I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 9th

Girl howdy and howdy to the girl who is girlie enough to be the happy mistress of the light but butch enough to bring out your submissive side publicly with no shame, and welcome to the nifty literary world of G. B. Miller, where the perpetual question of "If I was up, would you be down?" will never, ever be answered by him.

As per the norm, a picture from my vast 10+ year archive of photos, of which the majority can be found in my pictorial blog Pictures for Smarties{front page tab is provided for your ease of convenience}.

I have no real comment on this but it sure is cute, eh?

I thought I would add something new to today/s post, something I'm calling "Classic Quotated". This will be a weekly-to-semi-monthly quote of ye olden defunct Tumblr intros that were designed to show off both my dry wit and naughty sense of humor.

Today's installment is from ye olden post of October 27, 2018, and as you'll see, it touches two very real ongoing hourly/daily/weekly occurrences. Disclaimer: I am a moderate Republican, but did not vote for him, and I did suffer a direct hit from a now ex-FB Canadian friend (her choice, not mine) who is infected with said disease.

Boy howdy and howdy to the girl who likes to be the husband in the relationship and welcome to the wonderfully skewered literary world that is G.B. Miller, where dealing with Trump Derangement Syndrome is a daily occurrence in socialized media and posting "Illegal immigrants are criminals" is hate speech.

As they say, FacialSlapBook is like a gallon of rotten egg nog that tastes absolutely divine.

Anywho, to the writing up-to-date!

We're still busy merrily chugging along with our current round of editing, as I'm now working on chapter 12. I've sliced about 500+ words from the book so far and I'm sure more will be sliced by the editor. One of the many things that I'm trying to reduce {as per the excellent advice from my editor} is the amount of personal pronouns that I've used in the story. By "personal pronouns", I mean that I'm using the characters names way too much (like almost every two paragraphs), so I'm trying to substitute those particular pronouns with "he/she/him/her", and so far I'm doing pretty good.

And now, we feature a right hand "K" shaped u-turn for your enjoyment, which is specifically writing related.

As most people can confirm, I'm a linear kind of guy. At work, I always move in the way of "A-B-C-D-E" whenever I'm doing something. Whenever I'm forced to deviate (usually involuntarily) from a particular plan of attack, I can get highly irritable. With writing, it's pretty much the same deal. I can only write in a linear order: the beginning, the middle(s); the end. I can't do it any other way.

Flashback to late Summer 2016.

I had decided to re-write an early vanity published novella for my next project. I dug out the original manuscript to use as a basic outline, and proceeded to start writing. Happily oblivious, I soon had about 4 complete chapters written and I was doing sooooooooooooooo good that I felt invincible. But then, my mind played a dirty trick on me. It said, "G.B., what about that prequel that you wrote some ten years ago?"

And just like that, my happy oblivion was brutally eliminated with extreme prejudice. I immediately stopped writing and started looking for the prequel, which I found about a half hour later. We ate the dust bunnies (with coleslaw), re-read the slushie and commenced to writing. Roughly six months later, in the Spring of 2017, we had a doozy of a 1st draft for a novel. Once completed, I got ready to go back to work on my previous project and congratulated myself on a job well done.

But, tooting my own horn quickly turned sour and out of tune. Why? Because that insidious memory of mine once again spoke up. It said, "Ya know, it sounds like you need a prequel to the prequel."

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

I beg of you, please don't make me do it. I just can't take on that kind of responsibility. I'm not that strong enough to do it. My writing is good, but that would require me to take it up another notch or two. I'm old to do this. But...but...but.

But nothing. My friends, in a nutshell, I went out of my comfort zone by writing a non-linear trilogy.  I started what would become book #3 (version 1) first. Switched gears to write what I thought would be book #1, but became book #2. Then I wrote book #1, which came out last year. Trashed 1.0 of book #3 and ultimately wrote half of book #3 version 2.0

Yay.

As always, you can follow me on FB, check out my blogging archives as well as my books via the book covers and page tabs.

{c} 2019 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 8th

Girl howdy and howdy to the boy who is so comfortable in his masculinity that he has no problem in showing off his devotion to his lady love by wearing a customized dog collar and leash in public, and welcome to the skewered literary world of G.B. Miller, where nothing of note happens in his world without his direct involvement...whether it hurts him or not.

Since we're about to get gobsmacked with a vortex of weather cold enough to shrivel your hair follicles to nothingness, I thought for this blog's weekly picture, we show a house covered with some soft fluffy white stuff.

It has been a crazy week in G.B. Miller's world and he has no idea on where to start, but like a certain well known comedian would say, let us begin at the beginning.

Work has been normally nutty at best and since I've talked about ad nauseum about work (I's a state guv'ment employee who DOESN'T deal with the general public on any kind of basis, seldom or otherwise), we'll kick it back over to the writing mode. But first, a blast from the past.

I've always abhorred censorship in all of its ugly forms (including when I'm forced to do it either on my blog or on FaceSlapBook) but I especially abhor it on radio. While I do understand the need to scrub/muddle F-bombs (which is why that kind of stuff is limited to college radio on the overnight or Internet radio) from songs, which can sometimes ruin the climax in a song {see RATM "Killing In The Name Of"}, I absolutely detest it when they, meaning commercial radio, scrubs non-swear words from popular songs.

A classic diatribe about radio censorship from ye olden blog Cedar's Mountain, dated January 4, 2013, for you to peruse and enjoy.

 And now, the noun-verb-adverb-adjective-other-types-of-grammar update portion of our post.

Like I stated earlier, this week has been certifiably nutty, so the mundaneness that is editing has been the oasis that helps me keep my sanity. Well that, and listening to music that normally helps me fall asleep too.

I'm wired differently when it comes to music and writing. To create, I need silence/P&Q in order to get things done. I discovered early on that if I listen to music or anything else while writing, I wind up concentrating more on the music that I do the writing. Editing is a entirely different animal. I can listen to almost anything while editing, including sports, but I find that if I really want to concentrate on what I'm editing, I'll listen to somewhat non-intrusive music for background noise.

I say "non-intrusive" since I will often tune out what I'm listening to when I'm doing other things. Bad if you're listening to a genre you really like (i.e. heavy metal, country or americana), but good if you're listening to a genre that you like but only can take it in small doses, so if you tune out and come back, you haven't missed much.

Back in the summer of my discontent {aka 2018} I discovered a fascinating Internet radio conglomo called SomaFM. Currently, SomaFM (which is 100% listener supported and which I will probably donate to once I get my finances under control) carries 30 different musical genres that cater to almost every taste under the sun.

I personally have the following, some of which I tap into to help me edit: FolkForward {folk}; BootLiquor {their version of Americana}; ThistleRadio {Celtic}; Lush {mellow/sensual electronica w/vocals}; BAGel Radio {non-commercial alternative/indie}; and a new one that I just added called Metal Detector {heavy metal}. The 1st, 3rd, 4th and 5th listed is what I'll use as white nose while editing. Low volume plus not knowing any of the artist equals a good time to be had by all. I also listen to bluegrass and eclectic music from Radio Paradise as well.

This my friends, helps me stay in the proper frame of mind for book I'm currently editing. Nothing worse than listening to something that does't work with what you got. So far, it's been working extremely well for me.

As always, you can follow me on Facebook and check out my various writings by clicking on the book covers or Books by G.B. Miller.

{c} 2019 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 7th

Girl howdy and howdy to the boy who is manly enough to have his girl be the driver in their relationship and welcome to the wonderfully skewered literary world of G.B. Miller, where the recent past is the prologue to a failed future. Especially if you're someone above the age of 35 who abhors a politically correct nanny state.

First up, the prerequisite picture, courtesy of Pictures for Smarties:

Riding the wave in an office building

While I sometimes may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, I often find humor in my adventures of day to day living.

Case in point, the other day I was tying my boots up in preparation to going to work. My hand suddenly slipped off my shoelace and I bopped myself in the nose. No big thing, I said to myself, since I've done this numerous times. Shortly thereafter, I trip on to the facilities to take care of some business, when I discovered a runny nose happening. I blew my nose and lo and behold, blood appeared on the TP.

Yup. I done punched myself a bloody nose.

Normally, this not something to brag about. I mean, how many people do you know that actually brag about doing something incredibly stupid to themselves? Probably less than the amount of fingers on your hand. But, I saved this experience to use as cannon fodder to diffuse annoying/crappy situations, and fortunately for me, a few popped up on that particular day.

Got some blog related news for ya. If you've clicked through to read this post, you will see a few interesting cosmetic changes made to this blog. Among the things added were two subscription widgets (RSS feed and e-mail), a new stat counter and four static page tabs across the top. The page tabs contain links to four of my old blogs that you can peruse at your leisure: Cedar's Mountain, Pictures For Smarties, It's Always Saturday In Suburbia and Father Nature's Corner, and each one has a short bio/synopsis of the blog.

And finally, some writing related news is to be had.

This weekend, I finally hit the stopping point of my latest WiP, The Friendship Has Ended. For the past few weeks, as I'd slugged away on my novel, the end goal was to write to a point where I wouldn't suffer through a major case of writer's block when I went back to work on it after a six month hiatus (I have quite a few slushies that will forever remain incomplete because I couldn't remember what the F'ng plot was when I'd finally decided to work on it again), so the end result is 6 chapters/38,397 words.

So this time, I got to a point where I know that I'll be able to continue writing it after a six month hiatus, because besides remembering what the book is about (wife cheats on husband) I will be writing a short one half to one page bullet point memo detailing the remaining character scenes that I need to write in order to tidy up all the subplots of all three books and have a satisfactory ending.

The reason why I'm doing all of this extra work is that I need to complete book #2 The Friendship Has Continued. I've already done three rounds of edits (of which I'll probably elaborate in the coming weeks) and I have, at the very minimum, two more rounds to do before I contact the editor of my choice to book a date for her to work on it.

As always, you can follow me on Facebook and check out my writings by clicking on the appropriate book cover or go to Books by G.B. Miller.

{c} 2019 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 6th

Boy howdy and howdy to the writer creating this post because he'll need all the help he can muster as writing on the fly is something that he's a little bit rusty at, and welcome to the skewered literary world of G.B. Miller, where necessity is the mother of Creativity In Action {which is the title of an actual story that you can find this very fine short story trilogy}.

Yes, writing on the fly is something that I'm definitely out of practice with, since the fiasco that was Tumblr forced me to pre-write my all of my posts on either WordPad or NotePad (both very decent products if you ain't got Word) prior to posting them there.

But writing on the fly, or rather, creating on the fly is a necessity for today's post. This past week was truly an exercise in stupid, since family life (a tragedy that happen to one of my daughter's closest friends on New Year's Eve/Day), work, personal issues (eye doctor), more work, (mini-fires and new employee orientation), overtime (to finish what I didn't do the previous day) and of course, writing.

Speaking of writing, I'm just about done with chapter six, which ends the 1st part of "The Friendship Has Ended". Once this is completed, the book will be shelved for a minimum of six months as I turn my attention to getting book #2 ready for publication. My main concern was finding a good enough spot to stop at, so when I pick it back up a few months later, I can spend just a few minutes in re-reading and picking up where I left off at. The only other thing that I'll need to write is probably a short outline detailing the points that I'll still need to cover in order to complete the novel.

So, here we are at the midway point of our post, and like I stated, I need to do some writing on the fly. I'm a bit rusty at writing on the fly these days, since our imagination has gotten a bit stale at times. Granted, at times, we've had continuous Twitter oriented spurts to open up our Tumblr blog posts for the past two years.

A good example would be the one that I wrote for my very last {12/1/18} Tumblr blog post (sorry, that blog has ceased to be as I nuked it last month in protest of their massive censorship decision to make their entire platform PG-13. As a side note, I will probably be sharing snippets from that defunct blog for the foreseeable future). It was witty, provocative and possibly offensive to millennials and SJW's.

Boy howdy and howdy to girls who use what the deity of their choice graced them with to get whatever they want out of life, no questions asked, and welcome to the skewered literary world of G.B. Miller, where being rude, crude and vile used to be a lyric to a Weird Al song but now is sadly a very real thing.

Okay, maybe that wasn't a good one, but this intro from my blog post of 11/24/18 was about as serious as I would get for an intro. The blog post itself was about reducing stress on SlapMyFaceUntilIBook.

Boy howdy and a major raspberry to the parents of a Canisius College student athlete who threatened her with excommunication from the family unless she went through so-called "gay conversion therapy". She rightfully declined and they excommunicated her with extreme prejudice (article to be found in The Advocate, which sadly I have no link to as I read it on my smart phone via the Smart News app).

Personally, I always thought that "gay conversion therapy" was a big fat joke. Genetically, you either are or aren't. Case closed. You don't get to choose, genetics does. But I digress, as there is a time and a place for discussions like this and presently, I'm not quite ready to offer the other 1 3/4 cents of my 2 cents at this time.

Let's hope that the 3rd time is a charm. From my blog post of 11/17/18.

Boy howdy and howdy to the delicious wing-nut that seems so tantalizingly out of reach that you simply sigh and quiver your bottom lip in disappointment and welcome to the wide, wide, wide, wide and most definitely unbalanced world of G.B. Miller, whose idea of a good Christmas movie is Eddie Izzard's "Lost Christmas".

Now this one has it all: a sexually ambiguous opening statement because it can mean either MF, FM, FF or MM; and a small snippet of the kind of extras (t.v., music, film, etc) that makes me, me. I'd first saw this movie 2017 and I was absolutely floored by it. I love weird Christmas movies, especially some of the weird mutations of "A Christmas Carol" and this one is in my top 5 of strange seasonal/topical movies.

And thus, ends our Creativity In Action. Tune in next week when I should be back to myAbie Normal self. As always, you can follow me on that other socialized media website.

{c} 2019 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved