Episode #262: Casually Moving From That To This

No hidden meaning behind the pic. Just pining for the warmer weather of Spring after battling the nasty cold of Winter.

I have officially put my five volume fantasy series "Sister vs Sister" to bed, as the final seven chapters {113-120} was properly transcribed, printed, three hole punched, stashed in a three ring binder, and had the requisite editorial notes written on their formerly pristine pages before it was lovingly tucked away in a plastic milk crate so that it could rest up for the next few months, because as you all know, editing is where the wannabes are brutally separated from those who are.

Of course, the issue now facing me is...what do I do next? I mean, I just spent 2 1/2 years working on a project that theoretically took over every waking moment of my life, and now I'm just supposed to find something else that would also take over every waking moment of my life?

The obvious answer to that question is supposed to be a resounding YES. But to be perfectly frank with everyone, the well has run temporarily dry when it comes to churning out fresh new product.

But, even though the well has run temporarily dry, I still got something up my proverbial sleeve that I can work on. Something that I actually finished work on around 2 1/2 years ago, when I had finished up a second round of edits, and just before starting my fantasy series: a re-re-re-re-worked novella that actually has the working title/blog tag of Average American Novella.

Funny thing about this novella, which is a fast-paced fantasy crime drama of the R rated variety, is that throughout the entire time I was writing it, it felt like I was possessed by it. No, seriously, I think I was possessed by the story itself. I mean, once I was finally able to find a good plot line to work with, {on the fourth try, hence the re-re-re-re-work} it just...took on a life of its own.

I mean, the time that I had spent on this novella just seemed to fly on by, especially when I did the switch to handwriting the final nine chapters. Now that I had some time to reflect on it, I made the switch from straight computer writing to pen and paper midway through because the hand fatigue that I was suffering for the past several years was getting progressively worse, so I figured it was time to try something new. And, as the tired cliche goes, the rest is history.

My goal with this novella is to have it published in 2025, so to that end, we're starting off the process by applying another round of edits and printing out a fresh copy to play with. Once that's been done, the next trio of issues that I will need to tackle, which are the usual bane of any writer's existence: a title; a medium length blurb; and a short length blurb.

There are few other issues that I will need to spend some time on, but those three are the main ones that will require my immediate attention once I get everything printed out again. While not completely taking over my life like my fantasy series did, it will demand just enough of my attention to keep my writer's brain from atrophying through non-use.

Tune in next week when I should have a better idea on what I need to blog about in regards to this novella, since the last time I had blogged about it was nearly 3 years ago. But hey, redundancy can be a good thing, right?

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #261: The Winner For Strangest Non-True Crime Book Read Is...

The star of today's post for strangest book read.

Simple question for everyone perusing this post: What is the strangest book that you've ever read?

Caveat: Only non-fiction non-true crime choices.

Reason: We all know that fiction and its wonderful genres, sub-genres and sub-sub-genres can be...strange to a certain degree to everyone. So trying to come up with a fictional title that would qualify as strange would be quite difficult, because someone else's strange is someone else's normal. So fiction is eliminated because it's difficult/nearly impossible to come up with a viable choice that people can agree upon.

But non-fiction, that's a whole other pork pie. Because with non-fiction, you can generally come to a consensus about the strangeness/oddity of a given book. And trust me, since the heady start up days of the printing press back in the 15th century, non-fiction has always had that special singular ability to churn out some really odd choices for reading material. Also, no true-crime, because that is a whole different zoo of its own and I want to keep everything at least PG-13 or lower.

Pivoting back to me. I've always held a deep fondness for the non-fiction genre, as it was the very first overall genre that I had fallen in love with as a child and is the only genre that has stuck with me in for my entire life. No matter what sub-genre that has sprouted from it over the decades, I've probably sampled at least one from those sub-genres.

Over the years, especially in the past few, I've read some very quirky non-fiction titles over an assorted range of topics: animals {ex. barn owls}, historical events {ex. the Oregon trail} and national parks {ex Yellowstone}. But the subject of today's post has to be the strangest one that I've encountered and read by far: the Oxford English Dictionary.

This one I came across at my local library's gently used books store during my continuing adventures of finding a book for nearly any topic under the sun*, and this one really piqued my curiosity that I was more than willing to shell out $4 USD for it.

*for those of you who may be first time readers, I've been on a journey to prove a theory that you can find a book for any topic that you can think of. I have purchased several very odd books in support of that theory, of which three are mentioned above.

The premise of the book is pretty basic: it's about the people who help create the Oxford English Dictionary (this monstrosity was begun in the Victorian era and the main body was completed in the 1930's, with addendums being produced throughout the decades afterwards), with the chapters being broken down by the type of people involved (much like Sue Grafton's Alphabet Mysteries).

To give you a basic idea on how they were broken down, here is short list of four chapters:

1. P is for Pornographers
2. Q is for Queers (male or female)
3. R is for Rain Collectors
4. S is for Suffragists

Now, while these categories sound very odd, you have to remember that the bulk of the OED was originally created during the Victorian Age, so you know how publicly prudish/morally uptight (for letters P & Q), exceptionally odd (letter R), and politically active (letter S) people were.

Overall, this book was an exceptionally fascinating read, not only because I often wondered (in general) how dictionaries were created, but the rich history behind the creation of it (including the Victorian equivalent of a Kickstarter campaign to recruit volunteers). 

If you enjoy watching shows like "How It's Made" or YouTube channels that feature quirky stuff like that, then you will absolutely enjoy this book. This book is my choice for the strangest non-crime book that I've ever read. So tell me, what's the oddest non-true crime book that you've ever read?

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #260: Playing Nice In 2025

A winter scene of both discontent and peace of mind {photo taken in the mid 2010s}.

I've been going through a spate of blahness this week, in that things that would normally roll off my back decided to affect me mentally. Which in turn kind of affected my blogging, as I had a very difficult time in coming up with a suitable topic to blog about. But, as you can see, I did, so here we go.

Back in my younger-ish days (say three decades ago), I was very much, as I like to call someone today, a Richard Cranium with my interactions with people. I didn't bother playing nice with people, made a complete nuisance of myself online, and all around I was generally not a very nice person to be around.

Fast forward to now. I'm a father and a grandfather and I've managed to mellow out quite a bit, both with the general public as well as my family. I'm way more tolerant and easy going with my RW interactions. Online though, is a whole different enchilada.

Life is way more polarized online now, than it has been before. It really doesn't matter what platform is being used nor what topic is being discussed, it's gotten to the point where you can simply start a flame war simply by pointing out the fallacy/hypocrisy of a person's argument. Especially if the person is a part of the entertainment industry (granted, this is a very big umbrella).

Lately, I've been forced into the position of unfollowing people on the various social media platforms, as it seems to be the only way that I can give myself peace of mind while following a basic tenet that people have seem to completely abandon today.

Scrolling on by. Not watching. Not reading. Completely ignoring.

I learned this lesson early on while participating in socialized media. Basically, it works like this: no one is forcing you to read, to watch or to listen to anything that you come across. If you no like, you no have to participate. It's just that simple. Normally, if I see something I don't like, I don't pay attention to it and I try not to engage, which in today's world is very hard to do.

The hive mind is a terrible thing to experience, mostly because the hive mind will often be led by people who portray themselves to be open-minded, but show themselves that they're anything but. I have experienced this on numerous occasions, and it pains me deeply whenever I'm forced to deal with it. Constructive debate is always a good thing, and I enjoy a healthy difference of opinions. But it's hard to have a healthy debate of opinions when the other participants don't want to....well, participate.

So, it truly saddens me when I'm forced to go NC or LC with people who I've known for years (mostly online), simply because of their inability to play nice, at least with people who do not share the same viewpoint as they do.*

*this is the closest that I will come to laying out the actual reasoning to me going NC and/or LC with others. pretty sure you can make an educated guess.

It bothers me greatly when my online world is nothing like my real world. It was, at one point decades ago. But now, people completely embrace the keyboard commando ethos with their online world and ignore the collateral damage they leave behind. The collateral damage is very much real and quite destructive in the long term.

I'm turning 60 this year, and to be frank, I'm way too old to be dealing with the close-minded hypocrites of the modern world. It's tiring, dull, and very unimaginative, especially if you're dealing with the hive community of whatever topic that is being bandied about (e.g. writing). I have better things to do with my time than to make an attempt at engaging in a polite discussion with people who choose not to do so.

Thank you for allowing me to bend your ear about playing nice in 2025. The one thing that you should take away from this, is that sometimes, you have to stay in your own lane if you want to maintain your peace of mind online. There is absolutely no shame in applying the philosophy of "scrolling by" in your online world, nor is there any shame of going LC or NC with someone in your online world.

Peace of mind is something we all can strive to acquire and enjoy, especially in today's noisy online world. Remember, you have the power to simply walk away and unplug. Do it today, and you'll feel better tomorrow.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #259: My "Hot Mess" Is Now "Sister vs Sister"

This pic from the late '00's represents the fire that was first lit in June 2022 was finally extinguished on January 23, 2025.

June 2022. The sentence, "Jhon staggered into the bathroom, flipped the light switch and screamed in pain as the soft white light shot a dual laser beam directly into his eyeballs.", was the opening salvo to a story that immediately took hold of me much like my only trad published novel.

January 23, 2025: The sentence, "Fifteen seconds later Blanco and Akhal took off in the same cloud of dust towards home.", was the closing salvo to a truly epic fantasy story.

In between those two sentences, we wrote an estimated 600k words, totaling an estimated 1,320 pages, contained in 120 chapters, spread across five glorious volumes, with the overall series title being "Sister vs Sister". This particular project was not only an obsessive labor of love, but it was the first to be written completely by hand before transcribing it to the computer.*#

*t.l.;d.r.: less digital distractions, more meatiness to the story.

#longer t.l.;d.r.: basement flooded in 2021, recovered four writing projects in various stages of completion, this project was the third of four to be worked on to completion.

The interesting thing about this particular series, is that when it came time to finally tidy up all the loose ends once we arrived at the original conclusion, it became remarkably easy to actually write those conclusions. Over the years I've always had major problems in writing personally satisfying endings to my stories, which I think had a lot to do with trying to reconcile what I wanted to see as a reader versus what I actually wanted to write. Writing by hand helped me tremendously to properly resolve the nearly one dozen story lines that I had woven throughout the series.

A few random observations to give you the reader a better understanding of what it took to write this series.

1. The page count given equates to the minimum amount of notebook paper used as 660 sheets: two pages of transcribed text per sheet. However, the reality was more like this: 1 1/2 pages of printed text equates to one page (give or take a paragraph) of transcribed text. So this in turn, bumps up the amount of notebook paper used to nearly 1,000 sheets (1,320 transcribed pages at 1 1/2 handwritten pages per one page of text equals to roughly 1,980 handwritten pages, or about 990 sheets). To put this in perspective, I probably wrote out the equivalent of nearly three Harry Potter novels in order to write this series. I think I was a medieval scribe in a previous life.
2. The amount of pens and assorted items to fix corrections was mind boggling. For starters, I employed a rotation of 4 pens, two black & two blue, to write this series. Using a rotation like this helped me limit the overall total of pens used to about 25-30 for the entire 2 1/2 years spent writing this series. This total includes the two cheap ten packs bought, but also several others that were simply gathering dust in my pen box. As for the fixing of mistakes, I employed a two prong attack: liquid paper and address/file folder labels. In regards to the former, I did not have the hand strength to use the standard stuff, so we switched to the liquid stuff, of which roughly 10 bottles were used. As for the labels, a pair of scissors allowed me to squeeze out two to three strips per label in order to fix large errors. I won't even tell you what I used to do to fix seriously egregious errors like making a character go into a direction not of their choice and having to bring them back.
3. There really is no number three to speak. I mean everything else that was associated with this project was just part and parcel of my editing routine: reams of paper (currently finishing #4 and will be purchasing #5-8 shortly) and toner to print everything out; three ring binders (8) along with the requisite dividers (20 packs in total as they ranged from 5-10 per); and bullet point chapter synopsis so that I could easily find a particular point in the story (stopped after chapter 96).

Like I stated earlier, this project was very much an obsessive labor of love, and unlike the previous stories written where I had stressed about how to get from point A to point Z while making sure that I touched on the remaining letters of the alphabet, my stress level was significantly lower this time around. I'm pretty sure that the new writing routine was a large contributor to reducing my stress level (if you go slower, you can see further ahead) thus allowing me to pursue the statement in parenthesis to its ultimate conclusion.

Thank you for joining me on this Don Quixote-esque journey exploring just how far I can stretch my imagination while staying strongly tethered to the reality of today.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved