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.

Be Willing to Abandon Your Ideas

One of the most difficult things to do with a piece of fiction is to diagnose what’s wrong with it. That’s one reason we writers often pull in Beta Readers and other folks to offer up objective feedback, because as the creator and adoring god of our fictional universe we sometimes can see its flaws clearly.

Recently, while working on a novel I’ve been trying to get off the ground for a while, I was reminded of a basic mistake you can make when writing any fiction: Hanging onto ideas long after they’ve been proved to be not working.

Kill Them So Your Story May Live

Every story begins with ideas — interesting bits and pieces you want to explore. Sometimes that’s a character who pops into your head and demands attention, sometimes it’s a great sci-fi premise or a perfect murder mystery. And that main idea will inspire a bunch of other ideas that at first blush often seem perfect and foundational.

But sometimes ideas don’t stay fresh, and they can actually sour to the point where they’re actively hurting your story. But it’s hard to let go. Sometimes it’s the Fallacy of Sunk Costs that makes us think since we’ve already spent 20,000 words and several weeks of our lives on developing an idea we have to keep carrying it to the end. Sometimes it’s just the belief that if the idea was part of our original inspiration for the story, we have to carry it to the end.

You don’t.

Jettisoning an idea that might be cool but isn’t working with the story as it has evolved is tough, but often yields a burst of energy. That novel I mentioned earlier is set in a prison, and part of the original idea involved a group dedicated to planning an escape. The main character is jaded and disinterested in escape, believing it to be pointless, and I originally imagined getting a lot of tension out of that dynamic.

But as I worked on the story, I found myself continuously having to remind myself about the escape stuff, and shoe-horning it in. Eventually the novel kind of collapsed on itself, and I took a step back, trying to figure out if it was salvageable. I concluded it was — but decided I needed to lose the escape stuff. On paper it was a good idea. In practice, it was getting in the way of the emerging story I was interested in. Dropping that idea turned out to be the secret; after ditching it, I tore through a revision with renewed energy.

The moral of this post is simple: Don’t get too attached to ideas. With ideas, being “good” isn’t enough — they have to work. Being willing to drop a perfectly good idea is often the difference between a successful first draft and a novel that just sucks your energy dry and refuses to take its final form.

Of course, sometimes every idea is terrible, like that time when I had really long hippie hair as a teenager and went to my old Italian barber and asked for a ‘trim’ despite his clear hostility.

Detained: Chapter 2

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below!

2. Mike

When he’d passed the prison-like office park a few miles back, he’d worried that he’d been steered wrong, but the place was perfect. It was exactly what he’d asked for: Hyper-local, off the beaten path. The faded sign outside read MAD ONE JACK’S: Food | Liquor | Live Music and the place looked like it had been carved out of the trees a million years ago. He steered the rented Land Rover into a spot and shut the engine off.

He could hear music from inside: He recognized the twangy guitar riff, but couldn’t place it. He felt tired. A Scotch, a burger, and some local color was exactly what the doctor ordered.

Entering, he felt awkward for a moment. The place was dead. Four, five people, including the bartender, who didn’t look friendly, and the waitress, who did. She smiled at him, and he felt better, walking up to the bar and dropping his bag into one seat as he climbed into the one next to it. You need this, he said to himself. Six months without human contact is too long. Have a conversation.

For a split second, guilt flooded him. He saw her, on the floor, surrounded by trash. Her posture: She’d been crawling.

He shook his head and covered his momentary confusion by reaching for his wallet. He pulled out the black card without thinking and tossed it on the bar, and instantly regretted it.

The waitress’ eyes flickered to the card, hovered for a moment, then came back to him. “What can I get you?”

He was relieved to see the hint of a smile. She was pretty, he thought. Maybe even beautiful if you scraped off the long shift and did something with her hair. And the smile was pure gold, a natural wonder. He felt like an asshole throwing around his unlimited card, but it hadn’t been intentional, and she didn’t look impressed.

“You have anything that could legally be called Scotch?” he said.

Her smiled expanded incrementally. “Ooh, top shelf. I’ll alert the media.”

She spun away. He watched her walk the length of the bar and circle around behind it, wave off the bartender, and pull out a small step ladder from an unseen nook next to the fridge filled with bottled beer.

Movement out of the corner of his eye made him turn his head. An old-fashioned Dipping Bird, the glass toys that dipped their beaks into a glass for hours and hours at a time sat on the bar. It had a pelt of dust on it, so it appeared to hold a place of honor, and it made Mike happy. If this was the sort of place, he thought, that had a silly little tradition like an old-school Dipping Bird that got reset whenever it stopped dipping, then it was run by people with a sense of humor.

The waitress unfolded the ladder and climbed up to reach the literal top shelf, where two dusty bottles sat. He smiled as she climbed down, spun pertly, and presented the bottle to him. When he looked down, his smile froze and he almost choked.

He looked back at her. “Is this a joke?”

Her grin finally took over her face, pushing her over the line into beautiful. “Is what a joke?”

He glanced at the bottle again. “That’s a 1955 Glenfarclas.”

“Yup.”

“That bottle’s worth ten grand.”

“Yup.”

He laughed. He couldn’t help it. He’d come in to force himself to socialize, and he’d seen himself making awkward conversation, being trapped by some blowhard local. Instead he had a nearly empty bar being blown away by a beautiful waitress who was mocking him.

He nodded. “Okay. A double. Neat.”

She nodded as if ordering $500 worth of whiskey was a normal, everyday occurrence for her in her local bar. She picked up his card. “Open a tab?”

She was still smiling at him, so he laughed again. “Yes!”

He watched her walk towards the work station with the bottle. Movement in his peripheral vision made him jump. He turned to find the bartender standing there, holding out a hand.

“Jack McCoy,” he said. “Owner. Nice to meet you, Mr. —?”

He shook the man’s hand, which was like a shovel enveloping his own, huge and calloused. McCoy wasn’t big—he was no taller than himself—but he was dense. He was muscular and powerful and his grip said he would be capable of tearing phone books in half, if anyone still used phone books.

“Malloy,” he said. “Call me Mike. Great place you have here.”

McCoy nodded. “Thanks. You doin’ some hunting?”

Mike shook his head. “Passing through. Gonna climb the mountain, but just take in the local color, mainly.”

McCoy nodded as if this was a common response he’d heard dozens of times. The Mountain was a local name for a glorified hill that offered decent-to-great views of the area. It was something to do.

Mike leaned in slightly. “So, how’d you come by a Scotch like that?”

Jack gestured at the bar in general. “It was here when I bought the place, if you can believe it. Old Henry Wallace used to run this joint. Found it in his office, in a drawer.” He grinned. “I don’t think old Hank knew what he had!”

The waitress returned and slid a tumbler towards Mike. “Bottoms up!”

“Nice to meet you,” Jack said, turning away. “Enjoy the ?local color’!”

Mike lifted the glass and toasted the owner. “Nice guy,” he said to the waitress. Setting his glass down, he held out his hand. “Mike Malloy.”

She blushed a little and shook his hand formally, with a little half-bow. “Candace Cuddyer, at your service.”

They both smiled, and then an awkward silence grew up between them. Mike grimaced inwardly. This is what you get for cutting yourself off from everyone. For being alone too long. Robbie warned you about this. The thought of his attorney, fat and always vaguely out of breath, took him out of the moment. He reminded himself that that had been the whole point, the whole reason he’d spent the last year on the road, going from place to place. To clear his head. To find his purpose. To find his way back to people. He looked at the waitress again. He liked her look, her smile. Her way of somehow seeming like she’d been part of his life forever instead someone he’d literally met five minutes before.

And he’d flashed the black card and ordered a $500 whiskey. In this place. He felt like a jerk. He was certain she thought he was a jerk, too.

“So,” she said. “What brings you out our way? Local color?”

It was his turn to blush. He looked down at the bar. “Sorry, that made it sound like an anthropological trip, huh?”

“Life among the natives. The mating rituals of the common people.”

He laughed. She laughed.

“I’ve been traveling,” he said when the moment passed. “I needed to … clear my head. Get right. Leave some stuff and some people behind.”

He saw Julia again, on the floor in her underwear, her head turned away from him. When he’d walked around to her side, feeling shaky and fuzzy, her eyes were open and dry, and he’d jumped back in shock, twisting an ankle and landing on the glass coffee table. He cleared his throat.

“Anyway, road trip, I guess. An extended road trip. You? Local?”

“As they come,” Candace said. “Not that I’m all that proud of it, mind you. People being proud of where they happened to be born is just plain weird, you ask me. Anyway, I’m thinking … actually, I just thought, literally tonight, of getting out of here. Leaving town.”

He raised an eyebrow. He liked this girl. “Oh yeah? Where to?”

She shrugged. “I haven’t gotten that far.”

He liked that too. “Wandering. I highly recommend it. I’ve been doing it for a year now.”

She glanced over his shoulder. Someone getting the waitress’s attention, he thought. “Yeah? Running or chasing?”

He kept his smile in place with care. “Running. Definitely running.”

She moved off to take an order, and he finally lifted his glass. She smelled a little like lemons, he thought. From slicing up garnishes, sure, but he liked it, that smell. He sniffed the whiskey and took a long sip. It was delicious: Some of the smoothest whiskey he’d ever tasted. Well worth the money, but then he had plenty of money to burn, even now, even after a lost decade.

He turned the stool and leaned with his back against the bar, holding the glass in one hand. Candace was taking an order from an older man in a fishing vest, looking at her over his glasses. The fisher said something and Candace laughed, her whole body getting into it. At another table, a round, balding man was sipping a drink and looking over at them, his eyes roaming Candace in a way Mike instantly didn’t like.

Whoa, boy, he thought. You just met her. Don’t go picking fights like you’re in High School.

He turned his head and caught the other guy at the bar staring at him, even as he was talking to the owner, McCoy. Their eyes met, and neither looked away. Mike thought he looked painfully like an image the term local brought to mind: A rangy, skinny guy about his own age, scraggly beard, baseball cap, dirty jeans, white T-shirt, boots. A hardpack of cigarettes was actually rolled into the sleeve of the shirt, which Mike almost found incredible. Who actually did that?

He was becoming aware of something … some noise or vibration.

“An ancient ex,” Candace said, appearing next to him and signaling to Jack. “And now professional drinker.”

He raised an eyebrow, liking the warm feel of her, inches away. She looked like one of those tall girls who was totally comfortable in her body. Whatever other problems she might have, he imagined she woke up every day feeling fine.

“How ancient?”

“Jealous?”

“Just wondering if I’ll have to fight him in the parking lot.”

She hip-checked him playfully. “If you play your cards—what the hell is that?”

He snapped out of his flirty fog. The vibration had been building for a while, he realized, and was resolving into a rhythmic, pulsing noise. Through the windows they could see bright lights bouncing around, filling the place.

Everyone had stopped to stare. The jukebox played on. Steve Perry was complaining about circus life.

Mike stood and almost unconsciously moved in front of her. He saw that the Ancient Ex had stood up, too, and the owner, Jack, somehow magically had one of the shortest sawed-off shotguns Mike had ever imagined in his hands. If he actually fired it, they would all take some of the shot, he thought.

Then the front door opened. He saw Jack raise the shotgun as two soldiers stepped into the bar, men dressed in camouflage, sidearms on their hips. They stepped to each side and stood at attention as a female officer, also wearing camou, stepped into the place, one hand on her sidearm.

The officer surveyed the place. Steve Perry kept singing about hating the road. She was very tall, and her eyes lanced out from a face that was almost, but not quite, traditionally pretty. Her uniform looked crisp and freshly laundered, down to the black armband on her right upper arm. A quick glance confirmed the other soldiers had similar armbands, like they were in mourning.

“All right,” the officer said in a voice that boomed clear and crisp through the music, a voice that was very used to making itself heard. “Check every room, get me a head count. I’m sorry folks, but no one leaves.”

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Detained: Chapter 1

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below!

Chapter 1: Candace

She heard her father’s voice, warm and amused. You’ll figure out, sweetheart. In due time.

She blew the hair out of her face and smirked to herself as she collected tumblers with the watery remnants of cocktails swirling at their bottoms. She had the round metal tray balanced perfectly as she took the not-entirely-clean rag from the back pocket of her jeans and wiped down the wobbly little table. She straightened up and reflected for a moment on the futility of cleaning anything in Mad One Jack’s, then turned to carry the empties to the bar.

Her father: Three years gone and she could still hear him, sometimes, like he was right there. Always with the warm, useless advice he’d always offered: Supportive, cheerful, essentially empty. When she’d come to him after the Jimmy Haggen incident at Prom, crying, humiliated, certain life was over, he’d soothed her and given her a beer from the fridge with a delightful sense of somber rule-breaking, and he’d told her that these things happen. When she’d agonized over going to college, uncertain she had the grit to leave home and go off on her own, he’d bought her ice cream and told her she had a good head on her shoulders. When she’d cried after he’d told her about his diagnosis, he’d patted her back and said you’ll be okay.

That was Mr. Cuddyer, hunter, Master Plumber, her father: Soothing, content-free. And now, gone. Along with anything keeping her in town; she thought of the brush and the paints, the books. She thought of art school, all those brochures from ten years before. She’d been thinking about a lot of things, but it had all been thinking. No doing.

(more…)

The Bleeder

You can’t always control where your muse takes you. I was surprised in 2020 that my brain started noodling on The Ustari Cycle again, eventually leading to Idolator. I really enjoyed revisiting Lem and Mags and that greasy world of blood magic. Apparently my underbrain really enjoyed it, because shortly after publishing that story I started thinking about a new idea. The result? The Bleeder, coming March 15, 2021 and available for pre-order.

In the world of blood magic, Bleeders are often treated as livestock — as sources for sacrificial blood. When he makes the desperate decision to join a risky magical heist, Lem Vonnegan’s refusal to bleed anyone but himself for his spells causes tension from the get-go — and then things go really, really bad.

Here’s a video teaser for ya:

Are you excited? I’m excited. You can pre-order The Bleeder right now!

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Detained: A Novel

HAPPY NEW YEAR, boys and girls! I hope y’all made it through 2020 without too many scars. As we slide into 2021’s DMs I’ve decided to try another little literary experiment: I’m going to post a novel chapter by chapter here on the wee blog this year. One chapter a week every Monday, starting next week.

It’s called Detained, a thriller with a dash (well, more than a dash) of sci-fi:

The employees and patrons of a remote rural bar get the shock of their lives when they’re unexpectedly and violently detained by a secretive military unit. The soldiers think this will be easy duty, but some of the people they’re detaining have unexpected skills … and when they fight back, things take a turn for the deadly — and the very, very weird.

I write a lot, and sometimes novels fall by the wayside because I either can’t figure out who would want to publish them or because they’re missing … something, usually quite mysterious. This is one of those novels.

I’ll be posting it here weekly, which will take us through to December. Each chapter will also include download links for PDF, MOBI, and EPUB files for that chapter. Then when the whole thing’s been posted I’ll make a complete novel version available as a complete PDF, MOBI, and EPUB download right here on the site for free. I hope you enjoy!

Bad Writing and the Busy Emergency

Writing a story can be hard work. There’s a huge difference between a premise and a plot, and bridging that gap can be difficult. I’ve certainly had plenty of experiences where a bright, shiny inspiration that seems destined to blossom into a robust novel turns out to have just enough gas to make a short story. Or the realization that the story I’m working on is boring me to death even though it’s technically novel-length and a real story.

In either situation, the weary writer will lean back from their keyboard and scratch their chin thoughtfully and contemplate how to salvage the situation. And sometimes they will make the terrible mistake of ginning up a Busy Emergency, which is a term I just made up.

The Midnight Sky

I started thinking about this while watching The Midnight Sky, a film directed by George Clooney, currently streaming on Netflix.

Some mild spoilers to follow.

It’s an okay film in which Clooney plays a dying scientist who remains behind at an isolated Arctic research station when it’s evacuated due to a global catastrophe that soon leaves pretty much the whole of humanity dead. He stays behind to contact the crew of the Aether, a spaceship returning from a mission to determine if one of Jupiter’s moons is habitable. They don’t know they’re returning to a planet that’s become a deathtrap, and Clooney’s character wants to warn them.

That’s an intriguing premise! The film itself is a bit slow, but well made. At one point about forty minutes in, however, someone lost faith in the forward momentum of their story and introduced a Busy Emergency.

A Busy Emergency is when you thrust your characters into a panic situation just to give your story some oomph, some sudden energy. It can serve to demonstrate their skills or the way they handle stress, and it can even tie into your larger plot. But even if it does, it’s generally a meaningless jolt of action designed to juice up a sleepy story. It’s easy to diagnose: If you can remove it and its consequences without changing the core of the story, then you know it exists just because the writer was worried they needed something to wake up the reader/audience.

In The Midnight Sky, life on board the Aether is presented as pretty comfortable. It’s one of those spaceships with perfect simulated gravity and lots of creature comforts. Everyone is nice, and two of the astronauts have started a relationship and gotten pregnant. The crew experiences some mounting anxiety when they can’t contact anyone on Earth, but otherwise their sole purpose in the story is to give Clooney’s character a reason to do things (there’s also a twisty bit that you can see coming from a mile away that emotionally links Clooney to the crew).

Suddenly, the Aether veers off course! Everyone on the ship leaps into action, fiddling with this or that and analyzing the situation. They determine they can still get to Earth, but will have to pass through an area of the solar system that has never been charted, so they don’t know what to expect. This Busy Emergency leads to some tragic consequences for the crew, but ultimately has zero impact on the trajectory of the plot. If you removed it entirely and just had the Aether sailing homeward in untroubled space waters, not much would change.

Busy Emergencies are usually a sign that you are stretching a premise, like taking a short story and making it into a novel. They can be short, intense scenes designed to offer an adrenaline spike, or they can be lengthy action sequences — possibly very good action sequences — that just don’t accomplish much.

The rule of thumb is, if you can remove a sudden infusion of action without requiring extensive rewrites, it’s probably a Busy Emergency and you should contemplate why it’s in there. Of course, you can make a Busy Emergency into a more organic bit of plotting if you figure out how to make it essential, if you can get it to do some plot work or character work — if you can make it into a sequence that would actually matter if it was removed.

Of course, a Busy Emergency is better than a Busy Disaster, which is what I wind up calling most of my failed novels. It’s also, not coincidentally, a cocktail I invented in which I pour the dregs of whatever’s left in my bar into a glass and chug it, then wake up a week later.

Dealing with Rejection

Something every writer has to deal with — and I do mean every writer — is rejection. Creative work is subjective to the Nth degree, and no matter what you will be rejected when you pitch ideas or submit work. In fact, I’ve experienced so much rejection in my own career success actually feels ominous to me. When I get turned down I sleep like a baby. When someone wants to buy a story I go on a bender and find myself at the bus depot, weeping and tearing at my clothes.

Infinite Variety

Rejection comes in many forms. There are, of course, those delicious rejection notes telling you with aggressive politeness that your work isn’t quite what the editors are looking for. There are the rejected pitches, which is usually an implied rejection in that the editor simply chooses not to buy it instead of explicitly rejecting it. There’s the peculiar joy of edit letters, where a story that was ostensibly not rejected gets such a heavy edit it’s almost the same thing. And then there’s the worst possible rejection — rejection after the fact, when you sell something and then the editor kills it for any number of reasons.

This is all great fun. But it’s part of the deal. When you try to put your work out there for money, you open yourself up to rejection. Learning how to deal with rejection is as important a skill as you can master in this business. You can’t let it get to you, or slow you down. Because if you do, you won’t get anything done.

Here’s how I deal with rejection. Your rejection is your own. You should give it a name and hug it to yourself when you sleep at night, and your way of dealing with it may be quite different — that’s okay.

1. Don’t linger. When I get a rejection — and again, I get a lot of them — I just mark it down and move on. I don’t think about it. At all. I don’t wonder why, I don’t analyze it, I don’t drink a bottle of whiskey and stare into the abyss. Or, yes, I do drink a bottle of whiskey, but for totally different reasons.

2. Get back in the saddle. When a story, novel, or pitch gets rejected, I immediately put it back on my list of things to submit. I aim to get it back into circulation as quickly as possible. I don’t care how many times something’s been rejected, because it only takes one person to buy it.

3. Wait a beat. Often, rejection comes with feedback. It’s tempting to read and digest that feedback immediately, but I recommend you wait. Reading feedback when you’re still upset from the rejection itself usually means you won’t be able to absorb whatever advice is contained in the rejection — or be able to tell good feedback from bad.

4. I drink. Heavily, sometimes.

Get used to rejection. The key is to realize that being rejected doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer, it just means you haven’t found a home for that particular piece yet. And maybe you never will, but that’s okay. Learning to keep moving forward in spite of rejection is probably the most important skill any writer can master.

That and appearing to be sober on Zoom calls when you’ve been drinking since 6AM. Of course.

New Podcast Episode

I done did it again: A new episode of The No Pants Cocktail Hour is up for your listening enjoyment.

This time around I discuss my short story No Great Trick, which was written when I was still commuting into New York City every day for my job, skulking in an office full of cubes and exhausting personal drama.

The story was published in 2003 at the defunct Drexel Online Journal, but I pubbed it here on this blog a few years ago, so you can read along with me if that’s your thing!

Aces.

IDOLATOR

SO, I done went and wrote a new Ustari Cycle story. Idolator is set in the We Are Not Good People universe, and is a standalone story set after the events of that novel.

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It’s funny how inspiration strikes. I last worked in this universe in the 2017 short story Nigsu Ga Tesgu, which was published in the anthology Urban Enemies. I didn’t consciously decide not to work with these characters and this magic system after that — there just wasn’t an inspiration to do so.

Then a few months ago I had an idea. Riffing off the idea of The Entertainment in Infinite Jest, I thought about a magical artifact that compelled your attention, that took over your pleasure centers. And then I wondered how it might be used to enslave people, and the chaos such a thing might cause. When you put magic, chaos, and darkness into a box and shake it, what comes out is an Ustari Cycle story starring Tricksters Lem Vonnegan and Pitr Mags.

The story is up for presale and will go live on December 15th. There’s a handy free sample available at Google Play, if you want to see what you might be reading before you buy.

If you’ve never read anything in this series, this is an easy way to dip your toe in and see if it might be for you. And if you have read the other stories, I hope this one lives up to the rest!

Don’t Buy Tools. Just Read More.

Ah, freelanced writing: The ideal career for people who hate comfort and serenity. It combines a few terrible things with one awesome thing: You get constant change and a lack of security, constant nerve-wracking negotiation and the occasional dispiriting edit, but at the end of the day you get to write things for a living, and that is marvelous.

It’s also mysterious and opaque for a lot of folks, which inspires some magical thinking. One question I’ve seen frequently concerning freelance writing as a career concerns tools: Things like Grammarly or FocusWriter that either purport to make your work better or help you to work better.

There’s nothing wrong with using (or paying for) tools that legitimately help you, and experienced writers can make those decisions on their own. But the questions I’ve seen recently concern the need for these tools — as in, do you need certain tools to be successful as a freelance writer?

And the answer is simple: Absolutely not.

Read Moar Books

The idea that you can pay a subscription to the right service and instantly (and easily) improve your writing and/or your income is fantasy. Grammarly is often required by clients, and I understand why, but let’s be blunt: Grammarly is trash and at least 50% of its suggested revisions make your writing arguably worse (it does often catch boneheaded mistakes that can slip past a tired eye, so it’s not worthless — but it won’t transform your work in any meaningful or positive way, aside from apparently eradicating the phrase “in order to” from the English language, for some reason). And if you need help focusing, why not use an App or plugin designed to help you do so — but that doesn’t mean your work will be appreciably better as a result.

The only way to be a better writer is to read more. For fiction, that means books and stories. For freelance, it can be helpful to look at what other people are doing in your niche, especially folks writing for A-List web sites or mainline print venues. Study their tricks. Mimic their ledes. Just absorb it all as enthusiastically as you can — that’s how you’ll get better. All the Apps in the world won’t help.

Of course, once the next iteration of GPT-3 starts producing writing that doesn’t read as if it were written by your slightly creepy older cousin who spends their spare time reading the dictionary, we’ll all be redundant anyway. And, I assume, the phrase “in order to” will cease to exist.