Episode #195: Everything Is Cyclical These Days

Use your imagination for a caption, because mine certainly would offend most normal people.

Everything is cyclical these days, no matter whether you're writing or dealing with something that can be mildly annoying. Like telephone scammers.

This post was actually inspired by a Facebook memory from three years ago {10/28/2020}, when I was counting down the final two days to retirement {note: three years ago, October 31st fell on a Sunday so I had to retire on the last day of the work week, which was Friday October 30, 2020}, which being my humorous self broke it down by days/hours/minutes/seconds.

Anyways, it got me thinking about where life is often cyclical in nature, which led me to thinking about scammers from India. We still have a landline that often serves as 4th number backup when people can't be reached on their cell number. I'll zip right to the T.L.;D.R. of sending money to charities gets your personal info sold.

Early on in my retirement, I used to have all kinds of long(ish) phone calls with scammers trying to sell all kinds of useless stuff {e.g. Spectrum/Comcast/DirectTV/AT&T, Micro$oft, Amazon}. I first started by pretending to be gay and making passes at all of the male callers {they're extremely homophobic in India}. After a while, I switched off to giving all kinds of semi-fake information to the callers, but even that got kind of boring. So I would go into a "cyclical" phase of simply trying to make the phone call as brief as humanly possible WITHOUT hanging up on them, average length being  about one minute.

Side note: My mother ultimately wasted a bit of money in having call blocking on the phone, simply because all scammers employ spoofing phone numbers, which makes it virtually impossible to block the number.

Again, I eventually got bored being that brief on the phone {yes, I know, I need a life. I'm retired, so sue me} and started to once again, get creative with the calls. Over the past three years, I have done the following:

1} Used different voices, like a bad version of Mrs Doubtfire, Tim Conway's "Old Man" or a redneck/hillbilly/trailer park denizen. Even when I would talk in my normal voice, I was always called, "ma'am" or "miss". Sometimes I would pretend to be offended.

2} Because I would get two different types of callers: Indians and everyone else. For everyone else, I would concoct creative, if moderately plausible, stories when they ask if I was in an accident a few years ago. Of course, the stories got darker every time they called. With the Indian callers, I would do things like ask about the weather in India, compliment their voice, ask about their personal life, etc.

3} For certain types of Indian calls, the stories would get a little realistic. For example, for the Spectrum/Comcast calls, I would either tell them an outrageous amount of boxes or joyously greet them as a long lost co-worker. Twice I shocked them so bad that I managed to get a real customer service number out of them. If it was from one of those fake utilities, like for solar power, I would pose as a hapless businessman who paid all of his bills in cash, had no credit or debit cards and begged to get his rebate as a gift card. Once, I had a scammer explain to me what a WalMart card was.

Since everything is cyclical in nature for me, we are currently back on the downhill slope to dullness. Because it's so easy to tell where the call is actually coming from (pro-tip: there is about a one second connection delay in which you will hear a distinct "boop" sound, which means the call is from India) and what kind of call it is: no "boop" sound means you'll get an AI voice that needs to be dealt with before you go to the actual call, and more often than not, it's for the accident payment scam; a "boop" sound means, at least for me, a Medicare scam.

For the former, it usually takes me no more than twenty-five seconds to get through the AI, then I simply say, "Thank you for calling GEICO/State Farms/Liberty Mutual Insurance, how may I direct your call?", which in turn makes them hang up. For the Medicare scam, once they start asking if I have part A & B, I say, "Thank you for calling the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. How may I direct your call?", which again makes them hang up.

Note: the latter business stated is the actual federal agency that oversees Medicare and Medicaid.

Overall, I'm having lots of fun doing this, and as always, I'm always shooting for the Golden Sombrero of making the caller deviate from their script. Haven't had any luck, but it's not for the lack of trying. If  you're really interested in seeing scammers being made to look like fools, there is a channel on YouTube called IRLRosie, who specializes in doing this, both solo and in a group effort. She is a very talented voice over artist and musician.

Hope you have a very happy Halloween this year!

{c} 2023 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #194: You're Acknowledging...Who?

Don Quixote to the rescue of that windmill!

As most of you are undoubtedly aware of, I have a very odd sense of humor, which often will slide in my blog writings, FB postings, YT postings and just my plain writing. Today's post is about my oddball humor appearing in an often overlooked part of a published book: the acknowledgment page.

Now, I have done this before previously with my trad/indie book called "Line 21/The Inner Sibling", where I responded to a trollish insult to my writing abilities by saying, "guess what, I can string more than two words together."

In my upcoming book entitled "The Lie Reveals The Truth", with a tentative release date Spring 2024, I decided to get very cheeky with the acknowledgement page. The kind of cheekiness that will have you scratching your head and saying, "What the?" to your computer screen. So here, in order of how I wrote about them on the acknowledgement page, are the entities/people that deserve my recognition.

1} My house. No joke. One typical Saturday morning in the early summer of 2021, I woke up, got out of bed and walked down to my basement to find a couple of inches of man-made water in the basement (including the laundry room). This was courtesy of a burst kitchen pipe, so as a matter course after the water was drained out (note, do not pick up a live computer plug that is submerged in water) and before I moved some of my stuff out, I dug out a bunch of manuscripts from my ginormous slushie pile, which ultimately were two "completed" novellas, another novella that is turning out to be a four volume series and two short stories. Long story short, pretty sure if my basement didn't flood, I probably wouldn't be sitting here two years later typing out this blog post.

2} My dining room and YouTube. Seriously. I mean, seriously. My dining room, because that's where I had to relocate my manly man-cave for the second half of 2021 to do all of my writing and what not. You Tube, because I was on the main floor of the house, and since I'm a manly man who needs peace and quiet to write, and there was no way it was gonna be found with a noisy living room and equally noisy kitchen, I had to break my personal rule of not listening to music while writing. Thus YouTube, which consisted mostly of all kinds of classical/Medieval music from almost every single string instrument played (no, really), to all kinds of RPG music (aka role playing games like D&D or Magic: The Gathering) and all kinds of fantasy music and movie soundtracks. For this book alone, I listened to at least 25+ hours of music. Overall, I theorize that roughly 60+ hours of music streaming from YouTube passed in and out of my head that summer.

3} My family. This goes without saying that my family put up with my long hours spent writing, knowing that a happy, slightly off-kiltered father inching ever so closer to 60!, is a more malleable father indeed.

4} Facebook. Mostly due to the writing group that I am a member of, who has given me very sound and practical advice over the years, to which I am gratefully indebted. Also, a solitary shout out to a particular member of that writer's group whose nom-de-plume is Ramona Mainstrom (specializes in romance) who was able to create a viable tag line/short blurb/long blurb from the initial blurb that I had posted in our group. I did some tiny tweaking to get a couple more salient points in, but 98% of it was her, thus the need to give credit where credit is due.

5} My Muse and my Conscience. And finally, where would I be if I didn’t give thanks to the always lovely and perpetually effervescent Muse and my rancorous Conscience, who decided that pushing me into the abyss of unfulfilled ‘what-ifs’ was exactly what I needed to manually jump-start this very fulfilling, if not yet financially rewarding, side hustle.

And I finish it up by giving links to my Amazon page and my Book Blog page, of which the later I think needs to be radically tweaked in the coming months, but that's another post for another time.

So, there you have it. A simple, yet slightly skewered acknowledgment page for my upcoming novella. I think the only credits left to add will be the formatter's d/b/a and the graphic designer's d/b/a. Beyond that, the next headache left will be accessing my US Copyright account after three years of non-use, as well starting the KDP process (nooooooooooo!), and maybe one or two other platforms as well.

{c} 2023 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #193: Thinking. Is. Good!

Cake we had for my grandson's baptism on 10/1/2023. And it was actually good as we took one for the team.

This post is another fine outstanding example of creating something out of a few hundred words that were nuked to Orion's Belt. Or...or....or....realizing that the previous post was gobbledy-gook a nano-second after pressing the "publish" button, then come back an hour later and nuking said post to the previously mentioned star cluster.

Anywho, we decided to give a few writing updates, instead of a dull post about podcasts (what I listen to and how etc), because what I listen to isn't as exciting as what I'm writing.

So things are starting to settle down at the villa, as all the familial obligations and the medical obligations, save for lab work, are basically completed and we can concentrate on getting our Average American Novella published. A few weeks ago, I'd written a post containing the tag line, short blurb and long blurb for my novella, as well as trying to decide what the title should be {see here}. Suffice to say, we've come up with a title: "The Lie Reveals The Truth". So yay to everyone who had contributed their suggestions/votes for the title, and I will have a special shout-out contained in the acknowledgements for a fellow writer who did a great job in turning my original blurb, with a tiny bit of help on my part, to what you see in that previous post.

So really, the only things left on my checklist to complete are: a short acknowledgment section, a short interior blurb section about me and the infamous copyright page, which will fortunately be much, much shorter than the one for one of my short story collections {that one took up about a half page as every previous appearance had to be properly credited}. I also took the liberty of compiling a list on what I want the cover to potentially look like. I figured that being prepared this time will be less of a headache than simply saying, "Well....maybe."

I'm still shooting for an end-of-year release, but this hinges on what the schedules of the graphic designer and formatter look like. Worst case scenario, we get this bad boy released in the spring.

And now, the world famous Hot Mess.

As I'd mentioned in a previous post, my planned trilogy has blown up into a four volume series. This really wasn't originally planned to be a four volume series, but the way everything was unfolding {#1 is the kidnapping, #2 is the chase to recapture the hostage, #3 is the chase 2.0}, the realization that there was no intelligent way to keep it at three volumes. With the two previous volumes clicking it at 26 chapters +/-, it would be sacrilegious to saddle volume three with 35+/- chapters and two plot climaxes: the aforementioned chase 2.0 and the final encounter.

Since I'm a weird stats nut {I've actually mellowed out over the years. honestly}, I figure I would throw a few strange factoids at everyone.

Total word count as 10/16/23 sits at 290,195, which expands out to 65 chapters/640 pages. Originally, the amount I was handwriting versus what I was transcribing was a ratio of 1 1/2 pages written to 1 page typed. In the past sixteen months {yes, you read correctly. I started this bad boy June '22}, the ratio has climbed steadily upwards. Presently I'm transcribing chapter 66 and I'm currently on handwritten pg 16, which now equals 10 1/2 pages typed. I'm kind of at a loss to adequately explain why the differential is so much, except maybe that I write somewhat large {probably the computer equivalent of 14-15 pt}, very clear and concise. The large text part is directly due to me getting rid of 30 years worth of cramping my handwriting in order to fill out forms/reports concisely.

Right now, the chapter count seems to be on track, in that #3 starts at chapter 50, so I should be finishing this volume at chapter 75 +/-. To extrapolate this nonsense even further, my prediction for a final three volume word count is 350k, and for ha-ha's, an overall four volume word count of 500k. And trust me, I will revisit this prediction when all is said and done.

So this is where I currently sit with my two major writing projects, and I actually have at least two other novellas and another short story collection waiting for me in the pipeline. The road to written word salvation is fraught with headaches {need caffeine}, hair pulling {zircon encrusted tweezers and electric razor please} and hangry-ness {we started a diet this past week. a photo was the catalyst that helpfully pointed out just exactly how I presently look}. But the old local {CT} business slogan always applies at the end: Peace Of Mind, Guaranteed.

Have a splendorous week!

{c} 2023 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #192: How To....Exactly What?

My daughter and her current flame.

Life sometimes, oddly enough, gets in the way of life. Through the miracle known as planning things out, I got the end result that I was not really expecting, all because I had things perfectly planned out, which led to the title of this post.

See if you can follow my warped logic along with me:

My PCP, after 31+ years, retired effective June 1st; being the procrastinator that I am, wasn't able to hook with two new doctors until this October; with appointments in the second week.

Had my high school reunion this past weekend. Prior to the actual event, planned out that I would pick up the wife the day off and take her back to the campsite day after; picked up wife day off, had a decent time, then took her back the day after. Sounds simple right?

The plan also called for me to do my grocery shopping today, the day of this post. But....the first doctor's appointment is an hour after lunch (issue #1 &2), which causes me to move up my grocery shopping to the actual morning (issue #3), instead of the afternoon, because who knows how long my first appointment with my new doctor will take.

Meanwhile, in blog land, through a combination of excellent planning and neglecting to see the bigger picture, we are typing out a typical "man-splaining excuse laden" man-child rant for a post. In other words, the "I-am-dying-from-a-sinus-headache-and-I-need-constant-attention" whine for a blog post.

To sum it up, the one time that I decided to actually plan things out for a relaxing weekend, reality steps in, pulls me up with a major wedgie and says, "I don't think so."

Have a splendiferous Monday!

{c} 2023 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #191: How To Self Publish-A Bob & Ted Review

The fullest moon in recent memory was out the other night {9/27}, so I thought it would be an absolutely smashing idea to grab a couple of pics to add to my growing pile of phone pics. Not bad on the spur of the moment, eh?

While I was trying to think of a topic to write about, I discovered that I haven't done a Bob & Ted review since late July. So I figured, why not? I also figured that, since I'm making the final preparations to drop around four and a half Benjamins to produce another book, this would be a great topic to have our resident flakes Bob & Ted perform a review.

Wish me luck.

~~~~~

We find Ted sitting at his desk, jotting some notes and double checking his checklist, for he decided that today was to be the day that he was gonna take that giant first step and self publish his how-to book called "How To Earn A Full Day's Pay At Any Job By Working Less Than Five Minutes Per Day."*

"Okay, let's see: Money? Check! Graphic designer? Check! Formatter? Check! Copyright registration? Check! No interference from Bob? Ch--"

"Hey! Ted! Teddy-boy! My main man Theo! Theodore!"

Pinching his eyes with his cheek muscles, Ted lets rip with a noxious release of internal combustion remnants and says, "What can I not do for you...Bob."

Since sarcasm of any kind is lost on the man-child that is Bob, Bob continues on his path of most resistance. "So Ted, have you got that thirteen page report on why we should not change our company acronym from D.O.L.T. to D.U.L.L. completed? You know I don't like it when I'm made to look like the fool."

"Yes, Bob. Here it is Bob. Just like you wanted Bob."

Bob snatches the report from Ted's hand, and as he's perusing the contents of the report, he notices some strange bits of paper covered with markings, strewn across the desk.

He closes the report and asks, "What's that strewn across your desk?"

"Notes, Bob. Haven't you ever seen handwritten notes before?"

"So that's what that is? Must be some kind of new invention. So, you have these because, why?"

Ted internally facepalms, but outwardly, he says, "Because I'm getting ready to self publish my book."

Bob leans over and sees the title of the book Ted is pointing at. "Pffft. Who in the wide, wide world of mediocrity is going to read that?"

"You would be amazed at the amount of people who would buy a self-help book like this. It's gonna be a best seller."

"Humph," says Bob as he tries to read what Ted has written but is failing miserably due to his 4th grade comprehension skills. "So, you gonna go through one of them places where they charge you an arm and two legs to publish your book?"

Stunned at the overflowing bucket of stupid oozing from Bob's pores, Ted takes a very deep breath to clear his intake valves before speaking. "Bob....that would be spending money unwisely. I am not like my employer who spends lavishly on moronically stupid things while nickel and dimeing on things that matter. I spend my money wisely on professionals. You do know what a professional is, correct?"

Snorting derisively, he says, "Of course I do. After all, I am a professional, whereas you're just a peon slaving away for a paycheck of slight renown."

Ignoring Bob's contempt, Ted continues. "Well, I want this done right, and since I cannot even remotely perform what I want, I'm spending my money wisely, with reputable professionals in their chosen field. Unlike you, who spent gobs of money to publish a....steaming pile of....provocativeness with a vanity publisher of ill-repute. Tell me Bob, have you earned your $4k investment back yet?"

Bob again snorts derisively and turns read from embarrassment. "Well, you know, selling books takes time."

"Really Bob? Takes time, Bob? Bob, your book is so putridly bad, people only buy it when they want to give their farm animals their weekly dose of man-made fiber. Beyond that, your book simply doesn't even rise to the level of a Dick & Jane primer."

"Oh yeah, Mr. Smarmypants? You think that you're hot stuff with your book, do ya? Well let me tell you something. I---"

Ted cut Bob off at the thighs. "Bob. I have talent. You don't. I'm going to use a reputable publisher like KDP, Draft2Digital and Smashwords. And I'm going to take my time doing it. I worked on this bad boy for over five years and I'm very proud of it. Tell me, are you proud of your book, Bob?"

Bob got so red in the face that smoke started billowing from his ears and steam from under his collar. Ted waited a few more minutes to see if anything else was going to happen, but nothing did. So he casually turned back to his computer to finish typing out the particulars to the cover designer about his book cover. 

Ted was very happy with his book and the fact that it was already drumming up a lot of pre-orders, based on his highly successful blog called, "How To Turn Your Current Job Into Your Side Hustle".**

Bob on the other hand, was locked into his office, having a meltdown about not being the best book writer ever.

*not a real book, so far as I know. but in today's strange Amazon world, anything is possible.

**not a real blog, so far as I know, but in today's get rich quick schemes, there should be one.

{c} 2023 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved