Episode #337: We Be World Building 2.026 {1)

We all like flowers in the wild, as they be harbingers of a brighter today and a buoyant tomorrow. 

Blogging note: This particular topic was one that I had previously touched upon in great detail back in 2024 (see tag "Hot Mess" for similar posts), but I thought I would revisit this from a different viewpoint.

I understood the concept of world building early on, mostly as a reader, so I had no problem in reading stories that had a meticulously created background for them. I also understood it as a writer too, although I didn't make too much of an attempt at creating brand new worlds beyond writing stories where certain concepts were already presented as a given.

In other words, whatever oddity I had introduced into a given story, say a character with a tail and some fur or one that collected souls, it was treated as an everyday normal occurrence. I think, at least to the best of my recollection, I did this because I wanted to treat anything out of the ordinary as a simple and ordinary occurrence.

For about a decade, I was quite happy to sprinkle a little of not normal people/concepts into normal situations, and treat those things as normal. A slice of insanity dropped into a very sane world, if you will.

Fast forward to May/June 2022. This is when my mercurial muse decided that their life needed a bit of chaos thrown into the mix. They knocked on my chamber door to my brain and said, "You need to do something out of your comfort zone, and I'm going to help you do it."

I answered with some trepidation. "And what might that be?"

"World building! Doesn't that sound like fun!"

"Nooooo!"

Reality check: Fast forward to May/June 2022. I had made the conscious decision that I would tackle my next project by composing the entire thing by hand (hence the first month listed), then transcribe it to the computer (hence the second month). That next project was, by process of elimination, this fantasy series.

Now I knew early on that the dribs and drabs I was presently doing with my stories simply was not going to pass muster, with this series. Although at the time, turning this story into a series was the furthest thing from my mind.

To refresh everyone's memory: this story originally started as a mediocre novella that was ultimately shelved in the 2010s with about five chapters written (I think). When I had decided to make it one of my post-retirement projects, it became the first one to start off as 100% handwritten.

It quickly blew up, and from that novella sprang forth five full length novels that ultimately required a brand new world built from scratch in order to make it believable.

And here is where the fun and the stress of creating a whole new world(s) rears its beautiful (fun) and fugly (stress) head for the next three years.

to be continued

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

Episode #336: We Be Booking It To Our Bookshelf {1}

I found myself at my local library's used media store the other day, debating on what type of media I should purchase to add to my growing movie and c.d. collection, and I wasn't what one could say, having any luck. The pickings were quite slime in the DVD selections, and I wasn't really interested in the new age/modern country/classical that were currently populating the music section.

So I turned my attention to the possibility of beefing up my stagnant book collection. I say "stagnant" because my last dozen selections were striking out at a torrid pace that would match my New York Mets.*

*As of the day of this post, the Mets are fifteen games under five hundred, deep in the bowels of the NL East basement. So....yeah.

So my wandering eye starts wandering around the book section to see if anything that not only could catch my fancy, but it would be a topic I would actually be curious about. My eye eventually did settle on a book that caught my fancy, but the topic itself was one that I've either read about or listened to enough times to not pique my curiosity.

Now, I don't know if you do something similar, but when I come across as person/event that has been overcooked to a charcoaled goodness, I have a tendency not to sample that charcoaled goodness, no matter how tempting it may seem to be.

Let me give you a few examples. I listen to a fantastic true crime podcast called Small Town Dicks. Hosted by Yeardley Smith (The Simpsons), it covers criminal cases that are off the proverbial beaten path. I highly recommend it.

This year, they ran a three part episode on the OKC Bombing as told by one of the lead investigators. Sounds interesting, but I heard/read enough about the bombing to last me a lifetime. This summer they're running a ten part series on the Golden State Killer, as told by one of the co-hosts who helped track him down. Again, it's sure to be really good, but that particular crime wasn't my cup of tea to begin with.

So back to our potential back selection:

The book was about Buffalo Bill & His Wild West Show. Nothing really remarkable there, as I've read a lot about Buffalo Bill. However, upon closer examination, the full title was something that I did not know much about.

"Buffalo Bill's British Wild West"

I knew he toured internationally with his show, but this was the first book that I've come across that covered part of his international tour, which in this case covered the years of 1887-1904 in the UK. Naturally I was quite intrigued, to the point where I decided to open my wallet and gladly pay the $3 price tag.

I perused through a few pages, just to see what I was getting myself into, and the other thing that caught my attention, was that the book was 100% made in the UK. From the publishing press to the copyright info, the personal bio to the price tag and everything in between, it was all British. It was also a second edition too.

Upon closer examination, I could see that this was a well researched book. So this was going to be a pleasure to read, since as of late my non-fiction used book reads have been a major bust (like Brian Bosworth realm of football busts). About the only fault I could find with it was the size of the font, which is too small*. But as they say, it's a me problem.

*Imagine a 240+ page book in the font size equivalent of this entire note, that's what I mean by 'too small'.

In general, it takes a lot to pique my curiosity about a well covered event or person in time. It takes even more to actually have me revisit a well covered topic due to a different approach being used. See this post about doing just that with a well known criminal event.

In summation, this book piqued my curiosity to the point where I was happy to purchase this book to help my local public library fund vast extracurricular activities for the town and beyond.

Have a fantastic Monday and safe and slightly sane week.

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

Episode #335: When Dying Is Your Story's HEA {3}

Had another visitor in the backyard the other day (7/10). This was one of three pics and a seventeen second video clip that I took that day. About a minute later, they made an exit to the neighbor's back yard with a graceful leap over the fenxe.

I certainly do love living next to a mountain.

~~~~

This last post was, at the time, acknowledging something that I initially thought would never really happen to me: genuinely caring about the characters that I had created for a given novel.

to be perfectly frank, with all of the stories that I had previously written, the level of caring about my characters shown by me in this series, was basically non-existent. Don't get  me wrong, I cared about the characters in my stories, but not to the lever that I had with these characters.

So, without further ado, here is part three of our original FB series covering how I chose to kill off a few major characters.

Let me tell you, killing off characters that you have grown to love as a writer is hard. It's doubly so when the story requires you to show that sometimes the consequences for a particular action can have a spidering effect.

I can safely say that the aftermath of both characters' deaths affected everyone profoundly, both in the story and the person who had to write it. For me personally, even though I considered these two specific story arcs (out of the estimated fifteen the entire series contained) to be some of my best writing, nearly three years later, and numerous re-reads for editing, it still moves me to tears.

I think as a writer, if you can write something, like an entire storyline that makes you emotional, you should high five yourself. Because if you can become emotional at the deaths of two major characters, imagine how your readers will react to it.

I'm not sure if I'll be pulling any more of my unpublished FB posts for my blog, because I'm nearly certain that the topics that I had wrote about for FB were covered nearly two years ago on this blog. But I did want to pull this unpublished posts and publish them here, as I don't believe I've read anywhere about killing off a major character in a story before.

But I did want to share my thoughts on how difficult of a decision it was, and the aftermath of that decision, and how deeply it has affected me, and continues to affect me some three years later.

A fantastic Monday (or Tuesday and beyond) to one and all.

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

Episode #334: When Dying Is Your Story's HEA {2}

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