Episode #142: Dad's Muse Has Taken A Brief Siesta!

Coming soon to a house near you, Autumn!

Flexi, the muse that makes everyone's life utterly unique and stylistic, has decided to take a short siesta to recharge her batteries, her imagination and her clothing options. Stepping in to be her erstwhile substitute is yours truly, the copyright holder to whatever word salad she chooses to share with us, which as of late was a Cobb salad. Possibly in the future it will be a Waldorf salad.

So for the past three weeks, Flexi has been acting out a few of the main characters from my latest story entitled Hot Mess. To refresh your memory, Hot Mess was the last of four partially/completed manuscripts that I had dug out from my tote bin of slushies in 2021 that had survived damage from burst water pipes that I had decided to work on. Note, over one dozen manuscripts in total were saved from that disaster.

While the first three were easy enough for me to blast through (all 1st or 2nd drafts were done by February 2022, so roughly seven months total), the fourth has basically blown up in my face. I had about eight original chapters of utter gar-bage, which is the cleanest way I can put this, so it was quite obvious to me that something needed to be done.

Well, at the beginning of June, we did start to do just that. We blew up the original plot line of something (yes, this is a reoccurring theme for me, in which I have issues in trying to remember basic plot lines from stories written, in this case twelve, years ago), reconfigured what the new plot line was to be, and off to the races we went.

Fast forward to now: we just finished transcribing chapter 28 and our word count stands at 103,610. No, we're not finished as we just reached the apex of part the first of the overall plot. And what is that overall plot you may ask? To simplify: Mercenary {F} is assigned to kidnap/retrieve the husband of a former classmate/enemy and bring him back to a pod Queen. That's the legendary T.L.;D.R. version of the plot.

So while the plot is basically a solid universal trope (person is kidnapped for possible nefarious means), the gender roles were tweaked (kidnapper is female, victim is male) and a lot of strange things were thrown into the mix to make it anything but stale, we hope.

1} For starters, it's a bit of a low fantasy style story, with a mixture of real world and off-world(?) settings, specifically, an unidentified part of earth and a planet simply known as The Pod.

2} The characters themselves are pretty much hybrid humans with dormant cannibalistic tendencies.

3} One character has, from a still partially hidden background, styles herself a reluctant leader with two ladies-in-waiting at her back and call; while her husband, who is 100% human, worked for the Aztec Empire back in the day.

4} His ex-wife also worked for the Aztecs, having been taken as a possible Incan prisoner previously, and who also lives within him.

5} Another character has an adult foster son who is her equal in some aspects.

6} There are two groups of skeletal peeps. One is a pair that were previously consumed as a meal, but promised to be made whole at a later date, while the others are reproductions who can only speak in ASL.

7} Finally, there will be some old fashioned royal political intrigue, since The Pod is ruled by a Queen with insane protocol requirements and a power hungry of courtiers called The Royal Entourage.

8} And because I'm a bit strange when it comes to using information that I have absorbed through a lifetime of reading, I have tried my best to work those concepts in to my story: Greek/Roman mythology; turning very bad things into large conglomerates (e.g. human sacrifices and debt collection); using languages of all kinds for communicating (e.g. foreign and ASL); a modern form of technology (tablet); a fantasy world communication (telepathy); traditional forms of transportation (horses and travoises); new species (e.g. skeletal people); and finally, old fashioned intrigue and revenge.

If you stir all of these things together in a big old mixing bowl, what you get afterwards is a manuscript that has blown up like mentos and coke, and quite possibly turn into a two to three volume set of a humdinger of a story.

Least I forget, this is what happens when you decided to slow down your perpetually overactive brain just enough for it to actually think crystal clear on all kinds of thngs...by handwriting the entire story out before sticking it onto a computer.

Slowing down by being old fashioned is not something I would wholeheartedly endorse to anyone who enjoys writing, but it works for me. 

Happy Monday!

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