Episode #332: Let's Get Commercialized!

Tuesday morning, June 16th 2026, my wife stepped outside on the back porch deck and snapped this photo of two juvenile bears snacking on my bird feeders in my front yard. I'm pretty sure that mama bear was somewhere nearby in the woods.

Suffice to say, after this 2nd visitation in the span of one calendar month, has caused the following things to happen: my neighbor from across the street is now upset with me for bringing bears into the neighborhood (note, we've had an uptick in bear sightings in my town this year) and I had to relocate my bird-feeders to the (fenced in) backyard, where the bears (hopefully) will not get to them.

Commercials are the bane of our digital existence. Love them or loathe them, you can never truly get away from them, no matter what platform you use.

Television? While there are some good ones, most offer the stimulant needed for channel surfing. Gaming apps? 100% unavoidable, and they're one of the few platforms that can hold you hostage until they're done showing. YouTube? There are infomercials that you can definitely skip, but the six to fifteen second commercials are the master class of memorable advertising.

I know this because I'm one of those frugal souls who epitomizes the old "beggars can't be choosers" axiom, because I don't want to drop around $12.99 per month for ad free videos. Yes, I'm on YouTube nearly six total hours per day, but I'm not going to spend money unwisely.

There are times where I automatically skip the fifteen second commercials, simply because the product doesn't interest me (cancer meds, anyone?), but there are times where I'm intrigued enough to watch the entire fifteen second ad (and the occasional thirty second ad/movie trailer), even though I will never use the product/see the movie.

Let me give you a good example of memorable advertising. Apartment-dot-com has a memorable set of six second ads featuring Jeff Goldblum stating if you advertise on the website, you will have people crawling out of the woodwork to look at your property. Those people who come crawling out of the woodwork, so far include:

1. someone masquerading as a raincoat hanging on the corner of a door;
2. someone appearing primed for action after one of the closet beds springs open;
3. someone masquerading as a standalone bathroom sink.

Jarring? Absolutely. Effectively getting your attention? Absolutely. Is it getting extra eyeballs to the website? Probably.

It's funny how people's viewing habits have changed over the decades. Back in the day, you had people regularly glued to various t.v. and cable t.v. channels, so you could (mostly) justify spending your hard earned money on fifteen to thirty second commercials.

But now, with viewership so incredibly splintered digitally (regular t.v., streaming platforms and even YouTube), you have to go where people are now congregating. On the upside, on digital platforms, your advertising dollars can be stretched a little further than normal. On the downside, you have to make damn sure that your six to fifteen second commercial is memorable enough not to be ignored/skipped by those eyeballs you're trying to lasso in.

And I mean memorable in a good way. Raising Cain has new six second commercials that make absolutely no sense: a guy yelling at an employee for telling them to "eat it"; a well known gardening company featuring Martha Stewart pouring a bag of potted soil into a large pot while saying, "I'm a dirt nerd." Like, what?

The only reason why I remember these two examples, as well as countless others, is that they were exactly six seconds in length, so you had no choice but to watch them. At my age (61) and viewing habits (no television/streaming platforms beyond YouTube since 2019), this is what my short attention span can handle now.

And that's a good thing, because advertisers are coming to the ugly realization that the average consumer has the attention span of a gnat, so they got exactly six-to-seven seconds to get their point across in a way that sticks with them days/weeks/months from now.

I just wish that the professional sports would learn that lesson, especially when you have a 40 minute MLB pregame show, which is at most seventeen minutes that's actually related to the fame, with the remaining time related to advertising.

Have a fantastic Monday or whatever day you happen to be reading this on.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #331: What I've Learned From Writing "Sister vs Sister"

Mr Crow and Mr & Mrs Blue Jay having a three birdseed martini business meeting.

Lost. Empty. Sad.

Great descriptors that are used for when something bad happens to you on a personal level. Head scratching when those same descriptors (or their synonym siblings) are used to describe you as a writer.

I know that sounds like an odd thing to say about a writer, but bare with me, and hopefully it will all make sense in the end.

I'm not sure if anyone has experienced those feelings mentioned at the top of the post, but this is entirely new and uncharted territory for me. Even when I was going through the various stages with my first novel, I never had those types of feelings about it. But with this series, I did.

I'm not completely sure as to why I'm feeling this way about my series, but I will try to make an educated guess as to why. In total, from original gestation to applying the first round of edits, I spent around sixteen years "working" on this excellent series.

But if we go back to where I decided to turn the original dreck of a novella into this outstanding fantasy series, then we've been working on this series virtually non-stop from May 30, 2022 until June 11, 2026, eight days beyond four full years.

Now I quickly became enamored of this series, so much to the point where I did not write this series like others who would write a series: piecemeal. What I mean by "piecemeal" is that they may get the first one or two written, then stretch out however remaining volumes there were to be for "x" number of months/years.

I wrote mine in one fell swoop: all five volumes actually took me almost three years to write. I won't go into great detail about how much of a challenge this was (e.g. titles, page counts, chapters, word counts) other than to say that I actually resolved those issues listed during the editing process.

Being enamored of the series gradually changed to treating the characters in my story like they were close family members. I became quite invested in their backgrounds, their present lives, even what they were going through/experiencing. It became especially hard when I had decided to kill off two of my protags.

This was a decision that I had struggled mightily with. I'll save the details for a future post, but suffice to say, almost two years after I'd written that particular arc, which naturally altered the course of the story, still affected me in a particular fashion.

As I made my way through the final three chapters, which I had to expand our to six due to excessive word count, I found myself not wanting to complete the task I assigned to myself. This was directly due to the fact that I was now having an extremely hard time of letting go.

I felt like that finishing this story meant that I had to say 'goodbye' to a group of characters that felt more like family than characters, and I wasn't ready to say goodbye. And as you read at the beginning, I fired myself to finish up and say, 'goodbye.'

If you don't believe that old axiom that characters write the story while you're along for the ride, I can truthfully dispel you of that misguided belief. My characters ultimately took over writing my story, and for that I am eternally appreciative.

Have a fantastic week and while you're at it, thank those characters of yours for making you a better writer.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #330: Being Fresh In A World Of Inadvertent Redundancies

A classic overview from the early 2000s, before the Democrats decided to run the capitol into the ground by allowing the tail (criminals) to wag the dog (the law abiding citizens).

Eighteen years of blogging can often bring unintended consequences into the mix. What do I mean by 'consequences'? In this particular scenario, eighteen years of blogging created nearly 1,800 total posts, give or take, which can, and does, lead to the issue of being redundant from time to time.

For example, while I was performing another round of edits on book #5 (even though I was doing computer edits on #4, I was still doing edits on the next book), I came up with the brilliant idea of writing about world building for a blog post. The next day, I remembered that I had covered this topic quite extensively in a series of posts nearly two years ago, so writing about it now would be a tad redundant (If you're curious, search the Jan-Feb 2024 posts called "How We Go Here From There").

With that particular topic now scratched off the list, we pivoted to the topic of how I enjoyed writing in the fantasy genre. Specifically, how the fantasy genre really has no rules on what you can and can't write about and how there's no given formula for a successful book (unlike Romance, which there's one strict guideline you must adhere to). But like the previous topic mentioned, we wrote about this extensively in a previous year.

Thus, we pivot to searching for another topic to write about, and then searching our memory archives to see if our potential topic(s) have been touched upon previously. And guess what, we found a topic that we hadn't touched upon in any great detail previously.

I am an anomaly in the word of writing, in that my political viewpoints can be described by the seldom used descriptor as 'centrist', and by the modern descriptor as 'moderate'. Now, I wasn't always like this, because back in the day, I was heavily influenced by family political leanings.

My father was a conservative Democrat, who was moderately involved in town politics and union politics (then as now, you needed to be a Democrat), and in my younger years (70s & early 80s) I had the impression that Democrats were good and Republicans were bad, so at 18, I was a registered Democrat.

Fast forward a decade: by 1992, I was soured on the Democrat party on the state level (then as now, my state has been solidly controlled by the Democrats going on 45 years), so I switched over to being a registered Republican. The original hash tag of 'Walk Away' could apply here, and I've never looked back.

Fast forward to now.

In 2026, my viewpoints have gradually changed about certain things/ideas, while on other issues have remained the same, because unlike everyone under the age of 35, I have quite a bit of historical knowledge of those issues.

Having said that, it saddens me that other writers, who I used to respect, have permanently derailed/deplatform themselves from the reality of what the average person is forced to go through on a daily basis.

These people (I do have derogatory name for them, but I keep it on YouTube and Meta), have allowed themselves to be influenced by the MSM's visceral hatred of President Trump to such an extent that you simply cannot have any kind of adult conversation with them, w/o them taking leave of their senses.

So basically in 2026, I practice the concept of simply scrolling on by whatever comments my FB friends make about certain events, because everyone has the right to post what they truly believe in. I can respect that, so I simply don't engage because I believe it isn't right to argue an opposing viewpoint on someone's personal page with someone else.

As I said, I am an anomaly among my writer friend's/acquaintances, because my political viewpoints are centrist in nature and based in reality. And in today's world, the majority's reality is often trampled by the vocal minority's unrealistic reality of feelings don't care about facts.

And that makes me truly indifferent to the perceived problem that an annoying segment of the populace 'suffers' through on an hourly/daily basis.

Have a Happy rest of your week, and remember, step outside and smell the asphalt, because it's certainly a lot better than inhaling stale air, moldy food and UV rays from your computer screens for hours/days on end.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #329: What Hath The Vinyl Gods Brought Unto Me?

As I've mentioned previously, I have a relatively large music collection, divided between out of date media (cassettes); stubborn media that doesn't believe they're out of date (c.d.s) and media that has been in and out of date more times than a coffee drinkers daily intake (45s & LPs mostly).

This week's post is about that pesky runt of the bunch, a runt where original copies stopped being produced by the conglomos by 1992: 45s.

My 45 collection isn't what you would call huge, unless you think having nearly 1,000 units covering nearly a bakers dozen worth of genres huge.

However, my 45 collection came about in roughly the same way that my L.P. collection grew: 20% of actual money being spent, and 80% being offered said items after having a version of the following conversation:

Strange friend/acquaintance/family member: "Hey G.B.! I found this box of 45's left on the side of the road. Do you want them?"

Me: "Sure."

I should note that this did actually happen. My brother was taking one of my children to a b'day party, and he found a box of 45s by the side of the round that someone was throwing out.

Now the main reason why the percentage of 45s purchased is so ridiculously low, boils down to a strange facet about me. A fact that you've probably never came across in your entire life: I never really listened to music in a way that most people did while growing up. Sure I listened to it on the radio (mostly AM Radio), but I never actually went out to buy the music I was listening to. For me, music was something more akin to pleasant background noise than anything else.

I didn't actually start acquiring that particular media until I was in my late 20's, and ever since I been making a good dent into making up for lost time. Especially after I started working for the state in the mid 1990s, and I had co-workers who exposed me to other genres than what I grew up listening to.

I would now like to present to y ou a few samples from my collection. Please excuse the minor water damage on the covers, for they were caught in the minor basement flooding of 2021.

~~~~~~

1} Boxed set of The Carpenters.

This one is a little weird, in that I actually read the liner notes on the box for this post (I know, slap my hand with a ruler). It's a tribute to The Carpenters that originally came out in 1994 (reissued as a CD in 2011, now out of print in that format, but available as a download). Because this came out in 1994, it features such eclectic artists as: Sonic Youth, 4 Non-Blondes, Mathew Sweet and Grant Lee Buffalo, just to name a few. All performers who put their spin on the classic Carpenter music.

~~~~~~

2} Boxed set of Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite #1.

I have a treasure trove of boxed classical sets, some were pressed in the regular black vinyl, others like this one, were pressed in color vinyl. Back in the late 50's/early 60's, color vinyl was a thing that companies would use to make their product stand out (ex. I have a polka 45 that is pressed in green vinyl). RCA Victor was no exception, as back then I think their only major rock act they had was Elvis, with everyone else being in the classical/easy listening/popular* music genres.

*Back then, 'popular music' referred to what we call "The Standards" today, that every ye oldies musician sings trying to stay relevant (e.g. Rod Stewart).

Speaking of popular music of the 50's/early 60's, we have the following EP collection.

~~~~~~

3} Jackie Gleason presents.

This music was the type you would often hear in the background of "serious" movies of that era. These were pieces that were "conducted" by Jackie Gleason, after he had "chosen" theme as per his "musical tastes".

Now the sarcasm peppered in that previous paragraph, is directly due to me taking the liner notes with a mega dose of skepticism. Knowing what I've learned about the entertainment business over the decades, especially for that era, I'm leaning towards his image/name being used in order to sell more records, and thus, just like how it's done in ye modern times (image/name is everything these days).

Anyways, these are just a sample of the type of 45's I have sitting in my collection: a majority of original music sprinkled with a few reissues. with the majority being acquired via the simple method mentioned at the beginning. I will say I do find them to be a fascinating history/look at musical tastes and company products/logos.

Have a smashing Monday and sparkling week.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved