Bullshit

Literary Upstart Recap

Author: May 18, 2010

UPDATE: They posted a short slideshow of pics from last night. I am here. That’s me dressed in my Super Cool Author costume, reading my story Rust on the Tongue.

Short version: I did not win. Medium version: I had a great time, got a little drunk, got to see my agent and her lovely, not-yet-ground-down-by-lit-life assistant, and did not win.

Long version: The Duchess and I arrived at The Slipper Room at about 6:50pm, and there was already a long line of people waiting to get in, which is always a good sign when anything resembling a literary reading is going on. But I’ve done readings in bars before, and I know how it goes: The majority of the people are a) lured in by the drinks specials or b) there as friends of some other writer. You end up shouting over the belligerent drunks until, being slightly and belligerently drunk yourself, you crowd-surf, throwing punches and curses until you find yourself staring up at the sky lying in a puddle of your own urine and blood out back by the dumpster.

Luckily, I had The Duchess with me, which meant my own physical danger was lessened. She’s a formidable woman.

We opted to have a slice of pizza beforehand, mainly because I’d been talking about whiskey the whole walk over and The Duchess was getting nervous about managing me later, and wanted food in my stomach. While we were eating, one of our neighbors from Hoboken walked in. I stared at him and he stared at me; neighbors so rarely show up in your real life it’s strange when you run into them. It was a bit awkward. Made worse when we found out one of his friends was reading as well, and he was there to support him. We made conversation for a bit and then he backed out of the restaurant and made for the bar. Now whenever I see him around the block we will have to made awkward conversation about running into each other at Literary Upstart. I may have to move away.

Inside the bar, there was a roiling crowd already. $1 beers will stir up some passion. I introduced myself to the MC and he explained the basic process: Five of us would read our stories, and we’d remain on stage while the other read. Then there would be an intermission, then trivia, then we would all assemble on stage again to have our stories critiqued by the judges and then a winner would be announced. This sounded horrible. Critiqued on stage while I had to stand there, grinning? I am not a brave man. I started ordering whiskies. Normally, I like to go in the middle of a pack of readings. Gives me time to get drunk, to judge to mood of the room, to chant internally superstar in an effort to convince myself that I am, indeed, a superstar. I had barely finished three double Jamesons, neat, when I was announced as the first reader of the evening. Staggering up to the microphone, I had one of those moments where you feel like you’ve swallowed something awful and large: I was sweating, out of breath, nervous. I still read pretty, well, I think. At any rate, I did not pass out, vomit, or have my pants fall down with some ridiculous cartoon whistle in the background, and these are all good things.

The other readers did well, too, although only one story really grabbed me and made me jealous.  One of the authors was visibly shaking as they read, and I thanked Jamesons for sparing me that.

During the intermission, I had a few more drinks and told the other authors they were geniuses. They told me I was a genius too. Except one, who just nodded, accepting the compliment as their due. I started to get angry, then wished I had that kind of crazy confidence, and got depressed. The Duchess sent me to the bathrooms so as not to cry in front of all the hipsters.

The bathrooms in The Slipper Room are amazing. As long as your definition of amazing includes mold, damp, narrow bathrooms you cannot turn around in with locks on the doors which are theoretical at best. The toilet seats were always down, forcing me to touch what appeared to be the filthiest surface in the universe. If I die of some alien flesh-eating bacteria tomorrow, you will know why, and avenge me. While I was using one bathroom, a girl walked in on a guy using the one next to me, and there was such a flurry of screaming and activity I wondered what in the world he’d been doing in there. Another bathroom had no sink, and various people had scrawled sink-related graffitti, like dude, where is the sink? and seriously, what happened to the sink? The Duchess, upon hearing this, wondered who brought Sharpies into the bathroom with them.

The trivia portion of the evening was drowned out by drunken conversation. This is what happens in bars. When the friends of the event organizers try to shout down the people who just came out for a few drinks and some conversation, I wonder if they’ve ever been in a bar before, and if shouting down loud drunken people has ever, in the history of booze, worked. I suspect the answer is no, and it did not work that night either.

Back on stage, I had to stand and listen to the judges’ critique of my story. They were gentle and humorous. At one point the mood of the story was compared to Kafka, and my agent, bless her, suddenly howled in laughter as if this was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. I pretended to be outraged, but my agent is wise to my tricks and simply ridiculed me more, which is really how I need to be handled.

I didn’t win.

As we got ready to leave, people came up to me to tell me they really liked my story. While waiting in line for the bathroom again downstairs a guy slapped me on the shoulder and told me I’d been great, and asked if I knew I was going to be critiqued like that. He seemed like someone who’d come to get drunk on a Monday night and accidentally attended a literary reading, but had enjoyed himself. Strangely enough, so had I.

Bullshit, More Shit I Gotta Do

Watching Technology Pass You By

Author: April 16, 2010

Y’know, since 1986 I’ve submitted 1167 short stories. Believe it: One thousand, one hundred, sixty-seven short stories. I was just preparing five more to go out today and discovered that four of the five markets I’m submitting to require paper submissions. Which means I have to print out a copy of the story, print out a cover letter, get a manila envelope for the whole enchilada and a regular #10 with stamp for the SASE. The waste of paper and time is immense.

John Scalzi, god bless ‘im, has stated categorically on his site that he doesn’t mess with paper submissions any more, and in spirit I agree: This is frickin’ 2010. The excuses and explanations as to why a magazine doesn’t accept email subs are ludicrous, and fall into one basic category when you parse them closely enough: The editors of these magazines simply do not like email submissions. They may gas on and on about printing costs (unnecessary) how difficult it is to read on screen (2000 words? Really, Mr. Magoo?) and, unbelievably, how difficult it is to share an electronic sub with other editors. Yes, you read that right: An electronic file is more difficult to pass on to readers than a pile of paper.

So, as I’m getting paper cuts and searching for stamps, I’m grousing and thinking how I would have been done with my subs an hour ago if I could have simply typed up a cover email, attached a file, and clicked send. Grouse, grouse, grouse. Mmmmn, Famous Grouse is damn fine whiskey . . .  But I’m still doing it, because I still dream of selling short stories. There’s a glamour to it as far as I’m concerned. Certainly no money, but whenever I sell a short story I feel like F. Scott Fitzgerald for a moment. Plus, I’ve got a lot of stories. I write them constantly, for my own satisfaction, and once they’re done some of them stay with me and I decide to try and do something with them. No use in leaving them in notebooks for the Alien Archaeologists of the future to discover and puzzle over.

I’m not exactly George Jetson with the technology, either. Not only do I not have a smartphone of any kind, I don’t even own a cell phone for personal use.  A lot of new thingies leave me cold and I’m fairly slow to get on the various bandwagons that our glorious computer companies trot out every year – but let’s be serious. Email was invented seven hundred years ago. If you’re worried about attachments, let us paste plain text in. For god’s sake, it is the twenty-first century. We may not have transporters and replicators, but by god we have electronic mail.

Enough ranting. I’m still mailing the subs when I have to. I’m just amazed. A few years ago I managed 107 submissions in one year, and that was when I was still typing everything on a manual typewriter and making photocopies to send everywhere, believe it or not. The thought of doing that many paper subs today makes me feel sleepy and irritated, so every time I find a new story market that takes email subs, I rejoice. As should you.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, More Shit I Gotta Do, Writing

Like Immortality: I Suck at Correspondence

Author: March 31, 2010

“A Letter always seemed to me like Immortality, for is it not the Mind alone, without corporeal friend?” — Emily Dickinson
The aging process is an adventure! Who knows where it will lead you...

The aging process is an adventure! Who knows where it will lead you...

The aging process takes us in unexpected directions, doesn’t it? It’s always disturbing. You’d like to think you’re an eternal creature, a permanent existence, when not only is it a fact that someday—relatively soon, friend—you won’t be here any more, but you’re not even unchanging. You wake up every day a little more eroded, a little more educated—changed. Unfortunately, our self-image does not always change accordingly, resulting in people like me who still see themselves as they were when eighteen—svelte, optimistic, able to handle their liquor—instead of how we are—bloated, ruined, and suffering permanent yellowed skin from debilitating liver damage.

Time is indeed a harsh mistress.

There are plenty of examples of time’s softly scrubbing fingers I could offer: My taste in booze, my aching back, the fact that I’d rather shove pins under my fingernails than go out to a movie these days. These all seem subtle to me, however, and easily ignored. One aspect of my changing existence that always strikes me these days is the fact that I now suck, totally suck, at correspondence. This is not simply bragging about my misanthropic tendencies, my friends—when the phone rings, I glance at it in annoyance and let the machine pick up, and then fail to respond. When an email arrives, it sits in my inbox for weeks, ignored and threatening. I haven’t written a letter in years. People often write me through my zine or this blog, and even if they send me emotional, interesting letters or gifts, the most anyone ever gets back is a curt note thanking them for their interest. If I am drinking while stuffing envelopes, they get incoherent threats that if they don’t stop assaulting my bunnies, I will fertilize their lawn. Or something.

In short, I completely suck at correspondence.

(more…)

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine

Writers Life = Not Adventure

Author: March 24, 2010

So, The Duchess and I were watching Castle the other day (a guilty pleasure – actually, almost all our televisual viewing is Guilty these days, and it’s all my wife’s fault; I wouldn’t even know who Crystal Bowersox was if not for The Duchess) and I once again considered the fact that Hollywood seems to believe that authors live lives of adventure and glamour. Every author you meet on TV or in the movies is a part-time detective, full-time celebrity who goes to sexy parties and lives in huge lofts in Manhattan. It gets to me, because an authors life is really more about getting a part-time job to pay for your crippling liquor habit and getting instant sunburn when you go outside because it has been so long since you were outside. Let’s not even start on public appearances or sexy parties. If you’ve ever been to a book reading or a launch party, you know the lie behind that.

So, I was inspired to give everyone a glimpse into a true writer’s life. Herewith, then, is a Typical Day in a Writer’s Life. Castle it ain’t:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZscOJm0OW4&fmt=

Bullshit, Videos

These Damn Cats are My Only Source of News, but Damn This Bourbon is Delicious

Author: March 21, 2010

The War of the Gem Book 1I’VE been writing since I was nine years old or so. That’s a lot of words, most of which are terrible, ugly words no one should ever see, and which I keep under lock and key for the protection of society as a whole. As you age, as with just about everything else, you slowly perceive eras in your life, chapters. Most people have a distinct era in their lives labeled Childhood, for example, and maybe others labeled High School or College or This Guy Touched Me at Summer Camp 1998 or whatever[1]. Once you hit a certain age you can see the dividing lines pretty clearly.

It’s no surprise I’m at that certain age, and I can clearly see these eras not just in my social and emotional life, but in my writing as well. I mean, I’ve been writing every day for decades, through some of the most tumultuous and ridiculous eras of my life, like She’s So Beautiful I Swear I’d Sleep with Her Brother, or The Desperation’s Gone Part III. It shouldn’t be any wonder that I can also see distinct eras in my own writing, everything organized not necessarily by the events going on in my admittedly bourgeois and dull life, but by the themes and development of the words themselves.

Now, this sort of thing is navel-gazing at its worst, of course. Sitting here going back over your reams and reams of turgid, purple prose and sighing contentedly as you note the first time you played with an unreliable narrator, or the bizarre period you went through trying to write everything as a second-person dialog, or your string of really neat ideas that came so effortlessly and now you sit and blood pops out of the pores on your forehead because you can’t think of anything nearly as good to write and the sad thing is you never even sold those great stories and and and

Uh, sorry, I lost my train of thought. The point would have been that even for this solipsistic zine, a serious and thoughtful review of the strata formed in my largely unpublished writings would be a new low. That’s okay, we’re just going to focus on one era: The very earliest one, the first things I ever wrote in my entire life. Now, you’re used to grown-up Jeff, who is annoying and endrunkened and kind of an ass (don’t pretend, I know what the Internet chatter on me is), so your instinct when you read an essay like this is more than likely to knee me in the balls. But you see, when I wrote the work we’re about to discuss, I looked like this:

ME!

That’s right: I was frickin’ cute.

The reason I started thinking about all this is because of a conversation I had over dinner a few weeks ago. A friend was telling me that his young son has some aspirations to write, and wondered if I might be willing to chat with the kid some time. Normally I regard other people’s children the same way I regard enraged monkeys: I stay as far away from them as possible; if they’re in a cage of some sort I enjoy taunting them. But I actually told this guy I’d be happy to chat with his kid if he really wanted, because of Mr. Galvin.

Mr. Galvin was a co-worker of my father’s. My Dad was inordinately proud when his son wrote a 30-page Fantasy novel (The War of the Gem; it eventually turned into a 100-page trilogy—the cover of the first manuscript is at the beginning of this post) and handed out photocopies to everyone at his job. Mr. Galvin read the story seriously, and returned it to me a few days later like this:

EDITING!

That’s right: My very first copy-edit. He was nice enough to not mark every single mistake, and I’ll never forget the revelation it was to me that you needed to use punctuation marks like quotes on a regular basis. Up ’til then I think I regarded punctuation more like optional garnishes than necessary components.

It was the first time someone who wasn’t Mom or Dad had ever taken me seriously as a writer, and it was exhilarating. It was, of course, the first and last time I enjoyed being copy-edited, but it remains a highlight of my early life. I have no idea what’s become of Mr. Galvin—in fact, I don’t know anything at all about the man, to be honest; I was pretty young when he worked with Dad and after that I spiraled pretty quickly into the era known as I Am a Jackass Teenager but Don’t Seem to Know It, during which I valued nothing and complained a lot, mainly to people who weren’t listening to me.

It was probably a good thing that my first brush with being taken at all seriously as a writer had to do with being edited, as this is the general relationship the writer has with everyone. You write something, you show it to people, and there commences several decades of people telling you that you are Doing It Wrong. So I’m probably lucky to have gotten that splash of cold water in the face right off the bat, as it likely inured me to, well, pretty much the rest of my life.

And thus my first-ever Writing Era, the You Must Comprehend Me Via Magic, ended, and my second Writing Era, Yes Everything I Write is A Recreation of The Last Book I Read and Also Too I am The Main Character and I Have Super Powers to Punish Mine Enemies began. And a glorious time it was, too. Thanks to Mr. Galvin, I started using quotation marks in my prose, making it slightly more understandable, and this began a series of events culminating in me actually getting paid to write. Hooray for me! And Too bad for society.

My current Life Era? Simple: These Damn Cats are My Only Source of News, but Damn This Bourbon is Delicious.

————————————-

[1] If you’re me, you have eras like Drinking on Jersey City Street Corners, Post-Confirmation Church Attendance, Swearing Off the Booze I, II, III, IV, and What Do You Mean I Don’t Pay My Taxes, Why Do You Think I’m Always Broke?

Bullshit, Writing

Obscure Books

Author: March 18, 2010

Because I am a cheap bastard, I frequent Used Book Stores a lot. There used to be a store in Manhattan where you could buy old paperbacks for $1 each; man, I did some damage in there. One of the benefits of frequenting Used Book Stores is the low barrier between you and books you’ve never heard of. In a regular store if I come across a book that looks vaguely interesting but about which I know nothing, the roughly $500 price tag might scare me back to the old familiar haunts of Elmore Leonard and Richard Morgan novels, but in a Used Book Store, what the hell. It’s only a few dollars. As a result, I’ve bought and read some strange and obscure books. The odd thing about them is for the most part they weren’t always obscure.

Which may seem obvious, but it’s weird to think of yourself as an aware and well-read person and then discover there are literally thousands of books that once sold very well, that were very famous, and of which you have never heard. Consider The Crime Book of J.G. Reeder. I bought this one day while wandering a street fair with The Duchess. The only reason I bought it, for $3, was the cover:

The Crime Book of J.G. Reeder

It just looked interesting. I’d never heard of J.G. Reeder or the author, Edgar Wallace (though I should have). Turns out, they were both quite famous and popular, and stories featuring the character of Reeder have been filmed a few times. Not exactly the Collected Works of Shakespeare here, but still, books that were at one time pretty big, and which now might as well have never existed.

They’re not even all that great, honestly. Some better than others, but one of the stories stands out as inexplicably bad: In Red Aces, the mystery Mr. Reeder is investigating is explained in a 2-page infodump at the very end, with absolutely no effort made to, you know, actually make it into an entertaining mystery story. You get the set up, the characters, some of the investigating, and then at the end a character you never noticed before is arrested and we’re treated to a memo filed by Mr. Reeder explaining everything, including tons of details that weren’t given to you in the story.

Okay. . .so maybe it’s not so weird that these stories are now more or less forgotten.

This isn’t new for me; I began my career of loving obscure book back in high school, when I discovered a series of Italian book by Giovanni Guareschi about a small-town priest in Italy named Don Camillo. My father had a paperback copy of a book called Don Camillo Takes the Devil by the Tail, which I read and really enjoyed against all odds. I mean, this is a book originally written in Italian in the 1950s – what are the odds? When I found four more collections of Don Camillo stories in my school library, I noticed they hadn’t been borrowed in 25 frickin’ years, so I offered to buy them. The school charged me $5 a piece for the four books, which I still have, and still enjoy.

The Don Camillo stories are just hokey fun, for me – they’re charming. There are probably about five other non-Italians below the age of 75 who have heard of this character, though.

It’s fascinating, this glimpse into the past. These books sold well, were made into movies, were comon pop-culture currency at one time. Today they might as well have never existed, except for the occasional lunatic like me who hoards them, gloating over books no one else wants. Even before I had my own set of books to watch anxiously sink into obscurity, I found books like these fascinating, not only because they were once popular and now forgotten, but for the insights into the psyche of a long-gone reading public.

You can see now why I was never one of the Cool Kids. But screw it. The cool kids read boring books.

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

This Is Why the Future is Suck

Author: March 1, 2010

From IO9.com, a nifty little article with the headline “Scientists Have Discovered Booze that Won’t Give You a Hangover“. This, naturally, catches my eye, because I am a celebrated boozehound who thinks alcohol makes everything better right up until the point where it makes everything so, so much worse. So I clicked that sucker.

And as is sadly typical when any media reports on science (or, ‘science’), the headline is a crock of shit. The super new Future Booze does indeed give you a hangover, but it can possibly give you a measurably reduced hangover (concerning severity and duration) under certain conditions. Also, it ain’t new, no one actually discovered it since it’s been sold for years now, and from what I can tell from this brief article I would rather puke blood and feel like bugs were under my skin for days with my usual brand of liquor than drink this crap, but now I am digressing.

I tweeted this link a few days ago, but here it is again: Cable TV, Summed Up. This is the problem with science, and this is why so many authors (like me!) chuck real, actual science over the side and start making up our own colorful version of science. Science is dry, it is the art of observing and measuring tiny, tiny increments of tiny, tiny things over a period of, say, centuries, and then slowly collating that information into an incrementally better idea of how things are. Science is studying oxygenated alcoholic drinks and discovering that they leave your bloodstream 20-30 minutes sooner than regular alcoholic drinks, and if drunk in quantity may prove to give you a less-horrifying hangover. Who can blame blogs and news agencies from taking that less-than-inspiring story and turning it into SUPER SCIENTISTS FROM THE FUTURE HAVE BOOZE THAT GIVES NO HANGOVER.

Of course, things never take those kinds of leaps forward. The world is boring, just like science, inching along. We invent the telephone, and ti takes us more than a century to come up with the iPhone. We invent the car, and it takes us . . . well, crap, we still haven’t come up with a practical jetpack. Part of the reason we have this dissatisfaction with the Future which leads disturbed people like me to imagine entire universes for you is because of the way these stories are presented. We’re told: Hangover-free Booze! And we get: Booze with a scientifically measurable decline in hangover misery. Now with more data points!

Is it any wonder there are revolutions and riots on a regular basis? I was all set to go burn down Hoboken when I actually read this article and discovered the truth.

Now all we need is booze that won’t harm your liver no matter how many oil-drums of it you consume on a daily basis. Of course, that will likely be the End of Jeff, but it’ll be worth it.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Personal Space Wars

Author: February 23, 2010

Hey gang: This is a little essay that appeared in my local newspaper a few years ago. I wrote a number of these for the fun of it back in the day, so I thought I’d just repost a few. This one has been lightly edited to bring it up to date in some areas.

I can’t help but obsess about the PATH train, since I have now spent more time riding the PATH train than I’ve spent doing anything else over my entire lifetime. When I pass on, pantsless and forgotten behind some convenience store, a bottle of antifreeze my only comfort, I’ll probably see nothing but the interiors of PATH trains when my life flashes before my eyes. That might sound depressing, but it isn’t so bad; I’ve had plenty of high times and grand adventures during the half hour ride from Erie Lackawana to Penn Station. What I’ll mainly remember from the PATH rides, of course, are the humongous backpacks that people have battered me with on crowded trains.

I think from time to time we’ve all found ourselves jammed onto a train that seems to be holding more human bodies than the laws of physics would allow. Then again, my own understanding of physics is drawn mainly from old Twilight Zone reruns, and informs me that the universe is run by Oompah Loompahs, so perhaps my understanding of how many people can fit inside a train car is a little off. But we’ve all found ourselves pressed up against the car doors, closer to other human beings than we’ve ever wanted to be, unable to move. Invariably, there are a few people on the train who are wearing huge backpacks about twice as large as they are, and invariably they don’t take these backpacks off when they get on the train, and invariably they end up beating me about the face and neck with these backpacks.

The only conclusion you can draw is that most people have no idea how much space they take up, and that they’re largely unaware of how much they bludgeon the people around them. These are the same people who make walking through the streets of Hoboken and Manhattan a contact sport, and they’re probably the same people who walk around during rainstorms with umbrellas the size of hot air balloons. In short, morons.

Walking the city streets during a rainstorm is hard enough because everyone has an umbrella up and they knock into each other—basically, an umbrella increases the space you take up, and you have to compensate in order to keep civilization moving smoothly down the sidewalks. When someone shows up with one of those circus-ring umbrellas you could fit sixteen midget clowns under, presumably so that not a single drop of terrible rain falls on their tender persons, it clogs up the whole system and invades my personal space.

Why do some people feel that their royal status requires that no rain ever get close to them despite the fact that it interferes with the smooth operation of civilization itself? The same reason they get on crowded trains with comically outsized backpacks: They have absolutely no idea how their actions impact other people. And, of course, when I say “other people”, I mean me. Now, I’m not advocating that people should dispense with their umbrellas and get soaked, or get rid of their comically oversized backpacks—or, lord forbid, actually take the backpack from their backs and hold them, since that would interfere with their idle Ipod-fondling—which they apparently use to carry every single thing they own from place to place. I’m just advocating that we all pause for a moment and remember that we’re all part of a society, that there’s supposed to be some consideration for your fellow man. Without consideration for your fellow man—especially in crowded, damp train cars filled with humid humanity—things can quickly devolve into a Lord of the Flies situation. All because of your umbrella, large enough to catch an updraft and pluck you off the street like a stray leaf. Which would, now that I think about it, amuse me greatly.

Space is part of it, too, of course. As the tri-state area slowly begins to resemble Tokyo in its allotment of living space to individual citizens, you start to get a little jealous of your personal space. The urge to assert yourself via an umbrella that forces everyone to stay three feet away from you in every direction—creating, if you will, a stranger-free zone, a bubble of transient personal territory—might be irresistible, albeit still inexcusable. The final result of this line of thinking, of course, is obvious, at least to me: Everyone inside their own hard plastic bubble, serenely rolling down the sidewalks with three feet of personal space all around, guaranteed, even on sunny days. Granted, you’d have the new worries over being accidentally bank-shotted into traffic and killed, but there are so many ways to be accidentally killed in this world, what’s one more?

Of course, once that happens I’ll probably just start complaining about people who install themselves in huge bubbles that take up the whole sidewalk, knocking everyone else out of the way as they rampage through the city. Which actually might be fun, come to think of it—or at least more fun than an umbrella spoke in the eye.

Bullshit