When will I learn?

I should never take a long nap in the afternoon. I wake up cranky and lost, and it takes me forever to get myself back on track. Then I'm down instead of up and don't want to do anything. I could have just crashed on the couch for 20 minutes and been fine, but no...it was on top the bed under a cover and gone for 2 hours.

Fortunately, this was after I got an appointment for my eye, in the morning, and set up an online chat with a techie about my Mac's capacities for the afternoon. I also had a chat with Caladex and seems the China in Print Fair will happen, next year, and they wonder if I'd be open to going.  To which I said, Yes. I'd love an excuse to get out of the US after the election, especially since there will be madness following if the Blue Wave wipes out the GOP (as I hope it will).

I've got an itch to start on Blood Angel-Franz, soon as I'm done with APoS-Derry. I know the first line in this piece. They want to kill the man I love, and I don't know if I can. The line's a paragraph unto itself. Then the story jumps back to explain what happened to bring this about. That would be the first half. The second half would be dealing with Léonidès' mistake in not killing Franz.

I show in volume two of the story that Leon has no trouble killing, so long as the person deserves it. But Franz doesn't, yet. He's a soldier who's killed other men in battle, but that's considered acceptable. How do you go about killing someone who's done nothing wrong merely on the suspicion they would develop into a murderous monster? A preemptive execution.

Would it have been morally acceptable to go back in time to smother Hitler or Stalin in their cribs, as babies, knowing what they would do when they grew into men? I don't necessarily believe that things would have turned out better. For fun, I once worked out a whole scenario of what might have happened if Hitler had died in jail or as a child, from some disease.

Germany was mess after WW1, and when the Great Depression roared it, it grew worse. There was a growing communist party, growing unionism, growing anger at the rich, still aimed at the Jews. Russia was meddling in the country's politics and, when the capitalists heading the government in Berlin took strong, violent action against the Unions and Communists, Stalin supplied materiel to them so civil war broke out.

Stalin already had designs on Poland and used the country's support of the German Government to roar in and take over, then pushed into Germany to protect his supporters. England and France declared war as Poland's allies, but Soviet troops still marched into Paris. Took over the entire continent. Japan still hit Pearl Harbor, but Russia and Japan were not allies so the US focused on the Pacific.

England could not stop the Soviet war machine because the Russian factories were a thousand miles farther away and they had the materials to keep building bombers and fighters and tanks and guns, so London finally surrendered. And Ireland danced a jig because the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

And boom -- the whole of Europe became a satellite of Moscow, instead of just the eastern half.