Short Stories

The Short Story Report

Author: jsomers December 16, 2024 0 Comments

"The Winter Siege" & "Come and See" Covers

Well, 2024 is almost over, and I greet it as I do every year with a mixture of relief and sadness. Relief, because I survived one more year despite the universe’s animosity! And sadness because there are a lot of burritos I’ll never get to eat again. Measuring one’s life in burritos is not advisable, but here we are.

I could (and often do) measure my life in terms of short stories, because I am all about the short story. Sometimes I like to offer a report on my short stories to anyone who’s interested, because I know I love it when writers break down practical stuff like how much they write and what they make from it and all that. So let’s take a look at The Wondrous World of Jeff Somers through the lens of short story productivity.

This year I wrote 24 short stories, counting the one I’m currently working on that I will 100% finish by 12/31 or die trying. That’s pretty good – I always write a minimum of 12 (at least one a month), but I often think having ideas for stories is a good metric for how healthy my muse is. They might not all work, but at least I’m excited enough about concepts to put pen to paper.

Included in those 24 stories are Come and See and The Winter Siege, stories set in my Ustari Cycle and Avery Cates universes, respectively. You can read those by subscribing to my short fiction Substack.

I submitted 144 stories this year and sold two (History Porn over at Book XI and Lone Star. Deep Black. Hum. in Fission #4. A third story I sold last year published as well, Teeth Can Hardly Stand in Crimeucopia – Totally Psycho-Logical, and a fourth story that I originally sold back in 2019 finally published: A Permanent Vacation In the Void of Hunger appeared in Book of 42². I have one story on hold with an editor – they liked it but weren’t sure where they could place it, and so asked if I could let them sit on it for a few months.

Yes, two sales out of 144 subs is not a great sell rate, but I have a lazy firehose approach to submitting fiction, because I am a lazy man.

I earned $583 bucks off those short story sales, give or take, which isn’t retirement money but is whiskey money, so I’m happy about that. I’m more interested in getting my work published than getting paid for it, but I have found that holding out for pro rates on short stories generally means your stories have a better chance of actually being read.

So that’s the 2024 Short Story Report. I’ll be right back at it in 2025, assuming the vengeful universe doesn’t take me out.

Fiction, Short Stories, Writing, Writing Without Rules

Avery Cates & Ustari Cycle Short Stories

Author: jsomers September 16, 2024 0 Comments

Good news! In October of this year I’ll be publishing a brand-new Avery Cates short story, “The Winter Siege” and a brand-new Ustari Cycle short story, “Come and See.” Instead of putting them up on Amazon et al, this time I’m putting them out on the ol’ short story Substack: Writing Without Rules: From the Notebook. For $5 a month or $50 a year, you get a short story every week! And in October, two of those stories will be The Winter Siege and Come and See.

The Winter Siege is set after the events of The Machines of War, but is fairly standalone. Avery Cates has made a home of sorts for himself with a colony of survivors who have taken over one of New York City’s old skyscrapers. Living like a strange shadow of the way the One Percent used to, Cates knows he’s only useful to the residents as an enforcer, but he likes the obscurity and relative peace. Until that’s all shattered when two people arrive bearing a very unexpected — and potentially world-changing — package.

Come and See finds everyone’s favorite Tricksters, Lem Vonnegan and Pitr Mags, trying to work off a debt with a mid-level magician running a blood farm out of a dilapidated old apartment building. But everyone there is dead, and they all died staring at something, and then they hear the scrape of a footstep from up above …

Go on, sign up so you can read ’em next month!

Avery Cates, Fiction, Short Stories, We Are Not Good People

Announcing Writing Without Rules: From the Notebook

Author: jsomers September 1, 2023 0 Comments

Hello there—please excuse this random non-pop culture-related post, but since you’ve subscribed to Writing Without Rules: Deep Dives I thought you might be interested to know I’m launching a second Substack.

As you probably know¹, I write at least one short story every month, longhand, in a spiral notebook. I’ve been doing this for decades, and have 35 battered notebooks filled with stories. Some of these turned out very well—some have sold to quite respectable places. Some are not so great, but many are great² but not marketable for one reason or another.

But I want these stories to be read, so I’m launching Writing Without Rules: From the Notebook. For $5 a month (or $50 a year), you can read 4 of my short stories a month. That’s a pretty good deal, I think—just $1.25 per story. More like $1 if you spring for the year. And since I have a local bar that sells me shots of very cheap whiskey for a buck, you can be assured that every month you are buying me a round of drinks, as god intended.

Writing Without Rules: Deep Dives is going to remain 100% free. Some of you have pledged to pay a subscription for it, which I absolutely appreciate, but I think it works better as a free newsletter. If you enjoy my fiction or just my writing in general, consider signing up for From the Notebook. The stories will run the gamut of genre and style and will come from various times in my career, so lord knows what you’re going to get³.

The newsletter is launching on October 1st, 2023. Hope to see you on the mailing list. As always, if you have any questions, hit me at jdxs@jeffreysomers.com or anywhere on social media where I actually show up.

Fiction, Short Stories, Writing, Writing Without Rules

Fission #2

Author: jsomers April 26, 2022 0 Comments

Pretty jazzed to announce my short story “Free From Want” will appear in Fission #2, the annual anthology published by the British Science Fiction Association. Some fiction: Spreading like mold.

What’s it about? All I’ll say is that it demonstrates a darker side of a so-called “post-scarcity” civilization. I’m pretty jazzed about this one, and can’t wait for y’all to read it. Currently scheduled to publish in May, 2022.

HUZZAH!

HUZZAH, Short Stories

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

Taking Rejection in Stride

Author: jsomers February 13, 2021 0 Comments

Friendos, I was raised to be a cheerful kid certain of his importance in the world. My parents, bless ’em, ensured I had a pretty healthy self-image, and I managed to land on the Honor Roll more often than not at school, which pleased them, assuring me praise.

So rejection has always come as a sort of shock to me. Any negative sentiment directed towards me, in fact. My first reaction is always a variation on you can’t possibly mean me, sir, as I am beyond reproach. Which is usually followed by someone punching me in the nose, so you’d think I’d learn. But being a jackass is a genetic defect, and it takes a lifetime of work to overcome it.

This unfamiliarity with rejection is problematic for me due to my chosen profession: Few careers carry with them such a load of endless, bitter rejection. I’ve published nine novels, a book on writing, and dozens of short stories and I make my living writing things on the Internets, and still I enjoy a steady stream of rejection. Short stories get rejected politely, novels don’t sell, editors turn down pitches — rejection is constant. In fact, I wrote a series of blog posts about rejection letters a few years ago.

It’s a fact of life for writers, at least in my experience. Maybe there are uber-successful writers for whom rejection is a distant memory, maybe there are uber-talented prodigies who sold their first novel and have never seen a rejection email. All I know is, that’s never been me.

(Stares into the void and contemplates whether he’s a talentless hack and everyone knows it and everyone has been whispering behind his back all these years)

Rejection is on my mind these days because I just sold a story — after nearly nine years and 18 prior submissions.

No Trunk

The story in question was written in May, 2013, and I submitted it for the first time in August, 2013, and it sold on my 19th try. This isn’t all that unusual for me; I’ve got plenty of stories that took a long time to sell, and I submitted a novel to my agent in 2004 and she sold it in 2013, god bless her, and I pretty much never give up on a story no matter how many rejections it gets. And I have other stories that have been in my submission cycle for a lot longer than 18 attempts.

I pretty much reject the idea that (see what I did there) that there’s any sort of expiration date on a story. I can understand the argument that if 1,000 professional editors turn you down it might be because the story itself isn’t very good, but I also believe sometimes all a story needs is the right person to read it at the right time. So I keep submitting stories as long as *I* think they’re good. As long as I have faith in the story, I try to publish it someplace that will pay me in more than best wishes and kind regards.

Bottom line: If you’re a writer, get used to rejection in various forms. And move past it. Learning to let rejection notes roll off your back is one of the most important skills a writer can cultivate. That and the ability to sneak alcohol into places where alcohol is traditionally frowned upon, like libraries and public transit.

Short Stories, Writing

New Podcast Episode

Author: jsomers December 12, 2020 0 Comments

I done did it again: A new episode of The No Pants Cocktail Hour is up for your listening enjoyment.

This time around I discuss my short story No Great Trick, which was written when I was still commuting into New York City every day for my job, skulking in an office full of cubes and exhausting personal drama.

The story was published in 2003 at the defunct Drexel Online Journal, but I pubbed it here on this blog a few years ago, so you can read along with me if that’s your thing!

Aces.

Fiction, Free Short Stories, Podcast, Short Stories, Writing

IDOLATOR

Author: jsomers December 6, 2020 0 Comments

SO, I done went and wrote a new Ustari Cycle story. Idolator is set in the We Are Not Good People universe, and is a standalone story set after the events of that novel.

It’s funny how inspiration strikes. I last worked in this universe in the 2017 short story Nigsu Ga Tesgu, which was published in the anthology Urban Enemies. I didn’t consciously decide not to work with these characters and this magic system after that — there just wasn’t an inspiration to do so.

Then a few months ago I had an idea. Riffing off the idea of The Entertainment in Infinite Jest, I thought about a magical artifact that compelled your attention, that took over your pleasure centers. And then I wondered how it might be used to enslave people, and the chaos such a thing might cause. When you put magic, chaos, and darkness into a box and shake it, what comes out is an Ustari Cycle story starring Tricksters Lem Vonnegan and Pitr Mags.

The story is up for presale and will go live on December 15th. There’s a handy free sample available at Google Play, if you want to see what you might be reading before you buy.

If you’ve never read anything in this series, this is an easy way to dip your toe in and see if it might be for you. And if you have read the other stories, I hope this one lives up to the rest!

Fiction, Short Stories, Trickster, Ustari Cycle

Goodbye, Year

Author: jsomers December 25, 2019 2 Comments

WE’RE in the end game, now.

Normally, I live my life like one of those only-in-movies characters who has some sort of specialized amnesia that makes them wake up every day like Frosty the Snowman, without any memory of their lives before. I live in the moment, not because I’m living like I’m dying as Tim McGraw instructed us, but because my brain is weird and crumpled and I am almost incapable of remembering anything that didn’t happen within the last few hours.

Oh, I remember things, kind of. They’re vague impressions. Let it drift. I’ll never remember your name, don’t be insulted. I often confuse my many, many Catholic cousins named Mary and John. Let it drift

Around this time every year I like to look back in anger on the year in writing I just had. It’s fun. And depressing. I am a man obsessed with statistics pertaining to his own existence, as if the number of things I accomplish will somehow protect me from being completely forgotten within a few decades of my death, unless I am lucky enough to die embracing another man under a mountain of hot ash and am discovered centuries later by fascinated scientists wondering about our relationship. So in these sorts of posts I like to tabulate stuff and somehow equate it with accomplishment, to stir up the illusion of forward motion. I am that guy who measures his life in coffee spoons.

MY YEAR IN WRITIN’

So this is Xmas, and what have I done? On the freelance side of things, I had a good year with a sad ending; I picked up a few new jobs (most notably over at BookBub, which has been a blast) but of course the Barnes & Noble blogs shut down, which was a total bummer. I’ve been writing for the B&N blogs since 2014, and it was an incredible experience. Not only did they pay well, the editors were uniformly smart, fun, and excited about books. It’s been a few weeks since the news, and I still can’t get used to not pitching every idea I have about books to them. (Seriously, I pitched a lot to my B&N eds. They must have braced themselves every time one of my pitch-bomb emails arrived).

Still, freelance-wise this was a good year. Anyone who pays their bills by writing words knows that every day is a fresh opportunity to starve to death, so making it to December without having done so is a triumph.

Fiction-wise, also not bad. I finished 11 of my monthly short stories, so far (and trust that I will finish #12 in a few days even if I have to kill all the characters in a plane crash). I also finished 4 other stories outside of that monthly exercise. I didn’t complete any novels this year, but I’m 50k words into one and 40k words into a short-story cycle, so I wasn’t napping. I also finished and completed 50k words worth of novella-length parts of the new Avery Cates novel The Burning City and published them, so there’s that. And my agent has two novels in hand that we think have legs, and that’s never a bad position to be in as an author.

I submitted a ton of stories (74, to be exact; note this doesn’t mean 74 separate stories, but 74 submissions of a few stories I currently think are great), as usual, and sold three of them, of which two have published: The Company I Keep in Life is Short and Then You Die, edited by Kelley Armstrong, and Zilla, 2015 in The Lascaux Review. My system for submitting stories is sloppy and disorganized and probably favors volume more than it should, but it is my way.

And I started a podcast, like everyone else in this sadly imitative world. The No Pants Cocktail Hour actually launched in December of 2018, but I produced 16 solipsistic episodes this year and had a blast talking about myself, as usual.

So, the stats say I had a good year. Active, creative, somewhat lucrative. I hope your own writing year was a good one. Tell me about it in the comments, or on Twitter, or by tracking me down in a bar and leaning in too close and putting your hand uncomfortably on my thigh as you tell me the tale with far too much detail.

Happy 2020, folks. It’s coming whether you’re ready or not.

Bullshit, career, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Short Stories, Writing

Two Stories

Author: jsomers September 9, 2019 0 Comments

This month I have two short stories publishing; “The Company I Keep” appears in the YA Mystery anthology Life is Short and Then You Die, edited by Kelley Armstrong, and “Zilla, 2015” is up over at The Lascaux Review.

I’m extremely proud of both stories, and pretty excited to have them out in the world. As anyone who has seen me talk about writing in public knows, I want to basically publish everything I’ve ever written, good or bad. So having two stories out in one month is kind of exciting.

What’s interesting about these two stories, at least to me, is that they both started off as novels. And after writing ~100,000 words between them, I wound up with about 10,000 words worth keeping.

The Company I Keep

The Company I Keep officially began life in November, 2014 as a book about a man investigating the death of his college roommate 20 years after the fact. I began folding in material from a book about a mother who poisoned her children as a form of punishment, and spent a solid four years, off and on, trying to make the story work. In 2015, I had a 30,000-word novella that I liked but didn’t love; it had a nice sharpness to it, but felt meandering. So I put THE END on it and made a halfhearted attempt to submit, but then began working on it again.

In 2017 I had a 61,000-word novel that I knew better than to try an publish. It wasn’t terrible, but it also wasn’t good. I’d added a lot of backstory and business to it, but none of it felt consequential. Along the way, I’d played with the age of the characters, and the main character had evolved into a sort-of genius, a kid smart enough to attend college when he was 16 but not smart enough to actually do anything with his brains.

But I liked the Voice. I liked the main character. And I liked the mystery. When I read about the MWA Anthology Life is Short and Then You Die, which was looking for YA mystery stories focused on seeing your first dead body, I thought, The Company I Keep would work if it was 6,000 words long instead of 60,000.

Unless …

Yup. I cut that novel down. I deleted 90% of the words. And I sold that story to the anthology. Which either means that I’m a terrible writer who has to throw away 90% of his work before he has something decent, or that I need a bit of help identifying when my idea doesn’t really need 60,000 words to get through.

Zilla, 2015

I’ve had a poster of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies on my wall for years now, and had an idea about writing a novel where the Tinies didn’t die as kids, but were being murdered one by one as adults. In May, 2018 I started working on that novel, and never got very far, though I did work up a great deal of detailed background information regarding the characters (all 26 of them, natch).

In early 2019 I decided to make one last try, and began work on a bit that would act as a prologue for the novel, detailing the last days of Zilla. I liked what I did, a lot, and was optimistic about working up a novel around the concept.

Yeah, that didn’t happen. I flailed around for a bit, trying different ways back into the story. Then I began working on another novel which occupied increasing amounts of my brain, and eventually realized that the Zilla story was actually the point. That short story was what I’d been working towards for more than a year, I just hadn’t realized it. So I cut my losses and sent Zilla, 2015 to The Lascaux Review because it seemed like a good fit. And sold it.

What’s the lesson here? There doesn’t have to be one, but I suppose one take-away is that you can get hung up on an idea being this or that, when what you should be doing is seeing where those ideas take you. Or maybe the take-away is that even in failed novels you can often salvage something good.

I’m proud of these stories. I hope you read them and let me know what you think. And if you’re struggling with a novel right now, maybe you can pull something out of it right now instead of spending another few months trying to squeeze literary greatness from a rock.

Or maybe I’ll go back and try again on both of these novels someday. Why not? There are no rules. Or maybe the rule is, Jeff need to throw away 90% of what he writes all the time. Which would explain a lot, actually.

Fiction, Short Stories, Writing