Episode #344: And Your Archetype Is....?

I was taking a moderately long break during my morning walk, as my legs can no longer keep up with the stamina that I actually have these days, when I decided to take this pic. Even though it's early September, it's still summer in New England.

Many years ago I used to participate in a monthly blog hop sponsored by a writing group called The Insecure Writer's Support Group, and in their monthly newsletter, they would often have a question that you could use during the blog hop.

The suggested question for the month of September I found intriguing enough to actually use it for one of my blog posts. The question that everyone was given is this:

"Do you have a favorite character archetype that you tend to gravitate towards in your writing?"

Now this is something I actually had to look up, because I did not have a clue on what a 'character archetype' was. After a modicum of research, I now have a basic understanding of what one is.

I would have to say that the one I gravitate the most to, is one that Hollywood has been brutally  mutilating for the better part of two decades: the girl boss.

You've undoubtedly seen the Hollywood version: the woman who can do everything, solve everything, control everything, treat people, like men, as insignificant dolts who can't do anything without a woman to hold their hand and guide them along, etc.

Because virtually all of my stories are female-centric, I can say with complete confidence that my female main characters and even the secondary characters, are written in the true 'girl boss' archetype.

While they do ooze that 'girl boss' persona, they are quite confident in their ability to lead, to delegate, and to even ask for help. They are quite compassionate to friends and family, and can be merciless to their enemies. Most importantly, they know their limitations.

My actual 'girl boss' characters will never be mistaken for the Hollywood version of the Mary Sue 'girl bosses'. because we all know that imperfection makes a character resonate more deeply than the shallow that is seemingly forced upon us on a monthly basis.

I believe the 'girl boss' archetype will always be part and parcel of whatever type of story I choose to writer (this was epically showcased in my currently unpublished fantasy series). My stories have been female-centric from the very beginning of my career, and using this particular archetype correctly is something that I will always enjoy writing about.

Thank you for stopping by today and spending a couple of minutes out of your busy day to read my blog. And remember, "no," is the world's shortest sentence, no matter what language you speak. And quite often, the most difficult to understand.

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

Episode #343: I Think, Therefore, I Continually Create Stories

A bobble-head that cost me about 20 Bazooka comics and $10 back in the early 2000's. I also have a half dozen Bazooka Joe t-shirts purchased the same way.  Obviously taken where I used to work back in the bad old days of being a wonky worker bee.

It's been a loooooong while since I did a writing updater. But a lot of things have been going on since my last update, so I thought now would be a good time to do just that.

Since 2021, I have periodically alluded to four different writing projects (originally five, but one was published shortly after retiring): three that involved either re-writing or polishing up and one that involved republishing a previously published novella.

As you already know, I have succeeded on the first three projects: this novella, followed by this novella, and completing a fantasy series under this tag. The fourth project, which was republishing a currently published novella, took me a few years to complete, as I would periodically work on it while working on other things.

During the second half of August, I was able to work with yet another graphic designer, who came highly recommended to me, on a fresh cover for my upcoming novella, entitled "Evil Has A Conscience."

For comparison, this was the original cover for the same novella, entitled "A Taste Of Pain".

~~~~~

I've also been busy on the short story front. For the past few years, I've been going through my over-sized pile of mediocre short stories that were previously published on my now closed short story blog, and cherry picking those that seem to hold the most promise for being revisited and rewritten.

To date, I've written fifteen short stories overall, with three being one hundred percent original. All of them range from G-rated to that R/NC-17 rating that would sometimes make people cock their eyebrows, and I would like to think that applying a skill set that has evolved over the nearly fifteen years since they were originally written, vastly improved the original content of the story.

My main goal with my short story writing is to finish with at least twenty, so that I can create two balanced short story collections. A small side quest to this particular goal, is to write more original short stories, because if I'm being perfectly honest, what I have left for short stories to pluck from is more than a little south of 'meh.'

However, on the bright side, I acquired the ability of writing from a basic outline, as I'm now treaty those originals as a jumping off point in which to create a better story from those original elements.

That's about it for a writing update: republishing a new and improved novella, and learning something new when it comes to re-writing short stories. I sincerely hope that your week is going in the direction that you're driving towards, and that moving at the speed of slow is always a good thing to explore.

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

Episode #342: The Sputtering By-Product Of Wood Pulp: Newspapers

Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you. This was taken in mid August at my local Dollar Tree store. I won't even show you what I found the next aisle just yet, but you can probably guess on the first try.

For those of you who may not know anything about my previous employer beyond the fact that I am a retired govt employee, my very first job with he state of Connecticut was helping prepare old CT newspapers for microfilming (preservation).

Short info dump: back in the late 80's/early 90's, CT, along with dozens of other states, received grant money from the feds to catalog/microfilm old local newspapers from the 18th through the 20th century.

History lesson: during that extended time period, local newspapers is where you really got the nitty gritty of local town life, both the good, the bad and the fugly (any true crime podcast with integrity will often use local media sources for the bulk of their research).

Back then, local newspapers were, more often than not, the purveyor of good solid journalism. If you wanted a good take on a particular event that was maybe covered in a regional paper with a short paragraph, local was the way to go.

Unfortunately, by the late 1980's/early 1990's, all of that good journalism slowly made its way to the sewer system, as consolidation started taking place and it was not for the better. Just like today, where less than six companies control AM/FM radio and the podcast world nationwide, back then you had a lot of companies scoop up and purchase small town weeklies to make 'money' and to promote uniformity.

One of the most egregiously crass companies (in my opinion) that help accelerate the trend of "all the news that you will read will be printed", was a media company called The Journal Register Company. Apparently, they thought that dominating the market would bring them credibility.

Problem was, they went about it in such as horrendously bad way, that they made everyone else that you would have a low opinion of, look good.

Lets use my home state of Connecticut as an example of what this company did to the majority of the weeklies (and a couple of dailies) that they ultimately acquired.

Prior to being bought out by JRC (now 21st Century Media), the average weekly in Connecticut was between 48-72 pages and cost about 75 cents to $1 per issue (this was in the 1990s). Each one was unique to the community they served.

After being bought by JRC, the following changes were made:

1. the page count was slashed to 16 +/- pages with a 25%/75% ratio of print to ads (larger percentage to ads), plus a 50% price increase.
2. the masthead was changed to conform to a particular corporate standard. In other words, no individuality that would make the paper unique to the town.
3. what little news was published wasn't really local, but more regional than anything else.

We had a wonderful weekly in my town, but the corporate mandate gutted the newspaper so thoroughly that they turned it into a free weekly mass mailed before they quietly discontinued the title.

Now if I want local news that's fit to read, my fix is divided between a classified weekly that gets mailed out to a tri-town area that features 6-10 pages of local town news; and a monthly magazine that has local and syndicated news (mostly all purpose like home improvement, medicine, etc), with spotlights on various residents and businesses.

My state is simply a large sample of what this company did to the media properties that they had acquired. I believe this uniformity, plus other corporate malfeasance, led to the downfall of this company, and ultimately led it to being acquired and rebranded.

This kind of crappy corporate behavior, in my opinion, is a majority contributing factor to why the American media is on such a downward spiral to irrelevance. You don't treat subscribers as a commodity that can be bought and sold, and express shock (SHOCK, I SAY!) when people go elsewhere for their news.

This kind of bull fritters is why I stopped being a newspaper consumer going on now for two decades, and instead get my news fix elsewhere, where I can get more bang for my dollar.

Have a fantastic week, and remember, newsprint is a fantastic way to waste your money that could be better used on that Dunkin' Donuts mocha latte with a shot of espresso.

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

Episode #341: Eighteen Years? Eighteen Years! Eighteen Years.

Memory Monday: Back when my life had structure, but no real meaning, we would take pics of random happenings at work. For example, this fine outstanding example of an unhealthy work lunch. Except the apple. Even now I still have a piece of fruit with my lunch.

Imagine if you will, it's 2008, and on the advice of your cyber friends, you decide to start a blog. And you call it Cedar's Mountain, based on the mountain you live across from. And you're happy as a pig slopping away in their sty, because you found a place where you can write to your heart's content.

You first start off with a punishing pace of two blog posts a day, every other day. Six months of burnout convinces you to drop your output to once a day every other day. You maintain that pace for a number of years and all is good.

Gradually though, the spark that kept you going starts to dim, so initially you change your posting output to revive that spark; then when that stopped working, you create another blog for your writing output. That seems to do the trick, and with that spark revived, you decide to create a picture blog, which was soon followed by an adult-oriented blog and a short story blog.

But like before, that spark starts to fade a little, so again you tweak the amount of weekly posting that you perform and life becomes good.

~~~~

Imagine if you will, it's 2026, and surprisingly to the people that know you, you're still blogging. Your output is down to one post per week, but you're still feeling good. Then one day, while you're posting a link to Meta, because Meta long ago dropped a feature that allowed you to submit your RSS feed and have it automatically update to your friend's news-feeds, a though suddenly appears in your frontal lobes. You peruse it and it asks a question: how many blog posts did you write?

Curiosity piqued, I meander through all seven blogs that I have created in the past 18 years {tabs above give a brief synopsis for four of them}:

Cedar's Mountain

Books By G.B. Miller

Pictures For Smarties

Flashing Georgie's Shorts

It's Always Saturday In Suburbia

Father Nature's Corner

I Have Stories!

And counted up all of the posts that I had written for all seven of those blogs. After seeing the finals total on my calculator, my jaw dropped, figuratively speaking.

2,017 blog posts in 18 years. Or, if you're a number obsessed weird stats nerd like I am, this averages out to 112.05 posts per year, or 252.125 posts per blog.

While both of these stats sound amazing on paper, you have to remember the slanted reality: I started with six to eight posts per week in 2008, and by 2026 I was down to one post per week. In a specific example, from December 2018 thru early August 2026, I produced a total of 358 posts just for the blog you're currently reading. And my book blog only has one actual post {but lots of tabs} after I had done a clean-up/overhaul of that blog's content.

Still, 2,017 posts is nothing to sneeze at. At the bare minimum, it shows how much I've pivoted over those 18 years when it came to finding topics to write about. From work to my writing, from music to books, humor to general observations, and everything else that you can reasonably think off, became fodder {in a good way} for six of my seven blogs.

In a weird parallel universe, my blogs became a text version about nothing. The only common thread throughout those eighteen years of merriment was me, myself, and I.

Truth be told, even though my blogging is a serious extension of me as a person and as a writer, and I do enjoy blogging as a creative outlet, I'm not quite sure how long I should continue doing this. Eighteen years is a long time, and in fact, those years spent blogging is almost half the time I've spent being married {currently sitting at 37 years, almost as long as most federal politicians have been in office}.

But, in the very old children's song goes, I will have to continue putting one foot in front of another, and see where this blogging journey of mine takes me.

Who knows, maybe someday it will earn me an all expense paid trip to Butte, Montana!

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