Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

In Praise of Wasted Time

Author: jsomers November 19, 2013 0 Comments

This originally appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 12, Issue 4

FRIENDS, as loyal readers of TIS you know well that I am obsessed with time and its ravages upon me. All intelligent beings should be obsessed with time, because that’s time behind you, fucking you in the ass on a daily basis. And then you’re dead and buried, my friend—because Time finally killed you—Time will still be there, and will still be fucking you in the ass, for a while at least, as it takes your comely form and transforms it into a horrorshow of bugs, rot, and general decomposition.

So, normally I go around whining a lot about wasted time. I hate to waste time. I hate to stand in lines and will gladly go elsewhere to avoid it—people who will stand in line for things mystify me. Like taverns—who in fuck waits in line for a bar? Idiots, I think. Idiots who don’t realize that the same booze and the same quality of drunken, morally-loose people exists just about anywhere that a bottle of Jagermeister is kept. Or coffee—the lines at Starbucks enrage me. The other day I was at an airport and went seeking coffee, and the line outside Starbucks was wrapped around the fucking concourse, while two or three other coffee sources were abandoned. Starbucks coffee sucks balls, but if you actually like it, is it really so much better than all other coffee in the world that you’d rather stand in line and waste some of your precious life staring at the ass of the stranger in front of you than just take a chance on another brand of coffee?

That’s the power of brands, I guess, the lure of having everything be exactly the same all the time, guaranteed, but that’s the subject of a different article, isn’t it.

No, I go to great lengths, usually, to avoid wasting my time—but it can’t always be avoided. Sometimes you have to sit in waiting rooms, or on airplanes, or at your desk at work. Sometimes you have to speak with your fellow humans for long periods of time during which all your mental energy is used up maintaining faked interest in the conversation and imaging your head exploding, splattering brains and blood everywhere. Sometimes you’re informed that you’ve already called in sick twenty-three times this year and one more will mean your dismissal. Sometimes, like it or not, you simply have to waste some of your precious time. Think of time-wasting as if Time were blood. Imagine you sometime have to tear open a vein and spill some blood, and that you could never regenerate the blood you lose, so that someday you’d spill too much, run dry, and die. That’s the way to think about wasting time.

I’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding time-sucking scenarios, or at least at modifying them to my advantage. Once you realize you’re an adult and can make your own decisions, you can trim down the wastage pretty fast simply by choosing not to do things—like waiting in lines unless absolutely necessary. You do, after all, have full power over your life in some sense, so you can structure everything around not wasting time, from your job to your home life. Go for it.

Me, I’m too sleepy. I handle not wasting time by transforming it into time well-used. While I firmly believe I am the first human smart enough to have thought of this (a few ultra-smart Dolphins have probably already invented this), there is always the possibility that other geniuses are applying this technique quietly across the globe. I will ignore this possibility, however, and claim it as my own. The trick is simple: Always have something constructive to do with you. Me, I’m a writer, so I bring a notebook, a book, and sometimes a laptop. These amazing tools allow me to transform just about any otherwise wasted moment into a productive one, doing something I love.

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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine

Why “Scandal” Worked – At First

Author: jsomers November 6, 2013 0 Comments

That’s right, Imma about to write about the ABC show Scandal starring Kerry Washington. The TL:DR version is: I never would have watched this unless forced to by The Duchess, then briefly found it balls-out brilliant, and now not so much.

Here’s the long version: So, like I said, The Duchess commanded one day that we check out Scandal because people were talking about it and The Duchess loves her some zeitgeist. And I do what I’m told or things get broken. So we started to watch.

Right about here is where spoilers might start happening. Just sayin’.

At first it was kind of dumb: The editing tricks were headache-inducing, and the whole idea of the super-connected Olivia Pope schtupping the President in secret was only mildly interesting. I find a lot of Shonda Rimes’ writing tricks a bit shopworn and annoying at this stage; any attraction they had for me eleventy billion years ago when Grey’s Anatomy launched has been worn away. But it was serviceable, and The Duchess liked it, so we hung in. And for a short period of time, during the Defiance Arc, as it’s known, this show became so adorably fucked up insane it was absolutely entertaining.

The Defiance Arc was brilliant because just as you assumed the whole point of the show was OMFG THE PRESIDENT IS SCHTUPPING OLIVIA POPE! the show set you up and then hit you over the head with a conspiracy that stole the election that elected President Fitz-whatshisname. A conspiracy that involved the First Lady, a Supreme Court Justice, a Texas Oilman, the future Chief of Staff, and Olivia Pope – but not the President, who thought he’d won the election fair and square. This was such a demented plot twist that it carried the show for a while solely on the fumes of its audacity. Along the way, the President murdered the Supreme Court justice while she lay dying of cancer in the hospital, to give you a hint of just how demented it all got.

That was then. The Defiance Arc was resolved and the show must go on, so it’s been casting about for other ways to distract us from awe-inspiring awfulness that is the central relationships of the show (and the fact that the main character is so lacking definition she basically does batshit things all the time for no reason and does not in any way resemble the character introduced in the pilot at all unless you count consuming red wine in volume, in which case, a little bit). These ways have so far involved creating larger and more ridiculous straw villains who Rule the Universe – even more powerful than the President! – who also have intimate connections to Olivia et al. It’s so hammy by this point I fully expect Olivia to wake up in the shower one day and it was all a dream.

The reason Defiance worked was that the central idea was demented, and wonderfully so – but the mechanics of it were mundane. The way they stole the election? Simple, clean, and small-scale. It made sense, once you suspended disbelief sufficiently. The new arcs are now so soapy and silly I’m cleaner after watching this show and that DOES NOT happen when I watch TV, usually.

Ah well, I just wrote 550 words on a TV show no one will remember twenty years from now. I feel dirty.

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

How Not to Write a Novel

Author: jsomers October 20, 2013 2 Comments

I just wrote a novel in possibly the hardest way possible.

Years ago, I wrote two novels. Well, both were short – one very barely qualified as novel-length and one was absolutely a novella, really. I liked both very much, one a bit more than the other. The longer one I sent to my agent with that special feeling of doomed hope and suggested it might be the next thing we go out on. I loved the longer one because it had a sense of poetry to it, a dreamy atmosphere. Plus, I loved the longer one’s creation story:

The Duchess had forced me to attend the Broadway show Mama Mia. I was reluctant, for obvious – lord, I hope they’re obvious – reasons. But I am a dutiful husband, so I went. I had this central concept for a novel in my head at the time, but couldn’t get it to coalesce into something coherent. And then, as the lights went down in the theater, I had an epiphany. I saw the first line of the story in my head: “This is the story of my father.” And it was off to the races. I wrote the longer piece quickly, easily, after that point.

That’s no longer the first line of the book. That line isn’t even in the book any more. But it’s there, nonetheless, even if only I can see it.

The shorter one I held back, because while I loved a lot of it even I couldn’t convince myself that a 30,000-word “novel” with a lot of padding had any chance at book publishers. The novella had a bit of juvenalia to it, but it had a clear throughline that held it together nicely.

My agent, god love her, read the longer one and sent back her notes, which made a crucial point: There wasn’t much of a story arc. No real conflict, no climax. It was a story, sure, but it was kind of a flatline if you plotted the events.

So, I pondered. Other stuff happened.

Recently, I revisited the longer work and now it was apparent that my agent, whose sulfurous fumes still clung to the digital pages, was absolutely right: I had written a novel in which very little happened. Then I considered the shorter work from the same period, which had stayed in my imagination. It was a a bony, skeletal thing, which was about 1/3 padding as I meandered about the universe I’d created trying desperately to find details — but it had a definite plot, a mystery and a climax. It had a point.

I re-read both and had an epiphany: Written so closely together temporally, they were actually parts of the same story. They shared elements and atmosphere and, if I’m being honest, characters as I recycled them from one to the other. I had a longer, fleshy piece that was all character and setting and backstory, and a shorter, bony piece that was like a fucking plot outline. The answer was obvious: Combine them.

A lot easier than I would have expected. I really had written a novel in two parts, months apart, without even realizing it. I’m either a genius or a drunken moron, take your pick. They fit together so seamlessly if you didn’t know the story behind the new novel you’d never guess. You can’t see the scars as the stitching healed. The slight limp as it walks about on two legs of microscopically different lengths just give its gait some character.

I have no idea if we’ll ever sell this beast, but regardless I’m pleased. And also amazed at the way the brain works. And once again reminded of the value of a great agent.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

The Arc of Walter White

Author: jsomers October 13, 2013 4 Comments

I’ve been a huge fan of Breaking Bad throughout its run, and so I watched the finale, Felina, with a mixture of joy and horror, because it was very well done and it also meant it was ending. You don’t often see television shows that have 60+ episodes that are all reliably excellent. Of all the episodes of Breaking Bad, the worst ones were still pretty damn great. Grading them, I don’t think there would any below a B- in my book, and even those would be rare.

So, yeah: I’m a fan.

The Internet encourages instant reactions to things and then a quick Forgetting. Breaking Bad was a few weeks ago and it’s already fading from the Internet like a dim memory from childhood. But I’ve been thinking about it still. Because the finale was great, and because I think it accomplished something truly amazing. So let’s talk about menace.

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

FREAKS of the INDUSTRY: Two Days in the UnCanny Valley of New York Comic Con

Author: jsomers October 1, 2013 0 Comments

Since I’m returning to the hallowed halls of NY Comic Con for the first time since 2009, I figured it was a good time to revisit this essay from The Inner Swine that dealt with my previous experience.

MY NAME is Jeff Somers and I’m a writer. I’ve written a lot of things you almost certainly have never ever heard of but currently I’m most known for the Avery Cates series published by Orbit Books. People think that being a published author is a glamorous life filled with champagne and solid gold toilets but let me set you straight: I spend my days with four cats wandering my house in a tattered bathrobe clutching a bottle of booze to my chest and muttering.

Since the Avery Cates books are Science Fiction novels and are by the way the greatest novels ever written in the English language and if you don’t buy copies IMMEDIATELY you will suffer from cultural illiteracy and be mocked at parties, it was decided that I should attend this year’s New York Comic Con as a Literary Guest, where I would attempt to charm and bamboozle the good, pious fans of the Earth into paying some small attention to me. So I gathered my courage, put on some pants, and with my wife The Duchess in tow and we headed off to Two Days in the Uncanny Valley of the Javits Convention Center in New York.

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Avery Cates, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, More Shit I Gotta Do

The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled: Breaking Bad, “Ozymandias”

Author: jsomers September 16, 2013 0 Comments

Despair.

NOTE: Are there spoilers here? OF COURSE THERE ARE.

I’m a huge fan of Breaking Bad. I may have posted about it here before, in fact. At this point I think the only people who don’t think Breaking Bad is easily one of the greatest TV shows ever are those effetes who refuse to own a TV because obviously and those who refuse to watch it out of some sort of weird pride. And, of course, small children.

For the rest of us, it’s been one hell of a ride. An almost perfect show, with very few weak spots. And the last episode, Ozymandias, was one of the few times in my life I’ve sat with my mouth open for an extended period of time. I could have easily been photographed and inserted as the example illustration under the head MIND: BLOWN.

I thought the previous episode, To’hajiilee was just slightly slow. Not bad, mind you, just … somewhat deliberately paced. I enjoyed moments of that episode immensely and overall would give it an 8 or 9 out of 10. But it felt like they held back a little, and it was irritating. And then in Ozymandias, Vine Gilligan and company did the impossible: They made Walter White the hero of the story.

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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Where “Gone Home” Went Wrong

Author: jsomers September 2, 2013 1 Comment

SPOILERS: There are many. If you’re foolish enough to fear spoilers, don’t read this. YE BEEN WARNED.

So, Gone Home is a video game. Maybe you’ve heard of it, either because of its shocking nature as a first-person game created by some of the folks who worked on Bioshock that doesn’t have any guns, monsters, or action gameplay of any kind, or because of it’s storyline involving a teenage girl realizing she is gay and finding her first love. Or maybe you haven’t heard of it, because unlike me you have better things to do.

So, if you haven’t heard of it, here’s the basic rundown: It’s first-person, as I said, so you see everything as if you were there walking around. You do have a character, a college-age girl home from a year abroad in Europe only to discover the new house your family moved into is empty, your family missing, and all sorts of mysterious clues scattered everywhere. The point of the game is to figure out where your family is.

Here I will spoil it all for you, because I must: You slowly discover, after wandering the house and finding keys and newspaper clippings and concert tickets and listening to audio journals your kid sister left behind, that your parents are off at couples counseling and your little sister has run away with her girlfriend.

That’s it.

In other words, presumably in the game’s universe your parents return the next morning, y’all call the cops on your sister, and a few hours later she’s being yelled at extensively.

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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Writing as a Reader

Author: jsomers August 30, 2013 7 Comments

I had one of those moments the other night. No, not one of those “oops I drank a bottle of High West Double Rye and wet myself” moments – or, well, yes, one of those moments too, but that’s not the subject of this little essay thank you very much. The moment I’m referring to was a spine-tingling idea I had to solve a plot problem in a novel I’ve been writing for approximately 75 years. Which is actually a merging of two novels into one. Which has been slowly driving me insane. But let all that drift, because I figured something out, and it was to take a tiny detail alluded to a few times throughout the current draft and bring it back as an awesome but somehow perfectly obvious twist.

To celebrate I drank a whole bottle of High West Double Rye but I think I already told that story, so let’s let it drift.

After I woke up, went to the desert to dry out, and had a few starvation-induced hallucinations, I realized something: The only reason the twist came to mind or even worked at all was because I’d previously put in a couple of throwaway details. The thrill I experienced when I thought of a way to leverage those details into brilliance was pretty much the same thing I would have felt if I’d been reading a book and an author suddenly promoted what had seemed like an unnecessary detail to a plot point. In other words, I was writing like a reader.

Frankly, I think that’s important.

Here’s how it works, at least for me. In chapter one, I give a character a gewgaw for some color. Then I forget about it. Then in chapter 10 I realize I need that character to do something amazing and for that he needs an implement. And I realize with a thrill that I can just resurrect the gewgaw. I stand up, tear off my shirt, and scream IT’S BRILLIANT while the universe recreates the crane shot from The Shawshank Redemption. I could have given the character the gewgaw right then and there and retconned it into the story later, but because I used something I’d already added to the story and then forgot, I have the same experience (hopefully) that the reader will have.

It’s artificial, of course. I can do anything I want in my story – I can just make shit up any time I want! Yet when I have that moment when I’m just thrilled by a twist because it seems natural, it usually means I’m onto something. For a second there, I wasn’t a jaded, slightly inebriated writer trying to fool people into spending $8 on his books. I was part of the audience, and I was excited.

Of course, I’ve enjoyed some terrible films and novels in my time, so none of this means the story I’m working on is any good. It’s just the religious experience of occasionally shocking yourself with your own writing that gets me every time.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Sinister Horror Clichés

Author: jsomers August 14, 2013 0 Comments

Family Hanging Out in Sinister

Whenever The Duchess is out of town I do three things: I order a palette of cheeses, I make sure I have several gallons of grain alcohol on hand, and I watch awful movies. The cheese and the alcohol are for sustenance. The movies are to scratch the itch I have for awesome terribleness, the kind you can only get from low-rent horror movies and insane Sci-Fi epics. On a tangential note, my spellcheck is not complaining about “terribleness” which just feels wrong. Really, that’s a word? Holy shit.

Anyway …

Just recently I watched Sinister, unexpectedly starring Ethan Hawke. Hard to believe there was once a time when Hawke was considered a sex symbol and something of a rising star in Hollywood, though he does have a natural presence on screen still, and as he ages out of his epic self-regard phase he might have a future. To see him in a lowball horror flick is kind of startling, though, but just like his character in the film he’s got bills to pay, I assume. His character is a writer, but at least the movie avoids many of the odious writer clichés that other films give in to: While it’s imagined that his first books was massive bestseller and that he’s still living off of those proceeds, he’s also a writer who’s second and third books were failures and he’s got one last option book to try and turn the ship around. And he can’t afford the mortgage on his big house any more. So it’s slightly more realistic than your average movie when it comes to writers.

Anyway, I’m not here to really complain about that. Nor am I here to review the film, except to say that it was entertaining, slightly more interesting and well-done than most, and if it was riddled with boring pop-ups and cheesy horror-esque moments, the Super 8 home movies of family mass murders were incredibly frightening, and the whole film does manage to generate an atmosphere of dread that few horror films manage. Hawke’s pretty good in it, and the sound editor should have won an Oscar.

But I’m not here to praise Sinister. I’m here to complain about the two most grating movie stupid clichés currently in my wheelhouse: The Idiot Note and The Anti-Light Sleeper.

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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

America’s Got No Goddamn Idea: Surviving a Live Taping of America’s Got Talent

Author: jsomers August 7, 2013 6 Comments

Gaze Into the Abyss

There I was, in the audience. A long story. Which I will begin now.

My wife, the formidable Duchess, is a huge fan of America’s Got Talent. Me, not so much. It’s a perfectly inoffensive variety show by and large, though every single episode could be edited down to a tight ten minutes without any loss of entertainment value, unless you find entertainment value in endless repetitions of three or four core memes: That America does, indeed, have talent, that the contestants by and large are so desperate for success and recognition they will likely kill themselves shortly after being voted off the show, that the whole world loves Howard Stern with a blind passion, and that Snapple and Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn are the greatest foodstuffs in history.

Again: Me, not so much.

Anyways, I do watch the show with The Duchess, because it’s fun to gently mock her taste in TV, and heck, once in a blue moon there is actually an interesting act. Variety Shows are pot luck, after all. Yes, every season will have 500 nearly identical dance troupes, magicians, singers, and stand up comedians, but there will once in a while be a very cool thing. That Very Cool Thing is what keeps me sane during the long seasons.

The Duchess and I made some new friends recently, and one of them turned out to be a Gaffer working on AGT, and he got us tickets to a recent taping. The Duchess was beyond excited. I was … less so. But we went! And I survived!

###

Radio City Music Hall is pretty amazing. Showing up for the taping was pretty much like showing up for anything else: You have a ticket with an assigned seat. You get there, go through a sloppy security screening, and have the opportunity to purchase cocktails and soft drinks and snacks assuming your credit scores come back high enough to qualify for the loans required to actually make these purchases. Then you find your way to your seat and wait for the show. The doors opened at 6PM and we were seated by 6:30PM and my god what a mistake because the show doesn’t even begin until like 8:30PM. If you’re lucky.

The place never got full. There were tons of empty seats around us. But Radio City is awesome, so for a moment just hanging out there was pretty cool. And then Joey assumed the stage.

Joey, who has a real name and career I am sure but neither of which I recall, will be referred to here as Joey Bagadonuts. He is the swarthy “warm up” man who went about the business of keeping the crowd at a peak of frenzy with all the energy and concentration of a drunk trying to ward off the imaginary rats in smoking jackets that descend on him with horrifying regularity (not that I would know anything about that). Joey Bagadonuts began a Cult Training Program, reminding us over and over again that we were making television and not watching television, and that this meant we had to leap to our feet to applaud lustily whenever instructed, and follow the other rules (no phones, no shouting – strangely, those were the only rules, meaning this was more cult-like than could have been imagined).

Joey Bagadonuts reminded us of this, our sacred covenant as studio audience, until I want him to burst into flames right there on stage.

Joey occasionally seemed to forget what he was doing and just trail off, possibly to contemplate suicide. Then he would roar back with a nonsensical demand that we get loud even when nothing was happening. Do I need to say I hate Joey Bagadonuts? I hate him.

###

We were seated behind a ginormous balloon, because they had a segment to pre-tape. Presumably due to the possibility that one of the acrobats floating over us via balloon would fall and kill someone. I can certainly see the wisdom of this; by pre-taping the segment they can always release deadly gas into the theater and murder the whole audience in order to keep us silent after witnessing a murder, then remove the bodies and get a whole new audience in off the street.

They moved seat-fillers from the balcony for the pre-taping to provide the illusion that the place was packed. The judges arrived and were cheered, and the act was nice, with acrobats doing moves while floating around hanging from a balloon. Not something I would have paid to see, but entertaining enough. The judges did their feedback schtick and then the seat-fillers were ignominiously forced to go back to their original seats, despite the fact that there were plenty of empty ones. Except for the single aisle seat on my right, occupied by an older gentleman who was extremely keen on the proceedings and kept trying to engage me in serious discussions about the acts. I could only stare at him in horror and calculate silently how many whiskies it would take to be able to sleep that night.

###

When the show finally began, Joey Bagadonuts was back to alternately tell us how awesome we were and demand that we be more enthusiastic, more loud, more more. We were told that whenever they returned from commercial we must be on our feet screaming for about five seconds and then sit down as one as if we’d all just been deactivated. We practiced this at random moments before the show began it’s live phase. It was exhausting. It was like being in that Apple 1984 commercial.

People kept shouting at the judges. Every now and then one of the judges would turn and wave, and this encouraged everyone else to shout at them even more. On the one hand treating these celebrities like zoo animals warmed the frozen cockles of my heart. On the other, nothing is more alarming than someone sitting directly behind you screaming MMmmmmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllll BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!! every thirty seconds for three hours.

The acts? Who can remember. They were all angled towards the cameras, anyway, so I saw everything from the side.

###

We fled right after the last act in order to avoid being crushed to death by the stampede of people hoping to get Heidi Klum to look at them. Was it entertaining? Define the word. Sure, under certain sets of expectations, it was entertaining. It was kind of interesting for being a glimpse into the sausage factory. Live TV is exhausting. All I had to do was stand up every three minutes and scream and I was exhausted.

What they ought to do is offer free cocktails, right in the aisles, the way Rock of Ages does but, you know, free. If I’d had five or six drinks in me, I would have turned up on stage, shirtless with the word BAZINGA scrawled in shoe polish on my belly, and performed a short dance routine before being tackled to the floor. And I think we can all agree this would have been well worth watching.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements