Episode #344: And Your Archetype Is....?

I was taking a moderately long break during my morning walk, as my legs can no longer keep up with the stamina that I actually have these days, when I decided to take this pic. Even though it's early September, it's still summer in New England.

Many years ago I used to participate in a monthly blog hop sponsored by a writing group called The Insecure Writer's Support Group, and in their monthly newsletter, they would often have a question that you could use during the blog hop.

The suggested question for the month of September I found intriguing enough to actually use it for one of my blog posts. The question that everyone was given is this:

"Do you have a favorite character archetype that you tend to gravitate towards in your writing?"

Now this is something I actually had to look up, because I did not have a clue on what a 'character archetype' was. After a modicum of research, I now have a basic understanding of what one is.

I would have to say that the one I gravitate the most to, is one that Hollywood has been brutally  mutilating for the better part of two decades: the girl boss.

You've undoubtedly seen the Hollywood version: the woman who can do everything, solve everything, control everything, treat people, like men, as insignificant dolts who can't do anything without a woman to hold their hand and guide them along, etc.

Because virtually all of my stories are female-centric, I can say with complete confidence that my female main characters and even the secondary characters, are written in the true 'girl boss' archetype.

While they do ooze that 'girl boss' persona, they are quite confident in their ability to lead, to delegate, and to even ask for help. They are quite compassionate to friends and family, and can be merciless to their enemies. Most importantly, they know their limitations.

My actual 'girl boss' characters will never be mistaken for the Hollywood version of the Mary Sue 'girl bosses'. because we all know that imperfection makes a character resonate more deeply than the shallow that is seemingly forced upon us on a monthly basis.

I believe the 'girl boss' archetype will always be part and parcel of whatever type of story I choose to writer (this was epically showcased in my currently unpublished fantasy series). My stories have been female-centric from the very beginning of my career, and using this particular archetype correctly is something that I will always enjoy writing about.

Thank you for stopping by today and spending a couple of minutes out of your busy day to read my blog. And remember, "no," is the world's shortest sentence, no matter what language you speak. And quite often, the most difficult to understand.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #342: The Sputtering By-Product Of Wood Pulp: Newspapers

Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you. This was taken in mid August at my local Dollar Tree store. I won't even show you what I found the next aisle just yet, but you can probably guess on the first try.

For those of you who may not know anything about my previous employer beyond the fact that I am a retired govt employee, my very first job with he state of Connecticut was helping prepare old CT newspapers for microfilming (preservation).

Short info dump: back in the late 80's/early 90's, CT, along with dozens of other states, received grant money from the feds to catalog/microfilm old local newspapers from the 18th through the 20th century.

History lesson: during that extended time period, local newspapers is where you really got the nitty gritty of local town life, both the good, the bad and the fugly (any true crime podcast with integrity will often use local media sources for the bulk of their research).

Back then, local newspapers were, more often than not, the purveyor of good solid journalism. If you wanted a good take on a particular event that was maybe covered in a regional paper with a short paragraph, local was the way to go.

Unfortunately, by the late 1980's/early 1990's, all of that good journalism slowly made its way to the sewer system, as consolidation started taking place and it was not for the better. Just like today, where less than six companies control AM/FM radio and the podcast world nationwide, back then you had a lot of companies scoop up and purchase small town weeklies to make 'money' and to promote uniformity.

One of the most egregiously crass companies (in my opinion) that help accelerate the trend of "all the news that you will read will be printed", was a media company called The Journal Register Company. Apparently, they thought that dominating the market would bring them credibility.

Problem was, they went about it in such as horrendously bad way, that they made everyone else that you would have a low opinion of, look good.

Lets use my home state of Connecticut as an example of what this company did to the majority of the weeklies (and a couple of dailies) that they ultimately acquired.

Prior to being bought out by JRC (now 21st Century Media), the average weekly in Connecticut was between 48-72 pages and cost about 75 cents to $1 per issue (this was in the 1990s). Each one was unique to the community they served.

After being bought by JRC, the following changes were made:

1. the page count was slashed to 16 +/- pages with a 25%/75% ratio of print to ads (larger percentage to ads), plus a 50% price increase.
2. the masthead was changed to conform to a particular corporate standard. In other words, no individuality that would make the paper unique to the town.
3. what little news was published wasn't really local, but more regional than anything else.

We had a wonderful weekly in my town, but the corporate mandate gutted the newspaper so thoroughly that they turned it into a free weekly mass mailed before they quietly discontinued the title.

Now if I want local news that's fit to read, my fix is divided between a classified weekly that gets mailed out to a tri-town area that features 6-10 pages of local town news; and a monthly magazine that has local and syndicated news (mostly all purpose like home improvement, medicine, etc), with spotlights on various residents and businesses.

My state is simply a large sample of what this company did to the media properties that they had acquired. I believe this uniformity, plus other corporate malfeasance, led to the downfall of this company, and ultimately led it to being acquired and rebranded.

This kind of crappy corporate behavior, in my opinion, is a majority contributing factor to why the American media is on such a downward spiral to irrelevance. You don't treat subscribers as a commodity that can be bought and sold, and express shock (SHOCK, I SAY!) when people go elsewhere for their news.

This kind of bull fritters is why I stopped being a newspaper consumer going on now for two decades, and instead get my news fix elsewhere, where I can get more bang for my dollar.

Have a fantastic week, and remember, newsprint is a fantastic way to waste your money that could be better used on that Dunkin' Donuts mocha latte with a shot of espresso.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #341: Eighteen Years? Eighteen Years! Eighteen Years.

Memory Monday: Back when my life had structure, but no real meaning, we would take pics of random happenings at work. For example, this fine outstanding example of an unhealthy work lunch. Except the apple. Even now I still have a piece of fruit with my lunch.

Imagine if you will, it's 2008, and on the advice of your cyber friends, you decide to start a blog. And you call it Cedar's Mountain, based on the mountain you live across from. And you're happy as a pig slopping away in their sty, because you found a place where you can write to your heart's content.

You first start off with a punishing pace of two blog posts a day, every other day. Six months of burnout convinces you to drop your output to once a day every other day. You maintain that pace for a number of years and all is good.

Gradually though, the spark that kept you going starts to dim, so initially you change your posting output to revive that spark; then when that stopped working, you create another blog for your writing output. That seems to do the trick, and with that spark revived, you decide to create a picture blog, which was soon followed by an adult-oriented blog and a short story blog.

But like before, that spark starts to fade a little, so again you tweak the amount of weekly posting that you perform and life becomes good.

~~~~

Imagine if you will, it's 2026, and surprisingly to the people that know you, you're still blogging. Your output is down to one post per week, but you're still feeling good. Then one day, while you're posting a link to Meta, because Meta long ago dropped a feature that allowed you to submit your RSS feed and have it automatically update to your friend's news-feeds, a though suddenly appears in your frontal lobes. You peruse it and it asks a question: how many blog posts did you write?

Curiosity piqued, I meander through all seven blogs that I have created in the past 18 years {tabs above give a brief synopsis for four of them}:

Cedar's Mountain

Books By G.B. Miller

Pictures For Smarties

Flashing Georgie's Shorts

It's Always Saturday In Suburbia

Father Nature's Corner

I Have Stories!

And counted up all of the posts that I had written for all seven of those blogs. After seeing the finals total on my calculator, my jaw dropped, figuratively speaking.

2,017 blog posts in 18 years. Or, if you're a number obsessed weird stats nerd like I am, this averages out to 112.05 posts per year, or 252.125 posts per blog.

While both of these stats sound amazing on paper, you have to remember the slanted reality: I started with six to eight posts per week in 2008, and by 2026 I was down to one post per week. In a specific example, from December 2018 thru early August 2026, I produced a total of 358 posts just for the blog you're currently reading. And my book blog only has one actual post {but lots of tabs} after I had done a clean-up/overhaul of that blog's content.

Still, 2,017 posts is nothing to sneeze at. At the bare minimum, it shows how much I've pivoted over those 18 years when it came to finding topics to write about. From work to my writing, from music to books, humor to general observations, and everything else that you can reasonably think off, became fodder {in a good way} for six of my seven blogs.

In a weird parallel universe, my blogs became a text version about nothing. The only common thread throughout those eighteen years of merriment was me, myself, and I.

Truth be told, even though my blogging is a serious extension of me as a person and as a writer, and I do enjoy blogging as a creative outlet, I'm not quite sure how long I should continue doing this. Eighteen years is a long time, and in fact, those years spent blogging is almost half the time I've spent being married {currently sitting at 37 years, almost as long as most federal politicians have been in office}.

But, in the very old children's song goes, I will have to continue putting one foot in front of another, and see where this blogging journey of mine takes me.

Who knows, maybe someday it will earn me an all expense paid trip to Butte, Montana!

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #336: We Be Booking It To Our Bookshelf {1}

I found myself at my local library's used media store the other day, debating on what type of media I should purchase to add to my growing movie and c.d. collection, and I wasn't what one could say, having any luck. The pickings were quite slime in the DVD selections, and I wasn't really interested in the new age/modern country/classical that were currently populating the music section.

So I turned my attention to the possibility of beefing up my stagnant book collection. I say "stagnant" because my last dozen selections were striking out at a torrid pace that would match my New York Mets.*

*As of the day of this post, the Mets are fifteen games under five hundred, deep in the bowels of the NL East basement. So....yeah.

So my wandering eye starts wandering around the book section to see if anything that not only could catch my fancy, but it would be a topic I would actually be curious about. My eye eventually did settle on a book that caught my fancy, but the topic itself was one that I've either read about or listened to enough times to not pique my curiosity.

Now, I don't know if you do something similar, but when I come across as person/event that has been overcooked to a charcoaled goodness, I have a tendency not to sample that charcoaled goodness, no matter how tempting it may seem to be.

Let me give you a few examples. I listen to a fantastic true crime podcast called Small Town Dicks. Hosted by Yeardley Smith (The Simpsons), it covers criminal cases that are off the proverbial beaten path. I highly recommend it.

This year, they ran a three part episode on the OKC Bombing as told by one of the lead investigators. Sounds interesting, but I heard/read enough about the bombing to last me a lifetime. This summer they're running a ten part series on the Golden State Killer, as told by one of the co-hosts who helped track him down. Again, it's sure to be really good, but that particular crime wasn't my cup of tea to begin with.

So back to our potential back selection:

The book was about Buffalo Bill & His Wild West Show. Nothing really remarkable there, as I've read a lot about Buffalo Bill. However, upon closer examination, the full title was something that I did not know much about.

"Buffalo Bill's British Wild West"

I knew he toured internationally with his show, but this was the first book that I've come across that covered part of his international tour, which in this case covered the years of 1887-1904 in the UK. Naturally I was quite intrigued, to the point where I decided to open my wallet and gladly pay the $3 price tag.

I perused through a few pages, just to see what I was getting myself into, and the other thing that caught my attention, was that the book was 100% made in the UK. From the publishing press to the copyright info, the personal bio to the price tag and everything in between, it was all British. It was also a second edition too.

Upon closer examination, I could see that this was a well researched book. So this was going to be a pleasure to read, since as of late my non-fiction used book reads have been a major bust (like Brian Bosworth realm of football busts). About the only fault I could find with it was the size of the font, which is too small*. But as they say, it's a me problem.

*Imagine a 240+ page book in the font size equivalent of this entire note, that's what I mean by 'too small'.

In general, it takes a lot to pique my curiosity about a well covered event or person in time. It takes even more to actually have me revisit a well covered topic due to a different approach being used. See this post about doing just that with a well known criminal event.

In summation, this book piqued my curiosity to the point where I was happy to purchase this book to help my local public library fund vast extracurricular activities for the town and beyond.

Have a fantastic Monday and safe and slightly sane week.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #332: Let's Get Commercialized!

Tuesday morning, June 16th 2026, my wife stepped outside on the back porch deck and snapped this photo of two juvenile bears snacking on my bird feeders in my front yard. I'm pretty sure that mama bear was somewhere nearby in the woods.

Suffice to say, after this 2nd visitation in the span of one calendar month, has caused the following things to happen: my neighbor from across the street is now upset with me for bringing bears into the neighborhood (note, we've had an uptick in bear sightings in my town this year) and I had to relocate my bird-feeders to the (fenced in) backyard, where the bears (hopefully) will not get to them.

Commercials are the bane of our digital existence. Love them or loathe them, you can never truly get away from them, no matter what platform you use.

Television? While there are some good ones, most offer the stimulant needed for channel surfing. Gaming apps? 100% unavoidable, and they're one of the few platforms that can hold you hostage until they're done showing. YouTube? There are infomercials that you can definitely skip, but the six to fifteen second commercials are the master class of memorable advertising.

I know this because I'm one of those frugal souls who epitomizes the old "beggars can't be choosers" axiom, because I don't want to drop around $12.99 per month for ad free videos. Yes, I'm on YouTube nearly six total hours per day, but I'm not going to spend money unwisely.

There are times where I automatically skip the fifteen second commercials, simply because the product doesn't interest me (cancer meds, anyone?), but there are times where I'm intrigued enough to watch the entire fifteen second ad (and the occasional thirty second ad/movie trailer), even though I will never use the product/see the movie.

Let me give you a good example of memorable advertising. Apartment-dot-com has a memorable set of six second ads featuring Jeff Goldblum stating if you advertise on the website, you will have people crawling out of the woodwork to look at your property. Those people who come crawling out of the woodwork, so far include:

1. someone masquerading as a raincoat hanging on the corner of a door;
2. someone appearing primed for action after one of the closet beds springs open;
3. someone masquerading as a standalone bathroom sink.

Jarring? Absolutely. Effectively getting your attention? Absolutely. Is it getting extra eyeballs to the website? Probably.

It's funny how people's viewing habits have changed over the decades. Back in the day, you had people regularly glued to various t.v. and cable t.v. channels, so you could (mostly) justify spending your hard earned money on fifteen to thirty second commercials.

But now, with viewership so incredibly splintered digitally (regular t.v., streaming platforms and even YouTube), you have to go where people are now congregating. On the upside, on digital platforms, your advertising dollars can be stretched a little further than normal. On the downside, you have to make damn sure that your six to fifteen second commercial is memorable enough not to be ignored/skipped by those eyeballs you're trying to lasso in.

And I mean memorable in a good way. Raising Cain has new six second commercials that make absolutely no sense: a guy yelling at an employee for telling them to "eat it"; a well known gardening company featuring Martha Stewart pouring a bag of potted soil into a large pot while saying, "I'm a dirt nerd." Like, what?

The only reason why I remember these two examples, as well as countless others, is that they were exactly six seconds in length, so you had no choice but to watch them. At my age (61) and viewing habits (no television/streaming platforms beyond YouTube since 2019), this is what my short attention span can handle now.

And that's a good thing, because advertisers are coming to the ugly realization that the average consumer has the attention span of a gnat, so they got exactly six-to-seven seconds to get their point across in a way that sticks with them days/weeks/months from now.

I just wish that the professional sports would learn that lesson, especially when you have a 40 minute MLB pregame show, which is at most seventeen minutes that's actually related to the fame, with the remaining time related to advertising.

Have a fantastic Monday or whatever day you happen to be reading this on.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #331: What I've Learned From Writing "Sister vs Sister"

Mr Crow and Mr & Mrs Blue Jay having a three birdseed martini business meeting.

Lost. Empty. Sad.

Great descriptors that are used for when something bad happens to you on a personal level. Head scratching when those same descriptors (or their synonym siblings) are used to describe you as a writer.

I know that sounds like an odd thing to say about a writer, but bare with me, and hopefully it will all make sense in the end.

I'm not sure if anyone has experienced those feelings mentioned at the top of the post, but this is entirely new and uncharted territory for me. Even when I was going through the various stages with my first novel, I never had those types of feelings about it. But with this series, I did.

I'm not completely sure as to why I'm feeling this way about my series, but I will try to make an educated guess as to why. In total, from original gestation to applying the first round of edits, I spent around sixteen years "working" on this excellent series.

But if we go back to where I decided to turn the original dreck of a novella into this outstanding fantasy series, then we've been working on this series virtually non-stop from May 30, 2022 until June 11, 2026, eight days beyond four full years.

Now I quickly became enamored of this series, so much to the point where I did not write this series like others who would write a series: piecemeal. What I mean by "piecemeal" is that they may get the first one or two written, then stretch out however remaining volumes there were to be for "x" number of months/years.

I wrote mine in one fell swoop: all five volumes actually took me almost three years to write. I won't go into great detail about how much of a challenge this was (e.g. titles, page counts, chapters, word counts) other than to say that I actually resolved those issues listed during the editing process.

Being enamored of the series gradually changed to treating the characters in my story like they were close family members. I became quite invested in their backgrounds, their present lives, even what they were going through/experiencing. It became especially hard when I had decided to kill off two of my protags.

This was a decision that I had struggled mightily with. I'll save the details for a future post, but suffice to say, almost two years after I'd written that particular arc, which naturally altered the course of the story, still affected me in a particular fashion.

As I made my way through the final three chapters, which I had to expand our to six due to excessive word count, I found myself not wanting to complete the task I assigned to myself. This was directly due to the fact that I was now having an extremely hard time of letting go.

I felt like that finishing this story meant that I had to say 'goodbye' to a group of characters that felt more like family than characters, and I wasn't ready to say goodbye. And as you read at the beginning, I fired myself to finish up and say, 'goodbye.'

If you don't believe that old axiom that characters write the story while you're along for the ride, I can truthfully dispel you of that misguided belief. My characters ultimately took over writing my story, and for that I am eternally appreciative.

Have a fantastic week and while you're at it, thank those characters of yours for making you a better writer.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #330: Being Fresh In A World Of Inadvertent Redundancies

A classic overview from the early 2000s, before the Democrats decided to run the capitol into the ground by allowing the tail (criminals) to wag the dog (the law abiding citizens).

Eighteen years of blogging can often bring unintended consequences into the mix. What do I mean by 'consequences'? In this particular scenario, eighteen years of blogging created nearly 1,800 total posts, give or take, which can, and does, lead to the issue of being redundant from time to time.

For example, while I was performing another round of edits on book #5 (even though I was doing computer edits on #4, I was still doing edits on the next book), I came up with the brilliant idea of writing about world building for a blog post. The next day, I remembered that I had covered this topic quite extensively in a series of posts nearly two years ago, so writing about it now would be a tad redundant (If you're curious, search the Jan-Feb 2024 posts called "How We Go Here From There").

With that particular topic now scratched off the list, we pivoted to the topic of how I enjoyed writing in the fantasy genre. Specifically, how the fantasy genre really has no rules on what you can and can't write about and how there's no given formula for a successful book (unlike Romance, which there's one strict guideline you must adhere to). But like the previous topic mentioned, we wrote about this extensively in a previous year.

Thus, we pivot to searching for another topic to write about, and then searching our memory archives to see if our potential topic(s) have been touched upon previously. And guess what, we found a topic that we hadn't touched upon in any great detail previously.

I am an anomaly in the word of writing, in that my political viewpoints can be described by the seldom used descriptor as 'centrist', and by the modern descriptor as 'moderate'. Now, I wasn't always like this, because back in the day, I was heavily influenced by family political leanings.

My father was a conservative Democrat, who was moderately involved in town politics and union politics (then as now, you needed to be a Democrat), and in my younger years (70s & early 80s) I had the impression that Democrats were good and Republicans were bad, so at 18, I was a registered Democrat.

Fast forward a decade: by 1992, I was soured on the Democrat party on the state level (then as now, my state has been solidly controlled by the Democrats going on 45 years), so I switched over to being a registered Republican. The original hash tag of 'Walk Away' could apply here, and I've never looked back.

Fast forward to now.

In 2026, my viewpoints have gradually changed about certain things/ideas, while on other issues have remained the same, because unlike everyone under the age of 35, I have quite a bit of historical knowledge of those issues.

Having said that, it saddens me that other writers, who I used to respect, have permanently derailed/deplatform themselves from the reality of what the average person is forced to go through on a daily basis.

These people (I do have derogatory name for them, but I keep it on YouTube and Meta), have allowed themselves to be influenced by the MSM's visceral hatred of President Trump to such an extent that you simply cannot have any kind of adult conversation with them, w/o them taking leave of their senses.

So basically in 2026, I practice the concept of simply scrolling on by whatever comments my FB friends make about certain events, because everyone has the right to post what they truly believe in. I can respect that, so I simply don't engage because I believe it isn't right to argue an opposing viewpoint on someone's personal page with someone else.

As I said, I am an anomaly among my writer friend's/acquaintances, because my political viewpoints are centrist in nature and based in reality. And in today's world, the majority's reality is often trampled by the vocal minority's unrealistic reality of feelings don't care about facts.

And that makes me truly indifferent to the perceived problem that an annoying segment of the populace 'suffers' through on an hourly/daily basis.

Have a Happy rest of your week, and remember, step outside and smell the asphalt, because it's certainly a lot better than inhaling stale air, moldy food and UV rays from your computer screens for hours/days on end.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #329: What Hath The Vinyl Gods Brought Unto Me?

As I've mentioned previously, I have a relatively large music collection, divided between out of date media (cassettes); stubborn media that doesn't believe they're out of date (c.d.s) and media that has been in and out of date more times than a coffee drinkers daily intake (45s & LPs mostly).

This week's post is about that pesky runt of the bunch, a runt where original copies stopped being produced by the conglomos by 1992: 45s.

My 45 collection isn't what you would call huge, unless you think having nearly 1,000 units covering nearly a bakers dozen worth of genres huge.

However, my 45 collection came about in roughly the same way that my L.P. collection grew: 20% of actual money being spent, and 80% being offered said items after having a version of the following conversation:

Strange friend/acquaintance/family member: "Hey G.B.! I found this box of 45's left on the side of the road. Do you want them?"

Me: "Sure."

I should note that this did actually happen. My brother was taking one of my children to a b'day party, and he found a box of 45s by the side of the round that someone was throwing out.

Now the main reason why the percentage of 45s purchased is so ridiculously low, boils down to a strange facet about me. A fact that you've probably never came across in your entire life: I never really listened to music in a way that most people did while growing up. Sure I listened to it on the radio (mostly AM Radio), but I never actually went out to buy the music I was listening to. For me, music was something more akin to pleasant background noise than anything else.

I didn't actually start acquiring that particular media until I was in my late 20's, and ever since I been making a good dent into making up for lost time. Especially after I started working for the state in the mid 1990s, and I had co-workers who exposed me to other genres than what I grew up listening to.

I would now like to present to y ou a few samples from my collection. Please excuse the minor water damage on the covers, for they were caught in the minor basement flooding of 2021.

~~~~~~

1} Boxed set of The Carpenters.

This one is a little weird, in that I actually read the liner notes on the box for this post (I know, slap my hand with a ruler). It's a tribute to The Carpenters that originally came out in 1994 (reissued as a CD in 2011, now out of print in that format, but available as a download). Because this came out in 1994, it features such eclectic artists as: Sonic Youth, 4 Non-Blondes, Mathew Sweet and Grant Lee Buffalo, just to name a few. All performers who put their spin on the classic Carpenter music.

~~~~~~

2} Boxed set of Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite #1.

I have a treasure trove of boxed classical sets, some were pressed in the regular black vinyl, others like this one, were pressed in color vinyl. Back in the late 50's/early 60's, color vinyl was a thing that companies would use to make their product stand out (ex. I have a polka 45 that is pressed in green vinyl). RCA Victor was no exception, as back then I think their only major rock act they had was Elvis, with everyone else being in the classical/easy listening/popular* music genres.

*Back then, 'popular music' referred to what we call "The Standards" today, that every ye oldies musician sings trying to stay relevant (e.g. Rod Stewart).

Speaking of popular music of the 50's/early 60's, we have the following EP collection.

~~~~~~

3} Jackie Gleason presents.

This music was the type you would often hear in the background of "serious" movies of that era. These were pieces that were "conducted" by Jackie Gleason, after he had "chosen" theme as per his "musical tastes".

Now the sarcasm peppered in that previous paragraph, is directly due to me taking the liner notes with a mega dose of skepticism. Knowing what I've learned about the entertainment business over the decades, especially for that era, I'm leaning towards his image/name being used in order to sell more records, and thus, just like how it's done in ye modern times (image/name is everything these days).

Anyways, these are just a sample of the type of 45's I have sitting in my collection: a majority of original music sprinkled with a few reissues. with the majority being acquired via the simple method mentioned at the beginning. I will say I do find them to be a fascinating history/look at musical tastes and company products/logos.

Have a smashing Monday and sparkling week.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #326: The Family Bookcase {6}: Dictionaries

I caught my parakeet in an unguarded moment the other day. I usually see them using their swing at night when I'm about to cover them up, so when I was going about making my lunch and saw them, I took a few pics. The clipped curtain is so that they can peek through the window to see the outside word.

Way back in the day, when computers were either a nifty concept or something reserved for the academic word and the Internet existed in the windmills of the minds of those same academics, we had these various times called "dictionaries" and "thesauruses", that we would use when we were doing various projects that required a degree of brain cells usage that simply isn't done today.

These times often came in various sizes and lengths, depending on your personal situation. You had bulky desk top sizes that naturally stayed on your desk, small pocket sizes that you could take with you or throw into your desk, and finally, you had mid-size versions that you could either throw in your desk or stand on your desk.

For some bizarre reason, our family bookcase has between one-half and one dozen types of dictionaries (usually Websters) from various decades. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. I know a couple of them were mine: a pocket version and a regular version of Webster dictionaries. I think I even had a pocket version of Rogets at one point.

Anyways, both items were great to have back in the day. Just like the Yellow Pages, you would let your fingers do the walking, especially if you were hard at work writing a letter or some business correspondence, or even if you were playing a board game or a crossword puzzle.

(pauses for a very long moment as something in his brain loudly snaps, crackles and pops into the forefront of his cranial cavity)

~~~~~~

(and now, he's back, just like a tired rock band from the 80s who doesn't know when to retire)

You know when you get that feeling about a particular idea, and you become excited and gung-ho and you're just itching to act on it, and you dive in head first with gusto? And you frenetically pound away on your keyboard with enough energy to wake up an elderly senator from a blue state?

And suddenly, you crash and burn like someone who's been up for 36 hours straight, as that idea says, "nope, I am out of here, good luck to you," and you're left wondering how did I get here?

Well,. how did we get here?

We got here, as I had eloquently explained in a 93 word word salad that starts with "you know..." and ends with "get here?", or for those who have a terminal case of short attention span, we can sum it up in four distinct part harmonies. Quotated.

1. We have idea. We must act on idea.
2. We are acting on idea. We are smart.
3. Idea suddenly runs to the hills like a coward.
4. Words dry up.

Basically, what I thought was a good idea at the beginning, like I wrote it on a blog post to-do list good idea, turned out to be what Daffy Duck would often brag about, mediocre.

So we wound up using memorable snippets from the following people/items to save the post, in no particular order of importance.

1. Senators from a majority of Blue states (like mine) qualified for social security some twenty years ago.
2. A popular meme/GIF of someone exponentially destroying their keyboard.
3. King of the Hill.
4. Talking Heads.
5. Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant"-1st version.
6. Star Trek: TNG.
7. Daffy Duck cartoons.

Okay, the last one everyone could figure out because I stated directly where I was quoting from. In any event, we managed to complete a Tiny Tim dash to the end zone with this blog post. It certainly wasn't pretty, it certainly wasn't neat, but it got the job done.

A Happy Monday to one and all, and remember, The Happy Monday's was a popular true alternative music rock band.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #325: "Sister vs Sister"--- Where Are We? Now!

I finally bit the bullet a few weeks ago (late April) and purchased a couple of shepherds hooks and planted them in the side yard where squirrels cannot reasonably jump to and on. Oddly enough, I seem to be getting a different variety of birds with the bird feeders being so close to the mountain.

By the time you're reading this post, I am now working on book #4 of the "Sister vs Sister" fantasy series. I recently completed the first round of editing book #3, and I decided to celebrate my singular achievement by providing the odd statistical* writing update.

*I've always had a thing about finding oddball stats on whatever project that I happen to be performing at the time when the bug bites. And no, this is not a recent phenomenon, as I've been doing it all of my life.

I really do enjoy coming up with oddball stats for my projects and unlike the last one I had done a few years ago that had an emphasis on the actually for this series, this one will not be as labor intensive.

Starting with book #1: the actual editing time frame was January 13th through February 4, 2026, a span of about three and a half weeks. Now there were quite a few things that I did prior to that original start date that would allow me to utilize a new game plan that I had decided on way back in 2022.

Like supplies. Because I wanted to do the entire process correctly, I had purchased 5 1 1/2" D-style three ring binders (with a 375 page capacity based on the same science that says you can get 115 loads of laundry out of 1.17 gallon jug of liquid detergent), and a brand new storage container to hold the original 1st draft, warts and all; I created nearly 1 1/2 dozen initial posts for my FB author's page, as I wanted to turn it into a mini blog by chronicling this journey; and most importantly, an actual title for the book.

Now three and a half weeks to edit a one hundred ninety page novel does sound like an excessive amount of time, but if you factor in things like: living in the real world, and juggling two other writing projects (blog posts and Facebook posts) on top of the editing and the editing process itself, then that three and a half weeks looks a little different.

Between book #1 and book #2, I had a three day grace period, which was unevenly divided between needing time to recalibrate, choosing a title for the and reconfirming that #2 was going to be a slog, as I had some continuity issues that needed to be fixed.

Oh and, unless you're on a deadline because this is your 24/7/365 job, being methodical absolutely does with the race.

Book #2 definitely lived up to initial declaration of being a slog, as this two hundred forty-nine page tome toke me from February 7th through March 5, 2026 to complete. Nearly a month was spent methodically picking through line-by-line-by-paragraph tightening and fixing continuity issues, some of which were quite glaring.

I will not that the amount of words excised were more than doubled from book #1, and I believe that was due to the fact that my prose was becoming a little more purplish.

The break time between #23 and #3 increased to four days, which was mostly spent trying to come up with a title, with the remaining in time spent preparing myself to tackle a book that was at least 41% longer than the previous volume. The primary reason for this was that everything was about to come to head, when the multiple storylines were going to converge before heading back out on a parallel journey to the end.

Book #3 exceeded the limits that book #2 had previously established. The nearly three hundred forty-five page monstrosity took me from March 9th to April 23, 2026. Nearly a month and a half of not only y picking through line-by-line and paragraph-by-paragraph, but also making sure that the decision I made earlier by the killing off of two main characters and the subsequent aftermath unfolded in the way that I had intended. 

Oh and, what I had stated previously that manufacturer's are overly optimistic about their claims for capacity absolutely came true, as I had to purchase a 1" D-style three ring binder to fit the last 9 chapters of book #3.

In general, this volume was a tough edit, as it left me a little drained and a little sad. When you spend nearly two years that spans three volumes (so far), heavily invested in your characters, there's a certain level of pain when you have to remove a few of them.

I'm not quite sure how long the break will be between book #4 and book #5, but I'm pretty sure I'll be spending the bulk of that time coming up with a title for book #5 that will accurately hint or imply what the final volume is all about.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #324: How To Respectfully Write A Hot Button Topic {2}

A classic waterfall pic from the 2010s to brighten up your Monday.

Welcome back my friends, to the blogger that doesn't ends (18 years and counting). Last week's post featured an in depth look at how I chose to make the Aztec culture/society a medium sized part of my story with two of my characters.

This week's post will touch upon Heaven, Hell, Limbo & Purgatory and how they were integrated into the story in various capacities.

For starters, I chose to turn that group of three into a hybrid business corporation/recruitment complex. Again, I was always fascinated by the "what ifs" scenarios that are often explored in other mediums, like literature and celluloid. So I took inspiration from that Albert Brooks movie, and created my own version of those four.

I created Limbo to be a universal clearing house for the other three conglomos. A recruitment center if you will, or to be more specific, a family run recruitment center, where your soul goes to be judges on where you should be moved onto next.

I called the overlord of this vast realm, Lord Visigoth, because reading/listening about early worlds history confined me that thew Visigoth's were bad-asses, and what would be more interesting than a proverbial badass who had a family that he deeply loved and cherished.

In addition to the overlord of Limbo being an empathetic badass, I added a healthy dose of realism to his family: his wife is deceased and appears as a semi-solid apparition. I never hinted at precisely what the illness was that caused her death, and I would like to think that her death influenced the humanity in Lord Visigoth.

I wrote Lord Visigoth as a complex man. One who, even though is physically is a man's man (muscular, tall etc); is quite self-conscious about his looks; has a lifelong friendship with one of the character's mother, yet never flaunts it or crosses the personal boundaries that his family has; is awkwardly trying to stretch his emotional experience beyond any synonym for the word "angry".

In addition to Limbo being a clearing house for the recently deceased, as all religions might have. I also touch upon the very real concept of reincarnation. Some religion's tenets have reincarnation as a theme, and since I had created a a whole other species/culture called "sentients" that are deeply involved, so it was a no-brainer to show how one might become a sentient.

Another oddity in this story, is that Limbo isn't actually mentioned outright. It is called "The Realm" once or twice, but otherwise, it's either implied or inferred depending on a given situation.

I think that, overall, I wanted Limbo to be as nuanced entity that everyone could understand and appreciated. By "nuanced" I mean it's a blend between a conglomo and a proverbial mom & pop store, in that everyone should be treated with dignity and compassion, and not as a particular unit to be shuffled around.

So in a nutshell, this is my personal take on Limbo. I always felt that Limbo as an entity always fell somewhere in between what Hollywood portrays and what the various world religion's portray it to be.

Strangely enough, this is the only concept of the afterlife in which I feel this way. I'm not quite sure how definite my feelings are for the remaining three concepts that I'd mentioned in the beginning, but that is something I should definitely explore in the future.

Happy Monday to one and all.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #323: How To Respectfully Write A Hot Button Topic {1}

We all need a little flashback to our childhood when life was a little magical and whole lot innocent.

As long as I could remember, I was always ambivalent about religion. I do believe there is a higher power of some kind, and I do believe in the concepts of Heaven, Hell, Limbo and Purgatory.

But I was always inquisitive about those concepts, to the point where I would often search out books and articles, both hard copy and digital, about those very concepts. I think I spent the better part of a decade researching those concepts until my curiosity was (mostly) satiated.

Fast forward to the tail end of the '00s. I watched an old movie that basically changed the way I viewed concepts and cultures as it applied to my writing. The movie in question was Defending Your Life, starring Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep, who plays a man defending his life in the AfterLife so that he can be reincarnated.

That movie inspired me to re-imagine how I wrote about certain concepts and cultures: basically, I turned them into small conglomos/business entities.

While I made a good solid attempt at turning the few religious concepts mentioned above into conglomos that were deeply intertwined with each other in a novel that ultimately fizzled, I spent the next decade or so refining and adjusting that particular concept into something that once could consider to be commonplace.

Fast forward to 2022.

I'm two years into a happy retirement and I'm starting the fourth of five writing projects that I had originally set up for myself in the spring of 2021: this fantasy series.

I had decided early on in the story that I was going to turn the Aztecs into a modern day crime family , thus they have their fingers/hands in all kinds of illegal pies. And just like a modern day crime family , they are judge, jury and executioner, all of which ties in perfectly with their real world application of human sacrifices.

The other modern day reality: during my belated research, I was not able to definitively ascertain what the Aztec's cultural views were on homosexuality, either through the real world or their mythology. So I decided to have them implement the infamous (in some quarters) "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of the US military in the 1990s. I won't bore you with the gruesome details of the policy, but I did apply a vicious little twist to the policy that would satisfy even the most ardent opponent of the policy.

The olden day reality: Now if you take into account, and you really should, because if you know anything about common sense, you should never apply today's often warped societal mores. So because we are dealing with a world where certain customs were just done until modern times, we decided that although the Aztecs did believe in the concept of marriage, they did not believe in the concept of divorce. But they did believe in a concept called 'unmarriage', which I would venture to guess (which is odd, because...yeah) it would be similar to what an annulment is.

Another olden day reality that I touch upon is slavery. For those of you who believe that slavery was just a White European Thing, then you deserve the ridicule for how you voted in the last three presidential elections. Slavery was a worldwide multi-millennia hardcore economic realty (and in some places, still exists). Slavery is what the victors do to the vanquished after war/reading parties.

This is also touched upon in a very realistic way, as I drew upon my knowledge of world history and U.S. history, in order to create a very real background for one of my main characters. Which is something I'm very proud of because if you're going to write about a particular culture, you need to showcase everything, warts and all.

Thus ends part one of this two part post. Tune in next week when we cover how I chose to work in the concepts of Hell, Purgatory and Limbo into my fantasy series.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode # 321: The Family Bookcase {5}: Encyclopedias

Items that you can buy with bubble gum comics: bobbleheads!

If you're somewhere in the general vicinity of my age (60 1/2), you didn't grow up with the Internet to use for research purposes; you grew up with ye olde fashioned public library, which contained among other research items, encyclopedias.

Or perhaps, your house may have contained a semi-up-to-date set of the (usually) Encyclopedia Britannica, or some other quality encyclopedia set.

If perhaps you're a member of the younger generation, your definition of "encyclopedia" is probably just an actual encyclopedia, but more to the point of having it attached to a pop culture item.

Today's post is going to focus on both types of encyclopedias: those that have now turned into a search engine as Google, Bing, FireFox and Opera; and those which are connected to the genre of pop culture along with all of its sub-genres.

Regular encyclopedias:

While I no longer have that original set of Encyclopedia of Britannica from my childhood, I do have a 2,500+ page monstrosity called The Columbia Encyclopedia. Yes it was published by Columbia University, and yes it is one volume. (about 4 1/2 inches thick, cover-to-cover), and it was published in 1969.

Here are some examples of some long articles you can find. I should note that the font size in this book is around 4-5. For comparison, newspapers is around 8. To confirm, open any blank document and drop the font size to the aforementioned size for a better understanding.

1} The Hussites: religious movement.

2} Writing and the alphabet: complete with examples like cuneform.

Then we have non-traditional encyclopedias. We have quite a few complete sets, courtesy of my brother, who likes to salvage while performing home improvements for others.

1} Funk & Wagnells Wildlife: and you thought they were just a Carnac the Magnificent bit.

2} Illustrated Encyclopedia of Animals.

3} l Want to Know: what would considered to be Middle Grade.

4} Our Living World: published in conjunction with the Dept Of Interior.

Then we have the non-non-traditional encyclopedias. These are primarily oddball/pop culture collections that people would slap the "encyclopedia" label on to make it sound really interesting and a lot more expensive to purchase.

I have found the following types in our family bookcase:

1} A half dozen different types of baseball encyclopedias.

2} Various music encyclopedias.

3} A Cliff Notes version of Britannica.

4} Pro Wrestling.

5} Horror Movies.

6} Gun Design.

7} Antiques.

8} Boxing records.

As you can see, it's very much quite the eclectic haul of encyclopedias we have in this house. And rest assured, they will be treated like the last days spent with the previous owner: unwanted, unloved and most importantly, unread.

Now I will admit that the pro wrestling books are mine, and one of them is remarkably out of print (having come out around five years prior to the explosion of Hulkamania), but the other as previously stated, were not acquired by me, nor would they be something acquired by me.

My speed has always been the oddball collection like the Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, coffee table books like on the Rolling Stones, or extended collections that I had touched up on months ago from the now defunct Time-Life Imprints, or even one on Warner Bros Cartoons. Most importantly, the books I decide to acquire, I will actually read.

I know, imagine that, spending one's hard earned money on books that you enjoy reading, sometimes repeatedly. It does boggle the mind (a game I have played only once in my life) though, that some people, like myself, enjoy reading so much that they would have no issues in pulling out a random volume from a set of encyclopedias, flipping to a random pages and just start reading.

Fun fact that you may or may not be able to deduce from reading this post: I have a rather ambivalent attitude towards the encyclopedia, no matter what form they may come in.

I won't go out of my way to purchase a set, not even if it's on a topic that I like, True Crime for example. If one happens to be available and is reasonably up-to-date, I will be more than happy to use it, if only as a jumping off point to help me confirm something that I have knowledge of.

I leave you with one last thought: on a personal note: I would highly recommend, if you have a school age child that has an inquisitive mind and decent comprehension skills, that he/she be allowed to read the encyclopedia. It's an absolutely fantastic way to introduce your youngster to the world around them, both current and past, no matter what the topic, and give them a jump start on going down the rabbit hole of knowledge when something piques their curiosity.

Because as the old saying goes, reading is fundamental.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #319: My Den {2}-Getting Into The Groove: Vinyl LPs

It's been a while since I've talked about my modest music collection (well modest compared to others), so I thought it would be a slight refreshing change of pace to focus on audio, instead of video/visual. Specifically, the petroleum product portion of our vast music collection (aka vinyl).

To give a very brief update, between 45s and LPs, my petroleum product collection contains a combined total somewhere north of 9,000 pieces. Now this is a conservative estimation, as I have one full carrying box, twenty and a half wooden crates (each full crate about 55 units) of LPs and six and a quarter crates (each full crate contains 60 +/-) and one full carry box (about 100).

My petroleum product collection has been acquired in a few different ways over the decades.

1. Purchased for me when I was a young'un (ex: a Brady Bunch album);
2. I purchased for myself: new (as a teen and young adult); used (from the age of twenty-five going forward);
3. Have been given to me by family, friends and co-workers.

Presently, #3 is how I've been acquiring them, as my family and my friends know that I'm always open to acquiring petroleum products on the cheap (aka free). Because of this thoroughly treasured part of my character, I've been able to expand to all kinds of music that maybe three decades ago, I would've simply waved away.

Here is a small sample of music in my collection. Please note that I do not make the distinction between 45s and LPs.

Country of all types of persuasions, including classic and pop; pop music; true alternative/indie music; comedy LPs (60s thru the mid 80's); classical of all types; true R&B; rock music (60's thru 90's); show tunes; easy listening and even niche stuff like barbershop quartets and "adult" (aka smut) music.

Granted, college radio had a major influence in my later years, specifically starting late 90's going forward, which exposed me to all kinds of music, no matter the country of origin.

I now would like to show you a few examples of what has come across my hands and into my collection over the decades.

Elton Britt: yodel songs

Yes, you read correctly. I have an original album from 1956 that contains twelve selections of yodeling songs. I did a modicum of research and this gentlemen recorded nearly 600 sides (45's) and 60 albums during a 30 year career*. I've yet to listen to it though.

*The only artist that comes to mind that might come close to those totals is Willie Nelson.

Apparently yodeling songs were quite popular back in the day, as this gentlemen had a few million sellers back in the 40's & 50's, and from what I was able to ascertain, he was working right up to the day he passed away in 1972.

This is a country album put out by Senator Robert Byrd. Yes, that Robert Byrd. The older than Methuselah rabid segregationist who stayed in office right up until his death.

Anyways, apparently he was an accomplished musician and this was released on a small private label in 1978. Oh and, he actually sang on this record.

~~~~~

While I often enjoy collecting for the sake of collecting, there are times, when after I do a quick run through of a recent acquisition or even a basic run through of my collection looking for something to play, I will often scratch my very bald head in bewilderment at some of the music that was produced and oddly enough, actually listened to.

I sincerely hope that everyone has an enjoyable week and I'll see you next time on the price is not quite spot on.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #318: American English?! No, Not That! Well....Maybe

Flashback to when both dogs were living large and living pretty while enjoying life.

I discovered the joys of the American English Language very late in life, but early enough that it came to be part and parcel of my palette when I began to take my writing seriously.

To reintroduce everyone to my former employment background, my very first job was working at the CT State Library in something called "The Connecticut Newspaper Project". The extreme T.L.;D.R. is that I helped prepare old Connecticut newspapers for microfilming. the date range of these newspapers with the late 18th century through the mid 1980's, with a particular emphasis on the 1850's to the mid 1980's.

As I got to reading those early newspapers, I slowly began to appreciate the elaborate workaround that newspapermen would do to skirt the strong libel/slander laws of the time period. For example, you couldn't use select adjectives to describe someone in print. Instead you would often put a letter or two, followed by an underscore, and because your reader was reasonably intelligent, they would instantly recognize the word in question.

Or, if you want to insult someone in print, you would have to get really creative with your insults. For example, if you wanted to call someone "week" when they were bragging about the rope tying skills, you could say that "I had to learn on the fly because I didn't have the luxury of someone helping me out by standing still."

Fast forward about a decade or so. When I decided to become serious about my writing, I knew I had to make my characters stand out in some particular way. The no-brainer for me was to flesh out my character's linguistic skills, and I did this with all of my characters throughout all of my stories. Like a stock character trait.

So what I've tried to do was to model my characters language/speech traits after those writers and journalists of the Victorian age: a sharp tongue, biting wit, a delicate mix of sarcasm and bluntness that allows the user to get their point/insult across without too much collateral damage. I also made sure that those particular traits were sprinkled throughout a given story, because as the old saying goes: saying less carries more of an impact than saying more.

To elaborate on the 'less is more' philosophy, I have found that you can easily establish the personality of a particular character is, by simply having them use one word that they can apply a lot of inflection with.

For example, whenever I use the worlds "Indeed", or "Quite", I'm imaging my character is wanting to get to the point of whatever issue they're dealing with so that they can move on, or they're simply agreeing with whatever salient point someone else is making. Whenever I use the word "Come", it's basically short hand for "we need to get moving on to the next issue at hand."

In summation, I try to create characters that are well-rounded, erudite without being snobbish and will often use language as a way to keep the antagonists at bay, or at least, in their lane.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #317: The Family Bookcase {4): Gaming

I was searching through the family bookcase looking for something interesting to blog about when I happened across a few RPG rulebooks/guidebooks. Now I am one of a good chunk of the population who are quite familiar with RPGs, but I never had the itch to play one. I prefer to use my imagination and writing skills for the general fiction world of the novella & novel, but I have mad respect for those who enjoy RPGs and the worlds they can create.

Anyways, I performed a bit of research on the three books that we possess, as well as a brief skim through, and I have to say that I am seriously impressed with the amount of effort from a collective to create these three books. Two of the three books are sadly out of print, as they were created by a close family member who no longer maintains that level of participation in the RPG community, although they have branched out in other ways {click here to see}.

The other role/guidebook was created by a company called West End Games, which surprisingly enough, is still in business under a different corporate umbrella. I won't bore you with the convoluted details, but please click on the link if your curiosity is piqued.

In general, I am astonished with the amount of work that went into creating these worlds (and their background, although it seems that the ones created and published by my close family member are heads above the corporate one), and so I will be explaining what each one is to the best of my ability.

~~~~~

The first of the two books created by my cousin is called Twin Crowns and Other Lands.

Considering I'm a serious neophyte when it comes to RPGs, what impressed me the most while I was thumbing through the book, was the incredible amount of detail and back story that were created for this particular RPG. I always knew that worlds were created for fantasy novels/series, but I always assumed that they would be limited to what would be actually needed for the story (like mine is), but I guess with RPGs, it skips to a whole new level of thoroughness.

The second book that my cousin had created was a role-play for the Twin Crown world that was based on Live Action Role-playing, which was something that I had never heard of before. Think of it as dressing for a Ren fair and then playing a D & D adventure, or one of those dinner theater mysteries.* And yes, my cousin and her gaming friends are featured on this cover.

*okay that last one is pulled directly out of the definition from Google of Live Action Role Playing.

Again, just like the first, it's extremely dense-not so much concentrated on the extensive background dump, but more concentrated on the characters and their  respective KSAs, as well as the assorted ephemera that makes a fantasy world function.

The third book seems to be the only part of an entire box that was left behind somewhere. Not knowing much about RPGs, I'm gathering there's other components that are needed in order to successfully play this particular adventure called Torg: The Possibility Wars.

If you check out the link for West End Games, it goes into greater detail about the origins of this game, and the company, which was found in the late 70's, and created a lot of well known RPGs for some very popular IPs such as Star Wars.

~~~~~

My views on all three games are decidedly mixed. On one hand, they have really opened my eyes to the amount of worlds building that is required to have a successful RPG (or fantasy series, both written and celluloid), so having top notch writing skills is a major plus, with a solid imagination a good second (especially if you're creating  your world from scratch and not using an established IP.

On the other hand, the amount of world building, along with the extensive KSAs involved with that particular world, is incredibly daunting and challenging to a neophyte such as myself, who has a very hard time putting that much effort to playing an RPG to begin with (which is why I never migrated beyond sports when it came to video games in my young adult years).

In spite of this kind of game not being my cup of tea by any stretch of the imagination, I do like learning about a facet of life that a lot of people enjoy participating in because it works both as a stress reducer and  a way to build a skill set that you can successfully apply to the real world.

Gaming is a great way to improve your critical thinking and problem solving skills, no matter what type of game you enjoy playing. Try one today. Or as my cousin used to say on her podcast, "happy gaming everybody."

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #316: A Typical Day In The Life Of Your Gen X Writer

This...is about as much as I'm willing to show of myself on social media in 2026. Photo was taken some time after 2006 and before 2015.

Yes my friends, you're reading the blog post title correctly. Gen X is defined as someone being born between 1965 (me) and 1980. You're welcome for the sticker shock. Oh and one more thing, Gen X invented the modern curse called the Internet. Again, you're welcome.

Anywho, I don't think I've done a post like this in quite some time, if at all, on this blog. I know I've done on my other now inactive blogs (thanks Internet AI!) periodically, because, you know, easy blog filler.

And this one will probably be the same, as in easy blog filler. Maybe. But we'll have some fun just the same. So to over use a tired cliche, "are you ready?", and a classic British humor line, "let's begin from  the beginning.", we shall indeed, start at the start.

Note: since we're in the early throes of using tweezers on our hair follicles due to editing, our routine will be focusing on that.

7:30-ish in the a.m., we turn around to face our $660+ ASUS Chromebook, because if your love for M$ stopped at Win7, this OS is for you, and continue where left off editing, which in this case is our fantasy series "Sister vs Sister". After we get our morning dose of procrastination out of the way, it's now 9-ish in the morning and it's time to close up shop....I'm just kidding. In all seriousness, we spend a maximum of 1 1/2 hours either to continue editing the chapter we left off at the previous night (for the purpose of this post, we're editing chapter 21 of book #2); or finishing the chapter, printing a fresh copy, download a Word doc of the completed chapter for backup, putting away the old chapter and pulling out a fresh one to edit.

9-ish in the morning to about 1-ish in the afternoon, we live the relaxing life of someone who took an early retirement now going on five and half years, which mainly consists of getting our morning calisthenics, followed by our extremely self-regulated socialized media fix (about fifteen to twenty minutes on Meta, longer if I'm performing my M-W-F posting on my author's page with about one hour watching/commenting on YouTube). Oh and, can't forget our very regimented, calorie-wise, lunch. Regimented as everything is properly weighed per the serving instructions on the packaging.

1p-ish in the afternoon to about 2:30p-ish in the afternoon, we perform a repeat of the aforementioned 7:30a-ish phase of our day, unless I have a pressing errand(s) to run that cannot be done in the evening (e.g. banking). Then we do maaaaaybe a half hour of editing before running our important errand(s).

If no errands are to be had for the afternoon, then we get our afternoon calisthenics in, which lasts from 2:45p-ish to 4p-ish. I should note that Sunday thru Friday I break up my modest goal of 6k steps into two easily digestible parts, hence the twice a day calisthenics. I should also note that this year's winter's cold has been extremely nasty to me, to the point where anyone over the age of two can move faster than I can.

So with that bout of whininess out of the way, we're now, for the sake of the post, back home nestled in the warm comfort of our den, sipping a cup of hot chai and dreaming of monetary goodness and being recognized by others for the excellent books that we've written. 

Doesn't that just give you the warm fuzzies?

At that very second, the sound of a t.v. with the volume jacked to eleven hits you with the force of a five gallon bucket of ice water suddenly brings you back to the reality of the present (my reality is being a political elephant in a large extended family of political donkeys, although there may be hope for a 2nd cousin). You turn your heater back on, move the mouse to activate the computer from sleep mode, and spend from 4p-ish to 6:30p-ish doing absolutely nothing related to your current project, but you are posting snarky comments to Meta posts and YouTube videos, all while devouring the evening meal of pizza and fries, with a veggie and sugar free pudding for dessert.

However, you do feel motivated enough to spend perhaps fifteen minutes writing a future Meta post for your author's page, because you taught yourself how to write sixteen lines totaling 220 words or less for each post, so fifteen minutes is all you need. And you pat yourself on the back because you're able to apply what you've learned from others.

It's now 6:30p, and you're sitting there, in your chair wondering just exactly where the day went and most importantly, why you're still sitting in the chair. So you get your (allegedly) tired butt out of the chair and force yourself to make....yeeck...contact with....people, yet again. You don't really want to, but you still have your evening errands to run (like clockwork, because, schedules baby). So you spend anywhere from one half to one hour running your evening errands, before you go back home and call it a day. You change into your jammies, pour yourself a hot cup of chai and settle down in The Comfy Chair to dream about those huge paychecks coming from your writing.

{cue very long record scratch}

Reality: You go back down to your semi-cold den and after brewing yourself a cup of instant coffee of the Walter Martin variety, you turn on your computer and proceed to spend from 7:45p-ish to 10:00p-ish performing the following writing projects: editing your series as per the opening paragraph of this post. This overall project is interrupted by two infomercials called 'handwriting upcoming posts for Meta' and 'upcoming blog posts like this one', both of which require you to get off your butt and do research.

At 10p-ish, you tidy up your work area, turn off the power to your computer and printer, fix the settings on your computer so that 95% of your computer programming is throttled to conserve power (seriously, my computer has settings that allow you to drastically throttle most of the background programming, etc when you're using battery power. It stops when you turn the DC back on), and either spend that last half hour-ish of time working on the aforementioned projects or doom-scroll YouTube, because you like to fry what few remaining brain cells that have been untainted by the written word. Then you finally go to bed, get your five hours of sleep and experience the rapturous joy of Bill Murray's Groundhog Day.

And yes, we ran the gamut for your p.o.v. pleasure in this post, because, you know, practice makes perfection. I hope you enjoyed this snapshot of a typical day in my writing life, and remember, being a good writer is about rising above your redundancies and turning slop into an above average fast food meal. 

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved