Writing

The Trouble with Cool

Author: June 18, 2009

I’ve never been cool. Going back to my glorious childhood in Jersey City, New Jersey – the city whose current mayor is famous (around here, anyway) for being photographed naked and drunk on his front porch while he was running for mayor, and he won the election) – I’ve never once been cool in my whole life. To be frank it never bothered me much. Despite what Hollywood seems to think my childhood was not a warzone of cool kids calling me names and beating me up; I had a great time despite being a nerd. And here I am, a productive, well-adjusted citizen, contributing quality fictions to a hungry world.

Still: Not cool. Let’s never forget that. Even if you walk into a bar and I am there looking cool, wearing a nice suit of clothes and with a group of people laughing with me and not at me, don’t believe it for a second. I am not cool.

This is unfortunate, because all of the cool ideas in SF/F have been done, it seems. Well, the easy cool ideas. Because I am also lazy as hell, friends. I’d love to write a time travel book, or a zombie book (I did have some zombie-like things in The Digital Plague, but I’m talking about a full-on Night of the Living Dead thing). Of course, I could write these, but the problem is that these stories have become so prevalent that figuring out a way to do them compellingly is almost impossible. That’s the problem with Cool Ideas: Everyone wants to get in on it.

For example, I recently saw a little independent horror movie called Pontypool. It’s not a bad flick, saved mainly by interesting and well-drawn characters. It’s basically a zombie-virus movie, with the slight twist that the “virus” is transmitted via words – when you hear and understand an ‘infected’ word, you start to fixate on that word, repeating it over and over until you can’t say – or think – anything else. Then you start to “hunt” words, trying to literally tear them out of someone else’s mouth, with predictable results.

So, the premise is actually kind of interesting, if scientifically absurd. Actually, if you eliminated the zombie part and just speculated about a disorder that causes people to fixate on words like that, the resulting societal breakdown might be fascinating, the way people would figure out how to communicate despite being forced to repeat “Honey” over and over again, that sort of thing. But in the movie, once you move past the initial infection stage, you just turn into a voice-hunting zombie, with the usual motifs of a) people trapped and hiding from mindless zombies, b) people attempting to fight off mindless zombies etc. It’s been done. A nifty little twist to the vector ain’t gonna make that story more interesting.

So, I can write zombie stories for my own amusement, sure, and if I write it well enough with some good twists and new ideas, I might even sell it and be successful with it. but it won’t be anything new. And knowing that going in kind of deflates me. I know my writing is not always new and fresh, but that’s my intention going in. I need that hope of newness at least to get me going. So until I come up with that twist to the time-travel or zombie idea that I’ve been waiting for, it’s a dead letter, sadly.

It can be done. A fellow writer recently outlined a time-travel concept that was absolutely dripping with originality, and made me very jealous to not have thought of it myself. This happens pretty frequently; I am starting to hate all other writers, everywhere. One of these days I’m going to wake up before noon, put on some pants, and start stealing some ideas, dammit.

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

Bad Books I Love

Author: June 16, 2009

As with almost everyone, I suspect, I have a lot of affection for things I experienced as a kid – things I probably wouldn’t have much patience for nowadays. This is either a terrible loss of innocence or an exciting maturation, who knows? It might also be the fact that, believe it or not, I drank more when I was a teenager than I do now.

Let’s have a moment to wonder at the fact that I am still alive.

A lot of my reading as a kid was fantasy and sci-fi paperbacks; There was a period in the 1980s when I bought just about every Del Rey paperback with a  DK Sweet cover available, usually without much investigation into the story or quality beforehand. Ah, to be 13 again and reading the latest Lyndon fucking Hardy opus. Let’s also hope that 20 years from now folks aren’t expressing similar sentiments about Jeff Fucking Somers, shall we? It’s amazing how many books I have on my shelves that were trilogies or longer, sold by the truckload in 1985 and now almost completely forgotten.

Let’s contemplate the horror of Xanth books. I read, oh, the first dozen or so when I was a youngster. The first five remain, I think, really well-crafted fantasy stories that stand up pretty well – it has a great central conceit, and the stories are told seriously, with the humor an organic part of the tale. As time progressed, though, Xanth turned into a cottage industry for the author, Piers Anthony, and every year a new Xanth book comes out, each more fey and pun-riddled than the last. These days the books seem to exist mainly so he can solicit puns from his readers and turn them into characters and plot points.

And who am I to argue with success? Anthony often includes a lengthy Author’s Note at the end of his books; when I was a kid just starting to write I loved these notes because he went on at length about his process and the business of writing. He made it very clear in those notes that writing is his job, that it was how he provided for his family, and you got the distinct impression that he would write Xanth books until his fingers fell off as long as they sold well. This concept of writing as a profession – instead of as the hobby of the elite – has eroded over the years because making a living from writing has gotten harder and harder (The always interesting Nick Mamatas has a few posts about the realities of writing economics over at his LiveJournal that make this very, grimly clear).  But it is a profession; we’re writing for money, after all. So who can blame Anthony if he wants to churn out Xanth novels by the truckload. Just because I’ve stopped reading them doesn’t mean anything – he clearly still sells well enough to get book deals every year.

Back in The Day, of course, genre writing was still in the basement. When I went to school clutching Lord Foul’s Bane (winner of Worst Title for Great Book prize, 1977) in my hands, I was instantly marked as a nerd and ruthlessly mocked. Today, of course, what with Harry Potter and Twilight and Lost on TV and Iron Man and . . . well, you get the picture. These days SF/F has become the new Western. It’s a staple. Talk about a Singularity: We’ve hit the point where not liking SF/F is weirder than liking it. What a time to be alive, as Frostillicus might say.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Cliffhangerin’

Author: June 8, 2009

Over at the George RR Martin forum someone asks about other books where every chapter ends on a ‘cliffhanger’, and someone helpfully mentions The Electric Church. As you can see, I ego-google far too much (though to be fair, Google Alerts allows me to ego-surf without making any effort). It’s nice to see my work being discussed in the general SF/F conversation, though. Somehow it’s like you haven’t arrived until your books start showing up in general discussions, you know?

Anyway, TEC and the Cates series as a whole certainly does employ the cliffhanger in virtually every chapter. Sometimes these are big cliffhangers, sometimes minor ones, but every chapter ends on a beat. This is intentional, although it wasn’t always there. The original draft of TEC, written 15 years ago, had very long chapters. It also had a different plot, different ending, and in many spots different characters. I always wrote with long chapters; a lot of my novels have only a handful of chapters in 100,000-word books.

The reason this changed when I revised TEC a few years ago is because I originally revised it for web publication on a site that was selling serial fiction. The idea was you’d “subscribe” to a story and receive a new chapter every week. They preferred open-ended ‘soap-opera’ style stories (in structure, not necessarily in content) but were taking novel-length stories as well. So I put together a proposal about TEC, which I’d been meaning to rework for years but never got the impetus to do so, sold it, and revised with their guidelines in mind. Since it would be a week between chapters, I wanted every chapter to end on a beat to keep people interested until the next one came around.

The web site didn’t last long, but the editor they assigned me was the incredible Lili Saintcrow, who loved TEC,  showed it to her editor, and the rest is ongoing history.

So for me, the cliffhanger style is still relatively new and funky. I really enjoy it. The short chapters, the beat-endings – it all makes for, I think, exciting reading and exciting writing, as sometimes I don’t know where a chapter’s ending until it suddenly hits me – there! Which is fun.

I worry sometimes that the constant cliffhangerin’ can get tiresome, but I try to alleviate that by having different levels of cliffhangers. Sometimes it’s a huge plot-device cliffhanger, sometimes it’s just a beat of dialog or a small revelation by the character. I think if every chapter ended with the characters pressed against a wall or hanging from cliffs, it would get ridiculous, so having some chapters end on tiny little beats is a good rhythmic technique.

Or so I think. I’m sure plenty of folks out there can’t stand the technique and rail against my book in private. Or so I like to imagine.

Anyway, just some random writing thoughts this morning. The lesson being: Just because you have always worked in one manner or always had a certain style doesn’t mean you can’t surprise yourself, pleasantly, with something wholly new, at least to you.

Writing

Writing Advice

Author: May 15, 2009

Being a writer who has earned something less than a poverty wage in return for his exciting novelin’ (and yes, I declare “Noveling” to be a new word; TRY AND STOP ME). I sometimes get asked for advice.

Sometimes the advice is practical: “Jeff, how can I feign sobriety during important things like job interviews, wedding ceremonies, and trials?” The answer: monosyllables. Makes you look mysterious and wise.

Sometimes the advice sought is businesslike: “Jeff, how did you get your agent, who is clearly smarter and funnier than you, and has much more interesting clients?” The answer: Trickery. For the first two years of our business relationship, my agent thought my name was John Updike.

Sometimes, however, the advice is for the ethereal artistic side of things, as in, “Jeff, how do create your plots?” or “Jeff, how do you write your dialog?” or “Jeff, how can I get you to stop writing altogether? Tell you what, write a number on this slip of paper and tomorrow that amount will be in your bank accounts, no strings attached, as long as you promise to not write any more.”

So, here’s the best writing advice I can offer:

1. Don’t ask other writers. In fact, I recommend not even associating with other writers at all. We’re arrogant and vainglorious, and if you give us an opening we will pry that sucker open like a swarm of invading termites and we’ll talk your ear off for hours about our “craft”. This is because most of the people in our lives, our intimate friends and relatives, don’t care much that we write, and finding someone who does is like finding a forgotten bottle of whiskey sunk in the toilet tank; we lose track of time. Plus, we will steal your ideas. And probably your wallet. True story.

Since you’re still reading, I assume you’re ignoring #1 and sticking around to see if I’m going to actually dispense any advice. Although since you’re ignoring my advice I wonder why.

2. All righty then: Forget all the pithy little things folks have told you: write what you know, avoid passive voice, you can’t write a novel entirely from the dead dog’s point of view using a complex code involving repetitions of the word “bark”. Screw it: Write a book you’d want to read. Shocking, I know, but a lot of the nuts and bolts of writing can be gleaned just by reading good books. Read a lot, write a lot, and write stuff you’d pay good money for.

3. The best cure for writer’s block that I know of is to write something else for a while. I know someone who has been working on the same novel for 27 years. One book. Nothing else. I suggest the best way to get anything done is to have several projects at once, keep the juices flowing in different directions. A blog is a nice way to drool words if you’re not ready with a second or third novel to work on. Short stories are excellent ways to get ideas on paper and work on scenes that otherwise might wander aimlessly. You know what else works for writer’s block? Liquor. Seriously. Look into it.

So, have a nice weekend, folks. For those of you who write, get crackin’ and good luck. For those of you who don’t, and just want me to get the damn books out already, I’m a goin”, I’m a goin’…

Bullshit, Writing

Word Count, Text-to-Speech = Madness

Author: February 27, 2009

Advice: Avoid writers when they start talking or writing about, well, writing. We’re a bunch of self-involved, arrogant bastards, friend, and we will bore you to death with our own perceived genius. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

First off, word counts. I never used to truck with word counts. I wrote whatever I felt like and didn’t worry too much about how long it was, and, believe it or not, things usually worked out just fine. The idea of counting words would have disturbed me, to be honest, as I had better things to do, like hang out on streetcorners drinking blackberry brandy and wondering why no one thought I was cool.

Of course, this was waaayyyyy back in time, before computers were everywhere. I typed everything on an old manual typewriter, and it was good. Eventually, for cover letter purposes, I figured out that every page was approximately 200 words, give or take, but that’s as far as I went.

Even now, when misguided publishers have actually paid me for my work, I usually only worry about word count after I’ve written the first draft, and then it’s just idle curiosity to see how far off the mark of a Real Live Novel I am. Usually I’m in the money. I have a weird instinct for that. Can’t explain it, and it’s one of two talents I actually have, the other being the ability to drink entire fifths of whiskey and still bike home. Well, someone’s home, anyway.

A few months ago, I knew I had about 3 months of down time while I pondered story ideas for the next Cates novels, routed them to interested parties, and got contracts signed. I didn’t want to do what I usually do with downtime, which is to drink too much and sit around strumming chords on the guitar and making up songs about my thrilling adventures, so I decided on an experiment: If I had 3 months, I’d write a book in 3 months. Hell, folks write novels in 1 month for NaNoWriMo, right? SO I figured if I wrote 1000 words a day, I’d have something novel-length at the end. So I set off. And I did it, or just about – it actually took me one week longer to finish it up.

It’s not bad. I doubt it’ll ever get published, but a version of it might. Who knows?

But I’ll tell you this much: I’m never going to keep track of word count again. I hated doing it, found it got in the way of my creative flow, and in the end I don’t know if I necessarily wrote any more or any more efficiently because of it. So it’s back to tossing words in the dark and hoping for the best.

Naturally, this isn’t meant to argue that everyone should do as I do. If word count as a daily/weekly/whatever goal works for you, go with Gary and do yer worst. For me personally, I’m done, beyond the macro word-counting to make sure I’m not about to send my publisher a 20,000-word premise instead of a 80,000-word novel.

SECOND, since I actually do have books out there in the marketplace (huzzah!) I have to pay attention to things like the Authors’ Guild’s stance on the new Text-to-Speech feature of the Kindle 2. Which basically seems to boil down to: The guild considers the TTS feature to be a derivative audio work of the novel, for which fancy lads[1] like myself ought to be paid. This despite the fact that the “voice” of the Kindle 2 sounds like the Kindle 2 is begging you to euthanize it.

Now, I am not a lawyer but I’ve had three cocktails, so: I don’t think you can really argue that anything read aloud by anything is a “derivative work”. The Guild’s role is to protect authors’ rights, and the thought process goes like this:

  • 1. Audio books cost $$$ – the famous voice, the packaging, the high production values.
    2. Kindle 2 will read your cheap ebook for pennies on the dollar in a voice that will make you wish to jab knitting needles into your ears.
    3. Therefore no one will bother buying audio books because they will just buy the cheap ebook and let it read them into hypnosis while driving, then order them to kill everyone.

    • Maybe there’s a tiny point there, in that if people own a Kindle 2 AND they are the sort of people who buy audiobooks, they might stop buying audiobooks because their melodious Kindle 2 gives them what they want, aw yeah. And potentially declining sales of audiobooks seems to me to be the obvious real motive here. But the larger point is, you can’t stop this shit, man. The technology has already time-traveled into the future and defeated your future armies. New features are going to be developed and attached to popular technologies, and you cannot put these things back into the box.

    In other words, even if through voodoo or magic or litigation Amazon is forced to remove the TTS feature from the Kindle 2, what happens when your iPod can read books aloud, or your netbook, or your wristwatch, or a small man who can live inside a knapsack you carry on your back at all times? This kind of unstoppable technological breakthrough is unstoppable, and very quickly becomes omnipresent. Think MP3s back in 1994: the RIAA tried to suppress that, too, and boy-howdy that worked.

    Of course, you have to put things in language I’ll understand: Things like royalties and high finance make me sleepy, but if you tell me that the Kindle 2 is somehow going to rob me of a bottle of Glenlivet 12 in the year 2013, and I will suddenly get all Hulky and smash things.

    [1] UPDATE 2/28: I would like to be referred to as The Fancy Lad from now on, okay? Yes, I have been drinking. What of it?

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

    The Rut

    Author: February 18, 2009

    In this business of publishing, your definition of success changes as time goes by. It’s a ladder: When you’re at the bottom and not even on the ladder, not even published in any way, you just want to see your name in print – someone else’s print, that cost someone money to print. Even a zine called Everything in This Zine Sucks seems like a dream at that stage. Then, once you’ve seen your name in print a few times, you start to want to get paid – just a little – for your stories. You’ll even accept chickens and McDonald’s gift certificates just to be able to say you got paid. And so on, until you’re a hugely successful novelist demanding that solid gold toilets be installed in your house before you write a single word for your next blockbuster book.

    Or so I’m told. I’m sort of at the lower-middle of that ladder myself.

    Of course, one of those steps on the ladder is publishing a book. Just a book. One, tiny novel. Once you do that, of course, you immediately want to publish fifty or seven hundred more – eventually flooding and dominating the universe with your literary output until you are proclaimed Emperor and given absolute authority – and at this point, assuming you manage to do so, you’re in serious danger of hitting The Rut.

    When I was younger, I read a lot of books by Jack L. Chalker. I still love those books, and I still have the cheap paperbacks I bought back when I was a kid, because I never throw or give books away, ever. Chalker was a master and I can only hope to publish as many books as he did – but Chalker had a Rut. We all do. The Rut is your Theme You Can’t Escape. Often subconscious, it’s an overarching concept that creeps into all of your work, or at least most of it.

    For Chalker, his rut was body transformation. I haven’t read every book the man wrote, and I may be forgetting something (I often do, because of the booze), but so many characters get repeatedly transformed into some other creature – while retaining their personality – in Chalker’s books, you start to expect it. No matter how cool the overall premise is, no matter how inventive the plot or how appealing the characters, you know going in that Chalker is going to transform some or all of the folks he’s writing about into mythical creatures, SF monsters, or blue-skinned gods of some sort.

    Nothing wrong with that. We all have themes we can’t escape, tropes that show up over and over again, creeping even into our non-SFnal work. Sometimes these themes will be buried, deep and hard to see, sometimes they’re right there in front of you, obvious.

    You have to get beyond one book or series of books to really see, however; in a series of related books, it’s natural to have shared themes or obsessions that bubble under all the time. You’re writing about the same characters in the same universe, after all. When your first series of books deals with a group of teenagers with special powers who are hunted by the powers-that-be, and your third, unrelated series deals with a different group of teenagers with different special powers who are hunted by the powers-that-be, well, you might have a Rut going there.

    Is The Rut a problem? Not necessarily. Our obsessions drive our work, after all – we’re exploring things that interest, terrify, and amuse us. Trying to explore themes that don’t interest/amuse/terrify you would be sort of like writing a textbook that resembles a novel: All the parts might be there, but nothing would pop off the page. If your Rut is feeding the world crackerjack stories, no worries. But once you notice The Rut, it starts to worry you a bit, just because you have to start wondering if you’re a one-trick pony, writing the same story over and over again.

    The big question, I suppose, is whether you’re bringing anything new to your obsession each time. If you’re exploring new, bold horizons using a familiar tool, bully for you. If you’re just falling back on familiar plot twists to keep things moving, well, that will bite you in the ass soon enough, grasshopper.

    What are my Ruts? You tell me. I think I know; I’ve got enough unpublished material here to give me a fair idea well before my work goes public. And no, booze and pantslessness are not Ruts, technically. Those are Lifestyle Choices.

    Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

    Mind Meld

    Author: February 11, 2009

    SFSignal recently invited me to take part in another Mind Meld with them, this time considering the question of what the hardest part of being a writer is. You can read my response as well as everyone else’s here:

    http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/02/mind-meld-the-most-difficult-part-of-being-a-writer-is/

    Personally, I think the hardest part really is having to wear pants all the time. So binding when you’re sitting at a desk all day. But court orders are court orders.

    More Shit I Gotta Do, Writing

    Twittered Fiction Redux

    Author: February 9, 2009

    Hola, everyone. Still recovering from NYCC. I’ll probably be saying that for months to come, because I am not a young man any more, and The Drink has taken its toll. I have the body of a much older person.

    Our Twitter Fiction Experiment was a success, and we got some great feedback. AJ over at Spontaneous Derivation even collected the Tweets, organized them in order and filtered out everyone else, and have offered it up to the world, for which I thank them. So, if you wish, The Black Boxes, in order:

    http://tweets.spontaneousderivation.com/Somers/Black-Boxes.html

    Since it was such a grand success, what the hell, I’ll do it again. Just as before, let’s vote on which title gets Tweeted. All you get is the title; no other indication of what the story’s about. Though I can say they’re all SF/Fnal in nature, to some degree. Herewith your choices:

    1. The Music Makers

    2. Dreamers of Dreams

    3. The Awards Dinner

    Note: Complete coincidence that 2 of those titles are ripped from the same poem.

    Go on and email/comment/twitter you vote to me. Story starts on 2/16, and votes will be counted up until 2/15. The same Twitter account: http://twitter.com/somers_story.

    See ya there!

    More Shit I Gotta Do, Writing

    Paper Mate

    Author: February 2, 2009

    A fellow named Paul Riddell has a saying: I love living in the future. This generally refers to all the cool gadgets and technologies we have at our disposal: Just a few decades ago home computers, iPods, video games – all of these would have seemed pretty incredible. For people who grew up primarily before the digital explosion, the last twenty years or so has just been one marvel after another.

    You know what I miss, though? My manual typewriter.

    Oh, I still have it. I just don’t use it much. I used to; I used to write everything on it. I have filing cabinets stuffed with manuscripts, and it was glorious, pounding away at that monster, almost like carving the sentences on the page. Of course, the benefits of the word processor are too many to list, and even a Luddite like me had to give in eventually – at first it was just clean final revisions, but now I write everything on the PC and the manual typewriter collects dust.

    One thing hasn’t changed: I still write short stories in a noteboook, longhand, using blue and white Paper Mate pens:

    Ah, the ole’ blue and white. I won’t use anything else. If my pen dies and I don’t have an extra, I stop working. It’s just superstition, and I can’t really explain it, but I refuse to use anything else.

    And to be honest, I can’t imagine what would ever change my process and cause me to abandon a technology that is several thousand years old. This isn’t an indictment of modern technology or a statement in favor of universal adoption of paper and pen by all writers; it’s just me and what I like. For my process, I can’t imagine what could possibly happen to make me utilize a different tool to write shorts. Unless, perhaps, a trained monkey at a keyboard I could dictate to. No, wait, I take it back: NOTHING WILL PRY MY CHEAP PAPER MATES FROM MY HANDS.

    As technological advancement speeds along, of course, these sorts of decisions start to look crazy. I remember, when I was a wee kid, watching an episode of Lou Grant (all ye children, Google it; you didn’t miss anything) wherein a blackout paralyzes the newspaper office except for the crusty old reporter who’d always refused to use an electric typewriter. Back in the mid 1970s refusing an electric typewriter in favor of a manual was eccentric. Sticking with the manual in 2008 would be insane. That’s where I am, I guess.

    Of course, when I like a story I’ve written I key it into the word processor (Open Office). I’m eccentric, not stupid.

    Now I read how kids these days aren’t learning cursive handwriting any more, so my short story notebooks are slowly turning into secret codebooks that only I will be able to read. So I’d better get keyboarding, if only for my legacy. It’s going to get weirder and weirder to keep writing stories longhand as time goes on – though eventually I’ll be visibly old enough to qualify as an “old coot” and no one will worry about it any more, as my every foible will be ascribed to age and infirmity. I can’t wait! And the final joke will be that when I’m that old my handwriting will be illegible anyway.

    Writing