Hot Damn!
I’ll tell you–Ego surfing has its advantages. I was searching on, well, myself today, and lookie what I found: A drawing of Glee from The Digital Plague:
http://enmi.deviantart.com/art/Glee-89268339
This is so cool it hurts.
L
J
I’ll tell you–Ego surfing has its advantages. I was searching on, well, myself today, and lookie what I found: A drawing of Glee from The Digital Plague:
http://enmi.deviantart.com/art/Glee-89268339
This is so cool it hurts.
L
J
Patrick over at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist has listed his ‘provisional’ Best of 2008 (provisional since the year is only half over, natch), and The Digital Plague is hanging on as an also-ran, currently ranked #10. Which means chances are Pat will read something in the next 5+ months that will knock me off the list, so I might as well crow about being there at all now, while I have the chance, eh?
Of course, maybe he’ll re-read TDP at some point and move me up. Anything’s possible. I wonder if I mailed him an envelope of ten-dollar bills, if that would have any effect? Only one way to find out. Of course, first I have to accrue some ten-dollar bills. I guess it’s back to busking for me — I only know 2 songs, both more or less theoretically, so this might take a while.
Jøsh Saitz, publisher of the tasty underground magazine Negative Capability, sent me my very own Venn Diagram yesterday:
Yay for pantslessness!
 In spirit, anyway (pic sent in by the very cool Davida Gypsy Breier, from Xerography Debt):
SFX Magazine has deigned to review The Digital Plague, friends, and they love us. Eddie Robson writes:
“This is a brash, brutal, brilliant novel, gleefully packed with violence. Fans of gratuitous swearing will also find plenty to enjoy, with major profanity appearing on nearly every page. In fact, possibly on every single page – we haven’t checked, but it seems eminently fucking plausible…”
Of course, for some reason they seem to believe someone named Nick Harkaway wrote it. Which might be problematic for folks reading the review and seeking to find me for celebrity endorsements. I’M GONNA SUE. As soon as I find my pants and a place to put my drink down.
UPDATE: At some point, they’ve fixed the name, thank goodness.
I ache all over. In the past week, I have done the following feats of Herculean amazingness:
All this and delivered a manuscript, too! And created about 6,235 new concepts for Next Major Project, the ultimate fate of which depend mightily on whether someone wants to pay me to write any particular one. The Duchess has been pushing a particular idea of hers which is an amalgamation of three stories I wrote years ago that she didn’t like much individually, but she hit on the idea of combining them and has haunted me about this ever since, as she believes combining these ideas = instant Nobel Prize. But if someone wants to pay me to write something else–perhaps an Epic Poem dedicated to the lump of green putty found in my armpit this morning–all bets are off.
I am exhausted.
Of course the other night I was sitting at my desk looking out my window onto our street, and a drunken motherfucker stumbled in-between two parked cars as I watched and began urinating lustily. I stared in surprise — I’ve crawled through enough bars on the East Coast to have witnessed plenty of public urination before, but this is the first time it’s happened a) while I was sober myself* and b) Â it was right outside my own damn house.
After a second he looked up and saw me watching. He shrugged, looking back at the business at hand.
“Whatchu gonna do?” He slurred. “This is what happens when you drink.”
Indeed. There is wisdom in there, if you care to look. By the time I decided the appropriate response would be to go get the garden hose, hook it up to the kitchen sink, open the front door and douse him, he was long gone, and I’d been staring blankly out the window for about fifteen minutes.
*Old hands will know automatically that sober is a relative term.Â
Over at the often forgotten Jeff Somers Rocks You Like a Hurrican Forums, a few folks were discussing reading at work (specifically, since this was, after all, the Jeff Somers Rocks You Like a Hurrican Forums, reading The Digital Plague at work). Work tends to be a big old package of wasted time no matter how you slice it — I’m convinced that people who complain about being busy at work simply haven’t figured out time management yet. Or perhaps that’s just my job, which can be done in about 3 good hours on a sunny afternoon while lying in the tall grass of your local park, daydreaming. When I had to troop into an office every day to accomplish my job it was a horror of wasted hours as I sat at my desk trying to look busy.
Anyway, reading at work is the Great Dream of all lazy, unambitious geniuses (like me). Before the Internet, which I know for a lot of youngin’s sounds about as far back in the past as The Great Depression, it was almost comically hard and you ended up doing a lot of things you would normally consider insane, like sitting in toilet stalls with a paperback, or photocopying a 1200-page book just so you could carry it around in a manilla folder and look busy while you were devouring a good potboiler.
The Internet made it easier, of course, as you could now find at least something to read on your computer and still appear to be borderline-productive. If nothing else you can find lots of classics at Project Gutenberg and the like. Now, today, I found this site: Read at Work. It’s a little weird, and I’m not sure if you can add content to it, but it’s a nifty idea.
There: I do my part to ruin your career and undermine the infrastructure of our great nation. Now, back to work.
So, I handed in the final manuscript of The Eternal Prison today, otherwise known as Avery Cates #3. My editor at Orbit is brilliant and a little frightening, but I think this story is kick-ass and I can’t wait to hear what she thinks. Besides, the very few people in this world I trust to read rough drafts of novels (i.e., The Wife and The Agent) have given it their seal of approval.
Still, makes me nervous. In a weird way I’d almost prefer to keep all my works hidden, just for me to gloat over. I think a lot of writers have this reluctance to release their work into the wild, and we all have different ways of handling it. Me, I drink. When I’m nice and liquored up I call my editor at 3AM and slur on and on about how genius I am, and then email the manuscript to her. Then I wake up 2 days later in Philadelphia. This process has worked pretty well so far.
Anyhoo, now we await the Edit Letter, which is where my editor tells me how ungenius I am and gives me her opinions. Sometimes these Edit Letters are thin and easy to deal with. Sometimes they are tomes of grave horror. We’ll see which way this one goes. If I am drunker than usual in a few weeks, you’ll have a clue.
I’m putting together the new issue of my zine, The Inner Swine, and thought I’d cross-post this essay written by me and old friend Jeof Vita (also the cover artist for TIS). It’s about the comic book we co-authored a decade ago, mentioned previously on this blog. Enjoy! Or don’t, bastards.
Jeff and Jeof Wrote a Comic, Once
The Birth, Glorious Existence, and Sudden Demise of Evil Boys, Inc.
by Jeff Somers & Jeof Vita
JEFF SOMERS: THE YEAR was 1996. I was 25 years old and had just started to realize that working a 9-5 job for a living was a liquor-greased slide into hell. Bill Clinton was President, and everyone was complaining that Alanis Morrisette’s hit single Ironic didn’t contain a single ironic statement in it. The Macarena was waiting in the wings like a bloated spider eager to feast on your bodily fluids, and The Inner Swine was not yet the international sensation it was soon to become.
This was also the year TIS cover artist Jeof Vita and I co-wrote a comic book.
Last night The Duchess and I crashed an io9.com meetup in NYC, at The Magician on the lower east side. Got to meet editors Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, and a couple of folks from my publisher dropped in as well, including marketing goid Alex and my fearsome editor Devi. The bar was a real find, and Annalee and Charlie were very nice to an awkward and slightly inebriated author. I learned a little bit about Women in Refrigerators, and got to hang out with some cool people. A pretty good night, I’d say.