Someday, I will write a novel copying all the techniques of Metalocalypse.

I’ve always been a good mimic, as a writer. Pretty much if I read a book or story that impresses me, I can and usually do write something that takes the style and technique and replicates it. This is not to steal anyone’s ideas or brilliancies – most of the time the story that results is far too close to the inspiration to be saleable. It’s good exercise, though, and I do it more or less unconsciously.

This is, however, kind of like homeopathy, in a sense: The molecules of that other writer’s ideas get increasingly diluted as time goes by and I move on to other things, until, eventually, you can’t recognize any of them in my work. Yet the effect remains, so diluted and subtle that you would never link the two, but it’s there, combining witrh the invisible thefts from other writers.

This is why everyone tells you to read constantly when you’re an aspiring writer: You’ve to steal little and steal big.

So what happens to me is that I read a few things by, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald and there follows for a few weeks a stream of stories or perhaps one ungainly novel that mimics his sgtyle and technique. These are mainly unusable, though great fun. Then, two years later, a story emerges that has tiny slivers of Fitzgerald in it but has been alchemized into something different, something new to me (if not necessarily the world at large), and boom! I’ve got more to work with as a writer. This happens without any conscious thought or direction; I just do it, and always have.

This has gotten me into trouble before. Back in my college days an asshat professor once gave me a D on a term paper because he was convinced it was too well written and scholarly in tone to be the product of a Sophomore. I complained and he challenged me to bring him examples of my writing to prove I was capable of it, so the next day I showed up with a box of manuscripts. he looked at the box, looked at me, and conceded defeat. And then the jackass who thought the paper was too good to have been written by me gave it a B+ instead. Jackass.

What had happened, of course, was that I read a long list of scholarly books about the subject at hand and unconsciously absorbed the style and tone of them, then replicated it in my paper.

This is a good thing. Sure, the first attempt is going to be an embarrassing imitation of another writer. But the exercise gets that DNA into your bloodstream, and years later it’ll bubble up and just add a little something to your own work. This is how you get better: You steal little and steal big from everyone around, while they’re stealing from you (hopefully). You discard the chaff over time and keep the good stuff.

Plus, I figure that someday I can parley this skill into a neato ghostwriting gig, like writing “new” Robert Ludlum novels or something. Man’s gotta drink.

Now and then, for my own obscure amusement, I like to calibrate my mortality in interesting ways: Twinkies eaten, years since I last used a typewriter un-ironically, hours spent watching TV since 1989 – that sort of thing. I do this on a pretty constant basis, as I have a real love for statistics and keep a raft of them reflecting my own life. One of the more prominent stats I keep on myself is my short story submissions, which I’ve mentioned before on this blog. I write a short story a month year in and year out, and if any of those stories seem good enough I try to keep them in circulation, trying to sell them to magazines or web sites or anyone, really, who might be willing to pay me five cents a word for them.

In my most industrious year, I managed 107 submissions. I have no idea how I managed that. Last year I managed 25. I’ll top that this year, but I’m not sure by how much. So I’m still pretty actively shilling fiction out there. I know there isn’t a lot of money in short stories, but the Somers Way is never about money, mainly because I am lazy and don’t understand money. Back in The Day all of these submission were through the post office. 107 submissions meant 107 photocopies of a story, 107 large envelopes, 107 letter-sized envelopes with my address and a stamp, and 107 cover letters. These days a lot of my submissions are via email or web form, which is fantastic, and I’m inching towards a Scalzi-esque refusal to submit to any magazine that requires a physical submission, because this is 2010 and goddammit it’s two thousand and ten.

But despite the increasing prevalence of electronic submissions, up until very recently I’ve still included a cover letter with each submission. I’m proud of my cover letters. I enjoy creating absurd, humorous cover letters that talk about Helper Monkeys and Wormholes delivering manuscripts to me, like this actual cover letter I have actually used:

“Having learned to subsist entirely on alcohol and the radiation beaming out of my computer monitor, I believe I am the next step in human evolution—assuming I can survive long enough to sow my soon-to-be-dominant seed. In order to buy time, I need money to pay for the best in health care. Imagine a race of supermen, drinking booze for nutrition, and downloading pornography from the Internet in lieu of sleep! We’d rule the universe in no time. But first I have to get my mutant genes into the pool, and that brings us back to the question of cash.

“You can help! If you publish approximately 500 of my short stories this year, by my calculations I’ll be moderately well off. Here’s the first one: “as soon as its day dawns” (~13,000 words). I hope you enjoy it.”

I’ve often received positive feedback on my cover letters, actually. I’ve even had editors offer me the (dubious) compliment of telling me they’d publish my cover letter, but not my actual story. I just kind of enjoy the whole cover-letter experience, to be honest.

Recently, however, I’ve started to see more and more markets instructing me to skip the cover letter. Usually it’s with a statement about only being interested in the work; some markets even ask that the story itself be anonymized so they can judge it solely on its merits, with no knowledge about you, the author. I don’t mind this in general; it’s not a bad idea to judge a story on its merits. But I will miss making up these ridiculous cover letters. For all I know my cover letters have cost me sales, as Serious Business Editors have been offended by my jolly missives, but that doesn’t bother me too much. I’m going to miss writing the little essays, is all.

The main reason this sticks out for me is that it’s one of those unpredicted consequences: The cover letter is an artifact of a paper age, if you think about it, it’s perfectly sane that it gets dropped when you’re just submitting a file via an automated form. Still, I never thought about cover letters going away. Yet another of my largely unmarketable skills, gone extinct, along with playing the spoons, knowing all the Pac Man patterns for the Atari 2600 version, and programming in BASIC.

Damn universe.