Ramblings of Jeff Somers, author
Jeff Somers (www.jeffreysomers.com) was born in Jersey City, New Jersey and regrets nothing. He is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series published by Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket Books. He sold his first novel at age 16 to a tiny publisher in California which quickly went out of business and has spent the last two decades assuring potential publishers that this was a coincidence. Jeff publishes a zine called The Inner Swine and has also published a few dozen short stories; his story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight, published by Berkley Hardcover and edited by Charlaine Harris. His guitar playing is a plague upon his household and his lovely wife The Duchess is convinced he would wither and die if left to his own devices.
Stare into the abyss that is my music, and the abyss will rock your world. Or possibly just stare back at you.
Here, songs:
Song595
Song596
Song597
Song598
Song600
Song604
Why do I do this to you? More importantly, why do I do it to myself? I dunno. I got the music in me, I suppose.
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.
SPOILERS: There are many. If you’re foolish enough to fear spoilers, don’t read this. YE BEEN WARNED.
So, Gone Home is a video game. Maybe you’ve heard of it, either because of its shocking nature as a first-person game created by some of the folks who worked on Bioshock that doesn’t have any guns, monsters, or action gameplay of any kind, or because of it’s storyline involving a teenage girl realizing she is gay and finding her first love. Or maybe you haven’t heard of it, because unlike me you have better things to do.
So, if you haven’t heard of it, here’s the basic rundown: It’s first-person, as I said, so you see everything as if you were there walking around. You do have a character, a college-age girl home from a year abroad in Europe only to discover the new house your family moved into is empty, your family missing, and all sorts of mysterious clues scattered everywhere. The point of the game is to figure out where your family is.
Here I will spoil it all for you, because I must: You slowly discover, after wandering the house and finding keys and newspaper clippings and concert tickets and listening to audio journals your kid sister left behind, that your parents are off at couples counseling and your little sister has run away with her girlfriend.
That’s it.
In other words, presumably in the game’s universe your parents return the next morning, y’all call the cops on your sister, and a few hours later she’s being yelled at extensively.
I had one of those moments the other night. No, not one of those “oops I drank a bottle of High West Double Rye and wet myself” moments – or, well, yes, one of those moments too, but that’s not the subject of this little essay thank you very much. The moment I’m referring to was a spine-tingling idea I had to solve a plot problem in a novel I’ve been writing for approximately 75 years. Which is actually a merging of two novels into one. Which has been slowly driving me insane. But let all that drift, because I figured something out, and it was to take a tiny detail alluded to a few times throughout the current draft and bring it back as an awesome but somehow perfectly obvious twist.
To celebrate I drank a whole bottle of High West Double Rye but I think I already told that story, so let’s let it drift.
After I woke up, went to the desert to dry out, and had a few starvation-induced hallucinations, I realized something: The only reason the twist came to mind or even worked at all was because I’d previously put in a couple of throwaway details. The thrill I experienced when I thought of a way to leverage those details into brilliance was pretty much the same thing I would have felt if I’d been reading a book and an author suddenly promoted what had seemed like an unnecessary detail to a plot point. In other words, I was writing like a reader.
Frankly, I think that’s important.
Here’s how it works, at least for me. In chapter one, I give a character a gewgaw for some color. Then I forget about it. Then in chapter 10 I realize I need that character to do something amazing and for that he needs an implement. And I realize with a thrill that I can just resurrect the gewgaw. I stand up, tear off my shirt, and scream IT’S BRILLIANT while the universe recreates the crane shot from The Shawshank Redemption. I could have given the character the gewgaw right then and there and retconned it into the story later, but because I used something I’d already added to the story and then forgot, I have the same experience (hopefully) that the reader will have.
It’s artificial, of course. I can do anything I want in my story – I can just make shit up any time I want! Yet when I have that moment when I’m just thrilled by a twist because it seems natural, it usually means I’m onto something. For a second there, I wasn’t a jaded, slightly inebriated writer trying to fool people into spending $8 on his books. I was part of the audience, and I was excited.
Of course, I’ve enjoyed some terrible films and novels in my time, so none of this means the story I’m working on is any good. It’s just the religious experience of occasionally shocking yourself with your own writing that gets me every time.
I Wish He’d Looked Like This.
SO, today I noticed I had mushrooms growing on my head so I decided to go outside and take a walk, get some sun. So I loaded up my decoy coffee travel mug with liquor, ate six chocolate donuts to get my strength up, and put on some pants.
I went to my old PO Box to see if any weirdness had come my way, but it was sadly full of junk mail. I suppose when you stop sending out a print zine, people stop mailing you. I am surprisingly not sad about that at all.
Walking home in Hoboken with my earbuds in, suddenly a sweaty, plump woman began talking to me. Because having earbuds in does not in any way imply that you cannot hear what someone is saying. Removing the earbuds, I politely grunted that she should repeat herself.
“I told that man to put on a shirt!”
I followed her gesture. About a block away was a guy in bike pants and no shirt, jogging. Even at this distance I could see he was as sweaty and shiny as a greased pigs. It was unsettling, but I didn’t let her know that. Instead, I looked at her and said “So?”
She looked outraged. “It’s illegal!”
I turned away. “Uh-huh.”
Perhaps it is. The list of things that are, in fact, illegal in this world is always surprising to me, to be honest. Especially when a court-appointed lawyer is explaining them to me in the grim interview room downtown I know so well. Who knew so many activities required pants? But shirts? That’s a whole different story. As far as I know it’s not illegal to run without a shirt. Perhaps uncouth, but not illegal.
The freaks are winning. What’s worse, the Freaks continue to think I look like one of them.
SO, in my ongoing attempts to draw your attention to my novel Chum, out from Tyrus books on 9/18, I’ve put together two free eBooks over one Smashwords that are either directly or tangentially connected to Chum:
Up the Crazy by Jeff Somers – a Lifers/Chum crossover.
Up the Crazy is a crossover short story. Crossover of what? Well, Chum and my first published novel Lifers share a universe and, briefly, some characters. They also share some scenes and characters from other novels I wrote, but since those remain unpublished they remain Novels Whose Titles Shall Not be Mentioned As They Are Meaningless to Everyone Not Named Jeff Somers.
So, anyways, I thought it would be fun to explore one point where the stories of Chum and Lifers intersect a bit a more fully, and wrote a “deleted chapter” from Lifers. It’s not necessary to have read either book to enjoy the story. Here’s a few lines from it:
“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.”
American Wedding Confidential by Jeff Somers
American Wedding Confidential is a collection of essays from my zine The Inner Swine about the weddings I attended. I’ve been to a lot of weddings, at first as a sort of gigolo emergency wedding date for my single girl friends, and later as escort to The Duchess as everyone we knew in the universe got married one after the other. Weddings are, generally speaking, the most horrible way you can spend an evening, so I started writing darkly humorous essays about my experiences. Fifteen of them are collected here.
Why? Well, a lot of the action in Chum takes place at a disastrous wedding, so there’s your tangential connection. That’s about it, really, although you can well imagine that much of my inspiration for the wedding scenes in Chum came directly from my terrible experiences at the weddings described in American Wedding Confidential.
Here’s a sample:
“I may have forgotten to explore an equally important facet of the swinging gigolos wedding experience: the dark side.
Oh, it’s there. I didn’t think so myself until a few years ago. Behind the free booze, between the drunkenly wanton bridesmaids, hidden by the blinding light of the camera capturing the Loco-Motion forever, eternally, winks the grinning leer of The Darkness, waiting for some sucker in a bad suit like me to innocently wander in. I started my long, slow walk into the darkness when Insane Co-worker #23 invited me to her friend’s wedding one day, about five minutes after she’d told me she liked me a whole lot and I’d blithely given her the memorized and oft-used (believe it or not) “we’re better off being friends but I will always be there for you” speech. Usually when I give that speech I mean it, and I meant it at that moment; even though I am running the other way as fast as I can whenever someone wants to date me, I usually do want to be just friends.
I hadn’t yet realized that Insane Co-worker #23 was, well, insane.”
Chum by Jeff Somers
Huzzah! Both are absolutely free and available in whatever format you prefer — go for it! Both are also rather poorly formatted and rife with errors, but then you wouldn’t expect anything less from me, would you? Now, go buy Chum before I burst into tears.
Win ALL the things.
Over at Lynn Viehl’s Toriana Blog (Lynn is the author of the Disenchanted & Co. books I created trailers for a few weeks ago) I took part in a regular “Steampunking” series where authors are asked jolly questions and give jolly answers. Go check it out!
“1. If you could replace one piece of current technology with a steam-powered equivalent, what would you swap out, and what would you call it?
The coffee maker. My coffee maker right now is basically Star Trek: It uses those little pods and it’s like you insert this obscure plastic thingamabob and then coffee is dispensed. For all I know the plastic pods are the currency of aliens who accept my sacrifice and give me coffee in return.”
AND ALSO TOO there is a grand giveaway, where you could win all the stuff pictured here: — Unsigned paperback copies of the complete Avery Cates series along with Trickster, The Writer’s Lab by Sexton Burke, Writing the Paranormal Novel by Steven Harper, How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You, The Geek edition of Magnetic Poetry, A typewriter-shaped notepad, The Predict-a-Pen, Handy bookmarks, A brand-new black and denim O’Neill backpack. What are you waiting for?
I’m the good-looking one in the back with the gin and tonic, flushed with success and amongst friends: the big flat-headed guy is Tim, my good friend and Security Director, and the round soft-edged fellow in grey flannel is Emil, my confidant and advisor. My cabinet, they are.
It’s nine o’clock on a Wednesday, The Deciding Hour, and if we were going to go home and get some rest now’s the time but we were holding back, nursing drinks, hoping that something interesting might happen to prevent early retirement. As we got older the bar gets raised on what’s interesting, until, eventually, we’ll give up altogether and just go home first thing.
www.chumthenovel.com
SO, as many of you already know, my next novel is titled “Chum” and will be published by Tyrus Books in a month (9/18/13 to be exact). So we’ve been gearing up some modest hoopla to celebrate the fact.
Giveaway the First: Tyrus Books has five copies up for giveaway at Goodreads. If you’re a GR member, surf over and sign up!
Giveaway the Second: Naturally I want to do my own thing, so here’s the deal. A modest contest, in three simple steps:
1. Surf on over the Chum’s official web site, www.chumthenovel.com.
2. Click on Your Wishes, then Add Your Own Thoughts.
3. Leave message for Mary and Dave on the occasion of their marriage.
I’ll leave this open until 9/17. On 9/18 I’ll choose the 10 most entertaining, most unique, most whatever entries and give those people a signed free copy each, plus perhaps some mystery extras. Or perhaps not.
Note: Be sure to leave a real email on the guestbook page so I can actually contact you if I choose your note!
More to come, if I stay sober.
Family Hanging Out in Sinister
Whenever The Duchess is out of town I do three things: I order a palette of cheeses, I make sure I have several gallons of grain alcohol on hand, and I watch awful movies. The cheese and the alcohol are for sustenance. The movies are to scratch the itch I have for awesome terribleness, the kind you can only get from low-rent horror movies and insane Sci-Fi epics. On a tangential note, my spellcheck is not complaining about “terribleness” which just feels wrong. Really, that’s a word? Holy shit.
Anyway …
Just recently I watched Sinister, unexpectedly starring Ethan Hawke. Hard to believe there was once a time when Hawke was considered a sex symbol and something of a rising star in Hollywood, though he does have a natural presence on screen still, and as he ages out of his epic self-regard phase he might have a future. To see him in a lowball horror flick is kind of startling, though, but just like his character in the film he’s got bills to pay, I assume. His character is a writer, but at least the movie avoids many of the odious writer clichés that other films give in to: While it’s imagined that his first books was massive bestseller and that he’s still living off of those proceeds, he’s also a writer who’s second and third books were failures and he’s got one last option book to try and turn the ship around. And he can’t afford the mortgage on his big house any more. So it’s slightly more realistic than your average movie when it comes to writers.
Anyway, I’m not here to really complain about that. Nor am I here to review the film, except to say that it was entertaining, slightly more interesting and well-done than most, and if it was riddled with boring pop-ups and cheesy horror-esque moments, the Super 8 home movies of family mass murders were incredibly frightening, and the whole film does manage to generate an atmosphere of dread that few horror films manage. Hawke’s pretty good in it, and the sound editor should have won an Oscar.
But I’m not here to praise Sinister. I’m here to complain about the two most grating movie stupid clichés currently in my wheelhouse: The Idiot Note and The Anti-Light Sleeper.
Gaze Into the Abyss
There I was, in the audience. A long story. Which I will begin now.
My wife, the formidable Duchess, is a huge fan of America’s Got Talent. Me, not so much. It’s a perfectly inoffensive variety show by and large, though every single episode could be edited down to a tight ten minutes without any loss of entertainment value, unless you find entertainment value in endless repetitions of three or four core memes: That America does, indeed, have talent, that the contestants by and large are so desperate for success and recognition they will likely kill themselves shortly after being voted off the show, that the whole world loves Howard Stern with a blind passion, and that Snapple and Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn are the greatest foodstuffs in history.
Again: Me, not so much.
Anyways, I do watch the show with The Duchess, because it’s fun to gently mock her taste in TV, and heck, once in a blue moon there is actually an interesting act. Variety Shows are pot luck, after all. Yes, every season will have 500 nearly identical dance troupes, magicians, singers, and stand up comedians, but there will once in a while be a very cool thing. That Very Cool Thing is what keeps me sane during the long seasons.
The Duchess and I made some new friends recently, and one of them turned out to be a Gaffer working on AGT, and he got us tickets to a recent taping. The Duchess was beyond excited. I was … less so. But we went! And I survived!
###
Radio City Music Hall is pretty amazing. Showing up for the taping was pretty much like showing up for anything else: You have a ticket with an assigned seat. You get there, go through a sloppy security screening, and have the opportunity to purchase cocktails and soft drinks and snacks assuming your credit scores come back high enough to qualify for the loans required to actually make these purchases. Then you find your way to your seat and wait for the show. The doors opened at 6PM and we were seated by 6:30PM and my god what a mistake because the show doesn’t even begin until like 8:30PM. If you’re lucky.
The place never got full. There were tons of empty seats around us. But Radio City is awesome, so for a moment just hanging out there was pretty cool. And then Joey assumed the stage.
Joey, who has a real name and career I am sure but neither of which I recall, will be referred to here as Joey Bagadonuts. He is the swarthy “warm up” man who went about the business of keeping the crowd at a peak of frenzy with all the energy and concentration of a drunk trying to ward off the imaginary rats in smoking jackets that descend on him with horrifying regularity (not that I would know anything about that). Joey Bagadonuts began a Cult Training Program, reminding us over and over again that we were making television and not watching television, and that this meant we had to leap to our feet to applaud lustily whenever instructed, and follow the other rules (no phones, no shouting – strangely, those were the only rules, meaning this was more cult-like than could have been imagined).
Joey Bagadonuts reminded us of this, our sacred covenant as studio audience, until I want him to burst into flames right there on stage.
Joey occasionally seemed to forget what he was doing and just trail off, possibly to contemplate suicide. Then he would roar back with a nonsensical demand that we get loud even when nothing was happening. Do I need to say I hate Joey Bagadonuts? I hate him.
###
We were seated behind a ginormous balloon, because they had a segment to pre-tape. Presumably due to the possibility that one of the acrobats floating over us via balloon would fall and kill someone. I can certainly see the wisdom of this; by pre-taping the segment they can always release deadly gas into the theater and murder the whole audience in order to keep us silent after witnessing a murder, then remove the bodies and get a whole new audience in off the street.
They moved seat-fillers from the balcony for the pre-taping to provide the illusion that the place was packed. The judges arrived and were cheered, and the act was nice, with acrobats doing moves while floating around hanging from a balloon. Not something I would have paid to see, but entertaining enough. The judges did their feedback schtick and then the seat-fillers were ignominiously forced to go back to their original seats, despite the fact that there were plenty of empty ones. Except for the single aisle seat on my right, occupied by an older gentleman who was extremely keen on the proceedings and kept trying to engage me in serious discussions about the acts. I could only stare at him in horror and calculate silently how many whiskies it would take to be able to sleep that night.
###
When the show finally began, Joey Bagadonuts was back to alternately tell us how awesome we were and demand that we be more enthusiastic, more loud, more more. We were told that whenever they returned from commercial we must be on our feet screaming for about five seconds and then sit down as one as if we’d all just been deactivated. We practiced this at random moments before the show began it’s live phase. It was exhausting. It was like being in that Apple 1984 commercial.
People kept shouting at the judges. Every now and then one of the judges would turn and wave, and this encouraged everyone else to shout at them even more. On the one hand treating these celebrities like zoo animals warmed the frozen cockles of my heart. On the other, nothing is more alarming than someone sitting directly behind you screaming MMmmmmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllll BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!! every thirty seconds for three hours.
The acts? Who can remember. They were all angled towards the cameras, anyway, so I saw everything from the side.
###
We fled right after the last act in order to avoid being crushed to death by the stampede of people hoping to get Heidi Klum to look at them. Was it entertaining? Define the word. Sure, under certain sets of expectations, it was entertaining. It was kind of interesting for being a glimpse into the sausage factory. Live TV is exhausting. All I had to do was stand up every three minutes and scream and I was exhausted.
What they ought to do is offer free cocktails, right in the aisles, the way Rock of Ages does but, you know, free. If I’d had five or six drinks in me, I would have turned up on stage, shirtless with the word BAZINGA scrawled in shoe polish on my belly, and performed a short dance routine before being tackled to the floor. And I think we can all agree this would have been well worth watching.