Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Obscure Books

Author: jsomers March 18, 2010

Because I am a cheap bastard, I frequent Used Book Stores a lot. There used to be a store in Manhattan where you could buy old paperbacks for $1 each; man, I did some damage in there. One of the benefits of frequenting Used Book Stores is the low barrier between you and books you’ve never heard of. In a regular store if I come across a book that looks vaguely interesting but about which I know nothing, the roughly $500 price tag might scare me back to the old familiar haunts of Elmore Leonard and Richard Morgan novels, but in a Used Book Store, what the hell. It’s only a few dollars. As a result, I’ve bought and read some strange and obscure books. The odd thing about them is for the most part they weren’t always obscure.

Which may seem obvious, but it’s weird to think of yourself as an aware and well-read person and then discover there are literally thousands of books that once sold very well, that were very famous, and of which you have never heard. Consider The Crime Book of J.G. Reeder. I bought this one day while wandering a street fair with The Duchess. The only reason I bought it, for $3, was the cover:

It just looked interesting. I’d never heard of J.G. Reeder or the author, Edgar Wallace (though I should have). Turns out, they were both quite famous and popular, and stories featuring the character of Reeder have been filmed a few times. Not exactly the Collected Works of Shakespeare here, but still, books that were at one time pretty big, and which now might as well have never existed.

They’re not even all that great, honestly. Some better than others, but one of the stories stands out as inexplicably bad: In Red Aces, the mystery Mr. Reeder is investigating is explained in a 2-page infodump at the very end, with absolutely no effort made to, you know, actually make it into an entertaining mystery story. You get the set up, the characters, some of the investigating, and then at the end a character you never noticed before is arrested and we’re treated to a memo filed by Mr. Reeder explaining everything, including tons of details that weren’t given to you in the story.

Okay. . .so maybe it’s not so weird that these stories are now more or less forgotten.

This isn’t new for me; I began my career of loving obscure book back in high school, when I discovered a series of Italian book by Giovanni Guareschi about a small-town priest in Italy named Don Camillo. My father had a paperback copy of a book called Don Camillo Takes the Devil by the Tail, which I read and really enjoyed against all odds. I mean, this is a book originally written in Italian in the 1950s – what are the odds? When I found four more collections of Don Camillo stories in my school library, I noticed they hadn’t been borrowed in 25 frickin’ years, so I offered to buy them. The school charged me $5 a piece for the four books, which I still have, and still enjoy.

The Don Camillo stories are just hokey fun, for me – they’re charming. There are probably about five other non-Italians below the age of 75 who have heard of this character, though.

It’s fascinating, this glimpse into the past. These books sold well, were made into movies, were comon pop-culture currency at one time. Today they might as well have never existed, except for the occasional lunatic like me who hoards them, gloating over books no one else wants. Even before I had my own set of books to watch anxiously sink into obscurity, I found books like these fascinating, not only because they were once popular and now forgotten, but for the insights into the psyche of a long-gone reading public.

You can see now why I was never one of the Cool Kids. But screw it. The cool kids read boring books.

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

Villain Decay

Author: jsomers March 15, 2010

I’ve been hard at work writing the fifth Avery Cates novel, which is the last in this series, which means I’m wrapping things up and settling scores. Which also means I’m going to have significant page-time with the main villain. So I’m pondering villains in stories – especially SFnal stories – these days, exacerbated by the fact that the TV show Lost is also wrapping itself up, and also dealing with villain issues in the form of Ben Linus’ character. For those of you who watch the show, you know what I mean; the last episode “Dr. Linus” dealt with Ben and his descent from power on Craphole Island.

Villains are tricky. They’re like monsters in horror movies: Usually the less you see them, the less you know about them, the better it is. The more familiar we become with villains the less scary they are, either because their supposedly awesome powers are revealed to be not so awesome after all (because the hero usually defeats the villain, thus putting into question just how tough the villain was to begin with), or because we learn something about the villain that humanizes them (awww, they have a child! awww, they love kittens! awww, he could have let the hero die horribly but he saved him!). Villains usually do have backstories, but it’s generally best to keep those backstories vague and mainly for the use of the Writer. I mean, if I’m writing a story, it’s good that I have some idea why my villain behaves the way he does. It’s usually not useful that the reader knows, however.

Part of this is the simple fact that your reader’s imagination will always have better special effects and more meaning to them than your own. If I give you a vague, menacing villain with some pithy dialog and dark hints about their abilities and backstory, you will come up with something on your own that is better – for you – than anything I’d come up with. Because your imagination is tailored precisely to your own likes and your own squicks. The moment I start filling in blanks, I’ll invariably select things you don’t think are so cool, and thus my villain decays.

Part of it, though, is simple familiarity. In a serial fiction, either a series of books or a TV show, or even a movie series if it goes on long enough, the villain has to have screen/page time, even if you put off the final encounter with the hero. Take Ben on Lost: This is season six, and Ben’s been around a lot, and he’s been one of the more popular characters. As a result he’s had a nice arc, and we’ve learned a lot about him, and recently he seems to be inching closer and closer to redemption, which kind of sucks. While I admire the way the show’s writers have maneuvered him into being a sympathetic character, I mourn the loss of the villain. He was much more fun as a character when he appeared to be a cold, ruthless manipulator rather than a tortured, unhappy soul.

The ultimate problem, though, is that readers/viewers want it both ways. They like their villains to be badass and unbeatable, they want the hero to beat the villain, and they want to know about the villain. The longer your series goes on, the more you have to reveal about the villain (otherwise you risk them becoming a humorous caricature of evilevilevil) and as a direct result the less impressive your villain becomes. If this goes on long enough, your villain often has to switch sides and go hero, like, transforming from Vader to Skywalker. This can be a dramatic moment, of course, but it does leave you with Villain Vacuum. You can then come up with a new villain, even More Awesoma than the previous one – but that trick only works once, maybe twice, and then you start to have a rather comical collection of ex-villains puddling about, looking less than impressive. This wears out your audience sooner rather than later, trust me.

The solution: Well, there is none. If you’re presenting a standalone story, of course, it’s not a problem at all, because your villain is going to get it in the end anyway; by the time your audience starts to get to know the villain, you destroy him. In a series, however, you will suffer Villain Decay, unless you’re okay with your protagonists being useless little pricks who always get beaten. Which you might be. The hero winning all the time is so predictable, after all.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Portal 2

Author: jsomers March 8, 2010

Aside from being a boozer, an anti-pants activist from long before the advertising world latched onto the movement, and, oh yeah, a writer, I’m also a casual gamer, almost exclusively in first-person shooters. Maybe it’s the virtual carnage, maybe it’s the immersion, maybe it’s the fact that because of the cropped nature of the HUD I can imagine my avatar is not wearing any pants while I slaughter zombies/nazis/robots/whatever. Whatever the reason, I like me some FPS games, and Portal from Valve was no exception. Now that they’ve announced Portal 2, I’m reminded of how great the first one was.

I was dubious at first: The idea behind Portal is that you have a wormhole gun of sorts; fire it at one surface and portal A opens, fire it at surface B and portal B opens. Step through portal A and you emerge from portal B. At first glance I thought this sounded a little dull and cumbersome, but as with just about everything else, I was wrong: Portal was easily the best game I’ve played in years. One reason it was so enjoyable was the unique game concept of the portal gun, which made the game basically one huge puzzle. You weren’t just running and gunning and occasionally pressing buttons, you were solving what amounted to rich physics puzzles. This is more fun than the phrase “rich physics puzzle” might lead you to believe.

The other, equally important reason Portal rocks, though, is the storytelling.

That’s one of the things I like so much about first-person shooter games; they feel like you’re in a story. There’s usually a plot, some character development, and in the better-designed ones some branching of the story based on decisions you make. Portal has a great story, which I won’t spoil too much aside from the premise: You wake up in a “testing facility” which appears to have been suddenly and chaotically abandoned. Your only companion is a sentient computer that has awakened you for a testing session that is designed, it becomes increasingly clear, to kill you. You have to be very clever with the Portal Gun in order to survive.

What really makes the story great, aside from clever, hilarious writing and very good voice acting, is the way the entire story is Shown and not Told. “Show Don’t Tell” is a cliche of writing workshops, and should never be regarded as an unbreakable rule (just like all rules, there are times and places where breaking it is genius) but rules like this get repeated for a reason. Portal is a monument to the power of Not Telling. You only get the information you can glean – from things the computer says, from graffiti on the walls, from frickin’ slide presentations in empty conference rooms – while surviving the murderous “tests” the computer throws at you. By the end of the game, if you’ve explored energetically and paid attention, you have a pretty good idea what’s happened.

The game’s writers could have had someone show up and explain everything to you in a nifty two-minute narration, yes. And this would have been boring, and reduced the game quite a bit – though the genius of the game’s design itself would have saved things. As a story, Portal works partly because the writers decided to rely on the intelligence of their audience and let us piece together the story from what we’re shown.

A good example of this is the way you figure out, slowly, that the Artificial Intelligence putting you through your paces is not, in fact, interested at all in your safety. At first the AI speaks to you in pleasant, programmed-sounding platitudes about test subject safety, but slowly, subtly, you detect some hostility, and by the time you get to the first test chamber that has some real, actual danger for you, you don’t believe the AI when it tells you that you won’t actually be hurt if you fail the test. This is good, solid storytelling: By this point you know the AI is not your friend, even though no one has told you and you’ve only had subtle visual and audio clues. A lesser storyteller might have had a cutscene where you witness or overhear something damning, or had the AI make a bombastic speech revealing its hatred of you, but Portal commits to the character of the AI: Insane, and possibly, on some level, unaware of its own evil intentions.

Of course, in a game storytelling is second to, you know, the game, and happily Portal is an exceptional game, that rare game that combined puzzle-solving with a visceral action interface. They are puzzles, sure, but since you (or your avatar) are the marble that has to be guided through the puzzle, there’s an exhilaration to solving the puzzles you wouldn’t get if they were on paper or mere models. When you jump into a portal from a high ledge and pop up from another portal, you soar into the air, disoriented and terrified. It’s great fun. Still, unlike most video games, if someone told me a novelization of Portal or a movie version were coming out, I might actually be interested. And that is saying something.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Moon

Author: jsomers March 5, 2010

My handlers and minders don’t let me out much any more, due to ongoing litigations and my apparent inability to keep my pants on. As a result, I don’t get to the movies the way I did in my youth, and when I do manage a movie it’s usually a movie my wife, the sainted Duchess, wants to see. My wife is smart and pretty, but her taste in films is what scientists term atrocious. Don’t tell her I said that; I have enough bruises. For proof I offer up the simple fact that one of the last movies she made me see was Valentine’s Day. I rest my case.

Now and then, though, I am left on my own here at the Somers Bunker and allowed to rent movies on the magical televisual device in our living room. Whoever invented pay-per-view movies should be canonized immediately. Being able to press three buttons and watch a movie makes popping a DVD in seem like an immense chore. I mean, three buttons from across the room versus, what, 37 steps? No contest, mi amigos.

Anyway, while The Duchess was out of town this week I rented Moon, starring Sam Rockwell. I’d heard some vague things about it but didn’t know much more than the star and premise. I really enjoyed it, mainly because it was one of the rare pure science-fiction stories you see filmed these days. Most SFnal movies are genre-mixers, really – and nothing wrong with that, as my own books fall into that category. But now and then it’s nice to watch a movie that is just SF geekery, you know? And Moon falls into that category. There are no guns, no explosions, no fancy special effects, and 4.5 characters, total. The story is not exactly a puzzle; you should figure out what’s going on pretty quickly. But it takes the refreshing approach of taking its premise seriously, exploring that premise’s implications, and seeing where that takes you, story-wise. It works really well.

One reason it works really well is because it shows you a lot and tells you very, very little. This makes sense because the character is on a mining base on the moon by himself, with just a computer and some video messages from earth for company. He only knows what he knows, dig, and what he can piece together from observation and logic. No Basil Exposition[1] shows up to explain everything, and the script very smartly avoids any Moron Lines to stress things that are perfectly obvious. For example, at one point in the film a message arrives telling the main character that a rescue team has been dispatched to effect some repairs. The photos of the rescue team are all you need to see to know they are bad news. No one needs to make a speech about it, and the character doesn’t need to find damning evidence that throws us a plot “twist”. You observe the team, you put their arrival into context of what’s happened already, and you know they’re bad news. The real fun part is, the main character makes the same calculation, but internally. When he does voice his conclusions about the “rescue team” it feels perfectly natural, because we’ve all made the same mental journey.

It’s nice to see that in the age of crap like Transformers, which, frankly, gives SF a bad name, someone out there can still raise 5 million bucks, get actors like Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey to star, and put out a smart little movie like Moon. I hear the director plans to make 2 more films set in the same general universe, though not necessarily extending Moon‘s narrative beyond this movie. I’m glad to hear it.

[1] If nothing else, Mike Myers gave us one of the most inspired character names ever.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

This Is Why the Future is Suck

Author: jsomers March 1, 2010

From IO9.com, a nifty little article with the headline “Scientists Have Discovered Booze that Won’t Give You a Hangover“. This, naturally, catches my eye, because I am a celebrated boozehound who thinks alcohol makes everything better right up until the point where it makes everything so, so much worse. So I clicked that sucker.

And as is sadly typical when any media reports on science (or, ‘science’), the headline is a crock of shit. The super new Future Booze does indeed give you a hangover, but it can possibly give you a measurably reduced hangover (concerning severity and duration) under certain conditions. Also, it ain’t new, no one actually discovered it since it’s been sold for years now, and from what I can tell from this brief article I would rather puke blood and feel like bugs were under my skin for days with my usual brand of liquor than drink this crap, but now I am digressing.

I tweeted this link a few days ago, but here it is again: Cable TV, Summed Up. This is the problem with science, and this is why so many authors (like me!) chuck real, actual science over the side and start making up our own colorful version of science. Science is dry, it is the art of observing and measuring tiny, tiny increments of tiny, tiny things over a period of, say, centuries, and then slowly collating that information into an incrementally better idea of how things are. Science is studying oxygenated alcoholic drinks and discovering that they leave your bloodstream 20-30 minutes sooner than regular alcoholic drinks, and if drunk in quantity may prove to give you a less-horrifying hangover. Who can blame blogs and news agencies from taking that less-than-inspiring story and turning it into SUPER SCIENTISTS FROM THE FUTURE HAVE BOOZE THAT GIVES NO HANGOVER.

Of course, things never take those kinds of leaps forward. The world is boring, just like science, inching along. We invent the telephone, and ti takes us more than a century to come up with the iPhone. We invent the car, and it takes us . . . well, crap, we still haven’t come up with a practical jetpack. Part of the reason we have this dissatisfaction with the Future which leads disturbed people like me to imagine entire universes for you is because of the way these stories are presented. We’re told: Hangover-free Booze! And we get: Booze with a scientifically measurable decline in hangover misery. Now with more data points!

Is it any wonder there are revolutions and riots on a regular basis? I was all set to go burn down Hoboken when I actually read this article and discovered the truth.

Now all we need is booze that won’t harm your liver no matter how many oil-drums of it you consume on a daily basis. Of course, that will likely be the End of Jeff, but it’ll be worth it.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

The Dangers of Specificity

Author: jsomers February 25, 2010

The Devil’s in the details, as the saying goes. I was recently contemplating the new saw that cell phones remove, like, 90% of plot devices from modern stories because so many plots, especially in horror/sci-fi stories, depend on characters being out of communication with the rest of humanity – not to mention that Internet connectivity on the move would make researching things on the fly frickin’ simple. Now, I don’t actually believe that cell phones and other new communication/information technology makes plotting difficult – there’s this thing called creativity, you see – but it’s an interesting game to play, taking any old movie that depends on isolation, miscommunication, or lack of information, drop a smart phone into it, and see how minutes you get into the plot before the movie just ends peacefully.

What it really got me thinking about, though, was the Dangers of Specificity when you’re writing. This is true for all writing, but especially true for SF/F writing, because when you’re writing about demons or zombies or aliens or time travel devices, you strive for complete realism and verisimilitude in the details of your story to ground the fantastic in the real. If your protagonist is fleeing demonic hordes, having them run into a Burger King for shelter instead of some fake, made-up fast food chain will instantly make the scene a little easier to accept by your readers. Of course, the details in the actual writing – what the place smells like, what kind of customers are there at 11PM, the music being played, the attitude of the workers behind the counter – will have a much larger impact. But pop-culture references and up-to-date cultural details will help, and they’re often a shorthand.

The problem with up-to-date references, of course, is that they age badly.

Ignoring pop-culture, which I’ve discussed before, let’s consider the simple fact that while details are your friend, they often turn evil and bite you in the writing ass. Consider the image I’ve got here: Gordon Gecko from 1987’s Wall Street. Not only did that movie star a pre-Cocaine bloat Charlie Sheen, it also apparently starred the World’s Largest Cell Phone. That’s a great detail: At the time, it conveyed to the audience Gecko’s wealth and power with a nifty detail, because in 1987 not everyone had a cell phone. They were icons of, well, wealth and power.

Today, of course, the universe has been cruel to Oliver Stone and Gecko’s huge, bulky cell phone is so amusing to us it’s actually a sight gag in the trailer for Wall Street 2: Wall Streeter. No, really, check it (about 27 seconds in). That’s how details kill you. Burger King might be the perfect detail today, but what about 20 years from now? Stanley Kubrick thought TWA was going to last for centuries. The more specific you are, the more danger your story is in.

On the other hand, I’ve read stories and novels from 100 years ago that still work just fine because they lack that sort of specificity. You can read a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and despite the fact that it was published in 1922 or so, it reads just fine, because his details are elastic. There are automobiles, telephones, airplanes – but no specific models or types. Yes, it’s still a bit dated, but as a whole it will work just fine. Or take a current story like Avatar: Not the greatest story ever told by a long shot, and way, wayyyy over overrated, but one thing it has going for it is a complete lack of specificity. Not within its own universe, which is realized with a great amount of detail, but concerning the world from which the story springs – namely a future-earth. We get absolutely nothing about things at home from this movie. No corporate shout-outs, no technological/cultural changes. Nothing. It’s a blank slate and thus the story lives entirely, purely within the alien landscape constructed for it, and as a result as long as we’re not sending Space Marines to fight corporate wars against blue-skinned natives on foreign planets, the movie will remain firmly science-fictional. The lack of grounding details works well for it. There’s no big TWA logo anywhere to distract future audiences from the story.

Well, the world is dumping what appears to be six hundred feet of snow on my house right now, so I have to wrap this up and go outside to move tons of crystallized water from my sidewalk. Wish me luck. The longer I live in the northeast USA the more certain I am that my demise will come after drinking four Hot Toddies and then shoveling snow for an hour.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

The Future is Frame Rates

Author: jsomers February 16, 2010

It’s not easy being as lazy and unfocused as I am and still get things done. I mean, if you were to install a high-speed camera in my office in order to make one of those time-lapse videos of me writing a book, you would think something had gone terribly wrong with the experiment when it showed me sitting at a desk, dozing, for sixteen hours. You’d wonder how in the world I ever get books written. The answer, as with everything else Jeff, is booze, but I’ll leave the actual details of that ancient Somers secret to the imagination. Let’s just say my body can’t take much more of this, so they better make that Avery Cates movie soon so’s I can retire and get some rest.

Anyways, one of the ways I waste valuable time is by playing video games. Specifically, First Person Shooters. You can blame my old friend Ken for this; back in 1991 he installed Wolfenstein 3D on his old 386 PC and I was addicted instantly, and in 1998 he bought me Half Life as an Xmas gift and that ruined me for life. It’s been downhill for my attention span ever since.

Even today, when I work on a Linux platform and thus can only play games that are about 5 years old, I still lust after the new FPS titles that come out, and I note that Bioshock 2 has just been released. I played the first Bioshock (despite it’s loathsome anti-pirating bullshit) and really enjoyed it, and if I had a Windows PC and less disdain for SecuROM and its ilk, I’d be happy to play the sequel. This makes me think, again, that the obvious future for a lot of entertainment is going to be the First Person Shooter.

For those who have never played an FPS: A First Person Shooter is a game where the “camera” of the game is from your character’s point of view; you move the mouse or the controller and you see only what you would see if you were actually there in the game world. The potential for immersion is huge, and as graphics cards and video drivers like OpenGL or DirectX get more and more powerful, the detail and animations in these games is getting more and more realistic and movie-like. I mean, look at this screen shot from Bioshock:

Damn.

Anyway, the first-person shooter is a visceral, immerssive way to tell a story, and the stories in these games tend to be very complex and novel-like in a lot of ways, except that you as the “reader” have some limited ability to choose your own path. You can, for example, linger in a particular “chapter” of the story and poke around, seeking Easter Eggs or secrets, or just looking at the details the creators of the game have placed there simply for your entertainment or your immersion. The fact that FPS titles are dominated by Science Fiction stories (and War scenarios, like Call of Duty) makes sense: They aren’t limited by what you can physically film and believably act – you can make the game about anything, make anything happen within them. Hell, you’re actually creating the physics of the entire damn universe. If that isn’t a technical ability that screams for SF/F writing, I don’t know what is.

I see a future where these games get merged with movies. After I’ve played a game, I like to go into God Mode (a cheat mode left in by the developers that makes you impervious to damage) and just wander around the levels, trying things. When enemies appear, I just get rid of them and then go back to my business, and i really enjoy this secondary walkthrough of most games. When you’re actually playing, you’re usually too amped up fighting off enemies to notice a lot of grace notes. Going through a second time is really fun, and I think that you could make an entire game – similar, in ways, to MYST – that had no action elements, so fighting, but was just you engaged in a story as the main character, experiencing everything as the character does, and – most importantly – able to linger in scenes when you wanted to, extend interaction with other characters if you wished, try different things just for fun. Of course, a natural extension of this would be to allow the “audience” to affect the plot of the game/film. Their choices would branch off into different storylines, and there would be multiple possible endings. This has already been done to some extent in games, where choices are presented that determine what ending you’ll see.

This would be some time off, of course. Right now, though, you can see the merging of your home computer with your entertainment system, and I don’t think the time is far off when you no longer have a separate PC and a cable box – you’ll have a merged system, and your TV shows and movies will be run through your Internet connection to your ginormous television. When that happens, why wouldn’t they put out, say, Lost as an interactive game/film, where you played the role of a survivor and you got to make choices that determined the story? You could be as involved and experimental as you wished: Just go along for the ride if you wanted, with a preset story, or jump in and start playing with everything, trying to see what you could make happen.

Since these games share a lot with the novel – the plots for some (say, Half Life) are epically huge – this would be a place where novelists get merged into the whole thing. Screenplay writing is very different from novel-writing, obviously, but the lines blur in these FPS games. Sure, there is a visual and voice-acting element just as in television and film. But the stories are usually very novel-like, rich in detail, backstory, and allusion. So this might be a conversion point where it all becomes one new kind of category. And I think that would be kind of cool.

Then again, there is my aforementioned laziness and booziness, so I might simply be in the throes of yet another unfortunate depantsing event here in Hoboken. Cheers!

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Skyline Books R.I.P.

Author: jsomers February 7, 2010

I’ve gone on about my love for used books before. It’s always awkward, as someone who wants you to buy his new books, to talk about how much I love used books. In reality, though, I’ve bought plenty of new books because of a used book. Used Books are like gateway drugs: Buy one Elmore Leonard or Patrick O’Brian for $1 each in Skyline books, next thing you know you’re ordering every book they ever wrote from Amazon.

For me, at least, Used Books were never primarily about saving a few bucks. Sure, when Bleecker Street Books sold paperbacks for $1 each I’d sometimes buy 15 books at a pop, but really it was all about the thrill of discovery. Because Used Book Stores are just goddamn treasure chests of bizarre random stuff. Because their wholesale cost is usually low – and sometimes zero – for uninspiring paperbacks from bygone eras, they just pile them up everywhere on the off chance someone will pay them a few bucks for it. I’ve bought books I’d never heard of once in my life and gone home to discover they were huge bestsellers in their day. I’ve bought books no one else has ever heard of that have become some of my favorites. I’m going to miss Skyline Books, because they’re closed.

The point is, when I walked into Skyline, I never knew what I’d find. You get somewhat the same experience in a retail store like Barnes and Nobel, sure – there’s always the unknown waiting for you in a B&N, just like everywhere else. But in the big chain stores everything’s relatively new or a classic – there’s no uncanny valley of books that were once new and now are not, but which never made it into classic status. My bookshelves are filled with tasty books I’d never have found in a big chain store, and I like that. No online source will ever be the same, even if you someday can buy $1 used books via the Internets, because when you walk into a Used Book store, you don’t actually know what you’re looking for. You just go in with a spirit of adventure and see what you find, and the investment is so low you don’t mind taking a chance. Whereas when I’m staring at a $26 hardcover in Barnes and Noble, believe me, I’m going to do goddamn research before I plunk down for that book.

Let’s face it, the Internet is not good for browsing. Aside from the loss of the smell and feel of old books – a delight in and of itself to us old codgers – there’s just the time factor; In Skyline, for example, I could stroll down an aisle and glance at 500 book spines in a minute, just waiting for something to jump out at me. To glance at 500 books on the Internet would take about 3 hours, I think.

Oh well, the world changes and this is neither bad nor good, it simply is. The post-Skyline world is just as fine as it was last week, just different, and I think we’ll all find the strength to carry on. Still, I can’t help but wonder how I’ll ever discover tattered old paperbacks out of print since 1970 now – although some might wonder why I’d care about books so mediocre they’ve been out of print for 40 years. It’s either the drinking or a vision of my own future – take your pick.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Eternity on a Sliding Scale

Author: jsomers February 1, 2010

A big part of Why I Write (aside from the free booze at parties every 5 years or so, of course) is to achieve some sort of immortality. I’m pretty conscious of being a tiny speck in the universe, and a tiny speck in the flow of time since the Big Bang. I’m aware that the vast majority of people don’t achieve any kind of lasting fame, and the even vaster percentage of writers get swept aside. It’s shocking, for example, to learn that The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, two books that dominated much of my high school English courses, are now slowly fading into obscurity. Slowly, yes, but fading. I mean, shit; if Salinger can fade into obscurity, we’re all fucked.

But of course it makes sense: Part of what makes it always seem like books were better in previous eras is the simple fact that history’s manic fingers have scubbed away the dross: All that’s left after 100 or 200 years is the really significant work. The merely great eventually gets swept aside. So, maybe Salinger and Knowles were merely great, and not Great, know what I mean? They hung on for 50 years, but won’t make 100. We can’t all be Shakespeare, after all.

And then there’s me: I suspect I don’t stand a chance.

Of course, if we want to look at it with the Big View it doesn’t matter because the sun will swell up and destroy the Earth eventually, anyway, and even if we flee the burning globe for other planets, entropy will catch us, babies, and swallow everything eventually. So why bother? Since we can’t even invent a comsumer-usable jetpack, I doubt we’re ever going to conquer quantum physics and find a way to step out of time and become truly eternal. So you have to have some perspective. The fact is, culture changes and the world moves on, and you’re lucky if you’re still relevant a decade after you first appear in print (or on film, or on the radio, or whatever).

When I was a kid, there were certain things that linked me with older generations whether I realized it or not: Bugs Bunny cartoons. The Honeymooners. The Brady Bunch – all of these weird pop cultural icons had been around for so long, people 20 years older than me knew them as well and we had a shared vocabulary. A lot of that has faded away. You can’t easily see unedtited Warner Bros cartoons any more, due to the excessive violence, occasional racism, and cheery 1940s slang. Those old sitcoms that stretch back to the 1950s and 1960s may still be on, somewhere, but it’ll be on a ghetto like Nick at Nite or something. My friend Ken and I had an extended joke concerning old Bugs Bunny cartoons the other night and it occurred to me that people 10 years younger than us (or maybe 20 years younger) might not understand a word we were saying – this is culture leaving you behind.

Which is okay. It’s a natural function, and I actually think this has been artificially retarded over the last 50 years due to television, maybe over the last 100 years due to radio and movies. It wasn’t until radio and other modern media, after all, that everyone in the country, or at least a large proportion of them, could simultaneously share a pop culture moment, then go into work the next day and discuss it immediately. And as The Entertainment Industry fractures into a million pay services that cater to your personal taste, we’re leaving that era behind. I grew up in a world with three networks and four local TV stations, a world where every major city had a handful of radio stations serving broad genres. Today you can choose from hundreds of stations and on-demand movies etc, you can buy Satellite Radio, you can massage your cultural experience into something unique and completely unshared by anyone else.

Which means when you go into work the next day, you might not have anything to talk about. Except the last bastion of shared experience, sports, and occasional movies that hit that blockbuster status.

I think we’ve hit that stage where Jeff is a little drunk and rambling, so let’s wrap it up. In closing, I think it would be best if I simply attain the wealth and power necessary to build a monument to myself, sort of like Bender’s “Remember Me” statue from Futurama:

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

I am Exhausted Just Reading This

Author: jsomers January 26, 2010

So, apparently James Patterson is the world’s most successful writer (via Pimp My Novel) [key quote: “Patterson may lack the name recognition of a Stephen King, a John Grisham or a Dan Brown, but he outsells them all. Really, it’s not even close. (According to Nielsen BookScan, Grisham’s, King’s and Brown’s combined U.S. sales in recent years still don’t match Patterson’s.)”]. This is fascinating stuff, especially when you dig in and read how hard the man works, although he’s pretty much just a Content Supplier at this point, and not so much a writer.

Which is cool; I doubt Patterson has sleepless nights regretting that he never wrote that spiritually devastating Serious Novel. The man pays co-authors out of his own pocket in order to publish 9 books a year; there’s no way he has any angst about the road he’s taken. Plus, sleeping on a bed of money kind of eases the pain a little, I’ll bet.

Some struggling authors might be jealous of Patterson’s success. Some who have even had a measure of success might be envious, but not me. And not because of fruity artistic concerns, either (they can make Avery Cates lunchboxes if they want, or — OOH! — Avery Cates cologne), but because I do not ever want to work that hard.

I can’t speak for other authors, because I shun the company of other writers (all they want to do is talk about craft and writing and the business of publishing, when all I want to talk about is who is buying the next round, when will the next round be forthcoming, and where are we going after closing time), but for me, my authorial dream life has always been the sort they depict in the movies and television: Rich writer spends about 5 minutes a day writing, about six hours a day endorsing huge checks, and the rest attending fabulous parties. I enjoy the writing, so writing for a few hours every day is fun, but that’s about where my ambition ends, and I fully believe in paying other people to do things like read my contracts, market my books, cut up and pre-chew my food, etc.

SO, I will never be quite as rich or successful as Mr. Patterson, sure, I accept that. Trust me, you will never hear me complaining because I haven’t published nine books in the past year, and I will never, ever, bemoan the fact that I’m not allowed to run my own marketing meetings at Hachette. Trust me. I’m putting all my efforts into becoming Castle from the TV show, sans daughter. Although, I must admit, the idea of paying other folks to write my books for me is kind of appealing. Except for the paying part. Maybe I could start the first ever unpaid internship for ghostwriting? College kids would submit writing samples and I’d pick three every year to live at my house and write a novel each for me to submit under my name. IT’S GENIUS!

Who’s with me? All accepted interns would be required to address me as El Jefe. Submit your resumes via my contact page.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing