Bullshit

Sweet Romance

Ugh, Monday.

Mondays are good for random thoughts. Here’s one:

I’ve never watched the new Battlestar Galactica. I watched the original when I was a kid, and I remember really digging it for a while, and I still think the Cylon design was great. But I have this weird disease when it comes to anything new: I regard it with extreme distrust until someone convinces me it really is good. I think this is a reaction to marketing – I’m convinced that whenever I’m hearing buzz about a great new show/movie/album/book, what I’m really hearing is advertising of some sort.

Then, when someone finally does convince me that something is really good, two years have gone by. It’s sad. I’m like that dimwitted hillbilly who won’t sign nothin’ because he’s convinced he’s being fleeced.

So, when the reboot of BSG came out, I ignored it. I keep hearing how good it is, but it’s just off my radar. I like what I’ve heard, and recently watched a recap over on scifi.com (here) and it does look good. I might one day fire up the dusty DVD player that doesn’t see much use these days and check it out.

One thing that I noticed in this recap is how much of the story is devoted to the romantic entanglements of the characters. I always find this a bit dull in SF/F works. Now, I know that you want your characters to appear human and thus have emotions etc., sure, but I don’t read SF in order to have lukewarm romance, I read/watch it for the frakin’ aliens and technology and mind-warping concepts. I don’t object to the characters being distracted by relationships – indeed, of course, the characterizations are deepened and made more believable and the plotting complicated by the complex relationships – but I also think stories, especially serials, get bogged down by it. Once you introduce a romance to the mix, it can send out silky tendrils through your whole story until you suddenly realize the last 4 chapters were devoted solely to your protagonist staring out a window, sighing.

This of course is not necessarily fair to BSG, which may have a perfectly balanced storyline that uses romance and interpersonal relationships to make the story that much deeper and more satisfying. But then, Mondays are for random thoughts, not fairness.

Sleepy

I am not a morning person.

Someday – possibly during the aforementioned Coffee Apocalypse – I may in fact be forced to start hunting down those of you who are, indeed, Morning People, and destroying you. (I just read a book on Operation Barbarossa and have been infected with the word “destroy”, which is used constantly by German Generals as in We plan to surround the 17th Red Army and destroy it.)

I used to think I wanted to eliminate sleep from my life – like, if they invented a way to safely never sleep again. I was fascinated by the time I’d get back. Hours and hours, every day! I’m a guy who needs 8 hours every night. If I skimp even a little, I feel like a dead man for days afterward, so the idea of getting back 1/3 of my life through modern chemistry or dangerously experimental brain surgery seemed attractive. Nowadays, not so much – I like sleep. I guess this is part of getting older. When I was 20, not sleeping meant more time for boozing and carousing mixed with more work. Now it would mean more time spent flipping cable channels and complaining. The attraction, she is gone. Plus, there are times – like hangovers – when sleeping is a blessing.

I wonder, if the technology was available and safe, how many folks would sign up to never sleep again. And if they did,  would that force the rest of us to do the same just to keep up? Man, that would irritate me. I resent all other humans now. I can’t imagine if you were keeping me up twenty-four hours a day.

J

Coffee Apocalypse

I am starting to realize that my whole life revolves around liquids: Without coffee in the morning, I would be a zombie. Without whiskey in the evening, I would be insufferable (After reading something by absent friend Diamat, I suddenly have a craving for Rittenhouse Rye).

I am also toying with the idea that you can add the word “Apocalypse” to anything and create a cool doomsday scenario. COFFEE APOCALYPSE, people. See? Catchy. I sooooo want an Internet meme.

Of course, coffee wasn’t always with us humans, was it? And it may someday be replaced. You have to think about these things when you write SF – what will future humans (or their Giant Alien Ant Overlords) imbibe in the morning to regain sanity? Surely science will gift us with something more efficient than caffeine-suffused broth. Then again, have you seen some of the new-fangled food technologies? <Shudder> No thanks. Still one has to imagine these things, especially if you consider how much work and effort goes into getting your morning java to you. If your SF imagination tends to run dystopic, like mine does, you have to consider a horrible world without coffee, and the terrors it would hold.

But, not today, folks. Not today.

J

Radio Success

Well, Seven Second Delay last night was possibly the most fun I’ve had on the radio evah. First of all, it just proves my theory that Everything is Better In a Bar. Second of all, I got lightly made fun of for ten minutes, which is my idea of a good time.

I was joined by very funny comedian Adam Wade and very talented musician Dori Disaster. Dori provided a musical interlude so Andy Breckman could read a few pages of my book and pretend he knew all about it all along, and she was great.

If you’re so inclined, you can hear a stream of the show over at WFMU’s web page. I’m the first guest, so you won’t have to wait long, but listen to the whole thing, as it’s extremely fun. Thanks to everyone who showed up to drink and hoot at me, and anyone who tuned in.

Big-Assed Famous

Friends, I have arrived: I have finally made the local All-Things-Hoboken Web Site, Hoboken411.com. I can now begin stepping on all the little people. DAMN YOU, LITTLE PEOPLE, HOLDING ME BACK ALL THESE YEARS!

Although the photo they used of me makes me look like a hobo of some sort. Which means it’s entirely accurate, just unfortunate. This is why my official photos are all blurred. DAMN YOU AGAIN!

Also, Matt Good was kind enough to send me a link to his review of The Electric Church, which he apparently enjoyed, so check it out! Thanks, Matt!

Milled, Swilled

Stepped out with The Duchess to the SFWA Reception (the Mill & Swill, as I hear it’s known) in Manhattan last night. Joined there by the UberAgent, who introduced me around to some folks. I always feel so awkward at these things – it’s like when you’re introduced as a writer, folks want you to be witty and entertaining and possibly pants-wetting drunk. Or at least that’s what I always suspect. A lot of that may be my own issues, I’ll grant you, but I still feel like this happens over and over again:

UberAgent: This is Jeff Somers, author of The Electric Church.

Folks: Ooh, nice to meet you.

Me: Uh. . .yes. . .hi. . .Electric. . .Something. <Jeff’s pants fall down with a comical wilting sound>

Again, maybe my own issues here.

Also met some of my Corporate Masters. As Corporate Masters go, the folks at Orbit are Good People, which, translated, means they like an open bar as much as I do.

We didn’t stay too long, though; aside from my belief that a little Jeff in Public goes a long way, we were also exhausted from a weekend trip. The Mill & Swill is always fun, though, and I think we’ll make an effort to show up every year, if only so I can force the UberAgent to buy me an $11 Glenlivet.

Geetar

Well, no one asked for this, but lord knows I have never let that stop me: I am posting here 3 MP3s of me playin’ guitar. They’re more or less songs, I guess, written by me. In the sense that they are not, as far as I know, songs you would recognize as anyone else’s, though I am sure I have stolen all the riffs and arrangements from someone else without realizing it. Please do not identify where I stole everything from, damn you.

Song28

Song30

Song35

Anyway, here’s how I made these snogs, in case you’re interested:

  1. An Ibanez ArtCore AF75 hollow-body electric guitar, plugged into
  2. A Fender Frontman Reverb Amp, used as a pre-amp, plugged into
  3. A Kubuntu PC.
  4. Using Hammerhead Rhythm Station (run via Wine) for drums
  5. Recorded and mixed using Audacity.

DISCLAIMER: Babe, I know these aren’t great music. I know the mixing is terrible and there’s distortion. I know I hit some sour notes and my grasp of Key is, um, fragile. These are posted for fun, and because I’ve been taking guitar lessons for a while now and I like to make things.

That said, these are Copyright (C) 2008, me, bubba. Steal them and I will ineffectually insult you over the Internets.

GAMING THE SYSTEM

Creating, Managing, and Getting Lost in My Own Damn ARG

LIKE MOST authors, I endured years and years of people giving me The Look—you know, that mixture of pity and amusement that looks like constipation—whenever I mentioned being a writer. The Look, loosely translated, means gosh, is that why you look so malnourished and scurvyish, because of the poverty and the alcoholism? and wasn’t ever really all that far from the truth, at least up until 1997, when I finally discovered that whiskey does not, in fact, contain vitamins.

So, when I sold my second novel, The Electric Church, I had a rush of enthusiasm which inspired me to take a shower, cut my long, tangled hair, and wear pants for the first time in years. I also started creating a web site long before the book had even been copy-edited. I had the idea to create a ‘real’ web site for the eponymous church, and embedded some simple codes and puzzles into the pages using every old-fashioned HTML and javascript trick I could think of. When my publisher saw the final result, they decided it beat trying to come up with a web site themselves and hired a professional designer to create a nifty, candy-colored Flash site for it. They also suggested we take the puzzles to the next level and create a modest Alternate Reality Game (ARG) to make the site fun and promote the book.
(more…)