I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 44th: Musings

A tall svelte young woman, with luxuriously thick waist length hair, confidently strolls down the dimly lit corridor. Carrying a small clipboard, she darts her eyes to the partially opened doors that populate the wall. As she walks by each door, she imperceptibly tilts her head towards each one, as if to zero in on whatever conversation happens to be going on.

Some thirty seconds later, she stops at door that says Research and Development, and peers in. She quickly scans the room and sees that it's completely devoid of human activity. Satisfied that everything is in order, for she notices the clock on the wall that says, "Staff Meeting", she starts to withdraw so as to continue on her inspection. Just then, she notices a piece of paper, colored electric pink, dangling from the clock.

Intrigued, she walks in and carefully removes the paper from the clock. Opening the paper, she begins to read it. When she's finished, she carefully refolds the paper and puts it back on the clock.

"My own cat is the exact same way," says the lady as she leaves the office to continue with her inspection.

Roughly two minutes later, as she's waiting at the elevator, she starts to make some notes on her clipboard. Seconds later, the elevator chimes its usual chime to announce its arrival. The young lady looks up and sees a piece of electric orange paper dangling in the center of the elevator. She walks in, pushed the button to her floor of choice and grabs the paper. Unfolding it, she begins to read it.

"Ewww, what a disgusting piece of prose," she exclaims.

The second the elevator announces its arrival, she crumples up the piece of paper and tosses out into the hallway. Shuddering for moment,  she quickly makes a right turn out of the elevator and speed walks down the corridor.

Some thirty seconds later, she stops at a door that says Cafe. She opens the door and is immediately met with a piece of electric blue paper. Sighing, she grabs the paper, opens it and begins to read it. When she finishes it, she sighs again and suddenly notices a heaping plate of finger food smothered in soy sauce. Smiling, she read the descriptive tag, and says, "Oh good, they have Asian style fingers for lunch today!"

Have a very enjoyable and frightful Halloween (for those of you who celebrate) this year!

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

I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 43rd: Reading!

Boy howdy and howdy to all boys and girls that still know what a real childhood is all about and welcome to the skewered literary world of G.B. Miller, where the past is no longer the prologue and reality is indeed stranger than fiction.

Reading.

It's something that we all do, either for necessity for enjoyment. For my family, it's often out of necessity (although my wife does subscribe to a mag that features flowers and birds that she actually reads). For me, up until last year it was for enjoyment and pleasure.

Now it's been mostly out of necessity.

This ugly trait/habit can be exactly traced to when I bought a smartphone in 2018. That particular smartphone was bought because I wanted a phone that I could listen to music and sports. Well, in addition to listen to music and sports, I discovered the wonderful world of podcasts.

BAM! My reading of books plummeted from 30 in the 1Q 2018 to 14 in 2Q 2018 to 4 in 3Q 2018 to zero in 4Q 2018. I became so enamored of podcasts (mostly for the various content matter and the fact that they ranged from 20 minutes to 1 hour in length) that I basically gave up reading books*.

On one hand, stopping the book reading resolved a few work related issues that came with dragging either a large book or my Nook (yes, you can shot me now) into work. It also stopped cutting into my writing time.

But on the other hand, I did miss having something concrete to absorb which would allow me to slip into a different world, if only for a little while.

So I'm slowly trying to reintroduce at least a monthly book into my life. I say "monthly", as right now the only free time that I have to utilize for reading is when I'm doing my weekly virus scan on my computer and when I'm doing personal hygiene (you can use your thesaurus for that one). And I'm making such good progress with that, that I'm seriously thinking about cutting into some other free time that I have to start reading then.

So what about you, has your reading been curtailed by other things, whether shiny and new or simply a unforeseen change in circumstances? If so, how have you gotten back to where you want it to be?

*The last book I read in 2018 was a non-fiction book called "Storm Lake", this was in 3Q (July thru September), while the last original book that I've read in 2019 was "Mustard Seeds and Mountains: Battling the Beast Within", a very fine memoir from the late Joy Redmond. 

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

I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 42nd: Yes, I Am A Writer

Boy howdy and welcome to the skewered literary world of G.B. Miller, where everyone lives in an alternative universe bereft of the inanities of the present.

In today's post, we broach the subject of writing.

As in, am I a writer? To which I can now safely answer, "Yes I am."

It has been a very long six months or so since I'd put virtual pen to virtual paper (aka typing words on a computer screen). From April through October, other issues cropped up that sort of prevented me from writing (one child getting married, other child going to college, work related issues and finally severe editing issues that I decided to ultimately kick down the road, to name just a few) anything of note.

This particular holiday weekend (October 11th thru the 14th), I finally decided to get my writing groove back on. The story of choice is a slushie that I started writing some five-six years ago. The genre I haven't quite figured out, but the story itself is in the same vein as "American Psycho", so the genre can be assumed from that.

I'll dive more into the story itself in the coming weeks/months, but suffice to say, when I was originally writing it, the plot actually scared me. Not only did the plot scared the crap out of me (a big thank you to Australian cinema), but so did the relative ease of the words that flowed out of my head to my fingers to the computer screen. That was (and still is) the most troubling aspect of this particular story.

Anyways, I decide to get a leg up on things by first tackling the most difficult part of the story, which is changing the name of the female lead. Before I'd put the story away, I had already changed one of the male MC's name from "Toi" to "Tomas" (matches up more closely with the darkness of the story, and it was inspired by this).

The female lead will be a bit more difficult. I'd originally gave her the name of "Trey", but somehow, it really doesn't go with the overall darkness of the story. So, I need to come up with a new name, something that will be better suited for the darkness of the story.

A question for my fellow writers: how difficult is it for you to come up with a suitable name for your character, male or female, after you'd determined that the current name simply isn't working for your story?

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

I Have Stories To Tell! Episode the 41st: Pop Culture!

Boy howdy and howdy to one and all and welcome to the wonderfully skewered literary world of G.B. Miller, where crap is king and we like dirty laundry.

Recently, I made a comment on an FB page that I happen to follow, called Occupy Democrats Logic (yes, I am a moderate Republican and this page mocks Democrats/Liberals in all of its glorious hypocritical form).

Basically, they shared a post from Twitter that said the following:

Today, I slapped a man and he slapped me back.
People, this guy legit slapped me back.
How dare you slap a woman back?
How dare you?

And I wrote a comment that got about 140+ likes: And you expected what, a Kevin Bacon response, "Thank you ma'am, may I have another?"

Someone responded to my comment by saying that millenials would never understand the pop culture referent. I responded by saying, "Sad, but so very true."

For those of you who didn't get the reference, it was a tweaked quote from the movie "Animal House", where a very young Kevin Bacon is getting paddled in a fraternity hazing ritual.

That got me to thinking about the fact that anyone under the age of 35, for the most part, do not get any pop culture references that hearken back to the previous century. And thus, a topic for a blog post was born.

Case in point: I have a supervisor, who I love dearly, who falls under the category of being south of 35, which means that any pop culture reference from the 20th century she does not get. Anyways, for a while we had a staff member that earned the nickname of a particular movie character from the early 80's. Anyone who met this staff member immediately got the reference. Well, everyone except my co-worker.

Apparently, this was because the movie in question came out when she was but a toddler. So being the thoughtful individual that I am, bought the movie for her as an late Christmas/early B'day present.

But really, my overall point is that having to explain a pop culture reference after saying it can be quite exasperating sometimes (another example is that I had to explain "happy little clouds" to someone). But, as they say, knowledge is power, and a lot of minutia knowledge can make G. B. a very strange bedfellow.

So my question to you, my dear readers, is this: have you ever had to explain a pop culture reference to someone, simply because the reference was from the previous century?

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

I Have Stories To Tell! IWSG Episode the 9th

IWSG

"What day is it?"
"I don't know, what day is it?"
"Why, it IWSG time!"

Yes, it's that time of the month (Good gravy, not that!) where all writers of all stripes bloviate/pontificate about all things writing relate.

Since originality has gone the way of common sense (see any guv'ment agency that you deal with in any way, shape or form), we shall use the alternate question, which is:

It's been said that the benefits of becoming a writer who does not read is that all your ideas are new and original. Everything you do is an extension of yourself, instead of a mixture of you and another author. On the other hand, how can you expect other people to want your writing, if you don't enjoy reading? What are your thoughts?

Up until last summer, when I discovered podcasts, I was a voracious reader. Both non-fiction and fiction, I read all kinds. Whatever piqued my curiosity, both good and bad. When I decided to get serious about my writing about ten years ago, I started reading with a more critical eye.

I focused on what I liked and what I didn't like about a particular book (intense dislike of anything that smacks of an MFA infected book), and I tried to work those attributes into my writing.

One thing I didn't work into my writing, were any writer's influences. I really didn't focus on one particular writer when I was reading, so no one particular writer influenced my writing. I simply used multiple sources as example when I would write a given story.

The one thing I definitely learned from listening to well over 630 hours worth of podcasts, was to make sure that everything that I wrote was somewhat pithy, concise and to the point. You really have to make your point/tell your story interestingly enough to have repeat customers when you have between 20 and 45 minutes of content to work with on a weekly basis.

I still try to read at least a book a month (about the only thing my current attention span can handle these days) and pull out what I can from that and still absorb what I can while listening to podcasts.

After all, isn't the basic idea of reading/listening is to absorb what you can, when you can, in order to write the best that you can?

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