I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 33rd

The song up above pretty much not only sums up my week, but my year as well. 

Every once in a great while in the literary world of G.B. Miller, stress in all of its hideous forms comes crashing down all at once. When that happens, it usually makes him quite non-competent in his writing, which usually lasts for an incredibly long time. This is one of those times.

All facets of my life have conspired to make me pretty much non-competent with my current writing project, which is volume #2 of "The Friendship Trilogy". For this particular writer, background distractions need to be very minimal at the very least. I have monster issues that need to be corrected with this book (when you have to fix every chapter, yeah, it's just that bad. some day I will elaborate on this self-inflicted shot in the foot) and unfortunately, every facet of my life has a serious stress issue that has taken precedence.

1} Family. Lets start off with the easy part. Daughter has graduated high school and this weekend we finally had her graduation party. No real stress there, but she is going to a local college here in CT to earn a masters in Social Work. Thus the beginning of stress. The plan is for her to live on campus, so all kinds of stress involved with moving, meal plans, living money, textbooks, etc. More stress is involved when it comes to tuition. Fortunately, the Fall 2019 semester is fully paid for ($34k), so we have about a fourth month gap before we have to worry about the Spring 2020 semester. So, hooray for college stress.

2} Family II. Continuing on a theme, Son is getting marred in mid September (about two months from now), so we have a copious amount of stress involved there. My particulars stress revolves around two things: wedding rehearsal dinner and the wedding itself. The rehearsal dinner is mostly a monetary stress, in that I have to pay for this particularly fascinating endeavor (looking at between $650 and $700}, while the wedding itself will be majorly stressful. Note, the last time I work a tux when about a decade ago when my brother got married. So, hooray for wedding stress.

3} Work. Ah yes, the 1200lb/kg elephant in the room. Where to begin...well, for starters, my employer (the state of CT) is looking to consolidate its backroom functions (i.e HR, Payroll, WC, FMLA) into one antiseptic-morale-crushing location, where you're not allowed to have anything personal adorning your cubicle and you become one with your new agency. A lot of people, including myself, are extremely unhappy about this move. On a personal level, I've started job hunting within, looking for something that will prevent me from transferring out to that other agency. Barring that, I am giving strong consideration to early retirement, of which I will qualify for after my b'day in May 2020, taking a crappy pension and looking for a new job in the real world.

Also, I just picked up another large payroll, so there's a lot of stress involved with that. And this not a completely unexpected move, because a wonderful co-worker of mine is going on a six month maternity leave in roughly two weeks, so her payrolls have to be covered and other job duties will have to be covered. On the upside, I will be losing a payroll once a new clerk gets hired (yup, more stress). So, hooray for work stress.

So all of these absolutely lovely background distractions are the concrete reasons as to why I haven't given thought one to tackling the behemoth that is volume #2. There are a lot issues involved with this novel that have to be fixed, and next week, I will post a very cautionary tale on how writing out of order can create an epic blowback that can take months to recover from

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