An Announcement

It is now about 18 months or so since I left paid employment. I was, shall we say, eased out by post-Covid management irresponsibility and incompetence. At least, that’s my story and I am sticking to it. In my last conversation with my line manager, before I was declared persona non gratia for resigning, he asked what I was going to do. To my surprise, and to his, it seemed (it is a bit hard to tell over Zoom) I immediately replied ‘Write’.

Post-paid employment I sat at my desk and considered. ‘Write’ is all very well but it lacks, shall we say, detail. The normal response in creative writing courses to the question of what to write about is to write about what you know about.

My thought process thus turned to what I know about. Hopefully, the long-term reader of these pages will have picked up that I have read about a variety of things, even though knowing about them, still less understanding them, remains somewhat elusive. So, I thought, what do I really, really know about, from the inside (to use a possibly unhelpful spatial metaphor).

Eventually, the answer struck ‘Solo Wargaming’. Counting back the years I have been a mostly solo wargamer for over four decades, with a few breaks for role-playing games among my student friendship group, the occasional Napoleonic wargame with a friend, and so on. But, as this blog, which has been going for well over ten years it seems, shows, most of my wargaming is done solo.

Those of you with very long memories might recall a post here in April 2022 on the subject of what there should be in a solo book. At the time the idea had not occurred to me to try and write, but clearly, a seed was being sown. I would like to thank everyone who responded in the comments, which seemed to suggest that the idea was viable.

So, slowly and painfully, my fingers were applied to the keyboard. My usual mind-mapping sorts of scrawls (which the Estimable Mrs. P. describes as ‘bubble diagrams’) were sketched for some chapter outlines and some ideas were collected. Some draft chapters started to grow, and I wondered what to do with them. There seemed to be a book gestating.

To get a book published you can either do it yourself (self-publishing) or involve a publisher. There are pros and cons to each, granted, but given that your correspondent is a shrinking violet (we will come back to that) I went down the publisher route and put together an outline of the bits I had written (about three chapters, as it turned out) and the bits I thought would make the thing whole. I settled in for a long wait (used to academic publishing timescales) and was a bit surprised to receive a response from the editorial office of the publishers asking for any chapters I had so they could pass it on for consideration by the commissioning editor within a few days.

There the matter rested. Again, I expected a long wait, but a few days later the commissioning editor was in contact saying that he liked the outline and would read the chapters. I sent what was probably a rather pathetically needy reply.

That was all in September 2022. By the beginning of October, I had a contract to write the book. Rather surprisingly I managed not to get too stressed or panic, but I sat down and actually tried to write and revise the originals and, working from my outline, do the rest. In the meantime, there were a few questions about the number of pictures and maps (not many) and the timescale, which I found difficult to answer but did a rough calculation based on writing 3000 words a week, plus a bit for the maps.

I did not want the book to reproduce the blog posts. I have seen non-wargame books that have done that and very annoying I find them too. So, while the ideas in the book might come from the same mind as the blog posts, and have some of the same themes as them, it was all supposed to be original stuff.

Rather to my surprise, the book was nearly finished by April last year. It was then put to bed for a week or so before I did proofreading, and eventually, submitted it to the publisher. Things went rather quiet until November, when the jacket was designed (my idea did not work, but that is life), and then in December copy-editing happened. This is a potentially traumatic occasion for an author where all the errors, repetitions, lacunae, and continuity lapses are ruthlessly detected and exposed. Actually, I think I got off rather lightly on this – the worst was a reference to Cannae which certainly did not belong in the paragraph. I wondered long what I was thinking at the time.

January ticked around and I got the first proofs, which I returned with, as I recall, 26 errors and two or three bigger points, and, presumably the cogs of the publishing industry were turning. Then, the dreaded email arrived, the occasion on which most authors head for the hills or hide behind the sofa (remember the shrinking violet thing?). The time had come to start the marketing.

I am trying to be rational and reasonable about this. After all, the book is the one that I would like to read about solo wargaming. It has gone through the process of being written and edited and everyone who knows about it so far has been kind and encouraging. If people do not know that the book exists (or, strictly, will fairly soon exist) they cannot choose whether to buy it or not. On the other hand, whenever I have had an article published I have had to ask the Estimable Mrs P. to open the package in which the item is published because I dare not. It is hard to know which route this one will go down.

Anyway, enough of this and the apologia. I will, almost certainly, be giving more detail in the next month or three about the book, its contents, and its route to publication. It is listed for publication in June, by Pen and Sword Books, although the last time I examined their website it was not up there yet. You probably want to know what it is called and so on, so here is the cover. I have reduced the resolution to make it a smaller file, so the original looks better than this.

As I said above, there will be more on this in the coming weeks, and I will also be setting up a Facebook page for shorter comments and discussion of it. In the meantime, comments and questions are welcome in the usual manner here.