Episode #237: I Worship At The Altar Of My Muse

This pic was taken during the second to last vacation (early 2010?) that I had decided to treat myself and the wife to. This glass tower is located at the Indianapolis Children's Museum. This was a suggestion made to me by a long time online friend. Indiana is a cool state, and I would love to get back there again someday.

I am very attached {to the proverbial hip} to my muse. If my muse had a thematic entrance, her music would be Judas Priest's The Electric Eye. My muse can simply give me a look that would make me shrink in fear and grovel at the bottom of her knee high leather boots.

You might be wondering, "G.B., what gives? How can a simple literary muse have such a stranglehold on your entire being?"

It's a bit complicated to explain, but I will give it the old William T. Sherman's March to The Sea try. 

To start, my muse is an amalgamation of the many wonderful women that I have/had the pleasure of crossing paths with in the past 40+ years of living/working the good life. All of these fine people had character/personality traits that I had come to admire, and when I started my blogging/writing journey in 2008, the first thing that I needed was a muse. A muse that contained the traits/qualities that I had most admired/appreciated among the women who had crossed my path. A muse, that most importantly to me, was female.

Now I know that sounds mighty strange, or to quote a former co-worker of mine, "You're weird sir.", but truth be told, I've always felt comfortable writing stories from a woman's perspective, which originally showed itself into having strong women and, to use a crass modern term, soy boys. But as I slowly improved my writing skills, the soy boy characters gradually fell by the wayside, and were replaced by male characters that were incredibly nuanced to the point of normalcy.

With the back story out of the way, we move on to the meat of the post: my muse. My muse has influenced my writing in numerous ways, ranging from having a light touch/influence to using a crowbar to muscle their way in, kick me out of the chair and perform a coup d'etat on my person {in the early years of my blogging, I wrote some nifty free-from blog posts, like this one featuring my muse, that largely involved random acts of humorous violence against myself}. In general, she has been my guiding light to how I write my female characters and story scenes.

She has given me solid advice throughout the years, mostly in the form of research. Whether it's been observational nudges {aka people watching} or delicate questioning of others about certain...things, she has been my literary anchor to all of my endeavors. She has managed to nudge me out of my comfort zone by adding certain real world elements to my stories.

With my current series, she has managed to really show me what she's theoretically made of. No matter what idea I'd managed to come up with, she was able, through the sheer force of her personality, show me how to properly work it in without it coming out like a bad screenplay for a bad...movie.

Note: before my muse found her footing, I wrote really, really bad stories that were more suited as outlines for adult movies.

So, she helped me flesh out the concept of a matriarchal monarchy with a devilish twist; a predominately female protagonists/antagonists story line; clothing and other types of accessorizing; and at least a half dozen other concepts, ranging from pre-modern to modern to futuristic/steampunk. In short, with her traveling the path more congested, thus more varied, she has turned herself into a force to be reckoned with. She has gained my trust so completely that I find myself inserting slivers of her being into some of the characters that I write about.

My muse does not have a name, per se, only descriptive pronouns that actually make sense to normal people. But she has earned my respect just the same, which is why she gets to go on mini-vacations to all of the sunny Oceanic hot spots whenever I take a break to do transcription.

This is the story of my literary muse, a vivacious lady with the attitude to match. We all should have a muse that propels us to do better with our writing, no matter what the gender may be.

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

Episode #236: Cliche-ing My Way To A Brand New Day

I support my public library by purchasing gently used books and music year round. The money they make is used to supplement their annual budget for doing outside activities. The book on the left is about the world's oldest profession in the Old West, while the one on the right is a memoir about a barn owl. Yes, this solidifies the fact that I have eclectic tastes in books.

Continuing on a theme from last week's post, we're going to expand and expound on the concept of cliches. Now I know that most people do not like using cliches, but since they're a {un}necessary evil (like cheapskate owners in your favorite pro sport), it's up to us, the writer, to make them as fresh and palatable as possible. Granted, this is no easy task, but your pal G.B. is gonna try to give you some pointers just the same.

Now, roughly 98.5% of the cliches that I use are like the 4.0 version of the extremely tired cliches that one is usually faced with when writing a story. I say "4.0" because I try to make those loathsome cliches seamlessly fit into a given scene.

A good example is one that I mentioned in my previous post. The overused cliche is, "being thrown under the bus." While technically the meaning of that cliche is to blame someone else for your foul-up, that doesn't mean you should ACTUALLY use it like that in your story. In my particular case, my overall story has a blending of at least five different motifs: modern day; ancient early second millennium peoples (Aztec, Inca, Mayan) with a modern twist; Medieval Europe; pseudo steampunk/modern day/mid-to-late-mid second millennium and religious concept of Hell.

So in order to make it more appropriate for the motif in question (the pseudo steampunk etc), we tweaked it to be, "thrown under a team of draught horses". It still conveys the concept of blaming someone else for your screw-up, but makes it more appropriate for that particular motif. Because, why refer to a bus when your main mode of transportation is equine.

In general, if you need to use a cliche, always tweak it for the time period you're working in. Even if you're creating one from scratch, make sure it fits the motif you're writing in. For me, having multiple motifs to work with forces me to become that much more creative with my cliche usage. My saving grace in deciding whether or not to use/create a cliche, is the vast warehouse of minutia that is contained within my head. This allows me the luxury of performing deep rabbit hole digging without hitting the same vein twice.

And let's not forget another small, but salient point, when it comes to cliches: it doesn't necessarily have to be a longish phrase, like the example above. Instead, it can be something simple as a few words, like "hallowed grounds". Yes, that particularly short phrase can be a cliche, because how many times have you read it as part of a well worn (i.e. timeless) description of a school/college/university?

I thought as much. In my particular case, I was able to use it to describe the dominion of a Sulfur Underground for two different religions. As a personal preference, I've always used that particular phrasing whenever I'm describing Hell for a story. In this particular instance, I wove in the fact that the current overlord of the Sulfur Underground is also someone who has mastered the fine art of diplomacy, thus being able to expand his realm. Thus, we have given new life to another worn out cliche.

For me, a vital component for writing my current story, or any story for that matter, is to creatively rework a tried and true cliche so that it doesn't turn off a potential consumer of my product. Nobody wants to pick up a book and be bombarded with a mixture of fresh and stale writing.

Tune in next week when I explore the topic of creating fictional business entities out of two different parts of a noun: persons and places. Until then, have a fantastic week, and remember to apply the old cliche of "the world indeed does revolve around you", to your day-to-day activities.😎

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

Episode #235: To Trope Is To Cliche, But How To Refresh?

Flashback to circa 2007-2013, when I wasn't so cynical about the world around me, and that a simple flower could brighten my mood in a given moment of time.

Using tropes and cliches in one's writing, whether you're doing it for a story or applying it to the real world, is always an adventure. In general, using them too much can show off a distinct lack of imagination, but using them too little can also show everyone that you're not afraid of being original but are hesitant in judiciously using the aforementioned items to compliment your writings.

In general, people do expect a sliver of tropes and cliches to be used in a story, but they don't want an overabundance of either being used as well. Most newbie-ish writers do struggle with that dilemma, and even established/semi-established writers struggle with it from time to time. So, with using yours truly as the proverbial guinea pig, here's how I managed to freshen up those two particular concepts by changing those square tires to something more circular.

Tropes: I was going to be a bit lighthearted writing about this, but after doing a bit of research {please click on the link for a nice informative article about it} I decided to still be lighthearted about it, but with the plot twist of being serious like a good straight man. So with that being said, off we go in the purple mauve yonder of the sky.

The basic plot of my current project boils down to this: a kidnapping and a retrieval. Simple, basic, and flavorful as a bowl of white rice staring mournfully at a salt shaker. So I got to thinking, what kind of changes can I do in order to make it more palatable to the average reader? I soon started coming up with a bunch of ideas.

1. Kidnapping: well, in the normal sense of the phrase, it's a man takes woman; let's switch it to...a woman takes man. Sounds interesting enough. Let's see if we can tweak it more. What kind of woman would simply kidnap a man? A mercenary! Well, that certainly makes it more interesting, doesn't it?
2. Retrieval: so we've established that a mercenary has kidnapped a man. But who goes after him? His...wife! His wife chases after him. Does sound a bit interesting, right? Lets spice it up by adding...his ex-wife to the mix! So now he has both his current and ex-wife chasing after him. This would definitely pique a reader's curiosity, right?
3. Reason the 1st: Well, we do have to come up with an outstanding reason for kidnapping, right? Certainly can't be something so trite like...money? jealousy? revenge? Well, we did come up with a mercenary kidnapper, so that means...they were hired by someone to do it! Okay, we're making some progress, but who? A...member of a ruling elite from a distant planet! Okay, now we're cooking!
4. Reason the 2nd: Okay, we got a primary reason set, which would certainly pique my curiosity as a reader. But what should be the underlying reason for the main reason? The member of the ruling elite in question is....a Queen! A Queen....who comes up with a plan of an internal coup d'etat that would leave her in power with....a husband at her side!

Now that we've established a juiced up story line, we can start adding all kinds of things to make this a truly memorable story jambalaya.

1. The wife is, unbeknownst to herself, an actual Queen in her own right who has her own retinue (plot twist involved with them later) to help her retrieve her husband;
2. The ex-wife is/was in a previous life, a debtor soul collector for her former enslavers, the Aztecs, just like her ex-husband, who was not enslaved, but did work for the Aztecs.
3. On the other side of the equation, the Queen is actually a half-sister to the man's current wife and hers is a matriarchal monarchy that still has men calling some of the shots and is the one who hired the mercenary to kidnap the man. Plot twist, she wants her half sister to be a co-ruler as well.
4. Among the other assorted seasonings that we added to the delicious pot of jambalaya were things like: modern day sensibilities/lifestyles; various ethnic groups and time periods, a tantalizing hint of steampunk and of course, elements of low fantasy thrown in for thickening.

So all in all, we've managed to take a basic story plot of a kidnapping, possibly gone awry, turned it almost 270 degrees and created something truly unique. Note, there are a finite number of extra tangents/subplots thrown into this story, all of which are connected to either one side or the other, which makes it taste even yummier.

Up next, cliches.

Cliches are basically words and phrases that are used figuratively, and often overused to the detriment of the story. While they're a necessary evil, more often than not, most people do not know how to use them correctly. The end result winds up being a shallow piece of glop that is being slowly starved to death due to a lack of originality.

Enter, yours truly. Way early on in the beginning of my writing journey, I used cliches, mostly sparingly, to help pump up {ha!} my stories. But I quickly discovered that in order to up my game when it came to using them, I needed to tailor them to whatever specific situations cropped up. Believe it or not, this was a really difficult challenge to undertake.

Why? Because almost every scene that I had created, always, ALWAYS, craved a snarky cliche of some kind to bring whatever particular point I wanted to drive home across the finish line. So not only did it require me to be quite judicious in using them, I had to make them very pertinent for the situation they were being inserted for. Let me give you a few examples.

1. "Do I pass the smell test?". This is one of the more traditional cliches that one will see from time to time in stories, as it's a minor variation of "How do I look?". In this particular case, for an answer, I had written a decent variation of the usual answer: "You have crushed it like an unrepentant sinner." Granted, it implies a rather graphic visual, but it gets the job done.
2. The ever popular cliche of "being thrown under the bus" was implied quite a lot throughout this story, which often necessitated the creation of more than a few variations, especially since the type of world that was created straddled both the 18th and 21st century when it came to things like transportation (horses), security (drones) and medical science (geneticists), just to name a few. One of the variations that I had created was "being thrown under a team of draught horses." Again, the visuals are very violent, but horses are the main mode of military/civilian transportation.
3. Another popular cliche that was used in this current story was, "death by a thousand cuts". This, as well as the variation of "death by a thousand paper cuts" were often used to note that someone else was going to die a very slow and maybe painful death. I tweaked it a little and created, "death by a thousand verbal cuts." Very much to the point, as I am quite fond of giving all of my characters a fantastic linguistic repertoire.

These are but a few examples of the many, many cliches that I was, for better or worse, forced to use in my current project. Fortunately for me, I have a fantastic imagination and a great working knowledge of all kinds of minutia that one could possibly need while writing. Especially when I need to create an alternative to a tired cliche (believe me, there are times when you do need to use one) that would fit seamlessly into the story, like the ones previously mentioned.

Imagination and a good working knowledge of the time period(s) of the story you're creating is the key to judiciously using cliches. It's worked for me, only because of the various time periods that I'm dealing with requires a level of attention normally not needed for the average story. It definitely doesn't mean that I like it, because I consciously go out of my way not to create the need for cliches.

*Now if you want to talk about trope-ish scenarios, then yes Houston, we do have a negative trajectory coming up the rear very fast. And that is something that might be covered in a later post, because nipping things in the bud has been an exercise in futility, but I am getting better.

I certainly hope you've enjoyed this little treatise of mine, because as they say, being a happy miser is much better than taking a completely unnecessary trip to some place else.*

*this is what I originally wanted to do for the post, but I was afraid that it would be poached somehow, so this nifty essay is what you got instead.

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

Episode #234: Do You Challenge Yourself Like This?

A question I'd asked on FB to a similar pic taken at the exact same Dollar Tree store (on a serious note: it's my favorite go-to discount store, as it has a better corporate vibe than Dollar General and ten times cleaner, and this store is one of the newer ones with items in the $3 & $5 range too) was "what month is I in?"

Best answer given so far was "Jultober".

Over the course of the past 15+ years of writing, I've always asked myself, as well as my muse, "have I rehabilitated myself?" "have I challenged myself as a writer?". More often than not, I would utter a 70's pop culture meme, before answering "have I?"

Which is a pretty funny thing to say to yourself, but to cereal up for a moment, I like to think I have. For example, back in 2008, I decided to challenge myself by blogging, and 16+ years later, through one active and five archival blogs, I done wrote, not including this one, 2,081 blog posts. Think about that for a hot minute: this means I posted anywhere from one to six blog posts a week since 2008, with only two short vaca breaks in the early 2010s as interruptions. So I guess that can count as a successful challenge.

Let's see....what else have I done as a challenge....oh yes. Back in the day when I was deciding to become a writer (I think 2007 or a bit earlier) I decided that I was going to write EROTICA! and make my living doing that. Even bought a "how-to" book on writing/submitting/publishing erotica. Suffice to say, my early stuff was perfect script material for adult movies, but not for the general public. So, that was an unsuccessful challenge.

I did successfully switch gears to writing adult (18+/21+) fiction, and it's something I've become remarkably comfortable in doing. I also became quite comfortable in writing fantasy, because I found it to be the only genre that allowed me to explore all facets of life, both current and historical, that I wouldn't get raked over the coals for (I mean, can one really be raked over for creating a whole new world, new people and a new language?), so that makes a total of three successful challenges. Oh and completed a side challenge in that my daughter has stated that she will not read any of my current writing. So let's make that a half completion.

Let's see....oh yeah, I challenged myself to write a story in a genre that I normally don't write in. To elaborate, while I enjoy ready all kinds of age appropriate material, that doesn't necessarily mean that I want to actually WRITE age appropriate material. But, the challenge was issued, so I managed to bang out a 100% legitimately age appropriate (MG, aka middle grade I believe) short story entitled Cedar Mountain, which can found in this nifty short story collection called What Is Life?. So let's consider this to be a successful challenge.

Think G.B., think...oh, I challenged myself to get published the traditional way. So a book I was extremely gung-ho in writing (I think it took me six months tops from beginning to end), became the guinea pig to this challenge. In 2012, I was able to have traditionally published The Inner Sibling, under the name Line 21 (lots of issues on my part for its failure to launch, including the initial title). So we considered that to be a successful writing challenge as well.

What, you want one more challenge? Well, this next one is an ongoing challenge with no real end in sight. After my basement gained a couple inches of H2O in 2021, I was able to salvage three nominally completed manuscripts and a partial. After reworking the three completed and publishing one of them: The Mortality of Familial Love, I decide to take a crack at working on the partial. 

By the beginning of 2022, my hands were pretty much shot, as it applied to my keyboarding skills (on a good day, my speed was about 14 +/- wpm). So I made the conscious decision to write the old fashioned way: pen and paper, then transcribe the finished product to the computer. Now this particular manuscript has been extensively covered for the past 2+ years on this blog, but I will say that one side challenge that has been presently successful, is that I've been able to do deeper dives/character explorations while writing the old fashioned way, which has really made me grow as a writer.

So what we have here for a record is 5 1/2 challenges completed and 1 unsuccessfully completed challenge. I think I've done pretty well for myself in regards to challenging myself as a writer. Oh, I just thought of another. In addition to challenging myself to get traditionally published, I also challenged myself to get a short story published, and I succeeded with two, the aforementioned Cedar Mountain and and another entitled Red Stripe, both of which are found in the short story collection mentioned above.

So the corrected record now stands at 6 1/2 to the positive and 1 to the negative. Overall, I think I managed to accomplish quite a bit as a newbie-ish writer. I think I need to find a few more writing challenges for myself. 

Have a fantastic week everyone!

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