Latest Posts

Every Other Day of the Week is Fine

Author: March 16, 2009

Ah, Monday. My sainted mother tells me that she still wakes up at 6AM every day despite being retired for 20 years now, trained by 40 years of waking up for school, for jobs, for her screaming, bratty kids. Similarly, I figure Monday will always be a drag even when I’m sitting on a yacht somewhere dozing through a good book and a bottle of good Scotch: I’ve been trained to view Monday was a descent into grim struggle.

Today though, there’s something fun to brighten my day: The Digital Plague is part of Bookspot Central’s March Tournament. In round one I’m up against Black Ships by Jo Graham, and after 2 votes (one by my sainted agent) we’re tied 1-1. Get over there and cause a ruckus and GIVE ME MY TITLE. I’m told there’s an engraved trophy, and I’ve never won a Major Award, so I demand everyone go there and make sure I win. Or I will be wrathful.

BAM!, Bullshit

Well, Lookie Here

Author: March 13, 2009

To balance out the bad review I posted the other day, here’s a really great review. It says, in part: “This book is absolutely brilliant. A masterpiece from a very talented author.” Huzzah!

Even better, the web site has excerpts from both The Electric Church and The Digital Plague posted, so if you’ve been wondering about my books but unsure, here’s a chance to take a gander and see if you like ’em.

BAM!

Messing with Everyone

Author: March 12, 2009

Twitter has its uses, eh? After tweeting some of my ridiculous schtick (I’ve been using Twitter as a sort of stream-o-consciousness platform, just riffing on whatever random topic comes to mind), this time concerning how I want everyone to send me their battered well-loved copies of my books in return for a pristine new copy. I’d encourage everyone to sign their used copies before sending them to me, and I’d start a little museum of the personalized copies of my books.  Sean Ferrell replied with an even better idea: Folks should send me their used copies and I send them a new copy with a different ending.

This is genius. We quickly sketched out a fantastic idea: Publishing a book that had many, many different subtle variations. Like, 250 different versions of the book. We’d tell no one. No announcement, no PR campaign. One person’s copy would have the hero dying in the end, another’s would have him live. Some would be almost identical except for different adjectives used throughout. The point is, we’d tell no one. Slowly, people would start to realize what we’d done.

This would be an amazing idea, a social experiment cum publishing stunt. But of course you’d need a publisher that doesn’t mind being a little ridiculous, and the brass balls to do it all with a straight face. Not to mention possibly invalidating your story completely if there are sixteen different endings and a basic admittance that it doesn’t matter what adjectives you use in that scene.

Still. . .I’m tempted.

Of course, you could do this much easier with an eBook, just serving up randomly selected files from a pool. Still, as Nick Mamatas pointed out on a recent SF Signal mind-Meld, eBooks are overpriced currently ($10 for a file I don’t even actually own, but only ‘license’? Jebus save us) and many are encumbered with DRM. So eBooks currently=Fail. Plus also too, doing this sort of thing with actual printed copies is so much more grand and epic. People could spend years trying to collect ’em all! And then think of the translations!

So, next time you’re reading one of my books, you might want to call up a friend and compare some pages. You never know.

Bullshit

Best Bad Review This Year

Author: March 9, 2009

The Digital Plague got reviewed by the glorious Zine World, and Henry S. Kivett didn’t seem to like it, though I had to read between the lines to get that. The bad review is worth it, however, for this glorious summation:

“Somers’ fatal mistake is that he kills off the only likeable character on page 29, leaving us to follow a jackass and his cohorts through a wasteland. . .”

And thus we have the title for Avery Cates #4, don’t we? A JACKASS AND HIS COHORTS coming to you in 2010!

BAM!

In Russia, Avery Cates is Even More Badass

Author: March 6, 2009

Friends, I give you:

The Electric Church in Russian. This was pointed out to me courtesy of the extremely talented translator who worked on the project. Aside from the fact that this is apparently some alternate universe version of the book where Avery Cates is some sort of spacefaring mercenary with tattoos all over his face, this is, of course, insanely cool. Of course, as I don’t read Russian, this could also be an entirely different book. Who knows?

Thanks to Katy for the head’s up! I think all of you should have this in your collections for completeness’ sake.

BAM!

Watching The Watchmen

Author: March 4, 2009

Friends, I’m used to being Not Cool. I’ve actually pretty much based my social persona on being Not Cool and Proud of It, though of course I cry tiny tears of drama sometimes when the fact is pointed out to me. Which it is about once a week by some of my hurtful friends. You know who you are. Actually, you don’t, because none of my friends actually read my blog, the bastards.

So the fact that I am apparently the only nerd on Earth who has never read Watchmen doesn’t alarm me, much. It’s a little strange, though, how everyone seems to assume that I have, you know? Like this was some sort of seismic event in culture, a shared moment of wonder. For folks who did read the Graphic novel, I’m sure it was. It’s just the assumption that Nerd = Read Watchmen that somehow irritates me.

I’m not sure why. I realized long ago that just because my old friends and I can and do have entire conversations using Simpsons references and quotes doesn’t mean this is universal, and that people I like and enjoy can, in fact, not enjoy or be very meh about things I love. My brother, for example, is a fun guy to talk to about things, but we score very low on shared cultural experiences because he just doesn’t like the same things I do, and vice versa. So why, then, does it seem like every blog post or magazine article i read assumes that if I’m reading that blog post, I must have read and loved Watchmen? I feel like I have to assimilate or be scorned.

Of course, by all accounts Watchmen is worth my attention, so I should put down my Scotch, get over my instinctive resistance to any suggestion made by anyone, any time, and just read the thing. Ah, but should I wait to see the movie? On the one hand any movie worth watching does not require you to read the source material to be appreciated. On the other hand, how will I know about the in-jokes and meta references if I don’t? How will I pass amongst the True Nerds if I can’t speak the secrets? Well, the usual: I will carry smoke bombs, and whenever someone asks me something I can’t answer, I dash it to the floor, laugh like a hyena, and make a run for it. 46% of the time, it works every time.

Man, we need Nerd Boy Cliff’s Notes for Failed Nerds like me.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Everybody’s Talkin’ ‘Bout Me

Author: March 3, 2009

For some reason there is a lot of me out there on the Intarwebs today. Allow me to point me out to you, okay?

  • Someone has somehow managed to shoehorn me into the origins of blogging itself. Why has no one else though to do this? Not that I actually claim any credit just because I’ve been self-publishing a zine since 1995, but why hasn’t anyone tried to float me as the inspiration of, well, just about anything cool? This is right up there with my lack of a Wikipedia page. You’re all failing me. What we need to do is 1) start my Wikipedia page; 2) say something ridiculous, like “Jeff Somers invented the Internet” or “Jeff Somers woke up one morning and wrote out the C Programming language on a yellow pad.”; 3) Let a newspaper quote the Wikipedia article with the fakery; 4) When Wikipedia’s Sorcerers try to delete the fakery, we show them an outside source – the very newspaper that quoted from us!; 5) Profit!
  • Dawn over at Officially Twisted seems to like The Digital Plague a little bit. She obviously has great taste.

Okay, okay – 2 mentions, perhaps, is not ‘a lot’. But they’re lengthy, thoughtful mentions, so there.

BAM!

Ain’t Technology Grand

Author: March 2, 2009

My publisher may be switching to an electronic review of copy-edited manuscripts, and goddamn, am I excited. Currently we do things the old-fashioned way: They mail me a pile of steaming paper with handwritten edits and I stet away with my blue pencil until my wrist aches (bastards dare to edit my glorious prose). Now there’s a possibility that in the future I will get a nice tidy file in my email, and it’s about time. And not only because I can search-and-replace my name in place of the main character.

I love books, the printed, bound wonders that they are. I hate piles of paper, however. I have filing cabinets filled with my old manuscripts, tomes written back in the days before I caved in to word processing, and now I wish I’d caved a long time ago, as those brittle pieces of paper are either going to burn up in a blaze someday or simply bury me in paper, leaving me to tap out desperate sandwich orders on my Twitter account. Someday I intend to spend about 5 years scanning everything down to nifty PDF files, probably just in time for PDF to stop being a universal format and leaving them as useful as my old Commodore 64 Kwik Writer files (which I still have, for reasons I can’t articulate, on ancient 5.25″ floppies).

Forget eBooks and Kindles – this is what technology is going to change. The way we produce and work, not necessarily how we experience completed work. I remain unconvinced that anyone’s going to want to ditch printed books entirely – at least not in significant numbers – but I personally will ditch printed page proofs in a second. Faster, even. Eventually, I want my proofs and copyediting beamed directly into my brain. And then I want that Stephen King Typewriter of the Gods.

More Shit I Gotta Do

$1 Orbit

Author: February 28, 2009

This is a grand idea: Every month, Orbit Books (my sainted publisher, from whom all goodness flows) is selling an ebook for $1. Check it out at www.onedollarorbit.com and enjoy, if ebooks are your thing. Personally, I’d rather have the book read to me by George W. Bush than read an ebook, but to each their own.

BAM!