Trickster

The Journey

So, Trickster is out. Huzzah!

I started writing this book in 2010. It’s amazing sometimes how you start with a germ of an idea and then end up somewhere far away from that. Here’s the first ~850 words I wrote for this book. I trashed this (and several versions afterwards) before settling on the final approach in October 2010; much of this is still in the final version, though in a different form, and spread over many sections.

Trickster Draft Zero, August 2010

WHEN I was nine years old, my father picked me up after one of my Cub Scout meetings at the old church, which was strange because my father had left us the year before and I hadn’t seen him since. He drove an old boat of a car, cracked seats and broken radio. I remember climbing around the front and back seats, so much room it was like a little portable house on wheels. He let me; he just sat behind the wheel with a pint bottle of brandy between his legs, humming old songs as he drove.

We merged onto an empty highway, amber lights driving away the darkness but creating a weird Marscape of road, like we’d left the real world behind and were driving in the Ghost World. I didn’t know where we were going. Dad took regular sips from his bottle and answered all my questions with grunts and monosyllables. I had a lot of questions. I remember being really excited, after all this time Dad had come to take me on a trip, and after I got tired of not getting answers to my questions I settled into the back seat with my Webelos handbook and tried to figure out where we were going—amusement parks, zoos, the beach all seemed likely candidates. Eventually I remember falling asleep, liking the sensation of rocking back and forth in the big back seat, the smell of cigarettes and the sound of the wind.

Dad shook me awake and we were out in the middle of nowhere in the parking lot of a small square tavern with a huge red neon sign that said, simply, BEER. I followed him sleepily inside, where a handful of people who all seemed to be wearing flannel shirts and baseball caps were scattered around the tiny, gloomy room. Dad lifted me onto a stool and I remember slouching there, still asleep, looking owlishly around.

“Bourbon,” Dad said. It was the first time he’d spoken since he’d picked me up. “Neat. A coke for the kid.”

This was magic. The man behind the bar, who was fat and red in the face, his gray-white hair greasy and pasted flat against his round head, put a glass in front of me with a grin and used a gun on the end of a rubber hose to fill the glass with soda. Soda from a hose! It was magic, and I immediately schemed to have one installed at Mom’s house, because she always forgot to do the shopping and there was never anything to eat or drink.

Dad didn’t pay any attention to me, just sat there staring at the silent TV mounted up on the wall and sipped from his glass. Any time I finished a soda the man behind the bar waddled over, smiling, and refilled my glass. Free soda from a hose. After a while I eased off my stool and wandered over to where a trio of ancient electronic games sat blinking dully. Dad watched me for a moment, then shrugged and called the bartender over, fishing out a five dollar bill and holding it up.

“Give the kid some quarters,” he said.

I drank soda until I had to pee so badly my legs ached, and played fifteen games of bowling before finally giving in to the realities of the situation and heading for the bathroom. It was a scary bathroom. It had a door that didn’t close right and was dark, everything in it cold and slimy. To get there I had to pass by an old man of at least my Dad’s age sitting at the end of the bar. He wore a white suit with no tie or socks, just white pants and jacket that seemed too light for the weather and a white shirt. He was a mass of wrinkles. His hair was long and slightly curly, and his nose dominated his face, making him resemble a squirrel. I didn’t want to push past him to get to the bathroom, and hesitated for a second or two while my kidneys swam up behind my eyes, bulging them out. Finally I screwed up my courage and hustled past. He just grinned at me.

###

I got bored after a while. The games were old and creaky and not fun and after my seventh or eighth soda the impossible happened and I didn’t want any more of them. Dad just sat and drank and stared. I was afraid to make much noise or bother him, remembering how terrifying he was when angered, and tried to find other ways to amuse myself. I looked around and found the man in the white suit staring at me. He smiled and waved, and I looked away. When I stole a glance back at him, he waved again, and I realized with a start that his fingertips were on fire. As he moved them back and forth through the air they flickered and smoked.

The flames were blue-green. As I stared the man winked at me.

I looked around, but no one else seemed to have noticed. Everyone else might as well have been asleep. Not me. My heart was pounding

Trickster Extracts & Giveaways!

I get it: You want to read my novels, but don’t want to buy them like some sort of sucker. I feel you, kid. I feel you. You’re in luck: Not only are there extracts from the book out there, but there are free books to be had as well!

Extracts:

Both the rockin’ Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist and All Things Urban Fantasy are offering up a peek at the book, so surf on over and have a gander.

Giveaways:

Both Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist and All Things Urban Fantasy are giving away copies, so check them out above. Or, if Goodreads feels better to you, check it:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Trickster by Jeff Somers

Trickster

by Jeff Somers

Giveaway ends February 26, 2013.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

 

Givin’ Away Books

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Trickster by Jeff Somers

Trickster

by Jeff Somers

Giveaway ends February 26, 2013.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

 

Trickster Review in RT Book Review

The list of things I never thought I’d ever say gets longer and longer every day, mis amigos. Among them is “no more whiskey for me I have to get up early tomorrow,” “holy shit there’s three feet of water in my living room,” and anything involving my name and the Romantic Times, but it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, and I’m feeling good. So we got a four-star review in the RT Book Review march 2013 issue for Trickster:

Trickster review in Romantic Times

Trickster review in Romantic Times

I’ve always known I had it in me to be romantic. Even when The Duchess tells me otherwise, I’ve always known I just needed a challenge to rise to. Who knew a book about blood sacrifice, magic, and con artists would be my gateway to romance?

First Review of Trickster

Trickster by Jeff SomersThe author is always the last to know: Apparently there are real live galleys of Trickster out there, because someone just posted the first review. Five stars on GoodReads, baby!

“I loved the world Mr. Somers hsa created, and his perfectly IMperfect characters, and I WILL be reading any sequels the moment I can get my greedy little hands on them.”

Score! Go buy ten. Papa needs liquor monies.

The Role of Terror and Jealousy in Writing

Trickster by Jeff SomersSo, I have a new book series coming out from Pocket Books. Trickster will be out in early 2013 and its sequel will follow. Also a digital-only short story in-between the two novels. I really excited, of course. These will be my seventh and eighth novels published, and let me tell you, right up until I sign the contract for the ninth I will be convinced they are also my last. That’s how it goes.

Here’s the story of Trickster in timeline format:

1995: I write a story titled The Night will Echo Back at You which deals with magic spells cast via blood sacrifice in the modern world. I never submit it anywhere. It’s one of those stories that I like in concept but is kind of dull in actual execution.

1996-2010: Nothing much happens. I drink a lot. Sell some other pieces of writing.

2010: Having finished the final Avery Cates book, The Final Evolution, I go to Bouchercon in San Francisco ostensibly to try to expand my audience into the thriller/mystery crowd but really so I can follow my agent around and surreptitiously order booze on her dime all day long (it worked!). Bouchercon teaches me two things: No one knows who the hell I am, and there’s no guarantees that I’ll ever sell another book. I was suddenly incredibly jealous of all the authors around me who had bigger followings, and terrified that I’d never publish again. The sheer energy of everyone around me busily promoting their work got under my skin.

I’d been planning to expand upon this old story anyway. Terrified and jealous, I wrote 10,000 words on the plane ride home. Most of those words survived into the final version of the book. That doesn’t always happen.

Fear is a great motivator for me when I write. Fear that it will suck, that no one will ever read it, that I’m actually not nearly as good a writer as I think I am. It gets the juices flowing, let me tell you. Some books get written peacefully over the course of years. Some burst out in an explosion of terror. I think I’ve done good work both ways, but I also suspect that fear is always down there, bubbling, churning the wheel that drives it all. Even if I’m not bug-eyed terrified like I was on that flight home, chugging tiny bottles of bourbon and garnering suspicious glances from the flight attendants (the strip search in Newark airport upon landing was no fun) the fear is still there, driving me.

It seems pretty obvious to me that if you’re satisfied, you don’t do anything. Maybe this is why so many artists bog down in middle age and stop producing good work; they hit a certain level of material comfort and are satisfied. Fear comes in many forms, and for some maybe the fear of starving to death is all it takes. Me, I don’t mind starving to death. Being ignored for the rest of my life is what gets my goat. I could live in a dumpster and drink antifreeze (not as bad as you might think – it’s got an oakey, spicey finish) and be okay with that. Tell me I’ll never sell another book and I’ll burst into tears.

The real question is, does the type and level of fear have anything to do with the level of work you produce? As an experiment perhaps I should be locked in a cage with two hungry bears and a laptop. See what happens. Well, we know exactly what happens: Bear porn. Don’t ask.