I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 22nd

Girl howdy and howdy to the boy who always looks at his mistress with sad puppy-dogs eyes, and on the rare occasions that she acknowledges him with an evil smile and a twinkle in her eye, comes refreshingly alive and welcome to the skewered literary world of G.B. Miller, where naughtiness is the normal and civility is the abnormal, and what goes up surely won't ever come down.

I thought that for today I would take a crack at writing free form and see what comes out my fertile imagination. Especially since I don't have any topic of note to work on {yes, that includes the series on how "The Friendship Trilogy" came about}, which is directly due to the garbage that is work and the happy reality of having a daughter-in-law this coming September.

For those of you who have followed my blog ramblings for the past ten years this is the return of the 1st/2nd p.o.v. stream of consciousness. For those of you who are new here, here is a sample for you to peruse at your leisure. Note, the video in the post no longer exists in that form, but does exists here.

So my muse, {what, you haven't heard of a writer with a muse?} who I love dearly, is at the moment taking a extremely long vacation, soaking up the sun somewhere on the Gulf Coast. Perhaps you've seen her {got a problem with that?}: lithe, lightly muscular, hotter than a sensual Maxim model and has no qualms in delivering a ginormous ass whooping if you look at her sideways. She is the entity that was the end result of all the character/personality traits from all the people I've met in the past twenty years.

Anyways, my muse is resting up from the recent hubris that was "The Friendship Trilogy" {roughly two plus years of non-stop writing that actually halted when I decided to get book #2 ready for publication and thus came to a stop roughly halfway thru book #3}. Once I came to a stop, she stepped out from my tiny little brain and decided to offer her succinct opinion of this current project.
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"Listen, I don't like where the plot to this trilogy is going."
Excuse me?
"I said, I don't like where this plot is going. Change it."
I think not.
She sat on my lap, crossed her legs and lightly ran a manicured fingernail down my cheek. "Are you dismissing my request?"
Shivering for a moment, I swallowed hard and said, Sorry, this basic plot is set in stone. Has been for for the past two and a half years.
She readjusted her position and continued to lightly stroke my cheek. "So, you're dismissing my request."
I shrank a little in my seat, swallowed hard again and said, For this particular story, yes I am dismissing your request.
She readjusted her position yet again and now was straddling my waist. Draping her arms over my shoulders, she purred, "This is so unlike you. How will you make this up to me?"
With a solitary tear running down my cheek, I swallowed very hard, and squeaked, I have a new character name that I want to use for another slushie novel that I want to revisit and rewrite. I promise that the outcome to that novel with be a complete 180 from this one.
She stared hard and deep into my eyes and it was all I could do keep myself screaming out in pain. After blowing out a long ring of smoke, she said, "I like the new name that you have chosen for me. You did good. I shall see you later in the year to help you finish your trilogy."
With that final statement, she got up and walked out of my den and into a waiting BMW convertible. As the car pulled away, I rolled my eyes back into my head, slid out of my chair and stayed in a fetal position for the rest of that week.

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

I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 21st

Boy howdy and howdy to the girl with the black dress on because Bubbles has moved on to a greener pasture and welcome to the skewered literary world of G.B. Miller, where he has decided to take a slight detour and become a little maudlin for today's post.

This is my daughter's pet ferret Bubbles, and unfortunately on the evening of April 18th, she passed away. We think it was due to old age, as ferrets do not have a long life expectancy, with the average being somewhere 5 and 6 years. We thought she was on her last legs at least two to three weeks prior, but received a reprieve from the man upstairs, so she continued to grace us with her presence.

Sadly, on that Thursday, the end came quick. She wasn't looking too good in the morning when I came down that morning to feed her, but between the time that I left for work (7:30) and returned home at 5:30p, she went downhill exceptionally fast, and moved on to a better life sometime around 8:30p.

So now, we have one less furry friend to keep us company during are day-to-day activities. I now feel a twinge of sadness whenever I go downstairs to my den and walk by the converted fish tank and not see her there. I'm sure that in her new home, she's having a blast stylin' and profilin' and having just a good old time enjoying the brighter side of the afterlife.

Bubbles, you were loved and you'll be missed.

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

I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 20th

Girl howdy and howdy to the boy who still doesn't get it, or anything else for that matter, and welcome to the skewered literary world of G.B. Miller who, due to the fact that he's still recovering from the kind of cold that annoys you to the point of calling in sick but ultimately doesn't get to that point of calling in sick, is duller than the underside of a leaf in the sarcasm department.

Welcome to part the 2nd of "Backstory: The Birth Of The Trilogy", where we continue to explore in excruciating detail just exactly how my current project had come to fruition. Since we're still talking about the sleazy world of slushie stories, the pumpkin returns.

Today's Classic Quotated comes from the ye olden Tumblr
post of November 26, 2016, which coincidentally is what I'm cherry-picking  researching for today's post.

If you're within the 50 territories called The United (in name only) States of America.....

As I mentioned in last week's post, I was feeling pretty good about what I writing. Page after page of a decent primary storyline and not-so-decent secondary storyline {at this juncture, I was still trying to keep to the original primary narrative of the story} was pouring out my fevered imagination and I thought, "This one is gonna grip me like my first one, I just know it."

But as I got further into it, I found myself not quite concentrating on the task at hand. Whenever I would stop to deal with a sticky plot point {usually with the secondary plotline} I would experience wanderlust. Specifically, the wanderlust that crops up when you're writing a scene and you get to thinking, "do I need some backstory for this scene?"

The nano-second that I said yes, my world went completely Superman Bizarro.

I figuratively face-planted my current project with extreme prejudice and immediately went searching for the solution to my problem. Yes, I actually did have the solution to the problem, it was just matter of looking in the very last spot it would be in.

The first place that I decided to search was the 35+ floppy discs that I currently own. Yes, I said, "floppy discs". Please keep in mind that I'm almost 54 years old and I've been around since the dawn of the Internet, thus I still use seriously ancient technologies, like floppy discs. I also use current technologies like flash drives and cloud storage, so there.

Anywho, after searching the ancient technology and the CPU and coming up emptier than a good bottle of micro-brew, I moved on to the next area to search, ye olden book case.

By nature, when it comes to writing, I have serious OCD. I have printed every notable piece of writing that I've ever created and stuck those bad boys in a binder {a post for another day on the topic of Writer's OCD}, which currently totals almost 1 1/2 dozen notebooks of various shapes and sizes, include the slushie novel that scares me to work on {also another post for another time}.

After an hour's worth of searching every single notebook that contained partial novels, novellas and other assorted written gobbledy-gook, I finally found what I was looking for: that horrendous piece of idyllic trope that violated every common sense rule of grammar, paragraph construction, dialogue construction and sentence structure know to mankind {think "I Are Ready" and multiply that by a factor of 100}.

Tune in next week when we'll have an in-depth review of that slushie novel and how important it ultimately became to the creation of this trilogy.

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

I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 19th

Girl howdy and howdy to the boy who takes things so gosh darned slow that a 100 year old tortoise does the "wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am" schtick thrice in a single day before he could get his zipper halfway unzipped, and welcome to the skewered literary world of G.B. Miller, who is unashamed to admit that his early writing often resembled that there pumpkin.

In our previous post for IWSG April 2019 {smack dab in the middle of the controlled chaos that is the A-Z blog hop}, we touched upon how I went about writing my current series called "The Friendship Trilogy". I thought that starting with today's post, I would elaborate {in excruciatingly laughable detail} how this all came together.

Now since my memory sometimes has a nasty habit of playing tricks on me, I will be mining some ye olden Tumblr posts from late 2016/early 2017 to help me along. Now I'm pretty sure you're asking yourself, "G.B., you nuked to atomized smithereenies your entire Tumblr world. How is it that you have old posts to mine?"

The answer is quite simple my friends. Tumblr never had a system in place in which you could compose blog posts and save them as you went along, like Blogger and WordPress has. Instead, you had to compose it in one fell swoop, which was great if you had a short post, but horrendous if you have a long post to write and if you couple it with the occasional computer issue, then you can surely understand why in mid 2016, I started writing my posts in Word/WordPad/NotePad first before copy/pasting them over.

With that being said, let's begin at the ending.

Back in ye olden days of writing (2006 thru 2010), I churned out a mountain of excrementally runny  stories. Among those extremely great stories that came from my warped imagination was a novella that I ultimately self-pubbed in 2009 through the vanity press from hell (no I will not link to it) entitled "Betrayed!", and a prequel that really didn't have much of a title to it (a reoccurring theme to a good percentage of my stories).

I was really proud of this prequel (for a myriad of reasons that are not that germane to this post), so after writing the final one-and-done draft, we sort of printed it out, stashed it on the shelf and went on my merry way with the rest of my writing adventures.

For the next six years, I decide to get adulting with my writing and ultimately had some moderate success: one traditionally published novel, a few short stories and a trio of self-pubbed books. Around the spring of 2015, I was starting to sniff around for a new project to work on, and eventually, I settled on doing a rewrite of my vanity published novella, "Betrayed!" While it hovered in that C-/D+ level of goodness and ultimately became the basis of Books by George {now known as Books by G.B. Miller}, I knew that there was a Sahara desert size swath of room for improvement.

So off I went to churn out a new story using my preferred characters of choice (hybrid humans and full humans) as well as using the original story as a close basis for the new story. As I started humming along like a rebuilt engine, churning out page after page after page of a dual plotted story, I was starting to feel pretty good about myself.

But alas, as all of you who have dabbled in the creative art form, all you need is a very tiny seed from the land called "memory banks" to derail whatever progress you were making with your current project. And in my case, this was one of those rare adages that did stick a branch into my wheel spokes, which in caused an epic crash of ginormous proportions...
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As always you can catch my act on Facebook and click on the covers for more information about writings.

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

I Have Stories To Tell! Episode The IWSG 3rd

IWSG

A boyish howdy to one and all and all for one and welcome to the skewered literary world of G.B. Miller, where no stone is left unturned as he searches to play both sides at one meaning.

Today, in the midst of the frenzied chaos that is the 2019 A-Z Challenge (for those of you who are partaking of such, today is the letter "C"), we bring you our writing related post.

Because this is the 2019 A-Z Challenge, I thought it would be a nice throwback gesture on my part to link to my "C" post when I had performed my one-and-done A-Z Challenge. And I thought it would be a good idea on my part to use the letter "C" for today's post.

For today's IWSG post, "C" stands for "Consistency".

For me, consistency means that I stay on the tried and true course that is my writing and that the only deviation that happens on that tried and true course, is whenever I happened to write like everyone else by semi-following the rules. To clarify, I don't mean the common sense grammar/sentence/paragraph rules that we all strive to perform, with only slight changes made in order to fulfill our creative needs.

No, I mean the tried and true conventions that we all do with our writing in order for it to make logical sense.

Let's use writing a book series as an example. If you ask 10 writers about how they would go about writing a series, 9 of them will tell you things like: they write them in some kind of chronological order; they introduce characters in chronological order; the plots slowly unfold in a linear fashion, etc. etc. etc. In other words, their consistency is based on the tried and true method of writing a series.

Now, let's pretend I'm the 10th writer answering your reasonable question. Here's how I would answer it.

"Well, I started off writing my current trilogy by rewriting a previously published chapbook. About forty pages/four chapters in, I remembered a completed slushie prequel that I wrote some years prior to the chapbook. After digging it out and re-reading, I proceeded to write a novel using the main plot as an outline. After I had finished, I decided that I really needed another novel to set up the novel that I had just finished. So I wrote the prequel to what I what I thought was a prequel to the chapbook that I was working on. In short, I wrote book #2 first, wrote book #1 second (which I published) and now in the process of re-re-writing book #3."

So as you can see, consistency for me is staying unconventional with my writing. If you give it some thought, how many people do you know started off writing a book series by initially writing the last book first and the first book last?

Consistency. No matter what genre(s) you choose to write in, always be consistent in how you execute your tasks. If you do it conventional (i.e. outlines, plotting, staging) be consistent. If you do it just a little bit outside the box, be consistent about that as well. Your readers will thank you for it.

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