Author Archive: jsomers

Today I posted a little column on my zine’s web site about putting out a paper zine instead of—or as well as—a Blog. I’ve been writing columns on that site for years now. I used to have a number of other columnists, but they’ve all fled for one reason or another—usually after I’ve drunkenly threatened them with bodily harm. This is quickly followed by postcards from foreign lands advising me to lose their cell phone numbers and eventually, of course, the restraining order. Every now and then one of them still sends me a new entry, but for the most part it’s just me now. I started the columns to try and give people a reason to come by every now and then; no one comes back to a static web site, after all. This was before Blogs were so, well, everywhere.

When I first started, I actually posted a new column every two weeks, but that’s long gone now. These days a couple of postings a year is the best I can do. I am not the young dynamo I once was.

Sometimes it seems like Zines are the product of a bygone era, that no one knows what the hell I mean when I say that I publish a zine—or they picture 1995 and imagine me with long hair, flannel shirts, and ripped jeans. The flannel is sadly still accurate, but in my defense I was wearing ripped flannel shirts when I was 14—is it a crime to have the same fashion sense as your adolescent self? If so, color me guilty. Other times I see a lot of zines from teenagers which indicate that the idea of putting out a paper publication yourself is not exactly dead. And I still get plenty of zines in the mail, so the subculture keeps going, whether I notice or not. Which is shocking, since I generally require the universe to alert me to all changes so I can approve or veto.

A lot of people have told me they expected me to stop publishing the zine once I started getting paid to write. I can understand why—my zine takes up a lot of my time, and it actually costs me money to produce, whereas the novels and stories and columns—while they also take up my time—actually pay me. But the zine is too much fun, so I doubt I’ll ever stop it, unless the State of New Jersey orders me to under the Patriot Act. As to why I keep putting out a paper zine in this Blog Era, well, for that you can go read the actual column, can’t ya?

For more info on Zines in general, you can go to Broken Pencil’s web site, or Zine World’s web site, or the charming Zine Wiki. Or a dozen other places. Or heck, email me and I’ll tell you more than you want to know about zines, bubba.

This morning I woke up in a completely different hotel room. Slightly better condition, more generic. The windows have all been blacked out, and there’s no phone or other indication of where I am. What’s worse, they’ve taken away all my clothes and left behind a note that everything is being laundered in preparation for my appearance at World Fantasy Con in November.

I imagine I’ll meet a lot of interesting people at WFC. Certainly, I’m looking forward to meeting people I’ve worked with or known from a distance, like the incredible Lili Saintcrow. Plus I’m looking froward to meeting people who may have bought my book and liked it. People who bought my book and ended up putting it in the freezer because of its inherent faults and disturbing horribleness, well, I don’t want to meet them so much. I suspect they may try to attack me.

Of course, these sorts of things generally mean answering the same sorts of questions over and over again. One that I get a lot is: Did you have any connections in publishing in order to get published.

There’re writers in this world who are convinced that the world is stacked against them and that you need to have some sort of special relationship or advantage in order to be published. This attitude is less prevalent in the genres than in mainstream fiction, but you still get it–or at least I do, leading me to suspect that people read my prose, scrunch their faces up in confusion, and think How did this kneebiter get published?

Conspiracy theories are easy, of course–any time something doesn’t seem to add up, it’s easy enough to file it under Those Damn Bastards are Screwing Me and move along. Writing is so subjective, and all of us can come up with a short (or not so short) list of writers we think suck, so the jump to imagining that people get published solely due to personal relationships or monied existences or something is tempting. Now, I am sure that this actually happens: There are probably writers who got big advance checks or big promotional pushes or simply got published because they “knew someone”. Or because their social status simply gave them access that the rest of us are denied. But all I can discuss, really, is my own experience, natch. As a matter of fact I am often guilty of making the logical mistake of assuming my own personal experience is general truth, as in I see a little leprechaun named McEgo who talks to me, therefore everyone probably sees lilttle leprechauns which leads, obviously, to me daydreaming about getting everyone’s little leprechauns together and having them grudge match until a Supreme Leprechaun is crowned.

But I digress.

My own personal experience includes almost zero connections. You know how I got published? Baby, I submitted. I licked envelopes until my tongue was raw.

As a matter of fact, I am rather a scourge on the publishing industry as I am too lazy to do things like read guidelines or send for sample issues and such. I kind of blindly paper the world with my submissions and hope for the best, garnering tons of rejections as I do so. Just about every story or novel I’ve sold can be traced back to this sort of submission, including both my novels. And I have the rejections notes here in my desk to prove it, all 1000+ of them*. I’m tempted to start carrying my rejection slips around with me, and the next time someone snidley asks if I had any connections that helped me get published I can pull them out and inflict severe paper cuts on the questioner, shouting incoherently until I removed by security. I mean, my evenings usually end with me being removed by security anyway, might as well get it over with.

I supposed as I get bloated and bloviated and super super famous as a writer this question will die off as everyone assumes I am swimming in a pool of cash and hobnobbing with the literary elite, if indeed people who write books about brain-stealing cyborgs are allowed to get near the literary frickin elite. Until then: Remember kids, you don’t need connections. You need lots of stamps, and the ability to ignore almost all negative comments that come your way.

*A few years ago, when I only had about 500 rejections, I wrote an article about it all in my zine The Inner Swine. You can read it if you like.

I’ve once again fallen behind on blathering here, because I am slightly busy. Between revising The Digital Plague and submitting it to my Corporate Masters and beginning the earliest draft of the third, as-yet-not-officially-titled Avery Cates book, I’ve been doing some promotion (i.e., interviews) and resisting summary dismissal at my day job, which is always a near thing considering how often I’ve exploded into incoherent expletives at staff meetings. And then my agent sent me a note asking me to look over the last draft of Chum and revise as I see fit. Chum, for those of you who can’t read my mind, is actually the manuscript that my agent signed me on. It’s not Sci Fi, it’s more of a black comedy with murder thrown in. My agent took it on years ago, but it got back-burnered when the sale of The Electric Church sort of came out of nowhere. She closed her note by saying “that working for a living is totally over rated, right?”

Ha! Who has time for all this? Plus, I’m working on writing the next issue of The Inner Swine. A little personal zine might not seem like much, but when each issue is about 20,000 words and you put it out 4 times a year, it does eat into your time. I’m frickin’ booked.

So, there have been a few interviews to point you towards: First off, Mike Collins interviewed me for Your Mom’s Basement:

11. Your book was chosen as one of the launch titles for Orbit in the US. What’s that been like?

Well, it’s interesting to have so much publishing muscle behind you. My last book was published by the tiniest of tiny publishers and the marketing team was me, my wife, and my Mom. Things went about as well as you can imagine.

Everyone is so excited about Orbit entering the US market–I’ve literally have people go from Listening Politely to Rabidly Interested in my book just because they hear that Orbit’s publishing it. To have that kind of clout behind you is intoxicating, and I’ve started walking about with a crown and a T-shirt that says KING OF ALL SPEC FIC. Is that wrong?

You can read the whole thing here.

Then, our friends over at Chud.com interviewed me after reviewing TEC the other day:

Was being a writer always your goal?

Then, heartbreakingly, I realized one day when I was 27 or so that becoming a brain surgeon would require lots of school, hard work, and a basic understanding of math. So I decided to write.

Whew! Is it any wonder I drink? I mean, this kind of pace is killer. I actually had to wake up before noon the other day. It was traumatic.