Said Cunning Old Fury – Page 69 – Ramblings of Jeff Somers, author

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Author: jsomers February 10, 2016 0 Comments

It’s tax season, which here in the Somers Compound buried deep under Hoboken (and we do mean buried, as the city removed the entrance/exit long ago) means that we’re slowly being crushed under 1099 forms and other tax documents (delivered via pneumatic tube). When you provide 45% of the Internet’s book-related Think Pieces, you accrue a lot of 1099s. Add on the statements from your agent, your DIY publishing endeavors, and your many Defense Department contracts for the Superweapons Based on Cats project, and it gets kind of cluttered.

Naturally, we’re aiming to make this year even more complex. Aside from writing even more book-related freelance articles to gain more of those precious 1099 forms, we also have a number of fresh, piping hot stories scheduled for 2016. This is all part of my plan to keep the pennies and nickels trickling in so I can fill the underground pool with filthy coins and swim around in them. Which is a lot harder to do than Scrooge McDuck makes it look.

So, here’s a breakdown of everything Somers coming at you this year, so you can plan accordingly and start polishing those nickels and pennies for me.

Avery Cates

The experiment of writing a novel in novella-sized chunks was a lot of fun, but all great experiments must end, so I’ll be releasing Parts 5 & 6 (The Bey & The City Lord) as well as the omnibus edition containing all 6 parts, The Shattered Gears, on 2/15. I originally said they’d go up for pre-order on that date, but now I think I’ll just release ’em. I wanted to keep the print version of the omnibus to $6 or so, but as it turns out that was drunk talk, as the cheapest I can make it is $14.

The Bey city lord_cover The Shattered Gears Omnibus

The Ustari Cycle

There will be new additions to my other series, The Ustari Cycle, which began with 2014’s We Are Not Good People (technically, with 2013’s Trickster, but that became Part 1 of WANGP). I have four novellas/short stories scheduled for 2016 from this universe. Three of them will be published as eBooks from Pocket Star:

The Stringer (August 2016) (Pre-order now!)
Last Best Day (2016)
The Boom Bands (2016)

And one short story, Crossed Wires, is a collaboration with Stephen Blackmoore for the anthology Urban Allies, out in July, combining my Ustari Cycle characters with his Eric Carter universe in an explosive (and cuss-filled) adventure.

Urban Allies Coming 2016

The Bonus Situation

Finally, a standalone short story of mine titled The Bonus Situation is scheduled to appear in Ragnarok Publications’ Mech: Age of Steel anthology. Technically, this is scheduled for January 2017, but what the heck. I’ve already typed all this, I’m not going to erase it now.

mech

There you go: All the Somers fiction you can handle. Or not handle.

Avery Cates, BAM!, Filthy Lucre, Ustari Cycle, We Are Not Good People

Aw, Man!

Author: jsomers February 3, 2016 4 Comments

We’ll take the hippies and the hipsters, but not the Irish!

For some reason today I realized that I have been using the word man as a general epithet, greeting, and acknowledgement since I was about ten years old — which was probably the last time it was cool, hip lingo. Not to mention the last time it wasn’t humiliating. Not to mention my probable emotional age. Let it drift.

I can remember my Mother admonishing me to stop using it in her presence because she considered it to be, I don’t know — smartassy? uncultured? simply annoying? But obviously her shaming me didn’t have much effect; when I’m not thinking I still call everyone man, as in “Thanks, man!” or “Hey, man!”

Today for some reason I suddenly found myself ashamed of this. I’m a middle-aged grown up, after all, but I call everyone man like it’s still 1975 in my head (I also have the wardrobe of a hobo unless The Duchess cleans me up for adult events, so what?). In many ways it is 1975 n my head; I still expect everything to cost fifteen cents, including gallons of gas and shoes, and get very cranky when presented with invoices costing more; just ask The Duchess. But that’s no excuse. Today in the grocery store I told the kid working the checkout line Thanks, man and he looked at me as if I’d turned to dust and crumbled away in front of his eyes.

OLD HABITS, OLD MAN

Language gets embedded like that. We all need our go-to phrases and lines, the things we utter when we’re on autopilot, or don’t have time to think. Thanks, man just pops out, and in my head it sounds friendly and loose, casual in a cool way. Because that’s how it was when I first picked it up, a bunch of scurvy street kids playing Wiffle Ball with black electrical tape on our bats, doing complicated handshakes when we met up every day. Calling each other man because someone saw it on TV or something one day.

What bothers me is the lack of evolution and the lack of consciousness; I prefer to think I am captain of the S.S. Jeff Somers, this shambolic body I inhabit, and not merely a doughy-eyed passenger. A long time ago the word dude entered my lexicon about the same time it entered everyone approximately my age, and I spent a long time rooting it out and eliminating it, for the most part. Because dude may be the worst word ever invented, and must be burned from our minds. Once in a while I use dude ironically, and once in a while I regress 20 years in a moment and it slips out, but it’s rare. I won the Dude War. So the ongoing battle against Man irks me: Every time I utter the word I feel like a jackass.

EVERY MAN

Of course, what’s the alternative? I suspect man persists in my everyday speech because it’s egalitarian in its way. Take the boy at the grocery: What should I use to address him? Thanks, kid makes me feel like I’m 105 years old, or possibly in a old noir movie. I could go with just an unadorned thanks, but that sounds abrupt to my ear, almost rude. I could go full-on hipster and make up nicknames for everyone — thanks, Stretch; thanks, Noodles; thanks, Starscream — but somehow I expect that won’t solve my problem. Maybe this is why some people just smirk silently at everything. It saves them the embarrassment of calling someone Chuckles or something.

See, with Man, it’s levelling: Everyone is Man. You’re all my equal when I whip out the circa-1980 secret handshake and call you man (and yet if I said Thanks, woman to a lady I’d likely be entered into some sort of police database, or possibly a Future Cyborg Watchlist). On the other hand, man seems acceptable to me mainly because for one brief shining moment it was considered cool. I could say Thanks, person! and it would be just as universal, but because it sounds so robotic and nerdy, it just doesn’t have the same panache … panache that perhaps only exists in my tiny, booze-soaked brain.

So, man remains, like mild brain damage I can’t cure. So be it. If only I didn’t sound like such an idiot when I used it.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

The Unbearable Whiteness of “The Intern”

Author: jsomers January 28, 2016 2 Comments

Shiny Happy People

Because I have committed terrible crimes in a past life, The Duchess made me watch The Intern the other day. Someday I will get myself hypnotized to discover what sort of child-killing Venetian nobleman I was in the past to deserve stuff like this, but for the moment I just accept my punishments as what I deserve.

A pretty not-good comedy starring Robert De Niro as a 70-year old widower who participates in a “senior” internship program at Anne Hathaway’s ultra-hip startup based in Brooklyn, the film sparked an observation I make from time to time that drives The Duchess crazy: A Whiteness Analysis. And holy cow, this is the whitest movie I’ve seen in a long time.

Now, I don’t think every single cast has to be colorblind or forcibly integrated, and yes, there are also films with entirely black (or other) casts. But it’s easy to argue that an all-black film is a necessary correction against the overwhleming diversity problem in mainstream Hollywood, and many of those films also include at least a few white folks, because they’re set in something resembling the real world. Films like The Intern are set in a weird fantasy land where Brooklyn, New York is more or less a White Enclave. Literally no one with any sort of face time in the film is non-White (there might have been a few background characters who were black or another ethnicity). In other words, a film set in a borough of New York City that has

a population of 2.5 million people and which is
about 36% non-White (or, you know, nearly one million people)

doesn’t have any non-white characters.

As Gwen Stefani might say while she was appropriating even more Japanese culture to sell us her wretched things, that’s bananas.

The Opposite of Good

Now, I’m no paragon of racial virtue. I’m an asshole, and I walk about draped in my white privilege like some sort of King. But I grew up in Jersey City where my friends and schoolmates were of a wide variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, so my eye is trained to think that a lot of skin tones and accents and strange cooking smells that hit you in the face when you come over for dinner is normal. Bland Whiteness, on the other hand, freaks me out, even though I am quite bland and quite white.

None of that means a movie is good or bad. A movie can have a painfully white cast and still be amazing — and vice versa. It’s just that once I notice the absolute lack of black characters of any kind, it grates on me a little. Sometimes it’s justified due to the focus of the story or the setting, true enough. But not The Intern, as noted above, because it’s set in one of the most racially diverse places in America.

And let’s be frank, The Intern isn’t a good movie (er, spoilers here if you care, though I can’t imagine why you would). It’s not awful, but it’s that mythical story that lacks any sort of conflict. De Niro’s character is friendly, supportive, intelligent, and only mildly stymied by modern technology and slang. His fellow interns and the employees at the company find him charming and a font of wisdom. Anne Hathaway’s major problem is that the investors at her wildly successful company want her to hire a CEO. And yes, her husband is cheating on her — but, as it turns out, only because she has emotionally abandoned him, he totally still loves her he’s just a modern man struggling to find manliness while being a house husband. Or something.

In other words, there’s no villain, no conflict. Everyone is jolly. Lessons are learned. The movie feints at making Hathaway’s character a bitchy ageist who dislikes De Niro simply because he’s observant while being old, and resolves this ghostly image of conflict literally one minute after it surfaces. This is a movie where everyone apologizes immediately for every single mistake so that no drama can possibly sprout from the seed. In that regard its very much like Downton Abbey, another show where conflict goes to die in a field of muttered apologies and hugs. And also a very, very white show, but they have at least established that black people and Indian people, at the very least, exist in the Downton universe. Plus, as mentioned above, the focus and setting on that show justify the monochromism to some extent, even if there is absolutely no justification for the total lack of stakes or conflict.

Authorial Struggle

Are there areas of this country where literally everyone around you is white? Sure, of course. And maybe those audience segments get unsettled when they see a diverse cast, so maybe there’s a marketing aspect to this sort of casting. I know in my own writing I sometimes have to take a step back and ask myself if my characters are all essentially just me and people I know and am comfortable with, and sometimes I purposefully model a character on someone outside of my tiny circle of friends in order to break out a little. So I can see that if you’re a writer who has pretty much all-white friends and family (which is just a circumstance and does not mean they’re a virulent racist) they can unconsciously write characters who are all more or less familiar to them without thinking about how it all looks.

That can happen. You write what you know, and if you don’t have anyone outside of your own ethnic and cultural experience around you, that’s a thing that can happen. It’s still jarring to see it, whatever the ultimate explanation.

Of course, if I started writing characters based on only the things I interact with on a daily basis, all of my books would feature cats, and would basically be 300 pages about napping.

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

Writing Lessons from Assholes

Author: jsomers January 25, 2016 2 Comments

I WILL CUT A BITCH

I was an indifferent student, because I am the Laziest Man Ever Born. To this day the fact that I actually earned a college degree is kind of amazing, not because I’m dumb, but because it’s difficult for 2016 Jeff to believe that College Jeff actually performed the bare minimum of work in order to achieve a BA in English, which is the Do Nothing Bitch of college undergraduate degrees. Most of my memories of my college days involve a television, so the degree thing is a mystery.

I do have one memory that I like to tell people about because it a) makes me look smart and b) underscores the ridiculous nature of academics in general — and now I can add a third reason: c) there’s a lesson about writing in it. So let’s recount the glorious Moment Jeff Made a Professor Look Stupid.

The Glorious Moment Jeff Made a Professor Look Stupid

I was taking some laugher of a 200 level English course; I honestly can’t even remember what it was. Tortured Rhyme Schemes in Early 19th Century Poetry? Inscrutable Medieval Symbolism 203? Allegory for Potheads? I have no idea. It was a 200 level course so I can assume my strategy was to attend as few classes as possible and bring Other Stuff to Do when I did attend.

We had to write a paper at some point, with the stress that we had to cite original sources and all that usual drama. Again, I have no recollection of what the paper was supposed to be about. I know I hit up the library (my god if the Internet had existed I would never have had to leave my dorm room/apartment during college), wrote my paper, and handed it in. And when I got it back, I’d been given a big fat D.

Now, I was never very ambitious about my academics, sure, but this was fucking bullshit: A D? On an English paper? No fucking way. I wasn’t ambitious, but I had pride. So I scheduled an appointment with the professor and asked why.

The professor, as I recall, wasn’t a full-on professor (200 level class, remember) and might have been a grad student or something, possibly a homeless man recruited to watch us for an hour twice a week, who knows. Like I said, my memory is sketchy and very much like Homer Simpson’s habit of imagining himself in a tuxedo when he tries to remember his evenings. I had no curiosity about his status then, and certainly no memory of it now. I remember he had shaggy, thinning blondish hair and big moon glasses and a nervous tic that involved licking the corner of his mouth with his tongue. And he told me, in condescending tones, that I’d obviously plagiarized the paper.

I think my head almost exploded. You can accuse me of a lot of things and I won’t care. Say that I have poor fashion sense and hygiene? Fine. A tendency towards run-on sentences and semi-colon abuse? You may well be right. The musical talent of a wallabee? Fine. But suggest that I plagiarized something and Jeff Smash. So I asked him how he’d come to this conclusion, and he told me that the writing style was far too academic and elevated. I asked him if he’d found, you know, actual proof of plagiarism, and he said no, but he knew no one at my age could write the way the paper was written.

So I asked him if I could show him plenty of other examples of my writing that was at that level, would he change my grade? He said he would, so I brought him five boxes of manuscripts and papers from recent years. He took one look at the boxes, said he believed me, and changed my grade. The kicker? This paper that was so well-written he assumed it was plagiarized? He gave me a B. A FUCKING B.

Still. Angry.

The Writing Lesson

I think of this today because it actually points out one of the often-overlooked aspects of writing, in terms of that dreaded word craft: mimicry. Copying someone’s writing style is challenging, and while you certainly don’t want to steal someone’s style for your own, it’s a very useful exercise. Writing in a styler or voice that isn’t your own gives you an objectivity about word choice, phrasing, and other technical aspects of language that you sometimes get blinded to when it’s your own creative output.

I never realized how often I mimic what I’m reading until that unfortunate day when I came within seconds of murdering a pudgy teacher. Since then, I’ve been much more aware — I do it more or less without thinking about it. If I’m reading a book and really into it, I’ll start cribbing bits and pieces of the style, stealing tricks, and after a few weeks I’ll more or less be writing a pastiche of the style in question. Now that I’m aware of it, it’s a tool: I can indulge in it, learn something, work on something different from my normal stuff, and then keep whatever’s useful and incorporate it into my own evolving style.

And all it took to learn this was an awkward encounter with a smug teacher and a brief, passing interest in my own academic career.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

New Philip K. Marks Story @ Black Denim Lit

Author: jsomers January 21, 2016 0 Comments

Black Denim Lit

Hey, kids! The folks over at Black Denim Lit have published my short story, Howling on For More and you can read it right now, for free!

Howling is a Philip K. Marks short story, which means, of course, that it’s creepy and a little weird as my favorite down on his luck investigator with a penchant for the strange, paranormal, and impossible looks into a new case.

Previous published Marks stories can be read, too; Sift, Almost Invisible, Through appeared in the MWA Anthology Crimes by Moonlight, edited by Charlaine Harris, and A Meek and Thankful Heart appeared in Buzzy Mag in 2013.

More Marks to come!

BAM!, Fiction

The Obligatory David Bowie Post That I Will Try to Make Into Something Interesting and Probably Fail

Author: jsomers January 18, 2016 2 Comments

Blackstar

I’ve never been the biggest David Bowie fan. His more mainstream and accessible songs, sure. The awe-inspiring genius of the open-chord riff in “Rebel Rebel,” the effortless cool of “Modern Love,” the howling pain in “Heroes”—genius songs each. His more avant-garde work, his jazzy digressions and artsy pretensions left me behind. I am a simple man. I like a 4×4 beat and some major chord progressions.

I also don’t know much about Bowie as a human being. After the shock and awe of his passing faded, there have of course been a plethora of backlash pieces, concerning his interactions with underage groupies in the 1970s. I never knew that. I don’t care how many drugs were involved or what year it was, any grown man who has sex with an underage girl is shitbag, and that complicates my impression of Bowie.

As does Blackstar, his final album, apparently written and released not only in the full knowledge of his coming death due to liver cancer, but as an artistic comment on it.

####

Recently, Nick Mamatas, who I’ve met once and who has published me a few times, posted links to heartbreaking stories about writers who committed suicide. The latter I had read years before, the former was recent. They’re both tales of desperation, of people who have slowly given up on their dreams, become hopelessly tangled in the endless bullshit life rains down on all of us. Life is, after all, death; everyone we know slowly succumbs, and everything we do is tainted with the knowledge of its transience. Some people handle this, sheltered by loved ones, friends, a vibrant social life. Some of us lose that shelter, or never have it.

Oh, I’m lucky. And yet despite my good fortune, I can see myself in those stories. How easy would it be to slowly lose people? To find yourself alone, truly alone? Easier than we think. Easier than I think. It happens so slowly and subtly and then so quickly and suddenly. And money and fame is no certain bulwark against it; Harper Lee has both and I suspect she is lonelier than ever.

####

Blackstar is Bowie’s final album, and it’s pretty clear he planned it and the surrounding publicity—the photographs and videos and the design of the physical album and the liner notes et al—to be a funeral card. A final performance. The lyrics of some of the songs seem to clearly reference the cancer that was killing him and his awareness of a legacy.

That’s amazing. To think that for a year and a half he labored under the doom of his rebellious cells and produced something that was designed to be his swan song. I find myself wondering if he scheduled his death as well, coming as it did so close to the release of the album. The discipline is impressive, and even if David Bowie wept and begged at the last moments, it doesn’t take away from his achievement. Whether Bowie was a good man or not, whether he committed crimes or was a secret asshole, he faced the one thing we all face in the end and he used it for fuel. He created something from it, and turned his own demise into a Moment.

I despair of ever having that kind of discipline, or creativity. When informed of my own death—assuming I get more warning than a shouted “Hey!” or a sudden sense of gravity having turned against me—I’ll likely wallow in self-pity and booze for a long time and then watch a lot of Netflix and then die, bewildered and irritated.

I won’t release a Blackstar, I don’t think. And that’s kind of sad, yes?

####

I’m obsessed with legacy. I don’t really believe in an afterlife, so much of my motivation to publish and self-publish is to leave a slime trail behind me. I have a strong suspicion I have just been outclassed.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

What “The Affair” Can Teach Us About Arc Mysteries

Author: jsomers January 13, 2016 2 Comments

Adultery Doesn’t Look Like Much Fun, Actually

A lot of TV shows hit the small screen with noise and thunder, inspiring think pieces and heated discussion. Few series maintain that level of fascination. For every Game of Thrones there’s The Affair, a show that debuted to a lot of harrumphing about its central storytelling device (conflicting POVs) but has settled into a groove of “premiere television.” Who knows how many people are actually watching this show, and while it still gets mentioned here and there it’s certainly not a cultural obsession.

I enjoy it, although I’ll admit the central device — those conflicting POVs — is irritatingly mishandled, at least in my not-so-humble opinion. Maybe there’s a brilliant long game there, but after two seasons my main takeaway from the POVs is that they are often so wildly inconsistent the characters must be insane people. Unreliable narrators is a great idea: Looking for clues to the truth in two different versions of the same story is potentially powerful. And the show sometimes attains that greatness in little moments; for example, the male protagonist Noah (played, brilliantly as always, by Dominic West) remembers himself consistently as an asshole, which is a really wonderful note to strike, considering the character is clearly selfish, self-involved, and going through a real doozy of a midlife crisis. That sort of detail in an unreliable narrator — plus the fact that he actually often comes off a bit better in other people’s POV — is a great use of the device.

Unfortunately, frequently the recollections of the same scene from different people are so different it’s literally impossible. No one knows better than my wife and I how two people can remember a moment differently, but not to the extent of warping time and space the way The Affair does. It takes a powerful device and renders it ridiculous and irritating.

But! I have not come here to bury The Affair or to praise its misused conceit. I have come to discuss how brilliantly it’s using its central season-spanning mystery.

The Potboiler

Initially, the show is all soap opera: A frustrated father (Noah) of four takes his family on a vacation to Long Island. Feeling like a professional failure and outsider with his wife’s rich family, he starts a passionate affair with a troubled local waitress (Alison). The conflicting unreliable POVs are used to some good effect as the two recall the beginning of the affair differently. Spoilers to follow if you have not watched the show but plan to someday.

There are also flash-forwards to future events that the show’s timeline is slowly catching up to, a future in which Noah is divorced from his ex-wife Helen, and has a child with Alison, in which Noah has published a successful novel which is basically a thinly-veiled account of his affair with Alison, in which Alison’s former brother-in-law has been killed in a hit and run, and in which Noah is the main suspect in that crime. The details of this soapy set up can get a bit convoluted, so let’s just boil it down to the fact that the second season of the show has been leading to the reveal of what actually happened when the brother-in-law was killed. And here’s where the show, which has mutated now from a relationship drama with a borrowed literary device (that did more for the show’s pretension level than its effectiveness) into a show about a murder mystery, did something very smart. It set up a scenario where all three of the main characters — Helen, Noah, and Alison — are involved and complicit in the killing.

The show’s been very patient in setting up the threads it brought together in the Season Two finale, planting seeds for the characters so their decisions leading up to the accident make sense, and their mutual decisions to cover it up make sense. The end result is exactly what an arc-mystery is supposed to do when it’s clarified: It complicates things and provides fresh motivations for the characters. The show is now completely transformed, it’s no longer about an affair and its repercussions, it’s about one boozy night and a dead man and the fallout from the decisions made in the wake of that. The fact that all of these threads spin out from the show’s original premise — the titular affair — makes it feel very organic.

So Often Wrong

The problem with most arc-mysteries is twofold: One, they don’t actually have any resolution, the writers are just making things up as they go. and two, they often resolve in ways that are designed to leave the basic DNA of the story undisturbed. A show like Lost will always be remembered more for the frankly awful way the central mystery of the story was resolved than for the glories of its storytelling. And too many shows have offered up solutions to arc-mysteries that try to simultaneously be shocking while allowing the writers to go back to business as usual in the next episode. Arc Mysteries are easy ways of generating buzz and getting people hooked on a show as they collect clues and exchange theories, but they’re also constricting if there’s no plan. It sure is easy to write a scene where something mysterious and mind-blowing happens. It’s much more difficult to come up with a clear explanation for it later.

The Affair did it right. Whether or not they capitalize on that in future seasons remains to be seen, of course.

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

“Jessica Jones” & the Back and Forth of Chekhov’s Gun

Author: jsomers January 6, 2016 0 Comments

WORST ROOMMATE EVER

So, I finally got around to actually watching Netflix’s Jessica Jones, and, naturally, I have thoughts about it, because of course I do. This is 2016, after all, and I’m a writer with a blog: I have thoughts on everything. You’re lucky I don’t bother posting most of them.

Anyway, I enjoyed the series, for the most part, and give it a solid B overall. It would have been a smashing eight episode series, but at 13 episodes it sagged a bit. The acting was top-notch, the writing in general was good, and David Tennant, frankly, was awesome as the worst villain ever conceived, Kilgrave, a.k.a. The Purple Man. The story of Jessica’s victimization at the hands of this mind-controller was horrifying and interesting, and Kilgrave was without doubt the most despicable and horrifying villain to come around in a long time.

There were, however, two plot points that no one commented on that bothered me, because they underscored a lazy writing mistake you see a lot of. Let’s consider Chekhov’s Gun and how people generally miss the other point that piece of writing advice makes.

FOR GOD’S SAKE WHY IS PETE CAMPBELL STILL ALIVE?

So, everyone more or less understands the principle of Chekhov’s Gun: If you show your audience something that can have an impact on the story, they expect to see it come into play and will regard a lack of activity involving that something as a betrayal. The classic line is, if you show your audience a gun in the first act, it has to go off by the third. Easy enough, and most writers pay attention — except those writers, like Matthew Weiner, who enjoy toying with this rule for fun and fuckery; after all, we saw Pete Campbell’s hunting rifle in Season One of Mad Men, and every year since millions of people tuned in to that show praying that tonight was the night Pete committed suicide.

Knowingly ignoring Chekhov’s Gun is the writer’s prerogative, and can be a sign that you’re in total control of your instrument. But what we saw in Jessica Jones were two blatant instances of the Inverse Chekhov’s Gun Rule: Once the gun goes off, you have to consider the ramifications for the plot going forwards — and backwards.

Let’s examine these two moments in the show. SPOILERS, people.

1. The Security Team. At one point in the show, Team Jessica has established a “safe room” where Kilgrave can be imprisoned. It’s got a soundproof cell where he can be safely stowed. Team Jessica kidnaps Kilgrave off the street, drugging him to ensure he cannot simply command them to set him free. They manage to get just outside the building where the safe room is located when a team of security specialists/bodyguards arrive hot on their trail and overpower Team Jessica through sheer numbers, retrieving their client.

It’s a great scene. Team Jessica’s desperation to hang onto their victory slowly erodes under the sheer numbers of beefy guys who keep coming at them, and when Kilgrave is ferried off to safety without ever using his mind control power it’s a gut-punch.

The problem? Kilgrave has a security team. A security team that knows precisely where his kidnappers were taking him. A security team that never shows up or is even mentioned again. When Kilgrave is kidnapped again and brought to the same location, no security team shows up. They’re not even mentioned or hand-waved.

Once you establish that Kilgrave has taken the precaution of setting up a failsafe that will go into action if his mind control powers ever fail to control the situation for him, you can’t just pretend they don’t exist in future scenarios. Can you argue that Kilgrave fired his team for one reason or another — maybe when Jessica agreed to come live with him in her childhood home? You can argue it, brother, but it isn’t stated in the show, and it doesn’t make any sense in any event. It’s just lazy writing: No one wanted to figure out how they find a new location for a safe room and evade Kilgrave’s security team the second time, so they simply deleted them from the story.

2. Patsy’s Headphones. We can goggle at the fact that when faced with a mind-controller who takes control via the sound of his voice, Team Jessica takes 13 goddamn episodes for someone to experiment with some noise-cancelling headphones. I mean, as I was watching this show I kept thinking, why not crank up some tunes? Sure, it doesn’t stop Kilgrave from ordering other people about or doing other evil shit, but at least it would prevent him from, oh, hissing Patsy, put a bullet in your head at you as he rushes past you.

I mean, sure, headphones aren’t exactly a perfect solution, but one thinks they might at least be tried.

So when, in episode 13, Patsy shows up wearing some Beats on her head, it’s finally a smart moment, but it also makes those headphones into a reverse Chekhov’s Gun, doesn’t it? Once you see them, you realize the characters did have the idea. The question becomes, why didn’t they have it sooner? It’s not exactly “one weird trick.” It’s probably the first thing almost anyone would think of once they realized they were dealing with an auditory mind control scenario.

Again, I blame lazy writing. No one wanted to spend time trying to figure out what happens when Team Jessica shows up with headphones duct-taped to their ears, ready to swarm Kilgrave and stab him to death in a parking lot. So they just pretended no one ever thought of it, and walked away with their hands in their pockets, whistling.

Ah well, they can’t all be as smart as me. And hey, someone paid them a lot of money to write a thing for TV, and no one is paying me for that (yet). As I said, I enjoyed the series overall and will definitely be back for the next season — although I’ll miss Tennant, like the desert misses the rain.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

The Cates Digital Shorts Going Forward

Author: jsomers January 3, 2016 7 Comments

The Shattered Gears Omnibus

SO, my little experiment in writing a novel as a series of short story-length sections has been going on for a little more than a year now. Well, a little more than four years, if I’m being honest, as the original section, The Shattered Gears, was originally sketched out in 2011. So far I’ve released sections Two through Four (The Walled City, The Pale, The Iron Island).

I’ve been sticking to a three-month schedule for these releases in order to give myself time to write each one (I’m doing this Full Pantser, writing as I go), but as I sit here I’ve finished sections Five and Six (The Bey and The City Lord).

Well, I say “pantsed” but to be fair I have sketched out brief summaries of twelve additional sections, which would comprise books two and three of this trilogy. And I mean sketched, these are thumbnails at best that just show a basic direction. I’d done the same for the first four, and things changed significantly as I merrily pantsed my way through it, but ultimately I’d say these have been a grand example of what I call plantsing, a hybrid approach to writing (I actually spoke about this and wrote an article about this for Writer’s Digest which will be coming out in 2016, watch the skies!).

There’s some proofin’ and other checking to do (never my strong suits — as I like to tell my editors, I’m more of a Big Idea sort of guy than a spellcheck kind of guy), but basically, the novel is done. In fact, here are the covers for Sections Five and Six:

The Bey city lord_cover

Since they’re complete and ready to go, I’ve decided to accelerate the schedule a bit, so here’s what I’ll be doing:

February 15, 2016: Both The Bey and The City Lord will go on pre-sale, together, at the same time, for anyone who wants to order them.

February 15, 2016: I’ll also be putting The Shattered Gears Omnibus up for pre-order as an eBook and a print book available through Amazon. This is all six sections collected and formatted into a single novel. The goal is to price both as close to $6 as possible, so the cost will be equal whether you bought each section as they came out or bought the omnibus.

March 15, 2016: Everything goes live, I am an instant millionaire, I stop responding to your emails and texts and begin building a Bond Villain Lair somewhere in the Pacific.

Hey! I bought all six digital shorts, do I have to spend another $6 to get the nifty omnibus? Not for the digital version. If you have all six sections, there will be a mechanism for getting a free eBook of the omnibus. Unfortunately, no, there won’t be any way for me to send you a free print version.

When will Sections 7-18 (books Two and Three) be out? I don’t know. My approach and enthusiasm for the second and third books depends a bit on how everything settles out sales-wise for this one, and my schedule. I do plan to write these at some point, but am also kind of hoping that I’m so spectacularly busy being paid to write other things in 2016 I have to postpone them, so, frankly, we’ll see. On the other hand, if in the final analysis the first one does really well I’d have to move these up in priority. I’ll let y’all know.

So, there you have it, The Plan Going Forward. To everyone who has downloaded, read, and reviewed, these digital shorts: Thanks! I hope you’ve enjoyed them as much as I enjoyed writing them. Cheers!

Avery Cates, BAM!, Filthy Lucre

The Art of Collaboration

Author: jsomers December 27, 2015 0 Comments

Urban Allies Coming 2016

I’m not a great collaborator. I distrust my own ideas so much I hate to verbalize them to anyone until I’ve turned them into something I consider defensible, and my instinctive misanthropy makes me distrust just about everyone. I always assume creative collaborations will end in disaster: Tears, recriminations, burned houses and stolen cars.

In fact, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually collaborated with someone more or less willingly. Let’s see … in 1993 I started to collaborate with three friends on what would eventually become The Inner Swine, but it wasn’t until it completely fell apart that I wound up publishing the first issue. In 1996, I collaborated very successfully with Jeof Vita on the Sliders comic “Blood and Splendor,” an event explored in this award-unwinning documentary:

Jeof and I tried to keep that partnership going, writing one script and discussing several other projects before life and our mutual hatred of each other split us apart.

More recently, Sean Ferrell and I have collaborated on a series of short videos known as Two Men Have Words, typically with one of us writing a script and providing basic direction, and the other tossing in ideas and improvisation. Although neither of us wants to take credit for anything specific.

That’s about it for me and collaboration. A few months ago, when I was invited to participate in a new anthology called Urban Allies that would involve authors of so-called Urban Fantasy novels writing collaborative stories featuring each of their characters somehow sharing a story, my first question was, how much will I get paid? And my second question was, do I have to actually speak with the other writer?

Turns out, I did. I was teamed up with Stephen Blackmoore, who would be bringing his character Eric Carter to the table. This was obviously a match made in heaven for many reasons, chief among them the fact that Eric Carter and my own Lem Vonnegan would get along famously when they weren’t plotting against each other or scheming the last free drink from each other. This, I thought, is going to be fun.

And it was! The story we wrote for Urban Allies, “Crossed Wires,” was a blast to write, because we kept handing it off to each other and being surprised by what we got back. You might think blending two complex universes (and slightly different magic systems) in 15,000 words would be difficult, but we made it look easy. Because we’re geniuses? OF COURSE because we’re geniuses!

Does this mean I’ll be collaborating more? Unlikely. I suspect Stephen and I worked together well as an exception to the rule, and my general feelings on collaboration haven’t changed — I have too many of my own ideas to work out to spend much time on someone else’s. But if Stephen Blackmoore ever wants to work on another Lem/Eric crossover, I’m in. Also, if he wants to buy me a lot of drinks because I’m so cool, that’d be fine too.

BAM!, Bullshit, Ustari Cycle