Writing

Creating Optimism

Author: jsomers January 15, 2020 0 Comments

I often joke about my poor memory and how I live in the present like someone with brain damage. This is reinforced by the fact that I greet each and every day with a song in my heart, the sort of cockeyed optimism that only people with brain damage ever actually experience. Sure, by 5PM I’ve been worn down to a whiskey-guzzling nub and I’m ready to set myself on fire rather than face another second, but every morning I’m good.

The secret is short story submissions.

Never Tell Me the Odds

The secret to my bright and sunny mornings is possibilities. I submit a lot of stories, I respond to a lot of freelance jobs, and I usually have novels on submission and other projects in play. The vast majority of these efforts won’t pan out, but every day begins with the possibility that it will end with good news.

That’s powerful stuff. And it’s an addendum to my usual motto that you write exactly zero of the stories you don’t begin, and sell exactly zero of the projects you don’t submit: You also get to be excited about zero of the submissions you don’t make, or the jobs you don’t apply for.

That excitement is like oxygen. Every morning I wake up and it just might be the day I sell a story, or get a new freelance job, or learn someone is going to grossly overpay me to make a film adaptation of one of my novels. Or something else, who knows? The point is, because I keep my level of open potential opportunities high, I get to start every day with this rush of possibility. And, friend, let me tell you: It works. I don’t understand writers who don’t submit and have something in the works all the time for this very reason. Sure, 99% of my submissions, applications, and naked requests for free money fail. Doesn’t matter, because every day I wake up with a fresh scorecard, and that gets me through the rough times.

Of course, my liver also starts each day with a clean(ish) slate, and that helps too, not gonna lie.

career, Writing

Don’t Do Unpaid Tests

Author: jsomers January 7, 2020 0 Comments

Man, it’s hard out here for a freelance writer. The whole ‘digital nomad’ thing is sold as freedom, and it’s honestly a great career. But it’s like any other work — there’s hustle involved. Sometimes you get emailed out of the blue and a job lands in your lap, but sometimes you have to pound the digital pavement and stir up work.

One of the downsides of freelance work is the multitude of approaches, work cultures, tools, and philosophies you have to adapt to. In a regular job you settle in, learn how things work, and go about your business. Every new freelance job is a fresh hell of platforms, tools, style guides, and personalities. And that goes for the hiring process, too; while most freelance gigs require similar things (samples, resume, etc) there’s a bit of variety in the details, which can be maddening.

One detail that crosses from maddening to infuriating is an unpaid writing test. Which I encounter far too often. And which all writers should run from, hard.

In the Words of Logan Roy, Fuck Off

On the surface a writing sample or test seems reasonable. They just want to see if you can write, if you can follow their style guide and directions, how well you comprehend instructions. Sure! I get it.

But writing a 1,000-word piece takes time and thought and research and revision. Writers should be paid for their time, and if you can’t afford to pay me for a test piece you’re telling me you don’t value my time at all. And if you can’t afford to pay for test pieces, your business model and/or your hiring process sucks, and that is not my fault.

So, my advice to all writers is: Don’t do it. Unpaid tests or samples simply underscore the idea that your time as a writer is more or less valueless. Even if you get the job, the tone has been set, and a place that wants a free piece just to get your foot in the door is probably not done nickel-and-diming you.

Plus, I consume at least $15 worth of alcohol per 1,000 words. I have to at least break even on these things.

freelance, Writing

The Muse

Author: jsomers January 6, 2020 1 Comment

Going back and reading something you created a long time ago is often exciting in the same way playing Russian Roulette can be exciting: You just don’t know how bad it’s gonna be. Sometimes I pull a story or novel from ten years ago and it is truly depressing how awful it is.

Sometimes, of course, the opposite is true. Sometimes you pull out a forgotten draft, and something amazing happens: You’re impressed with yourself. I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember past work very well. I don’t remember anything very well¹.

And the thing is, when I’m in the moment writing, I hate everything. All my current work is trash. It’s simplistic and dumb and repeats tricks I did better 20 years ago. But that’s how I always feel, and yet sometimes — sometimes — when I pull out an old piece and re-read it, it turns out to be complex and subtle and hilarious, and I wonder who snuck into my files and dropped this hot piece of great writing, because it couldn’t have been me.

Better with Age

It’s easy to get frustrated, because we always think our current WIP is shit and we had our last good idea seven years ago. But it’s worth remembering that we almost certainly felt that way about our past work when it was in progress. I don’t know how your Muse works, but mine tends to work via manipulation and misdirection, leaving soggy bar napkins in my pockets with strange, obscure phrases and setting things on fire to attract my attention, then refusing to accept the charges on my collect calls when I need bail money. I never feel in control of my creative process, which means I never think anything I’m currently working on — which I can clearly link to myself — is any good, while older work (which I can’t link to myself because I’ve forgotten all the details about its creation) is often surprisingly good, because it was created by a stranger named Past Jeff².

This is most useful, of course, at that moment when you’re halfway through a project that isn’t working out — or seems like it’s not working out. That moment of despair when you pour yourself three fingers of whiskey and wonder if you’ve ever actually written anything worth reading. At those moments, finding something you wrote and forgot about ten years ago that is actually pretty damn good is the goddamn wind beneath your wings.

Of course, in my case, it’s amazing that I do any good work at all when you consider the sheer number of cats sitting on me at any given time. I can barely breathe, much less write.

Writing

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

Nevertheless, Persist

Author: jsomers December 18, 2019 4 Comments

Sometimes lost in the tumultuous infinite conversation about writing–how to write, what to write about, how to sell the things you write–is the most fundamental thing of all: Persistence.

At the core, it doesn’t matter how you do it. Write every day? Write every other week? Write for 24 hours straight every Leap Day? It doesn’t matter. Not really. And it doesn’t matter what you do with your writing, not really. Submit it, self-publish it–whatever.

The most important thing is that you persist.

Exactly Zero

Giving up is the easiest thing in the world. You can give up micro and quit on a novel or story that isn’t cooperating. You can give up macro and walk away from writing altogether, frustrated and disillusioned. But as I am (overly) fond of saying, you publish exactly zero of the things you don’t finish, and if you give up, you won’t finish a goddamn thing.

Now, I’m one of those annoyingly cheerful writers who just enjoys it. I enjoy writing stories and novels, even when they suck (and they frequently do). I enjoy writing essays and blog posts and the mysterious unsettling things people pay me freelance monies to write. It’s my favorite activity, even when it’s going poorly.

But I know writers who don’t necessarily feel that way. They enjoy being creative, and they are driven to tell stories, but the actual writing isn’t always–or even usually–fun for them. So when it’s going poorly they start to think about giving it up. Maybe for a while, a vacation. Maybe forever.

But … you publish zero of the books you don’t finish. And you finish zero of the books you don’t start. If you think you might want to see your story in print somewhere, you’re going to have to persist.

And here’s the thing: If you persist, if you keep at it, you will finish things. Maybe not a lot of things, and maybe not to your satisfaction–but they’ll be finished. Which means you’ll be able to do something with them. Publish them, maybe. Or just enjoy the fact that you created something. Or pass them out to friends in a zine. You can do whatever you want, including ritualistically burn the pages/thumb drive while chanting something Sumerian that translates to a proffer on your soul to dark gods.

You can’t beseech dark gods unless you persist and finish your stories, is what I’m saying.

SO, whether it’s going well or going shitty, whether you’ve sold tons of stuff or still haven’t broken through, whether your current WIP is genius or a soggy loaf of fail–keep at it. If only for the sweet deal those dark gods are offering.

Writing

Avery Cates: ‘The Long Siege’ and Serial Novel Writin’

Author: jsomers December 12, 2019 0 Comments

The third part of the new Avery Cates novel The Burning City, The Long Siege, is available for pre-order, kids.

How this works is, I’m writing a novel (The Burning City, coming 2020) in big novella-length sections, and publishing each section on its own for 99 cents, just like I did with The Shattered Gears. Thus, you can either buy and read each part as they come, or wait until they’re collected into the novel. Or both! These sections are

There’s no tight schedule here; I’m planning to have both part four, The Dark Hunt, and the novel, The Burning City, out in 2020, but lord knows when. Just how organized/sober do you think I am?

Here’s the trailer for the novel:

Thanks to everyone who keeps buying all these Avery stories. I’m having a blast writing them, so it’s great to know people are enjoying them! You can pre-order The Long Siege at the following places:

AMAZON | B&N

Avery Cates, Book Trailers, Novels, Writing

Look On My Works Ye Mighty

Author: jsomers November 20, 2019 1 Comment

I’m a writer who’s obsessed with his own statistics as proof of his existence. This dates back to long before I started writing, in fact; I have every book I’ve ever read, for example—every single book—because the sight of all of those physical spines on a bookshelf is evidence that I am here. I have every baseball card I ever bought for the same reason, and also because of the mystical relationship between baseball stats and my own personal existential scorecard. Barry Bonds may have hit 73 home runs in 2001, but I read 37 books that year, and wrote 12 short stories and 2 novels³.

Over drinks recently a fellow writer told me they still print out hardcopy of their work each and every night⁴. Whatever they’d managed to write that day, they printed. They had stacks and stacks of paper everywhere, monuments to their work. I experienced a pang of regret, because my desire for those same kinds of monuments has run straight into my desire to live in the future, because like a lot of people, I’m running a 100% paperless writing career right now⁵.

But I miss the paper.

Stacks and Stacks

I held out for a long time. Until some time in 2005, I wrote all my fiction on a 1950s manual typewriter I stole from my sainted mother. Every story, novel, and failed experiment was tapped out on that old machine, resulting in a new stack of tidy white paper to add to the existing stacks crowding my apartments⁶. Moving house was a logistical nightmare thanks to the books and the manuscripts, and I quickly ran out of friends willing to show up for a slice of pizza and a beer⁷. That was okay, because all that physical paper reminded me that I was there. I had done things. Those ideas and stories weren’t just my imagination, I’d made them real.

It’s different today. Are the new ideas real? I don’t know. I have an obsessive spreadsheet where I keep track of finished works, and the numbers are comforting⁸. But it’s not the same. First of all, unfinished works have their own charms to the writer⁹, and they are invisible to the spreadsheet. And all those ones and zeros—no matter how many clouds you back them up to—exist only because civilization exists, because of the power grid and the technological infrastructure. When the world ends, and it inevitably will, when everything shuts off, in a split second everything I’ve ever created will more or less vanish until some super-evolved species of ant rises up from the radioactive slush and re-invents computer forensics.

In so many ways, the modern writing career is an improvement. Research is a matter of a few clicks. Submissions don’t require a trip to the post office¹⁰. Social media allows me to pretend to be much, much more successful than I actually am. And, yes, I can now move my entire life’s work to a new house by sticking a thumb drive into my pocket as I leave¹¹.

But I miss them, the stacks of paper. Because if the health department isn’t called to my Collyer Brother-like mansion because I have died after being trapped for weeks beneath a collapsed pile of ancient manuscripts, did I even actually exist¹²??

Bullshit, Writing

Don’t Fear The Reaper

Author: jsomers November 13, 2019 1 Comment

Like, I don’t know, every other human on Earth, I am not really aware of my own aging process. Well, somewhat aware. I mean, every time I stand up and some piece of my body literally falls off, or any time I stay up until 6AM drinking liquor that’s so fresh and corrosive it has a grit to it and instead of bounding into my day with a few aspirin and a therapeutic vomit like when I was 25 I die for 35 seconds in the back of an ambulance, I feel it a little. But in general I feel kind of the same as I did long ago when I was cool. From my perspective, I’m the same asshole I always was.

But that’s not really true. In reality, I’ve changed a lot, I think. And that’s changed my writing. And that’s okay. In life and writing, you gotta be willing to change.

A Game of Suffering

Two conversations. First:

2000 Duchess: Why have we been standing in line for Mets playoff tickets for eight hours?

2000 Jeff: BECAUSE THE METS ARE GOING. ALL. THE. WAY. And also because the Mets front office is incompetent.

Then:

2019 Duchess: Who’s gonna be in the World Series this year?

2019 Jeff: I have no idea.

Baseball used to be such a core part of my personality it was sometimes the only way my friends and I could communicate effectively. Well, that and Simpsons jokes. But just like I stopped watching The Simpsons about ten years ago, my love for baseball has ebbed. I still have affection for the game and the beautiful stats, but I can’t summon the energy to watch games or follow the season any more.

It’s strange to realize that something I once devoted so much energy to is no longer of interest to me, and I struggled with it. I tried to force myself to care, because it disturbed me that I’d changed so fundamentally. But then I just relaxed into it, because if you think about it for a moment there’s nothing that strange about losing energy for something after thirty fucking years. I mean, I’ve changed. Evolved. For the better? Probably not, but that’s not the point.

What does this have to do with writing? It’s the same principle. You should find that your approach to writing changes. You should be reading different books, weird, challenging books and easy satisfying books that show you tricks and techniques you’ve never seen before, and at the end of a decade of such books you should be writing differently. Better? Maybe. Maybe not. Doesn’t matter.

Just like Beisbol Jeff, this can be tough to deal with when your writing is part of your identity. When a reader or reviewer wonders why you don’t write the stuff you used to, or when you get bored writing stuff that once kept you up late because you couldn’t wait to nail down that scene. It goes straight to who you are as a writer, as a person. Your identity. Just remember that it’s normal for this to shift and evolve. It really has to. If it doesn’t, you’re stagnating.

Or maybe this is all because baseball games are 57 hours long and I’m just kidding myself. Carry on.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

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 youth¹³, 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

Don’t Self-Cancel

Author: jsomers October 31, 2019 1 Comment

Being a writer is exhausting. Sure, to the outsider it looks like nothing but limousines and tuxedos¹⁴, but in reality being a professional writer — or even a for-the-love-writer — means being an idea machine. As in, you have to have an endless supply of evergreen ideas to keep those sweet checks coming in.

This is true in fiction and freelance. The craft stuff, the style and the grammar and the tricks and the techniques are all important, but they’re meaningless unless you have an idea to work on. Without an idea to spin into characters and plot or a thesis and supporting material, you’ve got nothing.

The worst part is how easy it is to gaslight yourself about potential ideas.

You Know: For Kids

Every creative person experiences the sort of self-doubt that can potentially light your hair on fire, and it’s never more powerful than when you have what initially seems like a really great idea for a story or article. It’s so easy to convince yourself, slowly at first and with increasing speed, that you can’t pull it off, or it’s too crazy, or it’s actually been done, or no one will get it.

And these things might be true, which is the hell of it all. But you should work on that idea anyway. Self-cancelling yourself just leads to doing nothing. It leads to creating nothing. Sure, your nutty idea might flop. Maybe you can’t pull it off. You’ll wind up with a mess of terrible, half-assed words.

Boo fucking hoo. Welcome to the world of writing! It’s terrible here.

At least you’ll have works to disparage and bury, to burn ritualistically in your basement while summoning dark forces to your aid. If you self-cancel and convince yourself your ideas are shit, you won’t even have that. So write those ideas. Work on them. Revise them, improve them, and at least then when you’re burning the hard drive and chanting Baphomet’s secret name you’ll have a good reason.

Writing