Then, kidnapped by Alpha Centaurians to 2049 along with Jack Commer’s infant son Jonathan James, former Typhoon II ship’s engineer Phil Sperry struggles with his reversion to Centaurian brainwashing and his treason to the human race.  His lover Hedrona Bhlon, who resists Conversion to the Centaurian Grid, is considered an Animal and must fight as a Gladiator of the Sled for four years.  In May 2053, when the Emperor dies and the Grid collapses, the two rescue Jonathan James and his robot attendant, John Root, an irritating recreation of the youngest Commer brother John, who died ramming the Typhoon I onto Mercury.

In June 2075, after twenty-two years of Gridless Alpha Centaurian misery amid futile Martian counseling efforts, Phil must challenge his mentor, the non-telepathic Martian G’rea’nyaigu’nye, a name shortened by human colonists on Mars to Greeney Gooney.  Gooney, onetime terrorist, Mayor of Marsport, and Martian Star General, has inexplicably declared himself Emperor of Alpha Centauri.  Meanwhile the robot John Root gloats that he inserted malware into Jonathan James’ bestselling, libelous, father-bashing autobiographical novel that will spread a new Grid throughout Alpha Centauri.

Books in the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series:

1.  The Martian Marauders – published by Double Dragon Publishing January 2012.
After the evacuation of the Earth’s population to Mars, the crew of the Typhoon I spaceship must fight native Martian terrorists led by their new human Emperor, political agitator and traitor Sam Hergs.  But Captain Jack Commer compromises the mission when he kidnaps the Emperor’s consort and falls in love with her.

2.  Jack Commer, Supreme Commander – coming 2012
Jack Commer brings poor negotiating skills to the war with the fascist Alpha Centaurian Empire, losing his crew to Centaurian brainwashing as he and his wife are sent to be tortured on a barren planet. 

3.  Nonprofit Chronowar – coming sometime between #2 and # 4!
Ranna Kikken creates The Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth at her nonprofit Cat Farm, but its first conference in 2020 is destroyed when intruder Joe Commer time travels from 2036 to lecture CTESOPE on the coming breakdown of the solar system and the destruction of the Earth itself in 2033.

4.  Collapse and Delusion - coming 2013

copyright 2012 by Michael D. Smith

http://www.thenerdasaurusrex.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-martian-marauders.html

I’m delighted by this review, and not just because The Martian Marauders earned four out of a possible five Tyrannosaurus Rex claw prints.  Mr. Turner, the reviewer, has laid out what he likes and dislikes about the novel in a clear manner, and it’s a treat to see a writer spend so much valuable e-space thoughtfully analyzing one’s work.  I especially like that he’s looking forward to the second book of the series, Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, which I’m expecting will be released by Double Dragon Publishing in the near future.

Check out Mr. Turner’s other reviews on his new site, including his “Rules About Reviews.”  His clear, direct, and humorous approach should take him far.  He’s delivers his forceful opinions in an even-handed and entertaining manner, and backs up what he says.

This review is actually the second one garnered by The Martian Marauders, the first being one left on the book’s Barnes and Noble product page, written by one “Mike_” (no relation, I swear!)

copyright 2012 by Michael D. Smith

I’m not sure why we often see the title page of some novel read: 

THE BLOODSTRAIN COGNITION

(Original Title: A New Governess for Tilly)

Did the author have enough clout to insist on his original baby at least seeing something like print?  In any case I have a hard time believing that both author and publisher were so enamored of the original title that they just couldn’t let it go.  But as far as I’m concerned, the original title–sometimes called the “working title”–can be vaporized.

I have a decades-old novella I and many others thought a great deal of, Awesome Beauty of This Earth, in which ninety-seven percent of the world’s population has inexplicably committed suicide.  But as you can see the title is overblown.  I tried Odd Planetary Beauty for a while (but “odd” is a weak word here), then Executed Beauty (a mouthful that doesn’t quite strike anything) and finally The Psychobeauty.  This last is a word I’ve used to denote some sort of psychological, holistic grasp of personal meaning, but if I ever revise this novella I’ll either have to make this all much more clear or else change the title again.  This is an example of a work that so far has resisted a meaningful change in title.

The first novel I retitled was originally called Property, and was about a new social system that has just outlawed private property and is now on the verge of collapse.  I sent out some queries on it until I realized that the novel needed some serious revision.  I changed the title of to CommWealth (the name of the new society) after seeing two novels called Property in a bookstore and realizing how common the title is.  Library work had also shown me how often the same titles are appropriated, for instance Flashpoint with dozens of novels by that name.  Although you can never guarantee absolute uniqueness, I was determined not to recycle trendy-sounding titles for any of my novels.

Within the past two months I’ve changed two novel titles.  One was the third Jack Commer novel, Nonprofit Ladies, which became Nonprofit Chronowar.  Seeing The Martian Marauders published got me thinking, a lot more seriously that I had previously, about how titles are perceived by the public, and I realized that “Nonprofit Ladies” does not really sound like a science fiction title.  The women running the nonprofit organizations and their ineffectual attempts to come to terms with inexplicable solar system disasters are really just a subtheme.  The main force of the book is space pilot Joe Commer’s war guilt and the United System Space Force realizing that all along it’s been fighting a war based on time travel.

Thus the title Nonprofit Chronowar gives a nod to the first chapters where Joe scolds the naïve ladies and their Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth, but offers up the main theme of the book as well.  The title also indicates the futility of the war, which both sides know the Alpha Centaurians will lose seventeen years in the future, but which both have no choice but to fight anyway.

The second title change this year was the fourth novel in the series which I’ve just completed, and it took a couple weeks for me to work my way through the meaning of the words in some sixty iterations of the title.  The original title, Seven of Cups/Beyond DamnStar, finally became Collapse and Delusion.  My original idea for the novel was to tell the story of what happened after the Battle of DamnStar in 2036, where everyone knows that the Alpha Centaurians are going to lose the war on May 14, 2053, but all, including the Alpha Centaurians who understand they’re doomed, must fight for seventeen more years anyway.  Not quite sure I wanted to continue the Jack Commer saga just yet, I turned my attention to notes for a literary novel about illusion, which I called Seven of Cups after the scary Tarot card.  But after a while I saw that my literary notes were a rambling and unwritable mess, so I went for the story of the bridge to 2053 and used engineer Phil Sperry’s guilt about his brainwashing in Alpha Centauri as my investigation of illusion.  But I finally saw that the amalgamated title Seven of Cups/Beyond DamnStar was again too much of a mouthful, that one would have to picture the Waite deck’s Seven of Cups and that the somewhat loopy “DamnStar” can’t carry the title anyway.

At first I wanted to use the word “illusion” in the title, but finally I decided that “illusion” connotes something confusing and tempting which is presented to you from the outside, as in the Seven of Cups Tarot card.  “Delusion” connotes something you’ve agreed to, something taken inside and made part of yourself; it’s more deeply rooted.  The AC’s–and Phil–seem more into delusion than illusion, even though the Seven of Cups card is more about illusion.

 I had also wanted to keep “beyond” in the final title, but in the original Beyond DamnStar, “beyond” had the meaning of temporal distance.  But used in, for example, “Beyond Delusion and Collapse,” the meaning changes to surmounting or transcending or recovering from, and creates too positive a title, almost a “feel good” sense.

So something blunt like Collapse and Delusion is more of a warning bell.  Putting “Delusion” first in the title would seem like a natural cause and effect thing, but putting “Collapse” first is stronger, as it questions the cause and effect, which happens to be germane to this novel.

copyright 2012 by Michael D. Smith

I’m not faulting abstract painting itself.  I’ve seen many powerful examples of abstract and I know that there can be numinous power in them–raw power speaking to existence itself.  And while some abstract works may just be pretty designs and lack any such power, what other artists do doesn’t concern me much now.  I’m really just looking to explore my own relation to abstract art.

Not only because I’ve seen great abstract art, and done abstracts myself that I feel have had real meaning, but also because I know other abstract artists with talent and sincere motivation, I wonder how to express my own new misgivings respectfully.  I want to be measured and fair, but I’m also aware that much of what I say about my own relation to abstract art applies to other abstract artists as well.

Is abstract art just pretty design?  Have I come to the end of what I was supposed to do with it?  Is there any real audience for abstract art–much less a “market”?  And why should I desire such a market?

Is it all overblown posturing?  Something fairly easy to churn out, even with the various aesthetic crises arising during any given painting?  Is it all overpriced?  Is talking about “abstract meaning” just a copout?  Is it a matter of seeing what you can get away with?  As opposed to novels, which imply a reader able and willing to follow the unfolding of a real story?

Is the purpose of abstract art to give the artist a career?  One that really doesn’t require too much effort?  How much loving care and search for real meaning goes into “an afternoon’s work worth $5,000?”  Is abstract art a vehicle for hiding your emotions?  Keeping it cool?  Who is fooling whom?  Has it all been done before?

Is it possible to articulate anything real about abstract art?  Stripped of fashionable jargon and meaningless artsy BS?  Can the abstracts go back to having an emotional, psychological function, and cease trying to lazily hint at some diffuse metaphysical gesture?

The amount of energy I’ve devoted to writing these past few years has made thinking about art harder.  I want a new visual expression, but aside from a feeling of weariness about recent trends in my own art, I’ve been drawing a blank about the next step.  Maybe there IS no next step–which also gives me pause.

In 2011 I finally realized a longstanding ambition to make giant mural-sized canvases, and wound up with four unstretched canvases that I hung at the Renner Frankford Library in August.  The final installation looked good, and I got a lot of good feedback from those who actually saw the hung paintings, as opposed to the digital images on sortmind.com.

But executing the paintings was mostly unsatisfying.  The first one may have been all I needed to do.  The use of unstretched canvas may have a venerable history, but I disliked the process of shoving paint onto the loose wrinkly surface, then struggling to pin the finished product vertically so I could see and evaluate it.  The second painting was OK, but was even more rushed than the first.  The third painting, the five foot by fifteen foot monster that I immediately knew was crap and then cut into two paintings, both overpainted into much better works, showed my limits: exhaustion, trying to conserve paint (these supplies get expensive!), simply “completing the assignment,” and, running through all the paintings, trying to quickly blast something out and hope that size alone will convey some monumental impact.

There was merit in at last exploring the idea of being an abstract mural painter.  I saw that I really was not up to the task, and didn’t have any clear conception of what to do with such a huge space.  Nor was the desire to learn and expand with this project really there.  So I really didn’t want to do extremely large abstracts after all!

In the 90’s I embraced the idea of a “metaphysical” abstract meaning, and my 90’s abstracts, many of them large at five by five or five by six feet, were sincere explorations.  Then came the idea (boneheaded in retrospect, but it seemed to flow easily at the time) that visual art would be my prime career energy, that I could make more selling one painting that was done in an afternoon than I could make from a novel I spent five years on.  I began showing at open shows, then got library shows, good feedback, and a certain amount of recognition.  And the paintings were good, there was nothing fraudulent about them.  With the force of some good shows behind me, I naturally assumed, as did those around me, that my primary calling was visual art and that I would make my way as an abstract artist, pursuing that metaphysical meaning.  This dovetailed with a scary decline of my writing energy, which I scarcely realized at the time.

I went over this in the blog post My Visual Art is Somehow Literary.  No need to repeat all of it here, but I can now more clearly see that the abstraction in my “career art” between 2000 and 2006 was a different mood, and while I still think highly of most of it and I advanced in technique and professionalism, learning how to hang shows, transport paintings, and sell art, a more and more purely mercenary mood started creeping in.  While monetary concerns are certainly not evil and are part of part of any artist’ s life, I did begin seeing how a quick afternoon’s work might be called upon to pay a month’s mortgage.  And how many afternoons did I have to spare, how much could I turn out in how much time?  When I did hit a solid meaning abstract such as July 2007’s A Tour of Raw Architectural Space, I’d find myself repeating it, seeking mechanical ways to reconstitute that energy.  The hassle and uncertainly inherent in those punishing day-long sessions is also a clue–the dreary cycle of getting into trouble with the painting and then desperation to redeem it.  Then there was accepting less-than-quality work as somehow “that’s the way it turned out to be,” and only realizing much later how much I hated it.

Where was the real psychological exploration?

I’m still proud of the abstract paintings I’ve done that do have power.  I don’t feel that any of the works I’ve sold, abstracts or figurative, have been low quality–and I feel their prices have been justified.  I definitely do not want to give the impression that I’ve been pulling the wool over the eyes of innocent buyers!

By 2011 Double Dragon Publishing had accepted The Martian Marauders and I’d been long aware that the real fun lay in writing.  So all in all it’s been OK to let visual art slide over the past several months.  I’ve done no paintings since last July.

But now I feel a vacuum: I remember the good side of the glorious painting energy–yet I now dread the energy drain hassle involved in setting aside a day to paint, I feel totally uncertain of what I might want to paint, I wonder if I even want to paint at all or do color pencil instead–and above all, the question of meaning comes in.

The meaning theme is the core of the entire abstract art crisis.  Being overwhelmed by the Rothko Chapel in April 1973 was my initiation into the existence of true abstract power.  But I basically have not felt much of it in my own work after 2000.  Exposure to other abstract artists’ work, as well as the scads of art I’ve seen in contests and in the galleries I’ve visited, and in the hopeful gallery-opening postcards I get, have not gotten me confused about my own visual style, which is like my own handwriting.  I’ve never worried about comparing my work to others’ except whenever I’ve pursued “career” in low energy.

But have I just been making pretty images of sixty watts of meaning when what I want is a novel’s entire nuclear reactor output?  When I wrote in a blog entry to ask the question, Is Abstract Art More Difficult?, was I really saying that abstract is difficult because I’ve made it into a chore?  With the result being some mysterious aesthetically balanced or correct image that passes muster enough to be sold to pay a month’s mortgage?  (And face it, we are often asking for three month’s mortgage.)  Have I raised the idea of “difficult” as being superior to having a blast doing something you love?

So I lost touch with “metaphysical” meaning to abstract art, and began to think of it as “good design” and even “easy work,” with paintings moving along a conveyor belt of bleary execution, the digital photo session, the long and admittedly fun creation of new web pages for the work, the email to the sortmind.com list, and hopefully a couple return emails saying “Cool.”

It should be obvious that all this is totally opposite my writing energy, where I enjoy every aspect of creating it, including the problems that come up, where my energy increases the more I do it, and where, when I send off queries or interact with my publisher, I feel confident and professional and in command of my art, knowing I can always learn more and keep growing.

I don’t feel any of that about visual art right now.  In fact, I hold my nose in disgust at the nonsense in almost every artist statement I’ve come across, at the corruption of speech about art, whether it’s in the media or from other artists.  There is so much delusion and misdirection and plain verbal laziness at the bizarre intersection of academia, galleries, and art publishers.  “My art explores the synergy of opposing diversities and postulates epicycles of awareness.”  I feel I’m stepping into nightclubs where I don’t belong, being offered weird drugs and introduced to people-in-the-know who don’t really seem to know anything.

I will repeat that I do think it’s true that trying to pull together an abstract composition that makes emotional sense can be much more difficult than executing a drawing of roses in a vase and then coloring it in.  Yet maybe that’s too simple after all: the difficult abstract might struggle to carry fifteen watts of meaning, and while the vase of roses might be simple to plan, as executed it may reveal deeper power–it might even be as numinous as the Rothko Chapel.

I’ve been hesitant to declare in manifesto style that abstract art is meaningless, because what if I do want to again pursue the abstract energy?  What if I want to improvise again?  I don’t want to limit my explorations by declaring what I will and won’t do.  Likewise I don’t want to declare a return to realism.  I know I’m a little out of shape for it, but I also know that I could quickly ramp it up if I desire.  But I definitely don’t want to return to what I used to do with painting and realism, which was a kind of mechanical paint by numbers execution.

I think what I’m truly rebelling against is 2D improvisation, no matter how much I admire Franz Kline or Rothko.  For me it’s become merely design and problem solving.  The redeeming feature to me of 2D abstract is when it can nevertheless suggest vast emotional space.  Instead it’s all too often a roiling mass of chaotic forces.

Just wanting an abstract painting to have meaning, and even giving it some metaphysical title, can’t impart that meaning to it.  The best titles suggest an approach to the painting.  They really can’t carry it, and in some cases the titles are so ridiculous that they degrade the actual physical image.

Changing from a metaphysical approach to a psychological one, in the same way I’ve geared up for psychological novels, may seem like a step down, but in doing the psychological I’m reengaging with what I can really touch as opposed to what increasingly looks like wishful thinking in the “metaphysical” realm.

The last few years of new honesty and deeper writing have set into motion whatever will be.  I do feel a desire for some real images, and considerations of how they come about are really secondary now.  I’ll just let it happen while paradoxically pushing it–as this writing is part of pushing it.

copyright 2012 by Michael D. Smith

For the paperback, click the Paperback button.  This will take you to lulu.com, where Double Dragon has set up a “Print of Demand” (POD) service.

If you prefer the eBook, click the Add to Cart button.  This will get you to the formats for Adobe PDF, Rocket eBook, MS Reader, Palm, HieBook, iSilo, Mobi Pocket (This is the format for the Kindle), HTML, and EPUB (for most eReaders including the Nook).

Double Dragon also has the second and third novels in the Jack Commer series in the pipeline: Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, and Nonprofit Chronowar, and I’m working on final edits for these now.

The eBook is also available from:

Barnes and Noble for the Nook
amazon.com for the Kindle
ReaderStore for the Sony Reader

Other book info:

ISBN-10: 1-55404-918-0
ISBN-13:  978-1-55404-918-9
Genre: Science Fiction/Fantasy/SF
eBook Length: 289 Pages
Published: January 2012

Again, comments and reviews of any stripe are most welcome!

In related news, I’ve been invited to discuss The Martian Marauders at the Teen Writer’s Workshop at the Frisco Public Library (Texas), on March 24th.  That should be fun; it will be my first authorial speaking experience.

copyright 2012 by Michael D. Smith

But this set of morale-boosting marching orders didn’t allow for a deeper evaluation of past writings, for the ability to declare certain works to be the practice or experimentation of a younger writer–and if you’re going to allow yourself to grow as a writer, your younger writer self might just be from a couple years ago!

Does every single thing I write have value for others?  That must be preposterous.  Am I honoring my entire past history as a writer by mechanically pushing everything I’ve ever done out the door?  Can I really demand payment for the effort I put into older works?

I was recently struck by two counter concepts to the manuscripts in motion paradigm.  One was from reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, in which he posits that approximately 10,000 hours of practice in any discipline are necessary for true mastery.  Although Gladwell focused on the 10,000 hours of computer software geniuses or the Beatles’ musical career, the example that truly rocked me was that of the violin students who practiced 4,000 hours and became high school music teachers, and the violin students who practiced 10,000 hours and went on to play in symphonies.

So … maybe we’re here to practice … a lot … and not to get hung up on any day’s particular practice.

The other example was taking a look through Ken Follett’s web site and looking at his descriptions of some of his early published works, several of which he declared he didn’t want to see republished.  You might say on one hand that a highly successful novelist can afford to disdain his early work, yet there are undoubtedly other successful writers, attached to their past practice, who would eagerly welcome the reissue of their entire life’s work in handsome leather-bound volumes with their gold-stamped signature on one hundred covers.  I think Follett is listing his early practice to honor his writing life, but he’s obviously not attached to the old works, and knows that it’s his future writing that really matters.

I think everyone has experienced the letdown of seeing some famous writer’s early work–or an incomplete manuscript tidied up after his or her death–and secretly wishing they’d never encountered it.  The value, the quality, with an occasional astonishing exception, is just not there.  I can remember my first adolescent reading of Lord of the Rings and being so enthralled by the concept of “Tolkien” that I eagerly bought Farmer Giles of Ham … I choked that dry mediocrity down like cardboard.  It made no impression on me other than that I could notch another Tolkien book consumed.  But that was a valuable lesson about publishers milking everything a successful author has written.  But since almost all authors have to write a lot of crap just to learn the craft, pouncing on the low quality stuff just drags their reputation down.  In the case of a famous author finishing an incomplete work of another freshly-departed famous author, well, we’re left to wonder who wrote it after all.

I had to retrace my steps back to the fork in the road where I chose to ramp up the “gotta get published” dazzle but in so doing inadvertently diminished my art honesty.  It was painful to confront the fact that much of what I’d been writing, and thought to blast out into the world under the zap of keep the manuscripts in motion was full of psychic errors, writer ego trip, disdain for the ideal reader, or just off, even sordidly off in some cases.  I knew I had to excavate back down to the ancient sunshine, and I spent a number of years revising several novels into what I hope are fun, high energy, and psychically solid works.  These include The Martian Marauders published by Double Dragon Publishing and the next two novels in the Jack Commer series, and it’s an honor to have a publisher and readers appreciate these efforts.

Even so, keep the manuscripts in motion still needs to be reevaluated.  A long period of dredging up older work for revision had left me spending more time looking the rearview mirror than was healthy–and while I don’t think I was ever feeling insecure about my further development, I was extremely glad when Seven of Cups/Beyond DamnStar, a fourth novel in the Jack Commer series, popped out over the past year.  It seemed to mark the conclusion of the entire revision-and-repair period, and also helped me see that not everything I had revised and repaired was necessarily something to keep in motion.  While I always knew that some of my novels were merely practice and had no real value for others, I’d kept a list of the ones I thought were publishable and was always half thinking that even some of the ungodly efforts might even be dressed up somehow, some way, some day.

So I was chagrined to see that even a couple of the ones I thought were publishable really weren’t of the quality I’d come to demand.  Keep the manuscripts in motion would have me do a final edit and blast ’em off, but a new consideration arose: suppose I did get one of these “not quite my best” novels published?  And what if it were available on Barnes and Noble and amazon.com right next to my best work?  Suppose someone bought a “not quite” and justifiably wrote me off as low quality and never saw the good stuff?  In shock I realized that trying to push out something not quite right is actually a pollution of your writing life.

It also made me realize that I may have sampled other authors who dropped some dry tasteless peach into an otherwise luscious fruit basket and, since that’s the one I happened to bite into, I wrote them off once and for all.

It’s a new concept to consider that novels I put a lot of work into may be useful failures.  That it was good to revisit and rework their energies, but that they’re not something I deeply want to publish or should attempt to.  I have a growing sense that the quality itself is all that matters, the heart of every writing I’ve ever found joy in, and that sane publishing and marketing from that foundation is worthwhile.  But if not, it’s all shilling, throwing a lot of crap in the air and hoping some of it sticks … where?  And why?

Another realization that spun out of this new thinking was that I’m done with trying to market stories.  Forget ’em.  I’m a novelist, not a short story writer, and all the sage advice about starting your career by writing and publishing stories in little magazines to get your Wright Brothers career biplane aloft has been a horror for me.  I do have one recent story I like a lot (“Perpetual Starlit Night”) and I haven’t ruled out an occasional journey into that format, but basically, I gravitate to the long story arc of a novel.

Just because I’ve “completed” something and it seems “good” to me, it’s still my responsibility not to add mediocrity or “the merely competent” to the publishing milieu.  Of the fourteen novels and two novellas I’ve written, one is published and two are scheduled for publication–all these are my best efforts.  Three others, CommWealth, Akard Drearstone, and The Soul Institute, are also top quality and I have no qualm about sending them out.  My novella The First Twenty Steps is also an example of my best work, and I have no regrets about self-publishing it on PubIt and amazon.com.  That leaves eight works I can consider as practice, and I can relax knowing I don’t have to fool with any of them.  And unless I happen to get a high energy insight about how to rewrite one, I’ll devote my future energies to new explorations.

Fixing up the rusted hulks in the dark garage out back might be a fun hobby, useful and educational in its own way, but I’m no longer needing to spend time on them–and I’m certainly not about to slap a fresh coat of paint on them and call them completed.  New writing obviously has not been written yet, so it’s scary.  Enough said.  That’s always the case.  You don’t need to be Babe Ruth pointing to the center field fence about this.  You don’t have to boast of new writing.  It’s either there or it’s not–but I’m betting it’s there.

copyright 2012 by Michael D. Smith

The Martian Marauders,

http://www.double-dragon-ebooks.com/single.php?ISBN=1-55404-918-0

The book sells for $5.99, but as long as it remains “new” the price is $5.09.

I’m excited to be participating in the e-publishing revolution (which has a curious, synergistic tie to my duties as Technology Librarian at McKinney Public Library) with this book and with my earlier experiments with self-publishing my novella The First Twenty Steps on Barnes and Noble’s PubIt and amazon.com’s Kindle Direct Publishing.

Double Dragon also has the second and third novels in the Jack Commer series in the pipeline: Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, and Nonprofit Chronowar, and I’m working on final edits for these now.

The Martian Marauders – Synopsis

A series of inexplicable solar system disasters in the near future, including exploding gas giants and asteroids hurled into the sun, forces a panicky acceleration of space technology and weaponry.  But humanity has not learned much from Mars exploration and the discovery of Star Drive, and by 2033 the United System Space Force has not only wrecked the earth with the planet-destabilizing Xon bomb, but in evacuating the remnants of Earth’s population to Mars, has also somehow overlooked an indigenous, intelligent race which is quite displeased by the arrival of two billion shellshocked humans.

By June 2034 the native Martians have risen in rebellion, led by their new human emperor, the traitor Sam Hergs. Amid family squabbles arising from the presence of four Commer brothers aboard his ship, Captain Jack Commer finds himself in the deep Martian desert battling Martian insurgents armed with shatterguns that crack their victims into millions of jagged pieces of glass.

How to purchase

At the top of the purchase page, the links for US (United States) and CA (Canada) take you to the iTunes store for either country.

Otherwise, to get to the formats for Adobe PDF, Rocket eBook, MS Reader, Palm, HieBook, iSilo, Mobi Pocket (This is the format for the Kindle), HTML, and EPUB (This last is the new standard and will work for most eReaders including the Nook), click the Add to Cart button.

You will need to create a free Double Dragon account or log into an existing one before you complete a purchase.  The process is similar to ordering a book through amazon.com (add to cart, then check out, then pay, then download), but the site does direct you to a third-party e-commerce site and then returns you to Double Dragon for the actual download.  You can use credit or debit card, or PayPal.

Once your purchase has been completed, the eBook title will automatically be moved to your eBook Shelf.  From there you’ll see the option to download in the above formats.  Choose EPUB for most eReaders.

(By the way, you can rate the novel with the links to the left–but you don’t need to do that before reading it!  The novel will persist on your eBook Shelf and you can download it again in different formats if you wish, as well as eventually rate anything on your shelf.)

When you get the dialog box that asks whether you want to Open or Save, I recommend clicking “Save” and just downloading it to the place of your choice on your computer.  That’s how I got the EPUB version. (”Open” may work, but didn’t seem to want to for me.)

Using the EPUB as an example: when you open your newly-saved file (9781554049189.epub), Adobe Digital Editions opens and from there you can drag it to your eReader in Library View.  Or you can read it in Adobe Digital Editions.

If you do not yet have the free Adobe Digital Editions software, I am positive some dialog box will pop up and offer this to you!  It should also prompt you to create an Adobe ID.

The Mobi Pocket format (file name 1-55404-918-0.prc) should open in your Kindle (You can simply copy it from your computer to the Kindle via USB) or your Kindle emulator on your PC. 

The book is also available from Barnes and Noble and amazon.com.

Any and all comments you might care to make, positive or negative, are welcome!  I’ve learned a lot about e-publishing and writing in the last year but there is always more to grasp.

copyright 2012 by Michael D. Smith

copyright 2012 by Michael D. Smith

 Because:

1) Reading and evaluating a novel involves a commitment to spend a great deal of time with a work.  We all evaluate whatever we’re reading–we do so every second we’re reading, from page one to the end, usually two hundred or more pages, at perhaps between ten and sixty pages an hour.  We evaluate the worth of these verbal constructions to our own lives, whether for entertainment or learning or understanding. Reading is work, and so is evaluating the worth of what we’re reading.  It’s not undertaken lightly.

2)  We need to establish trust with the author, and while that trust can only finally be fully established through the process of reading and evaluating, it can at least be heralded via some form of a letter of introduction.  If you don’t have that letter of introduction, your work is regarded as a threat to a reader’s time.  He or she will regard the list of novels on your web site with distrust.  But if another person you trust tells you that you must read this book, you’re be inclined to approach it with a similar trust.  If a reputable publishing company markets the book, you’re also predisposed to consider the work with trust.  But as has been affirmed repeatedly, word of mouth is the most powerful means of communicating trust in a work.  The Internet translation of that term, “going viral,” has come to have the connotation of “the latest distraction of the hour.”  Which is quite a different matter.

The quality of the writing itself is all that matters.  And sooner or later, one person, then two, then three, then more, start finding the worth of your work.  That’s how it must be.  Your own letter of introduction to your work really doesn’t mean too much.  Because no one takes your word for it.

copyright 2011 by Michael D. Smith

Sending query letters to literary agents was one of my more useless wastes of time and energy, but one submission–and it might have been the last one to an agent, a couple years ago–brought me up short and made me clarify myself.

The agent had a detailed online form and it was almost like a job interview filling it out.  I couldn’t rely on my glib query letter after a while–I was being asked things about my purpose and qualifications, about marketing, possible competing titles, and my proposed audience, and it was such a struggle to keep up that, after finishing as best I could, I finally thanked the agent in the comments section for having such a challenging web form.

But the most important insight to come out of looking at that form was that I finally realized that the word “metaphysical,” which I’d been using to describe my work, is nonsensical.  I really have no idea what I mean by “metaphysical,” and I’m not sure anyone else does, either.  It may mean “spiritual,” pertaining to spirit or soul matters, but it can mean so many different things–most of them having to do with “weird”–that I saw how idiotic it was to rely on it as an introduction to my work.

So I misused “metaphysical” both in writing query letters and in trying to state what my visual art is about.  “Psychological” sounds truer.  I’ve always loved the idea of “psychological novels.”  Even when I do get into “spiritual territory,” I’m always coming at it from a human psyche’s side.

When I was a student at Rice I came up with a concept that has always stuck with me, finally fully returning with some force within the last couple years.  It started as the title of a painting I’d just completed.

“There is a super colossal mess jungle going on.  It’s my business to get involved with it, any way I can.”

I was admitting there that about all I could define of the outer universe was that it was a whirlwind of fascinating light and dark energy, some of it ordered, much of it in chaos.  But the statement gave me a purpose.  First, I could not shrink back into my introverted soul and play head games; I actually owed it to myself to mix myself with the scary outer.  Secondly, a method was proposed, i.e., “any way I can,” which would include whatever I could invent, whatever resources I could find: fiction, poetry, the journal, essays, drawings, paintings, sculptures–as long as there was real involvement with whatever was really going on and not just clever designs or tiny, meandering, self-absorbed stories.  It wasn’t a quest to create some immense philosophical overview or really understand the chaotic forces, but simply to interact with them in whatever way was appropriate for this lifetime’s personality.

For some time I’ve shunned the word “literary,” which to my mind has been polluted with a sense of Upper Caste, Award Winning, and Certified by the Literati–none of which qualifications apparently exempt some “literary” works from being godawful boring, fake, and/or inconsequential.  Sometimes “literary” is called “general” or “mainstream” fiction, apparently to tone down the haughtiness.  But an honest meaning of “literary” is probably what I meant all along by “metaphysical.”  I may make use of science fiction, fantasy, or absurdist elements, but I’m not necessarily working in those genres.  Even if someone picks up my book and says it is those things.

I do think there’s a trend–and really, it can only be healthy–for writers to want to get established in a certain genre like science fiction, mystery, or young adult, because the demand is high for such fiction.  Editors and readers more or less know what they’re getting before they start reading.  But I’ve read many recent works in these genres that have been overwhelming in their investigations of the human psyche.  The authors have chosen to bypass the fabrication of hoary, highfalutin, Pulitzer-chasin’ works.  Instead they courageously explore, and contribute to, the Super Colossal Mess Jungle.  And that strikes me as a higher and truer “literary” accomplishment.

copyright 2011 by Michael D. Smith