Writing

Long Days Journey Into Published

Author: jsomers May 12, 2013 9 Comments

Let me back up.

In 1997, I wrote a novel. After a lengthy period of writing in the SF/F genres exclusively (though I didn’t think of them as genres back then but just as Shit I Wanted to Read and Therefore Write About) I entered into a period I think of as my Faux Literary Period, where I thought I should be writing about Velly Important Stuff and eschewing things like robots and magic. So I started writing about a bunch of alcoholic losers who rob an office where one of them works, thinking it would change their lives. At first it was titled Lie Down in Our Graves after a Dave Mathews song I’ve never heard, because my titles always suck.

I renamed the novel Lifers and in 1999 started sending it out, and sold it, unagented, to a tiny publisher out in California. For money! A microscopic advance and a standard royalty rate. I figured I’d made it and began purchasing rare whiskies in bulk.

I wish I’d had an agent, however, as it was a terrible contract I was saved from only because the publisher went out of business in 2004. I will never know how many copies of Lifers sold back then since I never received any sort of statement from them. Lifers got reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and The Philadelphia Inquirer but that didn’t amount to much.

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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

BRING ON THE HELPER MONKEYS

Author: jsomers 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 Journey

Author: jsomers February 26, 2013 5 Comments

So, Trickster is out. Huzzah!

I started writing this book in 2010. It’s amazing sometimes how you start with a germ of an idea and then end up somewhere far away from that. Here’s the first ~850 words I wrote for this book. I trashed this (and several versions afterwards) before settling on the final approach in October 2010; much of this is still in the final version, though in a different form, and spread over many sections.

Trickster Draft Zero, August 2010

WHEN I was nine years old, my father picked me up after one of my Cub Scout meetings at the old church, which was strange because my father had left us the year before and I hadn’t seen him since. He drove an old boat of a car, cracked seats and broken radio. I remember climbing around the front and back seats, so much room it was like a little portable house on wheels. He let me; he just sat behind the wheel with a pint bottle of brandy between his legs, humming old songs as he drove.

We merged onto an empty highway, amber lights driving away the darkness but creating a weird Marscape of road, like we’d left the real world behind and were driving in the Ghost World. I didn’t know where we were going. Dad took regular sips from his bottle and answered all my questions with grunts and monosyllables. I had a lot of questions. I remember being really excited, after all this time Dad had come to take me on a trip, and after I got tired of not getting answers to my questions I settled into the back seat with my Webelos handbook and tried to figure out where we were going—amusement parks, zoos, the beach all seemed likely candidates. Eventually I remember falling asleep, liking the sensation of rocking back and forth in the big back seat, the smell of cigarettes and the sound of the wind.

Dad shook me awake and we were out in the middle of nowhere in the parking lot of a small square tavern with a huge red neon sign that said, simply, BEER. I followed him sleepily inside, where a handful of people who all seemed to be wearing flannel shirts and baseball caps were scattered around the tiny, gloomy room. Dad lifted me onto a stool and I remember slouching there, still asleep, looking owlishly around.

“Bourbon,” Dad said. It was the first time he’d spoken since he’d picked me up. “Neat. A coke for the kid.”

This was magic. The man behind the bar, who was fat and red in the face, his gray-white hair greasy and pasted flat against his round head, put a glass in front of me with a grin and used a gun on the end of a rubber hose to fill the glass with soda. Soda from a hose! It was magic, and I immediately schemed to have one installed at Mom’s house, because she always forgot to do the shopping and there was never anything to eat or drink.

Dad didn’t pay any attention to me, just sat there staring at the silent TV mounted up on the wall and sipped from his glass. Any time I finished a soda the man behind the bar waddled over, smiling, and refilled my glass. Free soda from a hose. After a while I eased off my stool and wandered over to where a trio of ancient electronic games sat blinking dully. Dad watched me for a moment, then shrugged and called the bartender over, fishing out a five dollar bill and holding it up.

“Give the kid some quarters,” he said.

I drank soda until I had to pee so badly my legs ached, and played fifteen games of bowling before finally giving in to the realities of the situation and heading for the bathroom. It was a scary bathroom. It had a door that didn’t close right and was dark, everything in it cold and slimy. To get there I had to pass by an old man of at least my Dad’s age sitting at the end of the bar. He wore a white suit with no tie or socks, just white pants and jacket that seemed too light for the weather and a white shirt. He was a mass of wrinkles. His hair was long and slightly curly, and his nose dominated his face, making him resemble a squirrel. I didn’t want to push past him to get to the bathroom, and hesitated for a second or two while my kidneys swam up behind my eyes, bulging them out. Finally I screwed up my courage and hustled past. He just grinned at me.

###

I got bored after a while. The games were old and creaky and not fun and after my seventh or eighth soda the impossible happened and I didn’t want any more of them. Dad just sat and drank and stared. I was afraid to make much noise or bother him, remembering how terrifying he was when angered, and tried to find other ways to amuse myself. I looked around and found the man in the white suit staring at me. He smiled and waved, and I looked away. When I stole a glance back at him, he waved again, and I realized with a start that his fingertips were on fire. As he moved them back and forth through the air they flickered and smoked.

The flames were blue-green. As I stared the man winked at me.

I looked around, but no one else seemed to have noticed. Everyone else might as well have been asleep. Not me. My heart was pounding

BAM!, Trickster, Writing

Rookie Mistake: Juvenilia

Author: jsomers November 29, 2012 1 Comment

Drunk Jeff Working Hard at “writing”

You’d think that by now I’d have this writing game down pat. Six novels with two more due out soon, over twenty-five short stories published, a few anthologies – I may not be a genius, or a bestseller, but I’ve done this for a while now. You’d think I’d have figured out how to not humiliate myself any more.

You’d think.

You have to remember, I am a lazy man. Lazy, lazy, lazy. Like, seriously lazy. Lazy Men like me have a lot of really bad habits born out of this laziness and we’re always getting ourselves into pickles because we try to be lazy and shit gets real and then we end up working twice as hard in order to pull things back together. Lazy Men are probably pretty much responsible for every tragedy and horror in history, just a long series of guys who’ve been wearing the same pants for six days shrugging and neglecting to do something.

So, my most recent laziness-related humiliation came from submitting a story. I write a lot of stories. Most are crap, but a few linger in my memory as pretty good. Sometimes I go back through the archives and find a few gems — pieces I didn’t appreciate at the time, but which have something to them. A more mature, diligent author would revise these. I prefer to just submit them.

Sometimes this works out. I’ve sold a few, much to my surprise. But then I’m always surprised when I sell something. When my agent called to tell me we’d sold Trickster last year I spent several weeks chuckling at her excellent joke. When the advance check arrived I was puzzled for a while, then assumed it was a hoax. So selling a few pieces of juvenilia doesn’t rattle me: Sometimes I think the central idea is good, but the execution is kind of meh, so I can see how it happens.

Recently, though, I submitted an old story with a nice idea and I didn’t really read it through very closely. I’m far too Rock Star for that, as long as we agree to define Rock Star as very drunk. It was recently rejected, and the comments from the editors were … not kind. They were also: Not inaccurate. I re-read the piece and frankly I’m a little ashamed of myself. Note the emphasis on little. I remain pretty much in love with myself.

The story can be saved with a bit of revision, and I’ll be dumb enough to submit it again. Lessons: none. I make it my business to never ever learn anything. So far it’s worked out remarkably well. And if you allow yourself to learn lessons from your writing career you’ll end up giving up writing because the lessons are always along the lines of you will never be able to quit your day job or your author photo makes you look like a dweeb because you are a dweeb. Still, this could be a lesson for all of you: Be careful when submitting your juvenilia, kids. There’s probably a reason you let it rot all those years.

Bullshit, Filthy Lucre, Writing

The Role of Terror and Jealousy in Writing

Author: jsomers August 20, 2012 11 Comments

So, I have a new book series coming out from Pocket Books. Trickster will be out in early 2013 and its sequel will follow. Also a digital-only short story in-between the two novels. I really excited, of course. These will be my seventh and eighth novels published, and let me tell you, right up until I sign the contract for the ninth I will be convinced they are also my last. That’s how it goes.

Here’s the story of Trickster in timeline format:

1995: I write a story titled The Night will Echo Back at You which deals with magic spells cast via blood sacrifice in the modern world. I never submit it anywhere. It’s one of those stories that I like in concept but is kind of dull in actual execution.

1996-2010: Nothing much happens. I drink a lot. Sell some other pieces of writing.

2010: Having finished the final Avery Cates book, The Final Evolution, I go to Bouchercon in San Francisco ostensibly to try to expand my audience into the thriller/mystery crowd but really so I can follow my agent around and surreptitiously order booze on her dime all day long (it worked!). Bouchercon teaches me two things: No one knows who the hell I am, and there’s no guarantees that I’ll ever sell another book. I was suddenly incredibly jealous of all the authors around me who had bigger followings, and terrified that I’d never publish again. The sheer energy of everyone around me busily promoting their work got under my skin.

I’d been planning to expand upon this old story anyway. Terrified and jealous, I wrote 10,000 words on the plane ride home. Most of those words survived into the final version of the book. That doesn’t always happen.

Fear is a great motivator for me when I write. Fear that it will suck, that no one will ever read it, that I’m actually not nearly as good a writer as I think I am. It gets the juices flowing, let me tell you. Some books get written peacefully over the course of years. Some burst out in an explosion of terror. I think I’ve done good work both ways, but I also suspect that fear is always down there, bubbling, churning the wheel that drives it all. Even if I’m not bug-eyed terrified like I was on that flight home, chugging tiny bottles of bourbon and garnering suspicious glances from the flight attendants (the strip search in Newark airport upon landing was no fun) the fear is still there, driving me.

It seems pretty obvious to me that if you’re satisfied, you don’t do anything. Maybe this is why so many artists bog down in middle age and stop producing good work; they hit a certain level of material comfort and are satisfied. Fear comes in many forms, and for some maybe the fear of starving to death is all it takes. Me, I don’t mind starving to death. Being ignored for the rest of my life is what gets my goat. I could live in a dumpster and drink antifreeze (not as bad as you might think – it’s got an oakey, spicey finish) and be okay with that. Tell me I’ll never sell another book and I’ll burst into tears.

The real question is, does the type and level of fear have anything to do with the level of work you produce? As an experiment perhaps I should be locked in a cage with two hungry bears and a laptop. See what happens. Well, we know exactly what happens: Bear porn. Don’t ask.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Trickster, Writing

Interview with Little Old Me

Author: jsomers August 14, 2012 0 Comments

Larry Gent interviewed me a while ago and the glorious results have been posted:

http://42webs.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/panic-view-jeff-somers/

“What is your favourite book/author? Why?

I don’t have one! I do have writers I am hatefully jealous of, and would kidnap, Misery-style, at the first opportunity. But I should probably not implicate myself in any future mysterious kidnappings of famous authors, so let’s change the subject. To your original question. Which I suspect you are impatient for an answer to. I just ended that sentence with a preposition. I am a horrible writer. Yes, I’m a little drunk.”

Go read it. Because I am fascinating.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, More Shit I Gotta Do, Writing

Excerpt

Author: jsomers July 30, 2012 3 Comments

Here’s an excerpt from an unpublished novel. Just a piece of writing I like, presented without context.

XII. Monday

I knew Lindsay the Doctor from High School. I knew this, although I didn’t remember much from High School. My childhood at all, really. My past faded. A few years down the line, it was like stuff never happened. People would show me photos – Tommy in a cowboy costume, Tommy screaming at some concert, Tommy playing guitar with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth at some frat party – and there was nothing. No glimmer of recognition. Like it was a different me doing all that, all those years ago.

I was a perfect organism. Unencumbered by past failures or triumphs.

It was all still there, though. If I concentrated, if I had a reason, I could pull it all back out of the dark moldy folds of my brain, the complex chains of acids and chemicals that formed memories. I rarely tried very hard. There was nothing for me there.

Lindsay, I remembered. She was useful to remember. She was pretty but not beautiful. The kind of girl you chatted up energetically at a bar and then spent the morning wishing fervently would leave. Super smart. Fucking Bond Villain smart. In High School, she’d been insecure and desperate, got high a lot, always had drugs, put out like a French Quarter prostitute and spent a lot of her time crying. Naturally, I stayed in touch.

In college, she’d done well. Professionally. Pre-med, good grades piled up. She was fucking brilliant. Could read a book in an hour, remember everything. Said she hated her brain, because she couldn’t forget. Anything. It all stayed there. Every insult, every back-seat date rape, every humiliation and menstrual cramp, burned in. If we bred, our children would be Supermen.

She was already making money selling. Pills, mainly. Pills were plenty. She also sold gear. Syringes, ampules, whatever. She got contacts to write scrips for a premium. Her dorm room was fucking party central, something out of a movie. People everywhere, getting stoned, Lindsay always stoned, but always somehow showing up for finals and getting fucking perfect grades. And when she went on to med school and I went on to a lowly perch in corporate America’s gut, I kept in touch. I remembered her. I forced myself to, because she was too good a resource.

And she appreciated being remembered. Most of her old friends had moved on. Most of her customers forgot her the second she shut the door behind them. I always reminded her how cool she’d been in high school. A rebel. A smart, pretty girl who liked to party. I told her high school story like a fucking teen comedy film, leaving out the crying jags except when I’d been there to manfully put an arm around her – a bonding moment for the main characters – and the occasional six-month depression. I shaped her adolescence into a fucking magical time of freedom and triumph, so she liked having me around.

She told me people wore her out on Oxycontin. Wore her out. That’s all they wanted. She was fucked up to gills all the time herself. Handfuls of pills, a bottle of vodka in her locker, in her glove box, in her backpack. She was thin and yellowed and her hair got brittle, she looked like fucking death but she pulled through her residency with flying colors. Told me she maybe killed two, three people by accident, but seemed kind of surprised by that stat. Like she knew it should have been more. Told me doctors killed more people than you would imagine but covered for each other. Invented symptoms, scotched up test results. She said most doctors were shit, they fucked up all the time but covered it all up so they could continue killing us.

She also told me doctors earned shit. Until they were out of residency, at least, and then only if they were specialists. And then only if they were fucking incredible. Most doctors made decent livings, but weren’t rich.

I didn’t do drugs often. I liked drugs fine, but the quality control issue bothered me. You buy something from some asshole, who the fuck knew what you were getting. Booze was safe. Regulated. Your chances of drinking a bellyful of antifreeze instead of bourbon were essentially zero. Your chances of blowing a rail made up sixty-five percent rat poison were essentially one hundred. But pharmaceuticals, from a fucking pharmacy, passed on a scrip? Fuck all. Why not.

Time had not been kind to Lindsay. At her messy, tight apartment downtown, she paced and chewed her nails. Her apartment had a layer of her dust on top of the dust that had been there when she’d moved in. A sublet. A sweet sublet, rent-controlled. She was paying practically nothing for a one-bedroom. And treating it like her dorm room. Shit everywhere. Hadn’t been cleaned, period. Like, since it had been built, first not cleaned by the Italian or Irish immigrants who packed into it, desperate and unwanted. Then not cleaned by generations of increasingly upscale slummers who could have afforded some shitbox studio in midtown but chose to beat the system and pay pennies on the dollar for a place with atmosphere. The place smelled, felt tight and hot, like we were buried under ash.

Her apartment made my skin crawl. I sat there with a theatrical smile on my face.

Lindsay had a small path to pace in. Eight feet, spin, eight feet. A canyon formed by piles of boxes and books, clothes and plump, swelling garbage bags I suspected should have been taken to the curb months ago. She smoked and chewed and spat little pieces of herself on the floor, telling me about it. Pills to wake up in the morning, pills to stay sharp during the day, pills to go to sleep at night. Dark bags under her eyes. Lindsay fucking up almost too much for even her fellow doctors to cover up. Dozens of people, now, she said. Dozens dead.

She kept telling me this as she paced, smoking a cigarette, hands shaking. Dozens. She’d killed dozens now. Nodding off during procedures, getting all blurry reading tests, writing out preposterous prescriptions that were filled without question, making hearts explode and livers fail.

Sure, sure, I kept saying. Soothing. I felt like I was back in school, trying to fuck a Sad Girl. You had to coax the Sad Girls. You had to listen and listen and listen and rub their back and tell them they were special and beautiful and of course you understood and then you had to listen and listen and listen again, and rub their fucking back and murmur kind words of support. And again and again, endlessly, your appetite for it directly proportional to how hot she was, how big her boobs were, how long her legs were. You did it long enough, you put in the time, the Sad Girls lay down and spread their legs and you got in. And then you made them more sad, but that was the next asshole’s problem.

Lindsay was like that. Pacing, making me dizzy. Smoking and talking. And talking. She was being watched. She was going to lose her license. She was being sued by so many people now, and she was going to lose her malpractice insurance. She was fucked. All I wanted to do was buy some pills from her, heavy duty stuff that you could calm a gorilla with. But I had to sit there and rub her back and say sure, sure and tell her she was beautiful so she would lay back and put her ankles in the air and sell me some fucking pills.

She had a plan. She was selling everything. Everything Must Go. Caution to the wind, she was moving more fucking drugs out the door than she’d ever dared. She was going to sell everything she could, fucking bankrupt the hospital, screw all of her doctor friends, and put together a tidy amount of money. Move to Mexico. She knew an American doctor with a license in any state could buy a license in Mexico for a few grand. She’d set out her shingle in some shithole town and make burrito money stitching up cuts and diagnosing asthma, and live off her wad.

Except, except, except, as she paced back and forth back and forth, smoking and picking at a scab on her arm, except she wasn’t piling the money up. She didn’t understand it. She was selling so much shit, like really setting records with it. Call the Guinness people, doctor who sold more prescription drugs than ever before in history, it was her. But she didn’t have a ton of cash. It just melted away.
I rubbed her back. I told her, sure, sure. It was a fucking mystery. Unsolvable, unless you put a face on the Cosmos and made it all angry and mean. The universe, fucking with her, stealing her money. I watched her scratching at herself. A real mystery.

Suddenly, she spun and asked me if I wanted a drink? Some music? Suddenly we’re on a date. She smiles at me. Tomwallace, she says. She did that, said my full name as one word. It was a thing. Tomwallace, she says, thanks for sticking with me.

I shit my pants. She’s going to cry. Jesus fucking Christ, all I want is a bottle of horse tranquilizers, and now I’m starting to worry I’m going to have to fuck her to get them. She’s giving me that dewy look. Like she actually believes we are some epic love story. She’s the Ungettable Girl, super smart and pretty and successful, and I’m the nerd character, the puppy dog loser who’s always there for her but never noticed. Until that one fateful night when something epic and tragic happens, and the Ungettable Girl looks over at me, the pop music swells, and I get her.

Holy fuck.

Failure was not an option, however. I rubbed her back. I told her, sure, sure. I was prepared to dive in. To peel back those sweaty panties and wear three rubbers and do whatever it took. I said I’d love a drink. I said I’d love some music. I retold an old chestnut about us in high school, showing up for a dance humming to the gills on brandy and mystery pills she’d doled out, everything slippery and hilarious. How she’d caused a sensation by dancing with abandon with a series of boys. I left out the part with her ending up in some jerkoff’s Mustang, getting felt up until she puked suddenly, an explosion of puke with no warning signs sprayed all over the jerkoff and his upholstery. I edited it. I cut the end and faded out on her dancing, dancing, dancing, everyone clapping and excited.

She raced around the place as I talked. Handed me a dirty glass of sour red wine and raced around. Put the radio on, the old-fashioned over-the-air radio. Swing music. Jazz. Sophisticated. Raced around, disappeared into the bathroom. Terror seized me. I pictured her doing a hobo bath in there, wiping herself down, spritzing on deoderant over the old deoderant, taking the five birth-control pills she’d forgotten this week all at once. Sweat popped out on my face. I told myself I could do this. Wallace men had fucked some pretty horrifying things in their desperate quest to pass on their genes; one mildly skanked out junkie doctor was nothing to write home about. My ancestors would laugh at me and mock my fancy ways.

I stood up, setting the glass of not-precisely-wine-anymore on the filthy, cluttered coffee table, and started moving towards the bathroom. If this was going to happen, I was going to take control and do it in the best possible way for me. As I walked, I tried to ignore the persistent smell of body odor, the thick feel of the air. I didn’t think about what was crackling under my shoes like dessicated beetles. I was going to go in. I was going to rub her back. I was going to say, sure, sure.

I knocked. No answer. I pushed the door in and stood there for a moment. Lindsay was sprawled on the floor. Passed out. I saw her chest rising and falling. For a second my ancestors crowded around me, urging me to fuck her anyway, a deal was a deal was a deal.

I looked around the bathroom. It was, of course, a level of disgusting I’d never encountered before. I was going to have to check into a hotel, burn my clothes, take a shower that was about one degree less than lethal, and possibly shave my head, before I could go back to my own apartment. The only thing that could be said in Lindsay’s favor was that she appeared to still be using the toilet for its assigned purpose instead of just shitting on the floor.

I decided to leave the bathroom search for last, and thank god, because she hadn’t even hidden anything. It was just piled up on her gritty bed. Pills in thick clear plastic bags, piles of them. Syringes, rubber tubes, small glass bottles – everything the ambitious drug user could want. I took a single bag and examined it, noting the cute little OC stamped on one side of the little pills. I stuffed it into my pocket and sifted through the syringes, all packed in neat little sealed plastic baggies. I’d no idea how many fucking types of syringes there were. I sorted through them until I found a nice long one, thin like a bit of wire. It looked sturdy enough to be pressed down through a cork.

I paused and looked around her bedroom. Dirty clothes everywhere, junk food containers, dust. On her dresser she’d arranged an implausible number of framed photos. Of herself. Other people, but always her. Always her from years ago – smiling, young, with healthier hair and fewer bruises. I saw myself in one, a smaller one, faded and blurry. Me, skinny.

I walked over and picked it up. I had no photos. I didn’t keep them. People sometimes sent me pictures; I threw them away or deleted them. I stared down at it. It was my lines, my shape. But it wasn’t me any more. I put it back where it had been, right exactly into the clean spot on her dresser, turned and went back into the dark, stuffy living room. I paused and listened. I looked around, thinking whether I’d left anything, sloughed anything off I was going to regret later. There was nothing.

I stepped out into the hallway. Music, somewhere, sopoforic and muffled. Ten thousand dinners stretching back to the 19th century crowded into my nose. I shut her door behind me and thought about calling an ambulance. Then, didn’t.

Fiction, Writing

Performance Vs. The Wizard of Oz

Author: jsomers June 28, 2012 2 Comments

THIS IS NOT THE PROBLEM.

A few years ago, The Duchess decreed that we would take a trip to Paris, as wives are wont to do. I was, of course, powerless against her wishes, despite the fact that my own desire to visit the City of Lights hovered around zero – nothing against the city, of course; I’m just unconvinced that it matters whether I visit or not, and I can be overcharged for things by rude people right here in the New York City metro area. Still , Jeff merely pawn in game of life, so I started making my preparations for the trip, which included learning some French. I have a personal rule that states I must at least have some grasp of the language of the country I am traveling to. I will not be one of those American tourists who runs around saying “English, motherfucker: Do you speak it!??!”

I worked on French for months. I do not have a brain designed for foreign languages, so this was a struggle, but I did manage to learn at least basic French, enough to get by on. Proudly, I went to Paris with my wife … and promptly choked. Every time I tried to use my French, I screwed it up. Mispronounced things. Forgot words and phrases. Every attempt ended with a sardonic Parisian asking me if I was American, then speaking in English. Slowly, as if to a retarded boy.

I am not a Performer.

Some people thrive on the Performance, the pressure of having to do something in front of other people on demand. Some writers are like this. They can elevator-pitch a story to an editor in the middle of a conversation, they can sell an idea. I’ve never been good at that. I much prefer to keep my ideas to myself and then reveal them when I feel more confident, when I have something more or less complete and more or less coherent.

The downside to this, of course, is that sometimes you only find out that people think your idea is crap after you’ve spent 300 hours and tons of energy on developing it. This can be a bit of a kick in the balls. Believe me, it’s happened to me. I once wrote an entire novel based on a vague conversation with an editor only to have that editor send it back with a dead rat in a box. True story. Figuratively.

You have to work with what you’ve got. I know I’ll never be the guy who can make you want to read a book of mine based solely on my passionate pitch:

YOU: So, what’s the new book gonna be about? Vampires? Sluts? SLUTTY VAMPIRES?

ME: Well, um, I had this, er, idea, after eating too much Chinese Food and drinking too much whiskey – which, you know, never ever eat Chinese Food with whiskey it DOES NOT go together well AT ALL – and so I had this idea, where this guy, like nothing he does feels right to him, you know, like people tell him something’s fun and he tries it and it isn’t fun at all it’s awful and he eats things people tell him to eat and he hates it and stuff like that and slowly he starts to realize this is because everyone is lying to him all the time and oh! I forgot about the aliens.

YOU: Aliens?

ME: Yeah! They sing. And that’s pretty much it.

YOU: …

ME: I’ll let myself out.

YOU: Yeah, I can’t even look at you right now.

Oh well. When I do finish a book and deliver it to folks, I usually get at least 85% the reaction I want. Which isn’t bad! The point is, sometimes I’m pretty sure the idea, diffuse and vague in my head, is actually pretty good, it’s just my inability to speak it coherently that’s the problem. My inability to speak coherently has been a problem since I was 13, actually. Which, coincidentally is the year I discovered liquor. Funny, that.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

The Sex Scene in “Lifers”

Author: jsomers May 13, 2012 1 Comment

On the insane assumption that any one cares, I thought I’d tell the story of the sex scene in Lifers, my first published novel.

It wasn’t in the draft submitted to the publisher (a cold submission, with no agent, pure slush to a tiny publishing company), which is amazing, because the final, published word count for Lifers was 39,616. Thirty-nine thousand words. This barely qualifies as a novella, much less a novel. So the fact is, the book was even shorter when I originally submitted it. The fact also is, I am a lazy, lazy man. If I ever become supersuper famous and powerful as an author, expect my novels to start being about 5,000 words long and written in bullet-point fashion, in huge 24pt type. Or possibly expect to be contacted by my people to write some novels for me, which might be better, if slightly more expensive.

But I digress.

When the publisher contacted me about buying the book, they were looking at it from a “Gen-X” point of view. For those of us too young to be Gen-X, this was back when being a twenty-something in the 1990s meant you were automatically a desirable market. As opposed to being middle-aged in the 2010s and realizing no one wants to sell you anything. YOU BASTARDS! MARKET YOUR AWFUL ENERGY DRINKS TO MEEEEEEEEE!!!

When I spoke to the editor on the phone about the book, he told me he thought the only thing the story needed was, in a word, sex. This was his sole editorial note. Looking back, this should have been some sort of warning sign for me.

Anyways, I was delighted with the offer to publish, of course. They were offering me $1000 as an advance, which in 1999 dollars was actually like $1003 today, and as a percentage of my gross annual income was about 75%. So, yeah, I was excited. Do you know how many packages of Ramen Noodles you can buy for $1000? LOTS.

I thus took his sexy suggestion seriously, though I wrestled with it for a bit. After all, I’d never been seriously edited before, and was generally convinced of my innate genius. The book was perfect! This clashed with my desire for the immense riches my debut novel was sure to generate for me (HA!), so I decided I would read the book over, see if there was a place for such a scene, and if so, write it. Then I could decide if I’d just ruined a perfect story, or improved it, or maybe just left it neutral.

In the end, I wrote a scene wherein the narrator has a one-night stand. It’s ridiculous and humiliating in that he’s almost not a voluntary player in it, and I ended up liking the scene a lot, as it speaks to the character a bit and it’s also one of the few scenes in the book where the narrator is apart from the other main characters. It ended up being a good addition to the story, though I don’t give that much credit to the editor at my publisher, who, I don’t think, even read the new manuscript when I turned it in. For him, he just wanted some sex in the story because young people like sex. End of story.

Of course, I was not put on this world in order to write erotica. Believe me – please! – this is not my purpose in life. We should all, in fact, take a moment to bow our heads and offer a moment of thanks that I have not been asked to repeat this experiment.

The lesson there, if there is one, is that any feedback or revision to a story has the possibility of improving the story. It doesn’t matter what the genesis of the note is. All that matters is what you do with it. That and that you can, apparently, sell a 40,000-word “novel” without an agent, a clue, or any clear idea of what a contract means. Incompetence, ho! And also, too, writing a sex scene involving stuffed animals, shame, and painful regret is not, apparently, sexy. At all. Or so I’ve been told.

Lifers is now available for $0.99 on Kindle and Nook, by the way. Just sayin’.

Filthy Lucre, Writing

The Futility of Writing

Author: jsomers 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.

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.

(more…)

Bullshit, The Inner Swine, Writing