Episode #334: When Dying Is Your Story's HEA {II}

This pic was taken nearly a week ago, after I had finished my morning walk and was in my backyard refilling the bird feeders. If it looks washed, it's because while we and the deer were in the shade, the backyard was bright and sunshiny. About a minute later, they had gently hopped over the fence and back into the mountain.

Part two of our series about death, talks mostly about the process I had used in order to make an informed decision on who (singular and plural) I should kill off in the series.

I am one of those writers who's a mix between a pantser and a plotter. I used to be a 100% pantser, but I soon realized with this series, I was going to have to add a little planning into the mix.

So what I did next, I really wouldn't recommend, especially if you're a planner: I stopped writing book #3 so I could properly plot out which character(s) were going to be kill outright; which would determine the direction that the rest of the series would go in order to achieve the pre-determined ending.*

*note: at the very beginning of this series, back to when it was a nearly four dozen page dreck of a novella, I had a definitive ending in mind. So we're talking nearly a dozen years holding onto an ending for this story.

So I waited until I was at the midway point with a chapter completed, before temporarily putting the book to the side. I then pulled out my handy-dandy clipboard, pen/paper, and spent the next two days charting out which character could be participating and their relation to others.

Then I worked out what I felt was the most important aspect: Once dead, do they stay dead?

I also sketched out a few different scenarios that would reasonably answer both of those questions. By the next day, I had made my decision on how I should answer the important question of "once dead, do they stay dead?", by selecting a character from both sides.

Was I 100% comfortable with my decision making process? Yes, I was. I am one of those people who, upon realizing that making informed decisions about a particular scenario, whether real world or the fictional world, likes to gather upon as much info as humanly possible.

Was I 100% comfortable with the choices that I decided to make once I had all of the information needed? Not entirely, but those choices were, in my honest opinion, the easiest to write to a satisfactory conclusion, because they both lived up to the expectation of the title of book #4, and we hope to the expectation of whatever the title of book #5 will be.

I would like to point out that this particular series of posts were originally written back in March/April of this year, which is why it states that no title was picked for book #5. As we all know, a title was picked prior to editing book #5, just like I had done with the previous four books.

(to be continued)

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

Episode #333: When Dying Is Your Story's HEA {1}

This pic was taken the day after the juvenile bear invasion. At least once a year we find deer in our backyard chilling out.

Today's post features a topic: killing off a major character, that I had originally written for Facebook, but due to circumstances beyond my control (hack/scam attempt using Meta's own services, among other things), I decided to hold it and a dozen others at bay for the time being.

This will be a three part series, as I had specifically designed it to be on Facebook. In fact, I have gotten pretty good at keeping within the specific parameters I had created for myself: nor more than seventeen lines per post, which translates to about 220 +/- words. Without further ado, here is part of one of how I went about killing off a major character.

~~~~~

I never really had an issue with killing off minor characters in my stories, since they were mostly disposable pieces that primarily moved the story along (see my novella "The Mortality of Familial Love"), nor did I suffer emotionally when killing a major character as a realistic consequence for the life he was living (see my novella "To Live Is To Die Young"). I think the main reason for my reaction to them boils down to that they were simply stand-alones.

However, killing off a major character(s) in a series is always a risky proposition. You don't want a series of any length to not have someone suffer the consequences of their actions, but by the tail side of the coin, you don't want to have someone die without it have a lasting effect on the story.

In this series, it was inevitable that at least one major character was going to die and their death was going to affect the rest of the story in a myriad of ways.

My issue at the time, was deciding which major character(s) I was going to 1} kill off; 2} how I was going to present the immediate aftermath; and 3} how the story would unfold for the remaining two books.

Note: the climatic battle scene takes place in book #3, which sets the stage for the remaining two volumes.

(to be continued)

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

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