Bullshit

Rookie Mistake: Juvenilia

Author: November 29, 2012 1 Comment

Drunk Jeff Working Hard at "writing"

Drunk Jeff Working Hard at “writing”

You’d think that by now I’d have this writing game down pat. Six novels with two more due out soon, over twenty-five short stories published, a few anthologies – I may not be a genius, or a bestseller, but I’ve done this for a while now. You’d think I’d have figured out how to not humiliate myself any more.

You’d think.

You have to remember, I am a lazy man. Lazy, lazy, lazy. Like, seriously lazy. Lazy Men like me have a lot of really bad habits born out of this laziness and we’re always getting ourselves into pickles because we try to be lazy and shit gets real and then we end up working twice as hard in order to pull things back together. Lazy Men are probably pretty much responsible for every tragedy and horror in history, just a long series of guys who’ve been wearing the same pants for six days shrugging and neglecting to do something.

So, my most recent laziness-related humiliation came from submitting a story. I write a lot of stories. Most are crap, but a few linger in my memory as pretty good. Sometimes I go back through the archives and find a few gems — pieces I didn’t appreciate at the time, but which have something to them. A more mature, diligent author would revise these. I prefer to just submit them.

Sometimes this works out. I’ve sold a few, much to my surprise. But then I’m always surprised when I sell something. When my agent called to tell me we’d sold Trickster last year I spent several weeks chuckling at her excellent joke. When the advance check arrived I was puzzled for a while, then assumed it was a hoax. So selling a few pieces of juvenilia doesn’t rattle me: Sometimes I think the central idea is good, but the execution is kind of meh, so I can see how it happens.

Recently, though, I submitted an old story with a nice idea and I didn’t really read it through very closely. I’m far too Rock Star for that, as long as we agree to define Rock Star as very drunk. It was recently rejected, and the comments from the editors were … not kind. They were also: Not inaccurate. I re-read the piece and frankly I’m a little ashamed of myself. Note the emphasis on little. I remain pretty much in love with myself.

The story can be saved with a bit of revision, and I’ll be dumb enough to submit it again. Lessons: none. I make it my business to never ever learn anything. So far it’s worked out remarkably well. And if you allow yourself to learn lessons from your writing career you’ll end up giving up writing because the lessons are always along the lines of you will never be able to quit your day job or your author photo makes you look like a dweeb because you are a dweeb. Still, this could be a lesson for all of you: Be careful when submitting your juvenilia, kids. There’s probably a reason you let it rot all those years.

Bullshit, Filthy Lucre, Writing

When Booze Attacks

Author: October 19, 2012 0 Comments

This first appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 14, Issue 1.

Hangover Cat is An HeroIn general, liquor been very very good to me. In a storied career stretching back several decades I’ve had a lot to drink, and certainly had my share of hangovers. I still have a suit of clothes I woke up wearing in Philadelphia one night, with absolutely no memory of how I acquired it. It hangs in the closet waiting for the day that we either invent cheap at-home DNA testing or time-travel, and the truth will be revealed. Until then I assume I drank too much and traded clothes with a much richer man of my approximate size and weight.

Still, I’m an old, frail man now, and I think I’ve tested my depth when it comes to killing myself with The Drink. Or at least I thought so. I mean, I ought to know my limits, right? I ought to be able to walk up the watery line of Lake Puke and toe it gingerly, and do a jaunty little dance of defiance. And usually, I can.

Recently, however, I’ve had several inexplicable brushes with the ancient stigma of being over-served, and the only thing more depressing than being a middle-aged zine publisher is being a middle-aged zine publisher who’s about to hurl his cookies all over the place like a high school kid after his first pint of blackberry brandy.

The first time, to be honest, I had consumed enough booze to pickle myself, I admit it. The evening got away from me in an excess enthusiasm for someone’s whiskey collection, and despite the way everything ended I don’t have any real regrets. The most recent episode, however, involved barely enough booze to register, and yet I ended the night swimming home in a taxi, turning various shades of green.

This is disturbing.

The cycle of life, as far as I imagined it, was this: You’re born. Then nothing happens. Sometime around your thirteenth birthday, you have your first drink, and then you fuck up multiple times, spending brain cells to gain experience. A period of happiness ensues, wherein you can pretty much drink without fear of consequence. This goes on until your liver explodes and you die, probably around age fifty. Suddenly returning to the earlier stage puts a distinct crimp in my plans for the future. Not to mention supplying me with ample embarrassment for those occasions when I attempt to be witty and erudite with my adult friends.

The only course of action is to continue to experiment until I figure out the problem in my technique. I’ll continue to report my progress as events warrant.

Bullshit, The Inner Swine, Whiskey

The Worst Whiskies in the World Part One

Author: September 4, 2012 0 Comments

Many people exist in this world with a purpose, to make the place better for those who come after them. I’ve never been one of those people. I was, in fact, kind of bummed to have an epiphany at age 28 and realize I was not only not immortal, but I was not even living in a universe custom-create for me. I was just one of several billion shlubs muddling through, and that was kind of depressing. Then followed a period of Super Villainy, where I not only didn’t try to help my fellow man or improve the world, I actively tried to ruin both.

But now I am mature. And I am here to do what I can to help. How can I help? I considered my talents: Rare and often not obviously useful. I can, for example, almost remember your name after meeting you just four or five times. It’s eerie. Also, I can do simple algebra equations in my head, so if four ounces of chicken has ninety calories, I can tell you how many calories three ounces has. Every time.

Still, none of these talents seemed like the sort of thing that would help the world in a significant way. So I despaired for a while and turned to writing, and we all know the damage I’ve done there. And then it hit me: If there’s one thing I know something about, it’s booze. And I’ve had a lot of really, really awful whiskies in my time. Why not share that horrible knowledge and spare my fellow man such suffering?

Of course, even there I fail, because I am not a fancy man who can tell you things like how whiskey is made or what it is, exactly, I am tasting. I have the palate of a bum used to drinking moonshine and antifreeze. All I know is whether I would gnaw off my own foot to escape further shots of a whiskey or not.

So, our first candidate is a German whiskey called Slyrs. German whiskey! Next thing you know we’ll have a lady president or something! No, seriously: German whiskey. Rather than bore you with a befuddled and confusing essay about the horrors going on in my mouth when I drink Slyrs, I thought I would use a simple video representation of the fact that if told I had to either drink instantaneously fatal poison made from the crushed testicles of dung beetles or drink another shot of Slyrs, I would choose the poison without hesitation.

Here’s the visual of that reaction:

You’re welcome.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Whiskey

Interview with Little Old Me

Author: August 14, 2012 0 Comments

Larry Gent interviewed me a while ago and the glorious results have been posted:

http://42webs.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/panic-view-jeff-somers/

“What is your favourite book/author? Why?

I don’t have one! I do have writers I am hatefully jealous of, and would kidnap, Misery-style, at the first opportunity. But I should probably not implicate myself in any future mysterious kidnappings of famous authors, so let’s change the subject. To your original question. Which I suspect you are impatient for an answer to. I just ended that sentence with a preposition. I am a horrible writer. Yes, I’m a little drunk.”

Go read it. Because I am fascinating.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, More Shit I Gotta Do, Writing

WE ARE THE MORON BROTHERS

Author: July 19, 2012 0 Comments

Bad Writing in Movies

by Jeff Somers
[This essay first appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 15, Issue 1]

LEST we forget, movies and TV shows get written too. And plays. And advertising jingles—the term writing covers a lot of ground, some of it sad and strewn with rotting carcasses, some of it merry and lined with beautiful gardens. This wide field means there’s also a lot of room for bad writing, about which Your Humble Editor here knows entirely too much.

When you do something on a professional level, you tend to lose some of your wonder for it. It’s an unfortunate consequence: Magicians don’t get wide-eyed when cards are made to disappear, computer programmers don’t get excited when email pops up on their screens, and writers wince and groan a lot when terrible dialog afflicts our television shows, books, or movies. We see the connective tissue, and we know all the tricks.

Normally, I can keep my mouth shut. Normally, I can manage to swallow clunky lines that fall to the ground with an ear-popping thud. Normally, I can handle a surfeit of cliché and a heavy hand with the purple—this because I am a firm believer in the Rules of Polite Society, that web of semi-transparent rules that keeps our world functioning, and one of those rules is that you don’t bother other folks with endless snobbish assessments of the quality of your entertainments. We’re writers, after all; for a lot of us, the reason we started writing in the first place was dissatisfaction with the stuff on TV and in the theaters, leading us to try and do it right.

Recently, though, I’m losing control of my temper when it comes to one time-honored tradition of Bad Writing: The Moron Line.

Their company is something you won’t miss
When your icetrays are filled with piss

The Moron Line is, quite simply, a line of dialog that is spoken only to help those in the audience who either haven’t been paying close attention or are mentally incapable of understanding anything even remotely complex or fanciful. Here’s a totally made up example:

<In the sewers beneath Los Angeles, The Villain is seen placing a large bomb against one slimy wall. A few scenes later, the Hero and his Sidekick stumble upon the bomb.>

HERO: Look!

SIDEKICK: Jeepers! A BOMB!

HERO: It must have been left here by the villain, earlier, when we weren’t here.

Most of that dialog is not only unnecessary if you have a heartbeat and an attention span of any length, it’s actually annoying, because it’s like that guy at a party who keeps telling you things you already know in a tone of voice that strongly implies he doubts you have the brainpower to know such things. It’s like an echo.

One of the popular uses for Moron Lines is to remind the audience of subtle plot points; having a character regurgitate a little exposition in the guise of summing up or arguing a point. Another is the time-honored Salazar Gambit, where a character—usually the villain—appears onscreen and, just in case you just wandered in from another movie—someone hisses their name:

<The Hero enters SALAZAR’s OFFICE. Cut to SALAZAR, grinning behind his desk.>

HERO: Salazar!

Again, the only people in the room who would be confused as to Salazar’s identity (assuming, of course, that he was in the story previously and this is not some complicated switch of identity or some other potentially confusing plot gymnastic) are folks who fell asleep shortly after the lights went down. Yet the Moron Line survives, because a) it often sounds dramatic to untrained ears and b) a lot of people creating entertainments for the rest of us have nothing but contempt for us, believe me.

They may not go down in history
But they’ll go down on your sister

Once you notice the Moron Line, you can’t unnotice it, and it starts popping up everywhere: Characters describing the clearly visible actions of other characters, characters repeating names and facts for no other reason than to make sure you remember something that happened, oh, fifteen minutes before in the narrative. Often these examples will be paired with quick-cut flashbacks, just to make sure you really notice what you’re being hit over the head with. This last technique could be called The Sixth Sense Are You Paying Attention Technique.

Are there people who need the Moron Line? Probably. I’ve been out to movies where future Nobel Laureates sit and have lengthy conversations about other movies while a movie is playing, and no doubt the Moron Line helps them keep track of at least the Bullet Points of the plot. And sure, there are probably a few functioning morons out there who need the Moron Line. Should these fine folks be abandoned? Of course not. What we need are a sort of reverse Director’s Cuts, where all the Moron Lines and redundant flashbacks are edited in, with a normal cut released for the rest of us with functioning brains.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing, The Inner Swine

Book Trailers

Author: June 24, 2012 3 Comments

A few weeks ago, I started a little side business making Book Trailers (and writing and editing and picking up laundry – you know, FREELANCING! Hire me for something. Please. I’m begging you). I’ve made a bunch of book trailers for my own books over the years, as well as other videos, and I really enjoy it. Something about taking pieces of video or photos, some music, and some text and making a coherent thing out of it appeals to me (heck, I made an entire music video out of scraps of stock video). I figured, I enjoy it, people need Book Trailers made (I mean, seriously – have you seen some of the trailers out there?) – why not put out my shingle?

Since then, I’ve made 3 or 4 trailers for money and had a lot of fun doing it. This, of course, forces me to think about Book Trailers in a more specific sense. As in, what is my Philosophy of Book Trailers? There’s a group of words I bet you thought you’d never see. There’s a lot of debate about the effectiveness of Book Trailers, of course. Personally, I think Book Trailers are useful tools, but you can’t expect them to work miracles. They’re basically cheap, persistent advertisements. If you think of them that way, there’s no reason not to do a book trailer. For pennies you post a ad for your book, and it’s there for years and years, keeping your name and title out there.

Book Trailers can be very dumb, of course, and there’s a lot of miscalculation out there, so here’s my basic philosophy of Book Trailers:

1. Be short. I think going forward book trailers will be a replacement, in part, for the act of browsing through a book on the shelf, since there won’t be any books on shelves any more. No one spends more than a few seconds flipping through a book, so your trailer shouldn’t be much longer. A minute is a good sweet spot. Longer than that and people will just quit watching anyway. Shorter and you may not have time to set a tone and get some meat in there.

2. Be entertaining. Everyone wants a viral video, but Virals aren’t made, they just happen. Just shoot for entertaining. If you’re talking about a one-minute trailer you don’t have to be experimental or edgy or anything, just keep people interested. In fact, you probably don’t want to go too far out there in a quest to be cool, because

3. Be informative. Don’t mistake informative with dull, but people are watching your book trailer because they want to know about the book. Images and music can set the mood, the tone, the basic setting. Give your audience a taste. Actual lines from the book help, but a summary of the premise isn’t a bad idea either. You want to give people a reason to buy your book, after all.

Book Trailers aren’t an exact science. If they were I’d have a factory in Mumbai cranking them out and be a billionaire. They’re sort of a long-tail approach to marketing; your trailer may not blow up on YouTube overnight and get 30 million hits, but it will be there six months from now, getting hits, making people aware of your book on a steady basis. Keep them cheap, simple, and entertaining, and it’s well worth the investment, I think. Of course, I would say that now that I hope to make money from it. I’ve never claimed to be anything but a selfish, self-centered ass, so there.

Book Trailers, Bullshit, Filthy Lucre

Haircuts in Hell

Author: June 15, 2012 0 Comments

Let us discuss then the various and sundry ways that working out of your house can be a descent into madness.

I’ve been working from my home for about five years now. I’m lucky enough to have a small dedicated office (shared with The Duchess, but she’s not home during the day, so normally the room is mine to be naked and drunk in. I mean, write novels in. Novels. Me, writing. Not dancing around naked with a bottle of whiskey in my paw. Never in life.

Anyways, working from home is a strange challenge, even assuming you don’t have more cats than is healthy sitting on your desk and your lap and your head. We currently have five cats. Sweet lord, five cats. That’s the subject of a whole different post, though.

There are, of course, the usual and obvious pitfalls of a work-from-home lifestyle: The lack of grooming or proper dress code, the slow erosion of social conventions. The urge to just sit and eat and get drunk at two in the afternoon. Well, drunker. But I’m not here to tell you about the usual pitfalls of working from home. There’s much weirder stuff going on.

Some people can’t work from home, or so they tell me. Some people need the routine, the schedule, the contact with their fellow humans. Not me. First of all, I am an obsessive person – I make my own routine wherever I go. I don’t need corporate routines handed to me, baby. Second, I hate people. All of you. The day they told me I should go work at home with the cats, I was delighted, because cats don’t try to talk to me. Not when I’m sober, at least, and when it happens after a bottle of decent bourbon I am usually well aware it’s just alcohol poisoning.

But working from home will make you hyper-aware of your surroundings. You think you know your house? Your office? Your bedroom? Wherever you end up working, you will become a small god of that space. You will know everything there is to know about it. Every pore in the wood, every scuff on the wall, every sound of your next door neighbor. My next door neighbor wakes up every day at noon and plays Somebody I Used to Know by Gotye. Every day. Every. Day. I have no idea what’s going on in his life, but I can guess, because I work from home and I am a god in this small space.

My grooming has, in fact, fallen off. Which is saying something, as it was never very high to begin with. Shaving is a foreign experience for me, and when I am forced to shave due to polite societal requirements, I end up with an angry red razor burn in place of my beard. And I do tend to walk about the place naked, because, really, who am I dressing for? Cats? They don’t care. The UPS guys? he never looks at me, always turning his face away when I sign for things, so obviously that’s not a problem. Besides, I’m god in this space. I work from home. YOU CANNOT DEFEAT ME IN THIS OFFICE, I HAVE SUPERPOWERS.

One thing about working from home: It’s an advantage for writing, because every day looks exactly the same, so you never get distracted. Commuting, or going to a new location every day engages your mind with novelty and you end up sitting there making observations and learning new facts about the world around you, which is just wasted time. I see exactly the same things all the time here, and thus I get a lot of writing done, because my brain literally has nothing else to do.

It’s not for the faint of heart, no. But if you have ever dreamed of purchasing a super hero costume and wearing it to ‘work’, working from home is your chance. Or so I’ve heard.

Liquor bottles, assemble!

Bullshit

Lost Weekend

Author: June 4, 2012 0 Comments

I don’t know what I did this weekend. Last thing I remember is pouring a glass of whiskey on Friday around 6PM, and then I woke up today. Luckily there’s some found video to help me out:

AND

Sweet lord. I need help.

BAM!, Bullshit, Videos

The Most Embarrassing Thing I Could Think Of

Author: May 20, 2012 2 Comments

Sometimes I get into lulls in this blog, or my zine The Inner Swine, where I’m not sure what to write about. I mean, Jebus, I been writing this stuff since I was ten. Novels, stories, sure, but also just essays. Ramblings. Opinion pieces, stuff like that. Millions of words. Possibly billions, by now. It takes a certain kind of self-centeredness to come up with that many words just to describe your Inner World, fans, and hopefully there’s a certain amount of charm in that. Otherwise I am screwed.

I’ve written about everything. Every voice in my head, every emotional breakdown, every embarrassing failure. Somewhere there are words of mine describing it. The self-regard is amazing. But, on the other hand, I also have very little left that normal men might term dignity.

So: I talk to myself.

All the time, a running monologue. If you didn’t know me, you’d think I was crazy. In fact, some folks who do know me do think I am crazy. When i was a kid there was a fellow in the neighborhood who would walk around all day long with a transistor radio clamped to his ear, talking to himself. He was always insanely cheerful. I have grown up to be Radio Man, albeit a slightly more Ready for Prime Time version of him, and sans radio.

I have two different Talking to Myself modes. One is just a profane soliloquy I keep up on a constant basis. Sometimes this is superficially aimed at my cats, Pierre, Oliver, and Spartacus. Sometimes it is just in the air, a seamless rant at no one and nothing in particular. In this I’m probably not too different from other alcoholic, misanthropic people who work at home and have no human contact for days on end.

The other mode I have, however, is a little worse: I write. Well, I enact scenes, have dialogs. Work out plots by pretending to be one of the characters. This can get a little involved, and I even lose track of time. Suddenly, I’m standing in the shower, and I stop and think: Why am I pretending to be an alien sociopath whose alien mental illness causes him to think like a human being and thus is the perfect Fifth Columnist? And then I look around, thank goodness I’m inside and away from people, and get on with showering.

This is fine as long as you don’t get caught. Trust me, once someone walks in on you either a) talking to the cats like they were small furry men capable of responding or b) talking like you’re acting in a role and think you’re being secretly filmed, you don’t live it down. I repeat: You do not live it down. You will hear about it for the rest of your life. If your wife, The Duchess, is the one that catches you, she will also repeat it to people, telling them the story as if it’s simply hilarious and not humiliating at all.

Of course, sometimes it happens when I’m just walking down the street, too. I’m pretty conscious of my Rain Man tendencies, so I don’t really walk down the street talking to myself out loud. But I do often walk down the street talking to myself inside, and sometimes I think it must be really obvious. At least based on the way people get out of my way as I approach. When I was a kid there was a crazy guy in our neighborhood who walked around all day with a transistor radio held up to his ear. He was nice, he would stop and talk to anyone who flagged him down. When he wasn’t talking to people, he just talked, out loud, to himself, responding to things he heard on the radio. We came up with the genius name of Radio Man for him when we were kids.

If I were any less socialized, or if my Mom had had a few more drinks while pregnant, no doubt I’d be the Radio Man of 2012 Hoboken. Actually, maybe I am. Certainly the neighborhood kids run away when I approach. Hmmmn.

Sometimes I suddenly realize I’ve been talking to myself for a long time, deeply buried in some scene I’m working out, and I have this unsettling moment of realizing that for the last half hour I really wasn’t in charge of myself. I was just operating, you know? It’s kind of disturbing. I have to assume that it’s all part of my process for generating the genius writing ideas I have. Otherwise I am just nuts, and I don’t want to think about that.

To the bar!

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements