I Have Stories to Tell!: Episode the 40th: Burnt Toasty Goodness

After roughly forty-five minutes of driving, Nikia felt another rap on her soul. Pulling down her bandanna, she asked, "What?"
'Fork roughly one mile ahead. Please choose which tine you wish to take.'
"Did you just ask me to choose a tine?"
'Problem?' answered the child in an annoyed tone.
"Wasn't sure if I'd heard you correctly and there's no need for you to get annoyed. When I ask a question, it's only to get clarification. Not to bust your chops."
'Bust my chops?'
"Slang for giving you a hard time. Now, I assume what unfolds for my immediate future will depend on the selection I make, correct?"
'Correct.'
"Well then, since my future is entirely up to a proverbial roll of the dice, I shall choose four lefts from center."
'That doesn't sound right.'
"Exactly," said Nikia, who dropped a gear and opened the throttle.
About one minute later, the literal fork in the road appeared. All four roads started parallel to each other, before branching off into different directions and quickly disappearing from view.
"Here's to the fickle finger of fate," yelled Nikia as she veered right and gunned it.

Taken from book #1 of The Friendship Trilogy, The Friendship Has Begun.

I decided to post that particular passage as I think perfectly sums up my current feelings about both my blogging and my writing. I've hit the proverbial salad fork in the road, in which I have no idea on where to go with my blogging and my writing.

I won't say that I'm suffering from the proverbial writer's burnt toasty goodness, but it has been a real struggle trying to put something together from a blogging standpoint as well as finding the motivation to pick up the proverbial pen and paper to string nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives in to coherent sentences and paragraphs.

Granted, all the proverbial major family stresses are now gone: child #1 is happily married, child #2 is happily entrenched at college, and work issues has been smoothed out/resolved (for now). So I should, in theory, be good to go. Right?

But it certainly doesn't feel right. It just feels, meh.

My writing life, as it presently stands, is at that proverbial fork in the road. Which tine do I take to find the satisfaction that I crave/need? I'm not quite sure at the moment. I do know that I have roughly 11 years (5/24.2008 to the present) invested into my blogging, as well as 9 years invested with my writing, and that's certainly nothing to sneeze at or ignore.

It's definitely something to think about in the coming weeks. Gotta see if I can find my mojo again for both aspects of my writing life.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with a video that accurately describes my predicament.

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

I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 39th

Good Morning to one and all and I sincerely hope that you had a fantastic weekend! As for me, I'm just now recovering from my son's fantastic wedding this past Saturday (9/14). I will be giving further details about it next week, but I did want to make a drive-by post to give everyone a couple of random thoughts.

First up, my 11 year old nephew absolutely killed it on the dance floor. Apparently he's into one of the dancing games for Wii and he's gotten really good at it. To give you an idea on what kind of moves he did, here is a very cool version of Uptown Funk for your viewing pleasure.

They played quite a bit of quirky music, and I'll have to check with my son on what their walk-away song was when they went back up the aisle after being pronounced man and wife, but this one was played as they were waking to their sweetheart table.

This is all I have for you my friends. Have a fantastic Monday and will see you next Sunday with the 411 on my wedding adventures (trust me, they all went extremely well).

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

I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 38th

This week is going to be all kinds of crazy, hence the song from The Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Two minutes of certified chaos that is the absolute perfect start of my George Jetson work week (for those of you who are unfamiliar with The Jetsons, George Jetson often complained about working his "horrific" three day work week), so I can absolutely guarantee that I will have incredibly zero tolerance for stupid of any kind this coming Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Since I have no real agenda for today's post, I thought I would do a little venting and what not.

1} Election season is upon us and for some of us, we are not overly amused about it. Yesterday (9/7), I received two robo-calls from a mayoral candidate, one in English and one in Espanol. No problem, right? Wrong. The mayoral candidate is for a town that I do not live in. Work in? Absolutely. But not live in whatsover.

For those of you who are thinking about running for a political office (although why anyone would want to cancel themselves out is beyond me), make damn sure that whatever phone list you decide to buy/acquire from your political party contains only numbers from people who actually live in the same town/district that you do.

2} I have come to a decision on what story to work on next once October rolls around, which will be announced then. It most definitely wasn't an easy decision to come to, but I think it was the best one for me.

3} Speaking of work, because of my son's upcoming nuptials this week, for the first time in about two years I will actually be taking time off during the work week. Previously, I would plan my vacations during my off weeks, that way no one would have the horror of covering my payrolls (yes, I have two payrolls that are virtual political minefields). But sometimes, ya gotta do what ya gotta do, and you hope that your co-workers can properly pick up the slack.

4} Still speaking of work, because of my son's upcoming nuptials, there may not be a post for September 15th. This is due to the simple fact  that I will be working some Sunday overtime so that I can get some of my payroll done (I have one that I will not trust to anyone else to do). Thus, it's a very good probability that no post will be had. If I do do a post, it will probably something music related.

I think that's about all I gots to vent about this week. If you hear a very faint scream blowing in the wind this week, it's just me pulling out my hair follicles with a pair of tweezers.

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

I Have Stories To Tell! IWSG the 8th

IWSG

One down, one to go, child in college and another getting married in 10 days. So daddy dearest is slowly going nuts from the stress of seeing child now performing the ultimate adulting move.

Which brings us today, for your curiosity must be piqued enough to cure the tofu bacon, tofu sausage and tofu ham (daughter is a veggie). Today is the monthly blog post for the IWSG blog hop, where a plethora of writers suddenly tune into the same wavelength and get down and say how do you do (Mouth and MacNeal will knock your socks off) and blog about all kinds of writer stuff.

We are currently in a quandary with our writing. What quandary, you may ask?

Well, I have no real idea on what I want to work on next. I have three viable options, of which two are taking me to uncharted territory, while the 3rd is a continuation of a story that came from a really dark place in my head.

1} Work on book #2 of the "The Friendship Trilogy". I got this book back from my wonderful editor in mid June, and after reading the 20+ page overview and basically concurring what was written, and it needs a boatload of work (aka partial-to-complete rewrite of every chapter). This is 100% uncharted territory for me and is not something I'm looking forward to doing, but it must be done.

2} Work on book that I had edited in 2017, that was not really ready to be edited (expensive lesson learned), as it needs almost as much work as the previous book (aka partial-to-complete rewrite of the entire story). Whereas the previous editor mentioned did a phenomenal job of detailing what needs to be fixed, this one did not. So I have two pages of an overview that I have to properly interpret.

3} Work on a book that was lasted worked on in 2013. This is the book that came from a very dark place in my head, which was inspired by a particularly troubling scene from an Australian crime movie called Animal Kingdom. I managed to write about 4 complete chapters before I decided to put it away after coming to the conclusion that it was starting to severely creep me out every time I would work on it, which was a lot since the words started coming to me very easily.

So this is my dilemma for October and beyond. Not quite crippling procrastination, but it's pretty darn closer.

What kind of dilemmas are you facing with your writing these days?

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