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