Ramblings of Jeff Somers, author
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.
Paul T. Riddell, who quit writing not so long ago, has two books finally coming out:
http://txtriffidranch.livejournal.com/275353.html
All I can say: Yahoo! Paul’s the Bees Knees.
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.
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!
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.
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.
For some reason there is a lot of me out there on the Intarwebs today. Allow me to point me out to you, okay?
Okay, okay – 2 mentions, perhaps, is not ‘a lot’. But they’re lengthy, thoughtful mentions, so there.
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.
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.
Advice: Avoid writers when they start talking or writing about, well, writing. We’re a bunch of self-involved, arrogant bastards, friend, and we will bore you to death with our own perceived genius. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
First off, word counts. I never used to truck with word counts. I wrote whatever I felt like and didn’t worry too much about how long it was, and, believe it or not, things usually worked out just fine. The idea of counting words would have disturbed me, to be honest, as I had better things to do, like hang out on streetcorners drinking blackberry brandy and wondering why no one thought I was cool.
Of course, this was waaayyyyy back in time, before computers were everywhere. I typed everything on an old manual typewriter, and it was good. Eventually, for cover letter purposes, I figured out that every page was approximately 200 words, give or take, but that’s as far as I went.
Even now, when misguided publishers have actually paid me for my work, I usually only worry about word count after I’ve written the first draft, and then it’s just idle curiosity to see how far off the mark of a Real Live Novel I am. Usually I’m in the money. I have a weird instinct for that. Can’t explain it, and it’s one of two talents I actually have, the other being the ability to drink entire fifths of whiskey and still bike home. Well, someone’s home, anyway.
A few months ago, I knew I had about 3 months of down time while I pondered story ideas for the next Cates novels, routed them to interested parties, and got contracts signed. I didn’t want to do what I usually do with downtime, which is to drink too much and sit around strumming chords on the guitar and making up songs about my thrilling adventures, so I decided on an experiment: If I had 3 months, I’d write a book in 3 months. Hell, folks write novels in 1 month for NaNoWriMo, right? SO I figured if I wrote 1000 words a day, I’d have something novel-length at the end. So I set off. And I did it, or just about – it actually took me one week longer to finish it up.
It’s not bad. I doubt it’ll ever get published, but a version of it might. Who knows?
But I’ll tell you this much: I’m never going to keep track of word count again. I hated doing it, found it got in the way of my creative flow, and in the end I don’t know if I necessarily wrote any more or any more efficiently because of it. So it’s back to tossing words in the dark and hoping for the best.
Naturally, this isn’t meant to argue that everyone should do as I do. If word count as a daily/weekly/whatever goal works for you, go with Gary and do yer worst. For me personally, I’m done, beyond the macro word-counting to make sure I’m not about to send my publisher a 20,000-word premise instead of a 80,000-word novel.
SECOND, since I actually do have books out there in the marketplace (huzzah!) I have to pay attention to things like the Authors’ Guild’s stance on the new Text-to-Speech feature of the Kindle 2. Which basically seems to boil down to: The guild considers the TTS feature to be a derivative audio work of the novel, for which fancy lads[1] like myself ought to be paid. This despite the fact that the “voice” of the Kindle 2 sounds like the Kindle 2 is begging you to euthanize it.
Now, I am not a lawyer but I’ve had three cocktails, so: I don’t think you can really argue that anything read aloud by anything is a “derivative work”. The Guild’s role is to protect authors’ rights, and the thought process goes like this:
Maybe there’s a tiny point there, in that if people own a Kindle 2 AND they are the sort of people who buy audiobooks, they might stop buying audiobooks because their melodious Kindle 2 gives them what they want, aw yeah. And potentially declining sales of audiobooks seems to me to be the obvious real motive here. But the larger point is, you can’t stop this shit, man. The technology has already time-traveled into the future and defeated your future armies. New features are going to be developed and attached to popular technologies, and you cannot put these things back into the box.
In other words, even if through voodoo or magic or litigation Amazon is forced to remove the TTS feature from the Kindle 2, what happens when your iPod can read books aloud, or your netbook, or your wristwatch, or a small man who can live inside a knapsack you carry on your back at all times? This kind of unstoppable technological breakthrough is unstoppable, and very quickly becomes omnipresent. Think MP3s back in 1994: the RIAA tried to suppress that, too, and boy-howdy that worked.
Of course, you have to put things in language I’ll understand: Things like royalties and high finance make me sleepy, but if you tell me that the Kindle 2 is somehow going to rob me of a bottle of Glenlivet 12 in the year 2013, and I will suddenly get all Hulky and smash things.
[1] UPDATE 2/28: I would like to be referred to as The Fancy Lad from now on, okay? Yes, I have been drinking. What of it?