More Shit I Gotta Do

Let’s see, what have been up to? I know you’re all fascinated.

First off, revisions to The Eternal Prison have gotten, er, involved. Has this ever happened to you: You write the world’s greatest book, nice and pulpy, perfect in every way, and then someone gives you a tiny bit of reasonable feedback about it and you think, damn, that’s a good idea, so you start tugging at the careful knots and patterns you’ve created, trying to slip in a few modest new threads, and then things come unraveled and you realize you have to work in some supplementary materials. . .which emphasizes a character you’d left in the background. . .which means you have to give that character more flesh and background. . and before you know it you’ve written War and Fucking Peace, except less coherent and with more future (not to mention unicorn)?

Dammit, that’s what’s happening here. The extremely good ideas fed to me in reaction to my first final draft has inspired me to basically write a whole new book of new material. This is either genius or the end of my career as Wildly Popular Novelist.

Erm, moderately popular novelist? Novelist? Moving on. . .

I’ve got another web site, www.innerswine.com which is the Intarweb home of my zine, The Inner Swine. It’s been live since the late 1990’s and had grown to absolutely amazing proportions, filled with archives of old issues, columns written, and a million static pages of various cruft. This weekend I lopped most of it off and transformed it into a clean archive for the zine. I’m still publishing the zine, and the web site will still have the latest issue and archives of the old issues, as well as occasional bits of news that are zine-specific, but I’ll be doing all my lazy, unfocused BS writing here from now on. I just can’t populate two web sites, a 20,000 word quarterly zine issue, short stories and novels any more. I AM NOT A YOUNG MAN ANYMORE.

The column I used to write for the TIS web site was called More Shit I Gotta Do. It’s theme was. . .all the shit I have to do on a daily basis. For those who have not been following my writing career, I am a lazy, lazy man, and my ideal existence would be sitting on a bean-bag chair with a laptop balanced on my belly, having tumblers of whisky brought to me by trained Helper Monkeys. Every day where I have to actually perform tasks is torture, and so just about anything can be the subject of a column. Had to buy groceries? That’s a column. Had to leave the house once this month? That’s a column. It’s genius.

I think I’ll start posting those here. Probably not too often, and I won’t mock the universe by proposing a schedule. But they’ll start popping up here, just wait and see.

Or, as most of you appear to be doing, ignore my blog completely and make fun of me in private forums.

L
J

6 Comments

  1. Craig

    I was pretty excited about the Eternal Prison before the changes… so I’m even more excited about the additional pages. Uh, you aren’t gonna raise the price are ya? [If so, maybe you are indeed a genius!]

  2. akabrady

    I knew more unicorn was the way to go! *rubs hands together*

    Of course, how you’re going to manage arming unicorns with gatling guns, body armor, mass displacement fields, and make it all coordinate with a snazzy uniform, is beyond me.

  3. jsomers (Post author)

    CRaig,

    Hmmn..tell you what: tell me the maximum you’d spend on a book, and that’s the price. On second thought: How much do you have in your wallet right now?

    akabrady:

    “Of course, how you’re going to manage arming unicorns with gatling guns, body armor, mass displacement fields, and make it all coordinate with a snazzy uniform, is beyond me.”

    That’s why I’m the genius here, damn your eyes.

    And the secret to any endeavor is a snazzy uniform. You should see my Writing Uniform. The epaulettes! They are breathtaking!

    J

  4. Craig

    Ah-ha! Done deal, baby. I have a five and two ones in my wallet. Yeah, with two sons in college I’m not exactly rolling in it… but I do have central air conditioning!

  5. iPhone Beeyotch!

    Your site looks terrible on my iPhone. Fix it. I’ll wait.

  6. jsomers (Post author)

    Mr. Beeyotch,

    I despise you, corporate lackey! This site looks fine on Lynx. That’s all that matters.

    J

Comments are closed.