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All Creatures Great and Small

Author: July 30, 2020 1 Comment

I want to tell you about the summer I spent reading James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small in the galley of a tugboat.

A writing career doesn’t just happen. You come to writing in your own way, along your own path. By the time I was sitting in that tugboat’s galley, I’d already been writing stories for a few years. Sci-fi and fantasy, mainly, with some weirdo crime stories thrown in for spice. In high school I wrote some stories that threw wild Twilight Zone twists into careworn plots because everything seemed new to me, and I wrote some stories about high school kids who committed terrible crimes, disappeared for a decade, and suddenly showed up at their high school reunion to reveal what really happened while their former classmates gasped and sighed and schemed to seduce them. You know, typical stuff. Pretty bad stuff.

My parents, god rest their souls, insisted that my brother and I get paying jobs once we turned 14. Of course, my brother and I were generally loafing incompetents, so the actual finding of said jobs was kept out of our hands. My father worked at a local bank (this was back when there were such things as local banks), so he got us jobs in the mailroom. I spent a summer walking around an office building delivering mail and listening to music on my Walkman1. Then I would go home and my mother would confiscate my earnings and tell me I was lucky. I didn’t feel lucky, but you couldn’t argue with my mother.

The next year, however, that job wasn’t available, so we had to get creative2. My father had an acquaintance who ran a drilling company, and he finagled a job for me3. The job wasn’t very closely defined, so one Monday morning my Mom drove me to the asscrack of Jersey City4, and a bunch of befuddled and slightly hungover men pondered what in hell to do with me.

The Tug Boat, Exciting and New5

After spending some eye-opening days with the functioning alcoholics who worked for the drilling company, I was eventually assigned to help spruce up an old tug boat. The company kept a few tugs in order to tow their drilling platforms around, and this one looked and smelled like it had been bought at auction around 1870 and left to rot for a while.

My ‘supervisor’ for the tug reclamation project was an older gentleman who was also living on the tugboat6. This disturbed me, because I would show up every morning and he’d emerge from the cabin, coughing and scratching himself, which made me feel like I was visiting some distant cousin, because all of my cousins emerged from their own bedrooms coughing and scratching in exactly the same way7.

I don’t remember the guy’s name. Let’s call him Earl.

Earl never assigned me any work. He made a few vague suggestions here and there, usually without any sort of context or explanation, and I quickly figured out that I could ignore these suggestions with impunity. Earl would then go off to do mysterious things in the engine area, emerging frequently to smoke cigarettes. I kept waiting for Earl to burst into flames after spending an hour shoulder deep in gasoline and engine oil and lighting up. As the summer dragged on, this became an increasingly attractive possibility.

I was borrowing my parents’ car to get to work every day, which was a perk. Once, leaving the yard, Earl asked if I would give him a ride to a local bar. About six other guys piled in, and I remember being impressed with how fast Earl could move when properly motivated. He made it from the car to the bar within seconds. I was too young to appreciate the value of this skill.

Anyway, since I had no actual work to do, I spent a lot of time in the tug’s filthy galley, where I found a single book: All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot (a pseudonym). These stories are about a veterinary surgeon who lives and works in a small English town. This is not exactly what 16-year old Jeff would have chosen to read, but I didn’t feel comfortable bringing activities to the job. It’s one thing to sit on your ass all day for minimum wage, it’s something else entirely to flash about how little work you’re doing. So I had nothing else to do but read that book.

And I read the hell out of that book.

It’s delightful! And charming. And completely different from what I’d been reading my whole life, and in that sense, transformative. I’d never imagined I could be so enthralled with these stories of animals and quiet country life. Sure, boredom was a factor. Possibly also fumes of some sort. But it taught me that I needed to be a little more wide in my reading, that perhaps stories that had survive for years or decades or centuries did so because they were awesome in their own way.

Eventually, it was discovered that I was basically doing nothing on that tug. I didn’t get fired, because technically no one had told me to do anything. I was not and am not a lawyer, but I lawyered that situation. And basically managed to get paid to read a book, which makes me a genius under international law.

Bullshit, Writing

The Other Beta

Author: July 29, 2020 3 Comments

As writers, many of us turn to Beta Readers to get objective, informative feedback on our work. I don’t use Beta Readers very often, because I dread that moment when someone brings me the slightly damp stack of paper I’ve handed them and starts asking uncomfortable questions, like

Why is this hardcopy in the year 2020?

or

Did you misspell the word ‘calisthenics’ on purpose throughout? Also, do you think calisthenics is a kind of telepathic power, because that’s how you use the word throughout this story.

or

Did you include an entire recipe for goulash in the middle as a metatextual commentary on your main character’s food obsessions or did you accidentally hit CTRL-V and never noticed because you obviously did not proofread this?

You get the point. But I totally see the utility of Beta Readers, and fully encourage their use. Betas can be incredibly helpful in clarifying your weak points — and encouraging you by pointing out what’s working.

In terms of useful partners in the service of improving your writing, something else most of us can use is a Beta Reader for reading.

Let’s Get Weird

One of the most important things a writer can do is read. Reading a lot of books in the genres and styles you work in can help you improve your writing and make it more marketable. Reading outside your comfort zones can improve your writing and make it more interesting.

The latter can be challenging. We all have blind spots, and we all have comfort food when it comes to books and stories and other reading. Even when we make an effort to read authors from diverse backgrounds, or genres we’re not familiar with, we can easily fall into patterns that dilute the effectiveness of the strategy.

Having someone who will gently guide you to books you’d never normally consider reading — a Beta Reader for Reading — can be a tremendous help. My own BRR is my wife, the formidable Duchess. The Duchess reads voraciously, and reads books I wouldn’t normally get anywhere near. But when she really enjoys a book, she puts it on my TBR pile and insists we have a mini two-person book club about it. And because she is The Duchess and she is formidable, I pretty much have to.

The results are good: I read books I wouldn’t normally read, or even glance at. I don’t always love them, but that’s not the point: My world is widened, slightly, but reading them. Having someone who is willing to push my reading boundaries and come at them sideways is a powerful way to do that, to make your reading count more.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to practice using my calisthenic powers to make bottles of beer float over to me, or die trying.

Writing

Sweat Equity. Sweat the Small Stuff. Sweat Everything. Sweat.

Author: July 23, 2020 0 Comments

Photo by Hans Reniers, Unsplash

FRIENDOS, I am a sweaty man.

I inherited this from my father, who was a deeply unhealthy man who could often be found eating entire jars of peanut butter at the kitchen table at 3AM. Seriously, we had to hide the peanut butter from him, but he always found it. When my father did chores around the house, he would tie a bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes, because that man was one enormous sweat gland.

And so am I, despite the fact that I don’t eat entire jars of peanut butter. I can only conclude that this general air of sweatiness is inherited. The Somers genes are certainly miraculous. I try to imagine what possible evolutionary advantage this level of sweat could possibly afford, and the best I can come up with is that it lubricates us in terrifying situations so we can squeeze through extremely narrow spaces. This makes sense, as we Somers’ are clearly a prey species.

In the modern world, however, where we Somers’ are allowed to burrow deep within the comforting fluff of civilization and are thus spared from most forms of predation, this full-body dampness serves little purpose except to make me appear consistently nervous or consistently on the verge of a heart attack.

IN WHICH I MAKE MY WIFE UNCOMFORTABLE

There are people in this world who enjoy eating outside, al fresco, no matter the temperature or the sunlight situation. God love these people, these happy idiots. I am not one of them. I sweat under arctic conditions, and sitting in the sun while eating hot food (or cold food, or ice cubes, or just breathing in a steady and unalarming manner) causes me to perspire wildly.

My brother, Yan, is someone who can sit in full sunlight when it’s 105 degrees out and eat a piping hot bowl of pasta without complaint. Just thinking about that makes me sweat through my shirt. How this genetic disparity happened, I don’t know, though it supports my long, deep suspicion that my brother and I are not actually related.

The other day my wife, The Duchess, and I were sitting outside in the sun, for some reason, having lunch. This was not my choice, as I am well aware of my dislike for sweating, or being outside, or eating my own lunch like a sucker instead of having it fed to me like the emperor I was born to be. This was, in other words, a triumph of The Duchess’ will. Meaning she insisted.

It was extremely hot, and so my body did what it always done when I eat in the heat: It assumed I was being force-fed by Imperial Torturers and began to shut down in self-defense. This is also, apparently, part of my genetic code, and the reason that the Somers family has survived into 2020 where so many other famous families have not. There are no more Caesars or Plantagenets, friends, but the world is lousy with Somers’.

My wife soon realized the true cost of her victory. Staring at me in horror, she declared in a terrified voice that we would never dine outside again, nor speak of the incident. I went home and toweled off.

The Doom of Jeff

Being a Sweat Person doesn’t weigh very heavily on me, normally. This is because I am also a Recluse Person who hardly ever leaves the house. Under normal circumstances I can sweat my ass off in private and never have to explain to people that no, I am not having a heart attack, this is just how I am.

Someday, of course, I’ll have my brain transferred to a cyborg chassis (like in a certain book) and sweat will no longer be a problem. Existential dread? Possibly, but not sweat.

Bullshit

The Art of Questioning Yourself

Author: July 13, 2020 2 Comments

I know this will come as a shock to you, but I have a pretty healthy self-regard. I like myself, a lot. Other people? Not nearly so much. Cats? It’s close … but I still win.

That doesn’t mean I’m not well aware of my flaws, and there are many. Many, many flaws. In fact, it’s probably not crazy to say I am more or less 90% flaw at this point. If I was grading myself as a person, I’d give myself a solid C minus. And yet! I am still my own favorite person. I think this is healthy.

The reason this comes up is because one of my many, many flaws is a tendency to get inside my own head and be a walking Bubble. This means that I sometimes lose objectivity, because I do things a certain way and I’m the only one aware of it, so there’s no pushback. There’s no one there to tell me I’m full of shit.

Which is fine if it’s just me, wearing an old school backpack as underwear and generally living like an animal, as one does. The problem comes when this sort of Bubble Thinking makes its way into your writing, because the worst time to discover you have some very strange blind spots is immediately after you’ve pressed PUBLISH on a story or novel.

AAYAAJ

Here’s the rule: Always Ask Yourself ‘Am I a Jackass?’

Look, we all get some strange ideas, habits, and attitudes. Normally, social interaction will correct these over time. You go out with other human beings and pick your nose at the dinner table, someone will gently correct you. If you go out on a date with someone and tell them that you believe the world is flat and secretly ruled by the Moon Men, they will probably correct you. Or back away slowly while dialing 9-1-1, but either way you at least get the general sense you’ve fucked up, and over a long enough timeline this should lead to introspection and adjustment.

But sometimes we manage to smuggle some serious weird shit into our writing, and if we never question it, it’s gonna get published that way. And you may not even be aware of your odd attitude towards women, or ethnicities, or economics. That is, until you publish a book filled with pervy male-gaze bullshit or elaborate justifications for racism or secret Moon Men conspiracy theories presented as fact, and that correction comes far too late.

This isn’t an endorsement of censorship, self- or otherwise. But when you’re working in the silence of your own brain, it’s easy to sometimes to lose objectivity and believe some seriously Moon Man-esque stuff. The challenge is that when you are your only audience for ideas, it seems like it all makes sense — until you unleash those views and crash into reality.

I read a lot of books. Some for pleasure, some for work. I get sent a ton of ARCs and galleys and such. And I can’t tell you how often a writer — usually, though not always, self-published, because when you self-publish you sometimes lack the people who are being paid by someone other than yourself who will be happy to tell you how full of shit you are — will drop a nuclear bomb of insanity in the midst of their story, and do so casually because they assume everyone shares their serene opinions, or their way of describing women, or their theories on proper behavior. A single conversation with another human being might have demonstrated how wrong they were, and saved us all a lot of trouble.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish my story about how everyone is mean to middle-aged white writers because we are universally awesome.

Writing

Cover Story

Author: July 4, 2020 0 Comments

One of the best parts about being an adult (i.e., old as heck) is the ability to just create stuff on a whim. As a kid, I always wanted to make stuff, to be creative, but as a kid you lack resources. Also, I grew up a very, very long time ago seemingly before electricity. My brain still gets wrinkled that I can fire up my computer and self-publish books, create music, create text adventure games, and any other strange idea I might have. I mean, seriously, this shit is magic to a kid who had to pretend an old hand-me-down tennis racket was a guitar when he was 12.

It’s just fun to create stuff, even if you’re not an expert. I mean, I’m no professional graphic designer or visual genius, but creating covers for my Avery Cates novella experiments and the resulting novels is just fun. And they’ve been quite a journey.

The Shattered Gears

When I first began writing the new Avery stories, it was solely because I had an idea and I wanted to try a different way of working. Normally when I write a novel I start at the beginning and write til I get to the end, all in one monolithic effort. This time, with zero market pressure, I could just play around with short sections and see what happened.

So, when I designed the first cover for the very first novella, The Shattered Gears, it was a bit of a throwaway effort. I wanted to echo the vastly superior work of Lauren Panepinto with the Orbit covers (and obviously failed miserably, because Lauren’s work is amazing), so I went with a silhouette of a badass and some simple and distressingly obvious gear textures. The rest of the novella covers weren’t much more creative than that, though I think they pop off the screen well enough.

When time came to collect those first novellas into a novel, I got a little more ambitious with the cover design. It’s still a very simple silhouette-based concept, but I added some texture and lighting effects to make a little bit more interesting. I was especially proud of adding in the sci-fi gun to the silhouette. But then, really simple achievements make me outlandishly happy. It’s one reason why I love to make stuff.

Last year I started working on the sequel to The Shattered Gears, a novel titled The Burning City. Once again I wrote it as a series of semi-standalone novellas that I published individually, beginning with The New World. I decided that I wanted to up my game a little for the cover design, because it’s fun. So while I kept the fundamental silhouette aesthetic, I went with a more photo-realistic approach.

I think they turned out pretty good. And I kept the theme going with the cover for the omnibus edition (all four novellas collected into a single novel):

Again, I’m no graphic design genius, and I probably could have done a lot of this much better. But I’m kind of proud of how these turned out, and I remained kind of childishly amazed that I can just … do this. I can literally just create whatever the hell I want.

You can pre-order The Dark Hunt (novella #4) and The Burning City (the novel) right now, if you want. Come on, you know you want to.

Avery Cates, More Shit I Gotta Do

Don’t Show Your Work

Author: June 29, 2020 1 Comment

Research. Some writers love research, and dive into it with relish, excited to learn everything they can about whatever subject they’re digging into. Some hate research and its superficial similarity to schoolwork, finding it more fun to just make stuff up. And many of us writers fall somewhere in the middle, moving up and down on the spectrum depending on our goals for the day and our level of hungover-ness.

And that’s fine. Like everything else in writing, there’s a spectrum. Sometimes research is the key ingredient to verisimilitude, sometimes you can get by on a fine mist of bullshit. Sometimes you start a book thinking you can get by without research and then have to shift gears halfway through when your bullshit fails you, and sometimes your research into a subject actually kills your interest in writing about it.

The only reliable way to screw up research is to show your work.

S-M-R-T

Research can be hard work, and invariably your research will lead you to knowing way more about a subject than your story probably requires. But that’s how it goes: You’re writing a story with a character who is a beekeeper, and you realize you need at least a passing familiarity with beekeeping to pass the smell test. So you start reading, and three weeks later you emerge visibly thinned and malnourished but just bursting with beekeeping knowledge.

After your stay in the hospital, you come out better able to write that story. But suddenly the three or four passing details that give your beekeeping character a sense of realism seems kind of a waste. You are, after all, now an expert. You worked hard for this knowledge. You want to get it all in there.

Or, perhaps, you really are an expert, and you’re writing a novel based on your own personal and professional experience. The research isn’t really necessary, then, of course — but you still might be tempted to make an effort to pack in all of your expertise.

Please don’t.

Verisimilitude is a delicate thing, and it’s very easy to drown it in detail. When you experience the urge to gin up endless lecturing exposition and whole scenes dedicated to demonstrating how much your characters (and thus, you) know about a subject, take a step back. Your readers will know when they’re being lectured, and they will keep receipts. If you force them to read fifteen pages about beekeeping trivia and none of it pays off in any way in the story, they will not forget. They will not forgive.

The question you should always ask is simple: Does my reader need to know this, or am I just showing off? There are plenty of reasons information is necessary for your reader, and you as author get to decide what is and what isn’t. But for the love of god, ask yourself this question before you have your POV character lecture me on Bitcoin for 4 pages for no reason other than to impress me with your vast knowledge of cryptocurrency.

Of course, in real life none of this applies. I am a popular dinner guest, for example, because of my exhaustive knowledge of Weird Songs Jeff Put on a Mixtape in 1990.

Writing

The Distillation Process

Author: June 17, 2020 3 Comments

No, this will not be a post about whiskey. At least not directly. I mean, in a sense every post on this blog is about whiskey, because whiskey is like The Force: It surrounds us and penetrates us, it binds this blog together.

No, this post will about writing a novel, because that’s one of the four or five things I have anything intelligent to say about (the others being myself, baseball between the years of 1978 and 2010, yarn, meatballs, and your odds of ever winning the lottery). Specifically, this post is about the process of writing a large portion of a novel — sometimes the entire novel — only to realize what the damn thing should actually be about.

I’m not saying this just happened to me. But it has happened.

40,000 Words of Hot Garbage

Whether you’re a Pantser or a Plotter, there’s always a point when you think you know what your book is about. And sometimes you discover that you’re wrong about that, and sometimes that moment comes when you’re already significantly along in the novel-writing process. Like, tens of thousands of words. And then you suddenly realize that your focus is off — you’re using the wrong POV, or concentrating on the wrong character, or cutting out the wrong stuff.

Whatever the reason, this is okay. This is a process of literary distillation. You just steamed off tens of thousands of the wrong words. The worst reaction you can have is to view this as wasted time. That’s totally wrong — sometimes you have to write those wrong words to figure out what the right ones are.

That’s the lesson here: When you’re writing a novel, any work you do is worthwhile. There’s no such thing as wasted time. Even if you don’t actually complete this novel, chances are the work you put into it will pay dividends later, either in ideas, or material you can re-use, or simply a better understanding of your craft and your best way of working. Once you boil off the stuff that’s not working, you might be left with pure gold.

Although, full disclosure: I do like to play up the despair when a novel collapses, just to have an excuse to drink heavily for a while and pretend I’m F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Writing

The Frog in the Well Problem

Author: June 8, 2020 0 Comments

Writing is either the greatest and most satisfying adventure in existence or an ongoing existential hell akin to having your paper cuts soaked in rubbing alcohol for ever, I can’t ever decide which. Some of that ties into where, exactly, I am in terms of the writing process. Just finished a story I’m very excited about? Writing is a joy. Mired in month 15 of struggling to force some coherency into an otherwise doomed narrative? Writing is torture.

One scenario that is particularly painful is when I’m making progress on a story but it’s slow, and I keep having to add material to apply new ideas or understanding. The result is what I call the Frog in the Well: Two steps forward, one step back.

To Infinity and Beyond

What happens in this scenario is that the end of the book never seems to be any closer. Even though I’m doing good work, even though I’m eating up plot and moving characters along, there always seems to be a static amount of work to do. And when I do make measurable progress, it usually sparks a new creative line that requires some backtracking and back-filling of the story to shore up.

None of this is bad, really. Progress is being made and I’m generally happy with what I’m producing. But it’s frustrating as hell because I can never seem to see the end. So if you’re dealing with something similar — the apparently endless project — what can you do?

One thing that works for me is to go back and re-read what I’ve already written. I’m often surprised at how much I’ve already forgotten, and sometimes it’s comforting to see how much progress I’ve actually made.

Sometimes I actually jump ahead and work on the ending. Why not? I’m a god here, I can do what I want. This can get messy, because inspirations that occur while writing the ending can require more back-filling, thus extending the length even further. But if I can flesh out the ending at ll it helps me feel like there’s a plan, at least.

Of course, then I finish the story and after three seconds of quiet satisfaction I will panic at not working on anything, and it all begins again. Which, come to think of it, is very similar to my hangover cycle. Food for thought.

Writing

The Problem with Being Cool

Author: May 28, 2020 0 Comments

So, maybe six months ago I started a story. It doesn’t matter what the story’s about; it’s not finished yet anyway, because as I’ve aged things just take longer, probably because of my slow slide into senility and death. The reason I mention this is because when I wrote the opening lines all that time in the past, I had the characters use the term ‘karen’ in its current memey definition of a privileged jerk thinking demanding special treatment. At the time, the term was still kind of bubbling under and felt very inside baseball, at least to me.

Yeah, it’s going to come out.

The thing about cool, topical slang and stuff is that it really appeals to writers. We’re Word People. We love to discover a new expression or a bit of jargon that not everyone knows. You slip it into a story and instantly it feels like you’re part of a Mystery Cult that worships your story.

But there’s a problem: What seems like Inside Baseball for the Cool Kids can suddenly become an overused piece of pop culture that people roll their eyes about.

Streets Ahead

You’ve got to think hard about any cultural reference you make in a story. Something that seems fresh and subversive in January might seem old and dated in March. I mean, there was a time when inserting a reference to Where’s the beef? or Wazzzuuuuuuuup! would instantly get a hearty laugh out of your audience.

Not familiar with those? Exactly!

Of course, this goes beyond language — you generally have to worry about how any pop culture reference will age, and I’ve written about that before. But I’m pretty settled with movie and TV references. I rarely include them, even in my contemporary fiction, because I’ve drilled it into myself that this is a fast ticket to Dated Town, Population: Streets Behind. Language is trickier. Some jargon and slang remains underground more or less forever, and sometimes including it seeds your story with the precious resource known as verisimilitude. As with all Literary Science, your mileage may vary and you may be capable of pulling off some shit I shouldn’t even attempt.

Still, next time you decide to include some current meme flavor in your writing, take a moment and imagine how it’s gonna play next year.

Writing

Black House: An Interactive Fiction

Author: May 21, 2020 0 Comments

Black House is live.

So, er, what is it? Well, Black House is an interactive fiction, a text adventure. You read descriptions, then you type in simple instructions and see what happens, like this:

You wake up in a room rapidly filling with water. There is a jug of whiskey and a small sponge next to you.

> Eat sponge

You chew on the sponge for a while, then die of stupidity.

<YOU HAVE DIED>

Well, something like that. Here’s the story of the story.

ZORK

Back in the sands of time, I played a lot of these sorts of games — Zork and its many descendants. I was always instantly hooked by the idea that these little text universes might be infinite, that if I poked around long enough I would stumble onto an endless series of hidden rooms and tricks. They weren’t infinite, but there were enough hidden things to manage the illusion. I liked solving the puzzles, but I enjoyed just roaming around trying stuff just as much.

MAZE

Then, sometime later I discovered a book called Maze by Christopher Manson (which I’ve written about before because it is incredible) which had the same spirit, if a somewhat darker tone. Maze is a sort of choose-your-own-adventure book, but it’s very similar in some ways to a text adventure.

As is my Method, Maze inspired me to rip it off wholesale, so I created my own maze, creatively titled The Maze and so blatantly stealing from Manson’s superior creation I still feel the shame today. I originally created my maze in HTML, then later recreated it in Visual Basic and spat out a Windows EXE file. What can I say: I’m just that cool international man of mystery sort who coded shit in VB in the 1990s and early 2000s. You’re jealous. Let it drift.

Marks

The third piece of this puzzle is Philip K. Marks, a character I started writing about in the 1990s. Marks is a kind of shitheel private investigator who specializes in weird, paranormal, sci-fi mysteries. I’ve published five stories featuring Marks, and a few years ago I thought it was time to write a novel-length story with the character. When I thought about what story to put Marks in, I thought of my old maze, and got excited about turning the maze into a novel. The end result was Black House, which I loved but had its flaws.

Black House wasn’t really saleable, so I sat on it for a while, then a few years ago I tried an experiment: I published it online, one chapter a day for about a month, then one day after the last chapter went up I pulled it down. The site is still there, if you’re curious.

Which brings us to today: I stumbled on this Medium article by Julie Stevenson a few months ago. I’d worked in Inform back in 2010 when creating the site for The Eternal Prison, which featured a flawed and half-finished text adventure, so I was reminded that this was something I could actually do.

So I did.

I was intrigued by the idea of turning a novel-like thing into a text adventure, and Black House, having come from a text adventure of sorts to begin with, was the perfect source. That’s what Black House, the game, is: A novel in text-adventure form.

Go on: Play.

Fiction, More Shit I Gotta Do, Novels