Ramblings of Jeff Somers, author
Dan Krokos*, who you’ll all be hearing about soon enough, and who must be greeted with a gutteral war cry of “KROKOS!“, sent me this photo, and titled it “Middle of fucking nowhere, PA”:
Rock on.
*I’d link to something, but Dan’s web site just makes me sad with all its emptiness.
I love a good Situation Comedy, I admit it. And NBC’s Community has been my drug of choice recently. Here’s a context-free speech made by one of the characters that I’m still laughing about (see it here if you’re interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-viB1GwqTYk):
Jeff Winger: I’m going to say some names to you. Jeffrey Dahmer. Ted Bundy. Rich. What do they have in common? We don’t know them very well. What do we know about Ben Chang? We know he’s nuts.
Ben Chang: Let him finish!
JW: We know he’s dangerous. Unpredictable. Selfish. We know he uses his name to make bad puns.
BC: Guilty as Changed.
JW: When he talks, he over- and under-emphasizes words, seemingly at random! When he eats, he holds his fork like a murderer’s knife, gnawing at its skewered payload like a deranged woodland rodent!
BC: Bring it home!
JW: We know he smells like band-aids. We know he dresses like a Cuban cab driver. We know he exhibits–nay! Flaunts proudly obvious symptoms of over half a dozen disorders you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy’s pets!
BC: Feel the *heat*!
JW: We know these things about Ben Chang. And so much more than we ever wanted to know about him. And why? Because its there. It’s on the surface. What you see may be what you don’t want, but it’s also what you get!
I think it was the “he smells like band-aids” that got me.
The only sport I pay much attention to is baseball. Baseball, I think, attracts nerds like me because a) a lot of baseball players (more so when I was a kid than today) look like they don’t work out much, and it creates this illusion that anyone can play baseball, and b) the stats. Other sports are much more physical, much more fast-paced, and you can blame a lot on the sheer magical physical capability of the athletes. In baseball you can crunch the numbers. If you think about it, baseball stats are basically Failure Stats. The best hitters in the game fail to get on base 60% of the time. The best pitchers in the game lose one-third of their games.
Baseball is beautiful. But it is a game of suffering.
So is writing fiction, babies. As a matter of fact, I sometimes think my own personal batting average for successful stories is worse than a batting average. The sheer number of failed novels in my desk drawers and on my hard drives is kind of amazing, and are so numerous they can actually be categorized:
Hell, if you did the simple math and divided every novel I wrote by every novel I would actually show to you, my success rate is pretty abysmal. This is nothing new, of course. I maybe have more completed novels in my files than some, but possibly fewer than others. Writing a novel ain’t easy to begin with. Writing one people can read without shooting themselves in the head is a whole other level of difficult. And writing one that people would pay to read, well, that’s nearly impossible.
And then it hits you: Writing is a goddamn World of Fail.
Even successful stories go through a hell of revision and feedback where people point out everything you did wrong, or didn’t do well enough. I have a feeling that if I ever wrote a book that sailed through all beta readings and the entire publishing process without any Fail, I’d have something like The Entertainment from Infinite Jest, or Monty Python’s Funniest Joke in the World. Which would be great. Because I would totally leverage that into world domination. I imagine some outfit like Halliburton would be at my door the next day with an 18-wheeler filled with diamonds and a 500-page contract for exclusive use of the novel in warfare.
Of course, when you’re living in a World of Fail, such fantasies are all you have.
The worst part is the Dan Browning: Even if you’re a successful writer who sells scads of books, you still get to Fail, and often, through the fact that all the hipster doofuses start complaining about your lack of lietrary merit or your tendency to lose control over POV throughout the story. Or that your story makes no sense even after you’ve huffed an entire tube of airplane glue in an old Taco Bell bag. You might think that doesn’t hurt our feelings, but it does. In other words, even when a writer Wins, they Fail.
And you wonder why we drink.
I love mashups. This one stunned me:
http://www.jeffreysomers.com/blather/23 Mighty Mike – Imagine A Jump.mp3
I mean: damn.
Well, here e are, the arbitrarily numbered year 2011. Whoop! We survived. Although I am reminded that life is a zero-sum game: None of us are getting out alive, kids.
I don’t do resolutions. First of all, the sheer number of things requiring improvement and modification in my life is staggering and, frankly, exhausting. And far too many of them involve cats. Which is the general speed of my entire life these days: Cats. Some people’s speed of life is Speedboat, or Champagne, or Battlestar Fucking Galactica. Mine is: Cats. Make of that what you will. So I don’t make boring little lists of goals. I mean, you want to do something, do it. It’s not complicated.
As a sort of general goal for life, however, I believe I have resolved to stop watching bad movies.
This might seem easy to do, yet I have failed at it for many years now. Somehow the books I read tend to be uniformly good. The music I purchase is generally what I want as a soundtrack, at least for the present. Yet about 50% of the movies I watch suck. The worst part? I know they suck before I watch them. I can’t explain it. If you shaved my head and showed me where they’d wired in the mind-control circuitry, man, I would not be surprised.
Movies are just too damn easy to watch these days. When I was a kid, you had to climb fucking mountains to see a movie. I remember actually paying to watch Who’s Harry Crumb? one night because all the good movies were sold out. And I swore, never again. But I don’t have to borrow my mom’s car and scrape together allowance to see movies any more. I press a button on my remote. The bar is too low, and I’ve gone soft from liquor and indolence. No more! I’m tightening shit up around here.
This might not matter much anyway, since the world is ending, according to insane people. I would welcome this, as I believe the instant removal of all these people would improve the world greatly. Even if the world was turned into a Lake of Fire afterwards, it would still be a better place. Wo0t! Still, I have to admit an abbreviated 2011 ending in Rapture relieves me of some responsibilities. I will spend the five months drinking and yelling abuse at the neighborhood children out my window. Good times.
So: Happy New Year, everyone! I’ll be starting up Ask Jeff Anything very shortly, so if any questions have occurred to you, send them along. And consider this: Why has no one asked Jeff to do something yet?
You might think what with writing incredible novels, putting out my own biannual zine, and doing costumed Superhero work at night (I am, it can now be revealed, the Pork Avenger), I wouldn’t have time for other pursuits. Yet I sit at home in my cave-like office and actually compose and record songs on my wee guitars. That’s right! It’s time for moar geetar music from Your Humble Author. Download them and weep:
Song320
Song322
Song324
Song325
Song327
Song329
Song333
Song334
Song335
Song337
Song338
Song342
Song344
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.
The Voices in My Head Demand that I post the most recent songs I’ve recorded with my shovel-like hands and, er, my guitar. Plus drum loops. And a distinct lack of shame. So, without further ado or any chance for y’all to protest or talk me out of it, here’s the latest batch:
Song303: http://www.jeffreysomers.com/blather/song303.mp3
Song304: http://www.jeffreysomers.com/blather/song304.mp3
Song306: http://www.jeffreysomers.com/blather/song306.mp3
Song307: http://www.jeffreysomers.com/blather/song307.mp3
Song309: http://www.jeffreysomers.com/blather/song309.mp3
Song310: http://www.jeffreysomers.com/blather/song310.mp3
Song311: http://www.jeffreysomers.com/blather/song311.mp3
Song315: http://www.jeffreysomers.com/blather/song315.mp3
Song316: http://www.jeffreysomers.com/blather/song316.mp3
Song317: http://www.jeffreysomers.com/blather/song317.mp3
Song318: http://www.jeffreysomers.com/blather/song318.mp3
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.
That’s right: Don’t dare watch if you don’t know every spoiler, ever.
As happens more and more often these days, I did not see Terminator: Salvation in theaters. First of all, it didn’t last as long as I thought it would – it wasn’t as big a hit as I’d expected it to be – and second of all there was something in the trailers and advertisements that made it seem flat to me, lifeless. So I waited a year and recently caught it on pay per view, and man, am I glad I did. This movie was one of those odd films that isn’t exactly bad so much as it quite simply made me angry. Spoilers ho, but here are the 4 reasons this movie made me really mad:
ONE: THIS MOVIE SHAT ALL OVER ONE OF THE COOLEST SF MOVIES OF ALL TIME. Now, sure, Terminator 3: Rise of the Ridiculous shat all over it too, but for some reason that didn’t incense me. T3 was simply a bad movie – it was still kind of fun watching Arnie doing his Terminator schtick, and it tried to honor its heritage. Salvation treats the terminator mythos as a collection of props to blow up, a collection of one-liners to spray at the nerds in the audience for gut fist-pumps, and a vehicle for Christian Bale’s increasingly creepy Action Man Persona/Voice. There’s absolutely no attempt to match the previous movies for tone, atmosphere, or even vision of the future. They namecheck the famous lines, the occasional detail (You Could be Mine, e.g.) but the movie is a sterile, underconceived horror.
TWO: THE WHOLE PLOT IS JUST A COLLECTION OF SET PIECES. Seriously, the kind of ridiculous story takes up about four or five minutes of screen time; the rest is just a collection of action sequences stitched together. Every time there’s a quiet moment with people talking, Skynet robots show up in awesome scale to kill and hunt, and the next ten minutes is just running and screaming – the best part being the screamed exposition as characters flee the huge Terminators, spouting definitions and explanations. This is even lampshaded when they introduce a seemingly interesting old woman as a character; She appears to be at least partially leading a group of desperate human survivors who have made an old gas station their HQ, complete with fresh fucking vegetables stored in the basement. Sure, why not. Still, the old woman, and her apparent authority with these desperadoes, is at least interesting. Who is she? How come these well-armed people listen to her at all?
Guess what? You never find out! A damn thing about her! Moments after she’s introduced, she’s scooped up by a Terminator and a mindless action sequence ensues. You see her again, in a weird twist, but nothing is ever explained about her. I mean, shit, if the whole encounter was just an excuse to calm the audience down so they jump when the hella-huge Terminator shows up, why even bother with the interesting details? Just put your standard-issue Mad Max type in charge, and leave it at that.
The whole damn movie is like that. Thirty seconds of plot and then … HOLY CRAP, TERMINATORS! RUN RUN RUN!
THREE: WHAT PLOT THERE IS STANKS. Now, you might think a movie where the entire premise has been explained in detail in prior movies would be a snap to plot out. And you would be right. Somehow, they fucked this one up. The whole plot is basically a scheme by Skynet to lure John Connor to his doom in the most elaborate and insane way possible. Granted, the crux of all the Terminator films has been Skynet’s inability to defeat Connor and ultimately the whole human race, driving it to elaborate schemes. Sending a robot back in time to kill his mother is, in fact, a ridiculously elaborate scheme – but it does have a certain directness once you fudge the whole time-travel thing: Terminator goes back (in time) to murder Connor (remotely, by murdering his mother before she can birth him). This scheme involves time-travel in a much flimsier way, and yet is so indirect and convoluted it’s a wonder a machine with a brain the size of the universe thought it might work.
The one thing I think of that makes it even possible is that Skynet, with infinite resources and clock speeds to plot, simply launches every plan it conceives that has a 1% chance of working or better. This would explain a lot, actually – Skynet is launching hundreds, thousands of convoluted bullshit plots against humanity every second. We’re just watching the tiny percentage that worked for whatever reason.
Anyways, even if you’re willing to swallow the ridiculous premise and twist of the film, once Connor is, in fact, trapped by this plot, what does Skynet do? Send a thousand robots to kill him? Fill the whole complex with poison gas? Nuke its own complex simply to destroy its human nemesis? You’re watching a better movie. It instead allows him to run around free long enough to set all the human prisoners free and hook up with allies. Then, when Skynet says, oh yeah, him, I ought to kill him, it sends exactly one Terminator after him. Without a weapon. Sweet fucking lord.
4. The ending. Sweet god in heaven, the ending. A heart transplant. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME.
I’ve read that the original ending had Connor die, and the cyborg Terminator Marcus being re-skinned with Connor’s visage to take over his legacy, and that there was outrage and horror and the filmmakers changed their minds. That other ending, if true, isn’t perfect, but it does have a certain appeal to me – the irony of humanity being saved, in the end, not by the screwup kid we met in Terminator 2, but by a Terminator, confirming that the Terminators were the heroes of the series all along. Kind of neat. Instead, we get an in the field heart transplant. Oh. My. God.
All right, after that, I ought to admit one thing I truly liked: Arnold’s cameo. Sure, the timeline is a bit muddled by now, and, yes, the whole idea of building bulky, slow humanoid robots to hunt down people is a little weird when you can build incredibly fast, deadly motorcycle terminators by the score, but seeing Arnie’s 1984 face and body going implacably after John Connor was pretty fricking cool.
Except … uh oh … that makes me think of …
5. THEY EVEN SCREW THAT UP, because there was absolutely no play on the fact that the man running for his life from Arnie in these scenes has seen this Terminator model before. That ought to be a fucking mind-screw – decades after you learned you mother wasn’t crazy to predict the end of the world, after Arnold shows up several times during your life to save you, after you bonded with the machine as a fucking father figure, then here he is again, perfect, new, and trying to murder you. There’s no implication whatsoever that Connor remembers a damn thing. It’s solely in there for the audience.
Whew. I’m exhausted. This movie made me want to destroy things. Thank you.
I’ve got an idea: It’s simple but could be fun. I get questions via email on a pretty regular basis, ranging from the sedate and expected (When’s the next book coming out, aren’t those bastards at Orbit going to have a trade size of The Terminal State) to the disturbing (Would you mind sitting in the other chair I can’t get my telescope that far to the left, or Is that really you speaking to me in my dreams telling me to burn down Citi Field?) I try to answer every question as promptly as possible, but I am a busy man, if complaining now counts as an activity you can be busy with.
So, let’s do a weekly question thing, where anyone who wants to can send me a question, and I will post a brief video to answer it. I’ll attempt to do this once a week, but lord knows once I get busy with drinking and sleeping and hunting the grounds for my lost trousers, time slips away fast, so no guarantees. What I do guarantee is that no question shall be ducked. Ask me anything. You may not like the answer, but that ain’t my problem.
Send all questions to mreditor@innerswine.com.