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 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 the table of contents. My miscellaneous Comments about last issue of POD are still on-line, and they may be worth going through. I talk about Synthetic Rubber in WW II, Soviets vs Japan 1941,  Neutral States in the American Civil War, and Pre-Columbian contacts, then do a bad 'pseudo-hippy' caveman skit.