NaNoWriMo Defibrillator

Alan, the protagonist for my novel A Rain of Dust, is modeled on Arkady Renko from Martin Cruz Smith’s awesome Gorky Park books. I was stuck hard on the writing, until I let Alan call Major Pribluda, one of the characters from Gorky Park for a bracing picker-upper. It worked–there’s a sprint in this phone call which eluded me in RL, and I went on to add another thousand words in the hour after I wrote this:

He looked at the progress bar in its agonizing crawl across the screen, and realized that all this database work was just slowing dow the novel. Fuck this too.
On the drive back north he used the hands-free for his cell phone.
“Misha, pick up the phone if you’re in. I … Continue reading

Welcome to Kabul

On the 25th, the chief Soviet advisers to the Afghan military met in Kabul. They were ordered to prevent any Afghan units, which were opposed to the Soviet presence, from approaching Kabul. Those military advisers and technicians who worked with the DRA air defense forces were directed to prevent actions against the air movement of the paratroopers by taking control of all the air defense systems and their ammunition storage bunkers. The advisers temporarily disabled some air defense systems by removing the sights or physically locking them. Consequently, the Soviet air armada flew into Afghanistan unopposed. Continue reading

What Really Happened 02 NOV 2010

Americans know what the plebes around the world can only guess at–that the Constitution makes each American sovereign. Deep down, it was ramming bills through without even reading, much less explaining them, and anti-Constitutional shenanigans such as “deeming” passed a bill which had plainly not passed as an end-run against well-designed safeguards, which cost the Democrats this year.

Most Americans cannot explain this, but they know it in their bones. If the Constitution is not the supreme law of the land, then nothing is, and we refuse to devolve into a mob, which is where we were headed under the feckless bungling of the last two years.

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