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.
Yup, a new video, because The Duchess went to The Ancestral Home for Thanksgiving, leaving me alone with four cats and a bar stocked full of booze. I’m not responsible for my actions under these circumstances, so I made a video about cats. Apologies in advance.
Yes, I am ashamed.
The fantabulous cover for The Terminal State is up against two other books in a Book Cover smackdown over at SF Signal. I want to win, because I assume there is a large cash payment and some sort of trophy. I suppose I could confirm that by reading the entry, but I will just assume. Go get me that trophy!
Well lookie here: My publisher has a nifty little post up about the mass market covers they’ve designed for the re-releases of The Electric Church, The Digital Plague, and The Eternal Prison, as well as the debut of #4 in the Avery Cates series The Terminal State. Lauren Panepinto rocks; I love the work she’s doing with these, and I love the fact that Orbit posts stuff like this, giving a glimpse into the process. Rock on.
Per the deliriously entertaining IO9.com, author Lynn Viehl has posted one of her royalty statements on the web for all to see. This is balls, if you ask me. This is America, for god’s sake, and what we earn at our vocations or avocations is sacred privacy, because that way the secret lizard aliens who secretly run the world can keep us down through collusion. Doubt me? Then you’ve been hit by the lizards’ brainwash ray.
Author earnings are strangely fascinating to folks. I think this is partly because authors have been traditionally portrayed in media as rich people who tap a keyboard for a few hours a day – usually in remote, luxurious locations – and all have bestsellers. Look at Castle for a current example of this trope. The other part of it, of course, is the wish-fulfillment of aspiring writers; believe me, when I was a kid pounding out 90-page rewrites of The Lord of the Rings, I wished fervently to believe that authors had status and riches. Sadly, we do not. Or at least I have not – I wonder if I need to sue somebody.
One thing to keep in mind about this stunt, of course, is that Lynn Viehl has more than one book out for sale, and unless her books literally vanish from the face of the earth she’s probably got a royalty stream from some of them in addition to this one book she’s posted about. Another thing to ponder is that she did get a sizeable advance (though of course in real-life terms, that got nibbled down, as she says, to near poverty-levels if that was your only income that year). Even assuming that the earnings drop considerably after the first year, put together she’s making more than this one statement shows. That’s part of the gig, too. If you publish one book and then decide to go all Salinger, you better hope that one book is a classic, bubba.
And no, I won’t be posting my own statements. One reason is, I don’t want you to know about all those paranormal-romance-selkie novels I wrote under pseudonym. Part of it is that I don’t see the upside. And the final part is, this way I get to keep pretending to be a millionaire playboy author who writes his novels during the 22-hour flight between here and my secret island kingdom.
I’m a huge fan of the 1967 TV showThe Prisoner, created, mostly written by, and starring Patrick McGoohan. In fact, The Prisoner remains the one and only fanfic I ever wrote, a novella penned in 1991 called Return of the King and no you cannot see it (although I was pretty proud of it at the time – and, to be honest, I posted it to alt.fan.prisoner back in The Day so you can probably locate it on teh Googler, though I used a pen name). Ah, the vagaries of youth!
Anyway: I was interested in the reboot/re-imagining/whatever on AMC, so I tuned in to the first episode. Sadly, I did not finish the first episode. Some folks seem to be enjoying this show, and that’s fine. For me it wasn’t so much that the show is terrible, it’s more that it’s boring as hell – or at least was for the first 30 minutes, and how much longer am I expected to give a show? None much longer, that’s what.
Still, plenty of television shows disappoint or don’t connect. What grates on me about AMC’s The Prisoner is the fact that they changed it so fundamentally and completely from the original I wonder why they didn’t just rebrand it and create a new show. Was it the name-recognition of the original? I dunno; while band geeks like me (and you, probably) are aware of the original and possibly still like using the phrase “Be Seeing You!” in cheerily ironic situations, I don’t think Prisoner-mania has swept the nation in the last 20 years. Probably it was somebody’s pet idea, to update the charming old cold-war concept, and that‘s fine too, but in that case they really should have pulled back a little. There’s almost zero 1967-era Prisoner in 2009-era Prisoner, aside from some cheeky visual and vocal references. They should have called it something else and tagged a “inspired-by” line on it, because aside from the most general description of the show – man wakes up in a mysterious Village after resigning his position, weirdness ensues – it’s completely different. Why bother?
On a possibly-loopy side note, I gave up on the first episode when Six looks up in the sky and sees a faint outline shimmering in what looked very much like the shape of the Twin Towers. I thought to myself, myself, he’s been pegged as from New York City – if this turns out to be everyone who was in the Towers when they fell living in purgatory or something, each numbered as a victim, I will set my own house on fire in rage.
I haven’t watched the rest of the episodes, so I don’t know if I’m anywhere near on that instinctive prediction, but the very thought of it was enough for me to change the channel. I think I watched House Hunters instead. Real Estate porn, activate!
FRIENDS, I realize I am not William Shakespeare or John Steinbeck, Charles Stross or Fred Saberhagen, but I demand my Wikipedia entry.
I had one, once. Heck, I had two over the years. Both deleted because I am not ‘notable’. Which is ridiculous, as I am very notable for a number of notable things. Admittedly, most of those things include the words pantslessness and obscure, but I’m still damned notable in my own strange way. I mean, I’ve published four novels and more than twenty short stories, a zine continuously since 1995, and a comic book.
Meanwhile, I have no Wikipedia entry. Meanwhile, there’s this.
So, I’m laying down the gauntlet: I’m going to sulk and complain until some Hero steps forward to add me to this ridiculous compendium of unreliable knowledge. I don’t care if the article is complimentary or filled with libel, if it’s fact-based or filled with unicorns and fantasy. As long as the guidelines are followed so the article doesn’t get deleted, I’ll be happy.
Because I have no Wikipedia Page. Meanwhile, there’s this.
I’ve set up a little widget on the side to monitor my WP status. Until an hero shows up to save me from obscurity, I will keep this blog on a war footing. Spread the word! Obscure author demands his due. Because if this is considered notable, then I submit that I am equally notable. Although possibly less horrible.
UPDATE 8-3-09: Damaso tried, and the page was deleted within moments. One starts to suspect an anti-Jeff Somers faction over at WP.
UPDATE 2 8-3-09: Jon Gawne, bless him, has created a preliminary page for me [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Jgawne/Jeffrey_Somers&action=edit] which he thinks may help if people add material to it. Thanks, Jon!
Well, y’all voted for The Awards Dinner this time. Thanks to everyone who took an interest and voted. The Tweeting of the story begins at 9AM today, Monday 2/16. The URL is:
http://twitter.com/somers_story
See you there!
Just a quick note this mornin’. For a while I’ve been hearing about two relatively new TV shows: Life on Mars and Fringe. I know that LOM is based on a British show of the same name, and I know the basic premise. I know that Fringe is a procedural about a cop of some sort investigating fringe-science stuff, sort of an X-Files scented beast. That’s about it. Some folks have told me good things about them.
So the other night I watched my first episode of Fringe, and it sucked. Now, like a lot of TV shows, it didn’t suck in execution: It was tightly directed, well acted, the dialogue had some zing, and the overall look was quality. The story, however, was terrible. A computer virus that liquefies peoples brains, unleashed upon the world by a disgruntled programmer, targeting the loved ones of people who’d wronged him.
A computer virus. That liquefies brains. This was a bad idea 20 years ago, and it remains a bad idea now.
Was this just a bad example? Maybe. Maybe other episodes rock and I’d be cheering the show on. I will not, however, find out anytime soon, because 1 hour of my life is all any show gets to impress me.
I haven’t seen an ep of LOM yet. I hadn’t any plans to watch; it seemed like I got the premise and wasn’t very interested in it: Cop gets shot, is in coma, is either actually transported to 1973 or is just imagining it in his comatose state, it all wraps up in with a deep mystery and whether or not anything is real. Not a bad idea, of course, but just didn’t excite me.
Then, this morning, I saw this on IO9. Now that’s something I didn’t expect from what I knew about the show, which is apparently: Nothing. That might get me to watch. My god, if the network had promoted tiny robots seeking proof of the human soul in its advertising, I’d have been there on day 1, because that ain’t typical broadcast SF fare.
This underscores the way mainstream SF is being sold nowadays: All the ads for this show make it look like a zany cop show with one single bizarre twist (2008 cop sent back to 1973). There is almost nothing else in the ads that would make this show SFnal.
Of course, I’ll finally tune in to LOM one of these days and I’ll probably get the episode where he encounters a computer virus from the future that liquefies brains. Dammit.
Once again we’re hearing a lot about how newspapers are probably going the way of the Dodo, and folks seem pretty confused and alarmed by the prospect. And once again I am underwhelmed. I am also under-alarmed by the demise of our auto industry, the advance of e-book readers, and just about any other new technology-slash-economic condition that threatens a well-established sector of the world.
Behind all of this hand-wringing is, of course, fear; but not fear of a world without newspapers, really. At its core it’s a fear of the unknown. We’ve all grown up with, say, newspapers in our lives. They’re familiar and comfortable, and even folks who haven’t bought a newspaper in their lives are used to having them around. Imagining a world without newspapers is difficult, because we’ve never existed in such a world. It’s easy, then, to imagine that such a world will be worse than the current one, simply because we, as a species, don’t like change. Especially change we have no control over.
Whatever will happen to journalism without newspapers to uphold standards? I suspect new standards will evolve and be upheld, and within a few decades there will be a couple of silver-maned Blogs or web sites that will have taken on some of the burnished air of the respected old source. Newspapers, after all, went through a pretty lengthy period of being unreliable, gossip-mongering pieces of yellow journalism, and even today there are plenty of 20th-century media islands that appear to be run by their owners with something less than journalistic integrity at their heart. So why in the world can’t Blogs do the same job, just without the costly and messy paper delivery model?
It’s just fear. The American auto industry has made some bad decisions, and bad cars, for a while now, and their business model is looking grim. Meh. What about a world without American-made cars? I’m no economist so I’ll take everyone’s word that this would have dire consequences for our economy and long-term survival as a nation, but I wonder if it has to be these companies. Why not a different company? A new company? I mean, there’s sober economic analysis that tells you we must preserve what’s left of our large manufacturing base. And then there’s simple fear where people imagine a world where Ford doesn’t exist and get all squirrelly about it, for no better reason than because it’s been there for their entire lifetime.
A sunny attitude for someone who writes about dystopias, I suppose. I guess I don’t have much faith that civilization will survive indefinitely, and I see Thunderdome in our future – I just don’t see it coming because the newspapers go away, is all.
Sometimes the advance of technology that is leading us inexorably towards a Skiffy Future (flying cars! face transplants! digital monies!) isn’t all that great. Take, for example, digital music. Most of us know that the popular MP3 format for digital audio is not the greatest as far as quality goes – it is, after all, a compression algorithm that takes the huge tracks you find on a CD and makes them small enough to be easily transmitted over Internet connections or to be stored in mass quantities on tiny handheld devices. The advantages of such a format are obvious to all of us – hell, not only is every CD I own residing on my hard drive as MP3s, every cassette tape I own is also sitting there as MP3s. Everyone loves MP3s exactly because they are portable and infinitely copyable.
At a price, of course: The MP3 format, I am told, is not so hot when it comes to audio quality. It’s compressed, after all, and that means that data that sits comfortably on a CD or in a FLAC file gets squeezed in. Which is all well and good if you’re taking a pristine, uncompressed format like a CD and making personal files for yourself – if you’re corrupting your music for portability’s sake, that’s on you. But now we hear that the music industry is mixing thier songs specifically for MP3 (this via BoingBoing via Slashdot), because they know that everyone is just going to rip the songs into that format anyway, and this means the source data on your CD is going to be sucky to begin with.
In other words, the advance of technology has ruined the technical quality of your audio. And you know what? I don’t care.
I have what Scientists of the Future call Tin Ears. My friends mock me for the large sampling of 96Kbs MP3 files I have in my collection, most made long ago before I clearly understood the process, yet I can’t be bothered to re-rip them into better quality, because, frankly, I can’t tell much difference. Which puts me in a quandary: On the one hand, if nothing is done our future will be a dystopia filled with tinny highs and muddy lows. On the other, I won’t be able to tell the difference personally, and it’s not like there isn’t a good trade off here. Personally, even if I could tell the difference between CD-quality and MP3-quality, I might accept the downgrade in exchange for the portability and ease-of-copying.
I also think there’s a certain Quality Horizon, a point beyond which improvements become meaningless. I consider, with heavy thoguht, those fancy new Blu-Ray DVDs. And I ask, who cares? Sales are sluggish precisely because folks look at the roughly 1000 DVDs they’ve bought over the last few years, peer owlishly at the supposedly greatly improved quality of the new issues, and can’t really see the point. Why bother? There’s no obvious mechanical upgrade like there was between cassettes and CDs or VHS and DVD – no better portability, longevity, or bonus features. Just the assurance that the overall quality of the thing is better. Which it probably is, but not necessarily to an extent that makes upgrading worth it.
My personal Quality Horizon, when it comes to audio, is pretty low. I’m a man whose music collection was at least 65% songs taped off the radio, commercials and all, at one point. Do I look like someone who can tell whether I’m listening to a CD or an MP3?
That’s one good thing about being a writer: Electronic formats don’t necessarily threaten to downgrade my words. I mean, sure, it might downgrade my royalties as you all gleefully download my books from torrent sites, but at least the super-high-quality prose itself will be preserved, right? Don’t answer that.