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 Inner Swine on Kindle

Author: March 10, 2011 4 Comments

The Inner Swine Volume 16, Winter 2010I’ve been putting out my zine The Inner Swine for 15-17 years, depending on whether you count its inception from the date my original collaborators and I got together to discuss putting out a magazine or the actual release of issue one, by which time I’d taken over the magazine all by myself. I’m closing in on issue 60.

Over the years I’ve released plenty of Inner Swine material electronically, mostly for free. PDFs of just about every issue are up on the zine’s web site for free download, and plain-text files of some issues are also there. I still do a print run of each issue for a mailing list of subscribers and traders. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking that a formal digital edition of the zine might be a good idea. So I finally sobered up for a day and created a Kindle Edition of the latest issue (Volume 16, Issue 3/4, Winter 2010) and put it up for sale on Amazon for $0.99. NINETY-NINE CENTS! Yowza.

The Kindle edition doesn’t have any images in it, because a) images on the Kindle are a pain in the ass and b) some of the images that make it into the zine are not, shall we say, vetted by my copyright lawyers. It’s a zine, after all. The copyright lawyers for my zine are a tiny leprechaun who sits on my shoulder and sings sea shanties into my ear all day and my cat Spartacus, who uses a thick book of copyright law as a scratching post. The Kindle Edition also has no advertisements in it. It’s just the text, baby. Other than that, it’s exactly the same: Every word that’s in the print edition is in the Kindle edition. It’s ~45,000 words, which is novella-sized.

Right now it’s set up as a standalone publication, not a series or periodical. There’s no DRM and it’s set to allow lending. I’m learning this as I go, so if you do grab a copy, all feedback is gratefully accepted. Let me know if I can improve the formatting or do anything else to make it a better product.

Thanks! Remember, I’ll make $0.35 cents on every issue. THIRTY-FIVE CENTS! Every five issues sold buys me a bottle of Thunderbird with change back!

More Shit I Gotta Do, The Inner Swine, Writing

The Whirligig 3-9

Author: March 7, 2011 0 Comments

The Whirligig!As y’all know, I’ve put out a gruesome, home-brewed perzine called The Inner Swine lo these many years. Why? No one knows, actually, but I continue to do so. Back in The Day, putting out a zine was a Thing People Did, believe it or not. There were many of us across the globe. Another zine was called The Whirligig, which was more of a literary zine instead of a zine where I just wrote about whatever was annoying me that day and called it art.

The Whirligig had some sass and published a couple of my stories. Then the original editor, Frank Marcopolos, sold the zine to another editor, who so far has put out one issue (and also published one of my stories!). Frank recently collected issues 3-9 of his old zine into an eBook and offered it up for sale:

http://frankmarcopolos.com/whirligig

If you’re looking for some seriously good fiction, including stories by Your Humble Author as well as Nick Mamatas, Khaled Hosseini, and many others, this is your ticket. Why not? Do it. Zuul commands it.

Fiction, Someone Else's Writing

Endstation Chaos!

Author: March 1, 2011 8 Comments

FUN WITH TRANSLATIONS: So, last year Avery Cates #4 came out, The Terminal State, which, frankly, is my favorite title of the series. Aside from the stream of physics-related pages I get in my Google Alerts emails, I just like the title.

The series is translated into German. I’ve had some email exchanges with the German translator and its been fun. I like their covers, too. Here’s the cover for the German version of The Terminal State:

Endstation CHAOS!

POW! Endstation Chaos, indeed! That’s bananas. I can’t decide which title is better. Although I wonder why they suddenly went with English on this one; the previous 3 all had German titles. Although we have to consider the possibility that “Endstation Chaos” is just so cool a title, it had to be.

BAM!

“The Breach” & “Ghost Country”

Author: February 25, 2011 1 Comment

Ghost Country RocksFriends, people always pester me to read things. Random strangers ask me if I’ve read something, and if the answer is no, they begin a campaign to get me to read it. Lawyers keep sending me suits and subpoenas I’m supposed to read. And my agent sometimes hands me copies of the books her other clients have written and urges me to read them. I am always hurt and outraged to learn she has other clients – always – and rush off in tears. But she’s so used to me rushing off in tears she doesn’t even send anyone into the bathroom after me any more. I weep alone.

Anyway, a few months ago the books she urged me to read were The Breach and Ghost Country by Patrick Lee. I accepted copies of his books and made a vague mental promise to myself to read them. As with all my vague mental promises to myself, I forgot all about them very quickly. Then I met Patrick at Bouchercon last year and immediately rectified the situation by reading The Breach. AND GODDAMN, these are good books. I was immediately jealous. It’s actually been a topic of conversation between me and other clients, how jealous we are of Patrick and his damn fine thrilling novels. DAMN YOU LEE!

Anyways, go forth and read these books.

Someone Else's Writing

Friday is Guitar Day

Author: February 25, 2011 2 Comments

Epiphone Les Paul CustomLike a sad monkey that thinks he’s people, I keep playing guitar. Like a sad monkey that thinks he’s people and has Internet access, I keep posting them here. I CANNOT BE STOPPED. Someday alien archeologists will examine the ruins of our civilization and ask why you all did not rise up to stop me from posting the music that destroys everything. They will not understand that I cannot be stopped.

Herewith:

Song347
Song352
Song354
Song362
Song363
Song365
Song368
Song370

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.

Bullshit, gee-tar

Considering Inception

Author: February 23, 2011 9 Comments

Simpsons OstrichI watched Inception for the second time the other day. It remains, in my mind, a good but not great story. Certainly it is well made and I applaud Nolan’s ability to structure a complex series of layers into a coherent storyline. I enjoy the movie, but it could have been much more interesting. The real strength of the movie is the fact that people have been discussing it endlessly since it came out. Hell, I’d give a limb to write a story that people discuss endlessly. Based on that alone, I’d want to murder Chris Nolan in a jealous rage. Add in The Dark Knight and he and I are eternal enemies, even though he’ll never know it. He’s joined my list of People I’ve Never Met but Despise because of Their Professional Success, right there with Ben Affleck.

Anyways, after my second viewing of Inception I confirmed my initial interpretation of the story, which we’ll get to below. I also noticed a couple of annoying plot holes. Herewith are two plot/mechanics problems and my overall interpretation about the film.

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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Yay for Royalty Checks

Author: February 20, 2011 3 Comments

I got a royalty check for my short story Sift, Almost invisible, Through in “Crimes by Moonlight”, edited by Charlaine Harris. And I feel great.

Getting royalty checks is rare enough in this business. Getting them for short stories in anthologies is almost like knowing the speed and direction of a subatomic particle: Theoretical, at best. Usually. Now I expect the universe to adjust the scales by dropping a piano on my head. Nice knowing y’all.

BAM!

His Sins Were Scarlet, but His Books Were Read

Author: February 19, 2011 3 Comments

This is an essay from the forthcoming Summer 2011 Issue of my zine, The Inner Swine.

The Don Camillo Books

Don CamilloWould it shock anyone to learn that I was something of a nerd as a teenager? It would not. As a matter of fact, I am pretty sure that when each issue of The Inner Swine arrives in your mailbox, you shout “NERD!” and then throw it in the garbage. You bastards.

However, being a nerd in high school wasn’t exactly terrible. I didn’t have a negative high school experience. If you watch TV or movies, having any sort of personality or brains when you were fifteen is depicted as The Worst Possible Thing Ever because apparently the world is filled with people who were lonely, bullied, sad people in high school because they had acne or didn’t play football, or read books or something. That wasn’t my experience. Oh, I was a nerd, all right. I wasn’t exactly cool in my high school. And we had football players and such, and a definite caste system. It was just that it was a private Jesuit-run prep school and everyone there was an academic nerd to some degree, so it wasn’t so bad. I had some good times in high school.

As a child, my father had done a lot to interest my brother and me in books and reading. He read to us, and there were always books around, and Dad liked to be well-read, which rubbed off on his sons. When I was really young he brought home a tattered paperback book titled Don Camillo Takes the Devil by the Tail, left it in the bathroom, and I started reading it.

It was the least likely book ever to make an impression on a kid in the early 1980s. It was written by an Italian author in the 1950s and translated into English. It involved stories about a priest in a tiny Italian village and his antics against the Communist mayor. It involved a lot of sincere religious feeling, including direct dialogs with Jesus. It was outdated, completely foreign, and almost aggressively Catholic and sentimental.

Naturally, I loved it.

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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing, The Inner Swine

Complete Lack of Control

Author: February 15, 2011 2 Comments

One of the interesting (to me) aspects of the Writing Career is the contrast between the complete, autocratic control you have over your work when it’s private, sitting on your computer or in a notebook or, god help you, in your head, and the almost total lack of control you have over many aspects of it once you sell it. Since selling your work is usually a goal of most writers (though not all, of course), it’s interesting how unprepared most of us are for the transition from being a the god of your particular written universe to being a pawn in the game of life.

Well, it’s not that bad. My limited experience with publishers is that a) they don’t buy books they don’t like, so selling your novel and then being told it needs more teenaged vampires is a pretty rare occurrence and b) they genuinely love the books they buy. Some writers worry that they’ll sign the contract and their editor will suddenly sprout demon wings, grow three times in size, and with a burst of hellfire inform them that now they will revise the novel to include thinly-veiled Scientologist themes as they laugh manically. This almost never actually happens.

However, the aspects of the book publishing experience that the author usually indeed has no control over can be a little disconcerting. When I was a wee Somers, writing 30-page fantasy epics with titles like War of the Gem, I drew my own covers. Like this one:

The War of the Gem Book 3: The Dark Tower

The War of the Gem Book 3: The Dark Tower

Jealous? Yep, I bet you are. Bet you can’t believe I was nine when I drew that. I’m also surprised I didn’t go into cover design as a career.

Then you grow up, sell a novel for money, and suddenly you’re not allowed to make your own covers any more. I mean, I showed Orbit Books the above cover and thought, well, here we go: They’re going to ask me to do all of their covers now and I’ll have to turn them down gently. Instead, I never heard from them about it. It’s like they pretended not to have seen it. Bastards.

The author’s almost total lack of control over the cover of their book is disconcerting, at least until you see the awesome covers they actually design for you. Assuming you’re lucky like me and have awesome covers. Lauren Panepinto did her Cover Launch post for The Final Evolution over at the Orbit web site today. I know I’ve posted the cover here already, but go check it out and let Lauren know she’s amazing:

http://www.orbitbooks.net/2011/02/14/cover-launch-the-final-evolution-by-jeff-somers

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing