Latest Posts

The Out of Ideas Fallacy

Author: March 16, 2017 0 Comments

Yup.

I go out drinking with my brother, Yan*, all the time. During these boozy afternoons we often repeat arguments, circling around the same old disagreements like brothers do. Also, lifelong enemies. One of the arguments we have stems from my brother’s conviction that nothing in the arts has been worth watching since 1995, and even the period between 1985 and 1995 is kind of sketchy. Yan believes that with rare exceptions, the best movies, TV shows, and music was created before that era, and he turns a yellow and suspicious eye on anything that bears a copyright later than that.

He also, it goes without saying, dismisses any sort of reboot or update, believing firmly that Hollywood is out of ideas and should get back to making new stories, instead of raiding the past for easy dollars.

I haven’t had the chance to ask him yet, but I am confident my brother would despise whatever comes of the Matrix Trilogy reboot being planned.

To be fair, he likely isn’t a fan of the original, either. My brother is quite the curmudgeon.

Still, the general wails of dismay concerning the reboot of the Matrix kind of perplexed me. Because I think anything can be rebooted. And maybe should be.

Shakespeare

It’s funny the things we decide cannot possibly be remade or rebooted; they tend to be things we experienced directly in our own lifetimes, as if we have some sort of ownership of them. Some movie made long before our time, which we’ve maybe never seen? Sure, go ahead and remake it. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? Hilarious! Go for it. The Matrix? Are you mad? That was just 18 years ago.

Look, I complained too when they decided that Batman needed to be rebooted just eight fucking years after the disastrous and terrible Batman and Robin. But I’ve changed my mind: Why not reboot things? Reboot them often, reboot them hard. Because all that matters–or all that should matter–is whether that reboot is good. They reboot Shakespeare on a regular basis, and no one in their right mind complains.

Of course, Shakespeare is theater–transient and of the moment. No one is going to complain that they did it better in 1601, after all, since no record of that performance exists, and even modern performances fade away like tears in the rain, memorialized only in our memories. Songs, too, get remade all the time, re-interpreted, slaughtered on reality-TV shows, remixed, sampled–you name it. No one cares.

But movies and TV shows? The outrage whenever we decide to reboot, remix, or simply remake a movie–unless it’s old and not part of our living experience–is always met with cries about how Hollywood is “out of ideas” and must pillage our cherished memories for more tickets sales. This of course ignores a few points:

  1. The movies we’re complaining about being remade are often themselves remixes, reboots, or a tasty melange of borrowed tropes, as all art builds on what has come before, and
  2. For a younger generation, the newer version will likely be theirs in the same way the older or original version is yours. Let them have it.

I just can’t get upset about a reboot any more. Look, The Matrix films were great–or, the first one was, and the two sequels, while containing some great sequences, were a slog–but our worst case scenario is that the new version will be a pale imitation of the original, which we’ve already seen and survived with The Force Awakens, so what’s the big deal?

 

*Not his real name. My brother is very important and cannot risk being embarrassed by connection with me.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Tipping and Incompetence

Author: March 12, 2017 2 Comments

Sorry, I’d tip but I only carry $100,000 bills, because I’m a writer.

Friends, we may be moving into a post-cash society. I say this with a degree of confidence because I am normally at least two decades behind in any trend; I’m that guy who walks into a room and says something like “Wow, that Kanye West fellow sure can rap!” in 2017 and then wonders why everyone is smirking at him. So the fact that I never carry any cash on me means that a cashless society can only be moments away, if I’m already on board.

I was once worried about going cashless, because I didn’t want the Illuminati to be able to track all of my movements and purchases. But I don’t worry about that any more, because 1) smartphones take care of that for them and 2) I’m old and tired and dealing with cash is just too much fucking work, so if the Illuminati want to know all about my liquor and cheese purchases (and, as a direct result of the first two, my Beano purchases), I say let them have all the big data they want.

Going cashless is wonderful. I no longer worry about having money in my wallet, I no longer have pounds of coins weighing me down at the end of the day. I have a record of every purchase which does wonders for budgeting. The only problem? Tipping.

To Insure Proper Service

I like to tip. This is because I am a drinker, and drinkers live in bars and the bar ecosystem is predicated on tips. I also have a certain amount of empathy for every fellow human I meet, and when I meet fellow humans doing a hard job I like to reward them and make their day a little brighter. It also makes me feel like Jeff Somers, Millionaire About Town, I won’t lie.

But, now that I never have any cash on me, I am frequently in the position of being Jeff Somers, Entitled Asshat Who Never Tips.

For example, I was at a fairly swanky event recently. Open bar, finger foods, coat check, all that nice stuff. And all night I felt like an asshat because I couldn’t tip the bartenders, the coat check girl, or anyone. Do you know that time dilates and it takes about 6 hours to get a drink from a bartender when you know you don’t have a dollar bill to put in their little bowl? It’s science. I have performed the experiment to confirm the phenomenon.

Yes, I could—and should!—plan ahead and just get some cash to keep on my person at all times just for tipping. This would require competence, which I do not possess. Believe me, it’s on my list of things to do.

I suppose someday there will be easy digital tipping options, which would be a little ominous as it’s easy to imagine someone setting up a card skimmer to accept tips and the next day you’re cleaned out just because the bartender had a heavy hand pouring your shots of Wild Turkey. But I’d probably take the chance, because I love to tip, and the chances that I’ll remember to bring cash ever are disturbingly low. Just like my chances of wearing pants, which is another reason I never have cash; no pockets. Don’t ask where I keep the credit card. Don’t. Ask.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Some Giveaway Winners

Author: March 7, 2017 5 Comments

We have three winners who will be receiving a signed print copy of the new Avery Cates story, The Kendish Hit, and this is the story of how they won.

First of all, if you weren’t aware that I was giving away copies of the story, that’s probably because despite my incessant pleas and reminders, you haven’t signed up for my newsletter. Which is, frankly, inexplicable. Four times a year I’ll be sending out an email with news, secrets, embarrassing photos, and giveaways and other exclusive stuff. You can sign up over at the top right of this page, or go here. I suggest you do it right now, before you forget.

In the March 2017 newsletter I asked people to finish a line from the story itself:

“The Big Guy had an accent, something drastic that made every word sound like _________.”

In the actual story, the line ends “… it had been carved out of rocks.” I took all the entries and anonymized into a document, which I submitted to the Jeff Somers Rocks You Like an Email Hurricane Judging Committee, which is staffed by my wife The Duchess.

The Duchess takes everything she does very seriously, and so after a costume change and a snack she settled in to read through the entries, sifting through until she had found three she deemed acceptable for a variety of reasons. Here are the winners:

“… it had been carved out of rocks!” — A.L. Coan

The Duchess says: “I chose this one because they mimicked the Master.”

“… cliff faces falling into the ocean, taking that hospital of paraplegic nuns with them. His voice was what the stratification of the Burgess Shale, the Morrison Formation, and the Laramide Revolution would sound like if you recorded every sound during their deposition, scrunched that into a five-minute soundclip, and turned it into a black metal single. Every intake of breath was the collective screams of pterosaurs and anomalocarids still trapped somewhere below his larynx, begging for just one tracheotomy to let them see daylight again.” — Paul Riddell

The Duchess says: “This one was chosen for the simple, sheer amount of time it took to come up with something like that.”

“… he’d been drinking Black Saddle bourbon for 3 days straight” — John Patterson

The Duchess says: “This one wins because it shows he actually read the newsletter.”

So there you have it, folks: The winners of the March 2017 Newsletter Giveaway. Who will be next? You’d best sign up to be in the running. You never know when I’ll be giving away my credit card # or something; I do drink a lot.

Avery Cates, BAM!

New Avery Cates Story

Author: March 1, 2017 2 Comments

Just a quick note to remind everyone that the new Avery Cates short story The Kendish Hit is officially available. For just 99 cents you get the title story, a prequel set long before the events of The Electric Church, plus several other Cates short stories that are variably available depending on how well you’ve been paying attention over the last few years. Here’s the cover copy:

In this prequel to “The Electric Church,” a young Avery Cates takes on his first job, meets someone who will be an old friend someday, and learns some hard lessons in the newly-formed System of Federated Nations.

Contains the previously-released Avery Cates stories “This Was Battle. This Was Joy,” “The Golden Badge,” “The Oldest Bastard on the Block,” “This Was Education,” “all orphans, at least,” and “The Sewer Rat.”

Enjoy! 99 cents for a digital copy, just $6 for a print book.

KINDLE | NOOK | KOBO | PLAY | PRINT

Avery Cates, BAM!

Writing: The Work You Don’t Want to Do

Author: February 24, 2017 0 Comments

It all makes sense now.

The cold truth is, writing is the easiest part of writing for a living. The actual writing? Easy. Give me a topic, five minutes on the Internet, and a keyboard and I can gin up 500 words on just about any subject. Give me three months and a monetary incentive and I’ll write a novel. The act of writing words has never been much of a problem for me. I understand I’m not everyone; some writers do in fact struggle with the actual writing, and many of them produce great work. As Diff’rent Strokes taught us, it’s take different strokes to move the world. What might be right for you might not be right for some.

<wanders off, singing the Diff’rent Strokes theme song>

Where was I? Right: Writing is the easy part. If you want to make your living writing, however, a lot of more difficult skill sets come into play. If you want to actually make money from writing and you haven’t been able to get the six-figure advance or sell the film rights before you’ve even written the damn book like Garth Risk Hallberg, you’re going to have to learn to do a few things that—if you’re like me—you don’t really want to do. Things like

Make the Phone Calls. I do a fair bit of freelance writing to pay my enormous liquor bills, and some of it requires me to make phone calls and speak to people, usually people who don’t find me entertaining or charming. It’s my least-favorite aspect of the work, but it must be done.

Write the Synopses. If you’ve ever tried to sell a novel, you know the peculiar hell of trying to boil 90,000 words down to three paragraphs of pithy plot. But if you want to sell that novel, you have to do it.

Make the Pitches. When you freelance, pitching ideas is a constant. It is something you do every day, and it’s kind of exhausting sometimes, but you either do it or you earn about $500 a year.

Take Edits. Look, you and I both know that sometimes we nail it. Sometimes we write something great, and sometimes the feedback we get from clients or editors is less than coherent. Sometimes you get that edit letter and you just have to step outside and let out a primal scream … but you go back in and revise.

Massage Text. Sometimes your first draft is perfectly fine, but you have to go back and massage it anyway. Maybe to fall in line with style or SEO guidelines, maybe to hit a specific word count or other formatting metric, or maybe just because a client or editor didn’t like it.

These are things no one wants to do. I’d much rather write whatever I feel like and collect fat checks for each piece as I finish them. But if you’re looking to write for a living, forget twaddle like write every day–that advice is basically telling you to do something you already want to do. Instead, do the stuff you don’t want to do. That’s the best use of your time.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number

Author: February 17, 2017 0 Comments

Artist’s Conception of Your Humble Author as a Child Writer

Here in 2017 we’re all basically waiting around to be woken up at 2AM to the news that the missiles have launched and we’ve all got about five minutes to say our goodbyes or go crawl into our bomb shelters with our cans of Dinty Moore and our gold bars. It’s hard to soldier on and try to write novels and such when you’re pretty sure the morons we’ve elected to the government — suddenly not simply an outsize insult, but rather an accurate description — are either stealing everything not nailed down or eager to destroy everything.

But soldier on I do, mainly because civilization has not crumbled yet to the point where the whiskey reserves are free for the stealing, right before they dry up completely because civilization is sort of necessary for things like whiskey.

So, I’m in a contemplative mood. And I am contemplating the fact that Christopher Paolini is 33 years the fuck old.

The Child Author

I wrote my first real, actual novel when I was about fourteen; there were “novels” before that, but they were very likely just novellas or even long short stories. Cravenhold was a short novel, but I wrote it. And promptly began trying to sell it. And telling everyone I met that I was just fourteen and I’d written a novel, as if that somehow warranted special attention. Like the president of Ballantine Books was going to call me up and congratulate me for being a super genius after offering me a million dollars.

The reason I think about this now, when I am withered by age and practically on death’s door with a whiskey in one hand and my smartphone in the other, is because it’s not unusual, believe it or not, to see kids posting to various Internet writing forums and announcing, smugly, that at the tender age of (14, 15, 16) they have written a novel. And I want to tell them, with all affection and sincerity, to go fuck themselves, because it doesn’t mean anything.

I sort-of, kind-of sold my first novel when I was 16; this wasn’t Cravenhold, but a subsequent novel titled White Rabbit. And believe me, I told everyone and more or less dug a hole for myself, so that when the deal dissolved like tears in the rain I had a lot of explaining to do.

Look, writing something recognizable as a novel when you’re still a kid is an achievement. And if, like Paolini, you manage to sell that novel and publish it to strong sales, that’s amazing. But simply writing a novel as teenager isn’t anything to shout about. Writing a novel at all isn’t something to shout about, actually; people write novels all the time — and routinely write them in a month or less. Sure, writing a novel is an achievement. But it doesn’t mean you’re destined for greatness or anything. Heck, I did it, but I didn’t sell my first real novel to a real publisher until I was 28 years old.

I always assumed that when editors read about my tender years they would be impressed; of course now I wonder if they didn’t immediately stuff the manuscript into the return envelope, rolling their eyes. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what I imagine happens now.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

My Day of MLM

Author: January 31, 2017 1 Comment

I WISH the meeting room had been this nice.

I don’t know about y’all, but when I was a kid my parents were pretty insistent that my brother Yan and I were parasites on the household, barnacles who had somehow conspired to attach ourselves to their home, sucking them dry. And as a result we were cruelly expected to have jobs from a very young age.

Now, any writers who are reading this know that being a writer comes with a hellish problem: On the one hand, we tend to know from a young age what we’re destined to do—write. In a world where most people wind up doing stuff they hate because they have no idea what they want to do, that’s a superpower. On the other hand, finding a way to monetize writing remains the Holy Grail of the writing life. In other words, finding part-time work as a long-haired teenager who liked to write stories wasn’t easy.

Thus every year my family went through the Ritual of Dad’s Friends, where Dad would essentially doll Yan and I up into church clothes and go out seeking a job for us. Most years he lined something up before we even knew what was happening, and suddenly I was being driven to an underground fight club where I was paid $5 an hour to mop the sweat and blood from the ground. But sometimes Dad’s connections failed him, and the looming specter of a Somers household without the extra income generated by their exhausted children began to loom large, making our parents cranky. Sometimes this led us to be a bit creative when it came to the job hunt. And that led me to my Evening of MLM Madness.

(more…)

Bullshit

Writing for the Wrong Reasons

Author: January 23, 2017 0 Comments

One Monies, Please

One Monies, Please

Friends, I’m not a very smart guy. Oh, I have a head filled with trivia, which in these low times often passes for smarts. Being able to win your local tavern’s Trivia Tuesday (increasingly difficult, let me tell you, when you’ve been banned from most of the local watering holes due to ridiculous and oppressive “must wear some form of trousers” rules) doesn’t mean you’re intelligent, it just means you absorb a lot of useless information very, very quickly. A skill, to be sure, but not the most useful skill.

Being able to write clear, well-constructed sentences about compelling stories and characters is also a skill I sometimes claim, but it also doesn’t make me smart. A lot of very dumb people make good livings writing words, and I am also very afraid that I am secretly one of them. Any time I start to think I might secretly be smart, all I have to do is gaze upon my works and despair, though. By which I mean any time I start to feel smart, I just look at some of the terrible novels I’ve written when I wrote for anything other than inspiration.

Take This Job and Shove It

The term “working writer” either sounds ominous or exciting to you. If it’s ominous, it’s because you’re smart and you know that the “working” part probably means you’re writing 300 catalog descriptions of sex toys at $1 a pop. If you’re excited, you’re like me and you imagine yourself lazily writing novels when you’re not busy cashing extravagant checks from publishers—not check for anything, just gifts of money they send you in the vain hope that you’ll choose to publish your next book through them.

Anyways, every now and then I get this idea in my head that part of being a Working Writer is trying to write something commercial, in the sense of writing something that will be easy to sell to a publisher because its part of a broad trend or somehow marketable. Don’t get me wrong—I want all my books to sell like hotcakes and I have no snobbery when it comes to genre or category. It’s just that sometimes I think I have to try a little harder to be, I don’t know, mainstream or something. So I’ll work up a story and write a novel not because I’m excited about the idea, but because I think it’s going to be an easy sell.

I am always wrong. And it is always a disaster.

Some writers might be able to pull this off, but whenever I’ve written a book for anything but pure inspiration and excitement, it doesn’t work out so well. Oh, as novels they’re fine. I’m usually fairly happy with the story, the writing, all that jazz. But there’s always something missing, some soul or other ineffable thing that means the novels fail. They look like novels, they tell a story that I like, and yet they fail. Whenever I try to be smart and engineer a book because I think I know something about selling books, the end result is a manuscript everyone reads and shrugs over. Meh, they all say. It’s not bad. But we can’t sell it.

The lesson here is obvious: Writing for anything aside from inspiration doesn’t work for me. The good news is, a lot of the books I write because I want to have sold. So one wonders why I think I need to change up my approach in the first place. Aside from the fact that I am, you know, not smart.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Filthy Lucre, Writing

Celebrating “Mad Men”‘s Least-Celebrated Character

Author: January 10, 2017 1 Comment

Paul Kinsey’s Very Bad, Super No-Good Life

Since this blog has become a receptacle for posts about Mad Men and other so-called “peak TV” shows plus a smattering of self-promotion posts about my own writing … let’s lean into it.

There’s often a sense that old TV shows should be buried and forgotten, as if there’s shame in discussing a show like Mad Men a certain time after it’s ended. Hell, we still discuss novels written centuries ago, so why not a TV show that’s less than a few years gone? But when we talk about Mad Men—and, remarkably, we still do, an awful lot—there’s a tendency to focus on the flashy main characters, naturally enough. But we have enough essays about Don Draper, I think. As writers, we tend to focus on Don, because he’s so obviously like us: Creative, tortured, stymied by the very instruments of his success.

Forget Don, though, and let’s contemplate a character that doesn’t get much attention in any serious way: Paul Kinsey. Because, writers, in many ways Paul Kinsey is us.

The Failed Writer

Kinsey doesn’t get a ton of screen time on the show, and what he does get is used mainly for comic relief, but as usual Weiner and company shade the character with plenty of good writing. We know, for example, that Paul is from New Jersey and attended Princeton on a scholarship, where he lost his joisoy accent and learned how to dress and talk and fondle a pipe like his richer classmates. At the beginning of the series, he’s one of a group of young men at the firm, all of whom are more or less equal despite being in different departments. He’s a copy writer, though, while his peers are in accounts.

And Paul is not talented. What he’s good at is superficial mimicry, which is why he does well enough at first when his immediate boss is the alcoholic and incompetent Freddie Rumsen. But Paul is weak and likes to think of himself as smarter than everyone else, so he dabbles. He dabbles in the Beatnik movement, the Hippie movement, the Civil Rights movement. He feigns an appreciation of the finer things, but he uses this appreciation as an excuse to let everyone know how worldly he is.

Paul is increasingly aware that something is off. Late in Season 1, a play he wrote is discovered in his desk and his co-workers stage it as a drunken, cruel prank. Paul eventually leans into it, directing the play with enthusiasm, but it’s clear the play is terrible. Meanwhile, Ken Cosgrove actually publishes short stories in real magazines, and slowly Paul sees his peers outpacing him. Pete and Ken and even despicable, harebrained Harry Crane move up the food chain, making more money and gaining status. Paul remains a Copy Writer, and not a very good one.

And then, in the middle of Season Three of the show, Paul Kinsey has an epiphany and realizes he is not a good writer. Because Peggy Olson is a good writer, and you can almost pinpoint the moment he realizes he’s not one to episode 10, The Color Blue. In that episode Peggy and Paul compete to come up with the best idea for a telegram advertisement. Peggy does the work studiously, and doesn’t come up with much of any value. Paul drinks, masturbates, and has a flash of inspiration–which he forgets to write down. We’ll never know if that idea was actually any good, because Paul shambles into the meeting later with nothing—and watches, stunned, as Peggy takes a throwaway line he used to explain his problem and runs with it, producing a decent if not world-changing concept on the spot.

At that moment, Paul knows he’s mediocre. In episode 13, when Don and the rest of the executives steal all the accounts and form a new company, Don personally recruits Peggy. No one recruits Paul. When Paul realizes this, its confirmed: He’s not good at his job.

The Downward Spiral

We don’t see Paul again until Season 5, when he appears as a member of the Hare Krishna’s, looking ridiculous and pathetic and lost with a shaved head. Like most failed writers, he hasn’t given up on his dream. Like anyone who has ever been voted off a talent competition show, he has decided that we haven’t heard the last of him, so he’s still writing.

Paul’s spec script for Star Trek is the sort of awful SFF idea that still gets written every few weeks by flailing writers, the sort of terrible idea that will always be written by flailing writers. Worst of all, Paul seems to know that he doesn’t have talent, as he has pinned his hopes on Harry’s TV connections to get the script considered. Paul has descended to a low point: No longer in the ad business, he’s not even getting paid for his second-rate creativity. He’s got nothing, and yet he’s still plodding away at terrible stories.

That could be any one of us. Even if you’ve published, and published widely, you can’t be certain it’s not just luck, that history will slowly rub your face out of the picture until no one is quite sure who you are, and no one remembers the stories you told. In just 40 episodes and probably a collective hour’s worth of screen time, the writers of Mad Men made Paul Kinsey into a well-shaded, sad individual, and he ought to be the patron saint of anyone who joined their high school literary magazine and thought they were special because they wrote stories.

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

Pitch First, Think Later

Author: January 5, 2017 0 Comments

When you’re a writer in 2017, you spend approximately 109% of your time thinking up clever things to Tweet in the vague, vain hope that about forty million people will Retweet it and thus declare you Cool. I’m not 100% certain how being Cool = $$$, but I am assured by everyone it can happen, and so I keep doing it.

Recently, I sent out this Tweet:

WISDOM

It got some play, and I was contacted by writers who thought this was a pretty incredible suggestion. What happens, they wondered, if you sell the pitch but can’t actually write the piece? What if you can’t support your thesis?

Look, freelance writing can be exhausting in the modern age because we’re writing short, punchy Internet essays with a short shelf life. And our corporate masters are insatiable, always eager for more content with which to attract those sweet, sweet clicks. Pitching fast and furious is the only way to make a living; I probably wrote about 500 freelance pieces last year alone, each and every one of them (with perhaps a dozen exceptions) stemming from a pitch.

That kind of volume means you can’t dawdle about wondering if a pitch idea is good (your editors will do that for you) or possible. The best way to pitch is to pitch first and think about it later, and here are three reasons why:

  1. The Doubt. If you think of a great idea for an article but pause to wonder about its feasibility, you will talk yourself out of it. You’ll convince yourself it isn’t that clever, that you’ll never find any supporting information or examples, that no one will return your phone call or email. And then a month later you’ll see a similar idea on another website and you’ll kick yourself. I’ve talked myself out of great ideas and I have always regretted it.
  2. The Speed. You are not the only person furiously pondering things to write about, and great ideas for posts and articles have an odd way of popping into many heads simultaneously. In other words, while you’re researching whether you can even pitch this idea, someone is pitching this idea.
  3. The Challenge. Don’t play it safe. Yes, freelance writing is for profit—but it should be for fun, too. Got a crazy idea you convinced an editor to buy? Have fun trying to make it work.

In Event of Emergency

All well and good, that sense of adventure and the swagger of pitching without fear, but in all seriousness—what do you do if you brazenly pitch a weird idea, get the green light, and then realize you can’t find much information to work with? WHAT THEN, SOMERS YOU ARROGANT ASS?

First off, that rarely happens. If you can conceive of a pitch idea, then it’s within the realm of the possible. And part of writing anything, on any subject, is creativity. If you’re having trouble digging up material for your pitch, get creative. If you can’t get creative in these situations, freelancing may not be your ideal career.

If that doesn’t work:

Widen your search. Don’t be afraid to get a little loose with your interpretation of your own pitch. Look back further in time, or allow for a bit of inconsistency in your examples.

If that doesn’t work, tweak. Contact your editor and see if you can twist the pitch a little to fit what the research is telling you, or just go ahead and tweak the premise. Usually small deviations aren’t a big deal.

Now, don’t get me wrong; a big caveat here is not to pitch wildly insane ideas—you should have some expectation that you can back up your pitch. “Pitch First, Think Later” simply means you don’t need to do all the research and legwork first.

Bullshit