Ramblings of Jeff Somers, author
Well, here I go again on my own, down the only road I’ve ever known: More guitar songs from Your Humble Author here. Why? I really don’t know.
Herewith:
Song471
Song472
Song475
Song476
Song479
The usual disclaimer: 1. I admit these are not great music; 2. I claim copyright anyway, so there; 3. No, I cannot do anything about the general quality of the mix, as I am incompetent.
In the sphere of Dubious Achievements, I believe I have just created a new one: Making a DIY music video constructed entirely from video snippets left over from Ask Jeff Anything videos and free (or very cheap) stock video I had lying around on the hard drive.
I enjoy silly challenges like this: Take some disparate video and try to construct something that has a narrative (of sorts), makes sense, and is maybe slightly appealing. It’s fun. I don’t claim it’s great. Just fun. Mainly for me. Huzzah for me!
by Jeff Somers
Friends, the Singularity has come. No, not one of those singularities geeks like to talk about, where we either reach a point of technological advancement that frees us from the traditional bonds of mortality, or anything like that. Like almost everything else in this crappy, zine, the singularity I refer to is completely all about me. And it has nothing to do with nanobots being injected into me, or jacking into the Matrix or any other type of horseshit. We all have a particular Singularity, right, a moment in our lives where everything changes and life as we know it will never be the same, yes? For you it might be the day you realize you can brew your own beer, or the moment you see your first born for the first time, or something like that. For me, the Singularity is when I am able to do my job in my underwear.
And it has happened.
As anyone who has followed The Inner Swine lo these many years knows, I work on the low end of publishing. No swanky lunches with John Grisham for me, just endless drudgery working on textbooks and the like, taking shit from editors who think their book is the first book evah published and doing things like sizing five jabillion pictures of eye diseases for publication. This is not a glamorous job, but it pays a tiny proportion of the bills and allows me to claim to people that I am gainfully employed—I don’t think The Duchess would have married me 4 years ago if I hadn’t had at least a minimum-level kind of job, after all.
The company I’ve worked for since 2004 decided to close its New York office this year, which normally would have been a sad day in Jeff Land, since unemployment is shortly followed by Interviews and Resumes and Jeff staring at the bottom of a bottle of Rye and wondering if he could possibly make enough money selling bodily fluids to satisfy his wife’s need for new shoes (answer: no). But my company didn’t “let me go”, as the euphemism goes. They offered to let me work from home. And man, I jumped on that with two feet, just barely stifling a whoop of joy. Because now I can become Bathrobe Man.
Here is a post of randomness:
PAGE 69 IS MISSING: Jebus. Last year I pulled out an old manuscript from my typewriter days. Meaning there are 100 pages of typewritten prose and no electronic record anywhere aside from a PDF scan that has no OCR capabilities. Meaning that if I wanted to do something with it, I’d need to keyboard it. I thought, what the hell. What else do I have to do between liver transplants and crying jags? Nothing. Besides, I had an idea about ruthlessly editing it down to novella-size, just because. I figure something I wrote so long ago must be filled with juvenilia-type bullshit, so cutting it by 50% is probably being gentle.
I’ve been slowly grinding on this. Keyboard is no fun, so it’s slow. And yesterday I took a glance forward, because I am old and brain-damaged and cannot even remember the plot of my own novels any more, and guess what? Page sixty-nine of the goddamn manuscript is missing.
Now, this is not that big a deal, right? 200-300 words, tops, missing. On the other hand, it’s so frustrating I want to track you down and set your house on fire just to see it burn.
THE DENTIST IS THE MOST AWKWARD SOCIAL INTERACTION IN YOUR LIFE. Forget the teen-aged register jockey you have to buy condoms and tampons from at midnight at 7-11, the Dentist is so awkward I try to make myself pass out on purpose when I get into that chair. I just had my teeth cleaned. Aside from the fact that my dentist uses a red-colored polish that always – always! – makes me think I am bleeding to death when I rinse.
The rest of the time, let’s face it, someone has their hands in your mouth and is breathing directly onto your face. Granted, that’s how most of my social interactions go, but at least I’m drunk).
HAPPY NEW YEAR. My New Year’s Eve was spent eating and drinking and staring at a cat sitting on my chest, rising and falling as I breathed. or, struggled to breathe, as the cat in question weighs 22 pounds. The resulting oxygen deprivation caused a series of hallucinations, most involving my pants as sentient beings and a universe where Lana Del Rey doesn’t exist.
Some friends of The Duchess hail from Kentucky, and for my Xmas gift they went and bought some ridiculously cheap bourbon for me and drove it back up to Jersey. Apparently in Kentucky bourbon is handed out on street corners and children can taste-test the sweet syrup of life from an early age. A glorious state it must be. I might move there. I might move there an establish some new Whiskey Free State. Why not? All I have are the aforementioned liver transplants and crying jags to look forward to.
fin
So, to recap:
Conclusion: GOD BLESS US, EVERY ONE!
So, it’s Christmas Eve, which for us lapsed Catholics and damned Christians means lots of boozing and gifts and more boozing and Italian Food. Or something. So I’m slightly drunk, and part of what I’m drunk on is Hudson New York Corn Whiskey, which is basically moonshine passed through modern filtration and safety standards. In short, it’s the pur distilled alcohol from corn mash, without all that tedious mucking about with wine casks that makes real whiskey so delicious.
I wanted to try it just to see what it was like, and it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever tasted. But I do think there’s a reason people prefer their corn mash after it’s spent several years, if not decades, mellowing in casks. After trying the Corn, I’d vote to let whiskies sit in casks for centuries.
It’s too sweet, and has no character at all. I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve long suspected this rise of “white whiskies” is just a way for distillers to sell off stock without having to wait years for it to mature. By US law, it has to sit in a cask for 2 weeks in order to be considered legal whiskey. I’m sure these bastards would walk it through a room filled with casks and call it done, if they could. In short: If you like whiskey, you will likely not like Corn or White Whiskey. If you enjoy going blind, you might.
For my actual Christmas Day, I will be drinking continuously from a bottle of Early Times. Which isn’t much better.
Merry F'n Xmas
KIDS, it’s the holidays again. Various holidays. I more or less celebrate Christmas, which means I get nostalgic for my childhood, drink heavily, sing some songs, and eagerly accept gifts from fools who do not yet realize that I consider my company to be the Greatest Gift of All.
It also means I have to do some traveling.
The Duchess hails from Texas, and we travel there every year to visit her family. This is usually enjoyable enough. As long as you completely ignore the actual travelling part, which is horrific on so many levels. Getting up early to catch flights, making your way to the airport, enduring airport “security”, sitting in a deathtrap squished in with several hundred other people. Ah, travel. The destination is almost never worth it.
Of course, I try to make these trips productive. I try to write. I always bring along reams of material on my laptop, determined to make the travel work for me instead of against me. It never works. Travel defeats my efforts to write every time. Every. Single. Time.
First of all, there’s the plane. You board, exchange some nasty words with the flight attendant who seems to think you stole a blanket from the first-class cabin, settle into your seat. No point in starting any work, because they’re going to tell you turn off all your devices soon anyway, right? So you read Maxim magazine. Feel stupid for, once again, purchasing Maxim magazine, which takes about thirty seconds to leaf through and brings nothing but shame, possible arousal, and then more shame.
Then, you take off. This is of course terrifying. A billion-pound thing is being hauled into the air via someone’s shaky understanding of physics, operated by some unseen military washout. HOLY SHIT. If you think I’m not clutching The Duchess’s hand so tight her fingers turn white, you do not know me.
After that, who can work? I’m shaking and soaked in sweat, and we’re not safe yet, because now we’re a billion-pound thing hurtling through the air at several hundred miles an hour. HOLY SHIT. So naturally I start drinking. How many tiny bottles of sweet booze does it take to get to Texas? I can tell you precisely: Thirteen.
Let’s just say not much work gets done on the plane, right? Aces.
Then there’s the hotel. Assuming you spend any time in it. Which we don’t. The hotel is always a speculative place, sort of like the Hatch in Lost. Sure, it’s there. There are things in it, like wireless Internet and a desk, a minibar. We will never know for sure, because we will never spend any time there. Sometimes we sleep there, but I’m usually so bloated on Texmex and BBQ that I’m in a dream-like state whenever I return to the hotel, floating along the hallways while Dean Martin sings Ain’t That a Kick to the Head and dancing cowgirls circle around us, singing.
In between are, of course, relatives, restaurants, shopping excursions, arrests, hallucinations, conversations with Jesus involving insincere pledges to never drink that much again, and deer jerky. So, so much deer jerky.
So, with my fingers perpetually greasy, and always hovering in a sweaty gray area between drunk and hungover, not a lot of work gets done outside the hotel, either. And then the trip is over, and we’re back on the damn plane (HOLY SHIT) and nothing’s getting done there, either, usually because the flight staff all remember me from the previous flight (or because my name and photo have been posted on secret flight attendant web sites along with unflattering descriptions of my behavior) and somehow I always wind up locked in the bathroom with one of the airphones, desperately trying to contact my lawyers so they can meet me at the gate.
They never do. Possibly because I do not, actually, have any lawyers. At least not ones I’ve ever paid.
So, the next week is going to be a black hole of unproductivity. This also means I sail into the New Year immersed in a strong sense of shame and panic, because I’m another year older and nothing much got done, as usual. I have hundreds of novels to write and so far I’ve managed about 20. HOLY SHIT.
Has this ever happened to you: You wake up in a Mexican mausoleum, wearing a white linen suit, missing you wallet and one kidney — wait, not that. I’m thinking of something else entirely.
Has this ever happened to you: You’re reading a book or watching a movie, and really enjoying the story as it sets up, and then suddenly it all takes a left turn in a strange direction and becomes a completely different movie? Usually this starts off as a more or less straight genre story of some sort and then zig-zags into SFnal territory, and it is almost always a disaster, because invariably the non-SFnal aspects of the story were much better than the SF stuff.
The first time I ever experienced this kind of dizzying letdown was with The Abyss, James Cameron’s 1989 film starring Ed Harris, Michale Biehn, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The film spins out a nicely tense set-up: A US submarine sinks to an extreme depth, marines led by an unstable CO are sent down to a deep water oil platform to team up with the civilian divers who live on the platform. The extreme pressure can have some side effects on certain folks, and the marine commander appears to be one of them; he grows increasingly paranoid, acquires a nuclear warhead from the sunken submarine, and things get interesting.
And then aliens show up, and the movie goes straight to hell.
Now, to be fair, there are other problems with The Abyss (if you’ve never seen it, watch it and look for the scene where Ed Harris brings his wife back to life apparently through sheer force of will), and the aliens were almost certainly the point of the movie from the get-go. My point here is that as a storyteller, Cameron should have recognized that his story without the aliens was actually very, very good, and very interesting, and he should have deleted the aliens and kept going towards the paranoid, tense climax the film was begging for. He should have edited that bastard. Not editing in the film sense, but editing in the sense of cutting your story down to what works.
Another example of this is the early Tarantino/Rodriguez collaboration From Dusk Til Dawn (Rodruiguez has a big problem with editing in this sense). Certainly it was a gonzo idea to begin with, taking two stories and melding them together. The problem is that Taratino’s story about the Gecko brothers taking a family hostage in order to sneak into Mexico and evade justice is compelling, funny, and interesting.
And the vampires show up and the movie goes straight to hell.
Again, there’s some fun in that vampire sequence. But it isn’t a great movie, and the characters established in the first half of the film cease to exist and become just actors fighting vampires. The first half of the story is pretty damn good, and I wanted to see what happened to the Geckos and their hostages. The vampire side is just bullshit.
And that’s usually the problem: Melded genres like this are sometimes (certainly not always) just gonzo exercises — someone says hey wouldn’t it be something if aliens showed up here and whether due to inebriation or writer-block desperation, someone else says yeah! and a terrible movie is born. Once you introduce the gonzo element (aliens! vampires!) [gonzo only in context, because the story up to that point was not in any way fantastic] the story actually stops dead, the characters cease to exist, and everything just becomes a fun mash-up to play with. This can be entertaining, but it is often a bad story.
The most recent example I can recall right now is Rodriguez’s half of the Grindhouse experiment, Planet Terror. Again, I know the whole point of the film is to get to the zombie storyline. I get that. but the set-up involving Marly Shelton and Josh Brolin as unhappy married doctors is really fun and interesting. From their bizarre son and his “I will eat your brain and steal your knowledge” line to Marly’s running mascara and Brolin’s air of menace, these are fun characters. I would have loved to see a story that actually followed Brolin’s growing insanity as he realizes his wife is planning to leave him, leading him to incpacitate her with drugs and lock her in a supply closet. I would have loved to follow her as she manages to escape despite being partially paralyzed. There’s good stuff in there. You can even keep the part where she’s menaced by <something> and leaves her son in the car with a loaded gun, and the marvelous reaction shot when she takes about two steps away before the gun goes off.
But then zombies show up and the movie goes straight to hell.
Now, this doesn’t mean that when writing a H/SF/F story you should never create interesting characters with interesting backstories, or if you do accidentally create such interesting things you should immediately surgically remove the H/SF/F aspects. It just means that sometimes your H/SF/F aspects do not mix well with a more reality-based story you’ve created as set-up, and sometimes, when that happens, your set up is better than anything else you’ve got and you should trim back and follow those lines instead. Recognizing which situation you’re in can be difficult, but it can have tremendous payoffs.
In my own work, when I have a straight set up that suddenly veers into the fantastic, it’s usually because I’ve run out of ideas, and dead-dropping some magic or monsters into the plot gives it a charge of energy. This often works because on the other end of things, when I get the idea for a fantastic story I often race to get the premise figured out but neglect the characters or plot. So on the one hand I have characters and half a plot that peters out. on the other I have a fantastic idea but no characters or plot. Mush them together, and theoretically you should have something resembling a finished novel.
Naturally, this never works.
Still, if I let every failed project stop me from writing the next one, I wouldn’t be flogging this blog, would I? Failed projects are The Wheaties of a witer’s life, the breakfast of champions. So, I sympathize with folks who go whole hog into this and produce films or other stories that veer off in crazy directions after setting up something interesting but, perhaps, unresolvable in the first two acts. I feel their pain. And if someone wants to pay me a few million bucks to put my literary horrors up on the screen, I’d be more than happy to do so.
As some of you know, I’ve been playing guitar for a few years now. And, yes, posting my terrible, terrible songs to the Internet. You cannot stop me from posting my terrible songs to the Internet. Because I am not a guitarist, so I cannot be shamed on this point. I’ll continue to steal beats from led Zeppelin and riffs from AC/DC and posting the results here.
Learning how to play guitar has reminded me of my earlier years as a writer. As in, my adolescent years. Like just about everyone in the universe, I first started writing when I was a kid, a wee lad of about 10. So I’ve been writing for a loooong time, bubbas, and forgotten what it was like to just start out, y’know?
Learning and playing guitar has reminded me though, because there are parallels. I like to flatter myself that I have some ability as a writer, whereas the guitar is just for fun, but they’re both creative experiences and the path is similar, sometimes. Here’s a couple of things learning to play the guitar has reminded me about writing:
1. When everything is brand new, it’s easy. Every time I learn a riff or technique on the guitar, it’s an exciting moment that unlocks a lot of immediate ideas. BAM, I’m working on a song using those ideas. That’s how it was in the beginning when I wrote: Everything was new, so writing new things was easy. Thirty short stories a year? No problem. Every story I read, every class I took gave me new things to use. The work I was doing wasn’t very original, but it felt original to me, because it was all new stuff. I read Ulysses and spent the next six months writing stream of consciousness like I’d invented it.
2. Stealing Is How You Do It. The meager skills I have on the guitar are the result of a few things — some lessons, practice, and most importantly learning other songs. Every time I learned a riff or a solo from an old song, I immediately began plotting to steal it. The earliest of my songs reflects this pretty baldly, as you can literally hear badly-played riffs from classic rock songs brazenly arranged in my own fumbling style (which is charming, right? RIGHT?). These days I’m better at taking a riff as inspiration, playing with it, adjusting it, putting it into a new context and running with it.
That’s the same way to write. read good books and stories. Burn with jealousy against them. Drink yourself into a stupor because you’ll never manage anything nearly as good. Wake up in a ditch. Get washed up, eat something, take a nap. Then trudge to the word processor and steal the idea/technique. Keep stealing it. Steal it until it’s just part of your repertoire, until it’s natural to you. Then it starts slipping into stories without being showy, just another tool you use to tell a story. byt the time you sell something that utilizes the stolen element, it’s no longer stolen, it’s learned, and its yours.
3. Do it for fun. No one cares if I play guitar or how well I play, so there’s no pressure. I play because I enjoy it, I make my ridiculous songs because I enjoy them, and I post those songs because that’s what we needy, attention-whoring creative types do. The same goes for writing: Do it for fun. The writing, that is. The publishing should be for money, or some form of compensation, but the writing itself has to start off as pure enjoyment. Whenever I’ve spoken with a writer who writes from an income point of view, it’s always pretty depressing.
The ultimate point is, try new things. Learn new things. You will always enter that period of pure discovery and fun (suddenly I can hear Willy Wonka singing Pure Imagination in my head), once you get past that dreary initial period of frustration and Fail. Or am I the only one who had periods of frustration and Fail? Smug bastards. You’re all lying.
Fearmongering in Modern Media
by Jeff Somers
PIGS, unless you read this issue of The Inner Swine right now, immediately, you will be eaten in your sleep by hundreds of tiny orange spiders with green legs. I will tell you how to avoid this fate at a random moment in this zine—maybe page 34, maybe page 3, who can tell?—so you’d best study each page carefully.
Trust me, bubba, being eaten by spiders is no fucking way to go.
I don’t know why I never thought of this before:
I should have thought of this years ago—after all, this is exactly what the nightly news programs do. They shout at you all night about something that’s going to kill you, and then smugly tell you that not only must you tune into their program to save yourself, but you must wait until later to do so. I mean, one second they’re shouting that a mysterious disease is turning people into a warm puddle of burnt-umber-colored goo, and then they’re telling you to wait 3 hours before finding out the details. Genius!