G.A. Miller's Blog

While I’m grateful that the film adaptation will finally make its way to our screens via Max, (due in no small part, I suspect, to Stephen King’s high praise on social media), I think the best adaptation of Salem’s Lot is yet to be made.

I’d think to truly capture the scope of the book properly, it would need to be a 10 part series helmed by Mike Flanagan. Mike has proven to be very adept at bringing King’s work to the screen faithfully, and if you’ve seen his series work, particularly on Midnight Mass, it’s easy to imagine what his take on Salem’s Lot would be like.

The only caution I’d voice if this ever comes to pass is, Mike? Whatever you do, steer clear of Warners for this project! Warners has become the studio where films go to die.

Just ask Wile E. Coyote.

It wasn’t that long ago that I decided to join the ranks of cord cutters and leave my cable provider in the rear-view mirror. For the handful of channels I wanted to have, I had to select a tier containing hundreds of channels I had no interest in and would never watch. And then, I learned that the monthly tab was heading north of two hundred bucks with the next increase.

Fuck that.

I bought and installed a HD antenna, which covers the local channels for news and such quite well, except when the weather is bad. I subscribed to a handful of streaming services, two of which include the local NBC and CBS affiliates, so bad weather occurrences are covered. Plus, they all rotate their offerings, so there’s always something interesting to tune in for, whether it be a good movie or an interesting documentary.

Life is good, right?

Well, life was good. Then, corporate greed began to rear its ugly head, as it always does. The cost for streaming keeps going up, and the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back was when Amazon, after renewing an annual Prime contract in November, decided in February that they’d incorporate ads in the programming we’d already subscribed to, as well as reducing the image quality unless… guess what? You pay MORE to get back those features you’d already contracted for back in November.

I’m no lawyer, but I know what breach of contract smells like. There are class action suits in play against Amazon for this, and I absolutely want to be a part of them… but I digress.

Let’s get back to the point. Chestnuts, remember? Just like the squirrels will hoard and bury them to ensure a source of food, we need to either return to physical media or digitize what we already have as a reliable, untouchable source of entertainment, given the path streaming is heading down. Whether your particular favorites are music or movies or books, collect them. Hold them and keep them. Hell, I’ve read of too many instances where people have “bought” movies in digital format, only to have them vanish in the haze because the company has gone out of business, the format has changed, whatever. What they thought they bought and owned was never a tangible asset, and those ones and zeros somehow fell off a server somewhere, never to be seen again.

Let me repeat myself. Fuck that.

I’m collecting and building a library of media, so that when the time comes to kick the streamers to the curb for the same reasons I kicked cable there, I’ll have a healthy collection to keep me entertained for some time to come, a collection to which I can keep adding as new material comes out.

You might well want to consider doing the same for the things you enjoy… while you can.

When it was released, Godzilla Minus One was not playing at any convenient theaters near me, so I decided to wait until it finally releases on Blu-Ray and enjoy it on my own 4K screen.

As time moves on and I hear nothing about a release date, I’m beginning to think I made the wrong choice… I should have traveled a bit to catch it in the theater.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda… the dreaded three that make hindsight 20-20.

Oh well, it’ll eventually come out, and I’ll snag a copy. Especially where streaming is now starting to show advertisements, despite folks paying for the service. Amazon now wanting an additional three bucks to avoid commercials in movies or shows? Fuck them and their greed, which is what it’s all about. Our subscription dollars aren’t enough, they want the ad revenue on top. Like I said, fuck them. Considering how anything over 35 bucks is delivered free from Amazon anyway, it’s a good time to cancel Prime.

I can buy quite a few Bly-Rays with the savings.

Like this one:

Back in 2018, I released a novella titled “Spirit of the Dead”. To be honest, it should be called an attempt at a novella, as it was actually a couple short ideas that I cobbled together in order to hit an appropriate page count.

It has some redeeming qualities, though… there are some solid characters who developed nicely throughout, a locale that has tons of potential, and the base story itself isn’t bad at all. It has a unique twist that I haven’t seen used anywhere before, so it’s not worth discarding.

Instead, I’m going to reverse engineer it, strip away the unnecessary parts and filler fluff and then fully develop the good stuff, doing a complete rewrite to let it grow into a novel that’s been properly crafted and executed. Take the time and patience to do it right is probably the best way to phrase it.

My goal is to let this story be what it should have been in the first place, and use that experience to step away from the short story factory that I’ve become and write some novels. It’s about time.

That said, I’ll still crank out shorts when the idea for them is good and it fits well, but I need to expand, to grow, to dip my toes in the big boy pool (and hope like hell they don’t shrivel up like prunes).

It’s gonna be an adventure!

I closed out 2023 with a new story in the style of Twilight Zone, Tales from the Crypt, and others where a narrator leads into the story and then caps it at the end. Obviously, I wasn’t going to use Rod Serling or the Crypt Keeper, so instead I introduced Digger…

Oh, hello. I’m not used to having folks around while I work. Name’s Dalton Graves, but everyone round here just calls me Digger. Y’see, I dig the graves here and maintain the cemetery too. What’s that? Oh yeah, I don’t use a shovel much. No, most of my work is done with this here post hole digger. Why’s that, you say? Well, let me tell you a story about old Joe Morrison and then I reckon you’ll understand. I call this story, ‘And Now, A Word From Our Sponsor’…

The story came out nicely, and a friend I shared it with absolutely loved it. It gave me an opportunity to take a healthy dig at the proliferation of commercials we have to endure if we choose to watch network television, and now Amazon is going to place commercials into the content Prime subscribers are already paying for? That is pathetic… bastards stay up nights figuring ways to squeeze more blood from a rock, and if the paying customers become collateral damage, well, too bad for them.

I’m in the process of reworking an old one I stumbled across while organizing my files right now… I think the idea has potential, but I need to dig in and improve that draft from some time ago.

Update! I’ve finished the rework, and the title is “The Ride Home” – here’s how it begins:

As the train doors slid closed, Joe Quinn closed his paperback book, leaving his index finger inside as a bookmark. The elevated subway train rolled out of the station and began the long arc that would feed it onto the bridge, which offered a perfect view of his destination. He got out of his seat to stand at the doors and look across the river at the city, which was breathtaking in the early morning light.

The golden sunrise reflected off the majestic steel and glass towers, making it look magical, a hidden kingdom in a fantastic adventure tale. This far away, you couldn’t see the litter, the graffiti, the homeless sleeping on cardboard in the streets. No, from here it was perfection, a shining Nirvana floating in the dark sky behind it, taking on a new life in Joe’s imagination.

The illusion was short-lived once the train made its way onto the bridge, the grimy steel structure and constant noise of traffic bringing back the gritty reality of another commute. Soon, the train would head down into the labyrinth of tunnels under the busy streets, and he’d need to change trains to continue up to midtown. The lights came on as the train entered the tunnel, and he reopened his book to continue reading where he’d left off as he returned to his seat. He made the mistake of looking out into the tunnels once when he first started working in the city, and the subway rats he saw scurrying around down there looked to be the size of small dogs.

That was when he began bringing books to read on the train. Joe focused on his reading to avoid letting those monstrous rats into his head, fearing what he might conjure up in his sleep.

This will join the other 5 newbies as new members of my collection of shorts. I may shop them around a bit, and if I don’t get any bites, I’ll cobble a collection together.

Oh, before I forget – hope you all have a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!

They say things happen for a reason, and it seems they may be right. I just started work on a new story and staged the opening… and had no idea where to take it next.

Then, on Christmas Eve of all days, the doorbell rings and a little USPS truck is seen driving away after having deposited a box in the mailbox, which turned out to provide the answer I was looking for.

The entire series, all 7 seasons in the original unedited format as broadcast on HBO before they were sanitized and edited for use on residual stations. The good old EC comics of my wayward youth brought to life on the screen, and they’re all in this box spanning some 20 DVDs.

That’s when the idea hit – write this new story as if it were a cynical screenplay for an episode of Tales From The Crypt! This is gonna be fun, the ideas now percolating nicely (cue John Kassir’s demonic laughter in character as the Crypt Keeper).

Merry Chirstmas to all and to all a good fright!

We’re getting surrounded. Everywhere you look in the world of technology, AI is cropping up, as if staging to take us over. Between the upcoming Windows 12 and Samsung’s soon to be announced Galaxy 24 line of flagship phones, most of what we read speaks to the inclusion of AI in these devices and platforms and how we’re going to love it.

Well, not me.

Sorry, but I prefer MOI to AI. You can read that as French for ‘me’, or as an analogy for My Own Intelligence, but either way, it boils down to the same thing. I’d rather do it myself.

Being a ‘Boomer’, I came up in a world where a pencil in hand was your word processor, and when the first small battery powered calculators came out, they were banned in the public school system because, as the teachers would tell us, “You’re not always going to have one of those contraptions in your pocket, so you’re better off learning how to do the math in your head.”

In all fairness, they couldn’t possibly have foreseen the cell phones we carry today, which carry more computing power than NASA used to land the craft that enabled Neil Armstrong to place the first human footstep on the surface of the moon. That not withstanding, their point was well taken. It’s much easier and faster to perform everyday calculations in your head than to reach into your pocket for a device to do it for you. If we’re pleased with the server that took care of us in a restaurant, just hand me the bill and I’ll add a generous tip, based on the bill amount. No calculator necessary.

As a writer, I like starting a story on paper and then, once my imagination takes over, racing to keep up with the flow as it comes. If someone reads my work and enjoys it, I’d feel better knowing it actually came from me and not from a device using AI and machine learning to fill paragraphs.

Story ideas come out of nowhere, often from the least expected thing or location. For example, my job recently relocated about 5 miles up the road from the previous spot, and that short distance makes a huge difference due to traffic congestion at the very end… at the last mile.

Not one to look a gift idea in the mouth, once the idea hit me of what I could do with that small difference, I went to work on a new short story. It’s nearly done now, just resting while I step away for a bit, so I can edit it with fresh eyes.

This is the fourth new story in the past few months, joining “I Am”, “Becoming”, and “Dorothy Parker Knew” in the list. Let’s keep the momentum going, shall we?

So, I’ve upgraded to the HP 34″ AIO Envy, and this screen is insane… 34 inches diagonal measurement at 5K resolution! Not only is it a pleasure to edit photos, but when I’m working on writing, the view I get in Word is immersive!

4 pages across! As that old commercial said, I’m lovin’ it! I was going with a 17″ Dell XPS, but Fed Ex screwed the pooch on delivery and when I reached out to Dell for assistance (because only the shipper can make changes to the delivery), they proved to be as useful as tits on a bullfrog. That was eye opening to me, as in “Do I want this kind of “support” for the next few years?”

Hell no! I wound up dealing with a LOCAL vendor on Amazon for this computer, and when I posted a question to them via Amazon’s seller messaging system, I had a phone call back within 15 minutes! This kind of customer support is exceedingly rare in today’s world, so I’m very glad I wound up with these folks!

OK, back to playing with my new machine!

As I enjoyed breakfast this morning, I decided to look and poke a bit and soon found an open call that I thought would be an appropriate home for one of my short tales. I went ahead and prepped the story as per the publisher’s requirements and then submitted it.

This one doesn’t offer a lot in terms of payment, but it would be good to start getting the work out there and adding to my resume. I’d just submitted one of my newest ones a week or so ago, and hope that one lands as it pays on a Pro scale.

And now, time to move on and forget all about them. Given the time it usually takes to hear back from publishers, it’s best to simply forget about the submissions and be surprised when that email with the thumb up or down lands in the in box. Time is better spent working on something new.

Speaking of new, I’m getting ready to move into my new studio for 2024… I’m upgrading to a top of the line laptop for both my writing and my photography work, and very much looking forward to its arrival:

Meet the Dell XPS 17 – 64 Gigs of RAM, a pair of 4 TB SSD’s offering massive storage and high speed throughput, all run by a 13th Generation Intel i9 CPU. Not even Tim the Tool Man Taylor could squeeze any more power into this sleek chassis. Once it arrives, I’ll get all updates done then move all my programs and files over from my current laptop, which will then go up on the block in search of a new home.

If anyone’s interested in a good deal on a year old Alienware A17 R2 laptop, give me a shout via the contact page for specs and pricing!