Episode #284: Constitutionally Catatonic Conundrum of Chuckling

Every American's new number one favorite document to hotly debate about, is a home grown creation that promises more chills, spills and mega thrills than any measly book written by the same English author that gave us a dystopian novel about an animal farm.

This week's blog post came to me much like the bulk of my previous posts: during a bout of self-inflicted stupidity, in which I actually decided to open the pictured book and actually browse the pages.

Among the various sections that I had skimmed, one really stood out to me: Amendments Proposed But Never Ratified.

Did you know that since the inception of this wonderful country, more than 10,000 amendments have been proposed, and that the Constitution has been changed a grand total of 27 times, giving us a grand total of 27 Amendments, with the 27th being approved 203 years after it was proposed (1992 changes to congressional salaries). If you're wondering about the 26th, that was approved in 1971, and it lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

Any ways, I thought I would share with everyone a short list of proposed amendments that got seriously rejected by Congress, along with some enlightening commentary by yours truly. 

1. (1876) Abolishment of the US Senate: can you imagine the chaos if the Senate was abolished? Laws would actually be passed and a whole category of elderly people would actually have to become gainfully employed and have no real power.
2. (1876) The forbidding of religious leaders from holding a government office or receiving federal dollars: All NGO's would have to be secular. Even worse, they would have to perform continuous fundraising, and just about the only fundraising that the American public likes to participate in, is the purchasing of Girl Scout cookies.
3. (1878) An Executive Council of Three to replace the office of the President: a great way to legitimize bribery and corruption in the Executive branch. 
4. (1893) Renaming this nation to "The United States of the Earth": precursor to The Gulf of America.
5. (1893) Abolishing the US Army and Navy: no more of those pesky football games and definitely no more being the world's policemen. But hey, we can be protected by those stunningly brave social justice warriors, right?
6. (1894) The Constitution needs to recognize that the almighty Father and his Holy Son are the absolute authorities to human affairs: who needs separation of church and state when the church is the state and the state is the church.
7. (1912) Making marriages between races illegal: reality check, the unwritten/written law was declared illegal in 1967 with Loving v Virginia, which was affirmed by SCOTUS on appeal.
8. (1914) Finding divorce to be illegal: another reality check, spouses, usually female, aren't chattel that can be used and abused. They are living, breathing individuals who demand and deserve respect.
9. (1916) All acts of war should be put to a national vote. anyone voting yes is automatically drafted into the army: we could theoretically wind up with the largest perpetual peacetime army in the world. Of course, no one will respect us in the morning...or afternoon...or evening.
10. (1933) Limiting personal wealth to $1,000,000: adjusted for inflation, in today's dollars it would be $24.7 million. Can you imagine the outrage within the US Senate and House of Representatives that their personal wealth will be capped at $24.7 million? They wouldn't be able to...enrich themselves with all of those highly questionable (for us) financial maneuvers. I think I need to clutch my pearls tighter.
11. (1936) A variation of #9, with the difference being a majority rule affirming/denying that we should go to war: To be honest, while I'm neither a dove nor a hawk (realist perhaps?), this sounds like a happy compromise that neither side would like.
12. (1938) The forbidding of drunkenness in the US and all of its territories: this one is so far out of touch with reality that it should be written into an episode of the Twilight Zone or Night Gallery. Oh wait, this was written as an episode of the Twilight Zone, except that it dealt with the banning of being pretty/pleasant to look at and people got sent to a modern day reeducation camp.
13. (1947)  The income tax maximum for any individual should not exceed 25%: the earliest proposal for a flat tax, which of course would send one party into an absolute meltdown, because this means that they would actually have to stick to a budget. What a novel concept, sticking to a budget. I think I can actually hear the loud thump of jaws dropping to the ground.
14. (1948) The right of citizens to segregate from others: back then we as a nation were trying to desegregate ourselves and we eventually succeeded. Fast forward nearly 75 years, and we've sadly come full circle, as college/university campuses have now self-segregated themselves to the point where at some campuses, there are separate graduation ceremonies for each ethnicity attending.
15. (1971) American citizens should have the alienable right to live in a pollution free environment: yes. we do. Will it happen? not in mine or my children's lifetime...unless both sides find a realistic compromise that each side can live with.

So as you can see, some of those proposed amendments were so far fetched that they got seriously torpedoed by whichever legislative body they were introduced in. While others, even though they make minimal sense now, were just too radical to be passed by hypocrites on both sides of the aisle.

I know the above list seems to be a genuine exercise in obtuseness, but those were the people we voted for back then, because unlike today, the reps were a microcosm of their constituents. Which meant they proposed bills/amendments that accurately reflected the viewpoint of the people who elected them.

Reality is always conceptual when it comes to politics these days, because more often than not, the people we elect often present a facade of what they think will get them elected. Once elected, the facade drops and we're left with someone who doesn't truly represent us because they have an agenda that, more often than not, does not coincide with their constituents agenda. Once entrenched, they're almost impossible to get rid of.

Happy whatever day of the week you happen to be reading this post. I sincerely hope that this post gives you the briefest of chuckles to brighten your day, and makes you think about the people who represent you on whatever level, and ask yourself, do they align with your values, and if not, what are you going to do about it?

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

Episode #283: How To Keep Busy While Publishing

This was taken during my first real long distance hike up Cedar Mountain. The deer was gracious enough to allow two photos to be taken before they made a right turn down the mountainside (as you're facing the photo).

I know the blog post title sounds just a tad redundant, but I made the mistake of trying to publish my book in July, which is the busy season for publishing. The end result to this madness is that timelines are often stretched out, which for people like myself who don't have real deadlines to meet, are sometimes put on the back burner.

So the seriously obvious answer to the question posted above is keep writing. But what should you specifically write to keep yourself occupied? Short stories? I cranked out about ten short stories of various word counts from a low end of 2,500 to a high end of about 12k. How about a novel? I don't quite have the brain capacity for writing another full length novel. What about writing a novella? I might have the brain capacity for that.

But where would I get the germination of a story idea for a novella? That is a toughie, but it was a problem that I was willing to tackle, so to speak. I had one that I had recently put on the back burner this past spring because it was becoming a cluster....bomb of a mess, so I actually thought about taking another look at it. But the idea that I eventually came up to fix it was one that would need some serious brain capacity to work on and that was something I really didn't want to pursue (changing the character focus completely around by making the incidental characters the main focus and the main characters the incidental focus).

So I turned to the short stories that I had previously written, which I had previously talked about here. While nine of the ten stories written were major rewrites that ultimately used the original story as a outline, nine of those stories didn't possess anything that would inspire me to explore further. But that tenth one, it had everything needed to nudge me to take that risk of expanding it.

What did it possess, you may ask?

The short story possessed the ending. I originally rewrote it to emphasize that the assignment that the main character was to carry out was their final chance to actually complete an assignment, or face the ultimate consequence for failing to launch. I'll still have to re-re-write it again to make it fit the setting/aesthetic of the novella, which will be feudal Japan, specifically the Shogunate eras of feudal Japan.

Which if you think about it, is a lot easier to research than it was to research my fantasy series. I mean, one country (Japan) as opposed to four continents and two planets, one of which was due to world building; one time period versus multiple times periods; and finally one ethnicity/culture (Japan) versus six (five original: Mayan, Aztec, Incas, American and English; and one made-up: Pod People).

So after choosing the story that seems to promise a whole lot of prior to that could be successfully written to turn it into a novella of some kind (trust me, I already have, based on the actual content of this story, mentally written the entire outline of how events should unfold leading up to this particular ending, which is something I almost never do), the issue now becomes how much time I can spend mentally/physically working on it while waiting for the creaky wheels of self-publishing to advance back into my personal realm of frivolity.

The main reason as to why I'm waffling about devoting all kinds of time and energy to this novella is once I get the manuscript completely formatted for e-publishing (KDP, e-pub and Word), I'll have to apply the brakes as I need to pass on the specifics for the print version of the cover. And that can easily become a cluster....bomb of titanic proportions if I'm not careful.

So presently, I am following my own advice and have started working on yet another novella while waiting for phase one of my book to come back to me. My only hope is that I can easily pick up the proverbial pieces to the novella and re-start from where I had originally left off at, and not have it turn into something that showed so much early promise, only to flame out faster than a flambe dish at a fancy restaurant.

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

Episode #282: "To Live Is To Die Young"-The Real Journey Has Begun

My friends, after a very long (3+ years on this particular phase) journey, we have moved onto the very most important journey that a book can undertake: being published.

It took over three weeks (apparently the summer is a popular time period for publishing books) but here is the cover for my upcoming crime fantasy novella To Live Is To Die Young.

To refresh everyone's collective memory, it took me an aggregate total of 3 1/2 hours spread out over three weeks to come up with a title, a tag line, a short blurb, a long blurb and a basic concept for cover.

And to answer one very important question: the cover is multi-racial because the four main characters of the story are as depicted.

It was really weird how everything came together so quickly. Unlike with my previous novella, which took a couple of reader polls and the collective effort of a writing group to come up with the aforementioned items, this was truly a piece of cake. Like if you were called in to work on an issue that you're so familiar with, that with only a cursory glance at the issue, you know exactly what was wrong and fixed it. This novella went exactly like that sample scenario: a cursory glance and everything eventually wrote itself.

~~~~~

The teaser blurb:

Caught in a power struggle between his supplier and a drug kingpin, Jon needs to find a way to keep on living in order to not die young.

The short blurb:

Jon Morris was in a world of physical pain and mental numbness.

Caught in a horrific power struggle with his supplier Bradley Tomas, a raging wannabe who could never be and his morally bankrupt hybrid wife Alexia on one side; and an extremely violent regional drug kingpin Terrence Torquicelli, who had no qualms in collecting body parts to solve fixable issues on the other side, Jon needed a way to fix all three of his problems while staying comfortably alive.

Thing was, could he succeed before the others succeeded with theirs?

The long blurb:

Jon Morris was in a world of physical pain and inner turmoil.

After throwing one of his infamously raunchy house parties, he soon found himself under a vicious attack orchestrated by his drug supplier Bradley Tomas. Once the dust had cleared, Jon had found, much to his annoyance, that his new job was now to be a nanny to Bradley's hybrid wife Alexia.

Alexia, who even in the best of times was a barely passable professional escort of dubious morals, decided to show her extreme displeasure of her husband's choice of nanny by making Jon's life an absolute nightmare.

Which included, among other nasty deeds, ripping off a major drug kingpin.

Jon knew that being held personally responsible for Alexia's shenanigans, meant at the very least, he would be suffering a barely living death. Thing was, could he find Alexia to make things right with the kingpin before the kingpin could make things permanently right on his own terms?

~~~~~

Having sent the cover to my formatter over the July 4th holiday weekend, I think that a realistic date of release would be late July or early August. I'm very happy with the work done on the cover and I can't wait to show it off to the world at large. Sometimes being a light nag with a "I need to get this done" mentality is an endearing quality to have.

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

Episode #281: Have You Ever Challenged Yourself?

When your brain is emptier than a plastic garden gnome, you know you be in some deep dark dank pit of creative nothingness...

Anywho, today's chop suey special is called "Challenging Yourself", or if you want to tweak a well known movie quote, you can say in the voice of the well known character actor Strother Martin, "Have you ever challenged yourself?"

Specifically, as a writer, did you ever go out of your comfort zone, just to see if you could produce a quality product?

I've gone out of my comfort zone quite a few times over the years. One of the very early instance of me going out of my comfort zone, was to write a clean story.

No, really.

When I first took my writing seriously, I knew right from the get-go that I was going to write adult fiction. While I enjoyed reading clean stories, my warped dark sense of humor and my exploration of adult....topics...in my younger days basically guaranteed that cleanliness in my writing was like men reading Playboy or Penthouse for just the articles: it wasn't going to happen.

But.....one day I decided that I was in a rut and needed to try something completely different to get out of the rut. So during the course of one day (maybe two), I wrote a G-rated short story called "Cedar Mountain". That short story became one of only two short stories that I managed to get published in my career, with this one being in a now defunct e-zine called "Beat To A Pulp". 

Another challenge that I decided to inflict upon myself, was to write a story in the first person/present tense. Now considering that we're all taught almost from day one that we should be writing our stories in 3rd person/past tense, with the occasional foray into 3rd person present tense, writing a complete story in the present tense is usually an exercise in frustration.

I've been known to do bits and pieces of an overall story in the present tense, but except for maybe a viable sliver here and there, I've usually reworked those passages to make them fit better with the overall story. But I had issued myself a challenge, and the challenge was accepted.

And I had just the perfect vehicle to implement my challenge with: a previously published novella that I wasn't too happy about (trust me, there were  A LOT of things not to be happy about). So back in the hey day of that nasty little thingy that made everyone's lives miserable for the first half of the 2020's (including my house), I took that previously written novella and re-wrote it to the present tense.

Definitely were not easy to do, changing everything from the proverbial "I used to be smart." to "I am smart." left it alone for a few years, then tidied it a bit this year, so when all is said and done it will come out as an e-book only. But, the challenge was successfully completed.

Another challenge that I had decided to do early on, and this one pre-dates the previous two listed, was to write a story in the 2nd person viewpoint, which is considered to be one of the hardest view points to write in. I can't really describe it well, but if you click on the link propagated by Google, all will be answered. But just the same, the challenge was accepted.

On the upside, I succeeded in writing two or three one page stories in that particular viewpoint. On the downside, I succeeded in writing, rather badly, two or three one page stories in that particular viewpoint. Also on the downside, there are no surviving paper copies, but one of my old XP or Win7 computers may have a copy or two. Maybe. 

And lastly, there was one final challenge that had multiple parts, of a personal nature, that I decided to accept: write a full blown novel. By full blown, I mean something along of the lines of being a supremely detailed, thoroughly researched, with completely fleshed out characters with just enough sub-plots to keep everyone cohesive without being too overwhelming.

I had actually tried this once before with another fantasy series that ultimately died an inglorious death (that is, I recently unpublished both the print and e-book versions), mostly because I was too much of a keyboard commando, for lack of a better term, to put in the work required to fix it/complete it. But that may change in the future....if I remember what the general plot is/was supposed to be.

Anyways, me accepting this challenge was the perfect nudge that I needed. I was waffling about whether or not I should switch to writing my stories via pen and paper then transcribing to the computer, but after writing about a half dozen chapters by hand for my latest novella and discovering the pros (no major digital distractions or chronic hand fatigue, to name just a few) more than outweighed the cons, I took the plunge.

The rest, as they say, is history, as I completed a five volume fantasy series totaling some 600k words over 122+ chapters, with every single page written by hand before transcribing to the computer, during the 1Q of 2025. Total time spent was almost three years, but it was well worth it. I want to note that I did chronicle this particular journey under the tag Hot Mess, so if you want to check out in greater detail about this fantasy series, by all means check out that tag.

And believe or not, I'm not flying on air, but I have decided to challenge myself once again: this time, taking a recently finished short story and turning it into a novella. And for an added bonus, the short story itself will be the actual ending of the novella. So unlike the fantasy series, in which I had the beginning and a nominal outline for an ending as a non-moving goal post, I have to create an entire beginning and middle to arrive at the completed ending.

I believe that you should always challenge yourself as a writer, because you just never know what you can actually accomplish if you don't actually give it a try.

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