Life Lessons
I am old, and have gained wisdom through the years, so I thought I’d give back to the world by distilling my wisdom into tiny video nuggets you can use to edumacate the world:
Booya.
Author Archive: jsomers
Jeff Somers (www.jeffreysomers.com) was born in Jersey City, New Jersey and regrets nothing. He is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series published by Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket Books. He sold his first novel at age 16 to a tiny publisher in California which quickly went out of business and has spent the last two decades assuring potential publishers that this was a coincidence. Jeff publishes a zine called The Inner Swine and has also published a few dozen short stories; his story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight, published by Berkley Hardcover and edited by Charlaine Harris. His guitar playing is a plague upon his household and his lovely wife The Duchess is convinced he would wither and die if left to his own devices.
The Sex Scene in “Lifers”
On the insane assumption that any one cares, I thought I’d tell the story of the sex scene in Lifers, my first published novel.
It wasn’t in the draft submitted to the publisher (a cold submission, with no agent, pure slush to a tiny publishing company), which is amazing, because the final, published word count for Lifers was 39,616. Thirty-nine thousand words. This barely qualifies as a novella, much less a novel. So the fact is, the book was even shorter when I originally submitted it. The fact also is, I am a lazy, lazy man. If I ever become supersuper famous and powerful as an author, expect my novels to start being about 5,000 words long and written in bullet-point fashion, in huge 24pt type. Or possibly expect to be contacted by my people to write some novels for me, which might be better, if slightly more expensive.
But I digress.
When the publisher contacted me about buying the book, they were looking at it from a “Gen-X” point of view. For those of us too young to be Gen-X, this was back when being a twenty-something in the 1990s meant you were automatically a desirable market. As opposed to being middle-aged in the 2010s and realizing no one wants to sell you anything. YOU BASTARDS! MARKET YOUR AWFUL ENERGY DRINKS TO MEEEEEEEEE!!!
When I spoke to the editor on the phone about the book, he told me he thought the only thing the story needed was, in a word, sex. This was his sole editorial note. Looking back, this should have been some sort of warning sign for me.
Anyways, I was delighted with the offer to publish, of course. They were offering me $1000 as an advance, which in 1999 dollars was actually like $1003 today, and as a percentage of my gross annual income was about 75%. So, yeah, I was excited. Do you know how many packages of Ramen Noodles you can buy for $1000? LOTS.
I thus took his sexy suggestion seriously, though I wrestled with it for a bit. After all, I’d never been seriously edited before, and was generally convinced of my innate genius. The book was perfect! This clashed with my desire for the immense riches my debut novel was sure to generate for me (HA!), so I decided I would read the book over, see if there was a place for such a scene, and if so, write it. Then I could decide if I’d just ruined a perfect story, or improved it, or maybe just left it neutral.
In the end, I wrote a scene wherein the narrator has a one-night stand. It’s ridiculous and humiliating in that he’s almost not a voluntary player in it, and I ended up liking the scene a lot, as it speaks to the character a bit and it’s also one of the few scenes in the book where the narrator is apart from the other main characters. It ended up being a good addition to the story, though I don’t give that much credit to the editor at my publisher, who, I don’t think, even read the new manuscript when I turned it in. For him, he just wanted some sex in the story because young people like sex. End of story.
Of course, I was not put on this world in order to write erotica. Believe me – please! – this is not my purpose in life. We should all, in fact, take a moment to bow our heads and offer a moment of thanks that I have not been asked to repeat this experiment.
The lesson there, if there is one, is that any feedback or revision to a story has the possibility of improving the story. It doesn’t matter what the genesis of the note is. All that matters is what you do with it. That and that you can, apparently, sell a 40,000-word “novel” without an agent, a clue, or any clear idea of what a contract means. Incompetence, ho! And also, too, writing a sex scene involving stuffed animals, shame, and painful regret is not, apparently, sexy. At all. Or so I’ve been told.
Lifers is now available for $0.99 on Kindle and Nook, by the way. Just sayin’.
The New Style
Friends, I like me some Mad Men. It’s one of the many television shows I ignored at first, smug in my resistance to marketing and hype, then watched in a marathon On Demand a few months after the first season ended, initially out of bored curiosity, then out of sincere excitement. It is an excellent show, written well and delivering subtle pleasures so consistently it’s hard to remember that the show is written and acted, and not just naturally generated from imagination, sunlight, and liquor.
Full disclosure: The show’s love affair with whiskey usually inspires me to drink a fifth of Rye during every episode, so my opinion of the show is … colored.
Anyways, I just watched episode “Lady Lazarus”, which I won’t bother summing up here because, why would I do that? Go watch it, you lazy bastards. Or find the eleventy-billion recaps out there waiting for your greedy eyes. This obsession with recapping the plots of TV episodes has got to stop. You know what’s really interesting about this episode? The fact that every single review or write-up about the episode I’ve seen mentions how much they paid to license Tomorrow Never Knows by The Beatles for it ($250,000).
Now, I’m a huge fan of Tomorrow Never Knows. It is a kick-ass song and is on a short list of songs that I think should never be seriously covered or re-imagined, because it is pretty much Awesome in musical form. And I think it was used wisely in the show, demonstrating to us that Don is not young and hip any more, and then demonstrating to us that he has no interest in being so any more. It’s important, I think, because Don is forty years old. In today’s age, forty is not so old any more. Forty year-old men today can be found at the same rock concerts as their kids. But back in 1966, friends, forty was fucking old. I’m sure there were some hip forty year-olds, but Don is certainly not one of them, and they used this song as a perfect way to demonstrate that: First of all, he can’t even tell a Beatles song from some horrible knock-off, and secondly, when he does give it a listen, he switches it off after a minute, disinterested.
All well and good, but for so many people, the big news was that they paid the whopping quarter-of-a-million bucks to use the song. Which is a lot of money. But why do we care so much? In today’s media-saturated world, it’s not so much that we’re so used to looking behind the curtain, there is no goddamn curtain any more.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It’s just interesting. Writers and other creative folks making these books and shows and movies are basically flim-flam artists. We fool you, we con you. We make you feel for imaginary people. We get you outraged at imagined atrocities. We trick you, over and over again. So it’s disturbing to realize how many tricks are no longer, strictly speaking, tricks any more, since y’all seem to know all about them.
It’s a challenging time. You know how you read books or see TV shows from 50 years ago, and they seem kind of simplistic and dumb and you know how they’re going to end like on page 2? Yup, because the audience is smarter now. Not in a general-IQ kind of way. In a media way. The tricks don’t work as well as they used to. These days, you buy a license to use a famous pop song from the ’60s and not only does everyone comment on your choice of music and what it means to the narrative, they also know exactly how the business works. They know you have to pay for that song, they know the song is expensive because of who wrote it, and they kow that as a result it was chosen very carefully.
I mean: Fuck. Where’s the mystery?
Of course, in a novel I can reference songs all I want, as long as I don’t print the lyrics. Titles can’t be copyrighted, so I can have my narrator cue as many damn songs as I like and hope the reader just hums along. Assuming they know the song. If they don’t, it goes awry – although, in the age of Spotify, that really isn’t a problem. In fact, if you’re writing a novel with a lot of song references, why not put together a playlist and be all 21st century and shit? Why not. Your readers will figure it out anyway.
JEFF SOMERS WANTS TO BE THE POET LAUREATE OF HOBOKEN, NJ.
Dear People of Hoboken,
As one of Hoboken’s literati, I have been scanning the pages of the local papers for my name on what can only be described as an obsessive basis.. Unfortunately, there have been no mentions of me. This distresses me. Although I am sure the local Hoboken papers are not causing me this distress on purpose, it remains a fact that the Hoboken free press teased me with a week of interest in my existence and then, just when I thought they were serious, dropped me like a hot potato for the next “flavor of the week“. I think you people owe me something, especially when you consider how much money I spend in the local bars, which is a lot, unless I can convince someone else to buy me drinks. Which isn’t easy when your face isn’t on the front page of the local newspapers, dig? So we come back to the central point: how can the Good People of Hoboken help a guy out and get him some free cocktails?
I have also noted, in a not-totally-unrelated-although-it-might-seem-so-at-first matter, that Hoboken does not seem to have a Poet Laureate. This really stuns me, as most class-act municipalities and nations have one. I had to go look up who the Poet Laureate of the United States is, and it’s Philip Levine, which is startling because, when you think about it, everyone’s first reaction to that is probably “Who in the world is Philip Levine?” I’m kidding, of course. I know who he is. A man who has not left a college campus in almost his entire life, and probably has forgotten what other human beings look like. Likely Mr. Levine peers out from his darkened lair with his fishbelly pale eyes stinging from the direct sunlight, and then he composes haunting poetry about how he hates all the Normals who mock his Phantom of the College existence, which he then mails off to the President. Who doesn’t read them.
Which brings me back to my point: I would like to be named Poet Laureate of Hoboken. There are many reasons for this. One, I would be a lot more charismatic and interesting to talk to (especially over a few gratis rounds of Killian’s Irish Red at, say, Stinky Sullivans, on you) than a freakish shadow-monster like the Poet Laureate of the United States. Two, I live in Hoboken and am the first person, apparently, to think of the idea. Three, I have crippling bar debts that threaten to force me into sobriety, and I could really use some sort of stipend from the government. Four, I think it would be very cool if I could introduce myself at parties by whipping out a striking business card that read, simply, JEFF SOMERS, POET LAUREATE OF HOBOKEN. Finally, I have actually written poetry, and while none of it specifically mentions Hoboken, quite a few deal with the horrors of hangovers, and that could arguably be symbolic of Hoboken. Here’s a sample Haiku:
“A DTs morning,
rats in red smoking jackets!
why do you mock me?”
I would appreciate the Good People of Hoboken‘s help in bringing the “Somers for Poet Laureate” movement to the attention of our mayor, whoever that is, and the other illuminati who run this city. Thank you.
The Futility of Writing
The following originally appear in The Inner Swine, Volume 11, Issue 4.
until drops of blood form on your forehead
The Futility of Writing
Brain Surgeon. No, really.
PIGS, when I was but a wee little one in Jersey City, before the standing-on-a-corner-drinking-blackberry-brandy period, I wanted to be a brain surgeon. The reasons for this desire are now obscure; possibly it had something to do with The Six Million Dollar Man. Possibly it was simply an easy answer to the endless questioning by tiresome adults about my career plans—adults were always asking us kids what the fuck we wanted to be when we grew up, and Brain Surgeon was a good response as it got a lot of grins and impressed gestures from the questioner. I coasted along with the whole Brain Surgeon thing for a few years, probably giving my poor parents—who probably hoped I’d magically evolve into some sort of athletic prodigy and earn scholarships to pay for school—a lot of sleepless nights as they contemplated the roughly 55 years of medical school such a profession requires.
Of course, I didn’t really want to be a brain surgeon. The only ‘profession’ I’ve ever desired is Writer, and as every writer in the world knows, the ‘profession’ of Writer is similar to the ‘profession’ of Sorcerer: Very cool sounding but usually only existing in movies and fantasy stories. Because no one makes any money at writing, ever, so it isn’t really a profession. But when I was six I didn’t realize writing was something I might someday palm off as a profession while standing on line for my food stamps, so Brain Surgeon it was.
And then, some time around grade three, I began to slowly realize that in order to become a Brain Surgeon, I was going to have to master math. Shortly after that came the aforementioned standing-on-a-corner-drinking-blackberry-brandy period, and that was the last I thought about a career until I was twenty-two, waking from a lengthy alcoholic haze and realizing I needed a job, and right quick. And also too a change of clothes and a bath.
Somewhere in between, I sold my first novel, White Rabbit.
Mission Impossible 2
In Which Tom Cruise Appears to Grin Mischievously for 2 Hours Straight.
AWESOME
I had dinner with fellow author Dan Krokos the other night. As usual, dinner with Dan always ends in horror, hangover, and humiliation. This time the horror, as it so often does, came courtesy of Tom Cruise. Dan insisted that Mission Impossible 2 was a good – nay! Great! – movie, and resisted all attempts to talk sense to him. I haven’t seen MI2 since it came out in theaters in 2000. As with just about everything else from 2000, I have very little memory of it. Just a vague sense of the ridiculous, lingering shots of fire and doves and the long-haired version of Tom The Cruise which we have all tried to forget so very hard.
So, being a basically fair and decent human being, I offered to re-watch MI2 and write a little something about it, good or bad. To see if perhaps my memories of it were skewed, if it was a better movie than I remember. To be frank, it’s a little difficult to get past Tom Cruise’s hair. WHY IS IT SO LONG AND GIRLISH?
And, to be honest it isn’t as terrible as I remember. There’s a decent action movie buried in there. It’s just suffering from Attempted Awesome Failure. There are soooo many things in this movie that are just ridiculous. If you take one second to think about aspects of the plot or the action sequences, they start to fall apart, even though the basic premise of the movie isn’t a bad one.
This is a movie, after all, that is guilty of a plethora of style-obsessed sins. Everybody taps at their keyboards when “hacking”! Every action scene has extended slow-motion takes, often repeated as if the film editor had some sort of nervous tic (so we can marvel at teh AWESOMENESS over and over, I suppose)! The ridiculous MI masks that make you look exactly like someone else, right down to sweat level and beard growth, are used so often it’s actually a comic effect by the end. Those masks were super dumb in the series, in the first movie, and forever. This movie uses them as plot points no less than three times. Maybe more. There was some flicker-related epilepsy while watching this movie.
On a larger scale, sense is sacrificed on the altar of AWESOME a few times as well. There’s a scene towards the end when Ethan Hunt has to break into a secure office building in order to destroy the horrible virus. It’s an awful scene, because Woo keeps cutting between the Bad Guy, who is predicting exactly what Hunt will do, and Hunt actually doing it, and it plods. Now, to show that the Bad Guy, a former IMF agent, is smart and knows Hunt well enough to predict his moves isn’t a bad plot idea, but the scene is so badly edited we keep stopping in our tracks for the Bad Guy to tell us what we’re about to see. Jebus.
And then, despite predicting exactly what his enemy will do … the Bad Guy allows him to do it anyway.
And then, when Hunt is attempting to break into the building by diving into an airshaft his teammates are trying to open for him, he dives before they have actually opened the airshaft, for no apparent reason.
And then, once inside, hunt moves with an elephantine slowness while trying to destroy every trace of a horrible virus that could kill everyone in the world. He moves like he’s wading through Jello, which Woo apparently thinks escalates the drama.
And then, in order to get a momentary advantage after being pinned down by the Bad Guys, Hunt sets off several powerful explosions in a laboratory that houses deadly viruses. My god, he just killed us all and we won’t even know it for a few weeks.
This sequence alone should have killed this film series.
The ending, of course, gets a lot of negative attention, but really isn’t the worst thing about the movie. Sure, there’s a lot of unnecessary slow motion. And pigeons, because doves would have been ridiculous somehow. And fire. And motorcycles. And yes, that final kick where Ethan Hunt, like Neo in The Matrix, learns how to manipulate the fundamental laws of physics and somehow kick a gun out of the sand into the air so he can catch it and shoot the Bad Guy a few times.
For that kick alone, John Woo should be mocked wherever he goes. It’s the sort of move little kids make up when playing cops and robbers: Now I kick the gun into the air and catch it!
So: Mission Impossible 2: Not a good movie, but you can see the decent movie it’s hiding under its bloated, awful carcass, I think. Something tells me there’s a good script version 1.0 somewhere, ruined by several layers of AWESOMEING. Which is now a word, for truth.
OBEY PIERRE
Busy Weekend
Jeesh. I am right now as I type this sitting in an Au Bon Pain in New Brunswick, on College Avenue. Where I attended college, actually, though my memories of this period of my life, as with any period of my life, are vague. I wandered about a bit thinking, ah, yes, I have stood in this spot before, but that’s about as far as my creaking old brain goes. College Years Jeff might as well be some other person.
IN fact, this Au Bon Pain wasn’t here when I attended school. I am outraged that the universe evolves without my direct participation.
I’m here because The Duchess is running a half marathon. Yesterday, we got up early and drove down here to pick up her bib, and it was frustrating because there were absolutely no signs anywhere telling you where to go, and my memories of Busch Campus are as vague as my memories of everything else, resulting in us driving around for a while while I frowned and mumbled things like “Ah, I think I went to a party in those apartments once …”
For the record, The Duchess does not care where I went to a party once.
So, we ran late in getting the race bib, and then had to race into Manhattan to participate in “The Future: What Does It Mean” event sponsored by Asis&t Metro. Fellow author David Louis Edelman and I had been tapped as Science Fiction authors to declaim on our vision of the future and information technology and such. It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed David’s presentation and the conversation that ensued, despite arriving in a flurry of harried incompetence, having forgotten all my notes, books, and other items in my rush to get there on time.
David Louis Edelman impressed me, and I’m really looking forward to reading his books, and so should you. For serious.
Then, The Duchess and I had to rush back to Jersey to attend a dinner that had been in the works for a few weeks which we also barely managed to make on time. And then, drunk and full, I went home and to bed. Which means subjectively, yesterday took about three minutes to elapse.
And now I’m back in New Brunswick, having dropped The Duchess off, sitting in Au Bon Pain waiting for her to finish the race. This weekend didn’t even happen, from my point of view.
Jeff in the Wild
Guess what? I’ll be here blathering on about the future and such on Saturday:
http://www.facebook.com/events/309056385827702/
WHAT: The Future, What Does it Mean? (sponsored by Asis&t metro)
WHERE: Hotel Pennsylvania, New York, 401 7th Avenue, 33rd Street, New York, NY 10001
WHEN: Saturday, 4/21, 2pm – 5pm
I’ll be there with fellow author David Louis Edelman (Infoquake, MultiReal, Geosynchron), and others to discuss “the information landscape of the future and the skills required to navigate this rapidly changing terrain.” I can only assume I was invited to be the comedy relief.
Ask Jeff Anything 4-18-12
Hola! A new Ask Jeff Anything, by the gods:
For the record: The Duchess is lovely and amazing, and I am a lucky, lucky man.