SO, in my ongoing attempts to draw your attention to my novel Chum, out from Tyrus books on 9/18, I’ve put together two free eBooks over one Smashwords that are either directly or tangentially connected to Chum:
Up the Crazy by Jeff Somers – a Lifers/Chum crossover.
Up the Crazy is a crossover short story. Crossover of what? Well, Chum and my first published novel Lifers share a universe and, briefly, some characters. They also share some scenes and characters from other novels I wrote, but since those remain unpublished they remain Novels Whose Titles Shall Not be Mentioned As They Are Meaningless to Everyone Not Named Jeff Somers.
So, anyways, I thought it would be fun to explore one point where the stories of Chum and Lifers intersect a bit a more fully, and wrote a “deleted chapter” from Lifers. It’s not necessary to have read either book to enjoy the story. Here’s a few lines from it:
“Trim, naturally, had a complete speech about Florence, the kind of speech Trim gave from time to time that convinced you he had dossiers on all of us with pre-canned speeches prepared for all occasions. The speeches were also curiously filled with strange stresses and obscure words and this also led me to believe they were basically toneless, rhythmless, rhymeless poems, the kind that Trim specialized in.
Florence, Trim told me, was too much woman for most men. She was tall. She was busty. She was, he insisted, a giantess – everything in proportion, but simply too much of it. It was overwhelming for most men, he said. Add to that red hair and a fuck yeah Florence! kind of attitude which gave her incredible confidence despite being a girl Trim was certain had been mercilessly mocked in her school days for being three or four times normal size, and you had a girl who intimidated all the men in her life and was therefore inexplicably single.”
American Wedding Confidential by Jeff Somers
American Wedding Confidential is a collection of essays from my zine The Inner Swine about the weddings I attended. I’ve been to a lot of weddings, at first as a sort of gigolo emergency wedding date for my single girl friends, and later as escort to The Duchess as everyone we knew in the universe got married one after the other. Weddings are, generally speaking, the most horrible way you can spend an evening, so I started writing darkly humorous essays about my experiences. Fifteen of them are collected here.
Why? Well, a lot of the action in Chum takes place at a disastrous wedding, so there’s your tangential connection. That’s about it, really, although you can well imagine that much of my inspiration for the wedding scenes in Chum came directly from my terrible experiences at the weddings described in American Wedding Confidential.
Here’s a sample:
“I may have forgotten to explore an equally important facet of the swinging gigolos wedding experience: the dark side.
Oh, it’s there. I didn’t think so myself until a few years ago. Behind the free booze, between the drunkenly wanton bridesmaids, hidden by the blinding light of the camera capturing the Loco-Motion forever, eternally, winks the grinning leer of The Darkness, waiting for some sucker in a bad suit like me to innocently wander in. I started my long, slow walk into the darkness when Insane Co-worker #23 invited me to her friend’s wedding one day, about five minutes after she’d told me she liked me a whole lot and I’d blithely given her the memorized and oft-used (believe it or not) “we’re better off being friends but I will always be there for you” speech. Usually when I give that speech I mean it, and I meant it at that moment; even though I am running the other way as fast as I can whenever someone wants to date me, I usually do want to be just friends.
I hadn’t yet realized that Insane Co-worker #23 was, well, insane.”
Chum by Jeff Somers
Huzzah! Both are absolutely free and available in whatever format you prefer — go for it! Both are also rather poorly formatted and rife with errors, but then you wouldn’t expect anything less from me, would you? Now, go buy Chum before I burst into tears.