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