Episode #274: A Fugly Tale Of Two Novellas

Pretty sure I posted another version of this photo in late 2024, but I still think it's a cool pic. I mean, when a cat casually appears in the street to survey you, and only you, it makes you feel...special.

It's been a really slow week here in Connecticut, which usually means we're going to blog about something writing related. This time our writing related topic, like the title suggests, is about two novellas, one published and one hoping to be published, and the two radically different paths that were trodden to get where they currently are today.

Let's start at the beginning with the comparison. They were both born during a rather fertile creativity period of the very early 2010's, in which I was churning out all kinds of slop for stories as well as for my blog (I think I was doing maybe three to four blog posts a week at that point). They were both poorly written but they were near and dear to my heart, which of course meant at the time they were ready to be published.

This is where their dual journey took a major diversion at the proverbial fork in the road, with the published book going left and the unpublished one going right.

The published book caused me a whole lot of stress and a whole lot of money. Because I was simply oozing with confidence, I decided to hire a now ex-Facebook friend in 2014 who was a freelance writer and editor, to edit my book. About two to three weeks later and $300 poorer, I had a nicely edited novella and a three to four page critique on what needed to be fixed on it. I read the critique, studied the editing notes that were written on the manuscript....and promptly shelved the entire thing because I was too chicken to actually knuckle down and fix it.

Fast forward to the wonderful world of Covid-19. We're happily retired and got to work on a number of projects, including this novella. Once I had fixed all of the issues and got it to where it was ready to be published, I promptly ran head first into a two-bay garage door.

It took me a total of ten years and an online poll to come up with a plausible title for the novella. I've always had issues creating a title for my stories, and this novella was no exception. The next problem that popped up was writing a long blurb, a short blurb and a tag for the novella. This also took about a month to write both, which included some substantial help from my Facebook writing group to hammer out two rough drafts of the long blurb before nailing it on the third. Had the same issue with the short blurb and the tag, multiple drafts before nailing each.

So overall, the published book caused me a ton of stress because I had a wickedly hard time trying to write 150 +/- word long synopsis, an 80 to 100 word short synopsis and a 20 +/- word tag for a novella that I had a moderately difficult time, due to the complexity of the plot, in deciding what the story was actually about.

Now we move on to the unpublished novella.

The unpublished novella was also similar to the published novella, which also included a complex plot and a fast pace. But that's where the similarities end, as even though it had a complex plot line, the underlying event/reason (drug turf war) was very simple to understand and work with. We performed at least four rounds of editing, both in Gdoc and Word (the formatter I use works in Word as a starting point for everything else) and in that process became overly familiar with the entire novella cover-to-cover.

Because of this over-familiarity with my story, everything else associated with it became the polar opposite of what was done for the published novella. In a span of three days totaling one hour, I had a 159 word long blurb that I was happy with. It took me twenty minutes to write a 91 word short blurb, and another twenty-five minutes to create a title. Because of the difficulty I had in trying to come up with a cover concept on the fly the first time around, I sat down and spent an hour re-reading the novella and taking notes about what I want for a cover. In fact, the only thing that I have left to do for this novella before I move on to the next phase of publishing, is to come up with a proper tag.

So we have a tale of two novellas, both of which took over a dozen years to come to fruition, but took divergent paths to reach the proverbial golden ring. One fed directly into my stress/anxiety of writing blurbs, a story title and a vision for a book cover; the other ignored my stress/anxiety and instead gently stroked my ego and self-esteem to the point where I was able to complete all but one of my goals in rapid succession.

A question that I would have for you: does your stress/aggravation level ebb and flow when it comes to writing the blurbs/tags, creating a cover concept or even coming up with a title with every book that you complete? Or do you find it to be the same no matter what kind of book you write?

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

Episode #273: From A Young Foot Patrol To An Old Foot Patrol

Gotta love the duck, for they only have three modes of transportation and doesn't give three quacks over which one to use at a given moment in time.

This past week has made me realize that I've come full circle with my modes of transportation.

To elaborate: after 16 years spent acquiring 132k+ very hard miles, it decided to throw a tantrum and drop its transmission. Under normal circumstances, I would simply say "adieu" and go through the aggravating/time consuming process of acquiring another dependable car.

Here's the thing though: after spending a solid month thinking about it, I decided to get another car for myself and keep this car as a proverbial back up/second car. Which means biting the bullet and having this one one brought back to working order (if you take about 6% of the aforementioned mileage, you will have a basic idea on how much this repair is going to cost me).

Which brings us to the topic at hand.

When we were young, foot patrol was our main method of transportation until we got our bicycle. That became our main mode (with obvious exceptions) until we acquired our first motorized vehicle. As we got older, foot patrol became a dependable/necessary back up when motorized transportation wasn't available. Sure, we would grumble about it, but we dealt with it to the best of our abilities.

Spending a week (actually 10 days) without a car made me realize how fortunate I am that reverting to foot patrol to run certain errands doesn't bother me as much as maybe five years ago. Five years ago, it was a major pain in the butt not to have access to other motorized transportation when my primary mode isn't available. I didn't have access to a bicycle anymore (safety concerns then and now) and walking was a pain in the butt to run my errands.*

*note: I live in the northern end of town where it's a forty minute walk to the center to run certain errands and an hour walk to the next town to run certain others.

Fast forward to now. Now walking is much easier for me to deal with, because less weight makes faster walking with less pain. So the majority of my time sans car was spent walking to run at least one of my night errands earlier in the afternoon. I did have access to a car to run a few important errands, but overall, I found I wasn't really inconvenienced by being on foot patrol.

I actually found the experience quite enjoyable, and to be honest, this past Friday (5/2), having to run two key errands, banking and lottery, was actually a snap to perform. It took me 2 1/2 hours to execute a large circular trip to the center (bank), then back towards home (not really) to the package store to run the second part of my errand, then finally back to home.

What helped me a lot was taking two viable shortcuts that saved me about 1 1/2 hours of extra walking time. Seven years worth of hardcore walking allowed me to plot out the shortest distance between two points on numerous occasions, and this walk was no exception. Think about it, if a normal walk to a particular destination took you close to forty-five minutes and you found a route that covered the exact same distance in thirty minutes, would you not take it?

I'm not sure if my new ambivalent attitude about walking has something to do with being a semi-Luddite when it came to technology as an adult. I'm a child of the 70's/80's, so the Internet wasn't a thing for me until the advent of Google in the 90's. I definitely was a half dozen steps behind when it came to both cell phones and smart phones, so being glued to my phone isn't as severe as other people have it. As for computers, no real exposure until I started working for the government in the late 90's.

In any event, I believe when you get older, it's possible to not be so concerned about transportation issues when you have a lot of time on your hands, and no real immediate need to actually do something with that excess time. As the old saying goes, work smarter, not harder. Or in my case, prior planning prevents poor performance.

How about you, do you find yourself not really worried/concerned when your normal mode of transportation has decided to take a short holiday and you have to improvise?

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

Episode #272: When Accuracy Really Matters In The Short Run

Still one of my favorite Mamacita & Son doggo pics.

 I've always been a research fanatic, even back in my young adult years when I used to study reference books and encyclopedias for fun (seriously). That fanaticism carried me well into my working adult years.

That same dogged determination from my work life carried over to my writing life, where I began to research like a fiend for my novels and novellas. Because as you know, nothing screams NEWBIE! when you open a book from a first time novelist and find all kinds of continuity errors/common sense errors/general knowledge errors. All of which stemmed from a lack of basic research into whatever topic that particular story happens to be written about.

Today's post is not about the abnormal amount of research that I've done for my novels and novellas, because I'm pretty sure that you really do not want to hear even a smidgen about. Instead, I'm going to be writing about all of the fun research that I had to do for my latest short story project. 

Note: I actually got motivated to start writing short stories again, as I was 99% caught up my current novella, so I was basically treading water while I was getting my finances back in order (courtesy of USPS and their suddenly slip-shoddy delivery service) and while trying to think of a good hook for my novella.

I believe accuracy is important in whatever story length/genre you happen to be writing in, especially if you're creating short stories. I mean, no matter what the topic of choice is for your short story, you want to sound like you know what you're writing about, because ignorance is not bliss when it comes to writing.

So, in no particular order of importance, I want to highlight what I had to research for the nine completed short stories and the one that I had just started on. Enjoy!

1. Story #1: An original bizarre fantasy/horror story that was written during the early months of mandatory WFH, so no real research was performed beyond my state agency's basic WFH requirements.
2. Story #2: A re-written short story from my early blogging years, no real research was performed beyond digging deep into my memory banks about the area/landmarks in my local neighborhood.
3. Story #3: A re-written short story from my very early writing adventures. Again, no real research was performed beyond recycling a few fictitious business names.
4. Story #4: A re-written fantasy short story that was originally published in my now closed short story blog. Once again, no real research was performed.

I promise, this does get better. It's kind of hard to do research on re-written short stories that do not deviate much from the original premise.

1. Story #5: A re-written short story that was based on a biblical verse. I had to redo some basic research, as each section of the story was based on one sentence from the verse in question. A bit dark, but I think it blends quite nicely with the verse in question.
2. Story #6: A completely re-written short story that used the very bad original as a basic outline for the new and improved version. This is something of a dark fantasy story that featured hybrid humans of maybe the werewolf kind, as well as a tiny bit of religion (including a biblical verse or two), so the research was a little more than what I did for the previous stories.
3. Story #7: A re-written short story that is a black humor fantasy. Research on Aztec religious rites were key elements to the writing of this story.
4. Story #8: A re-written short story that mostly kept the dark theme of the original fantasy. No real research was done for the story beyond a shallow dive in the memory banks for certain concepts.
5. Story #9: An original story that explored, in a very roundabout way, the adult entertainment industry (much like my novel "The Inner Sibling" did). So we had to dig very deep into my memory banks for various articles about what goes into making an adult movie. A few elements from my recently completed five volume fantasy series were featured in this story: telepathy and intraspace transportation. I think the most challenging part of this story was writing the explicit sex scenes PG-13, which if you think about it, is not an easy task to accomplish.
6. Story #10: This will also be a completely re-written short story, with the badly written original serving as a very basic outline. Because of the way the main character was dispatched in the original story (beheading), we decided to take that particular ending and go to town with it. We have researched, so far: Japanese girl names and samurai swords (because the main character is a female samurai). So this story is going to be a blast to write and a blast to research.

I know it doesn't seem like I did a ton of research the second time around with the bulk of the short stories listed, but the second around I did make sure that what I was writing did make sense in the long run. Even though each story is fictional, I still needed to be accurate with my portrayals of the three noun groups of life (person, place, thing), and I think I did a very good job with each of the stories listed.

So my question to you the reader is: do you have fun researching the required information needed for your short stories, or do you perform the absolute bare minimum for your short stories?

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

Episode #271: When Research Fails To Connect

Random picture from the mountain that makes one yearn for the sanity of Father Nature this Spring.

As most of you know, I enjoy supporting my local public library by shopping at their internal bookstore for gently used books/cd's/dvd's at three times a month.* I find it's an economical way to pump up my respective collections of media.

*my public library has two book fairs for all of the donated media they receive year round and what doesn't sell there, goes into the bookstore. They also cull the collection and sell those items in the store too. All monies raised goes towards various programs that are not covered under their general budget.

For example, my haul for the past month featured music by: Tower of Power; EmmyLou Harris; Jethro Tull; Annie Lenox; G.E. Smith; Barenaked Ladies;18th century popular music; Chevelle and early 19th century folk/ballad music. Books include a bio of a seafaring Victorian lady and a look at the London underworld from pre-medieval days to the present (late 90's/early 2000's).

Today's post is about the creator of the early 19th century folk/ballad music. The official title of the c.d. is "The Battle of Plattsbugh: Music from the war of 1812", and the artist in question was Connecticut native Stan Ransom aka The Connecticut Peddler.

Now as I'm want to do whenever I come across an old (in this case 24 years) c.d. is to see what kind of current info I can find on the artist/musician in question. So I went to his website listed on the back to see what I can see. Found a lot of stuff that was grossly out of date: the website was last updated some 13 years (it had Adobe flash player, so yeah...) ago, a defunct like button to a FB page and the last release listed was maybe in the early 2000's.

So off we went to go a-Googlin', and while we had some initial success by finding a newspaper article from the 2010's about the gentleman in question, any further dive would require spending money on a subscription to a paper that I neither wanted nor had any compunction to read. So off we went a-Googlin', this time for an obit.

Now you may think that searching for an obit is a bit strange, but in the bio link on his apparently defunct website, he was born in 1928, so a good assumption on anyone's part would be that he is no longer residing among the living. Alas, I found some obits, but not for the gentleman in question. In fact, the last thing I found for the gentlemen was a LinkedIn entry from 2020 thanking everyone for their birthday wishes.

Ultimately, this is where we decided to end our research. If I want to search out for any of his remaining c.d.'s, I would probably have to try my luck on Ebay. It's a rare occurrence for me when my research doesn't pan out in any meaningful way. In fact, I think this is the only time I wound up shooting a total cap gun with my research, as every other time I've done similar media research, I've always had a conclusion, good or bad, that I could live with.

I always want to be successful whenever I perform a personal research project, and this one felt like a complete failure to launch for me. 

So my question to you, my drive-by reader, is this: have you ever done a research project, personal or otherwise, that became a complete total bust/total zero when all was said and done?

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