I’ve been invited to be a presenter at the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference (www.writersdigestconference.com). I was told that, remarkably, if I didn’t live in the NYC area they would have paid for my travel and hotel but since I do they will pay for nothing. Which kind of encapsulates my publishing career to date, actually.
I will be making the following presentation:
Title: Take Off Your Pants and Write! The Benefits and Pitfalls of Pantsing vs. Plotting a Novel
1. Why in god’s name does anyone think you should be impressing impressionable young writers?
Because I’ve published eight novels with number nine on the way and over thirty short stories. Also: I’m a damn fine good looking man and the world benefits when I appear in public.
2. What kind of wisdom will you be imparting?
As the title hints, it will all be pants-related. Also, a little bit about plotting your novels. But mainly pants stuff.
3. Will you bring a bottle of Scotch and pour everyone in the room a drink as you famously did at your Bouchercon presentation in 2010?
No, I learned my lesson from that debacle. A drunk audience is not better than a sober one. They are worse. So much worse.
SO! There you have it. I will be imparting my noveling wisdom to those in need. Or at least those who have not yet found better, smarter, younger mentors.
Friends, all I do is sit around and complain. It’s become my “thing.” We all need a thing: Some folks go around donating blood and pulling old ladies and puppies from burning buildings. I have chosen to complain, and I’m good at it, although as I also never leave the house I’m running low on things to complain about. I have to get creative.
So, having little else to do with my time, I checked out episodes 1-3 of FX’s new series Fargo, based on Fargo, the Coen Brothers film. Now, I have no problem with repurposing the universe, setting, and generally sensibility of that film into a TV series — I think we’re all beyond such weak tea considerations, aren’t we? I mean, who gives a shit where the inspiration for something came from? Keep re-telling those stories, whether it’s Batman or Fargo. As long as the retellings are interesting, I don’t care.
What I do care about is that the retellings are interesting and well done. On the one hand, Fargo tics all those “golden age of TV” boxes: Good production values, top talent in all the major roles in front of or behind the camera, and a slow, thoughtful approach to the story that allows it to unfold slowly in what will hopefully be a twisty little plot filled with surprises and horrifying commentary on human nature.
One thing Fargo the TV series does not have, as far as I can tell, is any concept of depth of character.
The Inner Swine Guide to Ignorance
Episode Five: The Walk of Shame
Friends, like many of you, I once aspired to be a rock star.
I am curiously and inexplicably proud of this graphic.
This was before I realized how uncommonly dorky I am, of course. Plus the complete lack of musical talent—I mean, Mozart was composing when he was what, six years old? And The Beatles wrote complex, timeless pop songs before they even knew a single thing about formal music training. Me, I could sometimes hum a song well enough for it to be recognized [1]. Sometimes. Most times when I hummed, I wound up receiving the Heimlich maneuver and mouth-to-mouth from a concerned stranger.
Of course, that’s what you get when you hum tunelessly in public. Yet another lesson Ignorance has gifted me with.
Even in my dotage, friends, into which I am very, very deeply snuggled, wrapped in the warm comfort of forget fulness, epic naps, and a cheerful certainty that I have assets and income, as opposed to the icy certainty that I had debt and no clean underwear that was my constant companion in youth, even in my dotage I sometimes find myself out drinking like the old days.
I am not one who usually feels the need to sing songs about my youth. I like being this age and see nothing changing about that up until I have my first heart attack some time next week. Until then, I like this mix of experience and general physical stability and wouldn’t want to be 25 again for anything. Except, sometimes, I do miss going out drinking just about every day. No, seriously. Wasn’t that great? Monday, Wednesday, Sunday – whatever, someone was always calling around or sending an email out asking if anyone wanted to have drinks. It was a grand, wonderful time to be alive. And yes, also a dramatic and often sickly time, but do not ruin this, or I will end you.
Anyways, I do sometimes still get out to consume bottles of distilled beverages and then sing Irish folk songs like The Leaving of Liverpool remembered from when my dear old Dad used to get drunk and sing Irish folk songs, and when I do this with a crowd larger than, say, three, the same clusterfuck always happens, because crowds larger than three are programmed to act like they have never been in a bar before in their entire lives.
Recently watched The World’s End starring Simon Pegg and written by Pegg and frequent collaborator Edgar Wright. Didn’t love it, which was surprising because of the good reviews and the fact that I really enjoyed Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz and even liked Scott Pilgrim well enough despite not being familiar with the comic and it being sort of ridiculous. I thought I was going to fall in love with TWE and ask it to marry me.
Instead, I enjoyed the first part and got bored the moment the skiffy element was introduced. What started off as an interesting, funny, and surprisingly moving tale of grown men dealing with childhood disappointment and the mundanity of adulthood just sort of went all cockeyed, for me. Your mileage may vary, of course, and if you loved it I have no argument to make.
It did make me think about some of my own early writing. This isn’t really a review of the film or even a discussion about it, it’s about my own writing tendencies. Which included a period where I would deal with emotional and character development issues by copping out and introducing a Deus Ex Skiffy.
DEUS EX SKIFFY (I Just Made That Up and Like It more than It Deserves)
What that means is, I used Sci Fi and Fantasy elements as a way of writing about things I was uncomfortable with, by not really writing about them at all. It went like this: I’d start a story about, say, a doomed love affair. After establishing the characters I’d get bored with/be afraid of where the story was heading, and would instead suddenly introduce a killer disease or alien invasion and pretend like this was what I’d intended to write about the whole time.
Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, it doesn’t. Either way, the Deus Ex Skiffy is a copout.
The World’s End sort of has this feel to me. What starts off as a melancholy story about a man who is just starting to realize that he peaked at age 18 suddenly turns into a rather confused, muddled story of alien invasion that, frankly, makes very, very little sense. The film’s still fun, and worth watching, but as a standalone effort it’s kind a mess. And I think it may have been a similar writing exercise as my own failed attempts at solving knotty character problems by introducing killer robots: They just got bored with the story they were writing and worried it was a little slow and dull, and so they changed lanes and ended a totally different story.
I mean, there’s pretty much zero foreshadowing in the story. This may have been intentional to keep the surprise factor, but if so it was a miscalculation, because it only adds to the sense of separation between two entirely different stories. Believe me, I know; I’ve done it.
It’s entirely possible that no one in the universe wants to hear my little compositions, but who cares. If I listened to that little voice of doubt when it concerns my own creative genius, we’d all be dead now, because it’s generally the same little voice concerned with my moral performance. Hear these songs or the world ends, is basically our only choices here.
The usual disclaimer: 1. I admit these are not great music; 2. I claim copyright anyway, so there; 3. No, I cannot do anything about the general quality of the mix, as I am incompetent.
(This originally appeared in Brutarian Quarterly #50; for a while I wrote a column there about ignorance in general and my ignorance in specific. It was a lot of fun and I figure I’ll post them here now and again.)
I USED to think I was the only jackass in the world. A lone jackass, doomed to a solitary life of jackassery, wandering this world in a haze of ignorance and unintentional destruction—cities burned to the ground, populations wiped out by disease, entire societies ruined and desecrated by some consequence of my ignorant jackassery. This was not an entirely unpleasant notion; after all, is it better to be forgotten and swept into history’s dustbin, or to be remembered as The Destroyer of Worlds?[1] If that’s your only choice, bubba, I say go for Destroyer of Worlds. The title sounds pretty cool, and thousands of years after your death it’s almost guaranteed that cults will pop up to worship your memory. No one worships Jeff Somers, Jackass, but Somers, Destroyer of Worlds will get a lot of tithing, I think.
Ah, but I’m older now, and I realize that I am not, indeed, the only jackass in the world. In fact, I’ve come to realize that just about everyone has at least a moment or two of jackassery in their lives. You have the people who lead perfectly normal, uneventful existences until one day they decide to deep-fry their Thanksgiving turkey, or to investigate that gas smell in the crawlspace with an open flame for illumination. All of us have a Secret Jackass[2] inside us, waiting to come out. We all just put a lot of energy into hiding it from each other, creating a sort of multi-level marketing environment of jackassery—we’re each passing on jackassery, deepening like a coastal shelf, in a desperate bid to hide it. My goodness, how often can I use the word jackassery in one essay?[3] Let’s find out. Jackassery.
The secret ingredient in most jackassery, of course, is our old friend Ignorance.[4] If you’re aware that you should turn the power off in your home before attempting to rewire a broken light fixture, you are less likely to be lit up like a sparkler later in the day.[5] Thus, jackassery would seem to be an easy thing to cure; simply embrace education, eliminate ignorance, and we are living in an all-singing, tap-dancing jackass-free world. The problem, however, is that ignorance is like mold: You scrub at it and it seems to go away, but in reality it’s growing under the drywall and infiltrating every damn place. This is because most people are afraid to admit ignorance, and will pretty much pretend to know things they don’t in order to project a learned and wise demeanor.[6]
We’re all ignorant of something, after all. Even if you know pretty much everything I bet I could think of some subject you know little about—even some everyday, practical things, things you probably haven’t even thought of. And I bet if I were to discover your secret ignorance, rather than admit it, you’d go to great lengths to cover it up and obfuscate it, to pretend you know something you don’t. That’s how ignorance maintains itself. My god, people, we live in an age where men have walked on the moon, where we’ve split the atom and mapped the human genome! And yet, we also live in an age where most people have no idea how the electoral college works and where grown men have only the vaguest idea how the technology that serves us works. I’m not talking about the complex physics of, say, electricity, here; I’m talking about knowing how something like jumper cables work. I’ve personally observed people who have the same level of knowledge regarding jumper cables they have regarding Tiny Poisonous Frogs of the Brazilian Rain Forest. The difference being your chances of encountering a Tiny Poisonous Brazilian Rain Forest Frog versus your chances of needing to use jumper cables.[7]
Still, you’ll never know what people know or don’t know. Witness the various hoaxes concerning Dihydrogen monoxide[8]—otherwise known as water (H2O). People happily signed petitions to ban this terrible substance once they’d been told all the terrible things it does (for example, inhalation, even in small quantities, may cause death)[9] even though none of them, clearly, knew what the hell it was. They were handed a petition and challenged to either feign knowledge or admit ignorance, and they chose to feign knowledge. Because Ignorance is the most powerful force in the universe, and we’re all powerless against it. You might as well fortify your house, lay in stores of Spam and Twinkies,[10] buy some guns, and prepare, because when the world ends it won’t be a huge red sun in the sky or a plague or a fundamental breakdown in our environment, it will be hordes of ignorant people convinced you are an evil spirit who must be destroyed, or that you possess an army of Tiny Poisonous Brazilian Frogs that threaten the universe. It will be an army of jackasses transformed into Destroyers of Worlds through sheer ignorance.
This does, I think, take some of the shame out of being ignorant, or at least it should. Next time you’re puzzling over some aspect of modern life that seems like something everyone but you understands—fashion, perhaps—take a step back and realize that it’s more than probably no one understands it, and we’re all just pretending to. It seems pretty likely that fortunes have been made off of such assumptions, but fortunes, sadly, are one of the many, many things I remain ignorant about.
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[1] Remembered by who—since the world had been destroyed in this scenario—is a question for someone smarter than I.
[2] In my case, not so secret.
[3] The answer: Nine times.
[4] Leavened, most probably, by copious amounts of sweet, sweet alcohol.
[5] Admittedly, sometimes the universe conspires against you even when you admit you are powerless over ignorance: Witness the mysterious power line in my mother’s house that remains hot even when you turn off the master. I suspect it would remain hot even if we disconnected the house physically from the grid, and that it will kill someone someday. Hopefully long after we’ve sold the house.
[6] In my daily life, this is also known as Working My Day Job.
[7]Plus, you can eat the tiny frogs, as long as you build up a tolerance first by licking one every day for about six months. Or maybe that was something I saw in a movie once, who knows? The world is a mysterious place.
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax (a precarious place to cure ignorance, but the best my feeble researching powers can manage)
[9] Otherwise known as drowning.
[10] Contrary to popular belief, the shelf life of a Twinkie is actually only two months. Also, in the baking industry any small cake is referred to as a ‘Twinkie’. Also, I haven’t had a Twinkie in thirteen years.
Note: A version of this essay appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 4, Issue 2, circa 1998. I removed some meandering from the original essay but left in my juvenile abuse of dashes. You’re welcome. Also, 1998 was a hella long time ago and the Coen Brothers have released a lot of films since then, none of which factor into this essay.
Dislike and Disdain in the Films of the Coen Brothers
The Coen brothers, writers/directors/producers of the films Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski, are, without any doubt, two of the biggest Swines to ever gain national distribution of their films. Put simply, The Coen’s absolute dislike and disdain for their fellow human beings is almost a palpable story element in every one of their films. They hate us. They make no bones about hating us. And we love them for it.
Up the Crazy by Jeff Somers – a Lifers/Chum crossover.
I released this a few months ago on Smashwords – it’s a tie-in to my novel Chum and my novel Lifers, which share a universe and some characters. Figured: Why not post it here as well?
Her name was Florence, and she was trying to kill me.
###
Trim had a brother. This was disturbing news on so many levels I didn’t know how to process it, I kept forgetting it like it was a fnord and then picking it up again a few hours later and marveling over it the way you’ll find some huge insect in your basement, something primordial and brutish, a remnant of an earlier stage of evolution when insects could pick up small mammals and carry them away and you’ll spend a few moments just in awe of its awfulness before crushing it under a rock. Every time I remembered Trim had a brother I went through the same cycle: Amazement, horror, and then putting it out of my mind as quickly as possible.
Fresh from the Christine Debacle, which had taken on Capital Letters and become an epochal moment in my life, apparently, Trim set me up. Through his mysterious brother, he had an acquaintance named Jessica whom he described as “all legs and marry me.” Jessica was not for me, though. Jessica in turn had a friend named Nancy, who was also not for me, but Nancy had a friend named Florence, and Florence was, Trim insisted, for me.
Trim, naturally, had a complete speech about Florence, the kind of speech Trim gave from time to time that convinced you he had dossiers on all of us with pre-canned speeches prepared for all occasions. The speeches were also curiously filled with strange stresses and obscure words and this also led me to believe they were basically toneless, rhythmless, rhymeless poems, the kind that Trim specialized in.
Florence, Trim told me, was too much woman for most men. She was tall. She was busty. She was, he insisted, a giantess – everything in proportion, but simply too much of it. It was overwhelming for most men, he said. Add to that red hair and a fuck yeah Florence! kind of attitude which gave her incredible confidence despite being a girl Trim was certain had been mercilessly mocked in her school days for being three or four times normal size, and you had a girl who intimidated all the men in her life and was therefore inexplicably single.
Trim then went on to tell me that I was no match for her, and the whole exercise was doomed, but she was the only girl he knew that was currently single and might find my sense of humor funny. And so, we were set up. I tried to protest that the dead-eyed sex with Christine and her stuffed animals had destroyed my libido and all I wanted to do was somehow get our ridiculous, complex, doomed caper off the ground, make some money, and become a monkish sort who lived off of like fifty dollars a year for the rest of my life. I’d be famous for it. People would come to hear my wisdom and bring me food I couldn’t otherwise afford, like bread. I was in no way ready to engage another female in sexual congress, and possibly wouldn’t ever again be ready, with Christine’s motionless body still fresh in my mind.
Trim, being a bastard, smirked and said “Even Chick?”
I didn’t say anything to that, but it occurred to me that the chances of Chick ever realizing I had a working penis were essentially zero, so the monk life it would be.
(This originally appeared in Brutarian Quarterly #49; for a while I wrote a column there about ignorance in general and my ignorance in specific. It was a lot of fun and I figure I’ll post them here now and again.)
Episode Three: META-IGNORANCE
The other day I was sitting in Hudson Bar and Books in New York City drinking single malt Scotch and reading, when I had an attack of Meta-Ignorance.
Hudson Bar and Books is one of the world’s greatest bars for whisky. It isn’t a boisterous place where you can order pints of beer and watch baseball games—I have plenty of other places for that—but rather a jazzy, quiet place with a chatty bartender, the most fantastic cheese plate I’ve ever had, and an seemingly endless supply of good booze. It’s the only place so far I’ve ordered Glenmorangie Madeira Wood and not been laughed at, beaten up, or derisively offered a Dewars. Of course, my visits to Hudson Bar and Books are not without angst-inspiring moments; there is a sign posted in the front window that reads, ominously, PROPER ATTIRE REQUIRED, and there has not been one time yet that I haven’t paused with one hand on the doorknob, staring blankly at this sign, wondering if I was properly attired. So far I have established that proper attire requires pants of some sort, but beyond that it all remains mysterious.
At any rate, I was sitting there recently pretending to read a big, thick book and scheming to hit the bartender over the head, exchange clothes with him, and do his job for the rest of the afternoon—meaning I would lean rakishly behind the bar, drinking directly from a bottle of Scotch, and implore anyone who wandered in to tell me their troubles, in-between humming tunelessly and checking my facial expression for appropriate levels of rakish charm in the mirror—and waiting for my lovely wife, The Duchess[1]. When she arrived, she asked me what I was drinking.
ME: Scotch. TD: Is that whisky? ME: Yes. TD: Is bourbon whisky? ME: Yes. TD: What’s the difference? ME: . . .look! An elephant!
META-IGNORANCE
The problem is not so much that I am ignorant, but that I am ignorant even of what I am ignorant of. I simply don’t even know what I don’t know. The above exchange is a classic example: While I know what whisky is, and even have a vague idea of how to produce it, I can’t tell you much about why some is bourbon and some is not. Well, I mean, I can now, because I did some research. You’d think that over the years I’ve ingested enough of both kinds of booze that my underbrain could genetically analyze each and I’d sort of instinctively know the answer, but as with most situations where you’d think my underbrain would provide some sort of guidance, all I get is static and the occasional urge to take a nice long, hot bath. This leaves me defenseless against attacks of Meta-Ignorance.
Sometimes Meta-Ignorance rears its terrible horned head in situations where I really have no excuse—situations where I suddenly realize I am ignorant about things you might consider knowledge essential to my very survival. I’m not talking about the time The Duchess and I ended up hiking in the White Mountains of Vermont and were almost eaten by bears because I realized I was ignorant of things like which way is north and when lost in the woods what the hell do you do?
No thanks to you—or The Duchess—I now know the answer to the latter question is do not let your wife abandon you to be eaten by bears no matter how hard she tries[2].
But I digress—I was discussing moments of Meta-Ignorance involving basic knowledge you’d think everyone who manages to not be killed during their everyday lives must know, like what in hell a ground wire is. The Duchess and I recently bought our first house, and being a) concerned for my masculine image and b) one of the cheapest bastards you’ll ever meet, I naturally insist on doing all sorts of work around the house by myself, including wiring up light fixtures. Now, wiring up a light fixture does not require an advanced degree or even above-average intelligence, but I still managed to put my life and property at risk because when I opened the box and started the installation process, I had no idea what the extra exposed wire was for. Meta-Ignorance had reared its head: I didn’t even know what I didn’t know about electrical systems. How I didn’t electrocute myself and burn down the house remains a mystery, because I did some creative things with that wire before discovering the truth[3].
On a less immediately-threatening note, there is my Meta-Ignorance about my sad physical decline. Sure, I know that every year after you’re approximately 25 is just a steady boogie-board ride down the mountain to my eventual death, but the specifics of my bodily functions remain elusive and the only time I learn anything about them is when they go haywire. This kind of Meta-Ignorance can easily kill you, of course:
ME: Hmmmn, I have a painful welt on my ankle. TD: Want to go to the emergency room?[4] ME: Nah, it doesn’t look too bad.
[TIME PASSES]
THE CONSEQUENCES OF META-IGNORANCE
The real problem with Meta-Ignorance is that it’s impossible to combat, because you don’t know what you’re ignorant of. Ignorance can be cured—all it takes is some research and perhaps a bit of experimentation, possibly a willingness to take risks[5], which I can usually attain by drinking a few alcoholic beverages in a short amount of time. But if you don’t even know what you don’t know, you’re screwed. Think about it: You might be doing something right now that is going to speed you on to your death, and you don’t even know it. Like reading this article. Decades from now stern actors may be appearing in PSAs warning against reading anything written by Jeff Somers, as his words are now proved to cause insanity and blindness and eventual death.
There’s also the hovering specter of humiliation due to unsupposed ignorance. Above and beyond physical harm and death, all men fear public humiliation, which is why we are all so willing to feign knowledge and fake our way through things rather than admit we don’t know something. Sometimes I am convinced that all men are as ignorant as I am, and we’re all just nodding wisely and repeating phrases we don’t understand in order to appear wise. Take, for example, escrow. What in hell is escrow? No one knows. But if you bring it up in the company of men, all of them will nod wisely and say something like “Ah, yes, escrow: Can’t do without the ole’ escrow account.” Much in the same way I once looked my mechanic in the eye and said, “Ah, yes, the solenoid. Can’t get far without one of those!”[6]. But I know I’m ignorant about cars and engines and, well, physics. So whenever the conversation drifts to that subject, I start being cagey with my words—a lot of thoughtful nodding, as if I’m considering my options, replaces most verbal communications in these sorts of situations—and start building mental ditchworks to retreat behind if I get caught out. But what about subjects I think I’m fluent in? For example, my own family: I’ve started to realize I know next to nothing about my family, and anything I think I know that dates from before, oh, about when I was twelve years old is almost certainly bullshit I made up once long ago and have repeated to myself so often it seems true. Only to be revealed as bullshit the moment I relate it, authoritatively, to someone[7].
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Of course, one of the things I may very well be Meta-Ignorant of is how obvious it is to everyone but me that I am ignorant. I like to imagine that with my eyeglasses, my hipster-gone-to-alcoholic-seed fashion sense, and constant clutching of tomes to my concave chest I appear somewhat erudite to people who don’t know me very well, but the truth is strangers on the street are probably moved to pity at the sight of me, and experience the sudden urge to take me by the arm and guide me across the street. If you see me wandering the street pretending to be non-ignorant, however, I’d advise you to resist that urge; if it’s before noon I am hungover and prone to bouts of sudden-onset retching, and if it’s after noon I am inebriated and prone to violence.
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[1] My wife long ago ordered me to never use her name in my writing, so she is now known only as The Duchess. If you know what’s good for you, you will refer to only as The Duchess as well, even if you meet her in person.
[2] See The Inner Swine, Volume 10 Issue 1, “Don’t Be Eaten by Bears: Your Humble Editor has an Adventure”
[3] In fact, for all I know, I did electrocute myself and everything since then, including this essay, has been a delusion like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Although that would mean you exist only in the dying twitches of my brain activity, your poor soul.
[4] This is an imagined conversation, of course. in reality my wife’s response would be: Suck it up, silky-boy, and go fetch me some cookies. And my response to her would be: Yes’m. And then my futile stab at rebellion would be drinking half a bottle of whisky in the kitchen while fetching her cookies and passing out with my head in the dishwasher. Don’t ask how my head gets in the dishwasher. You don’t want to know.
[5] For example, tasting a sample of what’s in the mysterious Tupperware discovered in the rear of your fridge, that may or may not have been left there by the previous tenants.
[6] His look of frank pity remains clear in my nightmares.
[7] Like the fact that I thought my Mother was Lutheran, and told my wife so many times, only to have my outraged Mother correct me at a birthday gathering. The Duchess will not let me forget it.
So, this has happened:
