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.
Brutarian #52
Well, I just got my copy of Brutarian #52, which, as usual, contains my column called “The Inner Swine Guide to Ignorance” and is a must-read for hipsters and cynics everywhere. I’m quite popular, you know. It isn’t obvious, but I am. You should send Dom Salemi some cash and get a subscription:
$3.95/issue, Dom Salemi, 9405 Ulysses Court, Burke, VA 22015.
Git!
Pop Culture in Fiction
by Jeff Somers
FANS, I don’t claim to know much of anything at all. I know a few things: I know that Warren Spahn is the winningnest lefthanded pitcher in Major League Baseball history. I know that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot simultaneously know both the position and the momentum of a given object to arbitrary precision. I know that irony is a form of speech in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted by the words used. I know how to tie a Square Knot. I can write a Hello World program in BASIC. I know what a Fnord is. See, I know a few things, but nothing, really, of any importance, and nothing, really, that would convince you that I am qualified in any way to write intelligently about Serious Writing Topics. The fact that I’ve published a few literary gems doesn’t mean much, if you consider some of the crap that gets published these days-not just published, but the crap that wins awards. I don’t have any advanced degrees and I’ve rarely won an argument, usually descending to physical threats after about five minutes of stuttering impotence; I haven’t published any scholarly papers on the subject of writing and I’m not making millions through my art. So, there’s really no reason to pay any attention to me, is there? On this subject, I mean. If you need an essay on why a six-pack is good breakfast fare, I’m your man.
Of course, you’ve already acquired this zine. That doesn’t say much for your intellectual abilities, bubba. So I can assume you’re not too picky about what you read, and plunge straight ahead into the subject at hand, which, in case the introductory paragraph wasn’t very clear on the matter, is the usage of Pop Culture references in fiction, and why I think they’re bad, and avoid them.
Hola,
As some of you are aware, I publish a little zine called The Inner Swine. Have published it, in fact, since 1995, just about 50 issues worth. I write about just about everything in that zine, and mail it out to the world four times a year. Hell, some misguided folks actually pay me for a subscription! I know – crazy.
Anyway, all of the past issues of the zine are on the web site, but I’m going to start re-posting old essays from it here on a regular basis. They’ll be more or less randomly selected, with a concentration on writing and publishing-oriented ponderings. I’d be very interested to know what y’all think about them.
Creating, Managing, and Getting Lost in My Own Damn ARG
LIKE MOST authors, I endured years and years of people giving me The Look—you know, that mixture of pity and amusement that looks like constipation—whenever I mentioned being a writer. The Look, loosely translated, means gosh, is that why you look so malnourished and scurvyish, because of the poverty and the alcoholism? and wasn’t ever really all that far from the truth, at least up until 1997, when I finally discovered that whiskey does not, in fact, contain vitamins.
So, when I sold my second novel, The Electric Church, I had a rush of enthusiasm which inspired me to take a shower, cut my long, tangled hair, and wear pants for the first time in years. I also started creating a web site long before the book had even been copy-edited. I had the idea to create a ‘real’ web site for the eponymous church, and embedded some simple codes and puzzles into the pages using every old-fashioned HTML and javascript trick I could think of. When my publisher saw the final result, they decided it beat trying to come up with a web site themselves and hired a professional designer to create a nifty, candy-colored Flash site for it. They also suggested we take the puzzles to the next level and create a modest Alternate Reality Game (ARG) to make the site fun and promote the book.
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Years ago in my halcyon childhood, my suffering parents bought my brother Yan and I a set of the Columbia Encyclopedia, which I guess is what people who can’t afford the Britannica buy their kids. It was pretty impressive – a rich, dark blue faux-leather binding, gilt-edged paper, all that. My suffering parents were obviously still hoping their childrens’ ability with trivia and video games would somehow translate into well-paying careers, and thought the encyclopedia would help.
I immediately looked myself up, and was amazed – and dismayed – to discover that I wasn’t in there. And me, a famous Defender Prodigy with the high score in no fewer than three New Jersey arcades.
A few years ago, when Wikipedia (motto: almost!) was the hot new Internet toy, I created my own page there. Ah, those were the days. I played it straight; no claims of royalty, nothing about me inventing the automobile, very little megalomania in general. It was fun while it lasted; a few years ago I was deemed not important enough and my page was deleted. And so far none of you bastards have been moved to re-create it, and I hate you for the lapse, believe me.
I wouldn’t bother re-creating it myself, for a variety of reasons. Number one, I have no desire to get into a humiliating battle with Unseen Millions about whether or not I am a “notable” author (hint: I am probably not). Number two, let’s face it: a Wikipedia page is not exactly an honor. Wikipedia is about as reliable and useful for real data-gathering as interviewing drunks down by the pier. Sure, you might get some decent info, and it’ll certainly be entertaining, but you can’t list any of them as references.
This may sound like sour grapes. Would I burn Wikipedia down if it were a structure, in revenge for my de-listing? Sure. I also flatly refuse to play first-base for the New York Mets, the picky bastards. Since it is an amorphous web-page and not a structure, or a person whose kneecaps I can break and then run away, I must choose to suffer the humiliation and carry on.
Of course, Wikipedia is damned entertaining; I spend hours every week just paging through it, reading fascinating entries and wondering if any of it is actually true.
If anyone is nuts enough to actually want to create a new Wikipedia page for me, I encourage you to be creative. I wouldn’t mind being a former President of Nauru, or a former Bounty Hunter. Give me some magical powers, too, if you don’t mind, and for god’s sake use some free stock photography for my photo – some good-looking, strong-jawed fellow, but with a rakish quality. I mean, go all out.
The Man will likely delete my new entry, so it might be best if you organized a bit and formed a team who would be prepared to post replacement pages as quickly as they come down, using slight alternate spellings to evade automated checks. Naturally I’m not actually endorsing any of this, but in case you’re determined no matter what I say, I’d like my middle name to be Rex.
The other afternoon I wandered downstairs onto the first floor of the Somers Manse for the first time in weeks. I avoid the first floor because the front door is located there and past experience has taught me that the front door is the gateway through which the outside world torments me. Neighbors always want to speak with me about vague “behavior” issues, their children always want to taunt me with childish insults and name – calling, and authorities of all kinds are always delivering subpoenas or demanding admittance to ask me questions – all very tedious.
So, despite the fact that it inspires the local kids to more and more creative names for me, I tend to stay upstairs, where I have everything I need: My tatter bathrobe, my Converse Chucks, bottles of Rye in the desk drawers (for sustenance), and plumbing facilities. Whenever I am lured downstairs I always seem to get into trouble.
This time, however, I found to my delight my first royalty statements for The Electric Church. Discovering that several thousand people you don’t know personally have opted to spend money on your book is always cause for celebration, and the next 24 hours are a bit of a blur.
When I woke up, I took another glance at the statement and discovered that a good number of folks had bought TEC electronically. I don’t know for sure that all – or any – of these were Kindle sales, but I assume at least some of them must have been. This remains a tiny, tiny portion of my sales, but you hear a lot about the Kindle. Personally, I’d rather have bamboo shoots slid under my toenails than read a book on the kindle, but then I am also the Last Man on Earth to Not Own a Personal Cell Phone, so I’m obviously an idiot. When the Kindle first emerged I thought it would die a quick, smothered death, but it hangs on, doesn’t it. not exactly taking the world by storm, but still. . .there.
I’ll probably never own one, or anything similar. I just like books too much. While my sad devotion to an ancient technology is. . .well, sad, it doesn’t bother me much. I enjoy gloating over my stacks and stacks of cheap paperbacks too much. Carrying around all the same books in one brick-like digital reader just depresses me. Plus, I worry about DRM issues and not actually owning anything. It’s bad enough that I had to replace all my old Iron Maiden cassettes with CDs, if I have to buy old 1980s Del Rey fantasy books all over again just to satisfy my OCD tendencies, I will cry. And I don’t doubt at all that 10 years from now the kindle will be a convenient paperweight and we’ll all have to re-buy all of our books on the Apple iBook or some such bullshit.
Still, I don’t hate the kindle. No, really. The rosy glow of book geek joy that emanates from folks when they’ve just bought one means that at least people are excited about reading, and as an author I can’t look down on that, now can I? If it gets people to read more, than I’m all for it. Just like that dreadful Harry Potter.
Oh well. No one is paying any attention to a rummy skiffy writer like me, and thank goodness. If people were paying attention to me, we’d likely be going through some sort of worldwide economic crisis. . .oh dear.
Here’s an interesting story about why so few writers include modern stuff like the iPhone or Twitter in their stories:
http://www.tomorrowmuseum.com/2008/09/29/new-media-in-fiction-will-there-ever-be-an-iphone-novel/
At least, I find this interesting, because I do think about this quite a bit. Not concerning the Avery Cates novels, of course, those being SF and thus by law chock full of all sorts of specious technology and psuedo-science. But I write other stuff, and lots of it. In those more reality-based, mainstream works, I actually purposefully avoid mentioning technology explicitly as much as I can. I don’t have a defined theory on this, but in my own reading I find that the easiest way to jolt someone out of a narrative flow is to mention some bygone technology that is no longer even the slightest bit relevant.
The Duchess is running a half marathon in Jersey City today, so I am sitting in a Starbucks fine-tuning a manuscript and waiting for her to finish up so I can cheer her at the Finish and go home. And man, Starbucks is a horrible, horrible place. It’s been a long while since I’ve been in one, drinking their bitter, over-roasted coffee and listening to their bland, corporate soft-rock music. And I actually had to use the word venti <shiver> (which, thank goodness, WordPress’ spellcheck flags). I’ll need a shower when I get home. Just wanted to share that.
MySpace is haunting me.
Like a lot of clueless morons, I signed up for a MySpace page a while ago because some random person told me it was a necessary marketing tool. Every now and then I wake up on a strange park bench wearing a white linen suit that isn’t mine, and I think, damn, it’s time I started acting like a real live professional writer. On the long walk home I ponder what exactly real live professional writer means. I imagine wearing a dinner jacket all the time, smoking a pipe, and being able to quote poetry and Greek tragedies on demand. And then I notice I am walking by a windowless place named Teddy’s Bar and I forget all about it.
Sometimes, though, I make these spastic efforts at being all adult and professional, and lame attempts at branding or marketing result. Like, for example, setting up a MySpace page.
The great part about the MySpace page is that I don’t remember much about it. I think I set it up and then forgot about it, imagining it would yield all sorts of markety goodness all automatically and shit, without my intervention. Which is how I like to run things whenever possible. Hell, I would write my books without my direct conscious involvement if I could.
Instead, all I’ve gotten out of MySpace are endless friend invitations. And this is just underscoring and exacerbating my general misanthropy. I’m socially awkward, and this apparently extends to the Internets as well. As a matter of fact, it’s worse. In real life when total strangers try to flag me down for a conversation, or invite me to functions, I can generally do something to signal to them that I would rather make a total ass out of myself in public and be hated for all eternity than speak with them – you know, feign a seizure, feign not speaking English, all the usual tricks. On the Intarwebs, this is not possible. I get these friend requests and they just sit in my Junk email like radioactive nuggets until I turn off the PC and they get flushed away. Meanwhile, someone somewhere places me in their asshole folder for never responding.
I know it’s possible to delete your MySpace account and stop giving out the impression that I want to be people’s friends, but this would involve some actual effort, unlike the act of setting up the account in the first place, which basically involved me thinking casually that I ought to do it and then somehow, in a process probably involving black magic and elves, my account had been created. Aside from crippling misanthropic tendencies, I am also: incredibly lazy. I’m the whole package!
How can a man be this socially awkward and yet achieve some modest success as a writer? Science has no answers.
First, a side note: As I struggle to learn one stinking solo from AC/DC’s oeuvre and eat a big dish of Fail every day*, I note with glee that the band has a new album due out soon. This Glee is despite the fact that their last album felt like a drunk AC/DC tribute band had been hired at the last minute to mumble through some craptastic tracks, and despite the fact that you’ll only be able to buy the album at fucking Wal Mart or from their web site, for god’s sake.
The reason for the glee is that I actually like the first single, Rock n Roll Train. Which is surprising, as it’s a dumb song based on a repetitive riff and a loosey group chorus. But then, I just described every single AC/DC song ever, except this one has what the best AC/DC stuff had: Rhythm you can cut glass with and surprisingly complex guitar interactions between the Young brothers. In other words, it’s one of those songs that gets deeper and chunkier every time you listen to it, until suddenly in the year 2019 you wake up with the burning compulsion to learn how to play it.
Anyway, I mention this because there’s a month to go before I can buy the first AC/DC album I’ve bought since 1995’s disappointing Ballbreaker. Thus, you know, the future.
I’m also living in the future, I realize, because while you folks have not yet read Avery Cates #3, I am starting the difficult imagineering of Avery Cates #4. Yet I must pretend, in public, that Avery Cates #3 does not exist, in order to avoid the wrath of my Corporate Masters, who, I assume, have some sort of teh awesoma marketing plan. Or not. I can totally see them handing me a sandwich board on which someone has scrawled BUY ETERNAL PRISON OR WE KILL THIS MAN’S CATS and a bullhorn and being told to get to it.
But, see, I know everything. I know the plot, the twists, the ancillary characters, and where I’m taking them into #4, and here you are waaayyyy behind the curb. It’s like I was standing in the room, eating a sandwich, when the Large Hadron Collidor was switched on and immediately launched into a time loop where I am approximately 9 months in the future, taunting you. Although if that were true I’d already have bought AC/DC’s new album, wouldn’t I?
Hmmmn.
*I have what scientists call Big Dumb Hands.