JDBCOM's 2023 in Retrospect
This could be dangerous...
Like using the key below; only I can see who you are.
One new book; two Second Editions…
This Redhead, The Dialogues, shows the danger of coming to love a book as an author. It wasn’t easy to write because of the presentation, but The Muse and I had to pay attention to every line because it was all he says/she says/he says/she says, but without the “says” anywhere…and if you think that’s easy to keep track of, you try it. In the process, I came to be very fond of this one. I can only hope some of you do, too. It is, after all, our #11.
The Devil’s Own Day was the second book I ever got published, way back in 2011. I had a dispute with the first publisher, had trouble just getting paid, and they used the wrong file (my fault for not catching it sooner). The Second Edition you see here used the correct file that still needed some cleaning up, but is still doing OK. And since I’m my own publisher, I get paid regularly for it.
Crop Duster was the third book I ever got published, and I had the same issues with the same publisher with it, too. Yeah, my fault, but…Nonetheless, this one is cleaned up and everything comes to me, so…
Why The Samurai Lost Japan was the fourth book I ever had published, and is a second edition, sort of, for the first, What Were They Thinking, which is no longer available. Believe me, this one’s better.
And what’s in the hopper for next year?
Well, there’s Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan in March, an end (I think) of the Stella’s Game story, Losing Stella, maybe sometime towards the end of the year, then Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries in April 2024, and Ways of Knowing, which brings back Curtis Durand and Crest University in 2025…or so…
Ain’t like I’ve got nothing else to do…
Coming Up…
The Cantankerous Machine That Won The War
Classifying Ships and Other Floating Structures I
And Finally…
On 30 December:
1865: Rudyard Kipling is born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. A prolific and creative writer and journalist, some of the best-known quotes in English are from Kipling, including the often misconstrued “White Man’s Burden,” a cautionary, not an approving verse regarding the American occupation of the Philippines.
1941: Winston Churchill, in a speech to the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, utters his famous phrase: “Some chicken; some neck!” In the summer of 1940, Philippe Petain told Churchill that Britain would have its “neck wrung like a chicken” three weeks after the Germans invaded. A year and a half later…
And today is FALLING NEEDLES FAMILY FEST DAY, no doubt dreamed up by some guy who knew he would have to spend the next eleven months finding the needles falling off the family Christmas tree…one more reason I’ve never had a “natural” tree…