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How Not to Tell a Story

Author: March 10, 2012 3 Comments

The Walkin' DeadIs there anything less engaging on television than The Walking Dead right now? I mean, Jebus. This show is becoming a seminar in how to take apocalyptic zombie fiction and make it boring. Here’s the recipe, in case you’re interested in creating your own boring apocalyptic zombie story as a sleep aid for the restless:

1. Have very, very few zombies. Zombies do show up from time to time on this show, and when they do it’s usually effective. But for a world overrun by the walking fucking dead, the characters spend a lot of time sitting around, sunning themselves, with no zombies, like, anywhere near them.

2. Put your characters in stasis for long periods of time. By my reckoning, the survivors have been at the farm for sixty or seventy years at this point. The farm is magically resistant to zombie invasion, so the characters are just sitting around talking endlessly about … being on the farm. When they originally arrived at the farm I thought this was a decent idea: On the one hand, the implied security of the farm, it’s resemblance to a normal life would tempt our merry band of survivors to steal it, or force their way into it. And of course I fully expected – and still expect – the survivors to destroy the place, to lead the Walkers there and see it burned to the ground. The fact that neither of these things – or something else I didn’t predict – has happened means the characters have just been sitting around, with occasional bouts of action clearly thrown in just to jolt the audience from its nap.

For a short while, admittedly, the missing girl storyline justified this. I could get behind that. But then the girl was missing for what seemed like years, and I’d lost interest in her story long before the Reveal. The Reveal was decent enough, yes, but would have worked better if they’d snipped a lot of the intervening story out, like a tumor.

3. Revert to SitCom character stability. I think we get it by now: Rick is moral, indecisive, and prone to lengthy sermons on This Is How We Live Now. Shane is angry and unstable, prone to violence. All of the characters now have a schtick, and by gum they are steady. Any time the show flirts with the possibility that Rick might grow a little less conflicted, or Shane might restore some of his humanity, or Dale might stop being the nagging, ineffective Voice of Timid Reason, they find a way to write their way out of it. God forbid a character actually evolve, because that would mean they’d have to find something else to write instead of another scene where Shane rants and raves about how he’s the only one capable of keeping everyone safe.

This is, of course, can be easily corrected, and likely will be by the end of the season as they ramp up a spectacular finale. In the mean time, I’ve stopped watching. If I read some reviews that urge me to reconsider, I’ll be happy to. until then, I’m sick of the Hand Wringing Zombieless Zombie Apocalypse Gang.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Essay

Author: March 5, 2012 0 Comments

You’re Eating Yourself, You Don’t Believe It

(Originally published in Angry Thoreauan #28, Easter, 2001)

Back in College, my room-mates Jeof and Ken and I once decided to make a movie. Back then we had lots of ideas, most of which ended in dispiriting failure and occasional emergency room visits, unlike today when the last ten ideas I had were variations on the lets get a drink theme. Back then it didn’t seem so crazy that we would make a movie with a single video camera, no money, actors, or experience. Why not? We were, after all, brilliant, or so we thought. I still don’t know what went wrong — all the signs of unrecognized genius were there: General messiness, absent-mindedness, bad grades, ennui, depression. I suppose it’s easy to make a mistake, since those are also, apparently, the signs of dumbness.

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Bullshit

The End of Storage

Author: March 1, 2012 4 Comments

Friends, my brother Yan is going to be moving soon, and I of course have been drafted to aid him in this endeavor. Yan is not my brother’s real name. I call him Yan to protect his dignity, of which he has little. A few seconds of Googling likely will reveal his true identity, though why you would want it is beyond me. Yan is not very interesting. He is, in fact, a terrible, awful person who is going to make me haul about 300,000 metric tons of books from his old home to his new one. WE HATES HIM.

No, not really. We love Yan! His antics are quite amusing. But I thought I was done hauling freight in exchange for a few beers and some hearty thanks a loooong time ago. Like back in the 20th fucking century. It’s 2012, people. The world is going to assplode in a few months and I am spending my precious final hours hauling books.

Here at Somers Castle, I’ve been trying to rid myself of Things That Must Be Stored.

I used to be the King of All That Must Be Stored. It’s a genetic thing; my family has always kept everything. Bent, rusted screws? You never know, throw them in a jar. Winter jackets from when I was eight years old? You never know, hang them in a closet. I took this training with me and when I first lived on my own I was hauling a lot of stuff around with me.

About a decade ago I had a moment of clarity and have been trying to clean out my life, and I’ve had a lot of success. I realized that a lot of stuff I was hauling for nostalgic purposes had pretty much lost its meaning – if you haven’t spoken to someone in 20 years, do you really need to keep meaningless trinkets? And I used a bit of tough love on myself when it came to old computer equipment and CD-Roms filled with ancient software packages I don’t need any more. I mean, my god, I had shit I couldn’t even identify, pushed into envelopes marked MAYBE IMPORTANT WHO THE FUCK KNOWS. That’s how bad it is.

Currently, I’m largely divested. My CDs: In the trash, everything ripped to MP3s and stored on redundant DVDs. Paperwork, scanned. Trinkets thrown away if i can’t place their significance within five seconds. If I don’t burst into tears upon seeing the fucking things, I do not give a fuck about them anymore.

This is the End of Storage. I used to wonder where to jam everything. I used to sit and study the closets in the small, cramped old apartments I rented, pondering creative ways to get more shit into them. The digital world is freeing up so much damn space I can’t believe how much stuff I was hauling around with me. At a certain point in the future, I could actually imagine living someplace without much storage at all. Just enough to hold a few hundred DVDs — or, ultimately, a single humming RAID array, holding everything. Photos. Music. Manuscripts. Correspondence. All the paperwork of being an adult in the modern world.

The only problem: Books.

Ah, you say, you’re a moron, because books have been solved. I am a moron, this is true. But I’m also still kind of suspicious of eBooks in general, because corporations keep offending me with their blatant disrespect for consumer rights. As I’ve wheezed on before, when I purchase a physical book, I own that sucker. I can lend it, sell it, turn it into origami elephants. Whatever I like, because I own that sumbitch. When I buy an eBook, I am merely purchasing permission to read it and hang onto to it for as long as the seller lets me. Maybe I can loan it or resell it, but that’s determined by the rights holder, and the rights I have can be changed at any time, which means, of course they are not rights at all, are they? Jebus, the content of the book can be changed. On my device. Without my permission.

This is what scientists term bullshit.

So, books remain problematic. I would go get a Kindle or a Nook or whatever in a flash if I could actually own the digital files I purchased, if I could lend them and resell them to used eBook stores and all that jazz. Universally, across the board, without jumping through hoops. And then I could get rid of all these bookshelves and live in some sort of THX-1138 white world, unencumbered by all this stuff.

At which point, no doubt, we will all have holograms of bookshelves and piles of boxes beaming on our white walls, as it will become cool to have a mess everywhere. At least then I’ll be ahead of the game.

Bullshit

WORK, NADA

Author: February 19, 2012 3 Comments

This essay originally appeared in Volume 12, Issue 2 of The Inner Swine.

Work, Nada

The Sad Tale of My Journal

by Jeff Somers

LIFE moves pretty fast, in a way. In some ways, sure, it drags along—an endless series of eight-hour sessions behind a desk, sleeping, and generally doing the same things over and over again, like consuming an entire bottle of bourbon and waking up two states away wearing a pirate costume. These sorts of ruts make it easy to let your existence slip into a blur that’s hard to remember. I don’t think this is anything new; I’m pretty sure that a few thousand years ago when daily life was an endless heart-pounding series of near-death experiences and desperate struggles to survive, it all got kind of blurred together into one endless mortal combat and individual days got scrambled into a melange.

A few years ago, I realized that my life was slipping away like that. Not that I was spending every day in a rut of blood struggles against nature, but that my days were terribly similar and were thus blending together, resulting in an existence that I couldn’t pin point very accurately. Memories stood out, of course, but I found I was having increasing difficulty placing those memories in context and in the proper timeline. I remember being naked and chased by police in Mexico, I would think, and having to steal a woman’s dress from a clothesline. When was that? 1993? 1994? And I’d be unable to place it in my own personal timeline.

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Bullshit, The Inner Swine

In This Slowly Rising City, So Bereft of Company

Author: February 7, 2012 2 Comments

This story was written in the early 1990s and first published in The Whirligig back in 2002. Or so my notes say. I don’t remember either thing.

In This Slowly Rising City, So Bereft of Company

by Jeffrey Somers

Ten-thirty at night after one too many whiskey-in-sodas burning holes in my soft-soled shoes and anything can happen, and usually does, if only for me. Everyone else’s life is so achingly mundane, so rooted in the tar and concrete we’re scraping ourselves off onto.

“Dreaming again, Harrigan?”

It all snaps back into focus again, the unfortunate grayscale focus of night-time in metropolis, the greatest city in the modern sense, the urban sprawl growing to engulf endless acres and unnoticed inches.

I blinked at both of them, Tom and Richie, sweaty in their work clothes. Richie clutched his briefcase to his chest, a precious piece of aged luggage with stained and frayed vinyl. Richie hadn’t worked in six months, but he carried that damn case around as if job interviews might ambush him anywhere and he’d vowed to be ready. I imagined it filled with newspapers and phone books, with advertisements circled in thick red marker. He clutched it so tightly, no doubt, to keep it from bursting open in a frightening flutter of pages escaping into the night, back to their native forests where there was no place for them any more.

“What?” I blink again.

Tom laughed, the silly, barking laugh which was easily ignored when he was sober but which increased in volume and desperation like a wild animal’s mating call when he drank. “We’re getting ready to go. You okay?”

The place was nearly empty, all the usual drunks and loudmouths had left for the bottles they kept hidden at home for emergencies such as closed bars and ended happy hours. It had that sweaty, smoky feel that bars and really good parties had after they’d ended, the washed feel of spent time. Places like this were shrinking as the city grew. Room had to be made. I looked around dumbly and it looked smaller than it had before, the bar closer to our table, the ceiling lower. I found cigarettes in my pocket but they weren’t my brand, they were unfiltered and harsh. I shrugged and shook one out, but I didn’t have any matches.

As I spoke the cigarette bounced up and down before me. “Sure. Is it three o’clock already?”

“Past.” Tom said, standing up. “The bartender’s about to call the police.”

I grinned, partly because I knew he meant it as a joke and partly because I was drunk, and partly because the police would never get there in time; the streets had shifted slightly as the concrete spread, and many of them led to different places, now, or nowhere at all.

We crowded out onto the city streets, and Tom was taking bets as to whether he would be at work on time in the morning. I pushed my hands into my pockets and breathed in the thinning air which struggled heroically to cover all the new area. I didn’t know what the argument was for: Tom was never at work on time, and it never seemed to bother him much. We walked together for a while, and then we split up, Tom laughing to himself as if everything was funny all at once and Rich just listing back and forth, struggling to keep it all straight while keeping a tight grip on his briefcase, lest it bound away from him, slipping through his fingers the way everything else in his life seemed to. I waved to them both, but they didn’t turn to see.

—-

I stood on a street corner, waiting for the light to change. The street was at least a mile wide, the curbs pulling apart in slow tides. It yawned before me in a tempting, silent way, open and waiting. There wasn’t any need to wait on the light, there were no cars, there weren’t any people. The night air was cool and the wind had taken on the hollow whistle usually found in canyons and gullies. I leaned against a lamp post with my hands in my pockets and watched the streetlight change, red, green, yellow, red. It was even beginning to take the lights longer to change.

Getting home at night was a longer and longer journey, too, partly because of the expanse of the city, partly because I kept having this feeling that something was going to happen, and kept waiting for it to come.

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Fiction, Free Short Stories, Tuesday Short Stories

Half-Assed Music Video

Author: January 27, 2012 1 Comment

In the sphere of Dubious Achievements, I believe I have just created a new one: Making a DIY music video constructed entirely from video snippets left over from Ask Jeff Anything videos and free (or very cheap) stock video I had lying around on the hard drive.

I enjoy silly challenges like this: Take some disparate video and try to construct something that has a narrative (of sorts), makes sense, and is maybe slightly appealing. It’s fun. I don’t claim it’s great. Just fun. Mainly for me. Huzzah for me!

Bullshit, gee-tar, Videos

The! Inner! Swine!

Author: January 24, 2012 0 Comments

The Inner Swine Vol 17, Issue 3/4The new issue of my zine The Inner Swine is ready. I have a pile of paper here that is slowly being transformed into issues, which will then slowly be folded and stuffed into envelopes and mailed out. The key word being slowly.

In the mean time, the Kindle and Nook editions are available right now! Technology is amazing. The issue is 100pp long and the Kindle/Nook versions are each 99 cents and differ from the print only in that they lack most of the images. Go buy them and tell me I am a genius:

KINDLE

NOOK

Thank you for your support.

BAM!, The Inner Swine, Writing