Author Archive: jsomers

SO, the book’s done.

INTERIOR: Jeff’s office. A simple wooden desk laden with pornographic magazines and old copies of Who’s Who in Baseball, some filing cabinets, a futon, a hollow-body electric guitar, four cats, and a computer.

Enter JEFF. He is wearing a soiled-looking bathrobe. His hair stands up as if superglued. He is carrying an unlabeled bottle of brown liquid. He sits down at his desk and stares blearily at the computer screen. Slowly he nods off, chin sinking to his chest. Just as the bottle slips from his slackened fingers, three uniformed Helper Monkeys appear, gather up the bottle, make sure Jeff is still breathing, and scamper off, chattering.

In other words, I always find the transition from working like mad on a novel to being done with the novel to be a tough one.  I go from constantly working on a familiar and well-known piece, something I know so well I can jump to tiny details in the manuscript automatically without having to search for them, to having no big project at all.

For a few days I’ll contemplate my next step: Hire mercenaries and try to take over a small, unstable South-American country? See if I can finally gain that 150 lbs I’ve been dreaming of? Start writing that vampire-romance where pure, agape-type love cures vampirism? Begin my campaign to make public pantslessness acceptable to society?

Or, most likely: Sit around getting drunk and hate myself for wasting time? Yup. Let’s go with that.

I hate wasting time, but after a major project it takes me a few days to retread the tires and get started on something else, so for a few days all I do is waste time. So I sit around drinking cocktails and thinking, damn, I ought to be writing something. This way lies madness, of course. And cocktails.

In the mean time, in an attempt to make this dull period not completely useless, I am trying to learn the guitar solo from AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long. ANGUS YOUNG WHY DO YOU MOCK ME SO! The man must have freakish hands. Freakish.

A quick update for all your weirdos who care what I’m up to:

• Finished my monthly short story on Sunday. For those who may not know, I write a short story a month, rain or shine, inspiration or no. This is mainly an exercise to force myself to finish at least one project a month, and also a way to keep a steady flow of ideas hitting paper. This is especially important when working on a book project like The Eternal Prison, because otherwise some good ideas might wither away as I kill brain cells with reckless alcohol consumption triggered by a phone call from my agent wherein she advises me to add More Unicorn. Writing a story a month has the expected result: 99.9% of my stories are Teh Suck. But a few every year can be earmarked for future rewriting and expansion, and the one I just finished is one of them. It’s got potential.
• Finished my latest revision of The Eternal Prison, too. The new draft is much better than the previous draft, which I’d labeled FINAL. Just goes to show, you think a book is done, you show it to your editor and she kicks it back to you, you spend a few hours in the bathroom with a gun in your mouth, weeping, and then suddenly you realize she just made your final draft look like clown shoes. And BAM! A better draft is born.
• The new issue of The Inner Swine, my little zine, is being proofread. Whether it will actually mail in the month of September remains to be seen. You can check out the editorial from it at the web site, and then send me two bucks for a sample issue, you cheap bastards.
• I am surrounded by cats. And I have no pants on.

Not too shabby. Between all that, baseball, and avoiding the various political conventions like plague-infested blankets, I’m a busy, busy man.

Don’t forget, my beautiful babies, tomorrow evening I’ll be in Manhattan entertaining the masses with my silky voice, rapier wit, and tendency of my pants to drop at inexplicable moments. You’d think it would be easy to have your pants drop on cue like you’re in a Marx Brothers short film, but you’d be wrong. It has taken my team of scientists decades to perfect it.

WHERE: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003
WHAT: KGB Fantastic Fiction Series
WHEN: 7pm
WHY: It’s a Wednesday night: What else do you have going on?

I don’t know exactly what I’ll be reading yet; I’m going to see where the mood takes me. So you might get a blast of The Digital Plague, or maybe a preview of The Eternal Prison (now with more unicorn), or maybe something unexpected and possibly undesired. Who knows! It’s like a wild pantsless ride of wonder.

Come on by and say hey. I’ll be the drunk, sweaty guy hiding in the shadows.