Episode #215: Writing Is Diagonal When You Want Linear

Caught a squirrel eating al dente during a moderately warm morning walk. Them acorns and brown grass blades are certainly good eats indeed.

I are, once again, back in the blogging saddle. Took a month and a half blogging hiatus to catch up on my writing before switching gears to release this new novella of mine. I should clarify that it wasn't so much as a hiatus, as it was creating a series of posts from one particular seed of an idea, which led to the hiatus.

So, during my blogging hiatus I experienced a few writing related annoyances that I would like to share with ya'll. Some ya'll may find amusing, others not so much. But all were things that I have experienced just so that you don't have to. In no particular order of importance, they are as follows:

1} US Copyright Office: Since I was coming out with a new published work (novella), it would make sense for me to go through the laborious prospect of recovering my account on that website, which I had last logged into back in 2021. After coming to a standstill by locking myself out trying to reset my password, I contacted their IT support, who surprisingly enough got back to me in one-tenth of the way through the maximum ten day deadline.

One of the petty annoyances that they reminded me of was that in order to get the most out of the website, a Win PC was "required", along with either Firefox or Edge for a browser. No other OS or browser would give you the "best experience ever". The other was their version of a password meme: sixteen characters, minimum; at least three UPPER and three lower case; at least three numbers; at least two special characters; you can't use the previous eleven passwords; and you must change every 30-60 days. Oh and, you can't use words that contain all three of the same letter (e.g. eerie). 

I had a ton o' fun performing that task. Reminded of the non-user friendly websites that my home state currently maintain.

2} Being forced to spend more money than I really wanted to on a cover: Okay, this sounds whiny, but hear me out. I actually wanted to bring out my upcoming novella in early January '24, and to achieve that goal, I contacted my go-to book designer to get the ball rolling in late November '23. Long story short, she basically went AWOL for what I'm guessing to be, three and a half months. From mid-November '23 to about late Jan/early Feb '24, she basically ghosted her own website. No reason was given for her disappearance, as far as I was able to tell. She did manage to update it to a degree, but lost me as a customer.

So this thrown lug wrench forced me to solicit writer friends in my FB writer's group for suggestions. Fortunately for me, I received some excellent recommendations and selected one that was the most economically viable for me: 100 Covers/Book Cover Design. I say economically viable, in that they offered three different price points based on what you need, plus ways to add more later, also based on what you need later as opposed to now.

Now even though I am thoroughly happy with my current graphic designer, I am annoyed that I was ghosted by my previous designer. I mean, the very least that she could do would've been to change her auto-reply to something that stated something along the line of going on hiatus and a short explanation for said hiatus. If she had done that, I could've saved myself about two months worth of aggravation, not only with the cover, but with everything else associated with the process.

3} Finish up book #3 of my four part series: When is a final chapter not a final chapter? Well, to quote the Fire Marshall Bill character from MadTV, "Let me show you something!" 

I spent the better part of three weeks of actually writing a four page synopsis of what characters I have and what plot points are associated with them, along with possible scenarios of how the book is going to end and who will be moving forward, among other things; then we switched gears and performed one final edit of all five binders (added another 10% in notes); then we spent that final week of mentally plotting out how to write that final chapter.

And as the old saying goes, the meticulously crafted outline consumed itself with a side of fava beans and a fine Chianti to wash it down.

By the time I finished writing the required lead up to the battle, I was struck smart by the revelation that I needed to add a "final" final chapter, because there was no way I was going to write a 40 +/- page chapter to finish out this book.

So......yah. Writing a final chapter is just as easy as putting your hand inside the garbage can to throw something away...and missing the garbage can. 😖

Have a Happy Monday, and remember, if you need to have a good laugh, just think about all the bad grammar being tossed around by people who aren't smarter than a fifth grader, but are 4 times older than a 5th grader.

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

Episode #214{a}: The Mortality of Familial Love Is Now Live...Mostly

Soul collecting is both a dangerous and lucrative business, and no one knows better than the netherworld’s premier soul collector, Dmitri. Creating enemies is part of the job, but when a simple favor for a friend turns out to be a set-up, Dmitri finds himself in the crosshairs of a contract hit. Tangled in a web of sex, lies and violence, the collector must do whatever it takes to survive.

Survival is a brutal game, but Dmitri is playing for his life in this fast paced dark fantasy.

My latest novella, The Mortality Of Familial Love, is now available as an e-book from Amazon and Smashwords for the very reasonable price of $2.59. Get your copy today!

Details on the print version TBA at a later date (possibly the day of this post as I've submitted it for publication the day prior to this post), but will be available at Amazon and Books By G.B. Miller

But seriously though, my latest book was well over ten years in the making, going through at least one editor, a multitude of changes as we grew/matured into an slightly above average writer, and finally, a title that was at least four months in the making as well. I am very proud of this novella and I hope you feel the same way about it as I do.

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

Episode #214: The Waiting Is Always The Hardest Part

So today's post, as suggested by ye olden music video of a song that originally came out when I was still in high school, is about waiting. Specifically, waiting to publish my upcoming novella, The Mortality Of Familial Love. Last week, while I was going through the very informative {no sarcasm here} KDP process of publishing my book, I encountered a small....snag. A snag that KDP/Amazon politely pointed out to me.

In a very professional way, they stated that I had six spelling errors that needed to be fixed before I could continue with the process. Two were words that I had made up/heard elsewhere while the other was a non-capitalized version of the word, so those were easily fixable by me choosing the "ignore" option.

The others I had to contact my lovely formatter, Go Published, and asked if they could correct the errors that somehow slipped by me at least six times {seriously, I used spell check that many times}. She said that it wouldn't be a problem, sent me the correction form, told me how much it would cost, which in this case it fell under under 5 errors {thus no out of pocket cost for me} and afterwards, told me that I should have all of the corrected files some time next {this} week.

So, here we stand, patiently waiting for my manuscripts to be fixed so I can continue with my uploading. In the meantime, I started working on the final chapter of book #3 of my Hot Mess series, and I'm happy to say that as of the day of this post, I have finished book #3, and even written a very short bullet point of what characters aren't going forward.

Also, I would like to mention that KDP/Amazon is now asking authors who use their platform how much, if any, AI was involved with the creation of your book. It looks like they're simply tracking, but considering they're now limiting people to uploading three books per day (or per week, I'm not exactly sure), perhaps this is part of that crackdown as well.

Oh and, for those who also use Smashwords as a platform, they started migrating everyone to Draft2Digital. They're moving all of the easy ones and leaving the complicated ones, like myself, for later.

A very happy Monday to all and I hope to have good news by this time next week.

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

Episode #213: We Chillin' With Our Communication

An art piece that my lovely daughter created for my brother as a late Christmas present. I do not recall what type of material was used, but it took her many months to finish.

Going back, once again, to my four volume series colloquially titled Hot Mess, for this particular topic. In addition to creating unusual characters (mostly) based in the real world, I used all kinds of communication methods for the series as well.

Most obvious was the plethora of languages, both real and imaginary, that were used throughout the story. 

First and foremost, I applied the advice that a good editor friend, as well as examples used in various historical fiction novels, which was to state early on in a given conversation/scene/chapter what the actually language being used was. So at various points we had the following real (verbal) languages in use: English; Spanish; Portuguese; Greek (modern & ancient); Quechua (Incan); Nahuatl (Aztec) and just teeny-tiny bit of Biblical (e.g. thou, hast, etc) and Medieval/Renaissance English.

I also added in, because I believe in fantasy, the sky's the limit when it comes to communication, we also used the following real non-verbals, with great gusto and realism: Sign and Morse code. And we also used the following non-real types: Telepathy and Pod Planet.

Now the first paragraph is mostly self-explanatory, in that a person who spent, at the very least, centuries roaming the Big Blue Marble, would pick up the ability to communicate in a variety of languages, with varying degrees of efficiency. The second paragraph is where we'll have some fun explaining my thought process.

With Sign, this choice was a no-brainer, simply because I had created nine humanoids who had no real communication skills beyond telepathy, a very basic concept of grammar and no vocal cords, so I wanted them to use a language that could be considered a universal language. I originally used the moniker ASL until I found that there's another predominant version called BSL, thus the general moniker of "sign language" was employed. The one twist that I had decided to add, was to make it universal across different human species. That way, if telepathy wasn't available, various human species still had a rudimentary common language to use.

I chose Morse code simply because I love niche/obscure methods of communication, and what is more niche than Morse code? For at least a hundred years or so, it was the predominant mode of non-direct communication between people in the real world. In my series, I made it obsolete when I decided to treat telepathy as a real language that anyone could use, including animals. But I also made it a universal language that anyone or anything could use in a pinch, especially those who needed to keep their communications on the down low.

I turned Telepathy into basically a normal every day language that anyone or anything with a functioning brain cell could use reasonably well. So in my series, I have humans, sentient beings and animals using it with a very high degree of efficiency, and I gave humans the ability to put blocks in, so as to keep certain private convos private.

Now the last, Pod Planet, this was a bit tricky to implement. I wanted to give the denizens of the planet an official language that everyone was required to have a working knowledge of (speaking and listening), even if they don't use it, but I also wanted it to be the kind of language that people generally loath when they hear it or use it. So with that being said, the language itself consists of clicks, whistles and grunts. Which I believe, is just about the ugliest combination of sounds you can put together and call it a "language".

Overall, I really do enjoy employing different styles of communication in this particular series. It gives it a lot of real world flavor that would otherwise be missing if I kept everyone to speaking just American English. 

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