Jeff & The Duchess’ Eating Tour of Alaska

by Jeff Somers

ONCE again I looked around groggily and found myself on an airplane, packed into a tiny little seat, sweating and needing to urinate desperately. I turned my head and sure enough, there was my wife, The Duchess, reading a tabloid magazine. She glanced up and smiled at me.

“Only eight hours to go!”

I stared in horror at her. “You drugged me again!”

She shrugged, looking back down at her magazine. “It’s the only way to get you on the plane. Otherwise you cause such a scene, what with the crying and the begging and the sudden, mysterious loss of your pants.”

She sighed. “And you just missed the beverage cart.”

It had all started months before, when The Duchess had reminded me that her birthday was coming up. This is always dangerous territory, because a certain amount of pomp is required for The Duchess’ birthdays, and any perceived lack of pomp or enthusiasm for pomp is punished, immediately and severely. Generally speaking, The Duchess likes to celebrate each birthday in a different exotic locale, the farther away the better. Now, since I rank traveling to exotic locales on the same level as having oral surgery, I’m always falling short on the enthusiasm part. This is dangerous, because The Duchess has a keen eye for lack of enthusiasm. Under her steely gaze I often get nervous and made terrible, terrible mistakes. Like suggesting that we travel to Alaska to celebrate her birthday because I’m too stupid to realize that Alaska is further away from New York than just about everywhere else in the universe.

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What Kind of Writer Are You, Anyway?
by Jeff Somers

Lord knows my public persona is a carefully constructed straw man made of assumptions, half-truths, ominously oblique remarks, and lurid facial expressions, which is to say there ain’t much meat to it. When confronted, in public, with a careful questioner who begins tugging gently at the loose threads that sprout from my opinions, declarations, and explanations, I can only run in fear and cower behind alcohol, meaning I pretend to pass out and refuse to be brought back to consciousness until the offending person is gone. It doesn’t help, certainly, that I am fact-challenged in most of my positions. I prefer to answer probing questions with brisk falsehoods, and hit the ground running hoping that no one bothers to follow up and discover how much bullshit is inside this wicker man.

This really only becomes a problem when I meet new people who previously have known me only through this zine. My established friends are used to my bullshit, and don’t even bother asking me questions any more – the common sense ones (“Would you like another beer?”) have obvious answers (“Yes, and be quick about it, damn your eyes!”) and the ridiculous ones never occur to them. One of the ridiculous questions which always occurs to strangers, however, is “How do you write?” or one of its tributary questions, like “How do you decide what to write about?” or “How much of your real life is in your writing?”

These questions are ridiculous because, to be honest, I can’t imagine their value to another human being. Write your way, baby, and don’t worry about mine.

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Pop Culture in Fiction
by Jeff Somers

FANS, I don’t claim to know much of anything at all. I know a few things: I know that Warren Spahn is the winningnest lefthanded pitcher in Major League Baseball history. I know that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot simultaneously know both the position and the momentum of a given object to arbitrary precision. I know that irony is a form of speech in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted by the words used. I know how to tie a Square Knot. I can write a Hello World program in BASIC. I know what a Fnord is. See, I know a few things, but nothing, really, of any importance, and nothing, really, that would convince you that I am qualified in any way to write intelligently about Serious Writing Topics. The fact that I’ve published a few literary gems doesn’t mean much, if you consider some of the crap that gets published these days-not just published, but the crap that wins awards. I don’t have any advanced degrees and I’ve rarely won an argument, usually descending to physical threats after about five minutes of stuttering impotence; I haven’t published any scholarly papers on the subject of writing and I’m not making millions through my art. So, there’s really no reason to pay any attention to me, is there? On this subject, I mean. If you need an essay on why a six-pack is good breakfast fare, I’m your man.

Of course, you’ve already acquired this zine. That doesn’t say much for your intellectual abilities, bubba. So I can assume you’re not too picky about what you read, and plunge straight ahead into the subject at hand, which, in case the introductory paragraph wasn’t very clear on the matter, is the usage of Pop Culture references in fiction, and why I think they’re bad, and avoid them.

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