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.

Ask Me if I Have a God Complex

Author: May 6, 2011 6 Comments

“You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God.” – Alec Baldwin as Dr. Jed Hill, “Malice“.

I was chatting with another author about a work-in-progress the other night. This is unusual in that I a) dislike people and b) dislike other authors almost on sight, as a rule. Well, dislike is the wrong word; there are actually quite a number of other writers I like just fine, and a few I even enjoy. Don’t tell them, or they’ll start expecting me to pick up bar tabs.

Anyways, this writer – we’ll call him Mr. Bean – was asking me my opinion of the ending of his work-in-progress, which amounted to what I like to call a Titanic Ending: You’re tired of writing the damn story, so you just steer for an iceberg and let it sink. I told him so, and after an awkward pause he confessed he had another idea for the ending. He told it to me, and it was so much better I physically assaulted him. After we convinced the waitresses at Stinky Sullivan’s in Hoboken to release us and promised to pay for the broken table, I bought Mr. Bean another whiskey and asked why he was not going with the clearly superior ending, which had actually been his original intention.

He said it was a simple matter of mechanics: Earlier events in the story had precluded the ending, made it impossible.

So, I hit him again. Don’t writers realize they are gods in their own universes?

You can do anything in your story. Halfway through a historical novel set in Edwardian England you can have aliens show up and start melting brains. If you’re writing a locked room mystery, you can go back to chapter 1 and insert the innocuous clue that makes everything fall into place. Jebus, within the confines of your story you can make anything work. It’s like the Reverse Chekov’s Gun Principle: If suddenly realize you need a gun to go off by the end of your story, go back to chapter 1 and put in a damn gun.

It is surprising how many writers don’t seem to realize this. You are writing fiction. You are, in scientific terms, making shit up. If a detail you invented earlier doesn’t work, go back and change it.

Unless you are, as I notably am, lazy. My biggest dread when routing a new novel is the terrible Logic Revision, wherein someone notes either a major flaw in logic (e.g., “How come the hero didn’t just use his magic flying shoes to escape the prison?”) or introduces a brilliant suggestion that makes my storytelling seem like the work of drunken moron. Er, more like the work of a drunken moron. Shut up. These sorts of suggestions require major surgery, months and months of chaotic, confusing revision that sees me trying to salvage as much of my previous work as possible, papering over problems with paragraphs of new text, and sleepless nights until I finally realize I’ve made a mess of it, burn the manuscript in a drunken revel, and then burst into tears when I remember that this is 2011 and burning the manuscript doesn’t do anything except set off the fire alarm and summon my wife The Duchess, who then hides all my whiskey bottles.

However, when I wake up hungover and bleary the next day, I always realize that I am, after all, god in this little written world. I go back and start over. And I can always make it work, because I can change the fundamental truths about my world. I can make things appear and disappear. I can change the history of a character. I can introduce new people who never existed before and delete others from the world so thoroughly they are burned out of the pattern, so to speak. The dreaded Logic Revision hurts, but it isn’t anything that can’t be accomplished with some concentration and hard work. Any writer who retreats from a good Logic Revision deserves to have their novel sit in a metaphorical drawer, never to be read.

The ancillary rule to this is simple: The less you want to do the revision, the better the revision probably is. When I get feedback and my reaction to suggested revisions is a shrug and a vague determination to, sure, why not, do it someday, then that revision is probably just polishing the silver. If my reaction is to drop to my knees and scream out a good old fashioned do not want to the universe, chances are the suggested change is going to make me famous when I win some sort of book award. If I wrote the sort of books that won book awards, instead of just jealous emails from other writers at 3AM. You’re all jealous. I can feel it.

Someday, when I am rich and powerful I will force the publishing overlords to publish my novels straight from my zero-draft file. All logic gaps and misspelled words will be “poetic license”. Even if I’ve combined two completely unrelated stories via the simple technique of pasting one file onto the end of the other, they will print it! Oh, the day will come, my friends. Until then, I revise, and I am god.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Old Man Bars

Author: April 29, 2011 8 Comments

Kids, here’s an essay that originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of The Inner Swine

OLD MAN BARS
Are My Eventual Destination
A World Ignorant of Booze
by Jeff Somers

PIGS, here’s a horrifying scenario: I meet some friends at a local restaurant for drinks. Not a place of my choosing, because despite my best efforts I have not yet been able to bend people to my will simply by focusing my thoughts on them, though research continues. The waitress comes for drink orders and the following exchange occurs:

WAITRESS: What’ll it be, folks?
ME: What whiskeys do you have back there?
WAITRESS: Uh. . .some. . .uh. . .we have. . .er, bottles.
ME: <sighing> Johnny Walker Black, neat.

I’ve come to recognize the sort of fear and blank-minded panic on the faces of waiters, waitresses, and bartenders when I inquire about their booze selections that indicates they either have no idea what’s back there or that there’s not much back there to begin with. Whenever I spot this sort of panic, I immediately give up my quest for single-malt goodness because it will only end in tears, and fall back on either Johnny Walker or Jack Daniels, because there isn’t a bar in the fucking world that doesn’t have those.

Now, there’s nothing really wrong with Johnny Walker. As blended whiskeys go, it’s a fine dram and I can always get by on it. But it has come to represent defeat to me, because I know there are bars, at least in New York City, where you can stroll in and order just about any decent whiskey you can think of and it will be brought to you, posthaste. Having been in such heavenly places, it is always a difficult transition to regular bars, where most people drink wine or beer or mixed drinks, and if they do go for an unadulterated spirit it’s blended Scotch or American Bourbon.

Again, nothing wrong with good old American Bourbon. I like quite a bit of it. But I feel handcuffed in such situations, because, goddammit, I want what I want.

(more…)

Bullshit, The Inner Swine

Ancient Book Reviews

Author: April 15, 2011 10 Comments

Master of the Five MagicsKids, I’m a guy who has a lot of random thoughts on a daily basis. Most of these thoughts aren’t worth indulging; ask my wife The Duchess about it and she’ll launch into a lengthy tale about how I am always suggesting we train our four cats to do circus tricks and then travel the country in a van giving performances, eventually ending up America’s Got Talent and winning it all! So you see I’ve learned over time to ignore most of the things I think of. I could follow the route a lot of people have chosen and tweet my random thoughts, but I suspect that would just erode whatever reputation I still have.

Recently, though, I’ve been thinking about all the books I own. I own a lot of books. A lot. Maybe it’s not a record or anything, but I’ve got a house full of books. I never throw a book away, so I have what amounts to a record of every book I’ve ever read. I even have novels bought for college classes. I have everything. So sometimes I walk around the house inspecting the dusty bookshelves and pondering the books I’ve read. Not the important, classic ones, or even the ones that changed my life. No, I contemplate the forgotten ones. Ones I read when I was 14 and haven’t touched since. Ones I read and literally cannot remember anything about. Books by authors who have disappeared off the face of history.

I suppose part of it is morbid fascination: I am now an author of mass market paperbacks, so trolling my cache of MM paperbacks that are now completely forgotten is … morbidly fascinating.

Anyways, I thought I’d start writing about some of these forgotten books. I won’t re-read them; part of what I’ll write about is whether or not the book made sufficient impression on me to still remember decades later. These will mostly concern SF/F novels from the 1980s, actually, which was when I was reading at a pace of about two books a week and just consuming mass market fiction like crack. When I hit college I slowed down, got all fancy, and started reading classics.

Our first book will be Lyndon Hardy’s Master of the Five Magics. More accurately, it’ll be the trilogy Hardy wrote, including the sequel Secret of the Sixth Magic and the finale Riddle of the Seven Realms.

Now, the point of these Ancient Book Reviews will not be an in-depth analysis, but rather whether I remember anything at all about them. That’s what I find interesting here. 25 years ago I was willing to part with what was then a significant percentage of my cash flow in order to buy these books. I then read them and kept them, hauling from apartment to apartment to house, and still have them. Do I actually remember anything?

What I remember about Master of the Five Magics to this day is the system of magic Hardy created. It’s strikingly elegant. Hardy imagines Five types of magic, each with its own guild, its own rules, and its own paraphernalia: Thaumaturgy, Alchemy, Magic, Sorcery, and Wizardry. What makes the system memorable is that each discipline has its own set of rules. For example, the rules for Wizardry, which is the magical discipline concerned with summoning demons, are The Law of Ubiquity (Flame permeates all) and The Law of Dichotomy (Dominance or submission). In other words, you can summon demons through fire (fires built from different fuels will summon different or more powerful demons) and once a demon is summoned, the Wizard must either dominate the demon’s will , or be dominated instead. Simple and elegant.

Twenty-five years after reading the books, I still remember that system of magic even though a lot of the plot and character details have left my memory. Of course, the books are right upstairs and I could re-read them any time I want, and I just might, someday. Right now though, the interesting part is what I remember.

The other aspect of the books that I do recall is the basic structure of the plot: The main character keeps apprenticing in the different magical disciplines but keeps having to leave one and move on to another without achieving any sort of renown – but by the end of the book, he’s the only person in the world who has studied all five magical disciplines, making him one of the most powerful people in history, the Archimage. The progression of the story is subtle enough (if I’m remembering correctly) that this makes sense even though the protagonist’s powerlessness in the world is established in the beginning.

Considering how poor my memory is, that ain’t bad. I mean, I can’t tell you what I did yesterday, much less what I did 25 years ago, so remembering anything about a book two-and-a-half decades later is pretty impressive. I don’t think Lyndon Hardy ever published another novel, which is a shame; if anyone knows of more Hardy novels out there, send me a note!

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Interview with Sean Ferrell

Author: April 14, 2011 6 Comments

Numb by Sean FerrellBecause he keeps showing up at my house with a boom-box and reenacting the scene from Say Anything, I finally gave in and spent some time with author Sean Ferrell, whose first novel Numb was published by Harper last year and whose second novel is about to be announced. The resulting evening was recorded for my own security, and I decided to turn those tapes into an interview for the KGB lit magazine. Boiling 18 hours of binge drinking and forbidden dancing into a 1000-word interview wasn’t easy, but I am, after all, a genius.

Go read Under the Umbrella here. GO NOW.

More Shit I Gotta Do, Someone Else's Writing