Episode #112: How Womanly Are My Characters?

It's actually a fake frowny face, since I decided to take a picture of her as she was getting ready to blow out her b'day candles. So she decided to flash for me a proper "smile" for the occasion. 

Ahhh, the joys of having your youngest turn official drinking age and buying her first official IPA, which is what this generation now prefers to drink these days. Does not hearken to my days of youth, since I don't like beer. But, I digress.

As per the norm as of late, here we are talking about the Average American Novel yet again. Last week, we talked about how manly our male characters were. Today, we talk about how womanly badass our female characters are and how they came to be written that way.

No updated word count as this week was spent doing the family taxes {bleech icky-poo} and the chapter I'm currently working on is the next to last chapter, where all the principals involved meet for the final showdown.

Female MC

So I've basically done a total 180 when it comes to writing my female characters. While I've latched onto the idea of "using sex as a weapon" almost from day one of writing, I've also latched, quite firmly I might add, to the idea of writing them as very strong independent {aka badass} women who will use whatever they have at their immediate disposal to get the current problem resolved, no matter what it may be.

I have met/made friends with a plethora of women who are, in varying degrees, badass individuals. They take no prisoners, give no quarters, and can compete/excel with any given scenario. So I try to write all of my female characters, from major players to minor throwaways, with those particular traits in varying degrees.

In this story, I have two such women who fall under that category: Alexia Tomas and her sister Xandra.

She is the semi-abused wife of Bradley, who has made everyone who had the misfortune of having contact with her, paying for that contact. She is also a hybrid, which is a character trait that I began exploring with this particular story, as previously I was exploring the concept of using a symbiont in my stories {got the idea from Star Trek: DS9}. The hybrid concept {half human/half animal} really took off after this story and has since become a permanent part of my writings.

Xandra is her symbiont sister who has control over her tail, talks to her sister telepathically and is basically her conscience and soul. Additionally, not only she has become a defacto tour guide to exploring who she is, but also what she is and how she can unlock/explore her hidden traits/potentials more fully.

I would like to point out that with female characters, roughly 90% of those that I've written/created are people of color {to use the current vernacular}. I don't dwell on that particular notion for any lengthy period of time beyond a brief less than a paragraph length initial description before moving on. Always felt most comfortable creating my characters as people of color and always will.

I make it a point to make sure that while the main sibling has dominant control over the body, she can at times, give up that control to her younger sibling at any time and in turn, trade places with her sister in controlling the other pertinent body parts {e.g. hair and tail}. She does that whenever she believes that her sister would benefit from some life experiences.

Basically it really boils down to finding my comfort zone in writing my characters, and the way I decide to portray both sexes/genders, with some tweaking as a particular story progresses, is what works best for me.

Time now for our weekly flashback to my 1st blog. Cedar's Mountain, and to the specific year of 2011, when my blogging was still poking its head through the clouds festooned with popularity. Today's ye olden flashback gem is from February 28, 2011, and it covers the wonderful topic of cliches. It's a bit long, as back then I used to perform free-form blogging. In my tiny world, free-from blogging is where I just get sick with verbal diarrhea and the words simply pour onto the screen, starting with the post title, which is about 17 words long. 

Because I cherish the readers, casual or otherwise, that I do have, we will simply use the phrase, Cliches Are Fun, for a jumping off point. Enjoy and have a fantastic rest of the week.

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

Episode #111: How Manly Are My Characters?

One of the many, many food items that my family partook in this past Thanksgiving, which was brought by a dear cousin who I haven't seen since '19 {and you can guess the reason why}. And I do believe there were no leftovers to this monstrosity.

So here we are with another scintillating post about the Average American Novel, with topic of choice being how I came up with the main characters of the story and  the other assorted details associated with it.

But first, a word count update, since I've managed to complete two more chapters.

Overall word total: 42,882.

Handwritten: 20,062.

Percentage: 46.7%.

Not too shabby here, especially since the main goal is to have at least 50% of this novel being handwritten first, before transcription. I must admit, I am enjoying myself doing it this way, because at the bare minimum, going at this turtle pace is allowing me to properly concentrate on where the story is and how I need to get to where the ending is in the most sensible way possible.

Anyways, back to the topic of choice: characters.

Back in 2011, I had a baker's dozen of main characters and another baker's dozen and a half of throwaway characters originally written for this story. Suffice to say, that was way too many people to keep track of, so when I got to recreating this story from scratch, roughly 85% of those characters were either pitched or turned into major/minor throwaways. 

The reason as to why I make a distinction for my throwaways, is that the minors are basically those who simply fulfill a need for a scene arc {e.g. a bartender, a waiter, a henchman} before being taken out to the woodshed to be turned into kindling; while the majors are semi-throwaways, in that there's no real in-depth info dump on them, but they periodically pop up throughout the story to properly move key scenes a particular way.

With that out of the way, this week's post I will talk a little bit about my main male characters and explain why I wrote them the way that I did for the story. Next week I will talk a little bit about the important female characters in my story.

Male MCs

Just about all of my male MCs fall into two basic categories: Walter Mitty-esque types and those who are supremely self-confident in the own skin and aren't afraid to let you know.

For those who do not remember the story "The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty" nor the film featuring Danny Kaye, Walter Mitty is a mild-mannered severely hen-pecked husband who daydreams feats of daring-do/courage/bravery while running errands with his shrew of a wife.

I've always liked that particular combination of a man {or what we now call a keyboard commando} and strove to use that caricature/trope almost from day one of my writing, and yes that includes blogging, whenever possible. I've managed over the years to really refine that trope to the point where it doesn't stick out like a very bad toupee, by applying a unique twist to it.

So, my first Walter Mitty-esque character for this still untitled story, Jon Morris, starts off like that particular trope: a bit hen-pecked with fits of badassness against those who do not matter. But in this case, the hen-pecking actually starts when he has to deal his boss's wife, because she's a hybrid learning the ropes of what she can and can't do, so she's basically making it without faking it.

The second Walter Mitty-esque character is Jon's boss Bradley, who is basically a wannabe BMOC, but folds a little while under pressure. He basically uses people to his advantage, before discarding them like yesterday's stale bread once he's done with them. In this story, he's basically everyone's tool and he doesn't know until the bitter end that he is one.

My final character falls into the latter category of being a badass and being supremely confident of their badassness. Terrance Torquicelli, called T.T. for short, is the kingpin of his organization and is know far and why as one not to be trifled with. He does some truly despicable things in the beginning that makes him amoral, but eventually changes to play the short game, all the while keeping his personal morals separate from business. He doesn't apologize for what he does, except beyond saying/implying it was just business.

It's flashback time, one again. This time we're exploring the month of February 2011 for ye olden post, and I must say, while some of the posts that were written some 11 years ago were incredibly long, more than a few had a ton of broken links {that is, no longer exists}, which made it a bit problematical to find something good.

But I did have success! I found ye olden post from Valentine's Day featuring a piece flash fiction harking back to simpler times of youth, and which an actual functioning YT link. Published on February 14, 2011, this post is called 60% Of A Key. Please enjoy one of my better attempts at flash fiction.

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

Episode #110: Pffft. How Hard Can It Be?

Another sculpture pic from my local mall, which surprisingly enough, is doing quite well these days, even though they have about a dozen scattered empty storefronts and one very empty anchor retailer. By the way, this mall is roughly near my age {56} in years of existence.

Today's post is once again about The Average American Novel, and starting with this post, I thought it would be fun to track my word count and the various tangents associated with it. This tracking idea came about the same time I'd decided to write this out via pen-paper then transcribing it to the computer {I'd covered the reasoning for this in post #108}. So the stats for the book are as follows:

Total word count: 37,666.

Total handwritten: 14,846.

Total % handwritten: 39.4%.

Scary that over one-third of my story is comprised of four chapters completely handwritten {I believe I have a minimum four chapters left to write}, which with my hands is quite an accomplishment indeed.

As I'd briefly alluded to in a prior post, I do enjoy trying to work in a few aspects of my home state {Connecticut}, as well as my hometown and surrounding areas {including a mountain} into the story. In the original iteration of this story, I went a tad overboard, as newbies are wont to do when writing, with the descriptions of the various parts of the state I was using in the story.

Like, a painfully over-description of traveling from one town to another that makes me cringe now since it was soooo unneeded for the story; ditto for entering the town and driving to a particular house; to a small(ish) degree the last two settings of the story, although now that I think about it, the mountain one should stay in a modified form.

So this time around, I've really pared down the descriptions for all of the key scenes written so far: apartments, area surrounding the apartments, office/warehouse complex, discreet sex club (with the kinky sex really toned down to an NC-17 level as opposed to the usual X level that I write), the city and of course, two different road trips and roadside diners. As they say, sometimes writing your descriptions should be like writing your throwaway characters, minimalist with just enough details to set the scene/get the point across.

I've also discovered, while gutting the original like a cannery worker does with fish, that a key character that suddenly reappears at the end of the story, as well as being featured in the secondary plot, has no real reason for showing up at the end to begin with other than being used as a prop. The problem will be writing a meaningful part/reason/triggering event that becomes the catalyst for him being there. The solution will be writing a meaningful/reason/triggering event that becomes the catalyst for home being there.

Which will not be as difficult as it sounds, since I'm gutting the entire original chapter(s) to the point where they've become just the basic of all basic outlines to work with. Fun times there.

Next week, we will touch upon the primary characters in the story and how they came about.

In the meantime, since this story was originally written back in 2011, I will share with you another post from 2011 from my very 1st blog, Cedar's Mountain. Back in the day, when I was a worker bee/mindless drone, I was on pretty decent terms with my co-workers, and as such, would often get humorous e-mails forwarded to me. 

This post, from January 23, 2011, was one such e-mail. Entitled Connecticut Barbie, it was a very humorous and quite biting take on Barbie as applied to the various parts of Connecticut. Some of you might really get this as you probably have similarly strange pockets in your state as well. In any event, please enjoy this very humorous post from yesteryear.

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

Episode #109: I. Are. Not. Smart.

Maus

So, I saw a story about this book a few weeks ago, and ever since the day I read the story, I wanted to writer about it. I tried to write about it on FB, but apparently I'm their mini-doghouse, as whenever I try to post something that triggers a fact-check bot of some kind, it does the old, "we're experiencing technical difficulties, please stand by" and promptly eliminates the post. Apparently "book banning" is a naughty phrase.

Anyways, on to the story.

A mentally challenged school board in McMinn County, Tennessee has decided to have the book Maus pulled from all school libraries and curricula, due to the book containing things like: swearing {the horror!}, nudity {the HORROR!} and violence {THE HORROR!} and they don't want the "tender" minds of little childrens to be exposed to such "filth" (paraphrasing here).

A couple of things I would like to point out:

1} The book is bio/memoir of Art Spiegelman's father surviving the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and trying to come to terms with it.

2} Yes, the book has swearing. This is to be expected, as it takes during the rise of Nazi Germany and the background of WWII; Yes, it contains nudity. The horrors of war and concentration camps have a tendency sometimes to have nudity, that is a given. Yes, it contains violence. The horrors of war and concentration camps, which begat genocide, does indeed involve a level of violence that can be upsetting to people to read/listen/watch about. It's something that, quite frankly, is unavoidable.

Political views aside, I am not a fan of book censorship. If you don't like a book, fine. No one is forcing you to read it. Have an opinion? Dandy. Just don't force it on anyone else. This showcases the ugliness of war, true racism and the intentional eradication of a particular group of people who did nothing wrong beyond apparently being born into the "wrong religion".

As a sidenote: I have read the book. Once I figured out the gist of the book, I found very troubling and as very outstanding take on a survivor's take of surviving against all odds. 10/10 would highly recommend.

That being said, I really do hope that some outraged citizens contact their state department of education about this as well as contacting a lawyer and filing a lawsuit to overturn this narrow-minded and obviously obtuse decision of a school bard that apparently is working for themselves and not for the people who elected them.

On a similar topic, this one is about bigotry and narrowness of mind.

A few weeks ago, roughly the same time as the book Maus was getting banned, a small person who is a mayor in small town Mississippi decided that he wasn't going to give the public library their legally required/voter approved budget money (approx $110k), until the library got rid of ALL THE BOOKS that covered/were about the gay community/lifestyle. To paraphrase, he said he was "a god fearing Christian" and he didn't want any kind of "sinful books" like those in the library, and he wasn't going to give the money until they do.

Now, personally, it doesn't matter to me where you are on the political spectrum in regards to this issue (no, really, I pursue a "I don't ask" when it comes to issues like this unless the persona chooses to tell me, then I'm more than happy to listen), but you have to agree that something like this is just plain wrong. In theory, an elected official serves the people of the community who had elected them, so their personal feelings simply do not come into play.

Your personal beliefs should not factor into making a professionally public decision like this. It's your job, in this case, an election got you employed, to do what you personally loathe. We all have to make decisions about things we find personally detestable for the greater good. Are there things I personally do not like that I have to do? Absolutely. But this action by this mayor just simply reeks of cancel culture/wokeness,  and that's not right. Bullying sucks in all forms, and that is what their mayor is doing.

I certainly hope you enjoyed my little rant for the day. Tune in next week when I hope to be back into the swing of things w/o someone doing something to annoy me to the point of having to blog extensively about it.

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