A video I am not actually in:
(But check the credits. I got paid in nickels, but only after I did a little dance with my mop.)
Bullshit
Book Trailers
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.
Haircuts in Hell
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!
Lost Weekend
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.
The Most Embarrassing Thing I Could Think Of
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!
Life Lessons
I am old, and have gained wisdom through the years, so I thought I’d give back to the world by distilling my wisdom into tiny video nuggets you can use to edumacate the world:
Booya.
JEFF SOMERS WANTS TO BE THE POET LAUREATE OF HOBOKEN, NJ.
Dear People of Hoboken,
As one of Hoboken’s literati, I have been scanning the pages of the local papers for my name on what can only be described as an obsessive basis.. Unfortunately, there have been no mentions of me. This distresses me. Although I am sure the local Hoboken papers are not causing me this distress on purpose, it remains a fact that the Hoboken free press teased me with a week of interest in my existence and then, just when I thought they were serious, dropped me like a hot potato for the next “flavor of the week“. I think you people owe me something, especially when you consider how much money I spend in the local bars, which is a lot, unless I can convince someone else to buy me drinks. Which isn’t easy when your face isn’t on the front page of the local newspapers, dig? So we come back to the central point: how can the Good People of Hoboken help a guy out and get him some free cocktails?
I have also noted, in a not-totally-unrelated-although-it-might-seem-so-at-first matter, that Hoboken does not seem to have a Poet Laureate. This really stuns me, as most class-act municipalities and nations have one. I had to go look up who the Poet Laureate of the United States is, and it’s Philip Levine, which is startling because, when you think about it, everyone’s first reaction to that is probably “Who in the world is Philip Levine?” I’m kidding, of course. I know who he is. A man who has not left a college campus in almost his entire life, and probably has forgotten what other human beings look like. Likely Mr. Levine peers out from his darkened lair with his fishbelly pale eyes stinging from the direct sunlight, and then he composes haunting poetry about how he hates all the Normals who mock his Phantom of the College existence, which he then mails off to the President. Who doesn’t read them.
Which brings me back to my point: I would like to be named Poet Laureate of Hoboken. There are many reasons for this. One, I would be a lot more charismatic and interesting to talk to (especially over a few gratis rounds of Killian’s Irish Red at, say, Stinky Sullivans, on you) than a freakish shadow-monster like the Poet Laureate of the United States. Two, I live in Hoboken and am the first person, apparently, to think of the idea. Three, I have crippling bar debts that threaten to force me into sobriety, and I could really use some sort of stipend from the government. Four, I think it would be very cool if I could introduce myself at parties by whipping out a striking business card that read, simply, JEFF SOMERS, POET LAUREATE OF HOBOKEN. Finally, I have actually written poetry, and while none of it specifically mentions Hoboken, quite a few deal with the horrors of hangovers, and that could arguably be symbolic of Hoboken. Here’s a sample Haiku:
“A DTs morning,
rats in red smoking jackets!
why do you mock me?”
I would appreciate the Good People of Hoboken‘s help in bringing the “Somers for Poet Laureate” movement to the attention of our mayor, whoever that is, and the other illuminati who run this city. Thank you.
The Futility of Writing
The following originally appear in The Inner Swine, Volume 11, Issue 4.
until drops of blood form on your forehead
The Futility of Writing
Brain Surgeon. No, really.
PIGS, when I was but a wee little one in Jersey City, before the standing-on-a-corner-drinking-blackberry-brandy period, I wanted to be a brain surgeon. The reasons for this desire are now obscure; possibly it had something to do with The Six Million Dollar Man. Possibly it was simply an easy answer to the endless questioning by tiresome adults about my career plans—adults were always asking us kids what the fuck we wanted to be when we grew up, and Brain Surgeon was a good response as it got a lot of grins and impressed gestures from the questioner. I coasted along with the whole Brain Surgeon thing for a few years, probably giving my poor parents—who probably hoped I’d magically evolve into some sort of athletic prodigy and earn scholarships to pay for school—a lot of sleepless nights as they contemplated the roughly 55 years of medical school such a profession requires.
Of course, I didn’t really want to be a brain surgeon. The only ‘profession’ I’ve ever desired is Writer, and as every writer in the world knows, the ‘profession’ of Writer is similar to the ‘profession’ of Sorcerer: Very cool sounding but usually only existing in movies and fantasy stories. Because no one makes any money at writing, ever, so it isn’t really a profession. But when I was six I didn’t realize writing was something I might someday palm off as a profession while standing on line for my food stamps, so Brain Surgeon it was.
And then, some time around grade three, I began to slowly realize that in order to become a Brain Surgeon, I was going to have to master math. Shortly after that came the aforementioned standing-on-a-corner-drinking-blackberry-brandy period, and that was the last I thought about a career until I was twenty-two, waking from a lengthy alcoholic haze and realizing I needed a job, and right quick. And also too a change of clothes and a bath.
Somewhere in between, I sold my first novel, White Rabbit.
OBEY PIERRE
Busy Weekend
Jeesh. I am right now as I type this sitting in an Au Bon Pain in New Brunswick, on College Avenue. Where I attended college, actually, though my memories of this period of my life, as with any period of my life, are vague. I wandered about a bit thinking, ah, yes, I have stood in this spot before, but that’s about as far as my creaking old brain goes. College Years Jeff might as well be some other person.
IN fact, this Au Bon Pain wasn’t here when I attended school. I am outraged that the universe evolves without my direct participation.
I’m here because The Duchess is running a half marathon. Yesterday, we got up early and drove down here to pick up her bib, and it was frustrating because there were absolutely no signs anywhere telling you where to go, and my memories of Busch Campus are as vague as my memories of everything else, resulting in us driving around for a while while I frowned and mumbled things like “Ah, I think I went to a party in those apartments once …”
For the record, The Duchess does not care where I went to a party once.
So, we ran late in getting the race bib, and then had to race into Manhattan to participate in “The Future: What Does It Mean” event sponsored by Asis&t Metro. Fellow author David Louis Edelman and I had been tapped as Science Fiction authors to declaim on our vision of the future and information technology and such. It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed David’s presentation and the conversation that ensued, despite arriving in a flurry of harried incompetence, having forgotten all my notes, books, and other items in my rush to get there on time.
David Louis Edelman impressed me, and I’m really looking forward to reading his books, and so should you. For serious.
Then, The Duchess and I had to rush back to Jersey to attend a dinner that had been in the works for a few weeks which we also barely managed to make on time. And then, drunk and full, I went home and to bed. Which means subjectively, yesterday took about three minutes to elapse.
And now I’m back in New Brunswick, having dropped The Duchess off, sitting in Au Bon Pain waiting for her to finish the race. This weekend didn’t even happen, from my point of view.