will show up in
the search, with the page number where the phrase occurs. You
can
then read that page and the ones immediately before and after
it.
There is a limit to the percentage of a book you can read that
way. Obviously both Amazon and the publisher want you to get
hooked and buy the book. It’s worked on me once so far, but
then
I don’t have a lot of sales resistance when it comes to books. Update: I added some alternate technology stuff that I found on the web at the end of the distribution. It’s not really Alternate History but it is fun stuff. Commentary Section:I decided to put most of the commentary section on-line again for the third straight issue. As I've mentioned in previous issues, I don't usually put those on-line because they are more like an off-the-cuff bull session than the stuff I normally put on-line. The last few have had quite a bit of general interest stuff, so I've included them, but do understand that my comments there are not necessarily going to be fact-checked as well as the rest of the zine.
This page has had
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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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