Ask Jeff Anything 5-16-11
Once again back is the incredible, rhyme animal, the young cannibal, me: With another brief, somewhat entertaining video:
Enjoy!
Writing
Ask Me if I Have a God Complex
“You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God.” – Alec Baldwin as Dr. Jed Hill, “Malice“.
I was chatting with another author about a work-in-progress the other night. This is unusual in that I a) dislike people and b) dislike other authors almost on sight, as a rule. Well, dislike is the wrong word; there are actually quite a number of other writers I like just fine, and a few I even enjoy. Don’t tell them, or they’ll start expecting me to pick up bar tabs.
Anyways, this writer – we’ll call him Mr. Bean – was asking me my opinion of the ending of his work-in-progress, which amounted to what I like to call a Titanic Ending: You’re tired of writing the damn story, so you just steer for an iceberg and let it sink. I told him so, and after an awkward pause he confessed he had another idea for the ending. He told it to me, and it was so much better I physically assaulted him. After we convinced the waitresses at Stinky Sullivan’s in Hoboken to release us and promised to pay for the broken table, I bought Mr. Bean another whiskey and asked why he was not going with the clearly superior ending, which had actually been his original intention.
He said it was a simple matter of mechanics: Earlier events in the story had precluded the ending, made it impossible.
So, I hit him again. Don’t writers realize they are gods in their own universes?
You can do anything in your story. Halfway through a historical novel set in Edwardian England you can have aliens show up and start melting brains. If you’re writing a locked room mystery, you can go back to chapter 1 and insert the innocuous clue that makes everything fall into place. Jebus, within the confines of your story you can make anything work. It’s like the Reverse Chekov’s Gun Principle: If suddenly realize you need a gun to go off by the end of your story, go back to chapter 1 and put in a damn gun.
It is surprising how many writers don’t seem to realize this. You are writing fiction. You are, in scientific terms, making shit up. If a detail you invented earlier doesn’t work, go back and change it.
Unless you are, as I notably am, lazy. My biggest dread when routing a new novel is the terrible Logic Revision, wherein someone notes either a major flaw in logic (e.g., “How come the hero didn’t just use his magic flying shoes to escape the prison?”) or introduces a brilliant suggestion that makes my storytelling seem like the work of drunken moron. Er, more like the work of a drunken moron. Shut up. These sorts of suggestions require major surgery, months and months of chaotic, confusing revision that sees me trying to salvage as much of my previous work as possible, papering over problems with paragraphs of new text, and sleepless nights until I finally realize I’ve made a mess of it, burn the manuscript in a drunken revel, and then burst into tears when I remember that this is 2011 and burning the manuscript doesn’t do anything except set off the fire alarm and summon my wife The Duchess, who then hides all my whiskey bottles.
However, when I wake up hungover and bleary the next day, I always realize that I am, after all, god in this little written world. I go back and start over. And I can always make it work, because I can change the fundamental truths about my world. I can make things appear and disappear. I can change the history of a character. I can introduce new people who never existed before and delete others from the world so thoroughly they are burned out of the pattern, so to speak. The dreaded Logic Revision hurts, but it isn’t anything that can’t be accomplished with some concentration and hard work. Any writer who retreats from a good Logic Revision deserves to have their novel sit in a metaphorical drawer, never to be read.
The ancillary rule to this is simple: The less you want to do the revision, the better the revision probably is. When I get feedback and my reaction to suggested revisions is a shrug and a vague determination to, sure, why not, do it someday, then that revision is probably just polishing the silver. If my reaction is to drop to my knees and scream out a good old fashioned do not want to the universe, chances are the suggested change is going to make me famous when I win some sort of book award. If I wrote the sort of books that won book awards, instead of just jealous emails from other writers at 3AM. You’re all jealous. I can feel it.
Someday, when I am rich and powerful I will force the publishing overlords to publish my novels straight from my zero-draft file. All logic gaps and misspelled words will be “poetic license”. Even if I’ve combined two completely unrelated stories via the simple technique of pasting one file onto the end of the other, they will print it! Oh, the day will come, my friends. Until then, I revise, and I am god.
The Inner Swine on Kindle
I’ve been putting out my zine The Inner Swine for 15-17 years, depending on whether you count its inception from the date my original collaborators and I got together to discuss putting out a magazine or the actual release of issue one, by which time I’d taken over the magazine all by myself. I’m closing in on issue 60.
Over the years I’ve released plenty of Inner Swine material electronically, mostly for free. PDFs of just about every issue are up on the zine’s web site for free download, and plain-text files of some issues are also there. I still do a print run of each issue for a mailing list of subscribers and traders. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking that a formal digital edition of the zine might be a good idea. So I finally sobered up for a day and created a Kindle Edition of the latest issue (Volume 16, Issue 3/4, Winter 2010) and put it up for sale on Amazon for $0.99. NINETY-NINE CENTS! Yowza.
The Kindle edition doesn’t have any images in it, because a) images on the Kindle are a pain in the ass and b) some of the images that make it into the zine are not, shall we say, vetted by my copyright lawyers. It’s a zine, after all. The copyright lawyers for my zine are a tiny leprechaun who sits on my shoulder and sings sea shanties into my ear all day and my cat Spartacus, who uses a thick book of copyright law as a scratching post. The Kindle Edition also has no advertisements in it. It’s just the text, baby. Other than that, it’s exactly the same: Every word that’s in the print edition is in the Kindle edition. It’s ~45,000 words, which is novella-sized.
Right now it’s set up as a standalone publication, not a series or periodical. There’s no DRM and it’s set to allow lending. I’m learning this as I go, so if you do grab a copy, all feedback is gratefully accepted. Let me know if I can improve the formatting or do anything else to make it a better product.
Thanks! Remember, I’ll make $0.35 cents on every issue. THIRTY-FIVE CENTS! Every five issues sold buys me a bottle of Thunderbird with change back!
Complete Lack of Control
One of the interesting (to me) aspects of the Writing Career is the contrast between the complete, autocratic control you have over your work when it’s private, sitting on your computer or in a notebook or, god help you, in your head, and the almost total lack of control you have over many aspects of it once you sell it. Since selling your work is usually a goal of most writers (though not all, of course), it’s interesting how unprepared most of us are for the transition from being a the god of your particular written universe to being a pawn in the game of life.
Well, it’s not that bad. My limited experience with publishers is that a) they don’t buy books they don’t like, so selling your novel and then being told it needs more teenaged vampires is a pretty rare occurrence and b) they genuinely love the books they buy. Some writers worry that they’ll sign the contract and their editor will suddenly sprout demon wings, grow three times in size, and with a burst of hellfire inform them that now they will revise the novel to include thinly-veiled Scientologist themes as they laugh manically. This almost never actually happens.
However, the aspects of the book publishing experience that the author usually indeed has no control over can be a little disconcerting. When I was a wee Somers, writing 30-page fantasy epics with titles like War of the Gem, I drew my own covers. Like this one:
The War of the Gem Book 3: The Dark Tower
Jealous? Yep, I bet you are. Bet you can’t believe I was nine when I drew that. I’m also surprised I didn’t go into cover design as a career.
Then you grow up, sell a novel for money, and suddenly you’re not allowed to make your own covers any more. I mean, I showed Orbit Books the above cover and thought, well, here we go: They’re going to ask me to do all of their covers now and I’ll have to turn them down gently. Instead, I never heard from them about it. It’s like they pretended not to have seen it. Bastards.
The author’s almost total lack of control over the cover of their book is disconcerting, at least until you see the awesome covers they actually design for you. Assuming you’re lucky like me and have awesome covers. Lauren Panepinto did her Cover Launch post for The Final Evolution over at the Orbit web site today. I know I’ve posted the cover here already, but go check it out and let Lauren know she’s amazing:
http://www.orbitbooks.net/2011/02/14/cover-launch-the-final-evolution-by-jeff-somers
KGB Lit Interview
As I am a very famous and important person, The KGB Bar’s online literary magazine has interviewed me:
“As I’ve gotten older I have become increasingly aware that my development as a person really did freeze, in some senses, when I was much younger. A love for simplistic power-punk music. A sincere belief that flannel is an acceptable fashion choice. A refusal to watch DVDs coupled with a romantic love for serendipitously finding a beloved old movie on television. A child-like distrust of vegetables or, for that matter, any food that I have not previously consumed and survived. The themes and tropes I explore in my writing haven’t changed so much either.”
Check it out!
Ask Jeff Anything 1-5-11
After a hiatus imposed by all the More Shit I Gotta Do, we’re back with answers to your questions! And by “we’re” I mean “I am” in the royal sense. Because I’m the king of rock, there is none higher, Sucker MC’s should call me sire. To burn my kingdom, you must use fire, I won’t stop rockin’ till I retire. And also, look for a quick cameo by Spartacus the Cat, incensed that I spent a few minutes paying to attention to something that is not him. Little bastard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVANxAaBoc0
Holla!
Interview! With me.
Hola,
Well, someone’s still interested in Your Humble Author here. I’ve been interviewed by The Novel Road:
Me: Lunch with you and any author (except Sean) you choose, from throughout history or today, and why.Jeff: Lunch with Ferrell! The mind boggles. I’ve seen the man drink. It’s disgusting enough. Who would want to watch him eat? He reminds me of BrundleFly.
Myself, of course, forming a stable time loop that in essence grants me immortality.
Go on, check it out. You know you want to.
http://devinbriar.blogspot.com/2010/12/novel-road-interview-jeff-somers.html
Hey, a Short Story
My short story “His Rings Like Gifts” just got posted over at The Novel Road! Go check it out. I’ll have an interview over there soon, too. Because they are One of The Cool, natch.
Writing: Necessary Laziness
Folks, I am a lazy, lazy man. Unless it involves booze, I don’t like to put much effort into things. Take grooming, for instance: Haircuts, shaving, dry cleaning your clothes, all generally too much effort for Your Humble Author here. If I could find a way to combine booze with those activities – booze for me, mind you; I don’t need some drunk bastard cutting my hair – I’d be a happy man. And probably rich once I sell the franchise rights.
About the only thing I’m usually not too lazy about is writing, but this is because writing has always been fun and easy for me, pretty much in the same category as drinking – hey, if only I could combine those two NO NO NO that way lies madness. Sometimes when writing, though, you have to be lazy, kind of on purpose, you know? LEt’s face it, real life is a pretty huge dataset. The number of details that go into just one person’s every day experience while wandering this globe searching for free drinks and tasty sandwiches is staggering, and if you actually tried to capture all of those details in a story, even a story that takes exactly one minute of time to unfold, your story would like be about twenty-seven volumes long.
Thus, laziness. A great example is the popular-with-the-kids-these-days Zombie Apocalypse story, which almost always focusses on the whole thing about killing zombies and rebuilding civilization while calmly ignoring the fact that you’d probably starve to death long, long before the zombies broke down your door. Zombie stories are lazy about the food issue because it’s the only reaction that makes sense – no one wants story about the urgent need to find a can opener, say, or the moral quandry of murdering your dog in order to eat him. So, Zombie Apocalypse stories usually have abandoned supermarkets filled with foodstuffs for our survivors to gorge on, when in reality every time it rains more than two inches here in Hoboken the local supermarket is an empty, ransacked shell. I mean, seriously, if the news started reporting a zombie fucking apocalypse the supermarket would be completely devoid of edibles within about twenty seconds. Or, the story will have the survivors hunting and farming like in the good old days, which makes a lot more sense, except for the lazy convenience of having your survivors – almost always in a major metropolitan area – know how in fuck to hunt, skin, and butcher animals or farm anything. Not a terrible stretch, but I for one would be found dead with two cans of tuna in my hands and bloody fingernails before I figured out how to grow something in my backyard.
Or, take Lost for example (no spoilers here, don’t worry). The most recent episode, which gave us the extended backstory of Jacob and Smokey, was set in some undefined past, and the characters were all dressed in a sort of rustic ancient style by way of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars Episode IV. The costumes are cheesy and vague, and evoke exactly no culture or historical period ever in the history of ever. They are the laziest costumes I’ve ever seen in my entire life (the whole episode annoyed and disappointed me, but that rant is for later, after the series ends and I have a better perspective). But, I can see why, maybe, that decision was made: Because a) the story is maybe meant to be a parable and not taken literally, or b) because they don’t want to distract us with questions about whether, say, ancient Romans or Egyptians would do something. Keeping it vague gives them latitude to do whatever they want. Thus, the lazy costumes are necessary.
Or, maybe just lazy. Figuring out what’s a necessary laziness and what’s just lazy is not easy, even when you’re writing. I’ve had plenty of moments where an editor hands back a manuscript and tells me I need to spend more time and energy on a sequence, and when I lok back on it I can see pretty clearly that I was impatient to get past that spot and glossed over everything too quickly. It’s easy to be lazy when you can see everything clearly in your own head, and forget that people can’t read you mind and see all the details as clearly as you do.
Now, all this talk of booze has made me hungry. The food not so much. To paraphrase Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, food just makes me sick.
Literary Upstart and Moi
It’ll be THUNDERDOME!
Or, well, probably not. Those crazy kids what run The L Magazine run this thing called Literary Upstart, where authors submit works and, if chosen, read them live to a bunch of drunks and then a winner gets chosen. Because this sounded like exactly the sort of thing I do for fun (usually uninvited, just standing up on a barstool and starting to read from my tear- and beer-stained notebook), I submitted a story of mine (Rust on the Tongue) and I’ve been chosen to read at the May 17th event. THERE WILL BE NO PRISONERS TAKEN. I intend to win, even if it means performing the Daffy Duck Gasoline Trick that can only be performed once.
WHEN: 7pm, Monday, May 17
WHERE: The Slipper Room, 167 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002-2214, (212) 253-7246
WHY: Because I’ll be there, soaking up free drinks.
Not sure of the rest of the details, but you don’t need no stinkin’ details, right? I’ll be there. Reading a literary gem. Be there or be square.