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.

“Orphan Black” Has a Villain Decay Problem

Author: jsomers June 25, 2015 0 Comments

Somehow made all cute and hilarious this past season.

That Orphan Black, the SF show about a woman who discovers she’s one of many, many clones produced by a secret and unethical experiment, has over the course of three seasons become almost insufferably complicated. What was once a fairly crisp story about a woman struggling to save herself and her child while dealing with the horrifying realization that she’s a clone has spiralled into territory familiar with anyone who has watched TV shows based on a “mystery” premise: The audience wants answers, but if you actually give them the show is over, so you pull a trick wherein you explain a mystery while setting a new one in motion.

This can work for a while, if you’re skillful, and Orphan Black, in fact, seemed to pull it off in its second season, expanding the world and complicating the mystery while delivering a continuously interesting story week in and week out. This past year, though, things have come off the rails a bit. There are still pleasures to be had, mainly in Tatiana Maslany’s incredible performances, but the story itself is slow-moving hogwash, to use a technical term. The main problem is that Orphan Black hasn’t met a villain it can’t destroy in a few quick episodes. In fact, the show has had so many it’s solution to the malaise at the end of the last season was to circle back and recycle a villain from the first season.

Villain Decay

In the beginning, there were the Neoloutinists, a cult that believed in “self-directed evolution” who backed the cloning experiment and sought to control the clones, manipulating their lives and monitoring them. There was also a religious cult that saw the clones as abominations, and trained one of the clones to be an unstoppable killing machine, Helena, who was basically a serial killer of clones.

But the clones managed to turn the tables on the Neolutionists, maneuvering one of their allies into a position of authority at the institute set up to monitor the clones and removing the evil clone who’d been working with the Neolutioninsts. Also, Helena, once depicted as a crazy and incredibly dangerous person, was turned into a cuddly if sometimes murderous piece of comic relief as she became affectionate towards her clone sestras. So a new threat was devised: A separate military project involving male clones, which caused a bit of trouble until, again, the female clones managed to completely neuter it and render it impotent. And so, in the third season finale, the show surveyed its field of limp and defeated villains and came up with the idea that the Neolutionists, seemingly defeated for a very long time, were actually embedded in all of these other organizations and running the whole show secretly.

Much of this seems to have been done in the service of surprise: Build up someone as a Big Bad, then shock everyone when they are defeated much sooner than expected. This kind of writing gimmick is like crack: It feels good, but has diminishing returns and leads to your show being canceled.

The problem here is twofold: One, it’s hard to take these villains seriously when all it takes, usually, is a few episodes for them to either be utterly destroyed or brought over as allies; two, the new villains are always just permutations on the conspiracy the clones have been fighting against since Day One. They’re nothing new, just new versions of the same enemy.

A Glimmer of Hope

It’s possible that the bloodbath that was the Season 3 finale was a purposeful clearing of the decks, bringing back the original villains who will now be coherent and focussed. Instead of more and more variations on the “someone is secretly making and modifying or killing or spying on clones!” riff, we might get a real purpose to everything, and perhaps a single face for the enemy. That would go a long way to excusing Season 3’s disastrous meandering. Only time will tell.

The TL;DR version for writers is simple: When you’ve got a mystery-driven storyline, do two things immediately: a) have an exit strategy that involves an overall explanation for everything, and b) don’t give in to the temptation to destroy your villains on the regular just for the story shock value.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Win a PRINT Copy of “The Walled City”

Author: jsomers June 22, 2015 35 Comments

If you’re a fan of Avery Cates, you already know, most likely, that The Walled City, a short story that picks up where the previous story, The Shattered Gears, left off came out last week on Amazon, Nook, Google Play, and Kobo–in short, as a digital-only story.

Well, if you’d like to actually have a print copy of this story, I’m giving away two. Just two–signed any way you’d like, and mailed directly to your door.

How do you get you mitts on one? Just comment here, and I’ll pick two random comments. I’ll announce the winners on Friday, June 26th.

Get commentin’!

OR, buy a digital copy for yourself:

Avery Cates, BAM!, Bullshit

I Was a Teenage Script Kiddie

Author: jsomers June 18, 2015 2 Comments

For a brief, glorious moment, I was King of the Nerds.

When I was eleven years old, my parents bought me a Commodore 64, which at the time was the most amazing thing ever invented, built, or sold retail. It was also kind of pricey for my family, and I have no doubt they justified the expense by telling themselves it would help inspire me to become a computer programmer and thus be rich.

That never happened: Math is hard. Let it drift.

However, they hedged on the budget by opting to buy just the computer itself, with no storage device. That meant that I was limited to what I could do with the computer – I could type in a program, but with no way to save it the moment I turned off the computer it disappeared. After spending weeks typing in a program listed in a Commodore magazine, I successfully lobbied for a storage option, but we went for the cheapest option: Magnetic tape.

Tape worked, but it was slooooowwww. I had one game: Telengard, and it took about five minutes to be read in from tape. This was not a game that actually deserved five minutes of my time for loading, but it was all I had. And at least I had a place to store programs and other things, although if I’d been stuck with that tape drive I would likely have gotten very, very tired of my Commodore 64 very quickly.

Thankfully, we got robbed.

A No Good, Very Bad Day

My grandmother came to live with us when I was maybe ten or eleven; my memory, as always, is vague. Nanny was strict and somewhat mean-spirited, or so it seemed to us kids; she was always grousing that we were lazy and messy. Later in life she went through a bizarre period when she claimed to be unable to swallow food, and wasted away to the point where she couldn’t get out of bed despite the fact that doctors could find nothing wrong with her, at which point my Mother apparently went in, close the door, and told her she would be put in a nursing facility if this bullshit didn’t stop.

Nanny got better.

Anyways, when she did eventually pass away, we went to the funeral only to come home and discover our house had been robbed; thieves had obviously scanned the obituaries and noted the date of the funeral. Our neighbors had noticed the busted window but done nothing but stand around and cluck nervously, so it was up to us to call the cops.

The house was a mess. Drawers had been turned out, everything pushed out of place. They took some jewelry that wasn’t worth much, missed all the cash my mother had hidden around the house, and stole the Commodore 64.

My parents, exhibiting a crafty sort of self-serve justice I’d never seen before and never did see again in them, listed a disk drive on the insurance claim form instead of a tape drive. It was a little shocking, to be honest with you, to see them indulge in some minor insurance fraud. But I got my 1541 single 5.25” disk drive to go along with a new C64, and I was off to the races.

Floppies

The 5.25” floppy disk was an amazing thing. It stored 170 kilobytes of data, but you could cut a notch into the side that would allow you to flip it over and so each disk was instantly doubled, although this did increase the wear and tear a bit.

A few weeks after getting one, a kid at school introduced me to a program called Copy Quick. This was an amazing moment, because it opened up the world of software piracy. From that moment on, I never bought another program, because there were kids at school to trade with. Want a copy of Beach Head? Go find Hector and offer him a copy of Blue Max for it. Get turned down, because no one wanted Blue Max.

It was a whole subculture. We all had lists of the software we owned and we would pore over them and cook up trades like real wheeler-dealers. When someone got their hands on a hot or rare program, it was chaos and excitement as everyone tried to pry it out of their undeserving hands.

None of us thought it was wrong, or illegal. None of us really understood any of it, either. We were early versions of what you might call Script Kiddies: The kids who don’t actually know much about programming but download software and use it. I had no idea how my 1541 disk drive worked. All I knew was that if I wanted to copy a game, I would try a succession of copy programs until I found one that worked: Copy Quick, Fast Hack’Em, dozens of others. They were themselves copied.

By the end of grammar school, I had thousands of games and utilities on floppies. And despite lots of reports that the 1541 disk drive was unreliable, mine worked like a charm and may still be in working condition today, who knows? I still don’t know how any of it actually works, really, despite sporadic attempts to read about programming and hardware and teach myself a few things. But I do sometimes wish I could play some of those old games on the original hardware, especially the mysterious games I never figured out.

Non Comprendo, Compadre

You see, when you copied a game (often from a copy of a copy already) you didn’t get the manuals, and every now and then I got a game in a trade that I simply couldn’t figure out. It would load and appear to work properly, but I would have no idea what to do, what the rules were, how the controls worked. Sometimes you could figure it out. Sometimes my innate idiocy and lack of brains would assert themselves, and the game would remain a mysterious presence, ominous and filled with potential. Combined with the Internet, I could look up those games and totally rock them today.

If I ever invent time travel, that is exactly what I’ll do.

Bullshit

The Walled City Available

Author: jsomers June 15, 2015 0 Comments

Hey all: The new Avery Cates short story, “The Walled City,” is officially available. If you didn’t pre-order it, you can straight-up buy it any time you want, like a boss — even on Nook, which didn’t allow pre-orders for some bizarre reason.

Continuing Avery Cates’ story from “The Shattered Gears,” “The Walled City” sees the aging Gunner tangle with a psionic who has set himself up as a City Lord in the crumbling remnants of civilization.

Here: read an excerpt!

The Power of a Classic Lack of Choice

Author: jsomers June 15, 2015 0 Comments

Visual Representation of Most People’s MySpace Pages.

MANY BOTHANS DIED TO BRING US THIS INFORMATION: So, over at US Weekly (don’t ask how I came across this) they did a little piece on Kim Kardashian’s old MySpace account. You can Us Weekly on KK’s MySpace Monstrosity, and view the pink horror of Princess Kimberly and her 856 MySpace friends. This was in 2006, two years before Facebook arrived on the scene, so people can be forgiven for having a MySpace page. However, I think there’s a lesson here for writing and writers — no, seriously, wait, where are you going? Come back!

So, here’s the thing: Forget Kim Kardashian, just look at that hot mess of a page. Then compare it to Facebook. On the one hand, MySpace should have been the more popular. People can customize their pages, changing colors, adding graphics and music. Facebook is like the Dystopian government of social media: You get one shade of blue and one shade of white and fuck you if you don’t want to see promoted shit. And yet, Facebook is dominant and MySpace … well, people are generally confused to discover that MySpace still exists.

The lesson here for writers is: When it comes to worldbuilding, classic and clean is usually better.

See, back in 2006 you might have been forgiven for assuming that the world of social media and online profiles et al would go the way of MySpace: Increasing customization, increasing personalization. People had some hideous, hideous and horrific (but very personal) MySpace pages back in the day. Don’t believe me, just Google “ugly MySpace pages” and see them in their eye-straining glory. But if you were trying to imagine the kids using the intrawebs back in 2006, or trying to envision what the Super Internet of the future in 2015 would look like back in 2006, you might have used MySpace as a jumping off point and imagined a world where everyone had complete and awful control over the aesthetics of their social media.

Instead, of course, Facebook came along. Like a stern older executive at your company, they don’t allow customization, really. Everyone gets exactly one shade of blue, limited control over what they see and who sees what they post, and generally a uniform and bland visual experience. And people love it. Or at least like it better than the nightmarish universe that was MySpace.

The Lesson

So, the lesson: Be careful when imagining where the world will be — and also when cherry-picking the details you use to establish time and place when your story is set in the present. If you published a novel in 2006 that went on and on about someone’s MySpace page, then welcome to that awkward moment when everyone in the universe will have a moment of eyebrow-raising disruption when they come across this nugget in your story.

Now, we all get things wrong, sometimes. And heck — you might use Facebook in a story today, feeling fairly confident that its 7-year reign of terror over us all will go on forever. But like Kubrick’s use of Pan Am in 2001: A Space Odyssey, even the most established and seemingly rock-solid organizations and corporations can fall, leaving your work sadly dated. This would argue for limiting such references as much as possible. After all, your reference to Facebook might lend your scene a verisimilitude today, and make it feel ancient and outdated three years from now. Keep it classic and clean — which means concentrating more on what your characters are doing rather than the corporate channels they’re using.

And, in case you’re wondering, no, I didn’t have a MySpace page. I actually thought I was too good for social media until 2010 or so, which might explain why I’m so unpopular.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

FIVE DAYS

Author: jsomers June 10, 2015 0 Comments

—-

Out June 15th, digital only. PREORDER:

KINDLE

NOOK (T/K) – Nook doesn’t allow pre-orders yet, at least not for little people such as myself.

KOBO

GOOGLE PLAY

Avery Cates, BAM!, Book Trailers

On Reading Everything

Author: jsomers June 9, 2015 7 Comments

Holy shit this book is awful

So, as many may have noticed, I’ve been doing a lot of writing about books lately over at Jeff Bloviating at Barnes and Noble and Jeff Bloviating at About.com. It’s a lot of fun, and since I am one of those people who lives in constant danger of being buried under his immense piles of books that he keeps around his house like some sort of over-educated hoarder, it’s a perfect fit. But it’s also a job, so I am often expected or encouraged to read outside my normal taste, including some things I frankly would not choose to read of my own free will. And you know what? It’s been fantastic.

Here’s the thing: Most books have something to offer. I really do believe that — even the books cynically created by marketing divisions to absorb cash from gullible morons, even those books have something in them that you haven’t seen before, or, if nothing else, are edifying in their sheer monstrous evil hollowness. Reading widely doesn’t mean reading an occasional book you haven’t heard of. It means reading shit you would rather walk on glass than read. It means reading shit by political commentators and authors who resemble corporations with divisions pushing novels out of the corporate colon several times a year and reading immensely popular phenomenon novels that appear to have been written by a drunk superfan of other overwrought phenomenon novels.

It means reading everything.

Not all this stuff is good, of course, but it’s all interesting if you find the right angle. And I’ve found myself reading a few books that I would never have otherwise read that turned out to be awesome and incredibly enjoyable books, and as long as that rate hovers somewhere above 0%, I’m pretty much winning.

The Rut

I’m a man of ruts and habits, deep, deep habits that tend to get ossified over time.If left to my own devices I would be reading nothing but classic novels, old science fiction, and old-school detective fiction, repeated endlessly. If I were to design an experiment to encourage me to read more widely, I might create something like this: One third paid assignments, one third rando recommendations from people, one third drunk shopping on BN.com. Maybe a bit more of the latter, depending on how drunk I am that week. Which, judging from past weeks, is typically pretty drunk.

Anything that breaks me out of my usual routines is a good thing. And reading everything — including some hair-raisingly bad books — and then figuring out a way to comment on those books intelligently (or so I kid myself) has been a blast, and will likely continue to be a blast. Some people act like reading a book they know is outside their wheelhouse and is also probably pretty badly written will somehow infect them and ruin their palette for good books. That’s ridiculous. Read the bad books. Think of something smart to say about them. It’s good for you.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

What I’m Doing Tomorrow

Author: jsomers June 7, 2015 0 Comments

So, I’m taking part in a Facebook party-thing, hosted by Ragnarok Publications. The official details are:

LINK: https://www.facebook.com/events/626601564143078/

WHEN: Event starts at 8PM EDT, I’m on at 9:30PM.

WHAT THE: So, I’ll be posting things like excerpts from the new Avery Cates Series story, videos, and photos, as well as answering questions and generally being a drunken fool, as per usual. ALSO, will be giving away both super-rare print versions of the new Avery Cates short story The Walled City (not out until 6/15, and then in ebook format only) as well as copies of We Are Not Good People.

So, if you’re in front of a screen tomorrow night, stop on by and accost me. Ask me anything! Or hurl

insults my way, I’m used to that. I’ll be happy to offer up liquor recommendations, relationship advice, photos of my cats, and humiliating personal anecdotes that make me look like a jackass. It’s what I do.

BAM!, More Shit I Gotta Do

Orphan Black and The Doom of Men

Author: jsomers June 2, 2015 3 Comments

All the same actress.

Orphan Black is a nifty little Sci-Fi show shown on BBC America about a young woman, a snarky grifter-type from the foster system, who sees a woman who could be her twin jump to her death one night. Stealing the woman’s purse, and eventually impersonating her, she discovers that she’s one of many clones — identical physical replicas raised by a variety of parents all over the world.

There are, as you might imagine, conspiracies.

The main takeaway everyone has about Orphan Black is that one actress, Tatiana Maslany, plays all of the clones. For the most part that means she plays five distinct characters on a regular basis, and she’s played several other clones to boot. Even more impressive, she often depicts the clones impersonating each other, which is kind of mind-bending, if you think about it, because she finds little tics and ways of making it clear that this one distinct character is impersonating another distinct character. The acting she does on this show is nothing short of amazing.

That said, Orphan Black is one of those sci-fi shows that relies on a central mystery and dozens of satellite mysteries for its narrative focus and energy. That means that the first season, which was occupied with introducing the mythology of the clones, the clones themselves, the bad guys, and several double-crosses and unexpected twists, rolled along like a bus on fire. Since then, the show has suffered quite a bit from terminal Exponential Complexity.

Nesting Doll Plotting

The problem is simple: On a show like this, you can never actually solve the mystery. If you solve the mystery, the show is over. Lost was like that, and like that earlier show Orphan Black faces a problem: People want the mystery solved. We watch, at least in part, because we want the mystery solved. We can tolerate a slow solution, we can tolerate twists and heel turns, but eventually we need to feel like the story is moving forward to a solution that makes sense.

So, Orphan Black is doing what a lot of shows before have done in response to this problem: They solve a mystery here and there, but introduce two more at the same time. So, while in a sense the audience knows more about the universe of Orphan Black than they did back in Season One, in fact they know about the same proportion of information because the writers keep introducing new aspects that come with their own mysteries.

For example, in the first two seasons we were aware of the female clones, known collectively as Project Leda. At the end of Season Two it was revealed that there were also male clones from the same genetic material, known collectively as Project Castor. So while we know a bit about how the Leda clones came to be and what they’ve been up to, the Castor clones were a whole new mystery.

This strategy works for a while, but eventually becomes cumbersome. At this point in the show, the main character, Sarah, hasn’t had a good night’s sleep or a normal day in what seems like forever. It’s been a never-ending slog of investigation, impersonation, capture, torture, escape, shocking revelation, and the occasional clone dance party (Google it). It’s exhausting to imagine her having even more adventures as time goes on, only to continuously reveal even more mysteries, even more powerful villains who outrank who we previously thought were the Big Bads, and have to laboriously retcon story decisions that don’t make a whole lot of sense otherwise.

Eventually, it simply becomes untenable. Eventually, we can’t suspend disbelief any more. I don’t think the show is quite there just yet, but it’s inevitable. The British system of treating shows like one-off miniseries would be better: Tell a story, finish the story, and then, if there’s interest, set a wholly new story in the universe. It would save us all a lot of sadness.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

SMRT: Welcome to the Age of Faux Expertise

Author: jsomers May 29, 2015 5 Comments

One of the most painful aspects of growing older is the slow sinking realization that I am not so smart. When I was a kid, school was easy and adults were always telling me how smart I was, and man did I believe them. I believed them hard, and my ongoing ability to achieve academic – well, success is too strong a word, more like mediocrity – despite a lack of interest, effort, or even reading the books I was assigned just reinforced it.

As I’ve gotten older, though, one thing has become very, very clear: I may not be stupid, but I am also not smart. Also, I am lazy and have no fashion sense, but these facts have never been in dispute and have also never been controversial in any way.

However, despite not being very smart, I am smart enough to know when commercials and other advertising is wanking me off. And it’s irritating, especially this new breed of Faux Expert come ons.

(more…)

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements