Jonathan's Scrivenings

I have been enjoying Axis and Allies for almost twenty years now. I started with what is now called Axis and Allies Classic, the 1984 edition. I bought it for forty dollars (plus eight dollars shipping and handling) when I was about twelve. I had played the game at a neighbor's house, and absolutely fell in love with it, obsessing over it and mentally playing and replaying games in my head, trying to understand its ins and outs. I read the strategy guide, looked for opportunities to try new strategies, and even built a custom table for the game, something that barely fit into the cramped room my brother and I shared. I never became an expert in A&A, at best I am a fairly good casual player and the nice thing about A&A is that you don't have to be a massive board game nerd to enjoy it. The rules are complex, but the basics are easy to grasp. Once I went off to college, it was years before I played another A&A game, and in that time there had been a couple rev

So far this week I haven't gotten too much done, I've mostly been outlining. Book 1 was fully outlined in basic one sentence form, so I have been going back through the outline and tightening it up, by removing things that impede the narrative flow, and expanding the areas that help it progress.  I want to make sure that I don't have anything outlined that is just "filler" or something clearly thrown in just to pad the word count a bit, I hate it when authors do that. The goal is to get each one sentence outline expanded to a full paragraph. Then I'll do a scene breakdown, then and only then will I write the story. My hope is that this will not only keep the books feeling cohesive, but will also help me use my writing time more effectively. The outline for The Pyongyang Incursion  is twenty-one points currently, and I have expanded nine of them to a full paragraph in the last week. I also have the first three outline points done on the sequel, The Vladi

Ural-1 Control Unit The world of Soviet tech is an interesting one, they frequently were forced to resort to workarounds as they attempted to compensate for their lagging technological development when compared to the West. This does not detract from their very real accomplishments in areas such as the space race, where they led the West for years before finally irrevocably falling behind after the untimely death of their leading designer, Sergei Korolev in 1966. I recently purchased an entire book on eBay called The Technological Level of Soviet Industry, (archived 1978 review  here , there is no direct link to buy it as even Amazon doesn't seem to have it). This isn't a full book, rather it is a collection of different author's papers all bound together. I purchased the book specifically to get Chapter 8, Computer technology  which is an extremely good resource on the state of Soviet computing in the late 70s. At the time of publication in 1977, personal computers s

I haven't been doing much writing in the last couple years, I have mostly been working on other side projects. One of the problems with being somewhat absent minded and prone to chase rabbit trails ;) I have been pleased to see a handful of people downloading Rise to Revolt from Kobo and I even got a couple more star ratings for it, its sitting at 4 out of 5 stars with three total ratings. Kobo tells me that it has been downloaded about 20 times, although I seem to remember seeing something about that number possibly being inaccurate due to Kobo having a bug of some sort a while ago that interfered with counting free downloads. Is 20 free downloads and three ratings anything to get excited about? Well for me, it certainly feels good to know that 20 people tried to read my first book, and none of them hated it enough to send me nasty emails or leave a bad review. For a complete unknown's first work, one that was deliberately published on a very small platform that reaches a