Episode #290: It's Been Traveling Like A Car With Four Square Wheels

This is pretty much how last week went: crashing hard after surfing through the dullness of reality.

The picture pretty much sums up the past week that was, in that there wasn't much of newness to it, just a leveling off from the plateau of freshness into the mesa of staleness.

The only thing of note that I was consistently working on, besides finally getting to the last stage of publishing the print version of my novella, which was fraught with serious examples of self-inflicted obtuseness that created extra work that didn't need to happen, was my post fantasy chapter outline/bullet points for my recently completed series.

One of my little quirks that will sometimes raise its fugly head is that I can be extremely....focused on certain peripheral items that are related to the original project that I would be working on. This chapter outline/synopsis is one such item.

This soon to be 150+ page monstrosity allowed me to go into further detail with my note taking, in that allowed me to properly plan out how certain chapters should be rewritten and/or revitalized. For example, some time during the second volume of the series, I decided to refocus on how I wrote chapters. Instead of writing a chapter with competing plotlines between two main characters (that ultimately became three) that would occasionally meet up throughout the series, I decided it would be easier to alternate chapters between each of the main characters.

This made things so much easier for me to handle, as each character would have their own chapter devoted to their particular plot line, plus all of the various tangents within that plotline, with the occasional crossover to the other plotlines, until the final three chapters.

So this is how I've been keeping myself occupied in the morning/afternoon/evening: churning out what I will predict to be 105+ pages of pure, unadulterated, board certified doctor scribble. And I do mean doctor scribble. My printing is bad to begin with, and my note taking has ramped up the scribble to the point of being undecipherable, like a court reporter's note taking.

Like it's now turned into a hybrid mix of printing/cursive handwriting, complete with words that are supposed to be, say seven letters long for example, being chopped down to maybe four, with no vowels and letters that could masquerade for six others (yes, my scribble is just. that. bad.). My scribble is what doctors should aspire to and what pharmacy techs should loudly curse to the bowels of hell over.

So....that's been my basic to-do list for the past couple of months, but up until last week, I was able to do other things around it so that I would break up the monotony of a dreaded, but highly necessary addition to the laborious proper editing of this series.

Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Absolutely....in 2026, after I publish one final re-re-re-write of a previously published novella that I was severely disappointed with mere days after it went live.

Have a fantastic start to your month of September!

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #289: We Be Reviewing & Promoing Local Authors

Today we offer an interesting two spot for books: one for promo and one for reviewing, both by local authors.

Up first, the promo

After many years of writer's angst spread across multiple rewrites (and multiple computers and printers), we have finally published our latest novella To Live Is To Die Young as an e-book through KDP and Books2Read, with the print edition to follow in the first week of September.

It really was very much a labor of love to produce this fast paced urban/city crime fantasy novella, as this is the second of four writing projects that I had decided to work on when I had retired in 2020 (man, coming up on five years now) to be successfully published (first was The Mortality of Familial Love in 2024) and I do hope you find the opportunity to check it out in the near future.

~~~~~

And now, the review.

This author, A Wilson Steele is from Connecticut, and I had the pleasure of running into her at our town's annual Extravaganza as a vendor. I often try to purchase something every year when I visit and this year I have succeeded. 

Ms Steele writes historical mysteries set in the mid 1990's, and she also writes non-fiction books on horses (If I recall correctly, she's involved with a local horse rescue organization). This particular book, called The Trap, is volume one of a mystery series called The Griegg/Eastwood Mysteries.

Here's a snippet of the back cover blurb:

"It's 1995, and American Alana Eastwood's grandfather has fallen ill at his home in Germany. She immediately travels to be by his side. While staying in his home, Alana finds a box that contains family heirlooms and, to her amazement, an unopened letter postmarked Berlin 1945. The letter is addressed to her granduncle, who she believes died in the war. Even so, why was the letter still sealed? Opening the envelope thrusts her into one of the most notable unsolved mysteries of WWII."

I found this book to be very well written and intriguing enough to keep me engaged from cover to cover. I was very impressed by the way she handled both time periods involved: WWII and the 1990's, with an excellent eye for historical detail, especially with the way the entire story revolves around one of the more intriguing and enduring mysteries of WWII.

If you like well-crafted historical or time period mysteries, this introductory volume to the Griegg/Eastwood Mystery series is for you. Available as a paperback, e-book and audio book from Amazon. And you can find her on Facebook as well.

Thank you for stopping by and I do hope you check out not only my latest published work, but this wonderful introductory volume to what seems to be a very good mystery series.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #287: We Be Reviewing Library Books

I've always been an avid reader as far back as I can remember. Not really having many friends as a child/tween/teen/young adult/adult, I would turn to the one thing that gave me comfort: reading. Didn't matter what the material was (start with newspapers and you'll pretty much have an idea on what I liked to read), I devoured it voraciously. Eventually, and probably due to the amount of newspapers that I read, I narrowed down to two polar opposites when it came to favorite reading material: true crime and memoirs/biographies.

I've always enjoyed reading the life story of well known people from all walks of life. I've more than read my fair share of good/bad/fugly bios/memoirs over the preceding decades, but maybe for the past 10+ years I've been more discerning. After reading two good bios that didn't have the participation of the subjects involved (Paul Simon & Robert De Niro), I decided that reading bios that didn't have the participation of the subject involved weren't for me (example, bios of Ringo Starr and John Prine).

I've read good bios/memoirs from an eclectic group of people such as Erik Roberts, R.E.M., John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth), Tom Petty, Freddie Mercury, Sissy Spacek, Dean Butler (Little House on the Prairie) and Steve Boone (Lovin' Spponful). I've also read a few that left me either confused (Michael Neismith) or highly annoyed (Neil Patrick Harris did his as an "choose-your-adventure" book).

This past week at my library, I found this memoir by one of the founding members of The Heartbreakers, Mike Campbell. 

He does an incredibly fantastic deep dive into his friendship with Tom Petty as well as his music career, and leaves no stone unturned nor untossed, either at others or at himself.

One of the events that I was really interested in finding out, was the entire story surrounding the band threatening (not actually) to file bankruptcy in order to get out of a truly bad contract. For those of you who may not listen to regular commercial radio anymore, most jocks would always lead in with the tired tidbit of the band filing for bankruptcy. He gives the entire complex backstory and tells it in such a way that makes you take what little rose colored glasses about the music industry you may have and destroy it to smithereens. Highly, highly recommend this memoir.

~~~~~

True crime was the other go-to genre of mine, now going on 50+ years. After I had gotten tired/over-exposed to books that covered the same 40 people, I started branching out to other sub-genres of true crime to satiate my thirst for true-crime knowledge. Eventually, even those sub-genres weren't doing it for me anymore, so I moved on to getting my fix to other sources that covered crimes that MSM didn't cover. I now listen to podcasts such as The Casual Criminalist (covers true crime from around the world), Park Predators (covers true crime in the US National Park System), Dark Down East (covers true crime in New England) and Small Town Dicks (covers true crime in the smaller areas of the US, as well as Canada and Scotland).

At the age of 60, the only way I now dip my toes into revisiting a historical true crime (e.g. serial killers) event, is if the event is approached from a different angle that hasn't been covered before. I came across two such books in the month of July, one is about serial killer Dean Corll, which was written by a forensic researcher who is trying to identify his remaining unknown victims.

The other is pictured on the left. There have been a lot of books written about the man in question, but this one was written by the daughter of the woman who was childhood friends/co-worker/classmate with his very last victim, and was the one that helped jump-start the investigation that led to his arrest/conviction/execution.

This was quite the poignant read, as it does an extensive deep dive on not only how her mother was affected, but how the entire community was affected by this man. She does a great job of interweaving here mom's teenage years with her young adult/adult years as she revisits her mother's hometown with her.

I highly recommend this book, as there aren't too many true crime books that are written from the p.o.v of the victim's family/friends in such a personal way. Added bonus is that a Netflix documentary was done from the p.o.v of her mother and the last victim's family as well.

I hope to make this a semi-regular feature in the coming weeks, as the bulk of my book reading involves the extensive collection of my local public library, with the remaining sliver involving actual purchases of books from people that I've either met online or have talked to in person (like at a local fair). 

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #286: July Was....Very Interesting

My best bud, Mr Squirrel (I call him "Mr" because he has, somewhat begrudgingly, earned my respect over the past several years) once again chillin' out underneath the bird feeder. He was kind enough to let me take a few photos while I was about to go on my daily walk.

July was a very interesting month for me as it pertained to writing. It was also interesting because I saw, albeit briefly, a well known social media influencer/businessman get absolutely wrecked/cancelled in real time for using a word that is now considered to be "racially insensitive".

In regards to my writing, as I mentioned a few posts ago, trying to release a book in July is an exercise in aggravation (aka the 5 P's.). But the good news is that all of the pieces are about 98% in place, as the only thing that I'm waiting on now is the print cover. Which means that the July release that I really wanted will realistically become an August release.

Now because of the abnormal length of time it took to get everything ready (again, the 5 P's come into play here) I need to stay occupied. Which I attempted to do by writing another novella. As I mentioned previously, I had written a short story that was a perfect ending to a novella/novel, so I decided to write a story that would finish at that short story, albeit in a slightly different form.

We performed a full body dive into the deep end of the pool with this story. Things started off exceptionally well, but soon, it became abundantly clear that my enthusiasm for this story was not going to carry the day like it did with the others. In fact, after that first chapter, my enthusiasm began vanishing until it got to the point where it took me nearly a week to write an eight page chapter.

Long story short, we gathered up all the components (binder with completed chapters and chapters waiting to be transcribed), made a tidy little pile on my writing tray and spent the rest of the evening and the next day giving serious contemplation to moving the entire mess to my "slushle" box.

Later in the evening of the next day, we came to a dual concrete conclusion: I need to restart the beginning and channel my inner sociopath in order to properly do this story justice, and that I needed to switch from being a "pantser" (aka no real conceptual plan for the story) to writing a good basic outline so that I have an above average idea of how I really want the story to unfold.

And finally, I'm on the search for another FB writing group that's a cut above the previous one that I was in. I have a couple via the suggestions of FB algorithms, so I'm going through each group's guidelines to see which one is the better fit for me. To be completely honest with everyone, I'm much too old to deal with various issues/nuances that my previous group seemed to have. Give me concrete guidelines on what I can and cannot do, don't carve out exceptions to the "cannot" guidelines, don't have a plethora of admins (too many admins means poor communication) and you'll have a very happy member who will not rock the boat inside the group.

Remember, the weekend is always the cure to whatever ails you during the week, so make that your ultimate goal.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #283: How To Keep Busy While Publishing

This was taken during my first real long distance hike up Cedar Mountain. The deer was gracious enough to allow two photos to be taken before they made a right turn down the mountainside (as you're facing the photo).

I know the blog post title sounds just a tad redundant, but I made the mistake of trying to publish my book in July, which is the busy season for publishing. The end result to this madness is that timelines are often stretched out, which for people like myself who don't have real deadlines to meet, are sometimes put on the back burner.

So the seriously obvious answer to the question posted above is keep writing. But what should you specifically write to keep yourself occupied? Short stories? I cranked out about ten short stories of various word counts from a low end of 2,500 to a high end of about 12k. How about a novel? I don't quite have the brain capacity for writing another full length novel. What about writing a novella? I might have the brain capacity for that.

But where would I get the germination of a story idea for a novella? That is a toughie, but it was a problem that I was willing to tackle, so to speak. I had one that I had recently put on the back burner this past spring because it was becoming a cluster....bomb of a mess, so I actually thought about taking another look at it. But the idea that I eventually came up to fix it was one that would need some serious brain capacity to work on and that was something I really didn't want to pursue (changing the character focus completely around by making the incidental characters the main focus and the main characters the incidental focus).

So I turned to the short stories that I had previously written, which I had previously talked about here. While nine of the ten stories written were major rewrites that ultimately used the original story as a outline, nine of those stories didn't possess anything that would inspire me to explore further. But that tenth one, it had everything needed to nudge me to take that risk of expanding it.

What did it possess, you may ask?

The short story possessed the ending. I originally rewrote it to emphasize that the assignment that the main character was to carry out was their final chance to actually complete an assignment, or face the ultimate consequence for failing to launch. I'll still have to re-re-write it again to make it fit the setting/aesthetic of the novella, which will be feudal Japan, specifically the Shogunate eras of feudal Japan.

Which if you think about it, is a lot easier to research than it was to research my fantasy series. I mean, one country (Japan) as opposed to four continents and two planets, one of which was due to world building; one time period versus multiple times periods; and finally one ethnicity/culture (Japan) versus six (five original: Mayan, Aztec, Incas, American and English; and one made-up: Pod People).

So after choosing the story that seems to promise a whole lot of prior to that could be successfully written to turn it into a novella of some kind (trust me, I already have, based on the actual content of this story, mentally written the entire outline of how events should unfold leading up to this particular ending, which is something I almost never do), the issue now becomes how much time I can spend mentally/physically working on it while waiting for the creaky wheels of self-publishing to advance back into my personal realm of frivolity.

The main reason as to why I'm waffling about devoting all kinds of time and energy to this novella is once I get the manuscript completely formatted for e-publishing (KDP, e-pub and Word), I'll have to apply the brakes as I need to pass on the specifics for the print version of the cover. And that can easily become a cluster....bomb of titanic proportions if I'm not careful.

So presently, I am following my own advice and have started working on yet another novella while waiting for phase one of my book to come back to me. My only hope is that I can easily pick up the proverbial pieces to the novella and re-start from where I had originally left off at, and not have it turn into something that showed so much early promise, only to flame out faster than a flambe dish at a fancy restaurant.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #282: "To Live Is To Die Young"-The Real Journey Has Begun

My friends, after a very long (3+ years on this particular phase) journey, we have moved onto the very most important journey that a book can undertake: being published.

It took over three weeks (apparently the summer is a popular time period for publishing books) but here is the cover for my upcoming crime fantasy novella To Live Is To Die Young.

To refresh everyone's collective memory, it took me an aggregate total of 3 1/2 hours spread out over three weeks to come up with a title, a tag line, a short blurb, a long blurb and a basic concept for cover.

And to answer one very important question: the cover is multi-racial because the four main characters of the story are as depicted.

It was really weird how everything came together so quickly. Unlike with my previous novella, which took a couple of reader polls and the collective effort of a writing group to come up with the aforementioned items, this was truly a piece of cake. Like if you were called in to work on an issue that you're so familiar with, that with only a cursory glance at the issue, you know exactly what was wrong and fixed it. This novella went exactly like that sample scenario: a cursory glance and everything eventually wrote itself.

~~~~~

The teaser blurb:

Caught in a power struggle between his supplier and a drug kingpin, Jon needs to find a way to keep on living in order to not die young.

The short blurb:

Jon Morris was in a world of physical pain and mental numbness.

Caught in a horrific power struggle with his supplier Bradley Tomas, a raging wannabe who could never be and his morally bankrupt hybrid wife Alexia on one side; and an extremely violent regional drug kingpin Terrence Torquicelli, who had no qualms in collecting body parts to solve fixable issues on the other side, Jon needed a way to fix all three of his problems while staying comfortably alive.

Thing was, could he succeed before the others succeeded with theirs?

The long blurb:

Jon Morris was in a world of physical pain and inner turmoil.

After throwing one of his infamously raunchy house parties, he soon found himself under a vicious attack orchestrated by his drug supplier Bradley Tomas. Once the dust had cleared, Jon had found, much to his annoyance, that his new job was now to be a nanny to Bradley's hybrid wife Alexia.

Alexia, who even in the best of times was a barely passable professional escort of dubious morals, decided to show her extreme displeasure of her husband's choice of nanny by making Jon's life an absolute nightmare.

Which included, among other nasty deeds, ripping off a major drug kingpin.

Jon knew that being held personally responsible for Alexia's shenanigans, meant at the very least, he would be suffering a barely living death. Thing was, could he find Alexia to make things right with the kingpin before the kingpin could make things permanently right on his own terms?

~~~~~

Having sent the cover to my formatter over the July 4th holiday weekend, I think that a realistic date of release would be late July or early August. I'm very happy with the work done on the cover and I can't wait to show it off to the world at large. Sometimes being a light nag with a "I need to get this done" mentality is an endearing quality to have.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #281: Have You Ever Challenged Yourself?

When your brain is emptier than a plastic garden gnome, you know you be in some deep dark dank pit of creative nothingness...

Anywho, today's chop suey special is called "Challenging Yourself", or if you want to tweak a well known movie quote, you can say in the voice of the well known character actor Strother Martin, "Have you ever challenged yourself?"

Specifically, as a writer, did you ever go out of your comfort zone, just to see if you could produce a quality product?

I've gone out of my comfort zone quite a few times over the years. One of the very early instance of me going out of my comfort zone, was to write a clean story.

No, really.

When I first took my writing seriously, I knew right from the get-go that I was going to write adult fiction. While I enjoyed reading clean stories, my warped dark sense of humor and my exploration of adult....topics...in my younger days basically guaranteed that cleanliness in my writing was like men reading Playboy or Penthouse for just the articles: it wasn't going to happen.

But.....one day I decided that I was in a rut and needed to try something completely different to get out of the rut. So during the course of one day (maybe two), I wrote a G-rated short story called "Cedar Mountain". That short story became one of only two short stories that I managed to get published in my career, with this one being in a now defunct e-zine called "Beat To A Pulp". 

Another challenge that I decided to inflict upon myself, was to write a story in the first person/present tense. Now considering that we're all taught almost from day one that we should be writing our stories in 3rd person/past tense, with the occasional foray into 3rd person present tense, writing a complete story in the present tense is usually an exercise in frustration.

I've been known to do bits and pieces of an overall story in the present tense, but except for maybe a viable sliver here and there, I've usually reworked those passages to make them fit better with the overall story. But I had issued myself a challenge, and the challenge was accepted.

And I had just the perfect vehicle to implement my challenge with: a previously published novella that I wasn't too happy about (trust me, there were  A LOT of things not to be happy about). So back in the hey day of that nasty little thingy that made everyone's lives miserable for the first half of the 2020's (including my house), I took that previously written novella and re-wrote it to the present tense.

Definitely were not easy to do, changing everything from the proverbial "I used to be smart." to "I am smart." left it alone for a few years, then tidied it a bit this year, so when all is said and done it will come out as an e-book only. But, the challenge was successfully completed.

Another challenge that I had decided to do early on, and this one pre-dates the previous two listed, was to write a story in the 2nd person viewpoint, which is considered to be one of the hardest view points to write in. I can't really describe it well, but if you click on the link propagated by Google, all will be answered. But just the same, the challenge was accepted.

On the upside, I succeeded in writing two or three one page stories in that particular viewpoint. On the downside, I succeeded in writing, rather badly, two or three one page stories in that particular viewpoint. Also on the downside, there are no surviving paper copies, but one of my old XP or Win7 computers may have a copy or two. Maybe. 

And lastly, there was one final challenge that had multiple parts, of a personal nature, that I decided to accept: write a full blown novel. By full blown, I mean something along of the lines of being a supremely detailed, thoroughly researched, with completely fleshed out characters with just enough sub-plots to keep everyone cohesive without being too overwhelming.

I had actually tried this once before with another fantasy series that ultimately died an inglorious death (that is, I recently unpublished both the print and e-book versions), mostly because I was too much of a keyboard commando, for lack of a better term, to put in the work required to fix it/complete it. But that may change in the future....if I remember what the general plot is/was supposed to be.

Anyways, me accepting this challenge was the perfect nudge that I needed. I was waffling about whether or not I should switch to writing my stories via pen and paper then transcribing to the computer, but after writing about a half dozen chapters by hand for my latest novella and discovering the pros (no major digital distractions or chronic hand fatigue, to name just a few) more than outweighed the cons, I took the plunge.

The rest, as they say, is history, as I completed a five volume fantasy series totaling some 600k words over 122+ chapters, with every single page written by hand before transcribing to the computer, during the 1Q of 2025. Total time spent was almost three years, but it was well worth it. I want to note that I did chronicle this particular journey under the tag Hot Mess, so if you want to check out in greater detail about this fantasy series, by all means check out that tag.

And believe or not, I'm not flying on air, but I have decided to challenge myself once again: this time, taking a recently finished short story and turning it into a novella. And for an added bonus, the short story itself will be the actual ending of the novella. So unlike the fantasy series, in which I had the beginning and a nominal outline for an ending as a non-moving goal post, I have to create an entire beginning and middle to arrive at the completed ending.

I believe that you should always challenge yourself as a writer, because you just never know what you can actually accomplish if you don't actually give it a try.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #280: Is My Inertia That Blatantly Obvious?

This is about the only real selfie that you will see on any of the social media platforms that I use. This was taken between 2004 and 2013, as this was used on my very first blog "Cedar's Mountain" (you can find the link in one of the tabs above this post).

Before I get into the topic at hand, I want to make an observation: does anyone find it how remarkably obtuse some spammers can be when they ignore a caption that states comment moderation is enabled and post just the same? You would think that they would program their bots to ignore blogs/websites that have that policy enacted and just hit the ones that don't moderate. Right?

Back to the topic at hand: Inertia.

For the past month, I've been pretty much stuck in a holding pattern with publishing my upcoming novella. I was becoming so afraid of pulling the trigger (aka severely third guessing myself), so I started doing all kinds of things to avoid pulling that trigger. Things like:

1} Getting the short story bug and writing almost one dozen stories for maybe a short story collection in the future, although one of them is calling out to me saying "expand me to a novella", and I may do just that in the future, as soon as I can figure out how to work in that short story.

2} Beefing up my c.d. collection. I've temporarily stopped purchasing music from Amazon, and not because of some altruistic vibe of shopping locally, but simply because current life events have dictated that my frivolous Amazon spending be directed to non-frivolous Amazon spending.

But I did shop locally, as in I supported my public library by purchasing gently used c.d.'s (most of which were $1). I'm always of the opinion that used c.d.'s are the way to go if you're intrigued about a particular artist, past or present, but not intrigued enough to drop $10-$20 on a new c.d. in order to satiate that need.

3} Beefing up my DVD collection. Most of the DVD's that I've purchased came to my attention directly due to pay-cable t.v (e.g. HBO, Showtime, Encore) going through spurts of overplaying movies for a couple of months to gin up interest before taking them out of rotation (before the advent of streaming, most of the major pay movie channels had over a half dozen offspring that required content)

The movies listed are ones that I did not see first run, but saw on cable, which due to overplaying, got me hooked: Quigley Down Under (cool western featuring Tom Selleck); The Shawshank Redemption; Kung Fu Hustle (The gentleman who did the fight choreography for Crouching Tiger and The Matrix did it for this one); Falling Down (in my opinion, a truly underappreciated Michael Douglas film. Fun fact, it was filmed during the King riots of '92); Major League: Back To The Minors (fun fact, the Buzz are based on the real AAA team, the Salt Lake City Bees); and everyone's favorite spaghetti western: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

And finally, 4} re-re-editing a previously published novella. Or, that was the basic idea. Two years is a long time to go from not appreciating the original rewrite (went from the normal 3rd person/past tense to 1st person present tense) to having serious thoughts of leaving the bulk of it alone and just perform some continuity tweaks.

The short version, I have a previously published novella, A Taste of Pain, that ultimately I was not happy with the end product in a myriad of ways. In short, it should've been published as an e-book exclusive, without all of the fluff at the end (e.g. chapter samples of two other books to pad out the page count), which is one thing I'm giving serious thought to. But in regards to leaving it alone, after sitting down with the intent of re-re-editing it back to a traditional voice*, after tackling the first couple of chapters I came to the sobering thought that this story was flowing pretty good in 1st person/present tense view. Like it was a lot more personal/intense in that particular viewpoint than others.

*3rd person/past tense is usually the traditional method. But let me warn everyone, I've actually written stories in all three voices, because you know, I like to challenge myself.

The good news to all of this, is that the reason for the inertia has fundamentally changed. The original reason of being afraid to pull the trigger (my choice) has been replaced by simply waiting to receive the first version of a book cover. Only when I approve the cover for the e-book will the book formatter be able to start the process on their end. Until then, the inertia remains stuck in the same holding pattern, yet now, it's not by choice.

Contentment is a concept that has numerous paths to explore and no single path is the actual chosen one.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #279: Sometimes Life Feels Like A Venn Diagram

Believe me, this blast from the very distant past (like early 2000s) kind of matches up with my state of being for this past week.

My life currently feels like a Venn Diagram. For those who need a tiny refreshment of minutia on what it is, please click on the offered link. Everyone else, I apologize in advance for bringing up something that horrified normal people in 2024.

To elaborate just a tad, I had a lot of things going on in the past few weeks in which the only common denominator was me. So, with that being said, let's explore this human equivalent of a Venn Diagram with me being the central connecting point to all four circles.

Circle #1: let's say this one features my recently completed fantasy series "Sister vs Sister". Because of the general state of blue funkiness that I was in, I decided to do one last round of pen edits before I really put it away for the next year or so. Going through that five volume monstrosity didn't really do anything to negate the blue funkiness, because afterwards, I really felt just a little bit...lost. Like an actual hardcore empty nest syndrome.

Circle #2: let's say this one features book reading. Normally I try to keep up with my reading by consuming at least two books per month, but lately, my heart really isn't into consuming books, new or used. As I've mentioned previously, I really had to push myself to finish the book, because even though the topic intrigued me, the content was just...meh. Because it was meh, this 240+ page tome really did a number on me, as I was torn between DNF'ing this bad boy and pursuing the sunken cost fallacy to the bitter end. Suffice to say, the latter was chosen.

Circle #3: this one is a toss-up between two writing related options, so.....Jeopardy? And my answer is, writing fresh stuff. I spent the better part of two months writing nearly one dozen short stories as a distraction to actually doing the item in the final circle. Out of those nearly one dozen stories, one of them had ultimately planted the seed of writing yet another novella, featuring the two main characters from that story. So here I sit, mulling over that particular idea. Or rather, that idea gently nudging me saying, "write me, write me...you know you wanna."

And finally, circle #4: my novella, "To Live Is To Die Young". After completing all of the necessary tangents that are required for this novella {e.g. title and blurbs}, I finally pressed the proverbial Pay Now buttons and did just that, to the tune of $450. Yay me!

So we have four properly labeled Venn slightly illogical circles, none of which actually touch/intersect with each other, but do intersect with yours truly. Which if you really think about it, is quite odd. In theory, all four circles should have at least one thing in common with each other besides the main point, which in this particular case, is me.

But...they do not. Unless you count that they were all vehicles for my procrastination, which really doesn't work for me. Absolutely none of them have a common.....wait a minute.....wait a minute....okay, let me stare at the screen for thirty seconds.....

at this point, G.B.'s legendary muse walks up to him and slaps him upside the head like Moe does with Larry, Curly and Shemp. He promptly slides out of his chair, but is immediately caught by his muse and placed back in his chair. She sternly shakes her finger at him before silently walking away with a swagger in her stride.

Dumbfounded, which is a normal state of being at least once a month for him, G.B. suddenly picks back up where he had left off at previously.

Well, I'll be a McDonald's ice cream cone. They do have at least one thing in common with each other: reading! No, really. Think about it for second: circle #1 requires a boatload of reading since editing is being done; circle #2, no-brainer since a book is being consumed; circle #3, needed to do reading because one has to proof their stories to makes sure there's no typos etc.; and finally circle #4, reading was definitely needed while putting together one monster manuscript for the formatter to begin work on (my formatter of choice requires the entire novel/novella to be one entire manuscript, no matter how many pages/chapters it has in order to create the necessary files for KDP/Print/Non-KDP platforms).

Huh...so we had a come to your deity of choice moment while writing this heartfelt lament featuring the almighty (to some) Venn diagram. Which, if you really give it some thought, is about a bogey over on the golf course of life for me. More often than not, I will arrive at a conclusion a few minutes after the train left the platform, only to belatedly realize that making that stop at my local mom & pop coffee house allowed to arrive at that wrong conclusion, thus missing the train.

So now what this post boils down to is to pay closer attention to your surroundings, because while you're focused on the beauty of the blossom in your hand, you're completely ignoring the vulture standing on the arm of the cacti who is counting down the minutes to when his dinner will be served al dente.

Having good eats is not the same as being good eats. Paying attention to finding a common denominator to the multi-tasking that you're performing can only breed success in the long run. But definitely pursue finding that common denominator early, otherwise the end result will be something like this:

"A blog post that started with good intentions, but stumbled so badly out of the starting gate that it has no choice but to flail its arms in a cartoonist manner while running like Woodstock flies."

Happy Monday to one and all, and to those who are parents, whether dual or single, I sincerely hope you had a very good Father's Day.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #277: Breaking Through That 4th...Wall?

Definitely a blast from the past. We have a well known local farm that (usually) has a produce stand every summer. I haven't seen cows out in the pasture in a very long time, but seriously, how often have you seen cows smack dab in the middle of surburbia?

Last week {May 19th-24th}, I was severely procrastinating working on my latest novella by performing some pen editing to almost a dozen short stories, when I happened upon a particular paragraph that basically broke, if not severely crack, the proverbial fourth wall.

To refresh everyone's foggy Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday morning brain, breaking the fourth wall is when an actor breaks character and steps out of scene to talk to the audience about that particular scene. This is commonly done in movies and t.v. shows, usually with great success, but rarely has it been done in books (at least that I know of. I'm sure I'll be corrected on this point).

The story in question was one that I had to substantially rewrite as the original story was, to a major degree, quite blase. The re-write though, was something else though. As soon as I put fingers to keyboard (this was one of the last few stories that I wrote directly on the computer) something came over me. Whether it was due to the topic of choice, petty revenge, or something else, I suddenly channeled the smarmy/sassy/insufferable side of my personality and wrote like a man possessed.

To be honest, this was one of my better written short stories that featured a lot of tropes that usually populates my adult novels, but toned down to PG-13. But you didn't come here to listen to me brag about my writing. You came here to read about my opinion on breaking that fourth wall. Here is the paragraph in question.

What happens next has been pieced together from both first hand accounts and video that was taken by Dennis during the entire date, thus the narrative voice that is yours truly. What? Do you actually think I was there for all the behind the scenes stuff that’s been going on from the get go? Get real. This is a story that requires you to suspend your disbelief for a brief snippet in time, while yours truly the writer, weaves a fantastic tale of cosmetic karma for your enjoyment.

This stepping out actually takes place near the very end of the story, where the petty revenge is about to unfold in all of its exquisite glory. The entire story was written with a strong narrative voice along with the traditional p.o.v. Additionally, it does have a bit of the first person viewpoint sprinkled throughout.

Personally, I would consider this paragraph to be just the dipping of the toes in a small pond when it comes to something like this. I normally don't see something like this in a lot of the fiction that I read, so I am curious if this is something that is frequently done, or if it's something that is rarely done, simply because there are so many different ways to write/tell a story that breaking the fourth wall simply isn't a thing.

I do enjoy when actors break the fourth wall in movies and television, because I believe it makes the product that more enjoyable to watch.

So let me know of your honest opinion about breaking the fourth wall. Do you try to do it with your writing, or do you believe it's better suited for the stage, the big and little screen.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #276: I Don't Really Want To Know...

You know your week has gone from the frying pan into a mud puddle when you can't even come up with a decent backstory for the picture that graces your blog post.

How bad has my week been?

Well....it has taken me about a week and a half to determine, with the help of my ISP, that my Chromebook has a bad hardware problem with the network. Which means that the EOL has come one year earlier than expected.

Ultimately, we persevered, as by the time this post has hit your feed (either RSS or Facebook), we will have our new computer up and running (EOL date is about this time in 2032).

With that being said, the reality of this post is that there's no real topic to opine about beyond the computer issues mentioned previously. The one silver lining (or bronze lining depending on what your opinion is of Alphabet Inc.) is that none of what I have is tied to Windows, which means that in a pinch I can access what I got via my smartphone.

Having redundantly restated my previous statement, I think the best thing I can do right now, is to link up to an old blog post from one of my archival blogs. I got at least five to play with, four if you disregard the adult oriented blog, with a blog post count in the excess of 1,200.

So please peruse this short post from one my old blog's called Father Nature's Corner, which was active in the early 2010's. The topic of choice is how/where I purchase my music from. A couple of things that you should be made aware that are contained in this nearly nine year old post.

1. The link for the blog "I Are Writer" does not exist. At one point I had a Tumblr blog to post my musings, which lasted less than a year before I decided to nuke that blog to infinity and beyond.
2. I'm pretty sure that this post was written in between a couple of retail apocalypses, so there are references to retail stores that have sadly gone to retail heaven.
3. My c.d. count from that post has grown by 25% since 2016.

Beyond those three notes, please enjoy that short post on my musical tastes and hopefully by next Monday, I should be back to my old self.

I sincerely hope that your past week has gone much better than my past week and I also hope that your current week is going lights-out fantastic.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #274: A Fugly Tale Of Two Novellas

Pretty sure I posted another version of this photo in late 2024, but I still think it's a cool pic. I mean, when a cat casually appears in the street to survey you, and only you, it makes you feel...special.

It's been a really slow week here in Connecticut, which usually means we're going to blog about something writing related. This time our writing related topic, like the title suggests, is about two novellas, one published and one hoping to be published, and the two radically different paths that were trodden to get where they currently are today.

Let's start at the beginning with the comparison. They were both born during a rather fertile creativity period of the very early 2010's, in which I was churning out all kinds of slop for stories as well as for my blog (I think I was doing maybe three to four blog posts a week at that point). They were both poorly written but they were near and dear to my heart, which of course meant at the time they were ready to be published.

This is where their dual journey took a major diversion at the proverbial fork in the road, with the published book going left and the unpublished one going right.

The published book caused me a whole lot of stress and a whole lot of money. Because I was simply oozing with confidence, I decided to hire a now ex-Facebook friend in 2014 who was a freelance writer and editor, to edit my book. About two to three weeks later and $300 poorer, I had a nicely edited novella and a three to four page critique on what needed to be fixed on it. I read the critique, studied the editing notes that were written on the manuscript....and promptly shelved the entire thing because I was too chicken to actually knuckle down and fix it.

Fast forward to the wonderful world of Covid-19. We're happily retired and got to work on a number of projects, including this novella. Once I had fixed all of the issues and got it to where it was ready to be published, I promptly ran head first into a two-bay garage door.

It took me a total of ten years and an online poll to come up with a plausible title for the novella. I've always had issues creating a title for my stories, and this novella was no exception. The next problem that popped up was writing a long blurb, a short blurb and a tag for the novella. This also took about a month to write both, which included some substantial help from my Facebook writing group to hammer out two rough drafts of the long blurb before nailing it on the third. Had the same issue with the short blurb and the tag, multiple drafts before nailing each.

So overall, the published book caused me a ton of stress because I had a wickedly hard time trying to write 150 +/- word long synopsis, an 80 to 100 word short synopsis and a 20 +/- word tag for a novella that I had a moderately difficult time, due to the complexity of the plot, in deciding what the story was actually about.

Now we move on to the unpublished novella.

The unpublished novella was also similar to the published novella, which also included a complex plot and a fast pace. But that's where the similarities end, as even though it had a complex plot line, the underlying event/reason (drug turf war) was very simple to understand and work with. We performed at least four rounds of editing, both in Gdoc and Word (the formatter I use works in Word as a starting point for everything else) and in that process became overly familiar with the entire novella cover-to-cover.

Because of this over-familiarity with my story, everything else associated with it became the polar opposite of what was done for the published novella. In a span of three days totaling one hour, I had a 159 word long blurb that I was happy with. It took me twenty minutes to write a 91 word short blurb, and another twenty-five minutes to create a title. Because of the difficulty I had in trying to come up with a cover concept on the fly the first time around, I sat down and spent an hour re-reading the novella and taking notes about what I want for a cover. In fact, the only thing that I have left to do for this novella before I move on to the next phase of publishing, is to come up with a proper tag.

So we have a tale of two novellas, both of which took over a dozen years to come to fruition, but took divergent paths to reach the proverbial golden ring. One fed directly into my stress/anxiety of writing blurbs, a story title and a vision for a book cover; the other ignored my stress/anxiety and instead gently stroked my ego and self-esteem to the point where I was able to complete all but one of my goals in rapid succession.

A question that I would have for you: does your stress/aggravation level ebb and flow when it comes to writing the blurbs/tags, creating a cover concept or even coming up with a title with every book that you complete? Or do you find it to be the same no matter what kind of book you write?

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #273: From A Young Foot Patrol To An Old Foot Patrol

Gotta love the duck, for they only have three modes of transportation and doesn't give three quacks over which one to use at a given moment in time.

This past week has made me realize that I've come full circle with my modes of transportation.

To elaborate: after 16 years spent acquiring 132k+ very hard miles, it decided to throw a tantrum and drop its transmission. Under normal circumstances, I would simply say "adieu" and go through the aggravating/time consuming process of acquiring another dependable car.

Here's the thing though: after spending a solid month thinking about it, I decided to get another car for myself and keep this car as a proverbial back up/second car. Which means biting the bullet and having this one one brought back to working order (if you take about 6% of the aforementioned mileage, you will have a basic idea on how much this repair is going to cost me).

Which brings us to the topic at hand.

When we were young, foot patrol was our main method of transportation until we got our bicycle. That became our main mode (with obvious exceptions) until we acquired our first motorized vehicle. As we got older, foot patrol became a dependable/necessary back up when motorized transportation wasn't available. Sure, we would grumble about it, but we dealt with it to the best of our abilities.

Spending a week (actually 10 days) without a car made me realize how fortunate I am that reverting to foot patrol to run certain errands doesn't bother me as much as maybe five years ago. Five years ago, it was a major pain in the butt not to have access to other motorized transportation when my primary mode isn't available. I didn't have access to a bicycle anymore (safety concerns then and now) and walking was a pain in the butt to run my errands.*

*note: I live in the northern end of town where it's a forty minute walk to the center to run certain errands and an hour walk to the next town to run certain others.

Fast forward to now. Now walking is much easier for me to deal with, because less weight makes faster walking with less pain. So the majority of my time sans car was spent walking to run at least one of my night errands earlier in the afternoon. I did have access to a car to run a few important errands, but overall, I found I wasn't really inconvenienced by being on foot patrol.

I actually found the experience quite enjoyable, and to be honest, this past Friday (5/2), having to run two key errands, banking and lottery, was actually a snap to perform. It took me 2 1/2 hours to execute a large circular trip to the center (bank), then back towards home (not really) to the package store to run the second part of my errand, then finally back to home.

What helped me a lot was taking two viable shortcuts that saved me about 1 1/2 hours of extra walking time. Seven years worth of hardcore walking allowed me to plot out the shortest distance between two points on numerous occasions, and this walk was no exception. Think about it, if a normal walk to a particular destination took you close to forty-five minutes and you found a route that covered the exact same distance in thirty minutes, would you not take it?

I'm not sure if my new ambivalent attitude about walking has something to do with being a semi-Luddite when it came to technology as an adult. I'm a child of the 70's/80's, so the Internet wasn't a thing for me until the advent of Google in the 90's. I definitely was a half dozen steps behind when it came to both cell phones and smart phones, so being glued to my phone isn't as severe as other people have it. As for computers, no real exposure until I started working for the government in the late 90's.

In any event, I believe when you get older, it's possible to not be so concerned about transportation issues when you have a lot of time on your hands, and no real immediate need to actually do something with that excess time. As the old saying goes, work smarter, not harder. Or in my case, prior planning prevents poor performance.

How about you, do you find yourself not really worried/concerned when your normal mode of transportation has decided to take a short holiday and you have to improvise?

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #269: Random Writer-esque Musings

Spring is in the air, even in places where you didn't think anything could grow beyond wood chips, branches and leftover tree remnants.

How to write a swerve for a blog post: 1} start writing on a subject that you're extremely passionate about; 2} complete three complex paragraphs, including a disclaimer, before going off to run some errands; 3} realize that you've touched upon that topic a couple of months ago AND that in order to put a new twist on the topic you would have to go up to and straddle that line between keeping and blowing up your social circle; so 4} you need to come up with something that straddles the road between acceptance and offensiveness.

Which brings us to this particular post, which we hope will side-straddle that bridle path quite nicely. 

I recently put an upcoming novella on the back burner while I get my finances straightened out (thanks USPS for doing such a bang up job with delivering my mail :/s). The odd thing about this novella compared to the one that I had released last year, was that creating the title, the long blurb, the short blurb and a basic outline for a cover, took me an accumulative total of ninety minutes to complete.

So with an excessive amount of time on my hands, I started working on another short story collection. To date I have eight full stories written. The main challenge for me was not coming up with an original story to write (anyone can do that), but taking a story that had a born on date somewhere in the painful growing years my writing life and reworking it using the vastly improved skill set of 2025 to make it palatable to the masses. Not an easy exercise.

As we began work on story #9 that had a born on date going back to the mid 2000's (yes, I started writing during GWB II), my mind started wandering around to what I had already published and what I could do with them*. After studying the small piles of books that I had, I zeroed in on my two very short short story collections and my failed attempt at writing a series. 

*I should note that in mid-March I received an e-mail from Amazon about marketing my books and I was, and still am, giving it some serious thought. Hence the renewed focus of my published books.

The failed attempt at writing a series was easily solvable: unpublishing. I may get back to it someday, but I think at this point I've lost the basic plot of the entire series, and I just don't have the motivation to find it and continue (I do have a completed second volume that needs a ton of re-editing and a partially completed third).

The two short story collections, however, have presented me with another problem, but one with a potential solution. The main problem with the collections is that some of the added bonus stories/information contained within I'm no longer happy with, so the solution I came up with is to combine the two current e-books into one book carrying seven stories and tidy it up til it shines. Now I do want to keep the old print versions available, but I'm not sure if the Amazon overlords will allow it. I did post the question to the KDP Community forum, so I'm just waiting for it to be approved by the mods so that the community can offer me some sound advice. I should note that I have no problem in creating a new print version, but if I can avoid spending money unnecessarily, more power to me.

However, I am hedging my bets just the same, since with certain businesses (like a respectable self-publishing platform) I have a tendency to be overly-polite to the point of being a toady. So even if I get the answer I'm looking for, I may still start over from the beginning just to ease my conscience. It's funny, or ironic, that the amount of passiveness we display towards a digital company is often tied to how deeply we're enmeshed with that particular digital company (e.g. Apple & Google).

So this is where we stand with our writing: 1} came back to writing short stories like a man returning to a partner who has him wrapped around their dainty little finger with a silver bow; 2} decided to spruce up a couple of books by re-editing and re-releasing; 3} unpublishing a book that really should've never been published in the first place; and 4} getting all of my drakes bowing down to the ones who wear the pants so that I can drop a little under $500 to publish my novella.

I leave you with this very worthwhile link to the eternally optimistic Bob of Sponge whose Pants are Squared, to start off your Monday.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #267: It's An Extremely Casual Road To Nowhere

Spring is really, really, really trying to make an appearance on the mountain this month. Let's give this little guy three cheers and a GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!!!!!*

*for those of you who do not know, this word is now a worldwide sports meme, both audio and video.

Have you even sit down in front of your computer, open up your brain after opening up a freshly blank document and start pounding away on a story idea/blog post that sounded "oh-so-promising",  produce maybe five paragraphs, then realize it wasn't such a hot idea after all, so you nuke that mess and start all over again from scratch?

Glad to know that I'm not the only one with a slushie-brain in a tidy world.

Anyways, I wanted to give a writing update this week, but consider how few "hits" I get from people to visit, as opposed to my non-writing related blog posts (averaging about 36 hits per week), I wanted to spice things up by bringing back my Abnormal Reviews reviewers Ted & Bob, to liven things up. Alas, I had no such luck, as per the opening paragraph, it was a downhill ride to the cesspool of nonsense, thus we decided to flush it away.

So here we are, a little flummoxed on how best to give a writing update w/o people yawning until they cry. But since we have that can-do attitude of stubbornness, we're going to give it our best shot. To begin at the beginning, we have our recently completed novella, now called "To Live Is To Die Young".

Unlike last year, when it literally took a village over the course of two months in order to come up with a title, long blurb, short blurb and even a cover design for my novella The Mortality of Familial Love, this year, for my upcoming novella, it literally took me a total of seventy-five minutes, spread out over three days, to come up with a title {pen, paper, and nailed it on the ninth try}, a long blurb {fourth draft was the keeper} and a basic outline for a cover design. It's currently on the back burner due to budgetary constraints and the lack of a short blurb.

And since I needed to stay occupied in some particular way, we decided to work on a short story collection. I have three short stories {two original and one re-edit from a blog posting} already in the can, so it took me but twenty minutes to go through all of the short stories from my defunct short story blog and find a half dozen suitable specimens that I can rewrite. I also decided to write one fresh story featuring my wonderful literary muse, who was finally given a proper name and in this story, was elevated to be an upper-crust member of society.

The fun thing about this story, in addition to being low-fantasy, is that it's sprinkled quite liberally with concepts from my recently completed five volume fantasy series {e.g. telepathy, intraspace travel and sentients/empaths}, and most importantly, the story is basically writing itself. Like I'm just the conduit for the main character {my literary muse} as well as the supporting cast. It's only been about one calendar week, as of the date of this post, and I have the equivalent of 13 typewritten pages hammered out.

So this is my, what I hope to be, a lighthearted writing update. I say 'lighthearted', because I don't think I've had a long period of time where a short story simply flowed out of my pen to paper, nor did getting three of the four major items needed to publish a book completed with relative ease.

I like things to be easy in my writing life. Makes me feel like I can actually complete something without getting aggravated.

A very happy Monday to one and all.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #266: I......Am Hooked On A Name!

Flashback to the early 2010's, when my Holly was the absolute chillest cat you ever laid eyes on.

Back in mid-October 2024, I wrote a post that touched upon naming throwaway characters. It was a fascinating read to be sure, as I tried to dig a little deeper into my reasoning behind using certain names for my throwaways.

Today I decided to revisit that particular post in order to make another attempt at understanding why I like to use certain names repeatedly.

I think this is something that all writers go through from time to time, in that they become overly attached to a particular name, male or female, and decide to use an ungodly amount of time. If you really think about it, repeatedly using a particular name can be considered trope-like behavior.

Let's use me as a good example of trope behavior without really recognizing that I was doing it until a number of years had passed.

Way early on, I became quite enamored with the name Nikia. I first heard it used in the movie "Kill Bill, Vol 1", and I thought it was quite the badass name, even if it was attached to a young tween. So I started using it for a lot of my early stories whenever my lead female character was a badass. Ultimately it took me until the mid 2010's to pull the plug on using the name, as by that point it was going to be part and parcel of five stories (two novellas and a failed trilogy), and I was becoming quite sick of using it.

That 'sickness' eventually worked itself away, as I started using other types of names for my badass female characters (some involving a twist to the dark original name, e.g. Machiavelli). But it didn't really work for my male characters, as you will soon see.

The only reason that I fell in love with the name Melvin, is because of its versatility. Not as a character that would make a great protagonist, but as a character that would make a great antagonist. What immediately springs to mind when you hear the name Melvin? Annoyance? Disdain? Loathing?

Melvin is one of those names that you can say with any type of emotion and chances are, a character will be born out of that emotion. Think I'm kidding? Let me show you a few examples.

1} In my currently unpublished five volume fantasy series "Sister vs Sister", Melvin is portrayed as a loathsome, misogynistic piece of human excrement who is looking to take over the world (no, really). So in this particular instance, when I'm speaking/reading the name Melvin, I'm instantly disgusted/turned off by the mere utterance of his name. In other words, his name leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

2} Let's take a modest step back to the novella that I'm looking to publish this year, "To Live Is To Die Young". In this particular instance, Melvin is written as one of those fringe members of a society that really doesn't care about him. He comes off as an intolerable nuisance with barely any redeeming qualities. This time, when I'm reading/speaking his name, I want to severely mock him for being such a useless member of society, so in my head, my pronunciation of his name is one octave lower on the first three letters and one octave higher on the last three.

3) Let's take one more step back to a short story that I'm editing/reformatting for another small novella that I decided to work on while putting the aforementioned novella on the back-burner for a small moment in time. In this particular instance, Melvin is the name of the narrator of the story. He is written as someone who is both respected and loathed in equal amounts in a given friend group. In other words, when I read/speak his name, I want to treat him as someone who is the necessary evil that you need to keep your disparate friend group coagulating on a daily/weekly basis. In other words, I say his name with a healthy mix of disdain and tolerance.

So as you can see from these examples, the name Melvin can be molded/manipulated to any kind of character that you want to create, simply by uttering his name with whatever type of emotion you want to inject the name with. To be honest, it's starting to look like the name Melvin is going to be the literary equivalent of a character actor who becomes part of a movie/t.v. star's acting crew (e.g. John Wayne had a set number of character actor friends who appeared in his movies from the 30's through the 60's).

If I need an antagonist of some kind, whether minor/mid-level/semi-major, Melvin is going to be my go-to character name to fulfill that particular role. So my question to you is this: do you have a particular name, male or female, that in your eyes is versatile enough to appear in a good percentage of your stories in some particular way?

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #265: It's Never Simple!

Harbinger of what we hope will be a pleasant Spring 2025.

The title of this week's blog post was a favorite saying of a wonderful old supervisor of mine back when I was a newbie state employee in the late 90's. She would often utter this phrase whenever she came across a particularly annoying government rule that was explicitly designed to make something 10 times more difficult to complete than it needed to be.

I found myself thinking about that particular phrase when I was trying to come up with something to write about this week {fun fact: this year marks my 17th consecutive year as a blogger, having started in 2008}, and after pondering about during a Saturday evening nap, I realize that blogging is painfully similar to writing a novel.

Point A: Trying to come up with a topic (blog) or an idea for a story (writing). Both have a gestation period, but a blog's, due to circumstances, is the equivalent of the lifespan of a house fly; while a story idea's gestation period is the equivalent of the lifespan of a fruit fly.

Point B: Fleshing out a blog post to the exact point where it can keep a reader engaged is a tricky endeavor, since if you make it too long, people will step out and not finish reading it. Make it too short and people will get the idea that you write clickbait; while fleshing out a story idea is an easier endeavor, in that the only limit you have is your preferred production type (e.g. short story, flash, novella).

Point C: Engaging the reader. A blog post, above all else, must engage the reader in a topic that they would want to know more of, in some particular way. Make it too esoteric, and you'll attract a minuscule fraction of the actual audience you want; on the other hand, a story idea often has a built in audience to begin with, and it often boils down on how you wish to expand and expound upon said idea in order to keep that built in audience engaged.

Point D: Offensiveness. Obviously, you have to tread a very fine line of a hair follicle when it comes to writing a blog post, with the main reason being is that you run the very real risk of alienating part of your audience if you write about a hot-button issue (politics for example) in specific terms rather than general terms (national politics vs local/state); a story idea is the complete opposite, in that while you may alienate some with the way you expand/expound on your story idea, the bulk of your audience with not be alienated.

Point E: Well, I don't really think there's a fifth point to be had, as I basically covered the four main differences between blogging and writing. 

However, in summation, it's never simple when it comes to blogging, because if you make a direct comparison to writing, blogging has way more rules that you have to perpetually navigate on a (in my case) weekly basis, whereas when it comes to story writing, the only rules that you have to navigate are those in your chosen length and genre. 

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #264: Deep Down We All Have 2 Brains

This is what I would imagine myself to be after spending a day trying to understand why myself decided to usurp myself.

I am a typical guy when it comes to my health, in that it does not matter what happens to us, we do our best interpretation of the Black Knight before continuing on with our day.

Unless we get a cold, then we don't act like a typical guy. Instead, we simply brush it off and continue with our day in good old Black Knight fashion. But sometimes, every once in a while, things go a tiny bit sideways. When that happens, our second brain kicks in and takes over.

Think I'm kidding? Well, here's the deal: we all have a Big Brain* that we use to govern every part of our existence. Living, breathing, eating, relaxing, etc. etc. etc. It's used extensively and for the most part, what we say goes. But there are times when our body finally says, "ENOUGH!", and decides to do something about decision making process.

This is where the Not-So-Big-Brain comes into play. "How?", you may ask. Well, it's pretty simple really. Because I'm always a good malleable subject when it comes to exploring certain harebrained theories, we'll use me, because, unlike others in the world today, I don't suffer from phantom maladies, but I do suffer from a good sense of humor.

Now, everyone's Not-So-Big-Brain is located deep inside their Big Brain, and is only accessible by the Body, and no one else. Not you or I, nor the Big Brain, just the Body. So, getting back to me.

Like I stated earlier, I'm one of those guys who can be quite stubborn about their health, and this past week was no exception. In spite of the increasing pain in my lower extremity, I did my normal walking and ran my normal errands, and ignored all of the warning signs that my body was telling me. Well, my body finally said, "ENOUGH!", whipped out the Not-So-Big-Brain, and took over.

They decided that I should be punished for my ignorance by increasing the pain in my lower extremity to the point where I actually had to go to see my doctor before my scheduled appointment to have it taken care of. The immediate aftermath of this was that I am not allowed to do any long distance walking for at least a couple of weeks.

If you think that's no big deal, think again. I am one of those people who simply cannot sit on my buttocks whenever I want to listen to any kind of audio medium (e.g. podcasts, c.d., radio, sports, YT). I actually have to be doing SOMETHING. Doesn't matter what that something is, I need to do it if I want to have a fulfilling audio life.

So, not being able to get my 3+ miles of daily walking in while methodically listening to 27+ podcast feeds/5+ YouTube channels that specialize in pop culture content, bothers me to no end. Makes my body happier than a foodie creating sugary masterpieces in the kitchen, knowing that they're in the driver's seat because the weather has just started to turn for the better here in Connecticut, and that makes them cackle with glee.

And there really isn't thing one I can do about, because we all know that when our body wants to do something proper, like healing from an illness, and we don't, it's going to make damn sure that we suffer the consequences of our own blithering idiocy.

So my friends, always remember that if you and your Big Brain don't listen to your body from time to time, your body is gonna whip out that Not-So-Big-Brain and make you suffer the consequences of not paying attention. Just like me.**

*: "Big Brain" is a phrase that well known YouTuber Simon Whistler, who hosts almost one dozen channels and at least three that double as podcasts, is very fond of using, mostly as a gentle insult to himself and others.

**: I had developed a nasty foot ailment that I'd ignored for the past three months until the pain got to be unbearable. End result, ailment fixed but now forbidden from hardcore walking for at least two weeks. So now I'm substituting crosswords puzzles during the same two time frames for walking, in order not to fall too far behind with my podcasts subscriptions.

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