Ramblings of Jeff Somers, author
The good folks over at Rescued by Nerds carried through on their terrorist threat and have posted an interview with me:
“In those five minutes, however, Avery sang a haunting ballad about life being hard for honest assassins. It’s too bad you won’t hear it. It was very moving.”
Surf on over and make some snarky comments. First person to make Jeff the Preparer cry with their snark gets a prize. Said prize may not be something you actually want, though.
I don’t know about you, but I remain kind of excited that book #3 in the Avery Cates series, The Eternal Prison, is out. So I’m gonna continue to party like it’s 1999 here. Towards that end I’ve posted two short stories set in the novels’ universe over at http://www.eternalprison.com. The stories are both free to read and distribute as long as my copyright statement is retained.
The story “Oldest Bastard on the Block” was tweeted last week over at http://twitter.com/somers_story. The story “This Was Education” hasn’t been officially released anywhere before, although some folks will recognize it and chuckle conspiratorially under their breath. Both are set somewhere between The Electric Church and The Digital Plague, with OBB being first in sequence, though they’re not directly related to each other.
Surf on over and enjoy! Comments and feedback very welcome.
Weeb at Writing Raw invited me to take part in one of their 7 Question Interviews, which was a lot of fun:
“6. Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers?
Number one, do not believe the rumors. Number two, please send me some more money; the pennies I get from every book sold cannot hope to support my drinking and the associated medical bills.”
You can read the whole interview here. After the break, for fun, there’s an old interview I conducted with myself for an issue of The Inner Swine (Volume 4, Issue 4, December 1998).
I’ve made a mini-resolution to update this blog more often. I was doing better for a while, and then fell back into my old lazy ways, but I know the world is a better place if y’all are informed about my various and sundry doings.
Part of the time suck is the dovetailing of the writing of Cates #4 (The Terminal State) and the publication of The Eternal Prison (watch that space; things will be happening there soon), which means I’m writing chapters while trying to think of ways to convince an uncaring world that I am cool enough to pay attention to – which is difficult when you’re sort of genetically not cool, you know? The worst part of promotion is the sense that you’re dancing around with a sandwich board and a cowbell and no one is paying any attention. I mean, can’t y’all just buy my books without being convinced? Jeesh. Work with me here.
On top of that, I have four cats. Four. They march into my office all day, smelling of varying levels of food and litterbox, sit on my keyboard, wrestle with each other while making loud screaming noises, and generally distract me to no end. You think the Internet is distracting? Try four cats.
I might comment on the cats more. Folks seem to like that. I could be the Junior Scalzi of the Cat People demographic!
And on top of that, I am finally getting the latest issue of my zine, The Inner Swine out the door. It’s the June issue, which gives you an idea of the delay. The zine is always a delaying factor in my work life, as it’s ~20,000 words four times a year (or, soon, ~40,000 words twice a year) which means I’m more or less writing a book-length project every year in addition to everything else. I do it for love, but, as with the cats, even things you love you sometimes want desperately to kick halfway across the room*.
On a less whiny closing note, I’ve just discovered that there will be a German translation of The Electric Church and, presumably, the subsequent Cates books. Cheers! The translator contacted me with some questions about the German characters in the book and other language points – which I always welcome – and was kind enough to assure me that the German dialogue I included in the book was perfectly understandable, if not perfect.
I enjoy chatting with translators. It’s fascinating to hear what they find challenging, and the decisions they make to translate your jokes/references/allusions into another culture, not just another language.
That’s it for this meandering post. Have a great weekend all, and pre-order The Eternal Prison, please. Papa needs liquor monies.
I have as a secret ambition – one of many, right beside record a number one hit record and drink an entire bottle of Bourbon in one hour without dying – to see a fictional universe of mine become so successful that I can actually publish an alternate history version of it. Like, let’s say, the Avery Cates books blow up into Harry Potter squared, and writing an alternate history of The System wouldn’t be self-indulgent nonsense. Which, as things currently stand, it is.
Alternate History is a genre of Skiffy that doesn’t seem to get a lot of press, for some reason. I wonder if some folks regard it as something of a cheat – your characters are already there, and if inspiration fails you can always just bring back the True Timeline for a bit in a shocking twist. Or maybe it does get a lot of respect and I am sadly out of touch with the world – this would surprise no one.
The first AH story I ever read was, I think, in the anthology Alternate Tyrants, edited by Mike Resnick. The title and author of the story escape me now (and my copy of the book is alllll the way upstairs, and I am lazy – and sure I still have it; I have every damn book I’ve ever bought, except one) but it involved the Prince of Wales in modern England conspiring to provoke a constitutional crisis and seize all the old lapsed royal powers and reestablish the absolute monarchy. Since I can recall almost nothing else about the story, it may not have been that great, but I loved the idea. And I’ve been a minor sucker for AH ever since.
The crowned king of AH, of course, is Harry Turtledove, and I can recommend his Worldwar series happily to any who are interested. I haven’t kept up with the prolific Mr. Turtledove’s every series, which is probably a mistake, but I’ve enjoyed everything he’s written, and AH continues to draw me in. That sort of willful ignoring of history, or things that actually happened, is breathtaking in its way. I get a charge every time I read something in the genre.
As far as I know, no one has ever written an alternate history of their own series or universe, unless we count comic books, which seem to reinvent their universe every ten years just so they can clean up the mess they’ve made. I like this idea, and gift it to the world: Wouldn’t it be cool if JK Rowling wrote an alternate history of Harry Potter? Or if Stephen King did an AH version of The Stand or something? Every story branches off here and there into new directions, but there are always other, darker, unexplored directions that get left behind. It would be like re-writing your work without trying to obliterate the original from the canon. And better to do it yourself than wait for some Hollywood Hack to settle down one night with a bottle of Jim Beam and a gram of coke to do it for you, bubba.
Now, currently I don’t think my Cates series has reached that level of cultural saturation where anyone would make sense of an alternate history of it. Because you have all failed me. Don’t think I don’t brood at night over a bottle of whisky, wondering how much it costs to mail a dead rat to everyone in America, despite the fact that I am assured by my agent and publisher that this would actually reduce sales. So we’re all safe from that for now, though I’m sometimes tempted to do something like that just for my own amusement. Then again, the things I do for my own amusement already take up far too much of my time, and I got drinkin’ to do.
Enjoy your weekend, kids.
A couple things that I’ve been remiss about mentioning:
That’s my news for today. I’ll try to lead a more interesting life in the coming days (maybe I’ll try robbing a liquor store) to provide y’all with better blogging.
I’ve never been cool. Going back to my glorious childhood in Jersey City, New Jersey – the city whose current mayor is famous (around here, anyway) for being photographed naked and drunk on his front porch while he was running for mayor, and he won the election) – I’ve never once been cool in my whole life. To be frank it never bothered me much. Despite what Hollywood seems to think my childhood was not a warzone of cool kids calling me names and beating me up; I had a great time despite being a nerd. And here I am, a productive, well-adjusted citizen, contributing quality fictions to a hungry world.
Still: Not cool. Let’s never forget that. Even if you walk into a bar and I am there looking cool, wearing a nice suit of clothes and with a group of people laughing with me and not at me, don’t believe it for a second. I am not cool.
This is unfortunate, because all of the cool ideas in SF/F have been done, it seems. Well, the easy cool ideas. Because I am also lazy as hell, friends. I’d love to write a time travel book, or a zombie book (I did have some zombie-like things in The Digital Plague, but I’m talking about a full-on Night of the Living Dead thing). Of course, I could write these, but the problem is that these stories have become so prevalent that figuring out a way to do them compellingly is almost impossible. That’s the problem with Cool Ideas: Everyone wants to get in on it.
For example, I recently saw a little independent horror movie called Pontypool. It’s not a bad flick, saved mainly by interesting and well-drawn characters. It’s basically a zombie-virus movie, with the slight twist that the “virus” is transmitted via words – when you hear and understand an ‘infected’ word, you start to fixate on that word, repeating it over and over until you can’t say – or think – anything else. Then you start to “hunt” words, trying to literally tear them out of someone else’s mouth, with predictable results.
So, the premise is actually kind of interesting, if scientifically absurd. Actually, if you eliminated the zombie part and just speculated about a disorder that causes people to fixate on words like that, the resulting societal breakdown might be fascinating, the way people would figure out how to communicate despite being forced to repeat “Honey” over and over again, that sort of thing. But in the movie, once you move past the initial infection stage, you just turn into a voice-hunting zombie, with the usual motifs of a) people trapped and hiding from mindless zombies, b) people attempting to fight off mindless zombies etc. It’s been done. A nifty little twist to the vector ain’t gonna make that story more interesting.
So, I can write zombie stories for my own amusement, sure, and if I write it well enough with some good twists and new ideas, I might even sell it and be successful with it. but it won’t be anything new. And knowing that going in kind of deflates me. I know my writing is not always new and fresh, but that’s my intention going in. I need that hope of newness at least to get me going. So until I come up with that twist to the time-travel or zombie idea that I’ve been waiting for, it’s a dead letter, sadly.
It can be done. A fellow writer recently outlined a time-travel concept that was absolutely dripping with originality, and made me very jealous to not have thought of it myself. This happens pretty frequently; I am starting to hate all other writers, everywhere. One of these days I’m going to wake up before noon, put on some pants, and start stealing some ideas, dammit.
As with almost everyone, I suspect, I have a lot of affection for things I experienced as a kid – things I probably wouldn’t have much patience for nowadays. This is either a terrible loss of innocence or an exciting maturation, who knows? It might also be the fact that, believe it or not, I drank more when I was a teenager than I do now.
Let’s have a moment to wonder at the fact that I am still alive.
A lot of my reading as a kid was fantasy and sci-fi paperbacks; There was a period in the 1980s when I bought just about every Del Rey paperback with a DK Sweet cover available, usually without much investigation into the story or quality beforehand. Ah, to be 13 again and reading the latest Lyndon fucking Hardy opus. Let’s also hope that 20 years from now folks aren’t expressing similar sentiments about Jeff Fucking Somers, shall we? It’s amazing how many books I have on my shelves that were trilogies or longer, sold by the truckload in 1985 and now almost completely forgotten.
Let’s contemplate the horror of Xanth books. I read, oh, the first dozen or so when I was a youngster. The first five remain, I think, really well-crafted fantasy stories that stand up pretty well – it has a great central conceit, and the stories are told seriously, with the humor an organic part of the tale. As time progressed, though, Xanth turned into a cottage industry for the author, Piers Anthony, and every year a new Xanth book comes out, each more fey and pun-riddled than the last. These days the books seem to exist mainly so he can solicit puns from his readers and turn them into characters and plot points.
And who am I to argue with success? Anthony often includes a lengthy Author’s Note at the end of his books; when I was a kid just starting to write I loved these notes because he went on at length about his process and the business of writing. He made it very clear in those notes that writing is his job, that it was how he provided for his family, and you got the distinct impression that he would write Xanth books until his fingers fell off as long as they sold well. This concept of writing as a profession – instead of as the hobby of the elite – has eroded over the years because making a living from writing has gotten harder and harder (The always interesting Nick Mamatas has a few posts about the realities of writing economics over at his LiveJournal that make this very, grimly clear). But it is a profession; we’re writing for money, after all. So who can blame Anthony if he wants to churn out Xanth novels by the truckload. Just because I’ve stopped reading them doesn’t mean anything – he clearly still sells well enough to get book deals every year.
Back in The Day, of course, genre writing was still in the basement. When I went to school clutching Lord Foul’s Bane (winner of Worst Title for Great Book prize, 1977) in my hands, I was instantly marked as a nerd and ruthlessly mocked. Today, of course, what with Harry Potter and Twilight and Lost on TV and Iron Man and . . . well, you get the picture. These days SF/F has become the new Western. It’s a staple. Talk about a Singularity: We’ve hit the point where not liking SF/F is weirder than liking it. What a time to be alive, as Frostillicus might say.
Over at the George RR Martin forum someone asks about other books where every chapter ends on a ‘cliffhanger’, and someone helpfully mentions The Electric Church. As you can see, I ego-google far too much (though to be fair, Google Alerts allows me to ego-surf without making any effort). It’s nice to see my work being discussed in the general SF/F conversation, though. Somehow it’s like you haven’t arrived until your books start showing up in general discussions, you know?
Anyway, TEC and the Cates series as a whole certainly does employ the cliffhanger in virtually every chapter. Sometimes these are big cliffhangers, sometimes minor ones, but every chapter ends on a beat. This is intentional, although it wasn’t always there. The original draft of TEC, written 15 years ago, had very long chapters. It also had a different plot, different ending, and in many spots different characters. I always wrote with long chapters; a lot of my novels have only a handful of chapters in 100,000-word books.
The reason this changed when I revised TEC a few years ago is because I originally revised it for web publication on a site that was selling serial fiction. The idea was you’d “subscribe” to a story and receive a new chapter every week. They preferred open-ended ‘soap-opera’ style stories (in structure, not necessarily in content) but were taking novel-length stories as well. So I put together a proposal about TEC, which I’d been meaning to rework for years but never got the impetus to do so, sold it, and revised with their guidelines in mind. Since it would be a week between chapters, I wanted every chapter to end on a beat to keep people interested until the next one came around.
The web site didn’t last long, but the editor they assigned me was the incredible Lili Saintcrow, who loved TEC, showed it to her editor, and the rest is ongoing history.
So for me, the cliffhanger style is still relatively new and funky. I really enjoy it. The short chapters, the beat-endings – it all makes for, I think, exciting reading and exciting writing, as sometimes I don’t know where a chapter’s ending until it suddenly hits me – there! Which is fun.
I worry sometimes that the constant cliffhangerin’ can get tiresome, but I try to alleviate that by having different levels of cliffhangers. Sometimes it’s a huge plot-device cliffhanger, sometimes it’s just a beat of dialog or a small revelation by the character. I think if every chapter ended with the characters pressed against a wall or hanging from cliffs, it would get ridiculous, so having some chapters end on tiny little beats is a good rhythmic technique.
Or so I think. I’m sure plenty of folks out there can’t stand the technique and rail against my book in private. Or so I like to imagine.
Anyway, just some random writing thoughts this morning. The lesson being: Just because you have always worked in one manner or always had a certain style doesn’t mean you can’t surprise yourself, pleasantly, with something wholly new, at least to you.
Being a writer who has earned something less than a poverty wage in return for his exciting novelin’ (and yes, I declare “Noveling” to be a new word; TRY AND STOP ME). I sometimes get asked for advice.
Sometimes the advice is practical: “Jeff, how can I feign sobriety during important things like job interviews, wedding ceremonies, and trials?” The answer: monosyllables. Makes you look mysterious and wise.
Sometimes the advice sought is businesslike: “Jeff, how did you get your agent, who is clearly smarter and funnier than you, and has much more interesting clients?” The answer: Trickery. For the first two years of our business relationship, my agent thought my name was John Updike.
Sometimes, however, the advice is for the ethereal artistic side of things, as in, “Jeff, how do create your plots?” or “Jeff, how do you write your dialog?” or “Jeff, how can I get you to stop writing altogether? Tell you what, write a number on this slip of paper and tomorrow that amount will be in your bank accounts, no strings attached, as long as you promise to not write any more.”
So, here’s the best writing advice I can offer:
1. Don’t ask other writers. In fact, I recommend not even associating with other writers at all. We’re arrogant and vainglorious, and if you give us an opening we will pry that sucker open like a swarm of invading termites and we’ll talk your ear off for hours about our “craft”. This is because most of the people in our lives, our intimate friends and relatives, don’t care much that we write, and finding someone who does is like finding a forgotten bottle of whiskey sunk in the toilet tank; we lose track of time. Plus, we will steal your ideas. And probably your wallet. True story.
Since you’re still reading, I assume you’re ignoring #1 and sticking around to see if I’m going to actually dispense any advice. Although since you’re ignoring my advice I wonder why.
2. All righty then: Forget all the pithy little things folks have told you: write what you know, avoid passive voice, you can’t write a novel entirely from the dead dog’s point of view using a complex code involving repetitions of the word “bark”. Screw it: Write a book you’d want to read. Shocking, I know, but a lot of the nuts and bolts of writing can be gleaned just by reading good books. Read a lot, write a lot, and write stuff you’d pay good money for.
3. The best cure for writer’s block that I know of is to write something else for a while. I know someone who has been working on the same novel for 27 years. One book. Nothing else. I suggest the best way to get anything done is to have several projects at once, keep the juices flowing in different directions. A blog is a nice way to drool words if you’re not ready with a second or third novel to work on. Short stories are excellent ways to get ideas on paper and work on scenes that otherwise might wander aimlessly. You know what else works for writer’s block? Liquor. Seriously. Look into it.
So, have a nice weekend, folks. For those of you who write, get crackin’ and good luck. For those of you who don’t, and just want me to get the damn books out already, I’m a goin”, I’m a goin’…