Latest Posts

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

Cliffhangerin’

Author: June 8, 2009

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.

Writing

The Movie Question

Author: June 6, 2009

Over at SF Signal, they asked their readers which books they’d like to see made into movies, and someone voted for The Electric Church. Which is great to read, of course. Naturally, I’ve thought about this possibility, and it’s always fun to cast the movie of your book. Of course, when you’re imagining casting and budgeting the movie of your book there’s a tendency to assume a) unlimited, blockbuster-level money and b) you’re going to have some control over the proceedings. The first is unlikely, though, of course, possible. The second will never happen. I’ll be lucky if they remember to include a “based on the novel by” credit, much less invite me to be a part of the process. Which makes sense, because when they decide that the Monks should turn out to really be demons from hell complete with wings and glowing red eyes, they don’t want me throwing furniture and setting hotel rooms on fire.

As I’ve said before, if and when a movie gets made of one of my books, chances are it’ll be an international SyFy kind of project, starring the action stars of 1983 (if we’re lucky) and funded by the Canadian government, so it’s best not to get too hopeful and creative, but it’s also fun to think about who might star in such films. So what do do you think? Assuming unlimited budget, who would you cast in the major character roles of TEC?

To be honest, I haven’t thought on this too much, though I do have an opinion here and there. But I’m interested in what everyone else thinks, as it’s a fascinating glimpse into how my characters are perceived by readers.  Have at it!

Bullshit

Back in the U.S.A.

Author: May 28, 2009

Well, I forgot to mention, but I’ve been in Italy for a week following my wife around and attempting to conquer the country with exactly 25 words of badly conjugated Italian. Which is more possible than you’d think. I got more mileage out of can you tell me where and quanto devo than you’d ever imagine. Of course, everyone seemed to speak English there as well, and this is what usually happened:

JEFF: <garbled, barely-intelligible and badly pronounced phrase in Italian that loosely translates to excuse me, but can you the bathroom in the footwear? Pizza!>

ITALIAN GENTLEMAN: <Sighing>. You’re an American, eh? Give me fifty Euros.

JEFF: Grazie!

Anyway, it was a fine trip, aided by the fact that even in these sad modern times you can jab a meaty finger at a menu and grunt hopefully, and something will be brought to your table. Sure, sometimes it’s Tripe, but that’s Italy.

The trip made me think about world-building, actually, because there are places in Europe which are so drastically different from America, yet they both exist in the same world. Heck, even cities in Italy are very different from each other; Florence for all its Renaissance charm feels much, much more modern than nearby Siena, where Black Death and war apparently froze development for hundreds of years, leaving the city little changed, in some ways, from its Medieval roots.

This got me to thinking about writing science-fiction – at least SF that’s based in the future, like mine. What you’re always trying to accomplish with futuristic SF (well, maybe not always, but a lot of the time) is a believably weird extension of our present. This is sometimes a fine line to walk. On the one hand you want there to be technological advances and seemingly-impossible, unexpected cultural shifts. On the other hand, you want to avoid creating a future world that is completely wonky and disconnected from the previous state of things. Things here in the 21st century might appear bizarre and incomprehensible to someone from the 14th, sure, but there are threads of things that remain the same. A road is still a road, a loaf of bread is still recognizable. Some things – more than you might expect – have remained the same.

This principle applies, I think, to any story set in a future Earth: You have to avoid the temptation to re-imagine everything. Because the future, unless it is so far away as to be completely disconnected with the present, is an extension of said present. Things only change when forces act upon them – better technology, changing climates, new ideas. Some things stay the same despite technology and time, simply because no one can conceive of any advantage to changing them. If you can think of a reason why people will be wearing bizarre plastic suits in the year 2109, fine, go on ahead. You don’t even have to explicitly detail why or how, as long as there’s a reason in your head as you write. But if you can’t think of a good reason why people would wear bizarre plastic suits. . .then don’t make your characters wear bizarre plastic suits.

Look around: I’ll bet you there is tons of technology and infrastructure around you that is old. They invent all sorts of cool new things, but the old sludgy things stick around a long time. The water pipes in the ground in my home town are 100 years old. There’s tons of old copper wire strung between houses. Old cars, old buildings, old technology – just because new stuff gets invented doesn’t mean the old gets swept away in a glorious tide of newness, so if you make your future world a shiny example of all-new everything, it’s going to feel a little plastic.

Just one writer’s opinion, of course. And a drunk writer at that. And a drunk writer with just 25 words of Italian under his belt. What sense could I possibly make?

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements