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EDITING: Have You Heard of It?

Author: October 23, 2011 2 Comments

The AbyssHas this ever happened to you: You wake up in a Mexican mausoleum, wearing a white linen suit, missing you wallet and one kidney — wait, not that. I’m thinking of something else entirely.

Has this ever happened to you: You’re reading a book or watching a movie, and really enjoying the story as it sets up, and then suddenly it all takes a left turn in a strange direction and becomes a completely different movie? Usually this starts off as a more or less straight genre story of some sort and then zig-zags into SFnal territory, and it is almost always a disaster, because invariably the non-SFnal aspects of the story were much better than the SF stuff.

The first time I ever experienced this kind of dizzying letdown was with The Abyss, James Cameron’s 1989 film starring Ed Harris, Michale Biehn, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The film spins out a nicely tense set-up: A US submarine sinks to an extreme depth, marines led by an unstable CO are sent down to a deep water oil platform to team up with the civilian divers who live on the platform. The extreme pressure can have some side effects on certain folks, and the marine commander appears to be one of them; he grows increasingly paranoid, acquires a nuclear warhead from the sunken submarine, and things get interesting.

And then aliens show up, and the movie goes straight to hell.

Now, to be fair, there are other problems with The Abyss (if you’ve never seen it, watch it and look for the scene where Ed Harris brings his wife back to life apparently through sheer force of will), and the aliens were almost certainly the point of the movie from the get-go. My point here is that as a storyteller, Cameron should have recognized that his story without the aliens was actually very, very good, and very interesting, and he should have deleted the aliens and kept going towards the paranoid, tense climax the film was begging for. He should have edited that bastard. Not editing in the film sense, but editing in the sense of cutting your story down to what works.

From Dusk Til DawnAnother example of this is the early Tarantino/Rodriguez collaboration From Dusk Til Dawn (Rodruiguez has a big problem with editing in this sense). Certainly it was a gonzo idea to begin with, taking two stories and melding them together. The problem is that Taratino’s story about the Gecko brothers taking a family hostage in order to sneak into Mexico and evade justice is compelling, funny, and interesting.

And the vampires show up and the movie goes straight to hell.

Again, there’s some fun in that vampire sequence. But it isn’t a great movie, and the characters established in the first half of the film cease to exist and become just actors fighting vampires. The first half of the story is pretty damn good, and I wanted to see what happened to the Geckos and their hostages. The vampire side is just bullshit.

And that’s usually the problem: Melded genres like this are sometimes (certainly not always) just gonzo exercises — someone says hey wouldn’t it be something if aliens showed up here and whether due to inebriation or writer-block desperation, someone else says yeah! and a terrible movie is born. Once you introduce the gonzo element (aliens! vampires!) [gonzo only in context, because the story up to that point was not in any way fantastic] the story actually stops dead, the characters cease to exist, and everything just becomes a fun mash-up to play with. This can be entertaining, but it is often a bad story.

Planet TerrorThe most recent example I can recall right now is Rodriguez’s half of the Grindhouse experiment, Planet Terror. Again, I know the whole point of the film is to get to the zombie storyline. I get that. but the set-up involving Marly Shelton and Josh Brolin as unhappy married doctors is really fun and interesting. From their bizarre son and his “I will eat your brain and steal your knowledge” line to Marly’s running mascara and Brolin’s air of menace, these are fun characters. I would have loved to see a story that actually followed Brolin’s growing insanity as he realizes his wife is planning to leave him, leading him to incpacitate her with drugs and lock her in a supply closet. I would have loved to follow her as she manages to escape despite being partially paralyzed. There’s good stuff in there. You can even keep the part where she’s menaced by <something> and leaves her son in the car with a loaded gun, and the marvelous reaction shot when she takes about two steps away before the gun goes off.

But then zombies show up and the movie goes straight to hell.

Now, this doesn’t mean that when writing a H/SF/F story you should never create interesting characters with interesting backstories, or if you do accidentally create such interesting things you should immediately surgically remove the H/SF/F aspects. It just means that sometimes your H/SF/F aspects do not mix well with a more reality-based story you’ve created as set-up, and sometimes, when that happens, your set up is better than anything else you’ve got and you should trim back and follow those lines instead. Recognizing which situation you’re in can be difficult, but it can have tremendous payoffs.

In my own work, when I have a straight set up that suddenly veers into the fantastic, it’s usually because I’ve run out of ideas, and dead-dropping some magic or monsters into the plot gives it a charge of energy. This often works because on the other end of things, when I get the idea for a fantastic story I often race to get the premise figured out but neglect the characters or plot. So on the one hand I have characters and half a plot that peters out. on the other I have a fantastic idea but no characters or plot. Mush them together, and theoretically you should have something resembling a finished novel.

Naturally, this never works.

Still, if I let every failed project stop me from writing the next one, I wouldn’t be flogging this blog, would I? Failed projects are The Wheaties of a witer’s life, the breakfast of champions. So, I sympathize with folks who go whole hog into this and produce films or other stories that veer off in crazy directions after setting up something interesting but, perhaps, unresolvable in the first two acts. I feel their pain. And if someone wants to pay me a few million bucks to put my literary horrors up on the screen, I’d be more than happy to do so.

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

From the Zine

Author: October 18, 2011 1 Comment

HOW I SAID “FUCK PRIDE,” LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE MODERN AGE, AND FINALLY GOT FACEBOOK AND TWITTER ACCOUNTS, THUS BECOMING A BETTER PERSON*

by Jeff Somers

FRIENDS, I am usually the last person in the universe to adopt any given technology, catchphrase, or trend. This is because I am stupid and cowardly, and while everyone is running around shouting about how great something is, I’m sitting in my room drinking liquor and grumbling. Then, five or six decades later I stumble on it and say wow, this is cool, hey everybody, lookit this! And everyone sneers and calls me a Luddite.

Add to this a healthy dose of misanthropic hatred for people in general, and you can only imagine my general attitude to things like Facebook and Twitter. Not only are these new-fangled technologies, but they both fall into the general category of social-network applications, and that means they connect me to people. Horrible, dirty, stupid people. Not people like you, of course. Everyone else. All those other people, whom I hate. Not you.

Enthusiasm for these applications, therefore, was lacking.

Still, being a desperate mid-list writer with some books on the shelf, a need for more, more more! whiskey, and a perpetual fear of never publishing anything ever again ever, I’m always pondering how I can take over your brains and force you to buy more of my books, and I’ve been told over and over again that Facebook and Twitter can be great tools to connect with fans and potential fans, so I opened accounts on both. And since everything I do ends up in this zine, filtered through the Bullshit Wacky Japanese Island of Wacky, here’s an article about my experience so far.

How sad: 1996, articles about me being drunk and being a wedding gigolo. 2009, articles about fucking Facebook. Is this what a midlife crisis tastes like? ‘Cause it burns, motherfucker.
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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine

Ask Jeff Anything 10-13-11

Author: October 13, 2011 5 Comments

Well, here we are again: Answering questions from the teeming masses for your entertainment. I actually enjoy this stuff more than I care to admit. YouTube keeps telling me I should monetize these videos, but I can’t imagine I’d actually make more than a nickel on these things, so it doesn’t seem worth it. But if anyone wants to send me some money to guarantee I don’t start running ads on these, that’d be swell.

This time around, the question is from the infamous Miss Snark, and involves my storage techniques for the eleventy billion manuscripts I’ve written in my lifetime.

Now, doesn’t that make you want to tip me? I accept money, booze, and interesting stones.

Question of the Week, Videos

What Guitar Reminded Me About Writing

Author: October 10, 2011 4 Comments

As some of you know, I’ve been playing guitar for a few years now. And, yes, posting my terrible, terrible songs to the Internet. You cannot stop me from posting my terrible songs to the Internet. Because I am not a guitarist, so I cannot be shamed on this point. I’ll continue to steal beats from led Zeppelin and riffs from AC/DC and posting the results here.

Learning how to play guitar has reminded me of my earlier years as a writer. As in, my adolescent years. Like just about everyone in the universe, I first started writing when I was a kid, a wee lad of about 10. So I’ve been writing for a loooong time, bubbas, and forgotten what it was like to just start out, y’know?

Learning and playing guitar has reminded me though, because there are parallels. I like to flatter myself that I have some ability as a writer, whereas the guitar is just for fun, but they’re both creative experiences and the path is similar, sometimes. Here’s a couple of things learning to play the guitar has reminded me about writing:

1. When everything is brand new, it’s easy. Every time I learn a riff or technique on the guitar, it’s an exciting moment that unlocks a lot of immediate ideas. BAM, I’m working on a song using those ideas. That’s how it was in the beginning when I wrote: Everything was new, so writing new things was easy. Thirty short stories a year? No problem. Every story I read, every class I took gave me new things to use. The work I was doing wasn’t very original, but it felt original to me, because it was all new stuff. I read Ulysses and spent the next six months writing stream of consciousness like I’d invented it.

2. Stealing Is How You Do It. The meager skills I have on the guitar are the result of a few things — some lessons, practice, and most importantly learning other songs. Every time I learned a riff or a solo from an old song, I immediately began plotting to steal it. The earliest of my songs reflects this pretty baldly, as you can literally hear badly-played riffs from classic rock songs brazenly arranged in my own fumbling style (which is charming, right? RIGHT?). These days I’m better at taking a riff as inspiration, playing with it, adjusting it, putting it into a new context and running with it.

That’s the same way to write. read good books and stories. Burn with jealousy against them. Drink yourself into a stupor because you’ll never manage anything nearly as good. Wake up in a ditch. Get washed up, eat something, take a nap. Then trudge to the word processor and steal the idea/technique. Keep stealing it. Steal it until it’s just part of your repertoire, until it’s natural to you. Then it starts slipping into stories without being showy, just another tool you use to tell a story. byt the time you sell something that utilizes the stolen element, it’s no longer stolen, it’s learned, and its yours.

3. Do it for fun. No one cares if I play guitar or how well I play, so there’s no pressure. I play because I enjoy it, I make my ridiculous songs because I enjoy them, and I post those songs because that’s what we needy, attention-whoring creative types do. The same goes for writing: Do it for fun. The writing, that is. The publishing should be for money, or some form of compensation, but the writing itself has to start off as pure enjoyment. Whenever I’ve spoken with a writer who writes from an income point of view, it’s always pretty depressing.

The ultimate point is, try new things. Learn new things. You will always enter that period of pure discovery and fun (suddenly I can hear Willy Wonka singing Pure Imagination in my head), once you get past that dreary initial period of frustration and Fail. Or am I the only one who had periods of frustration and Fail? Smug bastards. You’re all lying.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, gee-tar, Writing

The Unappeasable Host

Author: October 6, 2011 1 Comment

This was originally publish in Bare Bone #5.

The Unappeasable Host

by Jeff Somers

IT WAS hot, was all he knew. Hotter than he’d ever imagined it possible, dozing on a couch in his apartment, sullenly sweaty when the city temperature hit eighty. Eighty! He prayed for eighty degrees, now. He thought it must be at least 125 degrees. He thought he must be melting, slowly, some horrible former man, running away like candle wax. He supposed he was knee-deep in culture and ought to be absorbing something meaningful, but all he knew was that he was hotter than he’d ever been in his life. He didn’t think there were numbers to describe the amount of kinetic energy in the air.
He swabbed his forehead with a rag and stared around at the rest of the group. He was on an elephant. The whole tour group was riding the huge beasts. They smelled, he thought, like rotten beef jerky.

“Where are we going again?”

Pong, their guide, turned his small, tan head slightly, and said something in his language of marble-mouthed vowels. Then he turned away again. “We go to visit the Hill Tribes.” he said. “These people still live by ancient tradition.”

These people still live by begging from tourists, he thought icily.

In the tour literature, this part of the trip had seemed admirably fascinating. Over beers and burgers with his friends, that part had seemed the best part. On elephants! In the jungle! Visiting tribes that clung to thousand-year-old ways and rules!
He looked around sourly. He was melting onto an elephant and would have the pungent scent of sweated-on rotten beef jerky following him into the afterworld. He swatted at flies and took a drink from his water bottle, wishing he’d stayed in the hotel today, played sick, and just laid on his bed with the ceiling fan on high, misering his strength.

The other members of the tour seemed to be enjoying themselves, as far as he could tell. He didn’t see how it was possible, but they were chatting and laughing, awkwardly perched on their own elephant couriers. An elderly woman noticed him looking at them all and waved.

“Having fun, Harry?” she called out.

He managed a small smile and waved back. “Can’t wait to meet the Hill People!” he sang back, thinking She’s fucking eighty years old and she’s bouncing along on an elephant in 1000-degree heat. She’s senile. When he was eighty, he planned to spend most of his energy devising new ways to get things from the fridge without getting up from his bed. Still, he had to admit, privately, that she was amazing. She looked fifty, and had more energy than most of the others, who were all easily forty years younger. Her enthusiasm, though, annoyed him. He just wanted to go home, and it felt like she was single-handedly pushing them all forward, into the Hills, carrying ridiculous gifts for the beggar children who would swarm them.

“Christ,” he whispered to himself. “I’ll bet a game’s on channel five back home, right now.”

Pong turned to grin at him. “You want to go home, Mr. Harris?”

Mistah Harrie, he pronounced it. Harry still couldn’t tell if their guide was making fun of him or was just having trouble with consonants. He gave him a neutral look and shook his head. Pong was smart, so Harry suspected he was being made fun of. He knew he had a reputation as the dead weight of the group, the sourpuss. It embarrassed him, because the trip had cost so much, and so much effort had gone into its planning – to come and be so thoroughly unhappy made him feel like a whiner, especially since he was alone in his unhappiness. That had made him grit his teeth and stick with it  -though he could have simply kept his hotel and plane reservations and left the tour. That would have meant more money after what he’d spent on the tour, though.

“I’m just as happy here.” he asserted to Pong, who nodded amiably and turned around.

Harry sagged in the saddle behind their guide. Elephants! He hadn’t expected elephants, though everyone said it was right there in the brochure. He supposed it had been. It didn’t mean he’d expected it.

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Free Short Stories, Thursday Short Stories

From the Zine

Author: September 25, 2011 0 Comments

The recent media frenzy from the media about Hurrican Irene that had me living in my crawlspace for three weeks with nothing but a shotgun for company reminded me of this essay, which originally appeared in The Inner Swine V0lume 14, Issue 2, June 2008.

YOU WILL BE ATTACKED BY RABID COMMUNIST BEARS AND USED AS A TOILET BY HIPPIES

Fearmongering in Modern Media

by Jeff Somers

Spiders! EATING YOU AS WE SPEAK!PIGS, unless you read this issue of The Inner Swine right now, immediately, you will be eaten in your sleep by hundreds of tiny orange spiders with green legs. I will tell you how to avoid this fate at a random moment in this zine—maybe page 34, maybe page 3, who can tell?—so you’d best study each page carefully.

Trust me, bubba, being eaten by spiders is no fucking way to go.

I don’t know why I never thought of this before:

  • Step 1: Order TIS Security Chief Ken West to travel the country distributing orange spiders
  • Step 2: Offer secret of avoiding horrible death in this zine
  • Step 3: ????
  • Step 4: Profit!

I should have thought of this years ago—after all, this is exactly what the nightly news programs do. They shout at you all night about something that’s going to kill you, and then smugly tell you that not only must you tune into their program to save yourself, but you must wait until later to do so. I mean, one second they’re shouting that a mysterious disease is turning people into a warm puddle of burnt-umber-colored goo, and then they’re telling you to wait 3 hours before finding out the details. Genius!

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Bullshit, The Inner Swine

The Mystery MP3

Author: September 21, 2011 0 Comments

KIDS, you may not be aware of this unless you read my zine, The Inner Swine, with more than the usual attention. Said usual attention generally being a quick glance and then a toss into the nearest garbage can. Still, it’s a story so dull, so pointless, it has to be told. Again, and then again.

Back in the pre-history days, we didn’t have MP3s or streaming music. We had the radio, and CDs, and cassettes. My god. Just thinking back to that horrible time depresses the shit out of me. Anyways, since liking a random song on the radio meant you either taped it onto a cassette, complete with commercials and DJ stepping all over the intro, or shelling out $10 for the entire CD, which more than likely contained no other songs you liked. Feh. being a cheap bastard, I taped a lot of songs off the radio. I used to keep a blank tape in the stereo so I could just jab the record button whenever something even threatened to be interesting.

So, one day back in the mid-1990s I taped a song. I have no idea when, off of what station, or where I was at the time. I scrawled one word on the tape cover: “milky?“. Record-keeping, obviously, was never one of my strong suits.

And for the next 20 years, I wondered who the hell sang that song. It plagued me. I liked it well enough to wish for a better copy – a crisp MP3, a CD track, whatever. I did Google searches on the lyrics, on “milky”, on anything else I could think of. Nothing worked.

I even posted the MP3 I’d made from the cassette on my web site and put a plea in an issue of The Inner Swine for folks to crowd source this bastard and tell me what it was. Here’s the MP3 I posted. I got plenty of responses, mostly in the vein of hey I like that song too, let me know who it is when you find out. But no one knew what it was. Apparently I’d taped it the one and only time it ever got played on the radio. Lucky me. I began to feel vaguely ridiculous putting so much effort into discovering the heritage of a mediocre grunge-lite rock song.

Then, last week, old friend Ken West sent me an email:

from: Ken West

subject: LOOK WHAT I FOUND

Click on the speaker for “Milky”
Holy shit, mystery solved. Band: Cell. Album: Living Room. My life: A little more over.

Bullshit

Dreamers of Dreams

Author: September 18, 2011 0 Comments

A story from 11/2001, unpublished. Philip K. Marks is a recurring character of mine; he also appears in the story “sift, almost invisible, through” which appeared in the MWA anthology Crimes by Moonlight, edited by Charlaine Harris.

Dreamers of Dreams

by Jeff Somers

He didn’t know what to make of it, which was usually how he knew he was onto something. Being completely mystified meant he hadn’t yet understood, that was all. Phil Marks scratched at his growing beard and watched the two men across the subway car from him. Years of watching people more or less professionally made Marks a bold observer; he evinced no shame in watching others, and made no effort to hide the fact that he was watching them.

The first one was young, a kid. No more than twenty-five, Marks figured, feeling all of his own forty-two years suddenly, and with force. He was dressed like a student: torn jeans, white T-shirt, backpack. A pair of sporty sunglasses hung from the V-neck of his shirt. His sneakers were expensive but very old and decrepit, leftovers, Marks thought, of a pre-college loan era. The second man was taller and older, dressed in a black suit, everything black, down to his painfully-shined shoes that glared in the fluorescents of the subway. Marks ran his grey eyes over the second man and imagined, with confidence, that the man’s undergarments were also black.

They didn’t know each other. Marks knew that they had entered the subway car at different stops. Having noticed the Man in Black immediately, Marks had watched him. The man had examined the population of the subway car carefully, and chosen a seat next to the kid, where they sat in silence, ignoring each other, for a few moments. Then, without warning, the older man had turned and leaned in to the kid, speaking too softly to be heard by anyone else on the train. The kid had frowned, and then leaned in to hear better.

They were still in that position. The Man in Black had a hand on the kid’s arm, lightly holding on, and his jaw moved steadily. The kid, still frowning, made no move to pull away, and seemed pretty interested in what the man had to say. Marks watched, and didn’t know what to make of it. What did a total stranger have that a kid like that would find so interesting?

At the next stop, the Man in Black stood up, nodded to the kid, and exited the train. The kid sat on the seat loosely, slumped, as if his muscles had stopped having any effect on his frame. He stared at the advertising poster across the aisle so intently Marks twisted around in his seat to look at it: an ad for English lessons. Learn English in two weeks. Immigrants welcomed.

Marks looked back at the kid and frowned. The kid appeared to be in deep, deep thought, seeing nothing in front of him, and Marks’ instincts told him there was a story about to happen. He reached into one of the pockets in his great coat and pulled out a battered notebook and a pen. Flipping the notebook open to a blank page, he quickly jotted down his impressions of the scene and a few details: Man in Black speaks earnestly to stranger. Young kid down on his luck listens intently for no good reason. Is left with lots to think about apparently. MIB: tall, thin, grey hair and all black clothing, doesn’t look crazy. Kid: also tall/thin, looks like college-age but hasn’t eaten or bought new clothes in a while. Bet everything he owns is in the torn knapsack he carries everywhere.

Marks flipped the notebook closed and stuffed it back into his coat. He figured he’d follow the kid for a bit, see what might happen.

Two stops later the kid stood up and left the train, his knapsack still on the seat. Marks stood and plucked it up, thinking it was a great excuse to talk to the kid should he choose to. Carrying the knapsack, he dived through the closing doors and looked around the platform, finding the kid almost directly across, apparently waiting for the uptown train. Marks paused, looking down at the knapsack in his hand and then up at the kid again. He studied the kid’s posture, the way he was peering intently up the tracks at the oncoming train, and had half-raised his hand in a useless gesture when the kid took a step into nothing and allowed himself to fall directly under the train’s wheels.

Someone screamed, and Marks remained frozen, one hand half-raised, his mouth half-open. He had no idea what he’d intended to do.

A crowd quickly gathered, and several people had their cell phones out to dial the police. Marks shook himself out of his stupor and quickly knelt to the floor and opened the knapsack. He didn’t expect to find a note, but he thought there might be some hint as to why the kid had committed suicide – and he knew he’d never get close to the knapsack once he turned it over to the cops.

Marks was quickly disappointed. Inside the bag there were three paperback novels, a notebook of blank paper, and a bagged lunch. Nothing else. Marks slowly zipped the bag closed and looked up. A large crowd of people obscured the spot where the kid had gone over. The train stood there, emptied and lit, as if it didn’t know what to do either.

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