Table Of Contents:

Title	Subject(s)
What Is This?	A special extra-wimpy version of the newsletter.
Brainstorming Scenarios & Mini-Essays	Off-the-top-of-my-head alternate history mini-scenarios and mini-essays triggered as I read the last issue of POD
Quarantine Without Aliens	With a few twists you can end up with somewhat the same situation as the one in Quarantine without invoking aliens.
Cross-Time Garage Sale	Someone picks up a complete C64 computer system at a garage sale, then steps back into his native time: 1938.
A World Dominated By Marsupials	It’s possible, but you have to go back a long way
When Did The Mississippian Mound Builders Disappear?	They were still around in places to see DeSoto and his Spaniards in 1540.
Soviet Dependencies On Western Aid In World War II	Western aid was more crucial than most people think
Germany Versus the Soviets in 1939	With the Western Allies on the sidelines the Germans might do better than you think
Scenario Section	Larger, more in-depth AH Scenarios
Operation Torch Delayed	Delay the invasion of North Africa by 3 weeks and you get a whole different World War II
3 Fewer Crosses on Flanders Field	Millions of young men died in World War I. Any one of them might have changed history in a way great or small.
Fiction Section	Excerpts from various fiction projects I’m working on.
West Story ( part 1 )(POD Members only)	So, who is this Sister West I keep mentioning in the ‘Exchange’ stories, and what happens to her and her church?
Contributor Comments:	I comment on previous issues of POD.
Robert Alley	Synthetic Rubber in WW II, Soviets vs Japan 1941 & Neutral States in the American Civil War
Dale Cozort	So what were the time-lines behind those reviews? And what’s with that huge table of contents?
Tom Cron
David Freitag
Andrew Goldstein	- Pre-Columbian contacts
Robert Gill	- Welcome
David Johnson	More on Pre-Columbian Contacts & Trolleyworld (part 2)
Wesley Kawato	I do bad pseudo-hippy caveman.
Ian Montgomery
Gerson Lodi Ribeiro
Andrew Schneider
Kurt Sidaway
Dale Speirs

What Is This?

This is a relatively wimpy version of the newsletter. I’ve been busy with web classes, web design work, and life. Most of my writing time has been taken up by an AOL Advanced Science Fiction Writing class. The class is supposedly geared for people on the verge of being good enough to be published, and is designed to put them over the edge. The instructor is demanding but good. She wants us to average at least a thousand words of fiction per day. That pretty much accounts for my writing time. I put Quarantine aside for the time being and am writing another Exchange story for the writing class. This one takes you up-close and personal with Sister West and her people. The first part of that story will be in the print version of this newsletter, so members of POD will be blessed or cursed with it. Both versions of the newsletter will have something kind of unique: Three obituaries of people who in our time-line died in World War I France, but who in another time-line lived long, full lives and accomplished things that changed their timelines in ways great and small. I also include yet another World War II scenario, one where Operation Torch (Invasion of French North Africa) is delayed 3 weeks. That makes a surprisingly big difference in World War II.

Last issue of POD (Point of Divergence, the alternate history Amateur Press Association, for those of you who are not familiar with it)  impresses me as one of the better issues. Kurt Sidaway’s monster AH tour guide especially looks like it took an enormous amount of thought and effort. 

Last issue I continued my ongoing effort to insult every member of the POD by screwing up their name or some other bit of personal information. My apologies to Ian on getting his last name and country of origin wrong.

In case there is any doubt, only two of my "book reviews" from last issue were from other time-lines:

·         The American League Of Nations Mandates—A Masterpiece of French Diplomacy

·         Go For The Silver—The French Invasion of Northern Mexico—1562

I’ll talk about the AH behind those reviews later. All the rest of the reviews were of genuine books, though the reviewer of the Phillip Jose Farmer book was from a slightly different time-line, one where Farmer wrote a series of stories featuring surviving Nazis on Venus. In our time-line, that’s a series that I can’t quite figure out how to write just yet, but want to just for the sheer pulpishness (if that’s a word) of the concept.

This month I’m going to try a different organization. I usually come up with various mini-scenarios and mini-essays in the process of doing comments on last issue. In the past, I have simply gone to italics to separate out these brainstorming scenarios, and done a very detailed table of contents to steer other people to them. In this issue, I’m going to make the table of contents less detailed. I’m also going to put my brainstorming scenarios, and any mini-essays I think are of general interest in a new section: Brainstorming Mini-Scenarios and Mini-Essays.