jan.vanek.jr

Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on Books I will not write, #1 (of an ongoing series)
  Nope. I am unfamiliar with Jerome Bixby. (Googles) ... oh, It's a good life! No, I'm not unfamiliar with Jerome Bixby; I'm just unfamiliar with the later iterations of Star Drek....
• Charlie Stross commented on Books I will not write, #1 (of an ongoing series)
  There was a necessity to hold the Western Front, but given that the front line stretched from the mountains to the sea, the opportunities for "manoeuvre warfare" are somewhat limited. What alternative do you suggest? Open another front. It could have worked at Gallipoli if the RN hadn't cocked up the shore bombardment. It did work in 1917-18 in Palestine (my Grandfather was in that one; he advanced something like 300 miles in 6 months, which is certainly not the usual conception of WW1)....
• Charlie Stross commented on Books I will not write, #1 (of an ongoing series)
  The first attempt is always crap. But you get points just for finishing. (Another issue is that 50K words is feasible in a month, but it's not commercially viable unless you're writing children's literature: first published novels are in the range 85,000 to 110,000 words these days, with significantly longer stuff allowed/permitted in certain sub-genres or for well-established authors. But just getting to 50,000 words in a month means that you can certainly get to 100,000 words in three months, which is what it takes.)...
• asuffield.myopenid.com commented on Books I will not write, #1 (of an ongoing series)
  (This is all rooted in a vision I had, of William S. Burroughs as a CIA agent, and Philip K. Dick as his young henchman, going head-to-head with notorious gangster and pervert Adolf Hitler somewhere in Hamburg to find out where Hitler is shipping all the computers he can get his hands on.) Ah, I must be reading a Stross book again. beginning to awaken >from a period of isolationism, punctuated by a mbox format is bad for your health...
• Brett Dunbar commented on Books I will not write, #1 (of an ongoing series)
  The Entente had adopted a Churchillian strategy (as in John rather than Winston). Marlborough's battle plans usually involved attacking the French army, the strongest part of the enemy forces, rather than the allied Spanish and Bavarian forces. He worked on the theory that if the French broke then their allies would panic and flee without a fight, while the Spanish and Bavarian troops fleeing would not panic the French. The Entente figured that taking out Germany would cause the other Central Powers to collapse while taking out the other Central Powers would not cause Germany to collapse. The Ottomans were...