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.
Well, lookie here! Simon @ Bookgeeks in the U.K. has written up a fantastic review of The Eternal Prison. Since he wasn’t terribly enamored of The Digital Plague, this is pretty satisfying! Once again, if you’ve been hesitating to buy TEP because of doubts about its awesomeness, this ought to to allay your fears.
A big part of Why I Write (aside from the free booze at parties every 5 years or so, of course) is to achieve some sort of immortality. I’m pretty conscious of being a tiny speck in the universe, and a tiny speck in the flow of time since the Big Bang. I’m aware that the vast majority of people don’t achieve any kind of lasting fame, and the even vaster percentage of writers get swept aside. It’s shocking, for example, to learn that The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, two books that dominated much of my high school English courses, are now slowly fading into obscurity. Slowly, yes, but fading. I mean, shit; if Salinger can fade into obscurity, we’re all fucked.
But of course it makes sense: Part of what makes it always seem like books were better in previous eras is the simple fact that history’s manic fingers have scubbed away the dross: All that’s left after 100 or 200 years is the really significant work. The merely great eventually gets swept aside. So, maybe Salinger and Knowles were merely great, and not Great, know what I mean? They hung on for 50 years, but won’t make 100. We can’t all be Shakespeare, after all.
And then there’s me: I suspect I don’t stand a chance.
Of course, if we want to look at it with the Big View it doesn’t matter because the sun will swell up and destroy the Earth eventually, anyway, and even if we flee the burning globe for other planets, entropy will catch us, babies, and swallow everything eventually. So why bother? Since we can’t even invent a comsumer-usable jetpack, I doubt we’re ever going to conquer quantum physics and find a way to step out of time and become truly eternal. So you have to have some perspective. The fact is, culture changes and the world moves on, and you’re lucky if you’re still relevant a decade after you first appear in print (or on film, or on the radio, or whatever).
When I was a kid, there were certain things that linked me with older generations whether I realized it or not: Bugs Bunny cartoons. The Honeymooners. The Brady Bunch – all of these weird pop cultural icons had been around for so long, people 20 years older than me knew them as well and we had a shared vocabulary. A lot of that has faded away. You can’t easily see unedtited Warner Bros cartoons any more, due to the excessive violence, occasional racism, and cheery 1940s slang. Those old sitcoms that stretch back to the 1950s and 1960s may still be on, somewhere, but it’ll be on a ghetto like Nick at Nite or something. My friend Ken and I had an extended joke concerning old Bugs Bunny cartoons the other night and it occurred to me that people 10 years younger than us (or maybe 20 years younger) might not understand a word we were saying – this is culture leaving you behind.
Which is okay. It’s a natural function, and I actually think this has been artificially retarded over the last 50 years due to television, maybe over the last 100 years due to radio and movies. It wasn’t until radio and other modern media, after all, that everyone in the country, or at least a large proportion of them, could simultaneously share a pop culture moment, then go into work the next day and discuss it immediately. And as The Entertainment Industry fractures into a million pay services that cater to your personal taste, we’re leaving that era behind. I grew up in a world with three networks and four local TV stations, a world where every major city had a handful of radio stations serving broad genres. Today you can choose from hundreds of stations and on-demand movies etc, you can buy Satellite Radio, you can massage your cultural experience into something unique and completely unshared by anyone else.
Which means when you go into work the next day, you might not have anything to talk about. Except the last bastion of shared experience, sports, and occasional movies that hit that blockbuster status.
I think we’ve hit that stage where Jeff is a little drunk and rambling, so let’s wrap it up. In closing, I think it would be best if I simply attain the wealth and power necessary to build a monument to myself, sort of like Bender’s “Remember Me” statue from Futurama:
As promised: The second plot summary video in honor of the UK release of The Eternal Prison: “The Digital Plague in One Minute”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrIGmocXI4A
Tell me that isn’t the greatest plot summary ever, I dare you.
How many writers do you know who have a blurb on a Japanese translation published by Haikasoru? That’s right: One. Namely, me (if you look closely at this image, you’ll see my name down there at the bottom). I was psyched to get an advanced peek at Slum Online and thoroughly enjoyed the book – I just wish I’d thought of Nick Mamatas’ neat blurb for it: “Catcher in the Rye with MMO karate fights!” Now I am jealous, as my blurb pales in comparison.
So, apparently James Patterson is the world’s most successful writer (via Pimp My Novel) [key quote: “Patterson may lack the name recognition of a Stephen King, a John Grisham or a Dan Brown, but he outsells them all. Really, it’s not even close. (According to Nielsen BookScan, Grisham’s, King’s and Brown’s combined U.S. sales in recent years still don’t match Patterson’s.)”]. This is fascinating stuff, especially when you dig in and read how hard the man works, although he’s pretty much just a Content Supplier at this point, and not so much a writer.
Which is cool; I doubt Patterson has sleepless nights regretting that he never wrote that spiritually devastating Serious Novel. The man pays co-authors out of his own pocket in order to publish 9 books a year; there’s no way he has any angst about the road he’s taken. Plus, sleeping on a bed of money kind of eases the pain a little, I’ll bet.
Some struggling authors might be jealous of Patterson’s success. Some who have even had a measure of success might be envious, but not me. And not because of fruity artistic concerns, either (they can make Avery Cates lunchboxes if they want, or — OOH! — Avery Cates cologne), but because I do not ever want to work that hard.
I can’t speak for other authors, because I shun the company of other writers (all they want to do is talk about craft and writing and the business of publishing, when all I want to talk about is who is buying the next round, when will the next round be forthcoming, and where are we going after closing time), but for me, my authorial dream life has always been the sort they depict in the movies and television: Rich writer spends about 5 minutes a day writing, about six hours a day endorsing huge checks, and the rest attending fabulous parties. I enjoy the writing, so writing for a few hours every day is fun, but that’s about where my ambition ends, and I fully believe in paying other people to do things like read my contracts, market my books, cut up and pre-chew my food, etc.
SO, I will never be quite as rich or successful as Mr. Patterson, sure, I accept that. Trust me, you will never hear me complaining because I haven’t published nine books in the past year, and I will never, ever, bemoan the fact that I’m not allowed to run my own marketing meetings at Hachette. Trust me. I’m putting all my efforts into becoming Castle from the TV show, sans daughter. Although, I must admit, the idea of paying other folks to write my books for me is kind of appealing. Except for the paying part. Maybe I could start the first ever unpaid internship for ghostwriting? College kids would submit writing samples and I’d pick three every year to live at my house and write a novel each for me to submit under my name. IT’S GENIUS!
Who’s with me? All accepted interns would be required to address me as El Jefe. Submit your resumes via my contact page.
In order to celebrate and promote the release of The Eternal Prison across the pond in the U.K., I’ve created some new videos giving the plots of The Electric Church and The Digital Plague in about one minute, as a refresher course for folks who are thinking about buying The Eternal Prison. Here’s the first one, The Electric Church in One Minute:
The next one, The Plot of The Digital PLague in One Minute, will follow later this week. Enjoy!
Yea, verily: A merry fan has created a Facebook page for the books. If you’re on Facebook, why not join up? It’s fun, and all the cool kids are doing it.
Songs listened to while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald on the subway the other night:
It’s not every day you see your own name in The Hollywood Reporter, kids:
Sony nabs rights to Jeff Somers novel series
We actually sold the rights some months ago, but this makes it seem like there might actually be a movie made, which is pretty damn exciting. I don’t know any other details (I’m probably the least-involved person associated with the movie, actually) so let’s just cross our fingers and hope it turns out well, shall we?
EDIT: Holy crap, I made IO9.com!
Apparently, I love and want to marry every video the band OK GO makes:
OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.
Yay.