Why The Long Hiatus?  I wrote the bulk of this issue in late December and early January.  Unfortunately, I had very limited access to the Internet for all of January and February and for a good hunk of March.  Why?  I fell down some stairs back on December 14 of last year. The fall tore the big tendon at the front of the knee that holds the kneecap in place completely in half.  

As a result of the fall, I spent the bulk of two months 
essentially flat on my back, unable to bend the leg or put weight on it.  Making matters worse, I spent that time flat on my back on  my mother-in-law's couch.  A little bit of explanation: My mother-in-law is a very nice lady in her late eighties.  She lives downstairs.  We live upstairs.  Surprisingly, that has worked well for over a dozen years.  

Unfortunately, the injury left me stranded in her living room for over two-and-a-half months.  I had a laptop, a TV remote, and access to maybe half a dozen books.  Getting on-line meant tying up my mother-in-law's phone line.  I could only do that before seven in the morning or very late at night.  

Getting out of the house was impossible without a lot of help.  There were only about seven steps to go down, but I couldn't do it on my own.  The weeks have blurred together, but I'm pretty sure I went at least four weeks without getting out of the house at all.  Talk about feeling trapped.  

Fortunately, the leg healed well.  As of mid-April I'm walking almost normally.  I'm getting up and down stairs fine, though still a little slowly.  I'm trying to catch up on everything I've not been able to do for those months.  

This is a skimpy issue.  I couldn't do much research, and I spent a lot of time either in quite a bit of pain or asleep from painkillers. I also spent a goodly part of my writing time working on another novel.  Fortunately the March issue should follow this one in a week or two.  It's already written.  It just needs a little reorganization and then translation from Word to HTML. 

(The rest of this was written in early January) I'm starting a new effort that I hope will turn into a novel. It is still in the very early stages--more on that later. 

Columns in StrategyPage.com: I'm still writing alternate history columns for the website StrategyPage.com (www.stratgypage.com) from 
time-to-time. The most recent was an extensive rewrite of my Soviet Civil War scenario of a few years ago. I hope to have my first venture into American Revolutionary War scenarios to them within a week or two. It may be up by the time you get this if all goes well. (Note: It was delayed until late April due to the fact I couldn't get at my library. The first section should be up by the time you read this.)

American Indian Victories: I had an ambitious plan to promote it in the weeks leading up to  Christmas, but unfortunately was not able to do any of it because of the fall. Oh well. 

This issue: I have a short new segment of the multi-part scenario where Hitler doesn't declare war of the US in 1941. I may or may not get to the thought piece on how the American Indians would have developed if European contact had been delayed. I hope to. POD members will get the next three chapters of the novel Char and another section of Bear Country, They'll also get the start of yet another novel tentatively titled Mars Looks Different. It is something totally different for me. It is also something I've never seen done before—an alternate history/space opera set in the near future of our earth.

In the pipe-line: I haven't forgotten the series I plan to do on how the various World War II armies would have looked if their part in the war had gone on longer, but I wasn't able to get to it for this issue.