The Inner Swine

BRING ON THE HELPER MONKEYS

Author: April 4, 2013 6 Comments

This originally appeared in my zine The Inner Swine a few years ago.

BRING ON THE HELPER MONKEYS

How My Genius Novels Get Written

by Jeff Somers

FRIEND, do you have a book in you?

Note: Not literally. Or, OK, why not: Literally too.

If you’re one of the billions who does, indeed, have a story to tell but doesn’t know where to start, then this issue of The Inner Swine is for you. Because, you see, I myself have written several books. More than was probably wise, actually; if you consider how much time I’ve spent on them compared with how many I’ve sold and made money from, the resulting per-hour salary is depressing (homeless folks begging on the street make more per hour). Still, this isn’t an essay about selling a book, but rather about writing one.

Are you one of those folks who, when they’re introduced to a working writer at a party immediately tell them that you have a great idea for a book? Do you have a notebook filled with random notes for your “great American novel”? Do you work in an English Department, anywhere? Then this essay is for you, because I’m going to show you how easy it is to write a book. Easier than many other things, in fact. Hell, I’m writing a book right now, while I write this essay. It’s that easy.

An aside: I think everyone in the universe has a book in them, yes, but of course not everyone wants to write one, which is fine. I make no judgments. And some folks have self-help books or dictionaries in them, which again: no judgments, but you really should ask yourself two questions: Do I have a book in me, and should I actually write it?

You will almost certainly always discover the answer is: no.

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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine, Writing

The Inner Swine: Winter 2012

Author: January 4, 2013 1 Comment

The! Inner! Swine!

Well sir, a few weeks late perhaps, but the Winter 2012 issue of The Inner Swine is out for Kindle and Nook:

KINDLE

NOOK

The formatting’s screwed and the editing was … there was no editing. Enjoy for ninety-nine cents!

Here’s an essay from this issue:

Holy Crap What the Fuck

Hurricane Sandy Almost Killed Us
by Jeff Somers

SO, in the hallowed pages of JEFF IS A JACKASS, we have few weather-related entries. There was the time I attempted to drive a station wagon with bald tires through a blizzard and ended up performing a stately, ballet-like 360 across a huge intersection. Or the time when I was very, very young and thought that peeing in my snow pants was a genius way to warm up on a snowy day … for about five seconds. Or the time I was almost abandoned by my wife and eaten by wolves when I succumbed to mild hypothermia in the White Mountains. But aside from these lurid tales, for the most part my relationship with weather has been pretty quiet. Until October 2012.

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BAM!, The Inner Swine

When Booze Attacks

Author: October 19, 2012 0 Comments

This first appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 14, Issue 1.

Hangover Cat is An HeroIn general, liquor been very very good to me. In a storied career stretching back several decades I’ve had a lot to drink, and certainly had my share of hangovers. I still have a suit of clothes I woke up wearing in Philadelphia one night, with absolutely no memory of how I acquired it. It hangs in the closet waiting for the day that we either invent cheap at-home DNA testing or time-travel, and the truth will be revealed. Until then I assume I drank too much and traded clothes with a much richer man of my approximate size and weight.

Still, I’m an old, frail man now, and I think I’ve tested my depth when it comes to killing myself with The Drink. Or at least I thought so. I mean, I ought to know my limits, right? I ought to be able to walk up the watery line of Lake Puke and toe it gingerly, and do a jaunty little dance of defiance. And usually, I can.

Recently, however, I’ve had several inexplicable brushes with the ancient stigma of being over-served, and the only thing more depressing than being a middle-aged zine publisher is being a middle-aged zine publisher who’s about to hurl his cookies all over the place like a high school kid after his first pint of blackberry brandy.

The first time, to be honest, I had consumed enough booze to pickle myself, I admit it. The evening got away from me in an excess enthusiasm for someone’s whiskey collection, and despite the way everything ended I don’t have any real regrets. The most recent episode, however, involved barely enough booze to register, and yet I ended the night swimming home in a taxi, turning various shades of green.

This is disturbing.

The cycle of life, as far as I imagined it, was this: You’re born. Then nothing happens. Sometime around your thirteenth birthday, you have your first drink, and then you fuck up multiple times, spending brain cells to gain experience. A period of happiness ensues, wherein you can pretty much drink without fear of consequence. This goes on until your liver explodes and you die, probably around age fifty. Suddenly returning to the earlier stage puts a distinct crimp in my plans for the future. Not to mention supplying me with ample embarrassment for those occasions when I attempt to be witty and erudite with my adult friends.

The only course of action is to continue to experiment until I figure out the problem in my technique. I’ll continue to report my progress as events warrant.

Bullshit, The Inner Swine, Whiskey

From the Zine

Author: October 18, 2012 0 Comments

This piece originally appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 14, Issue 1

I KNOW NOTHING

PIGS, every now and then I get asked that perennial author question, how can I get published. The assumption being that because I have been published a little I have some secret voodoo spell you can recite that will result in thousands of your books clogging the mercantile arteries of bookstores everywhere. This assumption is pretty spurious, since most authors, myself included, are drunk when they sell their books and can’t possibly explain what happened; their stories usually devolve into strange tales of magical unicorns and wizards who cast publishing spells.

Still, I get asked. Every time the question comes up, my agent appears in a flash of purple flames and sulphur and slaps me across the face, commanding me to never answer. This is not because it’s some sort of masonic secret, but rather because everyone’s experience is different and most probably unreproducible. I mean, if you sold your book because you sacrificed a chicken and danced the Macarena outside  the publisher’s offices, the chances that such tactics will work for someone else are pretty minimal.

In other words, authors in general are idiots. I am no exception.

Still, the urge to talk about your publishing adventures can be overwhelming. For most writers, after all, being published is the only actual accomplishment we have that impresses anyone. You can win all the awards you like, and none of your nonliterary friends care. You can have all the artistic breakthroughs you want and no one will understand. But when you have an actual check in your hands, suddenly people are interested in your little hobby. So we all have an urge to just bloviate on and on for days about How We Got Published.

Part of this is because writing has transformed from a way to make a living into a lifestyle choice. It’s damned hard to actually make a living wage from your writing work these days, but it has become an artistic sort of hobby—after all, in today’s day and age, anyone can be a writer in the sense of having a printed book in your hands, so it’s become a choice of applied resources instead of a vocation. As a result, people who in past lives wouldn’t have bothered aspiring to being an author fancy they could do it—and why not? It’s not something they’re doing to earn money, or because undeniable artistic urges, otherwise known as Them Voices in Your Head, demand that they do so. They’re writing books because it’s a genteel sort of activity—like painting a sunset, or knitting a scarf.

I have no wisdom, really. My publishing adventures have been a mixture of pure chance, lucky incompetence, and inexplicable coincidence. People are always looking for rules to follow—the proper query letter format, the right way to approach an agent, whether or not to put your work on the Internet—but I am here to tell you folks that there are no rules. It’s Thunderdome out there.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine

WE ARE THE MORON BROTHERS

Author: July 19, 2012 0 Comments

Bad Writing in Movies

by Jeff Somers
[This essay first appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 15, Issue 1]

LEST we forget, movies and TV shows get written too. And plays. And advertising jingles—the term writing covers a lot of ground, some of it sad and strewn with rotting carcasses, some of it merry and lined with beautiful gardens. This wide field means there’s also a lot of room for bad writing, about which Your Humble Editor here knows entirely too much.

When you do something on a professional level, you tend to lose some of your wonder for it. It’s an unfortunate consequence: Magicians don’t get wide-eyed when cards are made to disappear, computer programmers don’t get excited when email pops up on their screens, and writers wince and groan a lot when terrible dialog afflicts our television shows, books, or movies. We see the connective tissue, and we know all the tricks.

Normally, I can keep my mouth shut. Normally, I can manage to swallow clunky lines that fall to the ground with an ear-popping thud. Normally, I can handle a surfeit of cliché and a heavy hand with the purple—this because I am a firm believer in the Rules of Polite Society, that web of semi-transparent rules that keeps our world functioning, and one of those rules is that you don’t bother other folks with endless snobbish assessments of the quality of your entertainments. We’re writers, after all; for a lot of us, the reason we started writing in the first place was dissatisfaction with the stuff on TV and in the theaters, leading us to try and do it right.

Recently, though, I’m losing control of my temper when it comes to one time-honored tradition of Bad Writing: The Moron Line.

Their company is something you won’t miss
When your icetrays are filled with piss

The Moron Line is, quite simply, a line of dialog that is spoken only to help those in the audience who either haven’t been paying close attention or are mentally incapable of understanding anything even remotely complex or fanciful. Here’s a totally made up example:

<In the sewers beneath Los Angeles, The Villain is seen placing a large bomb against one slimy wall. A few scenes later, the Hero and his Sidekick stumble upon the bomb.>

HERO: Look!

SIDEKICK: Jeepers! A BOMB!

HERO: It must have been left here by the villain, earlier, when we weren’t here.

Most of that dialog is not only unnecessary if you have a heartbeat and an attention span of any length, it’s actually annoying, because it’s like that guy at a party who keeps telling you things you already know in a tone of voice that strongly implies he doubts you have the brainpower to know such things. It’s like an echo.

One of the popular uses for Moron Lines is to remind the audience of subtle plot points; having a character regurgitate a little exposition in the guise of summing up or arguing a point. Another is the time-honored Salazar Gambit, where a character—usually the villain—appears onscreen and, just in case you just wandered in from another movie—someone hisses their name:

<The Hero enters SALAZAR’s OFFICE. Cut to SALAZAR, grinning behind his desk.>

HERO: Salazar!

Again, the only people in the room who would be confused as to Salazar’s identity (assuming, of course, that he was in the story previously and this is not some complicated switch of identity or some other potentially confusing plot gymnastic) are folks who fell asleep shortly after the lights went down. Yet the Moron Line survives, because a) it often sounds dramatic to untrained ears and b) a lot of people creating entertainments for the rest of us have nothing but contempt for us, believe me.

They may not go down in history
But they’ll go down on your sister

Once you notice the Moron Line, you can’t unnotice it, and it starts popping up everywhere: Characters describing the clearly visible actions of other characters, characters repeating names and facts for no other reason than to make sure you remember something that happened, oh, fifteen minutes before in the narrative. Often these examples will be paired with quick-cut flashbacks, just to make sure you really notice what you’re being hit over the head with. This last technique could be called The Sixth Sense Are You Paying Attention Technique.

Are there people who need the Moron Line? Probably. I’ve been out to movies where future Nobel Laureates sit and have lengthy conversations about other movies while a movie is playing, and no doubt the Moron Line helps them keep track of at least the Bullet Points of the plot. And sure, there are probably a few functioning morons out there who need the Moron Line. Should these fine folks be abandoned? Of course not. What we need are a sort of reverse Director’s Cuts, where all the Moron Lines and redundant flashbacks are edited in, with a normal cut released for the rest of us with functioning brains.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing, The Inner Swine

The Futility of Writing

Author: May 3, 2012 5 Comments

The following originally appear in The Inner Swine, Volume 11, Issue 4.

until drops of blood form on your forehead

The Futility of Writing

Brain Surgeon. No, really.

Brain Surgeon. No, really.

PIGS, when I was but a wee little one in Jersey City, before the standing-on-a-corner-drinking-blackberry-brandy period, I wanted to be a brain surgeon. The reasons for this desire are now obscure; possibly it had something to do with The Six Million Dollar Man. Possibly it was simply an easy answer to the endless questioning by tiresome adults about my career plans—adults were always asking us kids what the fuck we wanted to be when we grew up, and Brain Surgeon was a good response as it got a lot of grins and impressed gestures from the questioner. I coasted along with the whole Brain Surgeon thing for a few years, probably giving my poor parents—who probably hoped I’d magically evolve into some sort of athletic prodigy and earn scholarships to pay for school—a lot of sleepless nights as they contemplated the roughly 55 years of medical school such a profession requires.

Of course, I didn’t really want to be a brain surgeon. The only ‘profession’ I’ve ever desired is Writer, and as every writer in the world knows, the ‘profession’ of Writer is similar to the ‘profession’ of Sorcerer: Very cool sounding but usually only existing in movies and fantasy stories. Because no one makes any money at writing, ever, so it isn’t really a profession. But when I was six I didn’t realize writing was something I might someday palm off as a profession while standing on line for my food stamps, so Brain Surgeon it was.

And then, some time around grade three, I began to slowly realize that in order to become a Brain Surgeon, I was going to have to master math. Shortly after that came the aforementioned  standing-on-a-corner-drinking-blackberry-brandy period, and that was the last I thought about a career until I was twenty-two, waking from a lengthy alcoholic haze and realizing I needed a job, and right quick. And also too a change of clothes and a bath.

Somewhere in between, I sold my first novel, White Rabbit.

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Bullshit, The Inner Swine, Writing

WORK, NADA

Author: February 19, 2012 3 Comments

This essay originally appeared in Volume 12, Issue 2 of The Inner Swine.

Work, Nada

The Sad Tale of My Journal

by Jeff Somers

LIFE moves pretty fast, in a way. In some ways, sure, it drags along—an endless series of eight-hour sessions behind a desk, sleeping, and generally doing the same things over and over again, like consuming an entire bottle of bourbon and waking up two states away wearing a pirate costume. These sorts of ruts make it easy to let your existence slip into a blur that’s hard to remember. I don’t think this is anything new; I’m pretty sure that a few thousand years ago when daily life was an endless heart-pounding series of near-death experiences and desperate struggles to survive, it all got kind of blurred together into one endless mortal combat and individual days got scrambled into a melange.

A few years ago, I realized that my life was slipping away like that. Not that I was spending every day in a rut of blood struggles against nature, but that my days were terribly similar and were thus blending together, resulting in an existence that I couldn’t pin point very accurately. Memories stood out, of course, but I found I was having increasing difficulty placing those memories in context and in the proper timeline. I remember being naked and chased by police in Mexico, I would think, and having to steal a woman’s dress from a clothesline. When was that? 1993? 1994? And I’d be unable to place it in my own personal timeline.

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Bullshit, The Inner Swine

The! Inner! Swine!

Author: January 24, 2012 0 Comments

The Inner Swine Vol 17, Issue 3/4The new issue of my zine The Inner Swine is ready. I have a pile of paper here that is slowly being transformed into issues, which will then slowly be folded and stuffed into envelopes and mailed out. The key word being slowly.

In the mean time, the Kindle and Nook editions are available right now! Technology is amazing. The issue is 100pp long and the Kindle/Nook versions are each 99 cents and differ from the print only in that they lack most of the images. Go buy them and tell me I am a genius:

KINDLE

NOOK

Thank you for your support.

BAM!, The Inner Swine, Writing

From the Zine

Author: January 17, 2012 1 Comment

This essay originally appeared in The Inner Swine, Volume 13, Issue 3, September 2007

BATHROBE MAN

Working From Home = No Pants Ever

by Jeff Somers

Friends, the Singularity has come. No, not one of those singularities geeks like to talk about, where we either reach a point of technological advancement that frees us from the traditional bonds of mortality, or anything like that. Like almost everything else in this crappy, zine, the singularity I refer to is completely all about me. And it has nothing to do with nanobots being injected into me, or jacking into the Matrix or any other type of horseshit. We all have a particular Singularity, right, a moment in our lives where everything changes and life as we know it will never be the same, yes? For you it might be the day you realize you can brew your own beer, or the moment you see your first born for the first time, or something like that. For me, the Singularity is when I am able to do my job in my underwear.

And it has happened.

As anyone who has followed The Inner Swine lo these many years knows, I work on the low end of publishing. No swanky lunches with John Grisham for me, just endless drudgery working on textbooks and the like, taking shit from editors who think their book is the first book evah published and doing things like sizing five jabillion pictures of eye diseases for publication. This is not a glamorous job, but it pays a tiny proportion of the bills and allows me to claim to people that I am gainfully employed—I don’t think The Duchess would have married me 4 years ago if I hadn’t had at least a minimum-level kind of job, after all.

The company I’ve worked for since 2004 decided to close its New York office this year, which normally would have been a sad day in Jeff Land, since unemployment is shortly followed by Interviews and Resumes and Jeff staring at the bottom of a bottle of Rye and wondering if he could possibly make enough money selling bodily fluids to satisfy his wife’s need for new shoes (answer: no). But my company didn’t “let me go”, as the euphemism goes. They offered to let me work from home. And man, I jumped on that with two feet, just barely stifling a whoop of joy. Because now I can become Bathrobe Man.

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Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine