Dale Cozort's Alternate History Newsletter 

Volume 7: Number 1 --- January  2004

 


What if Columbus Hadn't Made it Back?

Neanderthal England?

What if France Had Fought On From North Africa? Part II

Scenario Seeds

Review: Ruled Britannia

Review: Creek Country

Best of the Comment Section

Alternate Technology


Main Alternate History Page


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.  

     

 


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 hits since I posted it on May 22, 2004.

 

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.