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HuZzAh

Author: July 21, 2009

I have these:

Thus there is joy here in the Somers Compound. You will be able to get one for yourself soon. in the mean time, some chaotic things are gonna happen, some of which are still secret.

Not secret: I’m gonna be Tweeting an Avery Cates short story over at http://twitter.com/somers_story starting on 8/5, through 8/12. 8/12 being the official pub date of the book, and also when the main web site (www.eternalprison.com) goes live (right now it’s just a placeholder). If you’re on Twitter, follow me and get a free story!

Other things will be happening, but for now they’re under wraps. And I am tired, and the cats are wrestling because they’re hungry. G’night.

BAM!, More Shit I Gotta Do

The First Line

Author: July 20, 2009

Friends, I don’t exactly live a life of suspense and international intrigue; I don’t think that shocks anyone. A little writing, some booze, some ambitious guitar playin’ – this is what passes for excitement around here. A fine example was this weekend: A nice dinner, renting Marley and Me with the wife (a movie which made me suicidal; I spent Saturday night alone in the dark in the bathroom with a bottle of rye) and a great deal of puttering. This is a good thing, because I’ve reached the Age of Honesty with Yourself, and I know I am no John McClane in secret. If I were to stumble into Die Hard, I’d be one of the extras who gets machine-gunned for no reason, probably standing by the buffet with a cheese puff halfway to my mouth.

Anyway, one of the other exciting things I did this weekend was try to watch the first episode of Syfy‘s* new show, Warehouse 13. I figure it’s a SF show, so I might as well take a gander, as you get few decent SF shows to watch. Also, Syfy’s offering it as a free on-demand show in my cable neighborhood, so why not? So one night while stalking cats through the house I put it on. For five minutes.

I can’t really say this show is bad, or good, or anything. All I can tell you is the first five minutes were so leaden and cliched I couldn’t go on. You know the old chestnut teachers pass on to writers in workshops and classes, “Grab the reader with the first line”? Well, it’s a good piece of advice (though, as with all advice, your mileage may vary and you should never hesitate to ignore it if you’re sure of yourself) and it applies to TV shows too. The first five minutes of Warehouse 13 were plain old boring.

Let’s see: Beautiful but cold and businesslike female agent? Check. Handsome and rakish male agent who breaks the rules but is a genius, and also too sleeps with more women than Hugh Hefner? Check. An adversarial relationship between them that includes sexual tension and grudging respect? Check. And you know immediately that they’ll be forced to work together despite their sincere pleas against it? Oh, I’m sure: Check.

I don’t know if the story itself was interesting, because I almost passed out at that point, contemplating the well-run rut of these character types. Sweet lord, I can even pinpoint season three, episode seven when they’re forced to share a hotel room on a rainy night and he sees her stripping out of her wet clothes and their eyes meet. I mean, really, is this the best they can do? If this were a book this is the equivalent of making the first line an instruction to go read other, more interesting books first.

Maybe the story was fascinating. Maybe it was the best SF concept in years, well-written and well-filmed. Who knows? I may never. Every time I even relive that opening scene in my head I start to feel sleepy.

There would have been six million better ways to open the show or draw the characters. Almost any other concept would have been better. Even simply switching the sex roles and making her the sexually irresistible playgirl and him the uptight perfectionist would have, if nothing else, made me give the show ten more minutes to at least find out what the premise of the episode was going to be. As it is this might as well have been sketched out by one of those script-writing programs, which it may well have been. And it reinforces my suspicion that the folks who run Syfy think that SF fans will watch anything as long as it a) has monsters, b) has aliens or ghosts, or c) has a passing resemblance to The X Files.

The lesson here is that you’ve got to put some effort into the opening of any story. You can’t expect folks to wade through a large amount of boring rubbish to discover a bit of genius on page 35, or after the first commercial break. Like I said: I don’t know if W13 is a good show or not. I may yet give it another chance, but right now I’m not inclined to do so, because why? I feel like I know exactly how the characters will behave, I feel like I could write the first twenty minutes of this show without a single note from the producers. Maybe there’s a shocking twist, maybe if I’d given it five more minutes I would have been rewarded with an interesting inversion or a great play on my cynical expectations. Maybe. And maybe I’m a boor for not having the intellectual fortitude to hang in there a few more minutes and see. Anything’s possible.

On the other hand, they could have simply made the beginning more interesting, and I wouldn’t have to wonder.

*Web site title: “Imagine Greater” WTF? Is everyone at that channel a moron?

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Alternatively Speaking

Author: July 10, 2009

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.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Odds n’ Ends

Author: July 2, 2009

Two things to mention today. I know that blogging’s been a bit dodgy of late, because I am frickin’ busy. Now, you may be imagining some sort of network-TV version of a writer’s life and picturing me dashing about in a tuxedo, solving crimes and cashing huge checks, but no, not that kind of busy. The boring kind.

First off: I should mention that longtime correspondent and pal Rob Tillitz has a book out that you should read:

Rob’s a fascinating guy with a style all his own, and his book’s already been optioned for a film. Check it out!

Second, I am not going to see the new Transformers movie. I saw the first one on cable and of course, as everyone acknowledges, it was batshit insane terrible. The sort of movie that takes your childhood memories and not only eats them, but then craps them out onto a plate and forces you to consume them again. If life was a horror movie, Transformers would be the ravenous brain-sucking alien that sucks out your brain. And if there was any doubt that the sequel is even worse, I have the fine folks at i09.com to clue me in.

But I don’t need cluing in. Science fiction movies have become more or less the new western;  mainstream and stripped of anything that might be too taxing for the general audience (which is not a jibe at the intellect of folks out there – a general audience hive mind is, by its very nature, bland and generic) and thus anything that might make it interesting or, damn it, science-fictiony. Transformers was about as SF as your average car commercial. Sure, it had robots. From space. I think. Their origin was never very well explained, nor was their ability to somehow look like current-model American cars, or anything, really. The dearth of actual ideas beyond BIG WHOMPING ROBOTS FIGHTING and MEGAN FOX HAS TEH BOOBAGE was pretty startling, even for a cynical summer blockbuster.

What is, after all, science fiction? Do you just need one big SF macguffin to qualify? Shouldn’t there be some speculative thought in there? Like, how is the world changed now that the Autobots live amongst us? Can their technology be adapted? Wouldn’t someone suggest capturing one and tearing it to pieces to steal their secrets? FOR GOD’S SAKE THERE ARE SENTIENT ROBOTS FROM SPACE. Who built ’em, and why? Or did they evolve, and what does that mean for the rest of existence?

Nope. At the end of Transformers I the world is exactly as it was when the movie began with the exception of a couple of sentient robots living secretly around us – if you call that living – and no one seems to worry about the Autobots and what they represent. Because Transformers was an action movie that happened to have robots, and none of the creative team involve gave a shit about those questions.

In short: Transformers was not a Sci Fi movie. And neither is T2, apparently.

So: Happy Fourth of July, Americans. Don’t blow your hands off with M80s, don’t get sunstroke after your fifth beer (I speak from experience), and don’t go see Transformers 2 unless you know exactly what you’re getting into.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Miscellania

Author: June 25, 2009

A couple things that I’ve been remiss about mentioning:

  • Street Team: Friends, have you ever wanted to take part in a slightly incoherent DIY marketing campaign? If so, you’re not alone. A group of scrappy readers have volunteered to do just that, so we’re forming an Eternal Prison Street Team. This basically means I send you promotion materials (stickers, bookmarks, etc) and you. . .well, do what you want with them. Plus anything else creative and legal you can think of. If anyone is interested in becoming one of these cool folks, you can contact me directly or surf on over to our little forum, where I’ve set up a special place for everyone to discuss strategy. I can’t promise everyone makes it back alive, and there’s not money in it for ya, but if you think it’ll be fun, come on by and take a stack of stickers and go to town.
  • In MWA Anthology: I just found out my short story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” has been selected to appear in the next anthology put out by Mystery Writers of America. The anthology is tentatively titled Blood Lust and is edited by Charlaine Harris. It’s currently scheduled to appear in April 2010. I am of course still waiting to find out it was all a terrible mistake.

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.

BAM!, Filthy Lucre, More Shit I Gotta Do, Writing

The Trouble with Cool

Author: June 18, 2009

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.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing, Writing

Open Accessed

Author: June 17, 2009

Hey kids, lookit this:

http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/books_9780316022101.htm

It’s my book The Digital Plague online. Free to read. Ain’t that cool?

It’s a pretty nifty little interface, too, I think. Why they chose book #2 while there’s only an excerpt of The Electric Church, I’m not sure, but maybe that’s something that will be worked out in days to come. In the mean time, if you know of anyone who might like my work but hasn’t bothered to buy a copy, feel free to send them this link and they can dig into it for free.

BAM!

Bad Books I Love

Author: June 16, 2009

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.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing