Latest Posts

Saturday is Guitar Day

Author: May 18, 2013 0 Comments

Epiphone Les Paul CustomAmateur guitarists of the world, unite! If we all keep posting our ridiculous homemade recordings, we can legitimately claim that “everyone is doing it” and no one will be able to mock us ever again! Or something.

Here, songs:

Song565
Song568
Song572
Song572b
Song576
Song579

If anyone wants to know how to play these amazing songs, too bad; I forget them almost as fast as I record them.

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.

gee-tar

Book Trailers Galore

Author: May 13, 2013 0 Comments

In my spare time I make book trailers. Here’s two new ones.

I Was a (M)Ad Man by Richard Gilbert: I’m a big fan of Mad Men, like everyone else in then universe. I also understand it’s fiction and doesn’t really depict the 1960s or even the Ad business accurately. This book by Richard Gilbert, who was actually working on Madison Avenue during that era, does:

Dominus by Christine Fonseca. This one was a lot of fun for different reasons. I like getting into the feel and spirit of a book and coming up with all the elements to give you a feel for it in one minute. It’s a wholly different challenge than actually writing the book. I think I nailed it on this one:

Go buy books.

Book Trailers, Someone Else's Writing

How to End Up at an Eddie Money Concert In 3,000 Easy Steps

Author: May 13, 2013 3 Comments

Eddie-money-post-concertSO, start at the beginning: The universe is created.

Millions of years later, the city of Rome is founded. Thousands of years after that, the guitar is invented. Then  electricity. Then Rock n’ Roll. Then Eddie Money himself is born, joins the NYPD, quits to pursue a recording career. Somewhere in there my wife is born. Somewhere in there I am born. I am vaguely aware of Eddie Money and the five or six songs that always got played on the radio when I was a kid. I grow up. I meet my wife. We get married. And one day she emails me and says, BTW I just bought us two tickets to see Eddie Money in New York in May.

And I say, holy shit, you’re kidding.

And my wife is not amused.

So there I am on a Saturday night with a glass of whiskey seated uncomfortably at a table with The Duchess and three other people. It’s a packed house, which is amazing. Up until a few weeks before I had assumed Eddie Money was either dead or working at a Wal Mart somewhere. I mean seriously: Eddie Money.

The show is, however, kind of fun. Eddie is 64 and looks it, and he dances and moves on the stage in a way that frequently alarms. You sit and watch him and every now and again you wonder if he’s going to just fall to the floor and start twitching, because his stage moves are the kind you imagine older folks perform when stroking out. But god bless him, because he puts on a decent show and there are actually more hits than I remember.

I’m not a big Eddie Money fan. I don’t actually own any of his songs, despite hearing so many of them at least a thousand times each over the course of my lifetime.

But it’s kind of impressive in general that he’s still making a living from his songs. And from a really embarrassing commercial currently on TV, too. But still: If I’m able to make money from my art several decades from now, that would be amazing. So good for Eddie Money. Not so good for me. Because now when someone asks, with raised eyebrow, Who in the world goes to an Eddie Money show? You can point at me and say “He does.”

Bullshit

Long Days Journey Into Published

Author: May 12, 2013 9 Comments

Let me back up.

In 1997, I wrote a novel. After a lengthy period of writing in the SF/F genres exclusively (though I didn’t think of them as genres back then but just as Shit I Wanted to Read and Therefore Write About) I entered into a period I think of as my Faux Literary Period, where I thought I should be writing about Velly Important Stuff and eschewing things like robots and magic. So I started writing about a bunch of alcoholic losers who rob an office where one of them works, thinking it would change their lives. At first it was titled Lie Down in Our Graves after a Dave Mathews song I’ve never heard, because my titles always suck.

I renamed the novel Lifers and in 1999 started sending it out, and sold it, unagented, to a tiny publisher out in California. For money! A microscopic advance and a standard royalty rate. I figured I’d made it and began purchasing rare whiskies in bulk.

I wish I’d had an agent, however, as it was a terrible contract I was saved from only because the publisher went out of business in 2004. I will never know how many copies of Lifers sold back then since I never received any sort of statement from them. Lifers got reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and The Philadelphia Inquirer but that didn’t amount to much.

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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Those of Us About to Die Salute You

Author: May 9, 2013 1 Comment

 

This essay originally appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 17, Issue 3/4.

Hoping the American Empire Lasts a Few More Decades: I Need the Book Sales

I’m just a regular Joe with a regular job
I’m your average white suburbanite slob
I like football and porno and books about war
I’ve got an average house with a nice hardwood floor

– Denis Leary, “Asshole”

[Begin transcript of unaired interview conducted in Manhattan]

SWAY CALLOWAY: So I’m sittin’ down with … wait, who the … Christie? Hey, Christie? Who is this guy? I thought we were doing the –

JEFF SOMERS: Take off your hat.

SC: What? Wait – thanks Christie, but – wait, what?

JS: I’ve never seen you without the little hat. Take it off. I want to see what you’re hiding under there.

SC: I never take off my hat, dude. Now hold tight while the PA gets the sheets for today. I have no idea who you are, or why I’m sitting here with you. I thought we were –

JS: Don’t worry, Jay-Z will be fine.

SC: Uh, what?

(more…)

Bullshit, The Inner Swine

Trickster Review

Author: May 9, 2013 2 Comments

I don’t go out of my way to read reviews of my work, because it’s alternately frustrating and horrifying. I’m generally embarrassed by good reviews and enraged by bad ones, and after all every book gets a bad review or fifty. People are still arguing over whether The Great Gatsby is a good book, after all.

Sometimes, though, Google Alerts or something just brings a review to my door and it’s occasionally a happy moment. Recently, Sarah E. Bewley who runs a book review blog posted a review of Trickster that warmed my tiny black heart. It reads, in part:

“The book is powerful, terrifying, involving and makes you, as the reader, want to race to the end to see what happens. It is well worth every moment spent reading.

I look forward to more Lem and Mags. The world needs them.”

Huzzah for me, I say. Why not buy a copy? Papa needs liquor monies.

BAM!, Trickster

The Hollow Men

Author: May 1, 2013 0 Comments

I wrote this a loooong time ago when I was really, really young. AND IT SHOWS. Still, I have some affection for this piece.

The Hollow Men

The Syndicate

Mind-eaters and soul-stealers, drug-dealers and drop-outs, minor miracles for small-time sinners, endless cycles and mean gray walls: It squatted gray and lifeless against the moon-lit horizon, behind a chain link fence designed to contain giants, to repel behemoths, soaring up beyond reason. It squatted three stories high, speckled in graffiti, grinning lopsidedly with teeth made up of windows which didn’t open. We stared at it long enough, surprised, I guess, by how strange it looked at night. I sucked on a cigarette, waiting for someone to move, feeling the wind stick its fingers into me, testing the surface tension.

The fence was easy. There had been talk, back when I’d been a freshman, of putting wire up on top of the fence. But it had never materialized, and the fence remained toothless. It was easy. Get a good running start, jump, grab hold, get set. pull up, hand over hand. Flip your legs over, brace yourself, and drop down. Less than a minute, and we stood panting in the courtyard.

There were four of us. Me. Gail, in black jeans, boots, and leather jacket. Henry, in front as always, blue eyes and little else. Kevin hulking in the rear. Our breath steamed in front of us nervously. We were surrounded by broken rules, swimming in the thick grease of guilt, and all we could do was smile at each other. It lay shattered at our feet and we grinned at our reflections in the shards and reveled that we had the power to cause it. Then Henry took off and we followed.

The side boiler-room door out back was still propped just so slightly open. Bill the mumbling old man who cleaned the place on good days hadn’t bothered to check it, as usual. Old bill could be counted on for two things: to be asleep by two every day, and to steal dirty magazines from our lockers. With that he was clockwork.

We slipped in and shut it behind us, making our way out of the works and into the lockers, dark and damp, foreign all of a sudden. We didn’t take our time. Working on fear and determination, we cut through the halls by memory and broke into the printing office with Henry’s screwdriver -push, pull, watch for falling wood chips.

I grabbed the paper, three packs of five hundred, from the side closet. Gail prepped the copier and set it up. The whine of its warm-up was ear-shattering. Kevin searched for the copy codes, popping open desk drawers with hard snaps of his own screwdriver, finally digging them up. Henry just watched, smoothing out the original.

Gail stepped back, Kev punched in the pass code, programmed fifteen hundred, and I loaded up the paper trays. We turned to Henry, and he was just grinning, watching us, looking crazy, his flashlight pointed up at his face and all the wrong shadows around his eyes. Then he slapped the page down and pressed start. The room filled with snapshot lightning, and we waited, getting nervous. nothing happened. Minor miracles for small-time sinners.

Done, we split up. We papered the place. We had to wade through papers to get out. Outside the gate, we checked time. Twenty minutes, exactly. henry joked that it took him longer to take a shit. It was his way of complimenting us. Then we each went home and forgot we’d seen each other.

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Fiction, Free Short Stories

The Brain Cloud Cometh

Author: April 24, 2013 5 Comments

This initially appeared in my zine The Inner Swine 16(1/2).

The Brain Cloud Cometh

I’m at “That Age”

by Jeff Somers

"That" Age

“That” Age

PIGS, I don’t go to doctors much. Part of this is my Viking heritage (buried deeply in my genetic code, yes, but I am convinced it’s there), which makes me naturally hardy. Part of this is the usual charming male hubris that informs me that I can walk anything off. Lose a limb? Walk it off, hands on your hips, taking deep breaths. Coughed up a lung? Take the bench for an inning, you’ll be fine. Part of it, of course, is my general incompetence and bad memory: I am usually shocked to discover when my last doctor’s appointment was.

Also: How awkward. I mean, I’m terrible at social interaction as it is. Make me naked under a thin hospital gown while another man cops a feel, and my small talk just dries the hell up, trust me.

My infrequent visits to the various doctors we need to stay alive from year to year used to be more or less perfunctory: My old General Practitioner, whom I’d gone to from the age of five until I was about 25, used to tell me to keep the weight off and to never smoke cigarettes, and that was usually the entire content of our conferences. Even past that I usually coasted through examinations: I was either there for a specific reason, burrowing towards a prescription and getting on with my life, or I was there for some sort of routine physical, generally passing with flying colors. Recently, though, while my visits are still not exactly complex or problematic, there’s a new wrinkle cropping up: My advancing age.

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Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine

An Essay and Two Reviews

Author: April 18, 2013 0 Comments

Over at the glittering blog Geeks Versus Nerds, I have an awesome guest post:

“So, yeah, I’d love to have my life recorded for me. Although what would happen then is that I would always intend to go back and cull out the boring stuff – the bathroom breaks, the time spent doing nothing – and hone it down to a grand documentary called Jeff Fucking Somers and then I’d never get around to it.”

It may be the greatest thing you ever read. Or not. I don’t know, frankly.

ALSO! In what might appear to be some sort of payment for my awesome guest post but which certainly was not, Geeks Versus Nerds also reviewed Trickster:

“I love urban fantasy, I blame The Dresden Files for that, and I love the wonder that could be hiding in the shadows of the streets we walk every day.  But everything always seems to stay in the shadows.  There is rarely any consequences when the Vampire declare war or when the Fae revolt.  UF also seems to have, despite its dark atmosphere, a rosy feel to it.  Everything will always work out.  Jeff Somers seems to ignore both of that.  When shit start to explode it takes millions of ‘normals’ with them.  Jeff’s UF world is dark and gritty.  It’s full of backstabbing and horrifying people and that’s before the cutting starts.”

HUZZAH.

AND ALSO! The Electric Church, book #1 in the Avery Cates series, was reviewed by The Taichung Bookworm:

“If the set-up sounds equally insane and implausible then you’re absolutely correct and let me assure you – that’s part of the fun. The Electric Church is an oil-burning page-turner playing like a pulp novel yet with a serious literary bent. Jeff Somers obviously spent some large portion of his life wolfing down Hammett, Chandler and their lesser-known ilk and portrays bustling, seedy dives and wandering, down-on-their-luck loners with a natural ease. Cates is such a grim, sardonic anti-hero that he often seems in danger of falling into caricature before saving himself with his stark insights into the rigged nature of the game he’s forced to play.The team of broken, conniving rejects he rounds up as his crack team and the decaying world they inhabit all contribute to the atmosphere of hopelessness which all must overcome.”

Not bad for a book that came out in 2007. And now: Celebratory drinks for everyone! Note: Must supply your own celebratory drinks.

Avery Cates, BAM!, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Fiction, Trickster