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.

The Umbrella Academy and Planned Obsolescence

Author: March 13, 2019 0 Comments

So, I watched season one of The Umbrella Academy. I’d never read the comics, and so went in pretty cold, aside from knowing that the lead singer of My Chemical Romance wrote the original comic stories. And it’s a pretty fun series if you’re into superhero stories!

It’s also a great place to discuss a specific writing challenge that comes with superheroes, which goes like this: Just as we’re all dying from the moment we’re born, every super-powered character has to be neutered at some point the moment you create them.

With Great Power Comes an Equal and Opposite Power

The problem is obvious, right? When you have a character who has an incredible power, they can slice through plot problems. In The Umbrella Academy, the kids all have powers, but one character is a cut above: Allison, who can make people do anything she wants by saying I heard a rumor. That’s a pretty potent power; after all, she can stop the villain at any time simply by whispering in their ear.

And so, the moment she’s created, she has to be smothered, or else nothing makes sense. When you create a hyper-powerful character you have two basic choices: One, you can neuter them somehow. Two, you can create a villain that is equally powerful. That’s it, and they both have problems.

In The Umbrella Academy, they chose option one. SPOILERS: They were clever about it in the bulk of the series; Allison is guilty about using her power throughout her life to get what she wants, and super guilty because she used it on her own daughter to get her to go to sleep. That’s a believable motivation for not using your godlike powers every five minutes. Later, when the true adversary is revealed and Allison must as a character start unleashing her power, however, they have to stop it or the story ends with one episode to go as Allison just says I heard a rumor you’re gonna take a five-year nap and that’s it. So they injure her vocal chords, essentially rendering her immaterial to the story, which kind of sucks.

Option two is also kind of boring, because when your villain has the same abilities and powers it turns into a slugfest. A boring trading of blows that amounts to two drunk guys having a fist fight in the parking lot of a 7-11.

So what’s the solution? Frankly, the solution is to not play the game. Don’t create a character whose powers are so incredible they can solve any plot problem you throw at them. Give their power a flaw, or a limitation, or a steep price to be paid. This way you can avoid having a mind-controller character who literally controls zero minds during the big final battle in your story.

Writing

The Beautiful Solitude of Writing

Author: March 6, 2019 2 Comments

Like a lot of folks, I’m a broadly creative kind of person—I just like making shit up, in a wide variety of media. The fun of making stuff doesn’t necessarily require talent; I make videos and music and sad, misshapen things around the house using editing, composition, and carpentry skills that run the gamut from mediocre to nonexistent, but I don’t worry about the end result much. I just enjoy making stuff.

So, one reason I’m a writer instead of a musician or a furniture-maker is the fact that I’m good at writing, whereas I am … not good at those other things. I might enjoy making music, but I’m not good at it, and that’s okay.

But you know what, there’s another reason I write instead of some other creative expression: The lack of collaboration.

Me Myself and I

To put it bluntly, I hate working with other people. I hate having to offer up my ideas before I’ve polished them, and I hate having to fight and push to get things the way I want them. I fully recognize that this process of having to defend your ideas is healthy, and often results in better work. When you’re forced to defend every idea, you have to up your game.

But I don’t enjoy it, so I don’t do it.

The great part about writing is, you don’t need other people. Or special equipment. Or software skills. All you need is a writing implement and some ideas. That’s awesome. Even if I had some special talent aside from writing—which, it’s worth repeating, I do not—writing would attract me because it’s so old school you can literally do it with a piece of charcoal and a rock. Nothing gets in the way—not screens, power failures, or the annoying tendency of people to have feedback and alternative takes.

Of course, the real epiphany always comes late in the essay: The fact is, the collaboration comes in the writing game, it’s just kicked down the line. Because once you convince someone to represent or buy your work, the notes come. The edit letters. The comments in the margin. The tracked changes. Whether I like it or not, selling your work usually means opening yourself up to collaboration.

But, there’s a crucial difference. When I am forced to collaborate later in the process, I’ve sold the damn thing. I have a fair amount of confidence that it’s pretty good. Which not only makes the act of having to interact with other people (shudder) much easier, it makes it much easier to push back on feedback and take a stand on the intention behind your writing choices.

Of course, my other secret weapon is my social awkwardness and charming personality, which combine to ensure that no one wants to collaborate with me twice.

Writing

Lenses So Thick You Can See the Future!

Author: March 4, 2019 0 Comments

I’ve worn glasses since I was a wee lad. When I first got glasses, my father, bless his heart, was convinced I was going to suddenly become Babe Ruth on the Little League field, where up until that point I was a bit more Mario Mendoza. His childlike faith that glasses were going to transform me into a star athlete still warms me today. Ah, Dad, you fool.

So I’ve been wearing glasses for most of my life—in fact, I really can’t recall a time in my life when I could see clearly without them, a time when I didn’t wear glasses. I don’t recognize myself in mirrors without them, frankly. Contacts? Jebus, the thought of jamming something into my eye is terrifying. Plus also I am incompetent and there is absolutely zero doubt that I would wind up with contact lenses embedded in my brain.

Trust me.

The Price of Incompetence

I was initially told I needed glasses to see the board in class, and so I didn’t have to wear them all the time. Now these first glasses—let’s call them Lenses Mark One—were huge. I mean, huge. Like, they were twice the size of my face, and the lenses seemed thick enough to offer views of the future, or possibly to protect my eyes from laser attacks. Like, they were big.

And expensive, relatively speaking. By this point in my existence I think it’s fair to say I’d become much more expensive than either of my parents had ever imagined possible, and the glasses were just one more insult. I mean, I was nine years old and already breaking down physically. Where would it end? Very likely in an iron lung, or perhaps a plastic bubble costing millions of dollars.

Anyway, the glasses were huge and so I only wore them when necessary, furtively slipping them on when I absolutely had to glean some information from the blackboard. Otherwise they went into my shirt pocket, and it took me about six days to lose them.

I thought my mother was going to have a stroke. Another pair of glasses was procured, and my parents sat me down and offered a rundown of my relative value when compared to the glasses, which was not in my favor. So I started wearing my glasses all the time, in terror.

True Grit

This did solve the problem of my general incompetence as it intersected my glasses, and I did manage to never lose a pair of glasses again, because, as noted above, I can’t even imagine living without a pair on my face. However, true incompetence, such as the kind I enjoy, is never defeated. It is only temporarily stymied, and although it took twenty years I did manage to cost myself another pair.

I took it upon my self to do some repair work in my mother’s basement, working with some concrete and such. I’d just gotten new glasses, and twenty years of wearing them had burned in some behaviors. Friends used to mimic my patented three-part nervous habit of cleaning my glasses, off my baseball cap, and running a hand through my hair. I did this about five times an hour, so while I was working with cement and sweat and dust in my mother’s basement, wearing my new glasses, I cleaned them regularly … using my concrete-encrusted shirt. By the end of the day I couldn’t understand why my vision was so blurry.

As I forked over the money for a new pair, I thought I could hear my dear departed father chuckling somewhere, toasting his son, the idiot.

Sometimes it’s weird to think I’ll be wearing glasses for the rest of my life … but no one who comes across my bones will know. The good news is that since I’m convinced the rest of you are figments of my imagination who only exist to amuse me, all I need to do to make you all go away is take off my glasses. Problem solved.

Bullshit

Everybody Poops but Nobody Poops Quite As Much As My Cats

Author: February 25, 2019 0 Comments

The other day I woke up and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and discovered that one of the cats had gone into the shower at some point and taken a huge grumpy crap on the floor. Now, if you live with animals you no doubt have had this exact experience—let’s face it, no matter what kind of animal you choose to invite into your home, chances are very, very high that they will take a dump inside the house at some point. And heck, with cats you more or less expect them to shit in the house! It’s kind of the whole point. So it’s hard to get too upset when they occasionally send a message via their bowel movements.

Of course, this prompted an immediate DefCon 5 cleanup of the shower, but I didn’t get too upset. My wife, The Duchess, and I lived through the Mad Pooper, after all.

The Mad Pooper What Poops at Midnight and At All Other Times

The Mad Pooper episode was a couple of years ago, now, and it is exactly what you think: One of our cute little cats began crapping all over the house. Again, if you have cats, this is going to happen from time to time, so we didn’t panic at first. A poop once in a blue moon is nothing to get excited about.

But it happened again, and again. When we found a dookie in our bed one morning, we knew something had to be done. The Mad Pooper had to be unmasked and taken into the Vet for a checkup, and possibly sold to cat traffickers. I’m just kidding about that, but the Mad Pooper was definitely getting under our skin. We were even starting to look at each other with some side-eye, trying to decide if it was at all possible that one of us was the culprit in the strangest case of marital passive aggressiveness ever.

In the end, the Mad Pooper chose to reveal herself: Our cat Coco, who is about eight pounds and moves with the sort of deliberate slowness indicative of either great wisdom or great stupidity, walked into the bathroom one day, looked at us, and proceeded to crap right on the rug while maintaining eye contact. It was terrifying. We got her checked out, bought another litter box, and the Mad Pooper was no more.

The Hygiene of Homer

Since then, we acquired a new tenant in the form of Homer, who started off life as an adorable little nubbin and then swole into a being we refer to in hushed tones as The Junkyard Cat. Homer is just a regular cat in many ways, but not all ways. For one thing, he reacts to any kind of unexpected situation with hissing and scratching, and then returns five seconds later with a hangdog expression that definitely implies you should never ever startle poor Homer again.

For another, he is the dirtiest cat imaginable.

Inasmuch as I contemplate the act of going to the bathroom beyond my own necessities, I assume it to be one of those simple natural functions that nature has more or less perfected. And yet Homer emerges from the little box looking like someone tried to mug him. He is always covered in litter and his own excretions, and I am not making this up.

And yes, this means that if you have ever shaken my hand, you have basically touched Homer’s butt.

Homer does make sad, futile attempts to groom himself, but there’s something missing, and so he spends much of his time moping about with a general expression of Eyeore on his face while his hindquarters resemble an industrial accident. There’s nothing physically wrong with Homer; one assumes it is the lack of a parental influence when he was a kitten. Or possibly a simmering hatred of us all that he expresses in an unusual and disgusting manner.

All this to say that a mere pile of poop in my shower does not phase me. At least it doesn’t as long as I can remember where I was and how much I drank the night before.

Bullshit

Going Postal

Author: February 20, 2019 1 Comment

Being an objective and sober assessment of the people you encounter on line at the Post Office.

I love the Post Office. I think it’s frankly amazing that you can stuff something into an envelope, pay a small fee, and it shows up at its intended location a few days later. I find it incredible that you can literally get every detail wrong in the address and somehow the letter still arrives. Sure, the Post Office has problems, I won’t deny it. It requires like 15 minutes to mail a single thing to Europe, for example, so god help your immortal soul if you have, say, five things to mail to Europe. Still! I am amazed.

I understand why people hate the Post Office, however. The lines, the forms, the often unfriendly people who work there—I get it. We live in an age of wonders, and yet I have to fill out a customs form by hand and watch while the postal worker keyboards everything I just wrote down into the computer. It’s madness!

The real madness at the Post Office is the people you’re in line with. For real.

Hell’s Waiting Room

I’ve got a lot of experience with the Post Office. I started publishing my zine, The Inner Swine in 1995, and for a while I was mailing several hundred copies of that thing every few months, and I was never sufficiently organized or smart enough to do any kind of bulk mailing. So it was stamps—stamps, motherfuckers!—and envelopes and carting boxes of envelopes to the Post Office. I also used to submit short stories to magazines via mail because I was born so long ago—so very long—that there was no Internet. So I would include a self-addressed-stamped-envelope (SASE) with my submission, and I’d have to get the postal worker to weigh the whole thing and put postage on the SASE as well.

What I mean is, man, I know what it’s like to use the Post Office. And I know the people you meet in line there.

The Amazed Impatient Jackass. The rule is, any time you go to the Post Office and wait in line, someone will walk in, pause for dramatic effect, and say something like ‘I can’t believe this.’ They will then proceed to sigh every few seconds, mutter under their breath about the unbelievable length of the line, the stupidity of the people working there, and how the universe is generally speaking a torture device calibrated especially for them. They will often make phone calls so they can complain about the line to other people in real time. When they get to the window, there is a 101% chance they will get a money order.

The Confused. Man, I get it—sometimes the Post Office is inscrutable. There are strange rules and odd forms and sometimes even I get the feeling the guy behind the window is just making that federal law up to fuck with me. But then you have the people who have never in their lives sent a piece of mail, apparently. Here’s a real, actual interaction I once witnessed:

Postal Worker: You have to put a return address too.

Confused: That is the return address.

Postal Worker: … then you have to put the address you want it send to.

Confused: <grumbling> Fine. <scribbles> Here.

Postal Worker: You’ve got to switch them. You’ve got the return address in the ‘to’ line.

Confused: … wat.

I’m not making that up.

The Older Gentleman or Gentlewoman Who’s There to Buy One Stamp but Also to Chat with Everyone. They’re sweet, and I wish them well. But when they get to the window and decide to spend a few minutes telling the postal employee about the nice time they spent on line in a Post Office recently, I want them to burn.

Someday, a few centuries from now, the Post Office will have a real website that enables you to mail things with an App and, I don’t know, probably a teleportation device or perhaps an army of gnomes who will burst from the floorboards and seize your package and fly off on winged monkeys or something[1]. Until then, we’ll have to wait on line.

————–

[1]Remember: Sufficiently advanced technology may look a lot like gnomes and flying monkeys.

Bullshit

How to Steal

Author: February 19, 2019 0 Comments

The fact that all writers steal is common knowledge. Naturally this doesn’t mean we’re all breaking into each other’s literary vaults[1] and literally stealing pages of pure prose gold, or that we’re plagiarizing the shit out of each other[2]. It means we’re all constantly evolving and developing our style and the tools we have at our disposal for telling stories by reading other people’s work and getting blown away-cum-jealous of what they pull off, and then trying to steal those techniques and ideas.

Far from a shameful display of artistic emptiness, stealing from other (usually better) writers is a time-honored tradition. But it’s easy to flippantly say that good writers borrow and great writers steal without actually explaining how one goes about stealing something like another writer’s technique. Here’s how I often do it when something I’ve just read impresses me, entertains me, or simply gets me excited.

STEP ONE: EXERCISE

The first step for me is usually a simple exercise involving copying the technique in question, usually by writing a slavish and unoriginal short piece that mimics what I’m stealing really, really closely. This is usually a whole short story in which I play with the narrative trick, Voice, or other aspect of the inspiration material I’m trying to nail down.

These stories are usually not great, or even good. The focus on the technique means other aspects of the story (yanno, plot, character, setting) get short shrift. What you want to accomplish here is mastery of the specific technique.

STEP TWO: ADAPTATION

Once I feel kind of comfortable with the specific technique I’m trying to steal, the time has come to try and bend it a little so so it fits into my own personal approach. If you don’t do this, after all, you have a very odd piece of writing that doesn’t really fit in with the rest of your work. Also, if you can’t bend it to your own specific goals, are you really in control? It’s kind of like owning a standard shift car when you don’t know how to drive a stick shift.

You can pursue this in a few different ways. One, you can revise the story or piece you just created, working to make it your own now that you’ve replicated the technique you’re stealing. Two, you can start something new or begin a fresh revision and insert the technique. Sometimes I like to start a new scene in a WIP that explores this new idea, even if it doesn’t really match the previous work I’ve done; I can always revise it later.

STEP THREE: BOREDOM

Eventually, the goal is for the thing you’re stealing to become just another boring part of your toolbox and repertoire. This usually requires using it constantly in your new work, even in places where it is glaringly obvious that it doesn’t belong. A sudden stream-of-consciousness sequence in the midst of a gritty detective noir? Oh, I’ve done that.

Once the tool becomes boring, you own it. It’s yours. When you’re no longer excited about it, it’s because it’s just one more tool among the many you have.

And that’s the saddest part of this writing gig. It’s really about draining all the wonder out of a bunch of magic tricks, until one day you know all the secrets, and have nothing left to say with them.

God, I need a drink.

——————–

[1]Do you not? How does one live?

[2]Although in all fairness I have drunkenly shouted I AM STEALING THAT when having drinks with other writers.

Writing

Devil’s in the Details I Can’t Remember

Author: February 13, 2019 3 Comments

My memory is broken and always has been, although it took some time for me to figure this out. Where some folks worry that one day they will be old and will realize they can’t remember why they’re standing in the kitchen in their boxer shorts, that’s how I’ve been since I was born. The past, for me, is formless and vague. I can remember things from my past, of course, but they’re not, like, lived in. I remember things in a detached, academic way.

I also lack any kind of attention to detail. The present sluices through me like a confusing existential wave, and I often barely retain enough information to present myself as a somewhat capable and competent adult as opposed to, say, a shrubbery. This means that my daily interactions are fraught with more stress than they should be, because I am always owlishly trying to make up for my lack of attention to detail with charm and trickery:

THEM: … so, Jeff what do you think of that?

ME: (completely uncertain where I am or what we’ve been talking about or who these people are or why I am sitting at a conference table with 37 people in suits with a stack of papers in front of me and a tuna sandwich in my shirt breast pocket) Uhh …

<and tosses stack of papers into the air>

ME: Everybody dance!

It’s incredible I manage to make it through a day without being committed to an institution. But you know what? My lack of attention to detail actually helps my writing.

Wait, What Was I Saying?

Detail can be confounding for writers, because there’s a sweet spot between too much detail and empty prose that conveys nothing of the flavor of your setting, nothing of the subtleties of your characters’ reactions to things. For folks who have a mastery of detail and great memories, who can conjure up the way something felt or smelled or looked in a precise moment, there’s a huge amount of data they can potentially pour into their writing. And writers usually start off putting way too much detail into their writing as they seek to conquer verisimilitude through sheer volume of words.

Me, since all of my memories are like those scenes in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where the books are all white with no words because Jim Carrey’s memories are being sucked out of his head, I have the opposite—and, I think, easier—problem: I have to go hunting for more detail to pour into my scenes because, frankly, I can’t remember anything.

It also frees me to, you know, make shit up. I never have to negotiate with myself over whether it’s playing fair to describe something in a way counter to how I actually experienced it, because I can’t remember how I experienced, typically. That basically gives me permission to just imagine it however I want and write it that way. The takeaway is that details are just tools. They’re just bits and pieces and you get to decide how many—if any—your scene or story requires.

For me, I figure it’s probably two, three years tops before I have full on facial aphasia, and I spend all my time watching the same TV show over and over again. Which means I better get cracking on this book.

Writing

The Levon Sobieski Domination Returns

Author: February 7, 2019 0 Comments

While I do spend just about every waking moment tapping a keyboard or scratching a page with a pen, man cannot write 100% of his waking hours. When I’m feeling sassy, I compose songs. When I’m drunk and sassy, I make music videos for those songs posing as the world’s most unknown band, The Levon Sobieski Domination.

The name of the band actually stems from my zine days, when Levon Sobieski was a character who would occasionally show up in The Inner Swine as one of my fictional employees, complaining about my general insanity. It was a lot of fun. Anyways, let me know what y’all think of my music skilz. I am available to come press play on a laptop at your next corporate event.

Bullshit, gee-tar

Action Scenes: Make it Personal

Author: February 6, 2019 0 Comments

Writing anything more than a piece of flash fiction usually requires that you flex several different tools in order to get the story over the finish line—description, dialogue, exposition, and, depending on the kind of story we’re talking about, action.

Action scenes can be a challenge. Just like a film director who edits the scene so frenetically the viewer has no understanding of the spatial relations, a writer can botch an action scene, rendering it confusing or, worse, unexciting. In fact, one of the easiest ways to screw up an action scene, whether it’s a gunfight, hand-to-hand combat, or a chase, is to model your scene mechanics on a visual medium. We’re all trained at this point in the 21st century to imagine our scenes as movies, but you have to take a more literary approach if you’re going to sell your action.

Ouch

The key here is to avoid the Superhero Problem. We’ve all seen action scenes in films where the hero takes a beating that would leave any normal human a smear on the floor, but the hero just shrugs it off and comes roaring back. Even in recent entertainments that have tried to introduce an element of realism—Atomic Blonde, say, or Netflix’s Daredevil with their out-of-breath heroes struggling to find the strength for one more go-round—still have the hero exhibiting ludicrous amounts of energy and strength, not to mention a tolerance for pain and injury beyond mere mortals.

That’s not really the problem, of course—these are superheros or superspies, after all, and the audience isn’t really looking for realism, I don’t think. The problem with this approach is really how it lowers the stakes. If your combatants can’t really be hurt, if no amount of exhaustion will stop your heroes, then why will your reader care?

The trick is to remember that you’re writing, not filming. Convey to your reader how it all feels, how it affects them. Make it personal. If your protagonist conveys agony and exhaustion, you’ll be better able to sell desperation and courage. And you’ll also seize better control over the blocking and staging of your scenes, because you’ll be ‘seeing’ everything through your characters’ eyes.

Plus, if you’re like me and walking up the stairs leaves you winded and nauseous, having your characters be exhausted all the time will feel more real, and thus you’ll be more invested in the writing.

Writing

Here’s to Topper

Author: February 6, 2019 0 Comments

As many of you know, I currently live with one wife (the formidable Duchess) and five cats. Your reaction to the cat population in my house probably varies in accordance with your own pet population; some people have one dog or other reasonable number of small animals, reptiles, fish, or birds in their home, and think five is, like, way too many. Others have a whole second apartment they rent just to house their brood of pets, and they think we’re amateurs.

The main downside to having pets, for me, is worrying about them when we travel. As hard as I work to not go on trips (and The Duchess will tell you—at length—how good I am at being so terrible a travel partner that she thinks twice before suggesting we go anywhere these days), I’m still dragged from my comfortable home onto economy-plus flights to various places, and we have to get a small army of people to take care of the critters. Most recently we had to do this for the Christmas holiday as we visited The Duchess’ family in Texas, where we spent a pleasant afternoon watching Cary grant movies with her mother. One of those movies was Topper, and that’s a whole thing because when I was a kid I named my very first pet Topper because believe it or not, my brother and I were huge fans.

No, Seriously, It Was a Thing

So … you might be wondering what in the fuck a ‘topper’ is. It was a 1937 film starring Cary Grant, Constance Bennett, and Roland Young as the titular Cosmo Topper. Grant and Bennett play rich ‘jazzy’ types who live fast lives and torture Cosmo with their frivolity and devil-may-careness. When they die in a car accident, they return as ghosts to haunt Topper, and turn his life upside down.

It’s a light, very dated story, but it was hit and inspired several sequels and a TV series. When I was a kid, I was delighted by the way the ghosts would fade in and out; they’d often get Topper into a zany situation and then disappear when someone else walked in, making him look insane. Great fun!

Yes, my brother and I were weird.

Anyway, when I was a kid I also got Pet Fever, which happens. My parents fought the good fight. They knew that any animal brought into the house would quickly become their third child, and so they worked super hard to fight off my desire for a thing to love. One gambit that was temporarily effective was getting me a goldfish, which my brother and I named Topper in honor of my unusual favorite story at the time.

Topper was … a goldfish. He floated. He ate. He excreted this long, thin poops that fascinated us. That was basically it, but he was pretty. He didn’t live too long, which obviously means we had no fucking idea how to care for a goldfish. We basically just put him in a bowl, changed the water occasionally, and fed him with zero plan. When he died we were very sad and had a ceremonious burial, placing poor Topper in a baby food jar and burying him in the backyard. I still feel badly about Topper; when I realized that he died like, super young and it was probably because we were idiots, I had a few nightmares, and I fully expect that when I die and find myself in hell, Topper will be waiting to extract his revenge.

We then promptly got another goldfish, who died a week later. We went through another bunch of fish who all died promptly, and things began to get a little grim around the Somers house.

Enter Pissy

Speaking of weird pet names, around this time our next door neighbors, who were German and Yugoslavian, inherited their son’s cat. They didn’t want the poor thing, and left her down in their basement and gave her no attention whatsoever. I started visiting that cat every day and she was ecstatic to see me each and every time.

The name they gave her sounded to our American ears like Pisshy. So when I heard that they were going to get rid of her and campaigned to save her by adopting her, my parents (glancing at the growing graveyard of goldfish doom outside) wearily agreed with the stipulation that we could not, of course, continue to call her Pisshy. So we renamed her Missy, and all was well. I had my pet, and a lifetime preference for cats was born.

This is a long way of saying this is how you wind up with five cats: You kill a bunch of innocent goldfish through ignorance and a lack of Internet (I swear, if Google had existed in 1982 Topper might still be alive), you save a sad, lonely cat from someone’s basement, and then you deny your formidable wife a dog in 2003 and she agrees to settle for a cat, discovers she adores cats, and begins collecting them like she collects shoes.

Bullshit