Episode #108: The Plot Does Thicken, But Only If A Thesaurus Is Used.

The pic was taken at my local mall last Saturday {1/22}, when due to the cold, I did my daily walk there. There about a half dozen of this variously decorated bears scattered about the mall, done by various organizations for charity fundraising.

Last week, I had alluded to elaborating on the finer points to my Average American Novel this week. So come join me on a walk down memory lane to that awesome year of 2011, where life was good and I was still in that decade of my 40's, living large and pretending like I have a say in how my household was run.

This was also the time period where I had a lot, and I mean, A LOT, of energy/motivation for writing stories. I think this was also the same time period where I had gotten bit by the short story bug and was still churning out contend for a now closed short story blog of mine. Anyhow, this was when I had decided to start featuring my personal slices of my town/county/state in my writings, and this was the first real story that I had decided to implement that particular strategy {I'll go scorched earth with some of the elements in later posts}.

So, off I went, writing a story that took me an incredibly long time to figure what the central plot was {this was a common theme back in the first half of the decade: unknown plot while writing}, which I'd eventually settled on being: girl A, is a party with man B, who she secretly has the hots for and ultimately has drunken sex with. Man C, her husband finds out and ultimately dumps her on man B making her his responsibility. Girl A eventually rips off man D, who is a big time drug dealer. Thus, havoc/pandemonium/chaos/violence of all types unfolds, and ultimately, death & destruction rue the day.

Yah. Clear as baseball mud. And while I was on a roll, I had an ingenious idea, because I saw this done elsewhere, of writing a secondary plot that ultimately merges to a semi-satisfying conclusion at the end. Brilliant! Right! Right? Right.

Yah, again. Anywho, we came up with the brilliant idea of having the secondary plot take place at the funeral home. So originally, I wrote about one to three paragraphs tacked on tat the end of the of each chapter. But since I'm re-writing everything, I'm giving its own stand-alone chapter. Do you know how hard it is to flesh out a one to three paragraph snippet into some thing meatier?

Anyways, that's about all I have today for the Average American Novel. Tune in next week when we'll explore a few more random tangents about the story.

And now for something completely different. Specifically, exploring my blogging life from 2011!

Since the Average American Novel had its original birth in 2011, I though it would a little cool to go back in time to that year to see what kind schtuff I was blogging about. This particular snippet came from my 1st blog, Cedar's Mountain, which was around from 2008 thru early 2013. This piece of flash fiction is entitled, They See Your Every Move, and it's pulled from the month of January. Enjoy!

{c} 2022 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #107: Plotting, Or How To Re-Re-Discover What You're Really On About

As I'd mentioned in my previous post, my current writing project, henceforth known as the Average American Novel, has quickly become my most difficult one to date. Unlike the previous two that I'd rewrote that required little to zero original writing, this one is requiring roughly 65-75% original writing in order to make it work.

The one thing that is making this novel inherently difficult is that I'm changing the entire tone/structure of the novel. When I had originally written this thing back in 2011, it was chock full of the triad of bad violence: physical, sexual and mental. It was also chock full of bad writing in general. Its only saving grace was that it had a decent two plot set up, so obviously that was the only thing worth hanging onto.

The two plots, such as they were and as best as I can figure out are this:

1} Plot 1: Large drug kingpin wants to take out a smaller rival so that he can become larger. An underling to the smaller rival gets bent and sexually assaulted (multiple times) by his boss's wife/girlfriend. Hilarity, hi-jinks and all kinds of mayhem take place after underling becomes babysitter to his boss's SO. Ending is tragically sad as things go kablooie. 

Please note that a healthy dose of sarcasm/contempt was inserted into that paragraph.

2} Plot 2: A wake for the deceased underling (this is revealed near the end), in which hilarity, hi-jinks and all kind of angry people get involved, and the late underling's boss gets it in the end.

Please note that you should wash, rinse and repeat with the previous note.

There lies the rub. Instead of redoing it and keeping that triad of violence somewhat intact, I decided to make the story do a handstand and make the characters a little more sympathetic, as well as emphatic to each other. I still kept the majority of the key scenes in the story (e.g. the party at the condo, the aftermath of the party, a home invasion and the club) but I made them a little more based in the reality of the type of business they're in and a few of the real consequences of their actions, as opposed to the over-the-top cartoonish consequences previously.  

I also flipped the main plot idea as well, so instead of having the underling killed off on purpose he gets killed by accident/double cross. Also, the large kingpin doesn't want to actually kill two of the main characters but wants them to take over his business as a partnership with another member of his organization. Sounds complex I know, but I'm making the best of a bad situation.

As for plot two, I'm basically keeping that one completely intact. The only change being made is that I'm filling out each scene so they become more satisfying and tasting greater. The ultimate goal is merge it with plot one so that there's a satisfactory conclusion to everything.

Finally, this story will the first where about half will be handwritten before being transcribe to the computer. Call me old-fashioned, but I would rather do my thinking while staring at a blank piece of paper and studying what was previously written, instead of staring blankly at my computer screen and eventually getting distracted.

Oh and my prediction of what I actually generated on the computer versus what I wrote out was spot on. I hand printed about eighteen and three quarter pages of text, which transcribed out to about nine and a half pages of text, totaling 4,700k+ words. This took me roughly two weeks or so to write out, spending approximately three total hours per day while doing so.

What is old is sometimes new, so long as you can clearly and accurately read your new. Otherwise you can call it a day and just become a professional with very bad handwriting.

Tune in next week when I try to elaborate a bit further on both plots and hopefully have something else to talk about as well.

And the picture? It's a closed side road that back when I was a lad actually emptied into the man road that runs through the town. It kind of represents the chaotic mess that this novel original was.

{c} 2022 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #106: Yikes! And Away From Today!

Since this post is a bit of a "come to a full circle with a little deja vu", I thought it would be a nifty idea to post a throwback pic from my early years of blogging. A time when I was full of energy, vigor and vim, and wanting to conquer the blogging world!

yeah, we all know how that eventually turned out: macho man in my 40's and NFTG in my 50's.

Anyways, the reasons for the post are twofold: 1} a sincere effort at writing a weekly blog post and 2} going back to why I got into blogging in the first place.

Due to some global circumstances inflicted on us by those from across the Pacific, we've had to break our minimal pledge of weekly posts. But we do genuinely intend to return to that pledge and get back in that Llama saddle and ride the South American plains again.

The original reason(s) behind writing a blog waaaay back when {'08 I do believe} was to practice my writing and to get away from censorship/harassment issues in the chat room forums {remember those?}. Well, one of the ways that I used to practice/polish my writing skills was to write by hand. You know, whip out that handy-dandy piece of notebook paper and paper, and laboriously hand write, or my case print, words/sentences/paragraphs in order to form coherent stories.

Now, I actually pursued this particular concept for the better part of four plus years before deciding to abandon it for, what turned out to be, about a decade or so. While ultimately it became too much a consumer of time resources to make it worth my while continuing, I did learn a few very valuable lessons from doing it: it forced me to slow down my writing and it forced me to think.

Not sure if you'd ever faced the problem of writing too fast for your brain to keep up, which is basically writing whole sections of a story/assignment/essay before belatedly realizing you forgot to writer a key part/component of said project, which in turn made your project sound very much 'off". Now because writing by hand forced me to slow down, it also forced me to think/plot/plan out what I was writing beforehand. 'Cause you know, when you don't have erasable ink, you want to minimize your cross-outs and make your writing look purty.

Fast forward to the present.

So here we are, year three of two weeks to flatten the curve (raise your hands if you think that this will wax and wane like the yearly flu) and we're back in our den and trying to get back into the groove of completing our next Average American Novel (with the spiffy title of "Novel_Project 3"). At this point, I've settled into a disturbing routine of not wanting to turn my computer back on after 7p but really wanting to write, only to break down a few hours later, turn my computer on, open up the latest chapter and pot around for a few...hours until bedtime approaches, in which we then shut down computer. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Armed with the knowledge that this simply will not do (dammit Jim, I'm a human being, not a politician), we acquiesce to the inevitable and embrace it with all the warmth of an angry porcupine. We dig out a clipboard, a wad of notebook paper, a pen, the newly completed previous chapter so I know where I'm going and the next crappily written ten year old chapter that I'm exterminating with extreme prejudice, sit down at our wooden tray, get everything properly OCD situated and write.

If you think I'm making fantastic progress on this, you are so sadly mistaken that a three year old toddler has enough empathy for you to pass over their bottle to you. I am writing so slow and deliberate that the progress I'm making is measured by the hours it takes to complete one page of handwritten text, with breaks for hand fatigue due to this, usually a minimum of three and a half hours total per day (I often spend an hour in the afternoon and the rest in the evening writing). Also, food for thought, one page of handwritten text usually averages about to about one half to one third of typed text, at least for me.

What does this mean?

Well....I've officially gone through about five pages of crappily written/poorly plotted/poorly thought out typed text, which so far has taken me about a week and a half to produce 16 hand written pages, which translates to about two to three pages of typed text. Yeah, so I'm SlowPoke McMethodciallySlow when I'm writing this way. On one hand, the good thing is I'm back to writing in peaceful solitude. On the other hand, the bad thing is that I'm writing in peaceful solitude.

So in essence, I've come back full circle. I started out the decade of '00 thru '10 writing by hand indoors and outdoors; basically skipped the decade of '11 thru '20 not writing by hand anywhere and now spending the decade of '21 thru '30 and beyond, writing by hand and transcribing to the computer.

For our next post, I should have a better idea grasp on what the actual plot is. No, really. I had a hard time figuring out what it was eleven years ago when I'd first written this....story. But when I'd decided to gut and rewrite from a different point of view, the plot slowly started coming together, and I was able to add a nifty twist while working on this particular chapter. So I'll be able to elaborate not only on that, but a few other things as well.

{c} 2022 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #105: One Year...Later?

Originally, I was going to write a post about the one year "anniversary" of the protest in DC. But after giving it some very serious thought, I decided that, unlike everyone on the left who are comparing it to being as bad as Pearl Harbor or 9/11 {among other things}, I wasn't going to give it any more attention that what it actually deserves, which is nothing.

Instead, I decided to do a semi-recap of my 2021 and possibly a goal list of what I want to do in 2022.

I did start off the year by writing a blog post that, one year later, I still stand behind, even though the fallout was personally bad. I also spent the next three months rewriting, then republishing this fine and dandy book called A Trilogy Of Love, which you can find exclusively on Amazon, with copies of print available  through me around early to mid February.

By early Summer (around mid June or so), I decide to tackle a few writing projects so that when 2022 rolled around, I would be a couple of steps ahead of the game in regards to getting a few books published. My first project would be a rewrite of a previously published book called A Taste Of Pain. Unfortunately, a broken/rotted out water pipe created such a wonderful mess in the basement, that I had to relocate upstairs.

Long story short, that particular re-write wasn't completed until early September, with the same amount of chapters and word count but with a new title.

My next writing project featured a manuscript that got remanded to the slush pile after stupidly spending $350+ on editing some 6+ years ago. By all accounts, the manuscript was indeed garbage, but some valuable tips were gleaned from it. Ultimately, the project was finished by late October/early November, with roughly the same word count and double the amount of chapters.

Which leads us to our final rewriting project.

This one I had actually started reworking back in 2014, after initially creating it circa 2011. But most things back then, I kind of gave up on it. Not sure why, but most likely probably had to do with not having the patience/inclination to overcome the many issues that the story contained.

And now seven and a half years later, we're trying a different approach. Instead of containing uber cliched trope (aka what a newbie writes), we decided to do a complete 180 and have the two main characters be sympathetic to each other, all while running a separate plot line that comes together in the very last chapter. I'm still keeping about fifty percent of the basic tenor/tone (using the current dialogue as an outline) and  roughly ninety percent of the various scenes in use. It's been really difficult for me to write as I'm trying to keep the same scenes in the new story while changing the tone of the story. Kind of like when a band does a song a particular way in the first half, then in the second changes a couple of words in the second to make it completely different {see "Figure You Out" by Nickelback and "Wonderwall" by Oasis for two good examples of this concept}.

Besides the writing, the past year has been pretty much a break even. My retirement was finally approved in May, so the reality of not being a worker drone at the age of 56 sank in pretty good. My health has stayed pretty much the status quo, with the only blip being that they still can't come up with an accurate genetic diagnosis of what kind of muscular dystrophy I have, but they're still trying. Beyond that though, we're looking forward to being a homebody with an empty nest to enjoy for 2022.

And hopefully, a more consistent blogging schedule for 2022 as well.

{c} 2022 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved