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.

That Whiff of Desperation

Author: August 16, 2008

Forgive me for a moment while I discuss singer/songwriter/poet-of-the-damned Jewel.

I know, I know: You don’t paid enough to read this shit. Bear with me.

Jewel comes to mind partly because The Duchess, my formidable wife, forced me to watch the execrable Nashville Star this summer. What can I say? The Wife is powerful and scary and likes crappy TV. She even admits it’s crappy, in weaker moments, and does not care. Jewel was one of the judges on this show, and has a country-western album out this year. That’s right, country-western. Why? Because she’s flailing. Jessica Simpson is flailing too, and is also coming out with a CW album.

Jewel began her career as a folky/hippy type, with loose, acoustic folk songs. She stuck to that for a while, but her album sales dropped with each new release, so a few years ago she tried her hand at slinky pop songs like Intuition (a song I actually liked, and damn your eyes if you think that makes me lame). When this failed to launch her back into the pop stratosphere, she cast about for something else, and hit on country music. Why not? It has to sell better than her last platter.

Simpson’s in a similar pickle: Falling album sales, falling label interest–she’s got to find a gimmick to get her back, and she’s hoping the same people who bought so many Carrie Underwood CDs will buy hers too. They’re flailing. They have no artistic point of view, nothing sincere inside them. They’re just trying to chase trends to sell CDs.

Nothing wrong with that, though its 99% chance of failure ought to be intimidating. Most artists who flail like this just end up looking foolish.

One thing I understand about this is that flailing is hard to avoid sometimes, because success – on any level – is addicting. Once you’ve had some level of success, it’s difficult to sink back down to a lower level. If you’ve had a platinum album and been the darling of the media, it’s tough, five years later, to be a modest-selling small-timer. The temptation, when you smell the looming dead-rat stench of failure, to just flail about for anything that looks like it might save you from obscurity is pretty strong. I know, because I’ve imagined it myself.

Certainly it’s not like I’m at some lofty perch in the literary world. Most people don’t know anything about my writing. But I’ve done better than I had any right to really expect, considering my work ethic and general lack of common sense, and if I allow myself to start imagining going from being a published author with new books on the horizon to Jeff Somers, local hooligan who once had a few books, well, the temptation to look into the literary equivalent of Country Music is strong.

And it’s easy to imagine. My bookshelves are stuffed with SF/F books I bought in the 1980s while a tender youth. We’re talking trilogies, series of books published over the course of several years. And many of the authors on my shelves are now, as far as I can tell, nowhere to be seen. Take a fellow named Dennis McCarty, who wrote a series of books about a place called Thlassa Mey back in the 80s and 90s – five book in total (my memories of these books is poor, which doesn’t mean anything – my memory of everything is poor). Nowadays I can’t find anything about him at all via Google. Granted, that doesn’t mean anything beyond his lack of online presence, but if he was still publishing he’d be somewhere online, I think–if nowhere else, on Amazon. Apparently he published 5 fantasy books and then promptly disappeared, and he’s not the only example.

Of course, some folks may have died. Or found new careers. Or gone on to write the sorts of things I don’t pay attention to – who knows? But most likely, of course, is that their last books didn’t sell well, their publisher passed on their next idea, and that was That.

That’s the fate that makes you reach for your cowboy hat and boots. Resisting that urge to crap out and try to do something that matches up with the newest trends, whatever they are, or maybe try to write a – gasp! – children’s book, is difficult. At least until the next book contract comes through.

In the mean time, let’s take comfort in the lyrical wisdom of Jewel Kilcher:

Follow your heart
Your intuition
It will lead you in the right direction
Let go of your mind
Your Intuition
It’s easy to find
Just follow your heart baby

, Bullshit, Writing

Nota Bene

Author: August 16, 2008

A few days ago I realized that the contact form plugin I was using here was. . .well, to borrow a term from Diamat, buggered. You could fill it out and click “submit” and by and large nothing would happen. So, if you signed up for the occasional update from me (including the rare but possible drunk-emailing of random insults and poetry) and haven’t heard a peep in a while, you might want to sign up again. For example, I sent an update email out yesterday. If you signed up and didn’t get it, your signup submission went into the Dustbin of the Cosmos, and you should sign up again using our shiny new form, which actually works. I think.

More Shit I Gotta Do: Permit Me to Burn Your Building Down

Author: August 13, 2008

Friends, I own a house. Well, let’s be clear: A bank owns a house, and if I pay the bank a garbage bag filled with crumpled dollar bills every month, we’re allowed to live here. The Duchess and I love our house, tiny and crowded with cats as it is, and we seek to improve it every now and then, the same way I sometimes get my hair cut: It’s just time to make things better. Most recently, we decided to get some air-conditioning installed.

I’ve never had any sort of central air-conditioning. I’ve had your standard window-units (Jeff Kay, over at the glorious West Virginia Surf Report, calls them “soviet humboxes”) from time to time and for the last few years, sure, but I’ve also spent a great deal of time without any sort of climate control at all. In fact, about twelve years ago I had an out of body experience in my old fourth-floor walkup in Jersey City, which reached an indoor temperature of about 500 degrees one July evening during a blistering heat wave. I’ve set up about 7 fans around my bed that night, all aligned carefully to create what I thought would be a lifesaving indoor tornado of moving air. All it did was create a sort of EZ Bake oven effect, resulting in the first time in my life I believe I soaked a mattress with sweat.

The Duchess, however, is from Texas, where everything, from homes to businesses to port-a-potties has central air. It’s a necessity down there, and people scramble from air-conditioned spot to air-conditioned spot like ants fleeing a giant magnifying glass. When she moved up here she was dismayed to find how rare central air is up in these parts, and has long vowed to rectify this in her own life. So the decision was handed down: Install some sort of AC in the house, so that we may be one of the gentry, living our ease while the rest of the world suffers.

I am always down with inching closer to the definition of “gentry”.

We found a contractor pretty easily, and they went to get permits for the work, which involved putting a condenser on the roof of the house. This proved problematic; the permit office claimed they needed architectural drawings of the whole system (which would cost about every dime I’m ever going to make, ever). The contractor basically said this can’t be right, but maybe they’re getting a hard time because they’re out of town. Hoboken is notorious for its politics, so this seemed reasonable. We decided I’d go down to the permit office myself and file as the homeowner. I mean, I pay taxes, right? Why do you think I’m broke? I might as well get my money’s worth.

What I entered into was a Kafka-like journey into a world without rules or justice. And filled with stuff I didn’t understand.

In theory, it should have been pretty simple: I show up, fill out an application, supply some basic materials describing the system being installed, and pay a fee for my permit. The first day I walked into the office, things looked promising: A nice woman told me I’d need a letter from an architect stating that our roof could handle the load of the condenser, and all would be well. This was fine – a letter from an architect is a lot cheaper than an official drawing. We procured said letter, and I went back again.

The same woman examined our materials again, and then said I’d need a drawing of just the straps holding the condenser in place. So we went and got that, and I returned a third time. Now I was informed that we needed to show liability insurance. I said, doesn’t our homeowner’s insurance cover that? And she made a call and confirmed that it certainly did, but there was something wrong with our drawing, so it had to be adjusted. So I had that taken care of, and went back, and the nice woman looked everything over and looked at me.

“We need to see a drawing of the roof with the condenser on it, showing load calculations,” she said.

I blinked. “The condenser weighs 150 pounds,” I said. “If our roof can’t hold it, we’ve got bigger problems.”

She gave me the patented city official Stare of Not Caring, and I went back to the architect to get said drawing, which he kindly threw in for no extra cost because I think the whole construction-related world was reading about me on the Internet and pulling for me. I think I was some sort of forum celebrity for a while there as kindly contractors from around the world said silent prayers that I not lose faith in The System.

“You need to show liability insurance, hon,” she said.

I stared at her. If you boiled down all my permit office experiences now into one conversation, it would go like this:

ME: Here’s my application.
THEM: You need huge, complicated, expensive architecture drawings.
ME: That’s ridiculous.
THEM: You’re right. How about a simple drawing of the straps?
ME: Here you go.
THEM: Great. You need liability insurance in case you destroy your neighbor’s house installing this.
ME: No I don’t. I’m the homeowner. My homeowner’s insurance covers everything, including the accidental molecular de-bonding of the house next door.
THEM: Right you are. These drawings are no good, we need to see the roof so we can be sure it can hold the weight of a normal human woman.
ME: Sweet jebus, here.
THEM: That’s great. Now if you could show us your liability insurance, we’d be in business.

It was like one of those phone polls when they ask you the same damn question sixteen times, phrased differently, to try and get a certain answer out of you.

So, we sent in our secret weapon: The Duchess herself. All tiny and girly, she went into the permit office the next day prepared to weep on demand, and damn if the gruff old guy in charge didn’t glance through her paperwork and grant her the permit almost immediately. This brings us to the central question of our times: Is Jeff a complete jackass, or is his wife The Duchess some sort of alien with super powers?

Most votes lean towards the former.

In the end, we got the work done and are now part of the landed gentry for reals. If anyone ever wants to come by in person for an autographed book, a hot meal, and several drunken rants* from Your Truly, you’ll have an air-conditioned couch to sleep on, now.

[*] Must bring own liquor supply.

, More Shit I Gotta Do

More Shit I Gotta Do

Author: August 11, 2008

Let’s see, what have been up to? I know you’re all fascinated.

First off, revisions to The Eternal Prison have gotten, er, involved. Has this ever happened to you: You write the world’s greatest book, nice and pulpy, perfect in every way, and then someone gives you a tiny bit of reasonable feedback about it and you think, damn, that’s a good idea, so you start tugging at the careful knots and patterns you’ve created, trying to slip in a few modest new threads, and then things come unraveled and you realize you have to work in some supplementary materials. . .which emphasizes a character you’d left in the background. . .which means you have to give that character more flesh and background. . and before you know it you’ve written War and Fucking Peace, except less coherent and with more future (not to mention unicorn)?

Dammit, that’s what’s happening here. The extremely good ideas fed to me in reaction to my first final draft has inspired me to basically write a whole new book of new material. This is either genius or the end of my career as Wildly Popular Novelist.

Erm, moderately popular novelist? Novelist? Moving on. . .

I’ve got another web site, www.innerswine.com which is the Intarweb home of my zine, The Inner Swine. It’s been live since the late 1990’s and had grown to absolutely amazing proportions, filled with archives of old issues, columns written, and a million static pages of various cruft. This weekend I lopped most of it off and transformed it into a clean archive for the zine. I’m still publishing the zine, and the web site will still have the latest issue and archives of the old issues, as well as occasional bits of news that are zine-specific, but I’ll be doing all my lazy, unfocused BS writing here from now on. I just can’t populate two web sites, a 20,000 word quarterly zine issue, short stories and novels any more. I AM NOT A YOUNG MAN ANYMORE.

The column I used to write for the TIS web site was called More Shit I Gotta Do. It’s theme was. . .all the shit I have to do on a daily basis. For those who have not been following my writing career, I am a lazy, lazy man, and my ideal existence would be sitting on a bean-bag chair with a laptop balanced on my belly, having tumblers of whisky brought to me by trained Helper Monkeys. Every day where I have to actually perform tasks is torture, and so just about anything can be the subject of a column. Had to buy groceries? That’s a column. Had to leave the house once this month? That’s a column. It’s genius.

I think I’ll start posting those here. Probably not too often, and I won’t mock the universe by proposing a schedule. But they’ll start popping up here, just wait and see.

Or, as most of you appear to be doing, ignore my blog completely and make fun of me in private forums.

L
J

Handsome, Ruthless and Stupid

Author: August 2, 2008

Some random thoughts:

Over at SF Signal, one of the commenters on the Mind Meld I participated in yesterday noted that most of the people giving examples were white men, and most of the examples they gave were the works of white men. Putting aside the fact that we don’t know how many women or other ethnicities were invited to participate and perhaps did not respond, I always find these kinds of examinations interesting. In the same way, I sometimes notice halfway through a movie that every single character in the film is white, or black, and from that moment on I’m more obsessed by the monochrome nature of the film than anything else.

Personally I don’t think I’m a sexist, but perhaps I am and don’t realize it. We all think we’re wonderful people, when in fact most of us are complete kneebiters. But that’s beside the point.

The question was to give an example of SF/F worldbuilding that I thought was genius, and I used Pohl’s Heechee books as my choice. I could have used Julian May’s Pliocene/Milieu books as my example; it’s just that as I scanned my bookshelf I happened to notice Pohl’s books first and thought damn, Pohl’s worldbuilding was fantastic and I fired off my response. If I’d glanced at a different shelf, I might have added one more woman to the list.

This makes me think about women writers I would give a limb to be in the same writing class as. Aside from May, there are plenty of female writers from various genres who have rocked my socks off, and continue to do so – like Barbara Tuchman, Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith (perhaps my favorite non SF/F writer currently), or Dorothy Sayers. Of course, anyone who reads should be able to produce a lengthy list of authors of various genders, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and religious affiliations, without trying too hard. If you can’t, you’re probably just not reading enough.

I’ve been trying to learn how to play guitar and speak French. For several years now. I don’t learn easy. Part of this is a stubborn determination to regard human interaction as undesirable, meaning I disdain teachers and tutors and try to do these things by myself, with fairly predictable results. A year ago The Duchess, my suffering wife, bought me some guitar lessons at a local place and marched me over there so she wouldn’t have to listen to my self-invented “chords” and I have to admit I like the teacher and have made astounding progress. I’m no Clapton or Van Halen, but at least I can play something identifiable as a “song”. And I now know what a Power Chord is! and why everyone lurves power chords.

French: Not so much. I’ve been striving to learn merely to speak broken, pidgen French using various audio recording-typ lessons, and while I think I might be able to painfully mumble something a generous and helpful Parisian might be able to understand, I don’t feel very masterful. We’ll see how it goes.

Aside from all that, revisions on The Eternal Prison continue apace, with some surprisingly hefty changes. This happens to me a lot; a minor suggestion or criticism inspires a lot of writing, because I suddenly see how things could be oh so much better, and I’m off to the races. I like what I’m doing, ripping and tearing things apart and pasting them back together. Hopefully my editor will, too.

World Building at SF Signal

Author: July 30, 2008

Hey y’all,

I was recently asked my thoughts on an example of excellent SF/F world building by the good folks over at SF Signal. Go on over and see what I and plenty of folks smarter than me had to say about it. Why not? My god, you’re reading my blog, you can’t have much else to do right now.

,

More Unicorn

Author: July 25, 2008

Well, heard back from my genius editor at Orbit about The Eternal Prison, so the long dark tea-time of my soul begins in earnest. Meaning I have some revisions to make.

Here’s my recollection of the conversation, which should go a long way to illustrating the Exciting Life of a Novelist in These, The End Times:

Genius Editor: Hello! Put on some pants and listen.

ME: Uh. . .pants, pants, pants. . .hold on. . .pants, pants, where the hell–ah! Here’s a pair. Not mine, but will have to do. <grunting noise> Whew! I’ve, uh, gained a few–okay! We’re in. Shoot.

GE: I just got done with The Eternal Prison. Excellent. Best one so far. You’re a genius.

ME: Hooray!

GE: Wait, don’t start drinking yet.

ME: <pausing with bottle in air> Uh, okay.

GE: I could not help but notice that we seem to be missing several chapters. Like, the whole sequence when they visit the Center of the Earth to retrieve the magic ring? Aside from not really being in concert with the universe you’ve created in the first two books, this whole sequence is just not there. At the end of one chapter they say they’re heading to the Center of the Earth, and the next chapter it’s like fifteen years later and that whole adventure is recalled in flashback by the characters. Very few flashbacks. It was very confusing. Was there a Unicorn? Because there was a lot of Unicorn imagery that might have made more sense if we’d been given that part of the story.

ME: Got it: more unicorn. I can do that.

GE: And, frankly, the whole last third of the book seems like ten chapters from a totally different book, just pasted in with the character and place names searched-and-replaced. Which I can tell because the search-and-replacing was sloppy, resulting in Avery Cates being referred to as Avery DorCatesothy throughout. Aside from this sort of unprofessional mistake, the last third of the book, as a consequence, makes absolutely no sense. Suddenly they’re in a zeppelin on an alien planet? And there’s elves?

ME: Uh. . .would more unicorn solve this as well?

GE: No, frankly, it would not. I think you have to re-write the whole last third. You know, so it makes sense.

ME: Uh-huh. Sure, sure. No problem.

GE: Good.

ME: What, exactly, does “make sense” mean, in this context? I really don’t see why more unicorn wouldn’t work here as well. It would, you know, create a visual link between the two sections.

GE: Moving on, I can’t help but notice that several chapters interspersed throughout the manuscript are, in actualilty, Wikipedia entries, simply cut-and-pasted into the file, with no attribution or explanation. The entries don’t even seem to have anything to do with the story. For example, chapter 17 is the entry for the Heavy Metal band Iron Maiden.

ME: Shows what you know. This is deep, Joyce-ian stuff, here. You have to look deeper. I am a genius. Of sorts.

GE: Well, we can’t publish it like this.

ME: Right! I’ve been taking notes. Let’s see. . .basically, you want more unicorn. That’s what I’m getting.

GE: …

ME: Oh! Right. And lose the Wikipedia stuff, despite the fact that that’s the core of the book and will win awards for us. But I should delete the Wikipedia entries. And more unicorn. Got it! When do you need a rewrite? I’m pretty open, I could have it to you by tomorrow morning. Maybe noon, but probably morning.

GE: …

ME: Holy shit, do you think there’s a Wikipedia page on unicorns? Damn, I might have this re-write for you by tonight.

GE: <dial tone>

My memory may not be what it once was, so some of the details may have been fudged in there. Back to work!

,

Book Roasted

Author: July 22, 2008

I am baked to a nice red color after my Book Roast. There was pantslessness, whiskey, and thong underwear, and someone did indeed win a signed copy of The Digital Plague. Truly, a great time to be alive.

Thanks to all the Book Roast folks for a grand time, and I’d encourage everyone to check it out on a regular basis for some book-based fun.

Roastin’ a-comin’

Author: July 15, 2008

TDP, baby!Just a reminder that The Digital Plague is scheduled to be Roasted over at Book Roast in exactly 1 week, on July 22. It ought to be a lot of fun, and I’ll be on the site like a lonely guy at a dance, butting in to every comment and demanding attention. If you’re lucky I’ll still be drunk from the night before, and as a result ashamed and irritable.

Here’s how it works: They’ll post a short excerpt from The  Digital Plague and then 3 questions. The questions are written by the Book Roast folks, not me, and will skew towards the humorous and/or ridiculous. Then people post answers to the questions, and I’ll be monitoring the blog comments and jumping in as well, so feel free to ask me questions or, as I said, insult me (do I know my readers or what?). I will, of course, be sitting at my desk pantsless with a glass of whiskey in my hand and will post photos to prove this if asked. If anyone’s working on the little puzzle over at the TDP web site, I might be induced to offer hints. But only if you’re super nice.

Then, I pick a “winner” who I think answered the 3 questions best – not necessarily correctly, just “best” – and the winner gets a free book. I might get creative with the prize, actually, and if you already own TDP we can figure something out, and naturally I will sign the book as well if asked.