Author Archive: jsomers

I’m sitting here working on Avery Cates #3, with a numb butt and a sleeping cat on the couch next to me, and my mind is wandering. A wandering mind writes no books, which is bad, as I believe my editor at Orbit will break my legs if I’m late with this manuscript.

I’m also enjoying a nice glass of Scotch as I write, which is one of the wonders of the modern age, that I can procure and drink such fine whisky any time I like (Glenrothes Select Reserve in case anyone’s interested). In the media writers are often portrayed as borderline (or even full-blown) high-functioning alcoholics, with the open bottle next to their desk. Indeed, a lot of great writers did hit the sauce pretty hard. Every few weeks or months I end up having a drink at The White Horse Tavern in Manhattan, which is where, of course, Dylan Thomas met his wet end. But I’ve always been suspicious of the old saw about inebriated writers – I don’t get much writing done when drunk. One nice drink after dinner, no problem. Even two sometimes causes no harm and I get a lot done while sipping the good stuff. But three sheets to the wind? Even if I did try to write, it would end up a sloppy batch of incoherency.

Those of you just about to say and what would the difference from your sober writing be can just stuff it. I’ve heard them all.

So that’s an interesting question I don’t think I’ve ever seen treated in an author blog or literary web site. How much does booze help or hinder the process? I mean, not all writers drink, of course, and even those who do like to tip a glass have varying degrees of tolerance and appreciation, ranging from the folks who’ll have a single glass of sherry on New Year’s Eve to those like me who have to measure their whisky intake in units similar to crude oil (i.e., the barrel). But it’s certainly part of the writing mythos that we’re all unapologetic boozers. Yet I’ve never seen a serious attempt to quantify the affect booze has on writing. As usual, Your Humble Author here is more than willing to sacrifice his time and, more importantly, his dignity, on the question. So here’s my personal table of booze intake versus literary output:

So there you have it, a scientific examination of the effect of liquor on my writing. I hope the world benefits from my fearless reporting. What about you? The world needs more data points so the young writers of the world can learn from their elders and make good decisions about whether to drink and write.

I have Google Alerts set to, er, alert me whenever my name or book titles get mentioned out there. It’s always fun to wake up and find out someone has posted about you, even when the post is about how much you suck. No, really – you’d be surprised how much fun even a post entitled JEFF SOMERS SUCKS MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE HAS OR EVER WILL SUCK can be.

Anyway, found this little blog post today, where a guy named Derek James is reading TEC and wonders whether it is worse to be buried alive or trapped inside a cyborg body you don’t control, as in The Electric Church’s monks, and he has a poll set up to see what people think. So, which would it be – buried alive or a Monk? Surf on over and let ‘im know.

You know what the problem with me trying to post on this blog every day? Nothing ever happens to me. Nothing, seriously. I also have very few thoughts which would qualify as “blog-able”. I am sure this surprises no one, especially those who actually read my zine The Inner Swine. The poor souls. If I were to somehow summon the energy to blog every day, the posts would read something like this:

Woke up, still tired. Sat and stared at day-job work for some time while cats batted my ears with their paws, painfully. Finally fed cats to much purring and rejoicing. Wife called me “little man” again while threatening to beat me if the house wasn’t cleaned by the time she got home. Napped some. Had bourbon for lunch again, no regrets.

I don’t think anyone wants something like that.

I do have some news today, though! It’s the Second Annual Fantasy Bookspot Book Tournament! Check out the explanation of what’s going on and note, dearest readers, that The Electric Church has been nominated. If you’re inclined and able, vote the heck out of it. Please. If nothing else, defend it against theBlue Meanies who will call it names and make me cry.

Finally, the ARCs of The Digital Plague are in, and they are gorgeous. Orbit sure knows how to make me look like a genius.

Whew! Gotta start trying to post more often, but as far as writing goes I’m being pulled in a dozen different ways and getting to the blog has fallen down the list. This is probably bad as no one wants to come back to a blog that’s never updated, but something’s got to be sacrificed, and no one is paying me to write this blog. Any takers?

I spent some time over the weekend organizing and re-filing the masses of hardcopy manuscripts I have. Not only do I keep everything – I have stories and novels written when I was 13 and in dire need of a kick in the ass – but I keep everything on paper, too. Not to say I don’t have electronic backups; everything written pretty much after 1996 I have on disk somewhere and even the old HC has been scanned to PDF files, er most of it anyway. But I still print out a hard copy of everything and file it the old-fashioned way, because, you know, no one has ever made that file format obsolete, and no one has ever stopped making paper, dig? If you ask which is more likely to be readable by our alien overlords in 2000 years, paper or PDF, I’ll go with paper.

In fact, if the house burned down and I was able to only save the backup DVDs, the first thing I’d do is print everything out again.

I mean, looking back, electronic files have a shitty record for me. When I was a kid writing short stories on my Commodore 64, I used something called KWrite (I think that was its name–no relation to the KDE word processor used in Linux these days). I still have 5.25″ disks with KWrite files on them, unreadable by any modern computer. Sure, assuming those disks are still viable I might hook up my old C64 (yes, I still have it) and somehow extract those files, but it wouldn’t be easy. And what would I extract them to? Paper, probably. Maybe I could convert them to something usable by modern PCs, but it probably wouldn’t be worth it. Thank goodness I *do* have a HC of those early, awful stories.

Then, a few years later I got my first PC, second hand from a friend, a creaky old 386 model. I installed Word Perfect on it and have a ton of files from that era as well. WordPerfect still exists, of course, so those files aren’t lost, but they might as well be since I won’t dish out the $$$ to buy a copy. Then there was the brief, hellish tour of duty with MS Word, and now I’m comfortable in my Linux dotage, using Open Office and loving it. Chances any of those file formats will be usable in 500 years, assuming my hard disks and DVD backups survive? Approximately zero, I think.

Chances the paper will still be readable? Pretty good.

Anyway, part of the reason I am pressed for time is these damn cats. I have four of them, and this is what they think of me working:

Translation: not much.

Finally, for those of you who have read through this whole post: I need a title for Avery Cates #3. For some reason, I’m halfway through this one and a title eludes me, which rarely happens. It needs to be punchy like its predecessors – The Electric Church and The Digital Plague. A three word phrase with an adjective vaguely connected to science etc. How hard can it be?

Damn hard. If anyone has a suggestion, feel free, though note that I will shamelessly steal it from you if it’s any good and offer absolutely no credit, so be warned.