Author Archive: jsomers

Some people make this blogging shit look easy, my friends, but I am not one of them.

Writing is sometimes easy for me–I’ve had both experiences. Sometimes writing is like painfully carrying words made out of solid granite up a steep incline and laying them laboriously next to each other, with paragraphs taking days and chapters taking weeks. Sometimes I rattle it off like I’m just tossing words onto a wall, where they magically stick together in wonderful ways. But blogging just doesn’t feel natural, so far.

One reason is that I can’t believe anyone wants to know what I’m thinking. I mean, how would that be possible? My inner monologue consists of baseball statistics, beer cravings, and a morass of useless trivia. No one in their right mind wants to read that, right? I can’t be wrong on this. If I’m wrong on this then I should really be on TV, earning millions from you people.

Some people make this shit look easy, though: Consider Jeff Kay, who writes The West Virginia Surf Report.  Jeff used to put out a printed zine back in The Day, and now does it blog-style, and damn if he doesn’t post funny, interesting things just about every day. I am insanely jealous. I am jealous enough to go down and burn down his house, except that would require planning. And energy. And time. Basically all the things that conspire against me on a daily basis. Normally I would hire someone else to take care of the house-burning-down stuff, but I’m a writer, you know. We have no monies.

Jeff recently got a literary agent, so we can only hope he starts delivering the printed goods again, and that maybe then he’ll stop blogging and for want of a better alternative people will start wandering here! Muhahahahaha!

The heat is broken in this hotel room, and it’s about 103 degrees in here. I’ve complained to the mostly silent men who stand guard outside my door, but they don’t respond, or do anything. So, I’m blogging naked, soaking in cold water in the tub.

By lowering a note to the street on a thread worked free of the bedsheets, I convinced a street urchin to purchase a bottle of Glenmoranjie for me, and so I’ve got a nice drink balanced on the edge of the old clawtooth tub. Things are looking up.

My present living situation and my recent contemplation of my flooding house has me thinking about places I’ve lived. Plus, I was just reading Jeff Kay’s West Virginia Surf Report and one of his recent posts was about an old apartment he lived in, so I’ve been thinking about places I’ve lived. My memories are suspect in the best of times, so really all I have are impressions:

Rented house: In my sophomore year of college I rented a house with 7 friends, or 4 friends and 3 of their friends. My main memory of this place is when one of my roommates went into the bathroom one day after a big party. The rest of us were watching TV in the living room, directly below the bathroom. Suddenly, there is a horrible, inhuman noise from the upstairs bathroom, and then, in quick succession, the sound of water dripping through the ceiling, the sound of running feet on the stairs, and then my roommate, in a green robe, skidding to a halt in the room, staring comically at the ceiling, then snatching my clean towels from the rack on which they were drying and sopping up his filthy toilet runoff with them. Good times, good times.

Apartment #1: The next year two of my friends and I rented a subterranean apartment a few blocks away. The place had no windows, particle board walls, and madness in the air. How we made it out without killing each other, I’ll never know.

Apartment #2: The first place I ever rented on my own was actually not a bad place, all things considered. The upstairs neighbors weren’t so great, though. A huge, red-faced woman and her thirty or forty kids, as far as I could tell. She took her parenting very seriously, however, asking me to go to the liquor store to buy her booze when she couldn’t leave the “young ‘uns” alone by themselves.

Apartment #3: A cheap place, with floors painted brown. I once decided to take a bath and turned the water on, and then forgot all about it until my suffering downstairs neighbor came screaming up the stairs, wondering why Niagra frickin Falls was pouring into her bathroom. Good times.

Apartment #4: Shared with the future Duchess Mrs. Somers, this was a bargain-priced railroad with the worst heat ever known to man. Pluto is warmer than that apartment in the winter. Once we put a thermometer into the bathroom in January and it told us it was 43 degrees in the bathroom. WITH THE HEAT ON. We had it “fixed” many times, to no avail. They’ll likely find an Indian Burial ground underneath that place someday.

Ah, good times, good times. When I get out of this hotel, I’m going to burn it down and send the bill to my publisher.

As much as I’d like to pretend writing is just me, a bottle of rye, a typewriter and my inner demons, the fact is, I owe a lot of people.

Not in the sense of owing them money–though there are plenty of people scattered across this world to whom I do owe vast sums, and lordy let’s pray they never find me. The one advantage of being trapped in this hotel room, blogging for my corporate masters, is that I am at least insulated from the various lawsuits and debts plaguing me.

No, I meant in the sense of them having contributed somehow to my writing. A lot of people fall into this category, from my parents to some teachers to acquaintances who have unwittingly been models for characters, usually in an unflattering sense. So I though, since I have nothing but time and blog posts to burn here, I might as well acknowledge some of them here. Since I will clearly never be cutting them checks in appreciation. Hollow praise is all they’ll ever get.

Today I’m thinking of Lili Saintcrow. Back a few years, I originally sold The Electric Church to a web publisher called Another Chapter, now defunct. The idea was serial fiction: People would subscribe to a story and every week AC would deliver a nifty PDF of the next chapter to their mailbox, with the ideal story being endless, like a soap opera, except in various genres. Doomed to failure, of course, as no one wants to wait a week for the next chapter and then have to read it on their computer screen or take the trouble to print it out themselves, but hell, a sale is a sale. Lili was involved with the site and was assigned as my editor on TEC.

And thank goodness, because Lili is a great editor. Sadly for you, she no longer does freelance editing, as she has her own kick-ass publishing career to tend to. She took the raw materials of TEC and really kicked my ass–forcing me to make sense, to write well, to be inventive, all those things writers get lazy about. In the end she made TEC a much better book, and even had a big hand in helping me sell the book to my publisher after Another Chapter went out of business.

In short, Lili rocks. And she can write, so you should check out some of her books, and you can thank me later.

And also too, if you get in touch with her, please tell her to get the word out that I am trapped in here, okay?

Blogging ain’t easy. I’m going to try and make it look easy, but it ain’t. Not only have I consumed all the booze I smuggled into this room, but there was no lunch yesterday, or breakfast today. I am told I get fed only when I post entries to this blog.

I remember when I was a kid, buying cheap SciFi/Fantasy paperbacks like they were crack and reading until I was almost blind at three in the morning. I started off in the local magazine shop near my house, which had a lot of cheap paperbacks, and then eventually moved up to taking the train into NYC every weekend to go to Barnes & Noble’s on 14th street. Back then you could buy most MM paperbacks for about $3-$4, which fit right into my allowance range. I’d read these books and wonder about the writers, how they lived, how they wrote.

For a while, I was a big Piers Anthony fan. I probably have about 20 of his books moldering away at home; as I got older I moved away from his works, but for a while I really enjoyed him. For a while (and he may still be doing this) he was including a lengthy Author’s Note at the end of his books, in which he rambled on about what was happening in his life and gave credit to reader ideas he’d used in his latest books, and, most interestingly, described in great detail his work style when writing. I recall that he wrote all his first drafts in pencil on a pad. I also recall he was very frank about writing being his business, how he fed his family and put his kids through school.

At the time, this was something of a revelation to me; I guess when I’d been ten or so I imagined that writers all lived in a Jonestown-like commune, churning out epic fantasies. I was simultaneously intrigued by this slice of reality, and horrified.

Now, here I am. I’m not even exactly published yet, because the book is due out in September when Orbit Books launches, but still–a working author of sorts. And let me tell you, there ain’t no mystery about it. You write for love, you write stories you want to read and be read, and then, the moment you put THE END on the polished draft, it becomes a business: You want to sell the damn thing, tap into the huge grinding mechanism of the publishing industry and get some income generated to boot.

I think about all the books I’ve bought, especially those cheap paperbacks when I was a kid: Some of those authors seem to have disappeared from the world. I note that Barbara Hambly, who wrote one of my favorite trilogies in The Darwath Trilogy (a trilogy of five books, now, because that’s how we roll in this biz) is still going strong and has published an unreal number of books in her career. But then there’s someone like Lyndon Hardy, whose books I remember reading the same way I remember getting haircuts as a kid: Vaguely, with few details. I admit I am a Google whore–if you ain’t listed in Google, you might as well not exist as far as my frail research skills are concerned. So Lyndon might be doing lots of exciting things that I just don’t know about, but he certainly hasn’t been publishing books. And then there’s someone like Stephen R. Donaldson, who wrote two series I really enjoyed (the first Tom Covenant trilogy and the Gap into Conflict series). He’s written a LOT of stuff since I stopped buying anything I saw by him in the bookstores more or less automatically, but has come back to the Covenant series recently, like it’s 1980 all over again. Weird.

Anyway, I have to try to pull up the carpet and see if there are any loose floorboards that might allow me to tunnel down to the next floor and escape. Or if there’s at least some forgotten mints maybe under the bed.