Bob Mueller

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Prompted Fiction: Substitution

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Reading Time: about 2 minutes

A few weeks ago I was visiting Mad Genius Club when I happened across a post by Cedar Sanderson about prompted writing. She talked about a kind of round-robin-ish shared writing prompt group. The idea is that a bunch of people share prompts and they get randomly assigned to different people.

I never fail to be amazed at the stuff that shows up in the WritingPrompts subreddit, but I’ve never contributed there. The volume is overwhelming, and often by the time I’ve gotten around to choosing a prompt, there are a bunch of really good responses, and I get intimidated by the talent I see. Consequently, I don’t write anything.

But I need to write more, and I need to write faster. This idea of an assigned prompt with a deadline seemed tailor-made for me. So I headed over to More Odds Than Ends and tossed my hat in the ring.

My prompt this week came from Jennie Posthumous, who writes at http://www.jfposthumus.net. Her challenge:

“A pinch of poison, a few hours, and a grave later the deed was done and none would ever be the wiser.”

Image by Thanasis Papazacharias from Pixabay

I let that rattle around for a day or so, then started writing. It ended up at 6,000 words, and I’m not sure what the wordcount limit is for comments at MOTE, so I posted it on the public side of my Patreon. Click here to read “Substitution.” I’ll warn you ahead of time that if you’ve read my previous stuff, you’ll likely be a little surprised at this one. It’s a lot darker than I expected it would be at first, and the language, while it doesn’t meet Goodfellas standards (296 f-bombs in a 146-minute movie!), does get spicy, as it were.  Hope you enjoy it.

I also sent a prompt (that’s part of the game) and it went to Cedar herself.

There’s a camera on your desk that you’ve never seen before.

Read “Snapshot” here.

I’m probably only going to do these every other week, until I can really get up to a decent writing speed. I really enjoyed this challenge, but I’ve got other projects to get out.

I welcome your support at Patreon, where you’ll see exclusive content like first drafts, deleted scenes, and so forth. You can sign up for my infrequent newsletter here. You can find some of my other writing at The Good Men Project, too. Subscribe to the blog via the link in the right sidebar so you never miss an update here, either. You can also add my RSS feed to your favorite reader. And of course, I always appreciate readers sharing my posts via social media shares.

New Year, New…Something

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Reading Time: about 5 minutes

Time for my annual summary and planning post.

I’m not going to post all the numbers like I have over the last few years. I started doing it as some sort of accountability thing, but I think all it really did was depress me. I’m still keeping track of my production; I’m just not going to share it like I used to. Suffice to say I didn’t make my goal. I completed the draft of In Plain Sight, but it still needs to be edited, and that’s waiting on funding. I’ve written more on my post-apocalyptic story, After, and that seems to be going somewhere. I’d planned a Sad Girl novella but didn’t write much on that. I may have another outlet for it, though.

Nutcracker

I tried something new this past month.

My daughter Olivia is a dancer, and last year danced in Encore Performing Society’s production of Nutcracker. I helped quite a bit backstage. At one point, she mentioned that they were having trouble finding men for the party adult scene in the first act. I said if they were really desperate, I’d consider it, but secretly was terrified that they’d ask me. I’ve never felt that I was a good dancer, although I’ve always been interested in ballroom/couples dancing.

This year as auditions approached, I said, “What the heck, why not?” and mentioned to the director that I’d be willing to be a party adult. The dances are fairly simple, mostly ballroom-style. It’d be fun to be in the same production as my daughter. “What could go wrong?”

Encore tries to make their cast announcements memorable for the kids. This year, they had the announcement in a balloon they dropped off at each cast member’s home. We got two balloons, which I thought was cute. Olivia popped hers and was thrilled to see she’d been cast as the Jester Doll, sharing the part with one of her best friends, as well as Snow and Waltz of the Flowers. I popped mine, thinking it was a nice touch that they did that for party adults.

Except mine didn’t say “Party Adult.” It read “Drosselmeyer.”

Hmm.

He’s got a pretty big part in the first act. He’s kind of important to the story.

Cracking the whip at our last show.

I had a blast. The kids seemed to have fun with me, too. It was a bit of a challenge to manage my blood sugar during tech week and performances, but I’m happy to say I didn’t pass out at all.

I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed being on stage. My last drama experience was in high school; I played one of the doctors in Harvey. I used to think it was Chumley, but now I can’t recall clearly. I did a couple of plays when I was younger as well, appearing in The Crown of Love and Death and I Remember Mama. I played in my high school’s concert band for three years as well as once with my dad in the College-Civic Symphonette. I realized after the shows I really missed it. I might do more; Encore is planning a performance of Cinderella. We’ll see.  

Patreon

The big New Thing is that I’ve got a Patreon now, at WriterUnfocused. Why? It’s another outlet for me to share things and maybe make a few cents here and there. I’ve got a bunch of old writing that I’ll probably put up there, along with some deleted scenes from different books. I’ll share some of my background notes on characters and so forth there as well. The aforementioned Sad Girl novella may end up here.

The other big change that I’m going to make is to shift releases of After over to Patreon. I’m still going to leave the first five chapters up here, but all future episodes will be on Patreon. Expect the next episode in late January, and other posts to follow possibly every other month. I’m still working out how long an episode will be.

I’ve only set up one tier, at $3. If you support me, I value your support, no matter how much you’re able to pledge. Check it out.

Plans

My plans for the next year are ambitious, to say the least.

I’ll be releasing the rest of The Sad Girl series in the spring. I’ve been holding off on book 2, Discoveries because I didn’t have the funds available to get book 3, In Plain Sight, edited in a timely manner. I didn’t want the second book hanging out there for a long time waiting on the third.

Once those books are released, I’m going to hit the ground running on Blown Away, the first book in the Red Dirt Justice series. If I hold to the very ambitious schedule I have in my head, that book will release in late summer, and I’ll follow it with Red Dirt Justice book 2, which is probably going to be The Fire Inside.

I’m also planning on three episodes of After. I expect each episode to be novella-length, about 35,000-40,000 words.

There’s a short story bouncing around my head based on the Marvel cinematic universe too. We’ll see where that goes.

And, just because I don’t have enough stories bouncing around in my head, I may start playing around with an alternate history story based on an old RPG I used to play. Twilight:2000 came out in the early 80s, postulating a third world war that included nuclear exchanges, the collapse of much of society, and all sorts of post-apocalyptic stuff. But it’s been forty years since it was published, and it occurred to me that I could continue a fiction project I started based on the game, and just write it as an alternate history story. Who knows what I’ll do with that? It may be another Patreon project.

Putting all that together in a list, we get this:

  • Write two books in one series
  • Write two more novella-length episodes of one serial
  • Plan and begin another serial
  • Finish a fan-fiction short
  • Release a total of four books

Wish me luck. I hope we all enjoy the ride.

I welcome your support at Patreon. I also have an infrequent newsletter. You can find some of my other writing at The Good Men Project, too. Subscribe to the blog via the link in the right sidebar so you never miss an update here, either. You can also add my RSS feed to your favorite reader. And of course, I always appreciate readers sharing my posts via social media shares.

Genealogy Profile: Rebecca Florence Smith

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Reading Time: about 5 minutes

Rebecca Florence Smith is my maternal grandmother, known in my family as “Nan.” She was the second of thirteen children born to Albert Campbell Smith and Mary Susan Mallow, in Randolph County, West Virginia.

Rebecca Florence Smith Baldinger, 1947
Rebecca Florence Smith Baldinger, 1947

I didn’t know her well. She died when I was fifteen, and by the time I was old enough to really appreciate her, dementia had begun its horrid attack on her mind. In my younger years, she was very intimidating. This photo from her genealogy page is from 1947, almost twenty years before I was born. Yet in my memories, she looked just the same when my mother and I visited in the 70s.

For much of my life, the story was that Nan’s parents had died when she was young, and there were no siblings. As early as 1945, she wrote to an insurance company that “my father and my mother died approximately 32 years ago when I was in school….I was born March 6, 1897.” Her father was still alive when she wrote that letter, though she’d had no contact with her parents or siblings for twenty years by then.

Nan married Edward Bleike Baldinger Sr. in 1921, in Orange, New Jersey. Soon after, they resided in New Orleans, where Edward was in the lumber business. In fact, Edward had been in New Orleans since at least 1920, partnering with James A Kirby in Kirby & Baldinger, a “Yellow Pine Service,” according to the New Orleans city directories. But Baldinger is listed in the 1919 City Directory in Houston, working for Trinity River Lumber. So how and why did Edward and Rebecca end up getting married in New Jersey? I assume it was something of a private event, given that I’ve found no articles about it. The Baldinger family was somewhat prominent in the Galveston area, as evidenced by this piece in Galveston, History Of The Island And City about Andrew Baldinger, Edward Bleike Baldinger’s grandfather.

Genealogy Profile: Rebecca Florence Smith; Smith, Mallow, Baldinger

My uncle Edward Bleike Baldinger Jr, Nan and Edward’s firstborn, was born in November 1922, about thirteen months after they were married. Family legend shares that not long after Uncle Ed was born, Nan wrote the family back in West Virginia, saying that she was married and had a child, and didn’t want to speak with them again, cutting off contact forever, as far as anyone knew.

My father, along with my mother’s sister (Gayle Baldinger Cahal) worked on my grandmother’s genealogy for years. As I recall, it started in earnest in the mid-1970s when, as Nan was recovering from surgery for a broken hip, she began speaking names that no one in the family had ever heard before. Gayle was sitting with her and wrote the names down, then asked Nan about them later. She denied knowing anything about any of the names. Throughout 1975, Dad and Gayle contacted several offices in West Virginia. Two years later, Gayle made a research trip to Salt Lake City and the Mormon archives.

Sometime in the next three years, Gayle found the correct date of birth and Nan’s parents’ names, although when and how she found them we no longer know.

In 1984, while working at the National Archives, Gayle reviewed the 1910 U. S. Census and discovered the names and dates of birth of Nan’s surviving siblings. My dad planned a visit to Randolph County the following year. In preparation for the trip, he wrote the postmaster of Harman, West Virginia, asking for information on the family. The postmaster passed the letter on to a friend of Hazel Smith Hedrick, a sister of Rebecca Florence, who quickly responded, thus reestablishing contact after some sixty years.

In 1985, after Nan had died, Dad contacted the Randolph County Clerk for a birth certificate, this time with the correct date and parents, but they had no record of her birth. As far as anyone knows, her birth was never recorded at the county or state level.

The Smith family still holds a family reunion each summer at the Albert Smith farm. The last one I attended was in 1993; I hope to make it for 2020.

I’ve had access to Newspapers.com recently, and have found disturbingly few articles about the Baldingers in New Orleans. Most what I’ve found are about my uncle Ed Baldinger. I did figure out that the Times-Picayune archives at Newspapers.com end in 1919. Even so, searching the Times-Picayune archives directly doesn’t give me much about my grandparents. I assume that’s mostly because she was just a very private person, although I do occasionally wonder if she was still trying to hide from her West Virginia family.

Goals

Baring a miraculous discovery of letters or a diary, we’re probably never going to know exactly why Nan cut herself off from her family. I would like to track down her travels a bit better though. I know she was in New Jersey in 1921, however briefly. There was some speculation from her siblings at one point that she’d ended up in New York “to work for a lumber man.” That makes some bit of sense, as her birthplace in West Virginia was something of a hub for the lumber business in the area. I doubt that I’m going to have much success there though, given my luck so far with newspaper archives. I know there are plenty of Smith cousins out there, given the number of siblings Nan had. Please feel free to share information about your branch of the family tree. You can use the Contact form here, or the Suggest tab on any of the Smith family member pages at my genealogy site.

Don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter. That’s where I’ll announce preorders and things like that. It’s otherwise very low traffic. You can find some of my other writing at The Good Men Project, too. Subscribe to the blog via the link in the right sidebar so you never miss an update here, either. You can also add my RSS feed to your favorite reader. And of course, I always appreciate readers sharing my posts via social media shares.

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