New Kindle Story Coming, Or Cashing In on the Crimean Crisis

In an earlier blog post, I wrote that if you want to write something to cash in on a current event (or a movie that's out), best self-publish it on platforms like Amazon Kindle Direct. With publication lead times being what they are, your story won't come out for months. And publishers know this--the late George Scithers, who was then the editor of Weird Tales, told me this when I pitched a Lovecraftian-Arthurian story to him in 2004 when the Clive Owen King Arthur movie was in theaters.

Well I'm going to take my own advice. Yesterday morning, using some handy-dandy maps courtesy of my alternate-history forum and MS Paint, I created the following cover:

It's set in a world I call "The War of 2020." The gist is that year, Putin's Russia decided to bite off some peripheral NATO members with Russian minorities he views as naturally belonging to Russia--the Baltic States. This provokes a general European war that Russia wins--the Polish army, the only Eastern European force large and motivated enough to be more than a speed bump, is pocketed and destroyed early on and the Russian forces advance into Germany (whose anti-military public is unprepared to fight) and Denmark to close off the Baltic to Anglo-American sea power. Meanwhile Russian ally Serbia decides to retake Kosovo and Bosnia while they're at it and Iran closes off the Persian Gulf.

Britain and France, due to their military strength and nuclear arsenals, can protect their own borders and those of smaller, weaker neighbors (i.e. the Netherlands and Belgium). But the U.S. is ill-positioned to intervene and NATO itself is unable and unwilling to fight a long war to push Russia back. NATO and the European Union are broken--from Germany east its members are folded into Putin's Eurasian Union (that also incorporates Russophilic former NATO members like Greece and increasingly anti-Western Turkey as well as Russian ally Iran) and the remainder forms the new Western European Federation.

"Albanian Gun Run" and other stories will be set in the years following that war, in which the new order is consolidated. The covers of the individual stories will be maps of the relevant areas--European stories might feature this map (with different titles of course), while stories set in Asia will feature a united Korea and a Taiwan that's been incorporated into China under "one country, two systems" (part of a US-China "grand bargain" in the aftermath of the breaking of NATO, something that alarms China too).

So far I've written 1,000 words for "Albanian Gun Run." I've got a lot of graduate school work in the next couple weeks, but I have all of May free to write before summer classes start in June. Hopefully it'll be ready by then.