Ramblings of Jeff Somers, author
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.
Yea, verily, despite the growing disinterest all over the world WRT my epic song writing skilz, here are, once again, some songs I made. Me, a guitar or two, and some software. I’m living in the future!
Herewith:
Song393
Song395
Song400
Song401
Song404
Song407
Song408
Song409
The usual disclaimer: 1. I admit these are not great music; 2. I claim copyright anyway, so there; 3. No, I cannot do anything about the general quality of the mix, as I am incompetent.
Here is an actual conversation:
DUCHESS: For my birthday, I’d like to travel somewhere for a little vacation.
ME: <incoherent weeping>
DUCHESS: Man up, weepy boy—we’re going.
This happens more than would be tolerable in my life if not for liquor’s sweet, forgetful embrace, and it never gets easier. My wife likes to travel, and I do not. This means we travel on a regular basis. Now, if you were to ask The Duchess if we traveled a lot, she’d laugh sarcastically and possibly harm you in some minor physical way. If you ask me, we travel far too much. Objectively, I find myself on an airplane about twice a year, heading somewhere I do not want to go (which is everywhere, because travel sucks). One of these trips is usually the annual pilgrimage to Texas to visit with my wife’s family, which is non-negotiable, and the other is generally a brief vacation-type trip that The Duchess plans for us. I always greet the news with weeping, and she always sedates me before dragging me to the airport because of my childish behavior when a trip is in the offing.
I know my wife is physically stronger than me, you see, so I have learned to resort to childish tantrums in order to try and hold down the number of loathsome planes I have to get on in a year. I’ll never avoid traveling altogether, I know, but The Duchess is like a river breaking through a dam. If you don’t do something, you’re going to get washed away. At least if you plug up some holes and make a go of it you can reduce your damage.
So, when she announced that she had a bizarre desire to go to Las Vegas, I sighed wearily, did my weeping, and then resigned myself to the trip. We had enough frequent flyer miles or something to fly first-class for free, and The Duchess tried to sweeten my reaction to the trip by reminding me, constantly, that you get to drink cocktails for free in first class.
Someday we will examine the fact that everyone in my life tries to make me do stuff by offering me free booze, but let’s not go there yet.
It occurs to me that it’s been 10 years, more or less, since my first novel, Lifers, was published. Originally written in 1997, Lifers is the sordid tale of three young men who plot to rob the office where one of them works, more as a rebellion against settling into maturity than anything else. It’s not a very long novel. It doesn’t have a happy ending, really, though there’s no tragedy in it. I didn’t have an agent back in 1999 when I started shopping the book, so I went through The Writer’s Market and just mailed a query and/or samples to any publisher who would look at an unsolicited submission.
I heard back from an outfit called Creative Arts Books out in California, a small press. They sent me your standard subsidy-publishing ambush. Nowhere in their listings did they call themselves a subsidy/vanity publisher (and I believe for a long time prior they actually had been a traditional small press), but suddenly they were offering to “publish” my book for a fee. Despite being young and agentless, even I was not stupid enough to fall for that. This was actually the third time I’d been ambushed by subsidy publishers – twice before I’d sent a query off to a company that made no mention of vanity publishing, only to get what I’ve come to call the “In These Difficult Economic Times” letter, where they claim that it is no longer possible for a small press to publish new authors unless the author is willing to pony up part of the printing costs of the book. Sometimes they offer you a bigger royalty as a carrot in this deal, but the fact is once you pay for the printing of the book they’ve actually already made a profit off of you, and therefore have very little reason to market or even distribute your novel.
So, I told Creative Arts to fuck off. No, really, I did. I wrote them a letter back saying fuck off, burn the manuscript, you suck.
Yea, verily: I have the best readers/friends in the world. Received today in my PO Box, a venerable Hoboken Baseball T-Shirt:
Huzzah! To me.
Well, it’s June, which means it’s just a few short weeks until the official release of #5 in the Cates series, The Final Evolution. Over in the U.K., we have our first review of the book over at The Bookbag:
“. . . when Cates is proven to be the one man to save the world, we find it suitably meaty, and gripping, despite that old saw – and it’s a rich nightmare of post-apocalypse for him to be saving, as well . . . Somers is an author of some powerful genre talents.”
Huzzah! We are a genius.
I also note the book is listed on IO9’s “Your Ultimate Survival Guide to June’s Science Fiction and Fantasy” calendar, although they are under the impression the title is The Final Evilution. What’s with people getting the title of this book hilariously wrong?
Anyways: Go forth and pre-order, or I will mail a monkey to your house. Which mail not sound like much of a threat, but that’s only because you’ve never opened a badly ventilated box containing a really hungry, pissed-off monkey.
When working on a book trailer for The Final Evolution, I had a lot of great ideas that were cruelly shunned by my Corporate Masters. As a result the official trailer is quite somber and serious. Fantastic, of course, but somber. And serious.
I saw no reason to trash all of my insanely great ideas for another trailer go to waste. So, featuring booze, pantslessness, and profanity, here is
B A M !
THERE is a certain smoothing mechanism to marriage, or at least there is when you enter into it as a lazy, somewhat grooming-challenged and disorganized person like me.
The phenomenon is difficult to explain but is undeniable — a lot of us go into marriage sweaty, disdainful of society’s norms, and somewhat unhygienic, only to emerge on the other side looking like a movie star. Or at least closer to looking like a movie star than you ever looked before by an order of magnitude. Gaining a spouse often means gaining other things as well, especially since opposites do tend, in general, to attract. So some people will gain an accountant, some will gain a butler or chambermaid, and some will gain a stylist.
Sure, sometimes this is disagreeable and amounts to being remade in your spouse’s image of who they’d meant to marry before you threw yourself bodily at them and conned them to the altar through a mixture of booze, charm, and Jedi Mind Tricks. More often, however, this is a beneficial situation, this smoothing, and usually involves a trade of skills. In my case, my wife provides to me a general smoothing — the skill set of a stylist, really. Not every day, or even on a regular basis — only when a public appearance is required.
In short, she makes sure that whenever we have an important event to attend I emerge from the house looking vaguely sane and prosperous, instead of the deranged hobo look I usually employ. After all, who can be bothered to actually find clean clothes every day, or shave on a regular basis, or not be drunk by 10 AM every day? not me, boyo — I’m not fancy-pants movie star. But because I have gained a wife, a few times a year I get to live like a movie star. Assuming movie stars are also menaced from room to room of their apartment by their stick-bearing wives who threaten all sorts of terrible things if they don’t clean up their acts right quick.
Thankfully, this only happens a few times a year and is probably good for me. But it does beg the question: Is this just a difference of opinion concerning my personal style (me: sublime; The Duchess: stunted, insofar as it is thought to actually exist), or am I being made incompetent?
Just in the post this morning, the UK version of The Final Evolution:
BAM!
Once again back is the incredible, rhyme animal, the young cannibal, me: With another brief, somewhat entertaining video:
Enjoy!
by Margaret Atwood
This Is a Photograph of Me
It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;
then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.
In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.
(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.
I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion
but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)