Episode #208: How We Got Here From There {3rd}

Sadly, the Michelin Man's younger brother Frosty disappeared before the Christmas season ended. No puddles to be found, but perhaps he was taken away by the wind, for he was lighter than air.

Part the 1st can be found here, while part the 2nd can be not lost here.

And I apologize for the length of this upcoming post, as I got a little carried away with this particular part of my creative process.

~~~~~~

I have a lot of different relationships at play in my current project and each has their own separate complexities that are involved.

Let's start with siblings. I did start out with three sets of siblings, but somehow along the way, one set of siblings, sisters, got changed to cousins. Of the two remaining, one pair are sisters, with the other being brother and sister, and each has their own unique set of characteristics.

The brother and sister pair are sentient beings with a host (as I mentioned in the story, this is what happens when you make decisions while being highly intoxicated). They have that special connection that siblings often have, and they are analytical as well. And like their host, are one hundred percent hetero.

For the other set of siblings, while on the surface it seems to be very straight forward as it applies to that special sibling connection, everything else is heavily implied. While one of the sisters is hetero, she is very understanding and accepting of her sister, who is not. This is very heavily implied early on, based on the emotions and physicality that the sister shows to her artist friend until at one point it comes plainly stated by virtue of the actions performed by her sister.

As for the cousins, I haven't written them in a way that implies one way or the other. This is directly due to them not really becoming a force of any kind until very late in book #3 of the series. Presently I have them acting like bff's who have to depend on each other in order to live their lives to the best of their ability.

Moving on to three of the six remaining female MCs. These three have hair spirit/sentient beings, which each having a specially unique relationship with their host. Let's start with the character with the least amount of baggage with her hair spirit: she goes by the name Melissa, while her hair spirit goes by the name Emilia.

Emilia came to Melissa via judicial decree and has a week in which to convince Melissa to accept her wholeheartedly. Emilia is very much a newbie with her interactions with Melissa and is also very much an orphan, as per her background. So subsequent interactions with Melissa are more on the level of mentor to student than anything else.

Macha the Pod Queen is a complex case. Even though she's the actual catalyst for this entire series, she is quite the multi-faceted individual, with conflicting morals based on her job duties and privileged upbringing.

Exit ramp #3: Even though it has been determined from the very beginning that she is hetero, her relationship with hair spirit was one that I was able to explore more in depth with some degree of intimacy.

Muscling my way back onto the highway.

Like I stated in an earlier blog post, Macha is the latest in a long line of rulers in a strictly matriarchal hierarchy, albeit one that still has men calling some of the shots as members of the ruling class. As I also stated earlier, Macha often has to weaponize her natural attributes to the best of her ability (which is required by law) in order to get what she wants and needs for herself and her people.

Now her hair spirit is a sentient being that goes by the name of Eleanor, and she has quite the special relationship with their host. This is because Eleanor is actually the half-sister to Macha, and she became her hair spirit in a most peculiar and heartbreaking way. 

Early on Eleanor knew that Macha was destined for a life of privilege and power, even if Macha herself did realize it. So in their late teens an incident occurred in which Eleanor was forced to throw herself the proverbial bus in order to protect her half-sister. Eternally grateful, she made her half-sister a permanent part of her life.

So they remained sisters in all aspects of her life, which allowed them a deeper familial intimacy and tolerance that is rarely shown to the outside world. Comforting words and phrases that one would use with a partner. Very intimate gestures with intense displays of affection and tenderness. All of which are hallmarks of a warm sibling relationship, but in her case goes both ways, in that Eleanor has unfettered access to her sister's most personal memories, thus allowing her to return the gesture with a deeper level of familiarity and affection.

😎

Again, barring any pleasant surprises that might nudge this train to a temporary detour, tune in next week on this same day for part the 4th. Have a Fantastick Monday, a Tony! Toni! Tone'! Tuesday, with an R.J. Reynolds Wednesday, Thundercat Thursday and Felix the Cat Friday following close behind.*

*For those of you who are too young to remember, in successive order we have: a musical play/movie, a music group, a tobacco company, a mid 80's cartoon and a classic cartoon strip/cartoon short.

{c} 2024 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #207: How We Got Here From There {2nd}

Alas this flower is no more either. Bereft of life, it has joined the avian choir invisible. This is an ex-flower now residing in an herbal tea bag.

You can find part the 1st here.

~~~~~~

I started putting the process in motion when I had started writing, or rather, rewriting a few short stories. Nothing really hardcore, but did apply what I had learned previously and started trying to really flesh out one of the characters, with a concerted effort made towards female MC's as opposed to male MC's.

Exit ramp #1: Way early on, like at the very very beginning of my writing journey, I had developed strict guidelines for myself on how I should write both sexes. I would like to note that I have judiciously deviated from these rules from time to time, but overall I have stayed true to those guidelines.

Guideline #1: Males are to be written with both toxic masculinity traits as well as Walter Mitty-esque traits. 

Guideline #2: Females should be written always as strong independent woman (i.e. girl boss) with just a hint of vulnerability.

Reentering the highway.

Now what I mean by a concerted effort to make my female MC's more fully fleshed out is a bit convoluted, but I will try to explain the best I can.

I've always admired strong independent women, no matter the ethnicity, which for me translated to having better platonic work relationships with women, as opposed to men. So this has basically bled quite heavily into my stories, creating composite characters based on real world observations, etc. Because of this, I have been more comfortable in fleshing out my female characters.

Exit ramp #2: Way later in my writing life, I came to appreciate and understand certain aspects of the real world, so I decided to incorporate them into my storylines. You are forewarned.

Reentering the highway once again.

Now that comfort level of writing female MC's has spilled over into the way I write about relationships. Not so much M&F, which can be complex if the situation calls for it, but very much when it came to F&F, no matter where the pairing might be on the relationship spectrum.

Now truth be told is that over the preceding years, I have become quite accepting of what is common place behaviors or PDA among all segments of society (I'm 58 1/2, so it's taking me a bit of time to tweak my views), and because of this I have started to make a concentrated effort to work all of these emotional and physical complexities into my stories. While I have written some characters to have either lesbian or bisexual tendencies in my stories and novellas (one of my novellas has a gay secondary character that is featured throughout the story), it has become completely fleshed out in the four part series that I am currently working on.

Now that's not to say that every single character in the story leans that way, either blatantly or subtly. On the contrary, I used very normal and very intimate gestures and words to lend some ambiguity to the story, which also depends heavily on where and what the situation may be.

I can comfortably state with confidence that a little suggestive ambiguity can go a very long way towards implying how a certain scene should be interpreted. It has taken me quite a bit of time to learn how to show more by writing less. For years I thought sledgehammering to get a point across was the way to go. Turns out that using a hammer that is more suited for decorative or detailed work will often get the point across in ways that sledgehammering won't.

Now, I can use intimate gestures and words to get my point across about a particular character in ways that sledgehammering could never accomplish. And if I take those same words and enhance them with judiciously dropped background info, it can show these characters in a brand new light.

😎

Barring any pleasant surprises that may force a minor change in posting, you can tune in next Monday for part the 3rd of my series. Have a Spaceman Spiff Monday, a Transmogrification Tuesday, Dromedary Hump Wednesday, Turbo Tax Thursday and mourn the fact that TGIF has closed almost three dozen under-performing restaurants this month nationwide.*

*For those of you who might not get certain pop culture references, in successive order we have: A Calvin & Hobbes subplot x2, a type of camel, a tax software program and a restaurant chain that has taken the first step towards a possible chapter 11 bankruptcy.

{c} 2024 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #206: How We Got Here From There {1st}

To reminisce of days gone by. Sadly, this particular bucolic scene no longer exists, as the flowers were turned over when the pond was filled in, while the statue was moved over to a side garden to stare out to the mountain.

Note: This post kicks off a series that specifically focuses on the deceptively complex question of, "Why do you write your male and female characters the way you do?"

I was originally inspired by one upcoming event that will split off into two intertwined pathways, which in turn brought me face-to-face with the fact that to give this event my complete attention, I needed to make sure that the blog would be set for posts until mid February. The event in question, is of course, publishing my novella, with the two intertwined pathways being the cover and formatting the manuscript. After all, when you're dropping quality cash for a quality product, you best be paying attention to all aspects thereof.

So with that being said, onwards and upwards. One other thing I must mention, is that this series does delve rather deeply into issues that may be offensive to the eyes of some people. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

~~~~~~~

From time to time, I would often wonder how I had arrived at this particular junction in my writing life. I mean, back in the day, back when I still had remnants of hair follicles growing out of my scalp, when I had made the conscious decision to start writing, I always thought that my genre of choice would be romance, or something along those lines.

I mean, how difficult could it be, right? I mean, have two people meet up, have a series of misadventures, throw some intimacy in, some conflict, mix it all up and viola! A romance novel.

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!

It took me about a year to reach that conclusion and about five more to extricate myself from that mindset. However, during that extrication process, I did try other kinds of themes/genres, in a genuine attempt at finding one that I felt very comfortable writing in.

As I searched, I obviously grew as a writer. I gradually figured out what I could and could not write if I wanted to stay within my own personal boundaries (strangely, one was writing a G-rated story). But we preserved and eventually found a consistent level of sorts on what direction I wanted to go and what kinds of themes I wanted to explore. 

I eventually got the hang of writing sex and violence that contained varying degrees of explicitness for each type, taking great care and finesse in not going "Hustler" on the former and gratuitously disgusting on the latter unless it was very germane to the plot/scene.

On the former, the only time we reached "Hustler" territory was with my one and only traditionally published novel Line 21/The Inner Sibling, which was directly due to the fact that the MC had to jump feet first into the waters of the adult entertainment industry. In regards to the latter, we have not crossed that line, but we have tip-toed right to it (my upcoming novella pretty much pulverizes that boundary in a barely non-gratuitous fashion).

Eventually we settled on exploring various relationships as an overall theme to apply and nurture my writing mindset. With one of my short story anthologies, What Is Life?, I was, to a certain degree, all over the relationship platform, which was due to the twin themes of the four seasons of the year and the four stages of life.

The relationships explored were pretty generic: Story #1 featured a mountain's relationship with the outside world, like a year in the life; Story #2 featured the relationship between man and nature; Story #3 featured the trials and tribulations between a writer, his work and his spouse; and Story #4 was a musician's relationship with their music and their manager.

With our other short story anthology entitled A Trilogy of Love, we started concentrating a bit deeper on human relationships. Story #1 featured a young man going through the heartache of being dumped by his girlfriend and being pursued by a secret admirer afterwards; Story #2 is about a strangely platonic relationship between two besties (M&F); Story #3 is also a story about two besties who do a "friends with benefits" scenario.

Story #3 is important to me, as it marked what I believe to be a very key turning point with my writing in multiple ways. First and foremost, because the scene unfolded between two female friends, I wanted to make sure that I didn't divebomb into an adult entertainment area of descriptive prose. Because to be perfectly honest, I didn't think at the time I had the ability to do that kind of deep exploration of a relationship in this particular story. So we kept it to a happy medium between softcore and hardcore.

After finishing that particular story, I went off on and odd exploration of relationships, in which we covered a few particular types: platonic with a deeper bond, besties on different levels and FWB on deeper levels too. And because I enjoy challenging myself, I throw in siblings as well.

Now sufficiently armed with a travel bag filled with endless possibilities for writing, we set off to have a little creativity in overdrive.

😎

So ends part the 1st of our multi-part series. Barring any pleasant surprises, stay tuned for part the 2nd on this must read blog series. Here's to your spiffy Monday, as well as your Tubular Tuesday, Hump Day Wednesday, Ticonderoga Thursday and Feline Friday.*

*four of the five day adjectives are self-explanatory, while the fifth, Ticonderoga, can be interpreted in a number of ways, from being a village in New York, to a Revolutionary War battle and military foot, to even a comedy bit for the Three Stooges and others from that era.

{c} 2024 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #205: I Done Cut The Cord 5 Years Ago

I are wishing for some snow in the Winter of '23/'24, but since the season is a randy beige, this lovely photo must do.

So, as the title implies for a refreshing change of pace, I cut the cord to my t.v. viewing. It really wasn't that hard to do, since by the Spring of 2019, the quality of programming had gone so far downhill, in my eyes, that the old days of watching candlepin bowling on the telly was really a step up to the glop being produced now.

Note: Seriously, back in the day, late 70's/early 80's, there used to be televised candlepin bowling from Massachusetts (channel was either WWLP 22 or WGGB 40). I think it came on either before or after "As Schools Match Wits", a high school quiz show, also from Massachusetts. Yes, I really am dating myself.

Anyways, the quality of programming was so unbelievably bad that I had stopped watching the two remaining reality shows that kept my interest, gator fishing in Louisiana and fishing in Alaska, stopped watching baseball (that required adding a channel that in my opinion, wasn't worth the money for the little time spent watching it), and just concentrated on watching two Showtime programs: Ray Donovan and Billions.

Ultimately, even those two shows failed to keep my interest: gave up on Ray Donovan next to the last season when he moved to New York, and gave up on Billions part way through season four. So by Easter, I was pretty much trying to figure how to occupy the enormous quantities of even more free time on my hands.

Note: I had to go wandering back to both my Google and my USB drives, as well as my book blog, to jog my tired 58 1/2 year old memory, in order to write this next part.

So I started working a little more on the second and third volume of my "Friendship Trilogy", but after getting the bad news on volume two from a very well respected editor friend, I couldn't stiffen my spaghetti spine to fix the problems associated with #2. Thus, I made the painful decision to shelf the rest of the trilogy until I could once again find the shiny spine to do what needed to be done. Some day I will go back to it. We hope.

In any event, as 2019 turned itself into 2020, we found ourselves lurching about with our writing, trying to find something that I could stick with long enough to make it interesting. I still stayed very far away from the brain drain video box, because in the intervening year, what the media companies were churning out for the generic "Must See TV", was for me, "Must Miss TV". 

I should note that my t.v. viewing didn't really poop the toilet in the Spring of 2019, but it was certainly heading there. In 2018, I was watching maybe a few reality shows and some baseball games, but the bulk of my t.v. viewing were the dozen and a half movie channels that were occupying my time. This was when Frontier was still doing the cable t.v. thing (presently, they have basically moved into fiber optics for the internet, and forcibly shoved all of their cable subscribers to this), so this was how I was passing the free time in during that time period.

The real catalyst to me cutting the cord, which is what my family did years later by switching to Netflix, Roku, maaaybe Hulu and that aforementioned link, was my mother switching to.....DirectTV. I won't bore you with the gory details or the Gothic horror stories, but suffice to say, we're still following the sane bit of advice given to us by not turning in the satellite dish, just in the very faint hope that we would want to switch again (installation would require multiple Benjamins to complete)

Anyways, back to this thing called writing. sometime in 2020, I don't remember precisely, I made the decision to rewrite a previously published short story trilogy called "Broken Promise". That was published back in '13, and while my writing was okay-ish back then, seven years later it was a very much improved product, so it was pretty much a no-brainer that it needed a major overhaul to bring up to my high standards: tighter stories, new formatting and a better cover. For those of you who are curious, here is the link to the current version of the book (which I republished in 2021), A Trilogy of Love, and here is a picture of what the old cover was.

At the time, I had a member of a now defunct FB writing group to do the cover for me free. I was very grateful and I learned a valuable lesson, which was to not be a "choosing beggar" when it came to free help. Haven't been one since.

So, I spent all of 2020 rewriting this bad boy. Eventually got it formatted, got a good cover from a graphic designer who has now seemed to have gone on hiatus without any explanation whatsoever, and by the Spring of 2021, had it republished. And during all of that time, my eyeballs were not polluted by watching any television whatsoever. Listen to it most definitely, since my den is underneath the living room and spent the latter part of 2021 in the dining room due to basement flooding, so I had no escape from the audio portion at all.

Speaking of flooded/water damaged basement, a funny thing happened to me while waiting out the entire repair process of the basement: I got motivated to work on some very old (like 7 to 10 years old) manuscripts, two completed and one roughly, in hindsight, about 7% completed. Short story long, re-wrote those two manuscripts, which you can find under the tags Average American Novel and Average American Novella, with the latter being the one that I've been talking about publishing this Spring.

Now both of those two manuscripts were a major pain in the buttocks to rewrite, simply because I had to find ways to tune out the dreck that the family was watching in the other room. I ultimately found a way by rediscovering my medium-to-high tolerance of classical music. 'Nuff said on that point. Eventually though, even a moderately intolerable situation must happily go away, and by the Spring of 2022, I was comfortably entombed back in my den, working on what has turned out to be, to use a very tired cliche, my magnum opus with the blog tag of Hot Mess. In all likelihood, this will probably be my very last novel series that I will write. I much prefer the novella and anthology formats, as I find them to be both less aggravating and wickedly fun to write.

And as always, we are still television free (the medium and not the group), and more often than not, what little television viewing I do partake in is done in five to fifteen second increments whenever I need to enter the living room. Sometimes, being blissfully ignorant of an entire medium can lead to unexpected fulfillment elsewhere.

{c} 2024 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #204: Language Makes The Mundane Intriguing

This city view of Hartford CT was taken over a decade ago and is for illustrative purposes only, but man, this was the peak of cleanliness for this part of the city.

I love different languages, or rather, I love listening to different languages. When I was residing at my last state agency {2006-20}, I truly enjoyed the white noise that was predominately Spanish in my humble office (Payroll/HR}, and in fact actively moaned whenever my "white noise" wasn't there.

So fast forward to now.

Because of that fondness for foreign languages, I tried to incorporate as much as I possibly could into my current 4 volume series with the blogger tag of Hot Mess. So this fondness has morphed in the following ways:

1.  I started off everyone speaking English, but when I had female MC #1 Myla's ladies-in-waiting make an appearance, I had her speaking Spanish to them. 
2. Eventually down the road I had her ladies-in-waiting switch to understanding Portuguese, because why not.
3. With female MC #2, I need a language that could be used for certain private conversations, so I introduced Greek to the mix.
4. Note: I did not use the actual Spanish/Portuguese/Greek language for the conversations. Using a tip that an editor of mine nicely informed me of and of which I saw being used elsewhere, I simply stated at the beginning of the conversation what language was actually being used.
5. Here's where it gets quite interesting. As I needed to do background research for a few characters, I had to perform a shallow dive to find out what kind of language was used and a deeper dive to find, if any, a Google translate for that language.
6. For my male MC, because I had him working for the Aztecs {note, for kicks and giggles, I love turning cold, impersonal historical entities into ruthless business conglomos} prior to getting married a second time, I decided to have as his second language, Nahuatl, which is what the Aztecs spoke.
7. Not to leave any of the other female MC's out, I had #2 & #3 speak Quechua, which was and still is, the native language of the Incans. This is in addition to the Spanish/Portuguese/Greek/English. As for #4, in addition to her speaking English & Portuguese, I also have her speaking Nahuatl as well.
8. Now just for other ha-ha's, because I had to create a whole other planet, I had to create a whole new language, which was spoken by female #1, as well as the denizens of the planet itself.
9. And all of this isn't even adding in the fact that telepathy is being used as a base of communication, no matter the species. Or the fact that a couple of the MC's understand avian and jaguar. And can't forget the legendary hounds of Hell, Cerberus. Two minor characters know Morse code, while three other semi-minor characters speak in sign language {I decided not to differentiate between ASL & BSL}.

So as you can see, I have run the whole gamut with the languages being used in this series. And for an added bonus, I have made a concentrated effort to add the necessary background info for everyone involved, which breaks down to: Central and South America {Aztec and Inca}, North America {US}, Europe {possibly late medieval/early modern U.K. and the mainland for a time period} and of course, the Pod Planet. So that way, I'm not using the languages for the sake of using them.

Next week will be a lighter post about this and that, before I start a Mariana Trench dive into the characters that make up this series. I think this will be something that will make you go, "I did not know that about G.B."

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