United America: 2014 excerpt
Since I have been told that cover art is only a couple of weeks away, in the interim I'll post some excerpts:

Chapter 3: Turning and Turning
Page 46

Cruising along in his F-16, one of the few that still worked, Desmond
recognized Cannon Creek Lake, Virginia, from the briefing map, and
began his descent. His co-pilot Ron, prepared the missiles for release. At
2,500 feet, the bottom of their downward run, Ron piped up, “Got the
control tower at Middlesboro locked in to laser sights,” and pushed the
button.
Desmond immediately pulled back on the yoke, climbing. “YESSS!
A direct hit! Another blow struck for the People!” crowed Ron, as the
fire they had lit grew small and far below.
A mile up, and Desmond asked matter-of-factly, “Want to make
another pass, inflict some extra damage?”
Ron scratched his chin in mock deliberation and said, “Mmm, I guess
so. The explosion wasn’t quite big enough for a munitions pile. They
might have moved it. Let’s make some toothpicks, shall we?”
Desmond never liked working with hippies. Ron was at least a
competent hippy, but still got on his nerves. Passion in battle to him
seemed obscene, taking joy in destruction. He was no longer the boy
drug pusher of Brownsville. He had a job to do now, to stop the flyoverfascists
from starving the old people and massacring the brothers, and he
planned to do it, get it done, and go home to his real work, earning a
degree and amounting to something for his family. Consequently, the
gung-ho enthusiasm of Ron and his ilk irritated him. Nonetheless, he did
his job with mechanical efficiency, circling and coming down low again
for another pass.
Ron drew a bead on a large hangar, set off in a remote area of the
airport, and pushed the button. They pulled up as the big fireball erupted,
growing so huge, for a terrible moment Desmond worried it would reach
into the sky, snatch their pathetic toy of a fighter jet, and devour it like
a piece of popcorn.
But the plane gained altitude, and Desmond regained perspective, as
the explosion they had caused became the flash of a firefly in the distance
below, insignificant to the crystal-clear stars and the moon so close to
Desmond and Ron. Feeling himself out of danger, Desmond reveled in
the joy of flight, luxuriously arching up to the heavens like a tiger
stretching and sharpening his claws. The first time he flew, a recruit fresh
out of boot camp who made the grade for pilot school at the UA Air
BEN MAXWELL
Force, he was terrified, sure he’d crash. But after fifteen successful
missions, he had grown to love his time in the air, whenever he wasn’t
embroiled in combat with no time to think or feel anything, only act.
The radar flashed an incoming missile warning. “A swarm, two klicks
and closing at seven o’clock,” Ron droned from the back seat.
Desmond waited. This was not the first time he had had one on his tail.
He waited for the distance to narrow.
“One klick and closing, still at seven o’clock,” Ron droned in his nasal
monotone. “Half klick,” and Desmond accelerated. “Three hundred
meters at nine o’clock,” Ron recited, trying hard to keep calm as the blips
on his screen became visible to the naked eye and turned into three rods
of fire, closing fast.
Desmond rolled her over for a deep dive, straight at the ground, and
the inhuman tormentors dipped down, too, though the abrupt maneuver
threw them momentarily to twelve o’clock. Mother Earth came up fast.
The dollhouses and trees below grew larger, became real. From two
hundred meters up, Desmond could see the lights in the farmhouse beneath
them. Pleading “Forgive me,” he pulled back hard on the yoke. Mere
meters from the roof, the jet reversed directions and headed straight up.
The Virginia farmhouse exploded far behind and below, and its
occupants became no more.
“YAAAHAAA! WE DID IT! WE DID IT! WE’RE ALIVE!!!!!!”
shouted Ron. Desmond was about to snap “Shut the fuck up” at Ron
when it hit. Right after the world stopped shaking like a kitten in the jaws
of a pit bull, Desmond looked out the windshield and noticed that half his
left wing was gone, and trees instead of stars filled his forward field of
vision. The forest had turned into a giant, demented top, spinning wildly
as it jumped up to greet him.

United America: 2014 by Ben Maxwell (ISBN: 1-4241-5273-9) I just finished correcting the proofs to my novel, titled as above. Next they send me cover art. Then I set up the web site and start booking radio appearances and signings. No budget for travel or anything else, so if I want to do the open mike readings in New York where all my old friends are, I'm on my own.
As you've no doubt guessed, the publisher is no major house. So if you could go down to your local book store and put in an advance order, I would be eternally grateful.

'til Human Voices Wake Us. Everything has gone to hell on roller skates. OJ is at all-time record highs. So do I give up on commodity trading? Shoot myself? My broker? No. This is neither the first nor the last time I've come to grief. There can be no gain without risk, and sometimes what you risk happening happens. So I take a page from both Kipling and Sinatra, pick myself up, brush myself off, and start all over again. Mean time, I have 85 days for the price of OJ to go down, but in the interim, that's not how I'm paying for groceries. One thing I have gained, though, besides newfound respect for the Lawrence Welk formation that I should have waited for, is a spreadsheet. I designed it to track options by the usual stuff, such as Delta and Gamma numbers, Black-Scholes theoreticals and implied volitility of out-of-the-money options. I also trace on a daily basis the volume of options traded and the open interests in each option (both the one I bought and the one above and below, and the call options of the same strike prices). This is worth watching just to understand how markets work and learn how to trade better next time. That's one thing that Kipling and Sinatra forgot to mention: If all you do is pick yourself up and start all over again without learning anything, you may be a man my son, but not a very smart one, and unlikely to improve your luck, either.

Like air to a drowning man. July OJ dropped 1.15 today, reviving my hopes for a brief downturn lasting a couple of weeks and extending about 20 cents. I still might drown, but at least for now, my hope can breath.

When Commodity Trades Go Wrong. My most recent has. I hoped that OJ would plummet, and had what I thought were good reasons for my belief. Until last Thursday, it looked like I might be justified. On Friday, however, July Orange Juice hit a high of 137.2. Luckily, I did not go short on the commodity itself. Instead, I purchased a put option with a strike price of 120. This made great sense when the price was hovering around 130. It might still be a worthwhile position, should the short trend reversal materialize in the next 80 some-odd days. I thought that reversal was imminent when I purchased the option, but now it is merely possible. Had I gone short on the commodity itself, however, I would either have hit my stop and exited by now--permanently losing any hope of recovering the hundreds of dollars lost--or faced a margin call, losing more money than I even wanted to invest. Moral of the story: Enter a position tentatively; i.e., with options. If the market goes your way, you can either exercise your option or sell it to someone else at a profit. If you guessed wrong, all you stand to lose is the price of the option. Spend a little extra and buy the longer term options. That will give you more time to be right.

Studiously Stupid News. I just answered a poll on aol in which I was asked how likely it was that civil war would break out in Iraq. This is in apelike mimickry of an earlier poll taken by the "driveby media" in which it was established that "a majority of Americans" believe that civil war will break out in Iraq. Both the ostensibly scientific poll and the aol poll, of course, have an obvious flaw: They didn't ask anyone in Iraq. It is not up to American opinion, except indirectly to the extent that American politicians will make statements to help themselves during the upcoming mid-term election. Those statements will make their way into Iraqi, Turkish, Jordanian, Syrian and Iranian ears, but I doubt they will convince anyone not already actively trying to foment civil war in Iraq to do so, nor anyone determined to do their part to hold the troubled country together to quit and let all hell break loose. The very hopeful tone of some news anchor hairdos as they cite this piece of non-news is nauseating. But today, they topped themselves. I heard a female hairdo exclaim breathlessly that "a great many people believe that Iraq is on the brink of a civil war!" She neglected to mention that none of those "great many people" polled actually reside in Iraq. She thereby crossed the line that separates mere stupidity from outright dishonesty, and several hours later, I couldn't get the comment out of my head.
A great many citizens of the People's Republic of China believe that the United States are on the brink of a civil war. I happen to be inclined to agree with them, which is why I wrote a novel based on that premise. But whether or not we have another civil war here is not up to the Chicoms. We've been on the brink a few times, most notably during the administrations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Rutherford B. Hayes, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, not to mention George W. Bush. But we only crossed over into actual combat once, during Abraham Lincoln's ill-starred presidency. A combination of habit, sensible men in the right places at the right times, and fate saved us from fratricide all the other times. Both England and China are older nations than we, and they both have had more numerous, longer and bloodier civil wars than our paltry one in 230 years. People of good will with a modicum of intelligence ought to hope that Iraq should be similarly blessed. So are these talking TV hairdos actually people of ill will who wish for mass slaughter and death in far away countries so long as it discredits President Dubya? Or are they merely stupid? How about we poll some Iraqis and find out.