09:32 – A couple of weeks ago, Jerry Pournelle sent me a draft copy of his latest column. Because of health issues, it’s been two and half years since his last column, but he’s decided to get back into doing a regular monthly column.
I “met” Jerry more than 30 years ago, when I emailed him to point out a mistake or two in Lucifer’s Hammer, and we’ve been sporadically emailing and phoning each other ever since. During our recent exchange, I mentioned that I’d started to outline my first novel, a TEOTWAWKI reminiscent of Lucifer’s Hammer, but with the threat being an air-transmissible MDR tularemia. Jerry, knowing that I’d been following prepping issues since the late 70’s–back when Mel and Nancy Tappen were mutual friends of ours but Jerry and I didn’t know each other–encouraged me to do the novel. I’m sure he would have written a great foreward for me.
But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to bag the novel and do a non-fiction title instead. It’s been a while since I wrote a narrative book (as opposed to a lab manual), so I decided to write The Ultimate Family Prepping Guide, which I’ll self-publish on Amazon.
I won’t need to do much research, because in a sense I’ve been researching this stuff for 35 years now. I can write it fluidly and authoritatively. I’ll still do some research and a lot of fact-checking, of course, because that’s the kind of writer I am. But when I sat down yesterday to start writing, things just flowed from the keyboard to the screen. It’ll still take months to finish because of all the other things I have to do, but it’ll get done quickly and be published next year.