OldBillyBob: Blog

Remember how I mentioned my muse leaving me a pile of half-completed stories while I was trying to finish Band Geek Diary? Well, today I'm posting one of them she deigned to let me finish: a story called "Cara" which should be up soon. The story is loosely based on real events. An old girlfriend had, indeed, checked out my LinkedIn profile, and it set off some memories. The memories it set off weren't the ones I ended up writing about, though. I wrote about someone else because my memories of her are sweeter. The one who actually looked me up was a bitch.

Honestly.

She. Was. A. Bitch.

I based the character, Faith, in my story "Faith and Hope" on her, including the way she acted, how she bit me and how I slapped her for it. All of that actually happened, so I wonder why that particular old girlfriend bothered to look at my profile after being out of my life for over 45 years. Who knows? I never claimed to understand her back then, either.

The other, sweeter, memories I wrote about? Read the story. The "real" real story happened differently, of course, but she was a wonderful woman with a shitty husband and I wrote the story while thinking of her. I miss her to this day, and I sometimes sneak a look at her Facebook page just to check up on her. She seems to be having a great life now and I'm happy for her.

The last chapter of "Band Geek Diary" is in the queue (great word, queue, it can be worth a lot in a game of Scrabble) and should post in the morning. The long journey is over for me after just more than five years. I feel like I accomplished what I set out to do: to write a tale that looks at the story, "Band Parents" through the lens of their son. He had his own story, too, and I tried to make that a sweet high school romance. I may have intended to write a shorter story, but the characters had a mind of their own.

Also, as intended, the story stops at the end of the school year. I never meant for it to go longer. I also didn't want to follow the track of so many other SOL authors, so young John only deflowers one virgin and even his adult lover decides to let him go. This way, he begins with meeting the girl and he ends up with her when the story ends. As John says in this last chapter, "Can I really ask for much more?"

Well, maybe YOU could, but I can't. There's a keyboard or its equivalent in front of you if you want to continue his story. You'd even be welcome to post it in the Band Parents universe, which is open to anyone on SOL who wants to post in it. As for me? I'm moving on to something else, maybe one of those two dozen stories my fickle muse started on me while I was trying to work on BGD.

Thanks for reading and voting. Thanks for all your comments, public and private. I've had fun writing the story.

Yes, penultimate.

It's one of my favorite 'big' words. It means "before the end," or "next to last." It's a wonderful word and I hate to see it abused such as it has been in years past by half-educated advertising copywriters who think penultimate is something greater than the greatest thing and tell you things like, "this is the penultimate Lexus, a driving experience like no other." When that happens, I find myself snorting at the television and saying I'll just wait for the next one because it will be even better. I've been an ad copywriter and I think I'd rather have slashed my wrists than misuse one of my favorite words like that.

I'm giving you this little lecture on the proper meaning of the word because I just posted the penultimate chapter of "Band Geek Diary" for your reading pleasure. John is going to finish his diary when he finishes the school year and I'm going to call the story finished at that point. I'll post the last chapter this weekend unless my muse decides to run off and join the circus. Unlike some other authors here, who will remain nameless, I don't have it in me to turn this into a ten-million-word series following every move my protagonist makes in life over the next thirty or forty years and recording all his rantings.

I plan to keep writing, though. In fact, I have several ideas for additional stories in the Band Parents Universe as well as a pile of half-written tales. When I was stuck and trying to jumpstart my muse, she sometimes had a different story to pour into my head before she'd let go of anything for BGD and, since I've been working on the story for five years and got stuck more than a few times, it's quite a pile. There is also the matter of my one incomplete and inactive story, All A-Twitter, which needs a couple of chapters to conclude it. I'm going to be a busy boy if my muse will just give me the rest of those stories she started.

Anyway, long story short, ;tldr and all that, I'll be posting the final, ultimate, chapter of Band Geek Diary on Sunday morning. Thanks for coming along for the ride. Some new stuff is on the way.

Those of you waiting patiently for the next chapter of Band Geek Diary will be rewarded when Chapter 39 posts on Monday morning. This chapter is John's weekend with Katie, though their time is shortened by Becky asking the kids to help her pack some things ahead of moving to a new house. My apologies for being more than a week behind where I wanted to be but, as I said in an earlier blog post, the holidays got in the way.

For those of you following the story by this year's calendar, which it matches, today we're in Chapter 20. John is surprised on Saturday when Becky has him come over for more lessons. He thought they were over once he'd deflowered Katie. This weekend is 'advanced oral sex' lessons and he learns about the G-spot. Becky learns she can squirt. John gets to try a little of what he learned on Sunday and he gets all day with Katie on this holiday Monday.

I think I'm on track now to finish the story before February. Thanks for reading.

Rantings

My niece, Rhiannon, was visiting the other day. Yeah, she was born in 1976, not long after Fleetwood Mac released the song that left half the women her age saddled with that name. I've always wondered why people, specifically my little sister, do such things. I'll leave it to others to speculate.

Anyway, Rhiannon started bemoaning the current state of popular music - specifically how she felt today's teens don't have what she described as a music of their own. It was actually a good observation and we could have had a great discussion about it. Having studied mass media in my college years, I could have told her why, and how, that happened. I could have drawn on forty years of working in broadcasting and advertising to point out the splintering of media that's happened since the advent of the internet in the past twenty some-odd years, which gives today's teens a multitude of outlets to seek out what they like for themselves.

I could have said how I think that's actually better than when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties with two radio stations and three television stations in town that basically force-fed us what was supposed to be popular. I could have told my own tales about the kind of promotional pressure the record companies would put on the radio stations to play what they determined to be the big hit. I never got the chance. She just kept going on and on and on with her rant, making rational discussion impossible. I finally just raised my hand and said "OK, Boomer."

That only served to set her off on a new rant about how I'm the actual Baby Boomer in the room and she is proudly and undeniably the Gen X'er. I pointed out to her that she was the one going off on the 'old fart rant' when I was ready to discuss the social and technological changes that have affected the entire entertainment industry since the internet came along. She didn't like my answer, so she left.

I'll never understand the younger generations…