Episode #349: Shorten Our Stories Reduex

I found this random floral bouquet during my afternoon walk the other day (10/15). Not sure why it was left there, but seemed just enough out of place for me to take a picture of it. Because you know, curiosity makes Georgie's daily routine less routine.

I know I've mentioned on more than a few occasions that I've gotten back into writing short stories, and I've been basically writing short stories that were previously published in my now closed short story blog, with a few originals thrown in for fun.

Over the years I've been saying to myself and to you the reader that I've been (mostly) a pantster when it comes to writing because generally, I found planning a novel to be a lot more complicated than just writing on the fly.

However, the three plus years that I had spent writing my fantasy series basically blew that viewpoint completely out of the water to smithereenies. How, you may ask?

Well....when you incrementally expand your universe to include eighteen characters and fifteen plot/sub-plot points, you decided that plotting/outlining that universe isn't such a bad thing after all.

So we applied that learned lesson to our short stories, albeit in a modified form: we took that previously written short story and used it as a viable outline for the new version of that short story.

And it does come in handy, as it gives me a predetermined starting point and a predetermined ending. All I have to do, in general, is create the filling. And sometimes, we improvised the starting point, so that it blends with the filling and the ending.

For example: I had chosen a train story in my latest batch of rewrites. It wasn't anything particularly special about the story: a man was riding a train and encountered a woman who left a hairbrush behind.

Using that original story as an outline, we tweaked the beginning (riding a train to visit his late wife's parents), created a middle that elasorateds on how he came to be a widow, tweaked the original ending and we ultimately wounds up with a ghost story.

This was the process that I used for rewriting over a dozen short stories: use the original as an outline to plot out nearly 75% of the story (aka, the beefy middle), with the remaining 25% evenly split between the beginning and the end.

I've gotten so used to writing with an outline that I now often wonder why I hadn't tried it sooner. Then I remember after asking myself that question, I answer it by stating that going into that much detail prior to putting pen to paper makes Georgie a dull writer.

So today, or rather, this year I learned that you can teach a crusty old dog new tricks, but only after you heavily bridge them with treats and harsh persuasion of the crystal blue variety.

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

Episode #348: Boy, Do I Got The Music In Me Or What?

I came across my birdie the other day and I caught them sitting on the mirror looking outside the window. I do catch them in unguarded moments from time to time, but never have my phone nearby to do anything about it.

I have a lot of c.d.s.

So many in fact, that my tiny little den was becoming quite cluttered because of the amount of c.d.s that I own. So naturally, I needed to get them organized. Fortunately for me, I have quite the imagination and planning capacity when the situation calls for it.

This situation called for it and my solution jumped out at m a couple of months ago, when I saw some cheap wooden crates at my local Dollar Tree store. I said to myself, these would work perfectly as c.d. racks. After taking a couple of measurements and checking to see if a c.d. case could actually fit. They did, and within the space of about a month, between Dollar Tree and Amazon, I had acquired thrity-eight small wooden crates that were 10 x 3 1/2 & 7 x 3 1/2, plus an appropriate number of slats of various sizes.

Fast forward a few months and I start planning on where I can put these crates  in my den. I had already emptied the den of my c.d.s, three tower racks and a bookcase, so it made the planning quite easy. Yet, it also made it quite frustrating.

"How?" you may ask.

Well, I am a firm believer of creating a free standing system of display units when it comes to wooden crates, so I thought I would design for my den would be easy peasy lemon squeezy.

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!

Rule #1: if you're creating a free standing shelving unit, maximum height is four crates. That way, the amount of c.d.s works as a safe counter balance for the height of the crates. This is especially important when you have a baseboard trim and cannot get flush to the wall with your crates. Excess height plus weight equals a disaster in waiting.

Rule #2: always important that you have enough units for the job that you're undertaking. Because thirty-eight units with a maximum capacity of 758 c.d.s is apparently not enough.

Yes my friends, you read that correctly.

Turns out that I had grossly underestimated the amount of c.d.s that I currently possess, thus requiring me to procure six more craters and an equal amount of slats. Plus, I had to find a smidgen more space for all of my c.ds, which are not counting the ones whose height is greater than 5.8 inches, and thus are propped up on a few of the crates as display pieces, along with old coffee cups, a pen cup and some toy cars.

so after redoing the numbers to make the math actually math, I believe I am close to 800 c.d.s. Which does, in a strange way, blows my mind, because if you had asked me nearly thirty years ago, would I be an owner of a format that was prohibitively expensive in those early years (if I recall correctly, new c.d.s were running around $25-$340 per title, much like new vinyl is today), odds were very good that I would answer quite negatively.

Such is the value of hindsight, I guess. In any event, as I stated, my freestanding wooden crate c.d racks were mostly kept to three units in height, and because I had so many c.d.s, I had to find other spaces outside of my den to make them all fit.

On a lighter note, I haven't purchased any c.d.s, new or used, as of late. Not because I don't have any room for them, but more to the simple fact that because I like my stuff reasonably organized, I would have to do a tremendous amount of shifting to make everything fit. And to be perfectly frank, I really do not want to do that kinds of work just yet.

I now have a reasonably organized den where stuff is judiciously spread out, as opposed to stacked upright and compact, and that makes me a happy miser.

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

Episode #347: What Is Specialized Dialogue?

Throwback Monday! Taken in the early 2010's, when I had a sense of humor at work. I may or may not still have that Sun doll, and the whale was put back in storage somewhere in this state after making a few appearances at the Big E.

While I was working on a few of my short stories, I noticed that I was trying to write my dialogue to fit the tenor of the story. I noticed that I was doing this on a similar scale in my fantasy series, only I was applying it during a given scene with certain characters.

For example, if I was dealing with a particular scene at the palace, I would tweak the dialogue to more accurately reflect what the courtiers and others would speak and how they would answer.

I found myself doing this with my sort stories, almost automatically. For example, a short story that I was rewriting, the setting was a passenger train in the late 19th century. Now in the Victorian age, there was a certain fluidity to the language, even though certain slang and curse words that would be the norm today.

So I made sure that the dialogue stayed within those Victorian standards. For example, I had my character curse, or rather, use a curse word that was stronger 'damn'. But I simply couldn't drop an F bomb when the man was showing disgust with himself and/or his current situation. Instead, I use the version that preachers would use  during fiery sermons about sin: fornicate.

While it doesn't have the shock or staying power of today's F bombs, it can still pack a punch where a proper young lady would be scandalized by the word.

Another example where I tried to tailor the dialogue to the tone of the story, was another rewritten short story that I had set in today's world, but the people were part of a large wolf pack (you know the type: human carnivore, answers to the man down under, etc.) that was a tiny bit gothic in nature.

So the dialogue had to be more in the view of gothic, with shades of being quite erudite. Like in the style of a few well known period shows back when television used to be really good.

One more example, again dealing with a rewrite (I have a plethora of badly written short stories that were explicitly created for my now closed short story blog that are desperately looking to be rewritten), with the setting being in the backwoods of a nameless southern state, and two of the characters being of the "Deliverance" mentality, and the other two being of the jaded city type with their own brand of justice.

Let me tell you, it were not easy writing dialogue for two characters with the IQ of their shoe sizes combined, but it was disturbingly easy to write dialogue for the proverbial dumb blonde/valley girl who actually wasn't plus her assistant.

So with those examples shown, I guess my question for every oner would be: do you tweak the way you go about writing dialogue based on what the given setting for your story, or do you keep it the same regardless of the type of story that you're writing?

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

Episode #346: My Puny Kingdom For A Sensible Story Title

It's Flashback Friday!

Just to give you an idea on how old this pic is, the RV pictured has been gone for almost 20 years, and that tree was removed to allow solar panels to be installed pre-pandemic.

The original inspiration for this blog post was a series of posts that I was writing for my FB author's page about my one and only traditionally published novel, Line 21. Specifically, I was lamenting about my poor title choice and how naive I was to think that the publisher would actually change it prior to publication.

So that got me to thinking about a task that I absolutely loathed over the years, to the point where it made my top five list of things associated with publishing that I hate to do: story titles.

This has always been a major splinter under my fingernail for as long as I can remember. Because I loathe this necessary evil to my writing life, I would often not even put in the bare minimum effort needed to choose a title. The end result would often be something like the aforementioned title to my trad publisher.

For this post, I thought I would revisit one of my least favorite writing related tasks to see what kind of progress, if any, I happen to be making.

My definition of "progress" is quite simple: am I now choosing titles based on the content of the story, or am I still being cutesy about my titles?

On the surface it does seem that I am making solid progress on the former. While I was spending the first half of 2026 editing my fantasy series, I was also coming up with solid titles for each volume. All the titles were based on the actual content for each given volume, of which the forth volume gave me the most trouble, as it took me almost two days to come up with one, and even then, I had to do some last minute tweaking to make it fit.

Now if we move over to the short story world that I had recently decided to refamiliarize myself with after about a year hiatus (give or take), to see what kind of progress I made there. I will note that the retitling has been a tad more difficult, as the content was more eclectic than normal.

If we take a look at the last story I had rewritten, you would see that the title more accurately matches with the story: a man traveling to Butte, Montana by train, so the story, naturally enough, is called 'Butte, Montana.'

As I thumb through the other fourteen short stories, it looks like I made a concentrated effort to link the title of a given story to the actual content of that given story. Although, it does look like one of them, titled 'Side Hustle', could be tenuously linked to the story content. However, the odd thing about this story is that I had, purposely it seems, added a few elements from my fantasy series.

So in my eyes, I consider this to be a win. Why? Because it's easier to explain a story with a title that makes sense, than to explain a story with a title that doesn't make sense (like my first novel).

I would like also to give a very brief update on my latest novella "Evil Has A Conscience": I should be getting the e-book version back by the beginning of October, with the print version back by the second week.

Have a fantastic week!

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