2025: A Year In Review
It's been one, ain't it?
Like using the keys below; only I can see who you are.
Well, we started off kinda sad after losing my long-time editor and buddy, Frank last September, but we published the last book he edited on 6 April: Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries.
Battalion got a rave review on Roads To The Great War, where David Beer said:
There is much to recommend this historical novel. Despite some unfortunate over-italicizing in the text, I found Steele’s odyssey from the Mexican border to the end of the Great War a captivating and informative read full of fascinating characters and insights into the workings of a wartime American army machine gun company.
I admit to an excess of italics; call it a quirk I need to address.
But Ev and I spent most of the summer with a man-made disaster in our backyard. The prime contractor told us they would finish demolishing our old deck, pouring a new patio, building a new back entry and leveling out the lawn in two weeks. Work began in mid-May, and didn't finish until after Labor Day. The delays were for the electrical inspections (the power to the garage had to be moved), the deck inspection (don’t ask), and one contractor’s equipment failures.
During that time, I finished The Persistent Past: Discovering The Steele Diaries. It’s the first book I wrote that Frank never read, written in parallel with Battalion, and it’s about how Curtis Durand researched and wrote Battalion.
You all remember Curtis, don’t you, from The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas?
This was the first year I published two new books. Some year to remember.
And Finally...
On 27 December:
1864: The remnant of the Confederate Army of Tennessee under John Bell Hood begins its two-day crossing of the Tennessee River at Bainbridge, Alabama. Having been shredded at Nashville on 15 December by the Union forces there, the Army of the Tennessee numbered fewer than 12,000 starving, footsore men.
1968: Apollo VIII returns to Earth, splashing down in the North Pacific Ocean southwest of Hawaii at 5:51 in the morning, local time. The first human orbital mission around the Moon succeeded, concluding a most turbulent year on Earth; another year to remember.
And today is NATIONAL ABIGAIL DAY, for all those Abigails out there, of whom I know…none; and I can never recall meeting one. Not even an Abby. Huh…