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Genre Mashing

Author: October 18, 2019 0 Comments

I’m going to assume two things about you right now. One, I’m going to assume you are aware that there exists in this universe a television show called The Affair, which airs on Showtime and is currently in its fifth and final season. And two, I’m going to assume you don’t watch it, because as someone who has watched it I can’t imagine that other real, actual people watch it. Because it is terrible. And extremely white. But mainly terrible.

Was it always terrible? Maybe not, though it’s hard to remember. The reason I am still watching this terrible, terrible show is because The Duchess refuses to let go; once she begins watching something she hangs on with a death grip. I recall that when the show began, the whole conceit — and it needed a conceit because it’s fundamentally a show about wealthy white folks experiencing some truly dull mid-life crises — was that every episode was split into two perspectives that showed many of the same events from different points-of-view. That conceit was never as interesting or well-used as they thought it was, but the show barely even references it any more so it doesn’t matter.

I am not here, however, to complain (or, not much more than usual) or to discuss the decline of a show that was only mediocre to begin with. No! I am here to discuss the only actually interesting writing choice the show1 has made this season: The reckless swerve into science fiction.

The Future’s So Meh, I Gotta Wear a Drab, Formless Sack

I have myself occasionally used a genre-mash to liven up a slowly dying manuscript. Sometimes it even works! A genre-mash is my own term, describing the sudden injection of speculative elements into a story that has been heretofore strictly realistic. A (dumb) example off the top of my head might be a murder mystery that plays out like a noir thriller for 50,000 words and turns out to have been a time travel story all along.

It’s a gimmick, but sometimes it can work. Now, this is not exactly what I think is going on with The Affair. What’s going on with The Affair is much more dumb.

So, as a quick bit of background (spoilers if you care about such things), The Affair started life as a show about, you know, an affair: A dickish, unhappy middle-aged man has an affair with a troubled, unhappy woman, and it blows up both their lives. The show has been concerned with a slowly-growing but pretty contained cast of characters ever since, exploring the many ways this affair has changed lives and affected personal histories.

One thread is the daughter of the unhappy woman, who the unhappy man originally thought was his but turned out to be the unhappy woman’s ex-husband’s (soapy stuff). This daughter, Joanie, is still a young kid in the main storyline, but the unhappy woman was murdered at the end of last season, and the decision was made to have an adult Joanie investigate the death thirty years later. As a result, a portion of The Affair season 5 is set in the future.

Okay, I can understand that plot decision. But here The Show had some narrative choices:

  1. Acknowledge that it’s 2040 or something but don’t delve into the changes time hath wrought and keep the narrative focus narrow
  2. Go full sci-fi with flying cars and an unending war with ruthless robot armies or something
  3. Half-ass it with some baseline technology upgrades and a muddled environmental collapse story.

Sadly, they picked #3. This is the worst option. If you’re writing this story and decide the time-jump is necessary, #2 is the bold option that might yield narrative gold and #1 is the safe option that does the work you need without wasting a lot of energy. The third option is just pointless. It results in weird little tech doodads like tablets with air screens and glasses that can literally show you weather simulations from thirty years before, and a weird thread about climate change where everyone seems pretty convinced the world is ending and Long Island is supposedly sinking under the waves, but no one is particularly worried about it?

Then The Show apparently got tired trying and so there are a lot of weird moments where characters ignore the time jump and just use standard 2019 technology, which is totally because of laziness but is weakly sold as quirk. At one point a character offers Joanie a ride in his totally 2019-appropriate SUV and she smirks and says something about how no one uses gasoline any more, and he laughs it off. This is so stupid it hurts my brain, and it’s not the only time. In another scene, when a villain is tricking Joanie into signing something The Show is too lazy to mock up a cool tablet or something, and so he hands her a piece of paper, and she makes the same lame comment.

This, friends, is what is known as bad writing. If you’re gonna lean sci-fi, then lean the fuck in and commit. Sorry. I am angry, because I am being forced to watch this shit by The Duchess.

Don’t Half-Ass Sci-Fi

The secret to mashing up a non-speculative story with a sci-fi element is to lean into the genre stuff. The mistake The Affair made is feinting towards these elements but then getting scared and finding cheap ways to keep the look and feel of the future the same as the present. If your goal is to walk that line, if the point of your sci-fi is that the future will look exactly like 2019 with a new hat, that’s fine — as long as it’s purposeful. But deciding that the future will be a high-tech environmental disaster and then doing none of the world-building to make that work leaves you with just the hat.

Someone Else's Writing, Writing

The Point of It All

Author: October 17, 2019 1 Comment

When it comes to writing, there’s a lot of focus on the what we’re all working on, and the how of creating a story from thin air, but not so much on the why. Sort of like how I’m very concerned with what kind of whiskey I’m drinking and the how of acquiring that whiskey, but I don’t spend much time on the why I want to drink whiskey. Which, bad example, because obviously I want to drink whiskey because it’s delicious.

The question of why do we put so much effort into writing these stories doesn’t get addressed very often, because I think we all assume we know the answer. But I suspect that assumption is different for almost everyone, because some people are writing because they want to sell millions of books and be J.K. Rowling, and some people are writing because it’s an instinctive urge they can’t resist, and some people are writing because it’s fun.

Me, I’m writing because I want to be published.

Jeff Everywhere

I’m not a writer who sits on projects. When I finish a story or a novel, I immediately want to do something with it. Usually that means sell it to a publisher or a magazine and get it out there. If that isn’t an option for some reason, self-publish it. Or do something else with it, transform it into another media, something.

Because I want my words out there. Life is short, and all I’m leaving behind is a string of disappointed former friends and some embarrassing photos. Unless I can get my words out there, as many as possible.

Folks who don’t pursue publication with the wild-eyed desperation of a dog chasing its tail make no sense to me. Dying with a drawer full of finished manuscripts is crazy, especially in this golden age of digital publishing. What’s the worst that can happen? A deluge of hurtful reviews mocking your writing, intelligence, and fashion sense? That happens anyway. Wait … does it only happen to me? Damn.

Knowing why you’re writing is powerful. This is true in general as well as the specific reasons for your current WIP. Are you writing because you’re trying to steal someone else’s greatness for yourself? Is it an old passion project you’ve been trying to make work for decades? Are you testing an idea or technique? Or is it just something fun that came to you in dream? Knowing why you’re writing can help you hone an individual WIP and steer it purposefully, while knowing why you’re writing in general can help you choose those projects in the first place.

Unless your thing is ragged chaos and your personal motto is Mongo Merely Pawn in Game of Life, which is a legitimate choice but makes no sense to me. Because I want the future to a riff on Bill and Ted where everyone uses words from one of my novels as the basis for all religion.

Writing

Walking Away from the Fireworks Factory: When Sci-Fi Stories Abandon Their Premise

Author: October 9, 2019 0 Comments

I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that there was a time in my life when most of my conversational gambits were direct quotes from The Simpsons; in fact, my friends and I could hold entire conversations using just lines from the first, oh, ten seasons of the show. One that still sticks with me is Millhouse’s anguished demand to know ‘When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?!’ in Season Eight’s ‘The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show,’ wherein the ostensible plot of the show-within-a-show is about going to such a factory, which never actually happens. Over the years it’s been an easy shorthand for stories that promise some exciting moment that seems to never arrive, either due to glacial pacing or simple bad writing.

Some stories, however, start at the Fireworks Factory—and then slowly back away from it. Every TV show, film, novel, or comic book has a premise that attracts you, the core bit of awesome at the center of the story that is the main reason you’re in the audience in the first place. When you go to see an action movie, you’re looking for the stunts, for the incredible fight scenes. When you read a horror novel, you’re there because you’ve been promised a terrifying monster, or a terrifying curse. Something terrifying, certainly. Most stories take a little time to warm up to that promise, to develop characters and build a world, and then, finally, deliver on that promise.

Other stories do the exact opposite. They start off with the cool part. And then they incrementally abandon their own premise, becoming an entirely different story.

The Infinite Unpacking

Sometimes this happens because the writers didn’t actually have any interest in the premise they sold you in the first place. Consider, for example, the HBO reboot of Westworld.

The Fireworks Factory, in this case, would be the sublime chaos of super-advanced robots gaining some form of sentience and rebelling against the humans who have been paying exorbitant fees for the privilege of abusing and violently damaging them. The original 1973 film, written and directed by Michael Crichton, has an expected structure: You’re introduced to Westworld while it’s operating as expected, you learn the rules of the place, and then you get the demented fun of watching everything spiral out of control into wonderful robot violence.

The reboot more or less starts there, with the malfunctions starting very early in Season 1, and a slow build to the robot apocalypse. Using multiple and deceptive timelines, the writers start off with the robots going haywire—and then, just when the massacre starts, the season ends, and in Season 2 you only get glimpses of it. If you were hoping for sequences of guests fleeing from murderous robots, too bad: There are almost none. You never get to the Fireworks Factory, because the show was never heading there in the first place. Instead, the writers are much more interested in the increasingly complicated philosophical underpinnings of their story—what is sentience? What is life?

That doesn’t make it a bad story. It makes it a different story, that will never serve up the imagined scenes that got people to tune in initially.

The U-Turn

Sometimes, there’s a detour on the way to the Fireworks Factory because the story just doesn’t work the way the writer expected. The thing about a story is that it has to work in two very different arenas: In conception—that is, on paper, as an outline and a sketch—and in reality, as an actual story. Sometimes the outline and the concept have to be abandoned because once you start writing it just doesn’t work.

A good recent example of this is Fear the Walking Dead. The spinoff from The Walking Dead was originally pitched as a prequel of sorts that would explore the way society collapses under the onslaught of zombies. The first episode was set about six months before the main series. For a lot of folks this was exactly the Fireworks Factory they wanted to go to, because often the most intriguing and exciting parts of a zombie story is the part where civilization slowly unspools. You start with the subtle signs—the dire news reports, the mysterious government decisions—and then bit by bit normalcy bleeds away, until eventually you’re all running for your lives and putting all those Apex Legends skills to good use blowing the heads off zombies.

But Fear the Walking Dead quickly began transforming into a show that actually isn’t all that different from the main program—just a bunch of people trying to not be eaten by zombies in a world that’s pretty much collapsed. This is partly due to the fact that the writers just didn’t give themselves enough runway to work with; societal collapse is a slow-burn story, and would have required that you delay the arrival of zombie hordes for a long time, or at least kept them peripheral. That’s tough to do in a TV series that’s about zombies, and so the story got there quick. But that’s a different Fireworks Factory altogether.

Later seasons saw the show retooled and revamped to accept this; they’ve brought on crossover characters from the main show and abandoned any pretense that it’s about a different phase of the zombie apocalypse. There’s still a lot of opportunity for interesting stories there, of course. It’s just not the story that early viewers thought they were going to get.

Runway

It’s easy, as a writer, to misjudge how far material will take you. Sometimes a single sentence in a plot outline will power hundreds of pages of manuscript. Sometimes a page of outline will yield a single, thin chapter. It’s difficult to judge stuff like that before you’re elbow-deep in the storytelling. In other words, writing a book is sometimes like planning a trip to a Fireworks Factory but traffic gets really bad so you take a random exit, or the factory is abandoned and filled with bats so you go to an alternate factory nearby. And sometimes you start off with what seems like a reasonable analogy and lost control of it completely.

Someone Else's Writing, Writing

Zombies Everywhere: The Graying of Genre

Author: September 25, 2019 0 Comments

The power balance in my marriage is despairingly unequal—my wife is unquestionably in charge. I confess this to explain how it is that I watched every single episode of The Big Bang Theory; my wife has a weakness for Chuck Lorre sitcoms, and I have a weakness for making her happy. Incidentally, The Big Bang Theory is also prominently featured in my moments of Existential Horror when I realize that I, too, will someday die; it’s incredible to realize the show debuted in 2007, six months before Marvel’s Iron Man.

For anyone who wasn’t alive or aware back in 2007, you can now look back on it as possibly the last time that a concept like The Big Bang Theory—which can be summed up as Haw Haw Lookit These Funny Nerds!—was a viable pitch for a TV show. Because not only have nerds clearly inherited the Earth in terms of pop culture domination (the Top 5 highest-grossing films of all time, for example, include two Avengers movies, The Force Awakens, and Avatar—all released post-2007), but the genre distinctions that once separated us from the rest of the world are quickly becoming meaningless.

The Thin Gray Line

Genre has always been a meaningless invention of marketing forces, to a certain extent. While defining something as ‘science fiction’ or a ‘thriller’ has utility for the consumer, it’s a messy business that was never well-defined. The reasons we might categorize Homer’s Odyssey or Shelley’s Frankenstein as ‘classics’ or ‘literature’ instead of epic fantasy and sci-fi horror are pretty thin. The argument against considering many James Bond films (not so much the novels) works of sci-fi is kind of weak, and so many TV shows, films, and works of modern literature have used the magical realism of A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life for lame plot devices they’ve become genres unto themselves—and yet are rarely called out as speculative in nature.

The main reason for such seemingly arbitrary genre classifications is due to a general attitude that genre was juvenile, the sort of stuff kids enjoyed because they’re dumb and immature. It was perfectly okay to love comic books when you’re eleven; by the time you grew up you were supposed to leave those childish things behind. A show like Doctor Who was conceived in the early 1960s as a children’s program, and an educational one at that, because no one at the time would have imagined that adults wanted to watch a show about a time-traveling alien magician who lectures about Earth history for reasons unknown. With a few exceptions, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror films were always low-budget affairs designed to serve what was assumed to be an audience of teenagers and younger kids.

And then Star Wars happened, kicking off a four-decade shift as people began to realize two simple things: One, adults were just as into sci-fi and fantasy as kids; and two, there was money in speculative genres. A lot of money.

The Nerdening

It’s no joke to say that the last few decades of pop culture have been a slow triumph of all things speculative. So, so much of modern-day pop culture is driven by science fiction and fantasy, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Game of Thrones and Stranger Things. What was once the province of grindhouse and pulp is now mainstream, and one unexpected and oft-overlooked effect of this shift is the erosion of genre lines. Put simply, it’s increasingly common to find speculative tropes used in ‘literary’ genres—and vice versa. The result is a kind of new Gray Genre that isn’t clearly definable as old-school literary fiction but also doesn’t seem to fit neatly into the classic sci-fi or fantasy categories.

Two easy examples of this new, mixed Gray Genre is Never Let Me Go by Haruki Murakami and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Both are clearly science fiction—one telling the story of clones grown to be sources of replacement organs, the other about the grinding attempt of a small number of people to survive the end of the world. Yet both are usually categorized and discussed as literary fiction, largely due to the prior work of both authors and a lingering prejudice against sci-fi in literary circles—writers with reputations for serious work still fight hard against what they see as a cheaper, more juvenile classification. Ian McEwan recently worked pretty hard to insist that his novel Machines Like Me, which deals with artificial intelligence in an alternative universe, is not actually sci-fi. And Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, also won an Arthur C. Clarke Award, though you wouldn’t know it from the book’s official website, where the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and the Man Booker Prize are all mentioned prominently.

But these lingering prejudices are the product of that earlier age, and are fading fast. The fact that Whitehead can publish a novel that is essentially a work of alternate history and magical realism and have it win a Pulitzer proves that. As more and more novels like these—and more and more writers follow in Justin Cronin’s (The Passage) footsteps as a writer who moves between genres without losing anything for it—there will be less of a focus on the specific genre of a story, and having speculative tropes pop up in all kinds of stories will be more common.

Consider a TV series like HBO’s Years and Years, which is marketed as a drama but has a clear-if-subtle sci-fi premise that follows a British family over the course of fifteen years stretching into the near future. Notably, the discussion surrounding the show has little to do with whether the conceit makes it any less a drama, signaling that general audiences—people who have been watching Marvel movies for more than a decade now, and who undoubtedly include folks who never read epic fantasy growing up but became hooked on Game of Thrones—no longer find these elements foreign or juvenile. They’re just tools of the storytelling trade.

None of this excuses my having watched all 279 episodes of The Big Bang Theory, of course—but it’s how we got to the point where a film like Hobbs and Shaw (a spinoff from the ridiculous and ridiculously successful Fast and Furious franchise) can be marketed as an ‘action’ film when the plot involves a cybernetically-enhanced supervillain, a deadly virus, and a complete suspension of the laws of physics. All the genres are being slowly baked into each other, until eventually they just won’t matter any more.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing, Writing

Read the Classics

Author: September 18, 2019 0 Comments

Writing is a weird gig. At a recent panel someone asked about the writing process, and I told a funny story about living with five cats and how my process was basically writing whenever I didn’t have a cat sitting on my keyboard, and then I thought, how weird is it that I sit in the same room every day making shit up? Pretty weird.

It’s also weird how easy it is to get depressed or discouraged in this business. Sitting on the panel, it occurred to me that the writers assembled represented a wide swath of the career pyramid. We had folks who’d published dozens and dozens of books and were household names, we had folks who’d published a few things here and there. It’s so easy to look at the former and feel like you’re not going anywhere. It’s easy to look at the shambles of your work in progress (WIP) and feel like it’s a mess, and you’ll never finish it, and even if you do finish it you won’t sell it.

There’s one weird trick I use in these moments. I pull out something I wrote a while ago and read it.

Look On My Works Ye Mighty

There are only a few rules in this life that I believe to be universal:

  1. Cats > Dogs
  2. Whiskey > Everything
  3. Something I Wrote in 2005 >>>> Anything I Wrote This Decade

I don’t think I’m the only writer who feels like everything I write magically improves with time. I’m rarely satisfied with my work in the moment, but let it brine for a few years and open it back up and holy fucking shit I was fucking brilliant.

Try it! Pick up something you finished a while ago and give it a read. Marvel at the nuance you forgot about, the smart plotting you can’t believe you pulled off, the hilarious character bits that make you laugh. It never fails: That old piece I pull out of the hard drive might not be pure genius, it might need some work, but invariably I am amazed at how good it actually was, usually contrary to my opinion at the time. And that always gives me a push to get back to work and finish this piece of trash I’m currently hating on, so I can continue the cycle.

Of course, you run the risk of opening up a letter you wrote to yourself 20 years ago wondering how rich and famous you are and then getting blackout drunk in a deep depression, but what is life without risk?

Writing

Two Stories

Author: September 9, 2019 0 Comments

This month I have two short stories publishing; “The Company I Keep” appears in the YA Mystery anthology Life is Short and Then You Die, edited by Kelley Armstrong, and “Zilla, 2015” is up over at The Lascaux Review.

I’m extremely proud of both stories, and pretty excited to have them out in the world. As anyone who has seen me talk about writing in public knows, I want to basically publish everything I’ve ever written, good or bad. So having two stories out in one month is kind of exciting.

What’s interesting about these two stories, at least to me, is that they both started off as novels. And after writing ~100,000 words between them, I wound up with about 10,000 words worth keeping.

The Company I Keep

The Company I Keep officially began life in November, 2014 as a book about a man investigating the death of his college roommate 20 years after the fact. I began folding in material from a book about a mother who poisoned her children as a form of punishment, and spent a solid four years, off and on, trying to make the story work. In 2015, I had a 30,000-word novella that I liked but didn’t love; it had a nice sharpness to it, but felt meandering. So I put THE END on it and made a halfhearted attempt to submit, but then began working on it again.

In 2017 I had a 61,000-word novel that I knew better than to try an publish. It wasn’t terrible, but it also wasn’t good. I’d added a lot of backstory and business to it, but none of it felt consequential. Along the way, I’d played with the age of the characters, and the main character had evolved into a sort-of genius, a kid smart enough to attend college when he was 16 but not smart enough to actually do anything with his brains.

But I liked the Voice. I liked the main character. And I liked the mystery. When I read about the MWA Anthology Life is Short and Then You Die, which was looking for YA mystery stories focused on seeing your first dead body, I thought, The Company I Keep would work if it was 6,000 words long instead of 60,000.

Unless …

Yup. I cut that novel down. I deleted 90% of the words. And I sold that story to the anthology. Which either means that I’m a terrible writer who has to throw away 90% of his work before he has something decent, or that I need a bit of help identifying when my idea doesn’t really need 60,000 words to get through.

Zilla, 2015

I’ve had a poster of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies on my wall for years now, and had an idea about writing a novel where the Tinies didn’t die as kids, but were being murdered one by one as adults. In May, 2018 I started working on that novel, and never got very far, though I did work up a great deal of detailed background information regarding the characters (all 26 of them, natch).

In early 2019 I decided to make one last try, and began work on a bit that would act as a prologue for the novel, detailing the last days of Zilla. I liked what I did, a lot, and was optimistic about working up a novel around the concept.

Yeah, that didn’t happen. I flailed around for a bit, trying different ways back into the story. Then I began working on another novel which occupied increasing amounts of my brain, and eventually realized that the Zilla story was actually the point. That short story was what I’d been working towards for more than a year, I just hadn’t realized it. So I cut my losses and sent Zilla, 2015 to The Lascaux Review because it seemed like a good fit. And sold it.

What’s the lesson here? There doesn’t have to be one, but I suppose one take-away is that you can get hung up on an idea being this or that, when what you should be doing is seeing where those ideas take you. Or maybe the take-away is that even in failed novels you can often salvage something good.

I’m proud of these stories. I hope you read them and let me know what you think. And if you’re struggling with a novel right now, maybe you can pull something out of it right now instead of spending another few months trying to squeeze literary greatness from a rock.

Or maybe I’ll go back and try again on both of these novels someday. Why not? There are no rules. Or maybe the rule is, Jeff need to throw away 90% of what he writes all the time. Which would explain a lot, actually.

Fiction, Short Stories, Writing

Jeff Gets Fancy

Author: September 5, 2019 0 Comments

I recently got a pedicure, which was the final movement in a symphony that began two decades ago when The Duchess asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday.

As I have always been a man in love with sitting at home in the dark, I told her “Nothing.” I wanted a day to just write, listen to music, and read books. I thought this was reasonable. The Duchess thought I was kidding. When the great day arrived and I emerged from my sleeping chamber swathed in a velvet bathrobe, scratching myself in intimate ways, The Duchess greeted me in her Jeff’s Birthday Adventure Outfit and politely inquired as to what I wanted to do. Upon being informed that we’d already discussed this and I thought we were doing nothing, she became confused.

The Duchess: Nothing.

Me: Yup.

The Duchess: Fascinating.

Me: Yup.

The Duchess: You’re the weirdest husband ever.

For years, she refused to believe that I might actually wish to do just stay home on my birthday. Her own birthdays were imperial affairs, usually involving travel and sumptuous dinners; they were events that required planning and expense. And for years she attempted to force my own birthday celebrations into the same pattern, and I went along mainly because it made her happy. Then, this year, she suddenly announced that she finally believed me and that we would, therefore, make no plans for my birthday.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

I was elated, but when the day actually arrived I had second thoughts. I’ve never had the courage of my convictions, and I began to contemplate my poor wife sitting around the house bored to tears because I’d insisted on a Day of Nothing.

The thing was, I made the initial request back when I was still working a day job and trying to cram writing time in wherever I could find it. The idea of having a whole day to just to work on a novel or story was incredibly exciting. But these days I’m a freelance writer, and so I have a lot more flexibility. If I want to work on a novel at 10AM while wearing a top hat and cape and nothing else, I sure can. So carving out a birthday for myself isn’t as much of a priority. Also, there’s the whole getting older and staring into the void so what’s the point of anything factor, but let that drift.

So, thinking I was about to be nominated as The Best Husband of All Time, I told The Duchess if she wanted to do something on my birthday, I’d be down.

The Duchess: So … after two decades of complaining now you expect me to plan a birthday for you with zero notice.

Me: No … wait … see, this is —

The Duchess: I suppose you want a parade. And elephants. And a big fancy dinner reservation.

Me: No, I was just thinking —

The Duchess: Fine. What do you want to do?

Now here it got tricky, because I knew I had one shot to turn this tanker around and be a hero instead of a jackass. I needed to come up with something astounding, but also easy to arrange. Something that would make The Duchess very excited.

“I want to get a pedicure,” I said.

Touch Me I’m Sick

I don’t think about my feet. Ever. My nail-clipping and other foot grooming is haphazard and inconsistent, and I have callouses on my callouses. But I’ve always been honestly fascinated by the idea of a pedicure. There’s something … fancy about it, like getting a shave at the barber: Something that goes against the grain of my middle class upbringing and makes me feel like a billionaire.

The Duchess almost exploded in excitement, and within seconds the arrangements were made, and about twenty minutes later I was sitting in one of those plush seats with my feet soaking. Everything went swimmingly until we got to the part where they buff off your callouses. I’m kind of ticklish, and The Duchess had a good time watching me for signs I was going to break into hysterics, but I held onto my dignity.

But then the callous scraping went on. And on. At one point, I think the poor girl had to switch out for a fresh scraper, and when they all started speaking in a different language I assumed they were discussing, in wonder, how it was possible that I was at liberty in society.

I mean, it went on. And on.

When it was done, however, I had new feet. They were pink and smooth and we went for a drink to celebrate, and it was definitely the best birthday ever. Except for that time my Future Self time traveled into my bedroom and kicked me in the groin for some crime I’ve yet to commit.

Bullshit, More Shit I Gotta Do

Stop Asking Permission

Author: September 4, 2019 0 Comments

Like a lot of people who grow up to make their living by writing words, I began writing as a kid; I wrote my first story when I was probably eight years old or so, prompted by a classroom assignment. When I started reading books (The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, most notably) that sealed the deal — I wanted to write stories, and that was all I wanted to do.

Yes, I was an extremely cool kid. Who needs money, athletic ability, or dashing good looks when you can write a story?

Anyways, as a kid I wrote via instinct, blatant plagiarism, and wild abandon. I never worried about whether my work was original, or whether it followed some set of rules about fiction. I just made shit up and had fun doing it. And to a large extent I’ve continued that tradition as an adult. Sure, I am more conscious of what’s happening in popular writing right now, and I avoid the level of outright idea theft I once engaged in, but I’ve never understood why so many aspiring writers pause to ask permission about their ideas.

Mother May I

You see a lot of this on writer’s forums and in-person at conferences and such, questions that begin with “Can I …” and end with some writing technique or decision. Some common ones are “Can I use real locations as settings?” or “Can I use different POVs in one story?” or “Can I have a lot of characters in a relative short story?” Sometimes, of course, the question is formatted differently; asking “How many characters can I have in a 10,000 word story?” is pretty much the same question.

The answer to all these questions, of course, is sure! If you can pull it off.

The frightening thing about writing is that it’s wholly creative. You start with nothing and you make a story out of thin air, characters, setting, conflict, plot — all out of thin air. That’s also the great thing about it, but it can be intimidating; rules give us structure, they put bumpers on the sides so you can’t jump the lane and crash.

Don’t ask permission. Go ahead and crash. If you try to write a story and fail, so what? You start over. You try to figure out why it didn’t work. You hone and revise and tinker. Asking other writers whether or not you’re allowed to do something will just get you a wide range of answers, because writers each have their own limitations, their own private rules with no guarantees that they will map well to your own inclinations. Trust me; just by going ahead and writing whatever terrible trash you’ve got in mind, you’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t, which is way more important than what’s allowed.

Except when it comes to pantslessness. Trust me when I say asking whether you’re allowed to take off your pants is not only polite, it’s often quite advisable.

Writing

WDC 19

Author: August 25, 2019 1 Comment

So, over the weekend I once again participated in the Writers Digest Annual Conference in New York City. The Duchess put some pants on me and we crossed the river without incident, unless you consider me spontaneously breakdancing on the subway an incident, which, to be fair, everyone else on the subway car certainly did.

First up was a two-hander with my agent, the Query Shark herself, entitled “JEFF SOMERS TELLS ALL, JANET REID REVISES HIM: BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE AUTHOR/AGENT RELATIONSHIP.” This was a lot of fun, as Janet and I have a great relationship and love to take the piss out of each other, and folks at WDC have a lot of questions about how a real-life agent relationship works. Here’s a photo of me trying to decide if I’ve just been insulted or not:

Not sure if ‘braying jackass’ counts as an insult.

After that The Duchess and I grabbed some lunch and a beer, and returned to the hotel to discover that half the WD Staff had been looking for me because my presentation file for my solo gig (Mistakes, I’ve Made [More Than] a Few: Learning to Take Failure in Stride as an Author) was crashing computers everywhere. After figuring that out, it was time for me to stand up in front of people and talk about all the humiliating failures I’ve experienced as a pro writer. For an hour.

I almost look competent here. Almost. Thanks to The Duchess for these great pics!

I really do think this is a subject that needs more attention at writing conferences and the like. When you’re asked to stand on stage and offer wisdom, the urge to brand yourself as an expert who knows everything is strong, but it’s a disservice to people making their way up, because it gives the impression that there is One True Way and deviating from it is disaster. I think if more pro writers spoke honestly about the times they failed, people would benefit greatly.

I got a great response to the presentation, with a lot of people staying behind to chat and ask questions, so I think others agreed. As always. WDC did a fantastic job pulling this together. Aside from me there were of course dozens of other great writers sharing their experience and advice (a few you might have heard of, like N.K. Jemisin and Karin Slaughter), and the WD folks work their butts off to make it a great experience for all. Thanks, guys!

Finally, here is my new avatar for all things social media.

Yup.

More Shit I Gotta Do, Writing

Me and ‘Hook’

Author: August 21, 2019 1 Comment

FRIENDOS, I’m kind of an asshole. My slow realization of this fact has been humbling and disturbing, because my personal evolution tracks like this:

AGE 9: I’m the fastest kid on this block!

AGE 14: I’m the smartest motherfucker in this room!

AGE 18: I’m the nicest guy in the world!

AGE 25: I … may have miscalculated.

AGE 35: I definitely miscalculated.

TODAY: I’m an asshole.

Now, don’t get me wrong: Part of being an asshole is liking yourself quite a bit, so I don’t lose much sleep over this revelation. But it does temper my reaction to things, because realizing that you’re kid of a dick is powerful stuff, especially when you realize that all those times people seemed to be celebrating your dickishness was really them shining you on a little.

For example, Hook.

Happy Thoughts for The Loss

To say I loathed the film Hook is an understatement. One of the few films I’ve never seen twice, I walked out of the theater in 1991 like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown except the cloud was anger and sarcasm. It was the relentless twee-ness of the film that offended me; by the time we got to all the guff about happy thoughts I was ready to set the theater on fire.

Back in 1991 I went to a lot of movies with a group of friends. Every week, sometimes more than once, we’d be in the theater; it was our default plan when we couldn’t think of anything else to do. Which means we saw some stinkers in that time, some real trash films, and yet I came out of those with a smile and a shrug. Hook just got to me in a way I couldn’t quite explain at the time, and I let everyone know exactly how I felt about it. I was hilarious in my rage, and it quickly became a joke among those friends. Hook became my talisman of anger, and any time a movie or TV show sucked people would make funny comments about whether or not this would be my new Hook.

Now, looking back with the full knowledge that I’m an asshole, I see it all differently. Because while Hook is a flawed film that I never wish to experience again, I didn’t take the time to analyze any of that and simply reveled in the joy of shitting all over someone else’s work.

Now, this is a minor thing. Thankfully, it all happened before The Internet, so it’s not like I have a million embarrassing blog posts about it. And it was kind of funny. To this day people will reference my outsize, jerky reaction to Hook, and we all laugh and laugh. But it reminds me, all the time, that someone created the things I am watching, reading, and listening to, and that being a jerk about not enjoying it might be fun but it’s also an asshole move that doesn’t help me understand why I didn’t like it. And the why is how you become a better writer. Not to mention how you respect other artists even when you dislike what they’ve done.

In the end, I think that Spielberg guy was okay despite my tiny fists of rage in a movie theater in Secaucus, New Jersey that night in 1991. And that’s the rub about getting older: You get more respectful and thoughtful, but much less hilariously ragey.

Bullshit, Someone Else's Writing