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What if France Had Fought On From North Africa? Part IV
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.
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ISSUE NOTES So What Have I Been Up To? Most of this was written in May
and June of 2004. I also wrote another newsletter for August
2004. Both print versions were actually on time.
Unfortunately for the on-line versions, most of the print versions were
composed of excerpts from a couple of novels I'm trying to finish
up. There really wasn't enough non-fiction to be worth putting up
here. I decided to wait until I finished one last revision of the
first of the novels (Char) and then
write a couple of scenarios to add in before I put the
newsletters up. When I made that decision, I thought the novel
was roughly 95 percent done--maybe two or three good days away from
ready to send
out. I've spent almost all of my writing time for the last six
months trying to get that last five percent done. The novel is
enormously better than it was. It should be ready to send off in
another week or two. I finally just decided to take a break, write some things to
add in and
make a proper newsletter, then put this and hopefully the August one
up. My writing time
has been severely limited in the last three months because one of my
uncles recently died of cancer. He has no surviving children, and
enough money that
the vultures started gathering months ago as he got sicker. He
left an
incredible legal and financial mess behind, and as one of few living
relatives I have been trying to make sure his wife doesn't end up
pennyless. That puts me in the middle of a really nasty real life
'adventure', with con artists, victims, a court battle, battles of
wits, potential for violence, and all of the stuff that up until
recently I've only encountered in books. I very much wish that
this was fiction. Wish me luck on the real life stuff. Below you'll
find the original (laughably optomistic) comments for the written
version of this zine. I’ve been
working on Char for a long
time. I finally finished a reasonably respectable
draft of it and sent off my first query letter. I want to finish
up the rough draft of Mars
Looks Different in the next approximately two weeks. It’s
approximately two-thirds of the way
written—with a little over 50,000 words so far, but will probably need
another
revision before it is really ready to go. The plotting definitely
needs work. I’ve tried to hold back on new starts until I get
these
two novels
finished, so there won’t be a lot other than the current sections of
them and
my comments on last issue in the zine this time unless my
self-discipline
breaks down and I decide to write one of the three or four scenarios
I’ve been
kicking around in my spare time or to finish France Fights
on From North Africa. I put a section of Char on line several issues ago. Here's a brief summary I recently wrote up on what the novel's about: One summer evening near a
small town in Sheriff
Hart is baffled by some aspects of the case. Based
on evidence from the crime scene, Char
doesn't appear to be quite human. Her
footprints are subtly 'wrong'. Her
stride appears to be 'wrong'. Her blood
appears to be primate, but not human in the normal sense.
Is she real, or is the evidence of her
existence the result of some kind of elaborate hoax?
If she is real, where is she from? What
is she doing in the As
the hunt for Char continues, another mystery becomes apparent. While she appears to be a primitive, she also
proves adept at using some kinds of technology, including a stolen
computer, a
rifle, and later a car. At the same time,
she doesn't appear to know how to open a milk carton or how to flush a
toilet. The number
of bodies mounts, and the mystery
of who Char is and why people are being murdered intensifies. Is she 'the murderess from dimension X' as
one character puts it? Is she a poor traumatized lost
kid, maybe the victim of someone playing 'most dangerous game' as one
deputy
suggests? Whoever she is, she becomes
more and more difficult and dangerous to catch as she adapts to her
surroundings. Commentary Section: The comment section is pretty good this time, so I will put it on-line. 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 in the on-line version of these zines. 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
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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.
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