Bullshit

Traveling with Jeff

Author: December 21, 2011 1 Comment

MERRY FN XMAS

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.

HOW TRAVEL DEFEATS JEFF’S EFFORTS TO WRITE

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.

 

Bullshit

EDITING: Have You Heard of It?

Author: October 23, 2011 2 Comments

The AbyssHas 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.

From Dusk Til DawnAnother 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.

Planet TerrorThe 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.

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

What Guitar Reminded Me About Writing

Author: October 10, 2011 4 Comments

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.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, gee-tar, Writing

From the Zine

Author: September 25, 2011 0 Comments

The recent media frenzy from the media about Hurrican Irene that had me living in my crawlspace for three weeks with nothing but a shotgun for company reminded me of this essay, which originally appeared in The Inner Swine V0lume 14, Issue 2, June 2008.

YOU WILL BE ATTACKED BY RABID COMMUNIST BEARS AND USED AS A TOILET BY HIPPIES

Fearmongering in Modern Media

by Jeff Somers

Spiders! EATING YOU AS WE SPEAK!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:

  • Step 1: Order TIS Security Chief Ken West to travel the country distributing orange spiders
  • Step 2: Offer secret of avoiding horrible death in this zine
  • Step 3: ????
  • Step 4: Profit!

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!

(more…)

Bullshit, The Inner Swine

The Mystery MP3

Author: September 21, 2011 0 Comments

KIDS, you may not be aware of this unless you read my zine, The Inner Swine, with more than the usual attention. Said usual attention generally being a quick glance and then a toss into the nearest garbage can. Still, it’s a story so dull, so pointless, it has to be told. Again, and then again.

Back in the pre-history days, we didn’t have MP3s or streaming music. We had the radio, and CDs, and cassettes. My god. Just thinking back to that horrible time depresses the shit out of me. Anyways, since liking a random song on the radio meant you either taped it onto a cassette, complete with commercials and DJ stepping all over the intro, or shelling out $10 for the entire CD, which more than likely contained no other songs you liked. Feh. being a cheap bastard, I taped a lot of songs off the radio. I used to keep a blank tape in the stereo so I could just jab the record button whenever something even threatened to be interesting.

So, one day back in the mid-1990s I taped a song. I have no idea when, off of what station, or where I was at the time. I scrawled one word on the tape cover: “milky?“. Record-keeping, obviously, was never one of my strong suits.

And for the next 20 years, I wondered who the hell sang that song. It plagued me. I liked it well enough to wish for a better copy – a crisp MP3, a CD track, whatever. I did Google searches on the lyrics, on “milky”, on anything else I could think of. Nothing worked.

I even posted the MP3 I’d made from the cassette on my web site and put a plea in an issue of The Inner Swine for folks to crowd source this bastard and tell me what it was. Here’s the MP3 I posted. I got plenty of responses, mostly in the vein of hey I like that song too, let me know who it is when you find out. But no one knew what it was. Apparently I’d taped it the one and only time it ever got played on the radio. Lucky me. I began to feel vaguely ridiculous putting so much effort into discovering the heritage of a mediocre grunge-lite rock song.

Then, last week, old friend Ken West sent me an email:

from: Ken West

subject: LOOK WHAT I FOUND

Click on the speaker for “Milky”
Holy shit, mystery solved. Band: Cell. Album: Living Room. My life: A little more over.

Bullshit

Essay

Author: September 8, 2011 1 Comment

The First Time I Ever Got Fired

(Originally published in Angry Thoreauan #27, November 2000)

I was eighteen years old and entering my Freshman year at Rutgers University and already I’d managed spectacular, if invisible, failure financially: In what was to soon become the soundtrack of my life, I found myself submerged in debt, most of it mysterious and vaguely disturbing. I usually chose to not think about it. Since at the time I was in the middle of my own personal Pax Soberia (having had a really disturbing “oh Jesus, that smell is me” revelation recently, inspiring me into my first and last foray into the nondrinking world) I approached this problem of debt with uncharacteristic sensibility, and decided to get a job. Prior to the Pax Soberia I would have spent a lot of time trying to alchemize cash out of used beer bottles and cigarette filters. Newly arrived at the University, I eschewed this standard solution in favor of a radical new one: Get a job. I figured for someone with my personal charm and adequate IQ, earning money would be easy.

Located in the middle of a formless grey cloud I can only refer to as nowhere, my campus was basically a roiling sea of tightly-packed and pressure-crushed Engineering students, and almost nothing else. It was just a big plain dotted with dorms and parking lots, and that was it. There was a Student Center, of course, which boasted video games, a pool table, a Wendys, and a Pizza Parlor. The glittering, oasis-like Student Center bravely employed and occupied about twenty of the thousands of students on a nightly basis. The rest of us had to sit in our rooms spitting at each other for entertainment, or take a six hour bus ride to the other campus, where there were bars and stores and (rumor had it) Things to Do. Or, of course, you could manufacture designer drugs out of the materials on hand (cleaning solutions, toothpaste, couch cushc ions, etc) and get stoned.

Looking back, it isn’t very surprising that my Pax Soberia didn’t last very long.

Buried in the middle of this wasteland, though, was a small grocery store which had refused to sell out to the University when the campus had been planned, leaving it the only non-University building on campus, not to mention the only other jobs on-campus. And Lo! A “Help Wanted” sign hanging in the door on that long-ago September day when I finally woke up and thought to myself, Well, I’ve been here for two weeks, might as well go to a class or get that job, or something.

I showed up and discovered that I wasn’t alone in my desire to work for the grocery store. Dozens of others were there, filling out applications for the fifty hours or so of shifts available. The owners of the store new a good deal when they saw one, and they announced that we would each be assigned a test shift, and that after the week decisions would be made as to which of us would be lucky enough to earn minimum-wage stocking shelves. I took my assigned shift and promptly forgot all about it. How hard could it be to get a job in a grocery store? I’d observed the people who worked in the grocery stores back home and had always assumed their sole recommendation for the job was their ability to show up for it every day instead of killing themselves. I could do that. For a while. Especially since I could already tell that the Pax Soberia was going to end soon; a group of us had been hoarding grape juice from the dining hall, and it was silently fermenting in my closet.

When I showed up for my test shift a few days later, one of the co-owners, a short balding man in thick glasses, greeted me warmly enough and introduced himself as Mike. Mike ran me through my responsibilities quickly: Keep the store clean, stock the shelves, and run the register. It sounded simple enough, and I was encouraged when Mike got into details and demonstrated the first third of my job: Keeping the place clean. Sweeping, dusting, litter-detail — all these things were simple and easily within my (even then) withered abilities.

Mike then tried to teach me how to stock the shelves and freezers. This was more complicated than I would have ever imagined. The sodas in the freezer, for example, were to be stocked in a specific order, in a specific way. Mike showed me twice. Mike’s way of showing me was to perform the chore very quickly, without saying a word, and then turning to me brightly and saying “See?”

Having detected absolutely no pattern to the way he’d stocked the freezer, I nodded enthusiastically and said “Sure!”

Mike stared at me. At first I figured he could smell the ripe funk of my lie, and was simply waiting for me to Do the Right Thing. Then I figured it out: he was just staring. Mike liked to stare. Over the course of the next few hours of my employment, Mike stared at me a lot.

Next, Mike showed me how to work the register. Due to Mike’s habit of staring at me, I’d come to the conclusion that he and the two women he owned the store with were telepaths, communicating mentally. Thus it didn’t surprise me when there was no system of codes or UPCs for the approximately infinite number of products the store sold. Mike cheerfully explained that I would be expected to memorize all the prices of all the items offered by the store (listed in a oft-folded typewritten and hand-corrected booklet), do the tax calculation in my head, and count out the change. Then he stared at me until my hair began to singe a little.

Mike supervised my first transaction, which went fairly smoothly. Then he slapped me on the back heartily and went into his office. I finished out my four hour shift, shook hands with the next person up, thought HAVE A NICE DAY, MIKE really hard in Mike’s general direction, and went home to check on the fermenting grape juice.

The next day, I got a call from one of the other owners asking me to stop by. Figuring that my use of the New Math at the register had netted them big profits and I was about to be offered a partnership, I stopped by later on that day. I was ushered into .their office where Mike and one of the others sat waiting. A check was handed to me, and I was informed that they appreciated me coming in for the one shift, but I hadn’t made the cut.

I was dumbfounded. I’d never been fired before. I’d never gotten a failing grade before. I felt like I was about to cry. I managed to ask what I’d done wrong, in some pathetic effort to salvage knowledge, if nothing else, from this horrible incident.

Mike leaned forward and stared at me.

“You didn’t stock the sodas correctly, Jeff. And I showed you twice.”

I floated gently out of the store like they do in Spike Lee movies, staring down at my first and last check. I was numb. Not only had I been rejected by a dumb, hole-in-the-wall grocery store, but my financial morass had suddenly gotten much, much deeper.

If nothing else, I had the end of my Pax Soberia to look forward to.

Bullshit, Writing

A Play

Author: August 25, 2011 0 Comments

RENOVATION FAILURE

(A Play in One Act)

<JEFF is at Home Depot, mystified>

JEFF: Excuse me, where are the door saddles? For an interior door?
CLUELESS HD EMPLOYEE: We only have these two kinds.

<JEFF buys one>

<JEFF is at home>

JEFF: Hey guys, I bought this saddle. They said it was one of two they had.

<CONTRACTOR1 gives JEFF his sad face>

CONTRACTOR2: Uh … we’ll just pick one up for you tomorrow.

JEFF: <slumping in defeat> Dang.

AND: Scene.

Bullshit

The F-Bomb Project

Author: August 19, 2011 15 Comments

The F-Bomb ProjectYesterday on Twitter while rambling on pointlessly as usual (my tweets can be boiled down to <joke about pants> + <joke about liquor> + <random comment on what I’m writing> + <link to something vaguely interesting on the Internet> = hilarity) I thought about creating a book trailer where a bunch of people read one line from a passage in The Final Evolution or something, and I spliced them together into a trailer (inspired by this.)

Then Bill Cameron said “If my passage doesn’t have a lot of f-bombs, I’m not doing it. Hahahaha.” And I thought, yes. Let’s create a trailer of people reading just lines with the word fuck in them. I mean, I counted 593 of them in The Final Evolution alone.

Then, I thought, why not make that into a trailer for the whole series? Boom.

So, here’s the deal: Got Avery Cates books? A video camera of some sort? Film yourself reading any line, from any of the books, as long as that line contains an F-Bomb. Send it to me. Everything else is up to you: How you do, where you do it, what line you read, what you’re wearing, how many of you are involved – go nuts. Have fun. All I ask is that when you send me the clip, you identify exactly what line you’re reading by book, page, and line (just to spare me from having to search for each instance). Email everything to mreditor@innerswine.com

I’ll need a bunch of these to make it workable, so I won’t be doing any work on it until I have critical mass. So encourage everyone you know to send me a clip!

Bullshit, More Shit I Gotta Do, Videos