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 novels¹.

Over drinks recently a fellow writer told me they still print out hardcopy of their work each and every night². 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 now³.

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 apartments⁴. 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 beer⁵. 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 comforting⁶. But it’s not the same. First of all, unfinished works have their own charms to the writer⁷, 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 office⁸. 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 leave⁹.

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 exist¹⁰??

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 youth¹¹, 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 tuxedos¹², 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

Genre Mashing

Author: jsomers October 18, 2019 0 Comments

I’m going to assume two things about you right now. One, I’m going to assume you are aware that there exists in this universe a television show called The Affair, which airs on Showtime and is currently in its fifth and final season. And two, I’m going to assume you don’t watch it, because as someone who has watched it I can’t imagine that other real, actual people watch it. Because it is terrible. And extremely white. But mainly terrible.

Was it always terrible? Maybe not, though it’s hard to remember. The reason I am still watching this terrible, terrible show is because The Duchess refuses to let go; once she begins watching something she hangs on with a death grip. I recall that when the show began, the whole conceit — and it needed a conceit because it’s fundamentally a show about wealthy white folks experiencing some truly dull mid-life crises — was that every episode was split into two perspectives that showed many of the same events from different points-of-view. That conceit was never as interesting or well-used as they thought it was, but the show barely even references it any more so it doesn’t matter.

I am not here, however, to complain (or, not much more than usual) or to discuss the decline of a show that was only mediocre to begin with. No! I am here to discuss the only actually interesting writing choice the show¹³ has made this season: The reckless swerve into science fiction.

The Future’s So Meh, I Gotta Wear a Drab, Formless Sack

I have myself occasionally used a genre-mash to liven up a slowly dying manuscript. Sometimes it even works! A genre-mash is my own term, describing the sudden injection of speculative elements into a story that has been heretofore strictly realistic. A (dumb) example off the top of my head might be a murder mystery that plays out like a noir thriller for 50,000 words and turns out to have been a time travel story all along.

It’s a gimmick, but sometimes it can work. Now, this is not exactly what I think is going on with The Affair. What’s going on with The Affair is much more dumb.

So, as a quick bit of background (spoilers if you care about such things), The Affair started life as a show about, you know, an affair: A dickish, unhappy middle-aged man has an affair with a troubled, unhappy woman, and it blows up both their lives. The show has been concerned with a slowly-growing but pretty contained cast of characters ever since, exploring the many ways this affair has changed lives and affected personal histories.

One thread is the daughter of the unhappy woman, who the unhappy man originally thought was his but turned out to be the unhappy woman’s ex-husband’s (soapy stuff). This daughter, Joanie, is still a young kid in the main storyline, but the unhappy woman was murdered at the end of last season, and the decision was made to have an adult Joanie investigate the death thirty years later. As a result, a portion of The Affair season 5 is set in the future.

Okay, I can understand that plot decision. But here The Show had some narrative choices:

Acknowledge that it’s 2040 or something but don’t delve into the changes time hath wrought and keep the narrative focus narrow
Go full sci-fi with flying cars and an unending war with ruthless robot armies or something
Half-ass it with some baseline technology upgrades and a muddled environmental collapse story.

Sadly, they picked #3. This is the worst option. If you’re writing this story and decide the time-jump is necessary, #2 is the bold option that might yield narrative gold and #1 is the safe option that does the work you need without wasting a lot of energy. The third option is just pointless. It results in weird little tech doodads like tablets with air screens and glasses that can literally show you weather simulations from thirty years before, and a weird thread about climate change where everyone seems pretty convinced the world is ending and Long Island is supposedly sinking under the waves, but no one is particularly worried about it?

Then The Show apparently got tired trying and so there are a lot of weird moments where characters ignore the time jump and just use standard 2019 technology, which is totally because of laziness but is weakly sold as quirk. At one point a character offers Joanie a ride in his totally 2019-appropriate SUV and she smirks and says something about how no one uses gasoline any more, and he laughs it off. This is so stupid it hurts my brain, and it’s not the only time. In another scene, when a villain is tricking Joanie into signing something The Show is too lazy to mock up a cool tablet or something, and so he hands her a piece of paper, and she makes the same lame comment.

This, friends, is what is known as bad writing. If you’re gonna lean sci-fi, then lean the fuck in and commit. Sorry. I am angry, because I am being forced to watch this shit by The Duchess.

Don’t Half-Ass Sci-Fi

The secret to mashing up a non-speculative story with a sci-fi element is to lean into the genre stuff. The mistake The Affair made is feinting towards these elements but then getting scared and finding cheap ways to keep the look and feel of the future the same as the present. If your goal is to walk that line, if the point of your sci-fi is that the future will look exactly like 2019 with a new hat, that’s fine — as long as it’s purposeful. But deciding that the future will be a high-tech environmental disaster and then doing none of the world-building to make that work leaves you with just the hat.

Someone Else's Writing, Writing

The Point of It All

Author: jsomers October 17, 2019 1 Comment

When it comes to writing, there’s a lot of focus on the what we’re all working on, and the how of creating a story from thin air, but not so much on the why. Sort of like how I’m very concerned with what kind of whiskey I’m drinking and the how of acquiring that whiskey, but I don’t spend much time on the why I want to drink whiskey. Which, bad example, because obviously I want to drink whiskey because it’s delicious.

The question of why do we put so much effort into writing these stories doesn’t get addressed very often, because I think we all assume we know the answer. But I suspect that assumption is different for almost everyone, because some people are writing because they want to sell millions of books and be J.K. Rowling, and some people are writing because it’s an instinctive urge they can’t resist, and some people are writing because it’s fun.

Me, I’m writing because I want to be published.

Jeff Everywhere

I’m not a writer who sits on projects. When I finish a story or a novel, I immediately want to do something with it. Usually that means sell it to a publisher or a magazine and get it out there. If that isn’t an option for some reason, self-publish it. Or do something else with it, transform it into another media, something.

Because I want my words out there. Life is short, and all I’m leaving behind is a string of disappointed former friends and some embarrassing photos. Unless I can get my words out there, as many as possible.

Folks who don’t pursue publication with the wild-eyed desperation of a dog chasing its tail make no sense to me. Dying with a drawer full of finished manuscripts is crazy, especially in this golden age of digital publishing. What’s the worst that can happen? A deluge of hurtful reviews mocking your writing, intelligence, and fashion sense? That happens anyway. Wait … does it only happen to me? Damn.

Knowing why you’re writing is powerful. This is true in general as well as the specific reasons for your current WIP. Are you writing because you’re trying to steal someone else’s greatness for yourself? Is it an old passion project you’ve been trying to make work for decades? Are you testing an idea or technique? Or is it just something fun that came to you in dream? Knowing why you’re writing can help you hone an individual WIP and steer it purposefully, while knowing why you’re writing in general can help you choose those projects in the first place.

Unless your thing is ragged chaos and your personal motto is Mongo Merely Pawn in Game of Life, which is a legitimate choice but makes no sense to me. Because I want the future to a riff on Bill and Ted where everyone uses words from one of my novels as the basis for all religion.

Writing

Walking Away from the Fireworks Factory: When Sci-Fi Stories Abandon Their Premise

Author: jsomers October 9, 2019 0 Comments

I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that there was a time in my life when most of my conversational gambits were direct quotes from The Simpsons; in fact, my friends and I could hold entire conversations using just lines from the first, oh, ten seasons of the show. One that still sticks with me is Millhouse’s anguished demand to know ‘When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?!’ in Season Eight’s ‘The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show,’ wherein the ostensible plot of the show-within-a-show is about going to such a factory, which never actually happens. Over the years it’s been an easy shorthand for stories that promise some exciting moment that seems to never arrive, either due to glacial pacing or simple bad writing.

Some stories, however, start at the Fireworks Factory—and then slowly back away from it. Every TV show, film, novel, or comic book has a premise that attracts you, the core bit of awesome at the center of the story that is the main reason you’re in the audience in the first place. When you go to see an action movie, you’re looking for the stunts, for the incredible fight scenes. When you read a horror novel, you’re there because you’ve been promised a terrifying monster, or a terrifying curse. Something terrifying, certainly. Most stories take a little time to warm up to that promise, to develop characters and build a world, and then, finally, deliver on that promise.

Other stories do the exact opposite. They start off with the cool part. And then they incrementally abandon their own premise, becoming an entirely different story.

The Infinite Unpacking

Sometimes this happens because the writers didn’t actually have any interest in the premise they sold you in the first place. Consider, for example, the HBO reboot of Westworld.

The Fireworks Factory, in this case, would be the sublime chaos of super-advanced robots gaining some form of sentience and rebelling against the humans who have been paying exorbitant fees for the privilege of abusing and violently damaging them. The original 1973 film, written and directed by Michael Crichton, has an expected structure: You’re introduced to Westworld while it’s operating as expected, you learn the rules of the place, and then you get the demented fun of watching everything spiral out of control into wonderful robot violence.

The reboot more or less starts there, with the malfunctions starting very early in Season 1, and a slow build to the robot apocalypse. Using multiple and deceptive timelines, the writers start off with the robots going haywire—and then, just when the massacre starts, the season ends, and in Season 2 you only get glimpses of it. If you were hoping for sequences of guests fleeing from murderous robots, too bad: There are almost none. You never get to the Fireworks Factory, because the show was never heading there in the first place. Instead, the writers are much more interested in the increasingly complicated philosophical underpinnings of their story—what is sentience? What is life?

That doesn’t make it a bad story. It makes it a different story, that will never serve up the imagined scenes that got people to tune in initially.

The U-Turn

Sometimes, there’s a detour on the way to the Fireworks Factory because the story just doesn’t work the way the writer expected. The thing about a story is that it has to work in two very different arenas: In conception—that is, on paper, as an outline and a sketch—and in reality, as an actual story. Sometimes the outline and the concept have to be abandoned because once you start writing it just doesn’t work.

A good recent example of this is Fear the Walking Dead. The spinoff from The Walking Dead was originally pitched as a prequel of sorts that would explore the way society collapses under the onslaught of zombies. The first episode was set about six months before the main series. For a lot of folks this was exactly the Fireworks Factory they wanted to go to, because often the most intriguing and exciting parts of a zombie story is the part where civilization slowly unspools. You start with the subtle signs—the dire news reports, the mysterious government decisions—and then bit by bit normalcy bleeds away, until eventually you’re all running for your lives and putting all those Apex Legends skills to good use blowing the heads off zombies.

But Fear the Walking Dead quickly began transforming into a show that actually isn’t all that different from the main program—just a bunch of people trying to not be eaten by zombies in a world that’s pretty much collapsed. This is partly due to the fact that the writers just didn’t give themselves enough runway to work with; societal collapse is a slow-burn story, and would have required that you delay the arrival of zombie hordes for a long time, or at least kept them peripheral. That’s tough to do in a TV series that’s about zombies, and so the story got there quick. But that’s a different Fireworks Factory altogether.

Later seasons saw the show retooled and revamped to accept this; they’ve brought on crossover characters from the main show and abandoned any pretense that it’s about a different phase of the zombie apocalypse. There’s still a lot of opportunity for interesting stories there, of course. It’s just not the story that early viewers thought they were going to get.

Runway

It’s easy, as a writer, to misjudge how far material will take you. Sometimes a single sentence in a plot outline will power hundreds of pages of manuscript. Sometimes a page of outline will yield a single, thin chapter. It’s difficult to judge stuff like that before you’re elbow-deep in the storytelling. In other words, writing a book is sometimes like planning a trip to a Fireworks Factory but traffic gets really bad so you take a random exit, or the factory is abandoned and filled with bats so you go to an alternate factory nearby. And sometimes you start off with what seems like a reasonable analogy and lost control of it completely.

Someone Else's Writing, Writing

Zombies Everywhere: The Graying of Genre

Author: jsomers September 25, 2019 0 Comments

The power balance in my marriage is despairingly unequal—my wife is unquestionably in charge. I confess this to explain how it is that I watched every single episode of The Big Bang Theory; my wife has a weakness for Chuck Lorre sitcoms, and I have a weakness for making her happy. Incidentally, The Big Bang Theory is also prominently featured in my moments of Existential Horror when I realize that I, too, will someday die; it’s incredible to realize the show debuted in 2007, six months before Marvel’s Iron Man.

For anyone who wasn’t alive or aware back in 2007, you can now look back on it as possibly the last time that a concept like The Big Bang Theory—which can be summed up as Haw Haw Lookit These Funny Nerds!—was a viable pitch for a TV show. Because not only have nerds clearly inherited the Earth in terms of pop culture domination (the Top 5 highest-grossing films of all time, for example, include two Avengers movies, The Force Awakens, and Avatar—all released post-2007), but the genre distinctions that once separated us from the rest of the world are quickly becoming meaningless.

The Thin Gray Line

Genre has always been a meaningless invention of marketing forces, to a certain extent. While defining something as ‘science fiction’ or a ‘thriller’ has utility for the consumer, it’s a messy business that was never well-defined. The reasons we might categorize Homer’s Odyssey or Shelley’s Frankenstein as ‘classics’ or ‘literature’ instead of epic fantasy and sci-fi horror are pretty thin. The argument against considering many James Bond films (not so much the novels) works of sci-fi is kind of weak, and so many TV shows, films, and works of modern literature have used the magical realism of A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life for lame plot devices they’ve become genres unto themselves—and yet are rarely called out as speculative in nature.

The main reason for such seemingly arbitrary genre classifications is due to a general attitude that genre was juvenile, the sort of stuff kids enjoyed because they’re dumb and immature. It was perfectly okay to love comic books when you’re eleven; by the time you grew up you were supposed to leave those childish things behind. A show like Doctor Who was conceived in the early 1960s as a children’s program, and an educational one at that, because no one at the time would have imagined that adults wanted to watch a show about a time-traveling alien magician who lectures about Earth history for reasons unknown. With a few exceptions, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror films were always low-budget affairs designed to serve what was assumed to be an audience of teenagers and younger kids.

And then Star Wars happened, kicking off a four-decade shift as people began to realize two simple things: One, adults were just as into sci-fi and fantasy as kids; and two, there was money in speculative genres. A lot of money.

The Nerdening

It’s no joke to say that the last few decades of pop culture have been a slow triumph of all things speculative. So, so much of modern-day pop culture is driven by science fiction and fantasy, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Game of Thrones and Stranger Things. What was once the province of grindhouse and pulp is now mainstream, and one unexpected and oft-overlooked effect of this shift is the erosion of genre lines. Put simply, it’s increasingly common to find speculative tropes used in ‘literary’ genres—and vice versa. The result is a kind of new Gray Genre that isn’t clearly definable as old-school literary fiction but also doesn’t seem to fit neatly into the classic sci-fi or fantasy categories.

Two easy examples of this new, mixed Gray Genre is Never Let Me Go by Haruki Murakami and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Both are clearly science fiction—one telling the story of clones grown to be sources of replacement organs, the other about the grinding attempt of a small number of people to survive the end of the world. Yet both are usually categorized and discussed as literary fiction, largely due to the prior work of both authors and a lingering prejudice against sci-fi in literary circles—writers with reputations for serious work still fight hard against what they see as a cheaper, more juvenile classification. Ian McEwan recently worked pretty hard to insist that his novel Machines Like Me, which deals with artificial intelligence in an alternative universe, is not actually sci-fi. And Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, also won an Arthur C. Clarke Award, though you wouldn’t know it from the book’s official website, where the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and the Man Booker Prize are all mentioned prominently.

But these lingering prejudices are the product of that earlier age, and are fading fast. The fact that Whitehead can publish a novel that is essentially a work of alternate history and magical realism and have it win a Pulitzer proves that. As more and more novels like these—and more and more writers follow in Justin Cronin’s (The Passage) footsteps as a writer who moves between genres without losing anything for it—there will be less of a focus on the specific genre of a story, and having speculative tropes pop up in all kinds of stories will be more common.

Consider a TV series like HBO’s Years and Years, which is marketed as a drama but has a clear-if-subtle sci-fi premise that follows a British family over the course of fifteen years stretching into the near future. Notably, the discussion surrounding the show has little to do with whether the conceit makes it any less a drama, signaling that general audiences—people who have been watching Marvel movies for more than a decade now, and who undoubtedly include folks who never read epic fantasy growing up but became hooked on Game of Thrones—no longer find these elements foreign or juvenile. They’re just tools of the storytelling trade.

None of this excuses my having watched all 279 episodes of The Big Bang Theory, of course—but it’s how we got to the point where a film like Hobbs and Shaw (a spinoff from the ridiculous and ridiculously successful Fast and Furious franchise) can be marketed as an ‘action’ film when the plot involves a cybernetically-enhanced supervillain, a deadly virus, and a complete suspension of the laws of physics. All the genres are being slowly baked into each other, until eventually they just won’t matter any more.

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

Read the Classics

Author: jsomers September 18, 2019 0 Comments

Writing is a weird gig. At a recent panel someone asked about the writing process, and I told a funny story about living with five cats and how my process was basically writing whenever I didn’t have a cat sitting on my keyboard, and then I thought, how weird is it that I sit in the same room every day making shit up? Pretty weird.

It’s also weird how easy it is to get depressed or discouraged in this business. Sitting on the panel, it occurred to me that the writers assembled represented a wide swath of the career pyramid. We had folks who’d published dozens and dozens of books and were household names, we had folks who’d published a few things here and there. It’s so easy to look at the former and feel like you’re not going anywhere. It’s easy to look at the shambles of your work in progress (WIP) and feel like it’s a mess, and you’ll never finish it, and even if you do finish it you won’t sell it.

There’s one weird trick I use in these moments. I pull out something I wrote a while ago and read it.

Look On My Works Ye Mighty

There are only a few rules in this life that I believe to be universal:

Cats > Dogs
Whiskey > Everything
Something I Wrote in 2005 >>>> Anything I Wrote This Decade

I don’t think I’m the only writer who feels like everything I write magically improves with time. I’m rarely satisfied with my work in the moment, but let it brine for a few years and open it back up and holy fucking shit I was fucking brilliant.

Try it! Pick up something you finished a while ago and give it a read. Marvel at the nuance you forgot about, the smart plotting you can’t believe you pulled off, the hilarious character bits that make you laugh. It never fails: That old piece I pull out of the hard drive might not be pure genius, it might need some work, but invariably I am amazed at how good it actually was, usually contrary to my opinion at the time. And that always gives me a push to get back to work and finish this piece of trash I’m currently hating on, so I can continue the cycle.

Of course, you run the risk of opening up a letter you wrote to yourself 20 years ago wondering how rich and famous you are and then getting blackout drunk in a deep depression, but what is life without risk?

Writing