More Shit I Gotta Do

We All Survived Another Year

Author: jsomers December 25, 2023 0 Comments

Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-sitting-on-the-floor-3419732/

Man, 2023 certainly was a year, in the sense that as far as I can tell time passed and I grew older. Every December I have the same experience: I am amazed and slightly alarmed to realize that so much time has slipped past. For the most part, I don’t pay much attention to time. I measure my days in terms of finished stories, completed freelance assignments, and the volume of liquor bottles in my recycling, not hours or days. Looking back, 2023 was a pretty good year. I

Sold two short stories
Published two short stories (I Am the Grass and The Little Birds)
Released two Avery Cates novellas and the latest Cates novel
Wrote approximately 5,000 freelance articles, which paid for the
approximately 5,000 bottles of whiskey I drank
Produced 12 podcast episodes
Published a slightly tarnished novel here on the wee blog
Judged some writing contests
Reviewed a bunch of books
Did a bunch of house projects that somehow didn’t end with the house on fire or me trapped under something heavy
Published 52 issues of Writing Without Rules: Deep Dives (52!)
Launched Writing Without Rules: From the Notebook and convinced some of y’all to pay me money for it (thank you)
Released not one but two albums of music from The Levon Sobieski Domination that no one asked for or appreciated
Continued to champion the footnote as both a literary device and a joke machine
Fed and clothed myself for 365 days straight. If you knew me you’d be impressed

I mean, put into bulleted list form that seems impressive. And honestly, any year that ends with the bills paid, the glass full, and the cats purring is a good year, so unless I am jinxing myself and next seven days are gonna be rough, I think we can put 2023 into the books as a perfectly cromulent year. I hope it was for you, too.

So, onto 2024. A couple of bits of business:

The Serial Novel. So I guess posting a novel here a chapter at a time is a thing, now, so if you enjoyed reading Collections (and Designated Survivor and Detained before that), know that the 2024 serialized novel will be Black House. I’ve done a podcast about this one, and released a text adventure based on it, so it’s not exactly an unknown quantity. But if you’ve been curious about it, you can read the whole thing next year one chapter a week. Here’s the not final, totally-might-change cover I’m playing with:

The No Pants Cocktail Hour Goes Nonfiction. I’ve been producing my self-centered podcast for more than 5 years , which is a lot of short stories and book chapters to read and discuss. In 2024 we’re going to experiment a little and cover 12 essays I’ve published over the course of my career. Some of these were promotional in nature, some were just gigs I got paid for, but I thought this would be an interesting vein to mine for a while. Maybe in 2025 we’ll do freelance work, or go back to fiction. Who knows! Here’s what we do know: I will be making a tipsy ass of myself at least 12 more times in 2024, and you should come along for the ride.

Otherwise, nothing much will change, I don’t think. Hilarious social media posts on various platforms? Check. Jokes about pantslessness in each and every post, article, and patent application I write? Yup. The endless struggle for attention that occasionally inspires drenching existential dread? Sure, why not.

Happy New Year, y’all!

Bullshit, More Shit I Gotta Do

The World’s Most Hidden CMOS Battery Ever

Author: jsomers October 9, 2023 0 Comments

So! We’ve finished up posting Collections, the novel no one wanted to publish, and my strange brain won’t allow me to start a new weekly novel post here until 2024. Which leaves us with some weeks to fill here at the wee blog. But, luckily, life decided to screw me over this week and I suffered a computer crash for the ages, which I can now write about in hilarious detail.

Friendos, I am the Platonic Ideal of Intellectual Shallowness. I have a real skill: I am 100% that asshole who skims a Wikipedia article an hour before meeting you for drinks and then spends the evening confidently lecturing you on the subject. Maybe I’m the Platonic Ideal of Unearned Confidence? Nah, that’s just me being a white middle-aged cis man.

Anyways, I have a long history of fucking around and finding out when it comes to computers. My first PC was a Commodore 64, gifted to me by my parents when I was a wee lad and still filled with promise. Back then no one laughed when I told them I wanted to be a brain surgeon, and so my parents could be forgiven for thinking that the $200 in 1982 money was an investment in making me a billionaire computer genius. I mostly used the C64 to play video games, of course, amassing an enormous empire of pirated games utilizing a wide range of illegal programs that broke DRM. I also spent a lot of time typing programs directly into the RAM from computer magazines¹. Naturally, none of these programs–which took days to keyboard–ever worked properly, and so I knew the bitter taste of computer failure very early on.

I bought my first real computer years later, and that’s when I started getting into trouble, because I got curious. Early attempts to dual-boot Windows and Unix resulted in many, many boot failures, and the thing was these all happened in 1998 or so. Imagine for a moment turning on your computer and getting a blinking cursor and nothing else, and you have zero other computers or access to online information. I had the Internet in some form, but with my PC blown to pieces by my tinkering I couldn’t get there. I had no smartphone or tablet, so I had to wait until the next day when I went to work, spend hours furiously Googling solutions, print out instructions, and go home to try everything until finally something actually worked².

Twenty-five years later, things are very, very different.

This FileSystem Does Not Exist

My computer blew up on Monday evening. These things always happen at night, for some reason. Your computer never turns into a malformed paperweight when you’re up early and feeling clearheaded; it always discovers entropy when you’re tired and slightly drunk and trying to figure out if the tiny leprechaun named McSwiggins who keeps shouting that you have to BURN EVERYTHING, BOYO is real or not.

An old man screams into the void. Not shown: McSwiggins, but he’s there all right.

One moment I was editing the thumbnail images for the new episode of the podcast, the next I was staring at a reboot screen. Fine, I thought. Something got screwed up and I’d lose a few minutes of my time.

The computer made it to the desktop, then crashed again. This time I didn’t even get a POST. No BIOS. No nothing. It was very much as if my computer had simply ceased to exist. For a moment I worried that when I opened the case to peek inside, I’d find nothing but a note from some alternate timeline explaining that my Alternate Self had to steal my computer in order to save the future or something, and then I would be swallowed by a violent temporal anomaly and that would be that.

Now, in 1998 I had no way to access the vast troves of information out there on the Internet, but this is 2023, baby, and I have a phone, two old laptops, two old tablets, and my wife’s laptop. I had access to the information. I’m not afraid to assault my motherboard with a screwdriver and my sticky, whiskey-stained hands.

Nothing worked. The computer was dead. I pulled the hard drive out of it and hooked it up to an old laptop and confirmed I hadn’t experienced any data loss, which was calming, and then I decided to do a few basic triage steps to try to revive the computer: I resat the graphics card and the RAM, I checked all the plugs and connections. And then I thought I’d bleed the CMOS battery and clear that as well, which sometimes revives a confused motherboard.

Except, I couldn’t find the CMOS battery.

Now, if you don’t know anything about computer hardware that means nothing to you, but as a guy who has stared into the abyss of many non-functioning computers in his time, not being able to see the CMOS battery was disturbing. It’s normally a pretty simple process to unplug the CMOS and/or clear it with the jumpers, but here I couldn’t even see that fucker. I wondered, for a moment, if computer technology had progressed so far that they no longer used CMOS batteries, and I missed it because I am old and feeble.

I broke out the motherboard’s documentation, and discovered that the manufacturer had hidden the CMOS battery the way a Super Villain would have. The battery is a thin, disc-shaped thing, and they glued it to the back of another component, which was in turn obscured by another component. Salt in the wound: The plug was also buried behind something, and the only way to try to unplug it was to get in there with a pair of needles or something and use them like chopsticks. Which I did. I think I lost several pounds of body weight through sweat and anxiety.

You Have Failed

So, did I win? Well, a new computer has been ordered, so the answer is: No. That motherboard is fried and not coming back from the dead any time soon. Maybe it was the incendiary nature of my writing, my ideas too hot for the hard drive. Or maybe I just got unlucky. But the contrast with past computer problems was astonishing: Instead of losing everything on my hard drive and staying awake for six days straight as I tried to cobble together information to fix things, I … just used the Internet to learn everything I needed to know and retrieve any files I’d lost. What used to be a paralyzing moment of terror is now just a pain in the ass.

Except for that CMOS battery. That’s gonna haunt me to the end of my days.

Bullshit, More Shit I Gotta Do

Jury Dutied

Author: jsomers February 28, 2022 0 Comments

Jury Duty is one of those things that always pops up out of nowhere. You wake up one day, calmly going through your inexorable march to the grave, and boom! there’s a letter from the county or the state or some sort of underground Thunderdome: You’ve got the duty.

I’ve never minded getting jury duty and never made much effort to wriggle out of it, yet I’ve only served on one jury in my life. It was a difficult case and all the jurors worked really hard on getting it right, and frankly the experience made even my cold, blackened heart swell up a little bit. I didn’t love every single person I served with, but we all did our best and that’s what matters.

So when I got my summons again a few weeks ago, I was sanguine about it, especially because the most irritating aspect of jury duty had been changed by the pandemic: In-person service. Instead of schlepping to the county courthouse every day, I could report for jury duty remotely using everybody’s favorite torture device: Zoom. This also meant that instead of trying to push and shove a bunch of other people out of the way to take possession of the one table in the jury room that gets decent WiFi, I could just sit at home with no pants on and work off-screen.

Naturally, being me, this led to a series of humiliations.

Humiliation #1: Bubbs

I don’t actually use Zoom for video very often. In my secret identity as a freelance writer, I do a lot of interviews and people are always, always showing up on video and always, always expressing surprise when I don’t. Video is pretty useless for that stuff, though — I can see where a team dynamic might benefit from some video action, but for a one-off interaction only sociopaths want to use video.

At some point I set up my Zoom name as “Bubbs.” I don’t know why. I have no memory of this. But when I logged onto the court’s Zoom meeting, I showed up as Bubbs and did not immediately notice, which led to the Court Clerk shouting “HEY BUBBS WHAT IS YOUR ACTUAL NAME CAN YOU CHANGE IT PLEASE?”

Worse, every time I logged in or out of a meeting or breakout room, my name changed back to Bubbs, and I would get shouted at again. I figured this coupled with my inelegant reaction (diving across the desk and slapping madly at my keyboard while making the classic Jeff Somers oh shit face) would pretty much guarantee I didn’t get picked for any sane jury. If the attorneys organized the potential jurors in different categories ranging from ACCEPTABLE AS EMPANELED to IMMEDIATELY CHALLENGE, I figured I was in the WACKADOODLE tranche.

Humiliation #2: Prince Harry, First of His Name.

I have cats. Boy howdy, do I have cats. Now, a sane man would have closed a door and kept his cats far away from the magical jury duty portal, but I have never been a sane man. So, yes, at several imes during the approximately 678 hours I was sitting on a Zoom meeting listening to the judge ask potential jurors the same 15 questions over and over again a cat decided it was a good time to stick its butt in the camera.

At several points during jury duty, my cat Harry decided to climb me like a tree and drape himself majestically across my shoulders. This left me with a choice between leaving him be and appearing to be an eccentric old man who wore living animals as clothing like some sort of off-putting Disney villain, or awkwardly remove a cat from my person, which would undoubtedly result in video of me being scratched to death while whimpering “Please Prince Harry, that hurts!” being uploaded to Youtube and becoming a sensation.

After all that, I didn’t even get questioned. Not simply not questioned — I never even got to answer the surprisingly long list of questions the judge had for all of us. Against all odds, they actually found eight jurors in record time, and while a few people were excused for cause, for the most part people seemed happy to serve.

Which was refreshing. Although now I’m pretty sure there are videos of me with a cat on my shoulder staring off blankly into space, although to be fair the fact it took this long for that to happen is kind of surprising.

Bullshit, More Shit I Gotta Do

Hesitate, You Die

Author: jsomers July 7, 2021 0 Comments

Like everyone else, I have longed to destroy my hair. Ungainly and uncontrollable, it has plagued me from my earliest days. The Eras of my hair all have ominous names:

Unkempt Straw

Brown Helmet

No Party Mullet

The Fin

Which brings us to the most recent era: Thinning Mess. But no matter what you do, it keeps growing back, with lessening volume and increasing misfortune. Remarkably, however, one of the few bright sides for me during the Year of Lockdown had to do with my hair: I started cutting it myself. And thank fucking god.

The Freaks are Winning

Haiorcuts are right up there with teeth cleanings in terms of horrifying forced intimacy. Just as I think my dentist can see straight down into my gross, Cheetoh-eating soul, I figure my barber can take one look at my hair and know what kind of life I’m living (hint: Not good). I dread the small talk, and I have a tendency to doze off while it’s happening, which can have catastrophic results on the actual haircut I end up with. After decades of suffering through banal conversation and the creepy experience of having some weirdo touch my head, I finally found a local barber who fit my ideal: She operated in virtually complete silence. Our entire conversation consisted of the same two questions:

Barber: How are you?
Me: Fine, thanks.
Barber: Same thing?
Me: Yes.

The “same thing,” it should be noted, is a #3, a little longer on top, square back. As you can see from the photos above, I have learned to not try anything fancy when it comes to my hair.

This was an acceptable situation, though it left me vulnerable to my barber’s vacations and appointment schedule. Every now and then I had to go to an alternate, and they were inevitably chatty folks who exhibited an unseemly curiosity about me. Why we can’t all just perform our duties in grim silence, I’ll never understand.

And then the pandemic hit.

When we all retreated into our homes like hobbits to peer fearfully through the window blinds, my hair was not a major priority for me. Hardening the house against the inevitable zombie hordes was pretty much my priority for the first few weeks, and when that began to seem increasingly unlikely and I realized I might someday have to step back into civilizaed society (a disappointment to be sure) I realized I was going to have to figure out the whole haircut thing. So I decided to order some clipper and do it myself. And I will never go back.

The DIY

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that my hair is not complicated, and a trained ferret would be able to cut my hair with minimal training. My needs are few — actually, my needs are one: I just don’t want to look crazy. And so far, mission accomplished, which means it’s been more than a year since I had to sit in a strange chair while a stranger snipped at my hair, clucking in disapproval and suggesting an endless stream of hair products I should be using but never will.

It’s been great. My hair still betrays me, and if there was a pill that would stop it from growing forever I would take two, immediately, without water. Until then, I will continue to shave my own head, like an exceptionally smart monkey, and I welcome you to my new Hair Era: The DIY. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to see if I can shave my entire body without asking for help, because the tiny demon in this bottle of whiskey told me to.

Bullshit, More Shit I Gotta Do

Moar Ustari Cycle

Author: jsomers May 30, 2021 2 Comments

Last year I suddenly got the urge to write some stories set in my Ustari Cycle universe — Idolator and The Bleeder — and someone asked if I planned to put out print versions. Since those stories were a bit slim for a print book, I said I’d do it if and when I wrote a third story so there’d be enough material. Well, I went and wrote a third story. I give you The Red Line: An Ustari Cycle Short Story:

Lem Vonnegan and Pitr Mags try to help a desperate Bleeder and Lem is pushed to the limits of his magical ethics. For the first time in his life, he considers crossing his red line against casting spells off of other people’s blood.

AMAZON | B&N | KOBO | PLAY

And, as I am a man of my word, I’ve combined all three of these new stories into a collection, so you can buy all three at once in either digital or print versions. I give you Magic is Violence, which contains Idolator, The Bleeder, and The Red Line:

The eBook of the collection is also just $0.99, but economic reality made the print price $7.99. If you do pick up a print copy, feel free to mail it to me for an inscription!

eBook: AMAZON | B&N | KOBO | PLAY

Print: Amazon | B&N

More Shit I Gotta Do, Short Stories, Ustari Cycle

Writing Without Rules: Deep Dives

Author: jsomers May 19, 2021 0 Comments

BECAUSE I apparently don’t have enough to do and can’t stop myself from writing about writing, I’ll be launching a whole new newsletter/essay series over at Substack on June 15, 2021: Writing Without Rules: Deep Dives.

Substack is a writing service where you can either read pieces right there on the site, or sign up for a weekly newsletter that appears via Internet Magic in your mailbox. While some folks monetize these newsletters, Deep Dives will be 100% free, unless you count the time spent reading my ravings and the possible reputational damage of being identified as someone who takes Jeff Somers seriously, which will be significant.

What will I be writing about over at Writing Without Rules: Deep Dives? Good question! The answer is right there on the tin: Whereas in most of my other writing about, er, writing I focus in on craft and technical stuff, over at Deep Dives I’ll be digging into the reasons why stories work. Most of what makes a story work or not work is kind of opaque and subterranean; you can get hung up on how to plot out a story or how to make characters sound like individual people on the page, but often what really determines the success or failure of a story has less to do with technical aspects like that and more to do with a certain je ne sais quoi. That je ne sais quoi is what we’ll be digging into, using pop culture — TV shows, movies, video games — as our examples.

Hopefully, it’ll be fun and interesting, especially to anyone who aspires to be a writer of fictions, or anyone who just likes thinking way too hard about TV shows and the like. And I promise to keep the pantsless jokes and whiskey references to a minimum.

So, hope to see you on June 15th. Until then, please go on over and sign up, share the link, and tell all your friends about this hot new piece of Somers Action. Wait, that came out wrong. Which button is erase

More Shit I Gotta Do, Someone Else's Writing, Writing, Writing Without Rules

The Stock Video Challenge

Author: jsomers May 8, 2021 0 Comments

LIVING IN THE FUTURE is fantastic. When I was a wee child growing up in the wilds of The Heights neighborhood in Jersey City, my brother Yan and I had outsize ambitions when it came to creativity and self-entertainment. I’ve written about some of our weird childhood projects on this blog before, and what’s amazing about them to Adult Jeff is how much effort they required just for the raw materials. When we constructed elaborate Star Wars-themed photosets complete with captions and blaster shots added via markers, we had to first assemble a world-class collection of Star Wars action figures, then we had to take a few dozen posed photos with them, get those photos developed, add in our ‘special effects’, write the story to go along with the photos, then mount them to paper, then force our poor, beleaguered parents to pretend to care about it, since they were our only audience.

Yan and I had a very slight interest in film-making; we lacked any real drive for it, and the tools were beyond the reach of our allowances. We never had a camera of any kind, or any training, but we always liked the idea of making films or animations. Back then, it was impossible. Today, my friends, we have stock video.

Building a Mystery

I’ve been obsessed with the idea of creating a visual narrative using stock video for years. In fact, I used to make some money off the concept by making book trailers for myself and my fellow authors. I like the challenge of the concept, the constraint. I don’t have direct control over the clips — the lighting, the actors, the style, or even how many there are featuring the same people and places. Trying to create something coherent and interesting with whatever you can find in the stock bins is, frankly, kind of fun.

I’m also an amateur musician, and I’ve invented a fake rock band called The Levon Sobieski Domination to release my music through. A few years ago, I tried my hand at creating a music video using a mix of stock and shots I created using my phone at home:

tHE bLIZZARD
A half-assed music video from Jeff Somers. Because no one asked me to.

Not exactly a cinematic masterpiece, but you get the idea. I came to realize that the mix of slick stock video and my own shaky-cam clips didn’t work, so when I returned to the concept last year, I stuck to stock video:

The Levon Sobieski Domination: Elephant in the Room
No Description

That turned out better. Recently, I’ve returned to the concept with a vengeance simply because it’s fun for me. I love finding a few dozen stock clips and trying to set a mood or tell a story of some sort with them. Here are three video I made in the last few weeks for songs I’m releasing:

“Rearview”

No Title
“Rearview” from the album “Seven” by the Levon Sobieski Domination (2020).

This one’s a mood, not a story and was basically inspired when I realized the surprising amount of cinematic stock video there is of ballerinas.

“Day Drank”

A song from the upcoming release, this video tells a pretty loose story that’s entirely on brand, I think. It started with a clip of business folks dancing in their office, and I took it in the most ridiculous direction possible.

Day Drank by The Levon Sobieski Domination
“Day Drank” by the Levon Sobieski Domination, from the album “Eight”

“Riding My Own Melt”

This one was a bit more of a challenge; once you go beyond ‘mood’ or incredibly broad narrative like “unhappy workers get day drunk and start dancing” it gets more difficult to tell a story of any kind. But in the end I think this pulled together nicely.

No Title
“Riding My Own Melt” by The Levon Sobieski Domination, from the album “Eight”

It’s fun to work on a creative project that has nothing tied to it. Whether anyone watches these videos or listens to these songs doesn’t matter: What matters is I had fun making them. And maybe you had fun watching them! Since science has yet to discover the discouragement that can deter me from unleashing such things on the world, I’ll very likely keep making these. You’ve been warned.

gee-tar, More Shit I Gotta Do, The Levon Sobieski Domination, Videos

Cover Story

Author: jsomers July 4, 2020 0 Comments

One of the best parts about being an adult (i.e., old as heck) is the ability to just create stuff on a whim. As a kid, I always wanted to make stuff, to be creative, but as a kid you lack resources. Also, I grew up a very, very long time ago seemingly before electricity. My brain still gets wrinkled that I can fire up my computer and self-publish books, create music, create text adventure games, and any other strange idea I might have. I mean, seriously, this shit is magic to a kid who had to pretend an old hand-me-down tennis racket was a guitar when he was 12.

It’s just fun to create stuff, even if you’re not an expert. I mean, I’m no professional graphic designer or visual genius, but creating covers for my Avery Cates novella experiments and the resulting novels is just fun. And they’ve been quite a journey.

The Shattered Gears

When I first began writing the new Avery stories, it was solely because I had an idea and I wanted to try a different way of working. Normally when I write a novel I start at the beginning and write til I get to the end, all in one monolithic effort. This time, with zero market pressure, I could just play around with short sections and see what happened.

So, when I designed the first cover for the very first novella, The Shattered Gears, it was a bit of a throwaway effort. I wanted to echo the vastly superior work of Lauren Panepinto with the Orbit covers (and obviously failed miserably, because Lauren’s work is amazing), so I went with a silhouette of a badass and some simple and distressingly obvious gear textures. The rest of the novella covers weren’t much more creative than that, though I think they pop off the screen well enough.

When time came to collect those first novellas into a novel, I got a little more ambitious with the cover design. It’s still a very simple silhouette-based concept, but I added some texture and lighting effects to make a little bit more interesting. I was especially proud of adding in the sci-fi gun to the silhouette. But then, really simple achievements make me outlandishly happy. It’s one reason why I love to make stuff.

Last year I started working on the sequel to The Shattered Gears, a novel titled The Burning City. Once again I wrote it as a series of semi-standalone novellas that I published individually, beginning with The New World. I decided that I wanted to up my game a little for the cover design, because it’s fun. So while I kept the fundamental silhouette aesthetic, I went with a more photo-realistic approach.

I think they turned out pretty good. And I kept the theme going with the cover for the omnibus edition (all four novellas collected into a single novel):

Again, I’m no graphic design genius, and I probably could have done a lot of this much better. But I’m kind of proud of how these turned out, and I remained kind of childishly amazed that I can just … do this. I can literally just create whatever the hell I want.

You can pre-order The Dark Hunt (novella #4) and The Burning City (the novel) right now, if you want. Come on, you know you want to.

Avery Cates, More Shit I Gotta Do

Black House: An Interactive Fiction

Author: jsomers May 21, 2020 0 Comments

Black House is live.

So, er, what is it? Well, Black House is an interactive fiction, a text adventure. You read descriptions, then you type in simple instructions and see what happens, like this:

You wake up in a room rapidly filling with water. There is a jug of whiskey and a small sponge next to you.
> Eat sponge
You chew on the sponge for a while, then die of stupidity.
<YOU HAVE DIED>

Well, something like that. Here’s the story of the story.

ZORK

Back in the sands of time, I played a lot of these sorts of games — Zork and its many descendants. I was always instantly hooked by the idea that these little text universes might be infinite, that if I poked around long enough I would stumble onto an endless series of hidden rooms and tricks. They weren’t infinite, but there were enough hidden things to manage the illusion. I liked solving the puzzles, but I enjoyed just roaming around trying stuff just as much.

MAZE

Then, sometime later I discovered a book called Maze by Christopher Manson (which I’ve written about before because it is incredible) which had the same spirit, if a somewhat darker tone. Maze is a sort of choose-your-own-adventure book, but it’s very similar in some ways to a text adventure.

As is my Method, Maze inspired me to rip it off wholesale, so I created my own maze, creatively titled The Maze and so blatantly stealing from Manson’s superior creation I still feel the shame today. I originally created my maze in HTML, then later recreated it in Visual Basic and spat out a Windows EXE file. What can I say: I’m just that cool international man of mystery sort who coded shit in VB in the 1990s and early 2000s. You’re jealous. Let it drift.

Marks

The third piece of this puzzle is Philip K. Marks, a character I started writing about in the 1990s. Marks is a kind of shitheel private investigator who specializes in weird, paranormal, sci-fi mysteries. I’ve published five stories featuring Marks, and a few years ago I thought it was time to write a novel-length story with the character. When I thought about what story to put Marks in, I thought of my old maze, and got excited about turning the maze into a novel. The end result was Black House, which I loved but had its flaws.

Black House wasn’t really saleable, so I sat on it for a while, then a few years ago I tried an experiment: I published it online, one chapter a day for about a month, then one day after the last chapter went up I pulled it down. The site is still there, if you’re curious.

Which brings us to today: I stumbled on this Medium article by Julie Stevenson a few months ago. I’d worked in Inform back in 2010 when creating the site for The Eternal Prison, which featured a flawed and half-finished text adventure, so I was reminded that this was something I could actually do.

So I did.

I was intrigued by the idea of turning a novel-like thing into a text adventure, and Black House, having come from a text adventure of sorts to begin with, was the perfect source. That’s what Black House, the game, is: A novel in text-adventure form.

Go on: Play.

Fiction, More Shit I Gotta Do, Novels

The Long Walk

Author: jsomers November 8, 2019 0 Comments

I recently discussed my strange wish to do nothing to celebrate my birthday, and I mentioned that my wife, The Duchess does not share my feelings. For The Duchess, birthdays are opportunities to spit in death’s eye and do all the things.

Naturally, since we are legally married, this means I must also do all the things, although I have contractual carve-outs that allow me to do so with incredibly poor grace and passive aggression, escalating steadily until I finally go too far and have to spend several weeks cleaning up my mess.

For her most recent birthday, The Duchess wished to do some serious hiking, which has been a sore point between us ever since I claimed to love hiking when we were first dating. This was a lie, as I remain scarred by several hikes I engaged in as a Cub and Boy Scout in my misspent youth¹, one in which I was almost led to my death and one which seemed to go on for so long I longed to just sit down and let the elements wash me away.

So, birthday hiking wasn’t exactly exciting. I had no idea what I was in for, however.

You Mean Leave the House?

What friends I have left, and there ain’t many, remark on the fact that getting me to do just about anything that separates me from my whiskey collection and forces me to put on pants is as close to impossible as anything in this universe. I mocked for this as part of a complex web of mockery that has grown to encompass just about every aspect of my life, but I can’t argue the point, because I do hate going places. And doing things. And talking to people.

Contrary to popular belief, this isn’t because I hate people, or at least not solely because of that. It’s because I’d rather be writing, or working on some other project.

I’ve never understood folks who want to write novels or paint pictures or what have you who don’t want to do those things all the damn time. I mean, not literally all the damn time, because we all need to take a moment to enjoy a nice single malt or an episode of Watchmen or read a good book or something, but generally speaking that’s my default setting, and activities that take me out of the house usually mean I can’t work, which makes me sad.

Of course, this kind of obsessive attitude leads to grinding, the joyless mashing of keyboards with no inspiration behind it, which isn’t very healthy. Being forced to go out sometimes is good for me. It gets me out of my head, forces me to experience real life, and lets my brain do some background work on whatever I’m writing. Long story short, I piss and moan about having shit to do, but it improves my writing so I should shut up and enjoy life.

So, we went hiking.

Death Hike Part Tres

I’ve written before about the times The Duchess has attempted to murder me via hiking (see here and here). This time we headed to upstate New York and the Catskills for a few days filled with some shopping, lots of eating, and, as I learned on our way there, an apparently infinite amount of hiking. We spent the first day there gathering intelligence by asking locals about hikes we could do.

If you know The Duchess, you know that the easiest way to get her to do something is to imply or state that she can’t do it. So the moment one very helpful guy in a bookstore suggested that walking to this one hike and then doing the hike on top of the walk there and back was way too much for mere mortals, I was doomed. The next morning we ate a hearty breakfast and then began walking … to the trailhead. Where we would walk more.

Was it all more or less uphill? It sure fucking was. Did I contemplate my existence several times along the way? I sure fucking did.

I also had fun, mainly because of that sense you get sometimes (more often, in my experience, when you’re young) of going against society’s rules and rubbing people the wrong way. Every time a car passed us and the driver gave us a look that translated to hey look at those weirdos I felt like a revolutionary, or a hipster, neither of which I’ve ever been but fuck it, roleplay can be fun.

And I thought about writing.

That’s the thing about writing, isn’t it? Writing is just 10% the actual words on screen or paper. The rest is thinking, and reading, and researching, and talking to yourself, and drinking heavily, and watching TV, and going to museums, and listening to new music, and, yes, fuckit, hiking. That’s writing.

Sure, I was sweaty and my feet hurt, and there was a soul-breaking moment when we’d been walking uphill for hours and discovered we had several hours to go, but I also had some good thoughts on the writing projects I was working on, and came home energized. And triumphant, because despite her plans The Duchess once again failed to kill me.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s probably something to do with good-quality shoes. If there’s a second lesson, it’s that writing happens all the time, no matter what you’re doing, so it’s okay to leave your house sometimes.

I said sometimes, dammit.

Bullshit, More Shit I Gotta Do, Writing