Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

A Writing Biography, Part VIII: The Exoskeleton, Archiving, Publishing, The Blog, and the Long Novels, 2011-2023

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Michael D. SmithJanuary 16, 2025

The period from March 2011, when The Martian Marauders was accepted for publication, to January 2023, retirement from the library, already finds expression in the blog, but I hope to pull together more insight here. It’s tempting to just narrate a timeline, but a catalog of drafts, inputs, scanning, and publishing merely checks off accomplishment boxes; it’s no substitute for growing and understanding. Part VIII will focus on themes.

I banked my painting energies during this time, calling a halt to solo shows, though I still painted and continued to place works in group shows. I also drew scores of novel character images for the website and blog, and turned a childhood story, “Trip to Mars,” into a fun picture book. But the primary urge was my writing. Following are its themes.

Theme 1. The Exoskeleton

The Writing Biographies haven’t allotted much space to the major decision I made in 1981, after seven years of enervating insurance accounting work, to find a better method of supporting my art. Librarianship, 1981-2023, succeeded–but also had its drawbacks, as I outlined in the 2023 blog post, “The Exoskeleton”:

To support my art, in 1981 I developed what I called a “world structure” around a library career. It became a complex, evolving exoskeleton which sustained my art life well. Despite a few times when I probably admired the exoskeleton a little too much, and veered a bit off course, I stayed faithful with my art.

I’ve often maintained that the deleterious effects of my library world structure were simply the waste of time and energy that could have been spent on art and writing. But now I see another issue: the type of energy demanded. Keeping up with the endless problem-solving and decision-making, ranging from trivial daily concerns to the momentous issues that either bolster or threaten your career, as well as the unceasing interaction with people, their expectations, ambitions, and conflicts.

The Exoskeleton copyright 2023 by Michael D. Smith

The 2023 sketch

The following blog satire from 2016, Crisis! Restructure Major Metropolitan Library!, gives a hint at the career stress. Lest the reader scoff at the concept that library work is stress-free (so many candidates came to interviews armed with that erroneous concept), let me emphasize that while library work isn’t a life and death matter, any profession has its unique stresses that jar the human nervous system with similar flight or fight responses. The library world has confronted massive technological, social, and cultural changes over the past several decades, and daily addressing the needs of literally hundreds of people of all backgrounds and ages is extremely challenging. Then add municipal government, business fads, library websites, marketing, programming, and endless new gadgets to access an increasingly problematic Internet. While the Exoskeleton gave a background structure to my writing and painting–and a host of interesting topics to write about–in some ways it actually weakened them. The metaphor was:

Consider an astronaut who’s been in space for a year, but despite all his exercise in orbit, when he finds himself back on Earth he’s unable to walk.

Thus my goal in retirement the last couple years has been to rectify any artistic bone/muscle loss. There’s still so much to learn and to develop.

One aspect of the library world dovetailed with my art. I set up both an adult writers’ group and a teen writers’ group at the library and was delighted with the interaction with writers of all ages. We traded advice and learned much from each other.

After leaving webmaster and network administrator duties at Dallas Public Library in 2001, I found myself strangely outside technology for a few years, but around 2010 I reacquainted myself with Nooks, Kindle, iPhones, and eBooks as I could make use of them and teach them to library patrons. These refurbished tech skills neatly coincided with my 2011 publishing breakthroughs.

I’d long planned retirement from the library for January 2023, and while I was yet unaware of some of the Exoskeleton’s dubious side effects, I knew the change meant that both my writing and art would continue to evolve.

Theme 2. The Mike Archives

I’d long wanted digital backup of all my writing. In 2011 I picked up the pace, scanning a variety of older stories, letters, and essays, and by 2024 managed to scan to PDF or Word almost everything I’ve written. I’ll never return to much of this but I still want those digital copies. Though I’ve sometimes remonstrated myself for past-tripping, I’ve usually found buried energy in the older works. Even if some of this got a bit obsessive, it all has been a necessary prelude to new work.

In the following list of this era’s archives, items in bold are revisions I eventually published:

3/22/11-3/27/11: “An Introduction to Synthetic Thinking”(1979), scanned/OCR’d
5/19/11-5/26/11: “Helium Street” (1977), scanned/OCR’d
5/19/11-7/13/12: Akard Draft One (1976-1978) scanned/OCR’d
6/29/11-7/9/11: The Holy Dark Ages (1977 novella) edits
7/26/11: “The Martian Holes” (1975) scan/print
7/26/11-7/28/11: “Emerson’s Vast Hotel” (1972) scan/print
7/31/11: Executed Beauty (1983 novella) title changed to The Psychobeauty
8/5/11-9/14/11: The Soul Institute 2011, Draft 5A
8/21/11: The Fifty-First State of Consciousness (1973) reformatting
8/21/11: Nova Scotia (1973) reformatting
9/14/11-9/16/11: The Soul Institute, Draft 5B
10/8/11-11/9/11: Akard Drearstone 2011, Draft 10
3/30/12: “Trip to Mars” (1964 story) edits
6/20/12-6/23/12: “Roadblock” (1981) edits/print
6/28/12-7/26/12: CommWealth 2012 edits
7/14/12-12/28/13: Trip to Mars the Picture Book illustrations
9/6/12-11/27/12: Akard Drearstone 2012, Draft 11
3/14/13-4/21/13 “Damage Patrol” (1984) revision
5/17/13-7/26/13 Journal 2008 input
5/25/13-5/27/13 100 Dreams scanned/edited
7/6/13 2009-2013 journals to single-file manuscripts
12/14/13: CommWealth 2013 edits
12/16/13-12/5/14: The Soul Institute 2014, Draft 6
2/18/14-3/2/14: Journal 2007 input
10/3/14: “Existence” (1967) input
10/6/14: “The Saga of Billy Bam, Basketball Star” (1967) input
10/3-10/11: Input of eight other minor 1967-era stories
12/7/14-1/1/15: Journal #1, 1969-1971 input
12/27/14: “The Individual” (1970) scanned/edited
12/27/14: “The Mathematician” (1970) scanned/edited
12/31/14: “Sam is Coming Home” (1970) input
12/31/14: “The Salamander Raid” (1968) scanned/edited
12/28/14: “War is Hades!” (1969) scanned/edited
12/28/14: “The Perfect Cube” (1968) scanned/edited
1/2/15-1/3/15: “Sam is Coming Home” (1987) scanned/edited
1/11/15: “Underground” (1971 Version 2) scanned/edited
1/18/15: “Underground” (1971 Version 3) scanned/edited
11/13/15-11/15/15: The Soul Institute Draft 1
12/17/15-12/18/15: Alternate Soul Institute created from The Soul Institute Draft 1
2/18/16-3/26/16: Journal 1971 input
4/9/16-8/14/16: Sortmind 2016, Draft 7
10/15/16: “Randy and Laura” edits
10/24/16-4/15/21: Nine Archetypes, experimental fiction from novel drafts
12/20/16-1/8/17: Journal 2006 input
2/2/17-3/5/17: Trip to Mars 2017 formatting for publication
2/19/17-5/24/17: Ocean Singe Horror retitled Jump Grenade, Draft 2
5/25/17-7/17/17: Akard Drearstone 2017, Draft 12
7/17/17-10/21/17: Akard Drearstone 2017
8/25/17-12/21/17: Sortmind Draft 8
12/22/17-2/11/19: Sortmind Draft 9 to MS.
1/30/18-2/23/18: Journal 1972 input
2/28/18-3/2/18: “The Desirable Fuck” (1972) scanned/edited
2/28/18-3/2/18: “Father/Children” (1972) scanned/edited
2/28/18-3/2/18: “A Playful Story” (1972) scanned/edited
2/28/18-3/2/18: “Elaborate Pantomime” (1972) scanned/edited
2/28/18-3/2/18: “Larry Jones, Businessman” (1972) scanned/edited
4/21/18-4/25/18: The Blue Notebook eBook Project (childhood stories)
1/23/19-4/20/19: Journal 1973 input
3/2/19-3/12/19: 1973 letters scanned
3/31/19-4/9/19: 1973 Journal-Like Writings scanned/OCR’d
4/20/19-4/22/19: “The Cleaveriad” (1973) scanned/OCR’d
6/29/19-8/4/19: Jump Grenade Draft 3
8/4/19-9/30/19: Jump Grenade Draft 4 to MS.
12/18/19-9/6/21: “Perpetual Starlit Night” proposed as novel
12/21/19-1/1/20: Akard Draft One Print Project
4/14/20-4/20/20: Journal 2004 input
3/11/21-3/25/21: The UR Jack Commer creation to final MS.
1/18/22-2/4/22: Journal 2003 input

Theme 3: Publishing and Self-Publishing

January 2011 saw my foray into self-publishing with The First Twenty Steps, and then the unbelievable acceptance in March of The Martian Marauders by Double Dragon Publishing. I was delighted to at last be part of the publishing world. I told some staff at work, but it wasn’t until a coworker graciously brought it up in a staff meeting did it sink in that my world had shifted.

I was further encouraged when Deron Douglas, the publisher, announced he would accept new series novels if they maintained quality. So on April 28th I sent this email:

I’ve gotten on to the Double Dragon Authors site (and have requested access to the Promoting site), and I saw your April 12th post about multi-book series. I do have two more books in the Jack Commer series after The Martian Marauders: these are Jack Commer, Supreme Commander (59,100 words), and Nonprofit Ladies (81,000 words). I would definitely like to submit them to you whenever you would like.

They are both completed, with various kinds of short and long synopses also finished. I recently had revised all three to be fully congruent with each other, and I’m happy with the results; I think there’s good quality here. I’m now about halfway through a fourth novel in the series, and am finding that each book can zero in on different characters and probe their psyches more.

By May 3rd I had contracts for those. This was all stunning. I also had the experience of writing to another publisher still holding Jack Commer, Supreme Commander to request it be withdrawn from consideration.

Deron assigned an editor who sent me her Martian Marauders edits in late December 2011. This was my first experience using Word review/markup; though at the time I thought this last-minute editing was a normal part of the process, this was really my first hint of her tendency to procrastinate; hey, the book is to be published in ten days! But overall I was always pleased to work with her; she made some great suggestions and never tried to rewrite my novels. An ironic aspect of this process was the number of typos that went unacknowledged by both of us.

Yet I had a disheartening evening early in January 2012, right before publication. I later dismissed it, especially as it seemed a blip in the overall ecstatic feeling of publication, but to my consternation I now received fully edited versions of Jack Commer, Supreme Commander and Nonprofit Ladies from another editor Deron had engaged for those two books.

I was stunned by the number of changes in the first few pages of each book, and soon understood that the new editor had essentially rewritten the novels in a style I hardly recognized as my own. The changes actually seemed irrational and I felt the books were seriously marred. I gamely tried to hack the first pages of each book back to some semblance of my style, but it was overwhelming and I gave up. For some reason I didn’t feel I could approach Deron about this–he must have paid this new editor, right?–but I did email my concerns to my first editor, who intervened wondrously and decisively, writing Deron and copying me a screed about the author’s right to his own words. Deron then graciously allowed her to take over the editing for the second and third books.

In any case, I was thrilled to have a Martian Marauders eBook for sale with a fantastic science fiction theme cover which the multi-talented Deron created himself. I quickly made a publication blog post and updated my Martian Marauders webpage. But, unsure how this book’s evolution from an eighth-grade novel attempt would play with buyers, I deleted that background. Later I saw it as nothing to be ashamed of and expanded the book’s history in a blog post, The Irregular Origin of The Martian Marauders.

I wrote Deron on February 5th about my idea for a title change:

I wanted to ask you what you thought of changing the title to Nonprofit Chronowar. Seeing The Martian Marauders published got me thinking (a lot more seriously than I had previously) about how titles are perceived by the buying 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.

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, marrying the two concepts in an interesting phrase that says “science fiction.” 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.

Deron replied that he welcomed anything that would strengthen the SF motif, and I felt better and better about my four-book series.

A paperback edition of The Martian Marauders followed in March. I’d assumed the eBook would need to demonstrate decent sales before a paperback was issued, but there it was. I was delighted with the arrival of a box of Martian Marauders paperbacks to give away and hawk at book festivals.

A librarian put in a word for me with the Frisco Public Library’s teen writing group, and in March I gave a short presentation there. I didn’t come to promote my book, just to demonstrate what was possible. What I really recall was the kids’ energies and ideas. I asked them how many wanted to write novels, and every hand shot up. That surprised me, as I would’ve thought it would be one-third poetry, one-third stories, and the third wanting to write novels would probably hide their hands. This inspired me to start a teen writing group at McKinney Public Library, where I saw equally intoxicating energies.

On May 14th Double Dragon accepted the fourth Jack Commer novel, Collapse and Delusion. Then Jack Commer, Supreme Commander was published in August. Another lovely cover, starring Jack’s wife Amav. But I was horrified to find a typo on the first page–then I discovered astonishing typos in both The Martian Marauders and Jack Commer. My Martian Marauders villain Sam Hergs had 39 instances of the incorrect possessive form of Herg’s!

I’d naively assumed that any manuscript I sent was without blemish. Or that an editor would catch minor ones. And I had no idea that, as you hurried to meet deadlines, you could easily make further mistakes in the act of correcting errors. I rather overburdened Deron with correction requests until I understood how burdensome it was for him to try to keep up with these changes from all his numerous authors.

In October, rereading the newly-titled Nonprofit Chronowar, I was struck again by remnants of the unintended sense of vulgarity I thought I’d fixed in November 2006, described in A Writing Biography, Part VII. I saw I could fix that by cutting one chapter and changing some other references. My editor agreed and I spent a couple days tightening and improving the book. It came out in May 2013 with another great Deron cover; I’d suggested the spaceships in an email but his take on it was awesome.

During 2013 I made other publishing inroads: Double Dragon had accepted my story “Perpetual Starlit Night” for its recurring story anthology, and it came out in Twisted Tails VII: Irreverence in February. Meanwhile I struck up correspondence with fellow Double Dragon authors, and one suggested the Ether Books website where my story “Roadblock” was published in December. The Book Daily website also reprinted three of my blog posts.

Another Double Dragon author steered me towards a title published by Class Act Books. I was still looking to traditional publishing and I was impressed with this title’s cover; in fact, I’d begun ruling out submitting manuscripts to web publishers displaying mediocre-looking covers. So I submitted my novel CommWealth to Class Act and it was accepted in September 2014, with a 2015 publication date. I was on a roll.

Meanwhile I came to terms with my websites. I’d been using WordPress for the blog but was still tied to FrontPage for my main site. I made hundreds of painful manual edits along with some rudimentary CSS to get the site looking solid, but it was obvious the manual era was over. I considered Joomla and Drupal for a new platform, but finally went with the WordPress I was familiar with; as usual I wasn’t curious about how things worked, I just wanted to create content. I converted sortmind.com entirely in 2015, and in October added another sub-site, press.sortmind.com, for Sortmind Press, intended as a more business-oriented platform.

At this time I began to find what could go wrong in publishing. My Double Dragon editor had some serious personal issues that kept postponing work on Collapse and Delusion. Though I sympathized with her, by early 2016, four years after submitting the final MS., I found myself pleading for some progress. Coincidentally, it turned out that she also worked for Class Act and the upcoming August 2015 publication date for CommWealth spurred her to finish that book for Class Act by late July.

I’ll return to Class Act, but to cut back to Collapse and Delusion, I finally wrote Deron about the situation; he said he was no longer using editors and that competent beta readers would work. So I engaged my wife Nancy and my new McKinney Public Library friend Kara Wilson, a fellow SF author, and got a polished MS. off to Deron in May 2016. Meanwhile I sent my editor a note I hoped was gracious, informing her we were taking both Collapse and Delusion and the fifth Jack Commer novel, The Wounded Frontier, off her hands, and said: “I’ve internalized much of what you’ve contributed to these works and this has provided a good foundation for my future writing and for examining the finished works with new tools.”

Collapse and Delusion came out in July 2016 with another great science fiction cover. It was also the first book to rein in the italicization and came off as the cleanest Jack Commer yet.

My interaction with Class Act Books in 2015 was a major prod to self-publishing. First of all, in contrast to what attracted me to this publisher in the first place–the other author’s excellent cover–the artist’s first cover for CommWealth was exceedingly mediocre. When I sent my painting “Property” as a suggestion for revision, the artist decided to use it instead. This was flattering; though the resulting new cover wasn’t overpowering, it worked decently.

In late July my editor finished CommWealth; I approved her corrections and she forwarded the manuscript to the publisher, who did a final copyedit. But what followed was much more extreme than the clumsy January 2012 editor pawings at Jack Commer and Nonprofit Ladies.

A few days before publication I got the CommWealth PDF galley and was told editing was done, but that I could note corrections on a separate Word document. But the “copyediting” threw the novel into chaos. Basically the book looked machine-edited, searching and replacing exclamation points with periods, removing almost all italic emphasis (though this influenced the reduction of italics in Collapse and Delusion), and making arbitrary changes to virtually every paragraph. Not only did it make the characters sound as if they were on Valium, it also introduced errors like:

“Don’t break the screen. I’m not gonna clean up that glass.” Jill said.

“Jill.” he whispered fiercely.

“Lisa. God, I love you.” Allan laughed, moving to grab her.

Other introduced errors included:

What a profile…that long dark hair and those piercing dark eyes…that blue bicycle shirt over his lean hard tors…— I’m not really shopping for a man, am I?

“Huh…?” Who cares about steady work? Everyone’s fixed for life with CommWealt, ahe’s beautiful.

Forensic Squad cab take turns always asking for it back.

These are only a few examples in just the first twenty pages and I wrote the publisher a long email in protest. Although I was ready to pull the book, losing the $200 for the cover and processing, I recalled an old piece of advice for complaints, which is to place your desired outcome in the first sentence:

Is there any way to return to the version the editor and I worked on in July and which she sent back to you early August? I’m not sure where the new edits came from but I’m finding that the whole tone of the novel is now so seriously off that it doesn’t even seem like my own writing.

The publisher relented and CommWealth was published as I wanted on August 15th. I was happy with it, though I didn’t sell a single copy from their website or through Amazon. Still, I did sell a few at book fairs.

The best thing about Class Act was its publicist, who got its authors web interviews. I did several and they were all hard yet fun work. But in early 2020 our publicist notified us that Class Act was apparently dead, its site moribund and its publisher unresponsive. I tried the publisher several times via email and letter, requesting her to pull CommWealth, but never got a reply. I even spent a long time doing obituary searches but turned up nothing. I sent copyright infringement protests to both Scribd and Amazon, and their Class Act pages were soon mercifully gone, leaving me clear to finally self-publish CommWealth with a round of improvements and a much better cover.

The Class Act expedience was quite educational and I’m not bitter about it. In addition to getting those great interviews, becoming aware of my italics overuse, and seeing what could be done to address untoward situations, it pushed me to self-publishing and boosted my confidence as a writer.

Double Dragon published the fifth and sixth books in the Jack Commer Series in 2018, The Wounded Frontier and The SolGrid Rebellion, with Deron incorporating my character images into the covers. But I think by this time most Double Dragon authors knew the end was coming. In July 2020 Deron informed his authors that he was selling Double Dragon to a British publisher. But since rights reverted to me and I wanted full control over my work, I opted not to go the British route. I bought rights to the six covers along with seven ISBNs for self-publishing the first six novels plus the seventh I’d been working on, Balloon Ship Armageddon.

I redid the series, not only to correct typos and excessive italics but to revamp the chronology to start in 2028 instead of 2021–just six months away! 2028 gave me some breathing space, but science fiction allowed me to rejuvenate all the characters, and despite earlier action still occurring from 2028 on, the characters now scheme and strive in the 2070s. I’m done with Jack Commer anyway, with a branch series, Supreme Commander Laurie, now underway.

It took me time to rethink traditional publishing with its lottery-ticket luck, popular tropes, good editors and bad. I’d sent one query for The Soul Institute in 2011 and one for Akard Drearstone in 2012, both mentioning my new credits with Double Dragon; their rejections didn’t hurt my pride but contributed to the sense that traditional publishing was a system beyond my control. I had much I wanted to accomplish instead of waiting indefinitely for my luck to break. My readiness to dump Class Act in 2015 and self-publish CommWealth, as I’d learned to do with The First Twenty Steps in 2011, was the turning point.

Now, much more wary of small new independent publishers dying in three years after selling zero copies of an author’s work, I finished my flagship novel The Soul Institute and published it on Amazon and Smashwords in December 2015. Using Sortmind Press felt right and I’ve never looked back. With a sense of things moving in the right direction, I feel none of the desperation to publish I had in earlier eras.

In 2017 I published Akard Drearstone and in 2019 Sortmind and Jump Grenade, the original idea of which came from a ninth-grade story. 2021 saw Balloon Ship Armageddon and the Jack Commer companion books The UR Jack Commer, a compilation of Jack origin stories, and The Balloon Ship Interviews, twelve character interviews originally posted to the blog. I’ve made little attempt to market those small paperbacks; I figure if anyone buys the complete Jack Commer series at a book fair I’ll toss them in for free.

The Damage Patrol Quartet in late 2021 pulled together four of my best stories; “Roadblock,” “Randy and Laura, “Perpetual Starlit Night,” and “Damage Patrol.” I’d briefly toyed with expanding “Perpetual Starlit Night” into a novel but finally saw that the story was perfect in itself. The collection came off well, even though I’d long ago decided that novels were my expression.

Marketing arose as a new task: websites, blogs, book fairs, interviews, sales, Amazon and other venues, eBooks and paperbacks and hardbacks, social media, and the much-resisted need for “branding” myself. Am I a science fiction author or a literary author? Should Michael D. Smith have a clever pseudonym? How do I present myself?

I set up the Writers’ Exchange group to discuss these aspects with other writers and treasured the interaction. After all these years of experimenting I feel comfortable with the self-publishing process, though there’s always much to learn. Of course I have to consider my current rank on Amazon (The Martian Marauders now at #7,300,960), low sales, lack of worldwide fame and shattering influence on twenty-first-century American culture.

But despite the lack of standard success I’ve been satisfied with my journey. I have some new novels to write and I’m looking forward to the total artistic control I’ll continue to assert. To quote from one of my favorite blog posts, What Does Your Muse Think of Your Writing Career?:

… somehow I have been prevented/preserved for this time. That my writing life is developing exactly the way it should have–in obscurity, protecting me from my own BS until I finally learned how to face reality and be honest with myself. From here on out I have the possibility of giving a gift to others.

I now seem to have a “writing life” instead of a “writing career.” That has made a real difference to me.

My Works Published by Other Publishers During this Period

The Martian Marauders, Double Dragon Publishing, 2012
Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, Double Dragon Publishing, 2012
“Perpetual Starlit Night,” Double Dragon Publishing in Twisted Tails VII, 2013
Nonprofit Chronowar, Double Dragon Publishing, 2013
“Roadblock, ” Ether Books website, 2013
Take My Word for It, republished on the Book Daily website, 7/10/13
On the Essential Meaninglessness of the Word “Metaphysical” retitled “Unfocused Queries” and republished on the Book Daily website, 7/31/13
How Do you Deal With Your Backlog?, retitled “Should you publish your backlog?” and republished on the Book Daily website, 9/30/13
CommWealth, Class Act Books, 2015
Collapse and Delusion, Double Dragon Publishing, 2016
The Wounded Frontier, Double Dragon Publishing, 2018
The SolGrid Rebellion, Double Dragon Publishing, 2018

Sortmind Press Self-Publishing 2011-2021

Showing minor revision uploads as I kept learning what works best:

The First Twenty Steps, 2011
The Soul Institute, 2015, 2020, 2024
Akard Drearstone, 2017
Sortmind, 2019
Jump Grenade, 2019
The Martian Marauders (Jack Commer Book 1), 2020, 2023
Jack Commer, Supreme Commander (Jack Commer Book 2), 2020, 2023
Nonprofit Chronowar (Jack Commer Book 3), 2020, 2023
CommWealth, 2020, 2023
Collapse and Delusion (Jack Commer Book 4), 2020, 2023
Trip to Mars, the Picture Book, 2017
The Wounded Frontier (Jack Commer Book 5), 2020, 2023
The SolGrid Rebellion (Jack Commer Book 6), 2020, 2023
Balloon Ship Armageddon (Jack Commer Book 7), 2021, 2023
The UR Jack Commer, 2021
The Balloon Ship Interviews, 2021
The Damage Patrol Quartet, 2021

Theme 4: The Blog Voice

An early post, The Blog Evolving into the Entire Journey, described the blog becoming a new writing voice:

I foresee the blog gradually becoming a specialized body of work, and it should all be current, despite the past dates. Let it evolve on its own. Dare to make a few mistakes along the way.

The best thing so far about the sortmind blog is its mixture of essays and stories and art: creative work juxtaposed with ruminations on it. I want the blog to be a good overview of my writing and visual art, as well as the processes I use. An accessible repository of sample writing, drawing, and painting.

In no way do I conceive of this blog as anything like “social networking.” I can appreciate how blogs have developed as structured personal websites with comment and networking capability, but I just want to master the game as self-expression, and see where it leads.

My journal-writing and my essay-writing voices are personal. The blog created a combination journal- and letter-writing voice, and I want it to be as clear and direct as possible. The reader should know where I’m coming from and hopefully receive something valuable.

Most posts are reflections on writing or art processes; some are marketing, announcements, or reviews. Excerpts from novels and character drawings market a book but try to give something back. Each of the eight writing biographies describes a topic I’ve needed to explore. I dreaded starting each one, fearing there was no way to describe those eras, but I’m amazed each has turned out so well.

The most fun and compelling blog posts:

Five Query Letters, 8/9/10
Flashpoint’s Daughter, 11/6/10
Dystopias—And I’ve Written My Share, 3/13/11
My Visual Art is Somehow Literary, 4/12/11
An Archeological Excavation of Akard Drearstone, Draft 1, 7/19/11
What Does Your Muse Think of Your Writing Career?, 8/20/11
Homage to the Wiess Cracks, 8/27/11
Take My Word for It, 12/15/11
How Do You Deal With Your Backlog?, 2/29/12
Being a Novelist as Opposed to a Short Story Writer, 12/28/12
If No Internet or Word Processing, 3/9/13
The Irregular Origin of The Martian Marauders, 10/19/13
Default Forces, 3/4/14
Justification, or, Flush These Notes Out of My System Before They Wreck a Novel!, 7/5/14
A Writing Biography, Part I: First Efforts in The Gore Book, 9/24/14
A Writing Biography, Part II: The Blue Notebook, 9/28/14
A Writing Biography, Part III: Unhappy Kid Interlude, Yet Two Novels, Sort Of, 10/14/14
Homage Part 1: Farewell to The University of Mars, 4/4/15
Homage Part 2: The Zarreich Enigma, 4/19/15
My Ancient and Unfortunately Unshakable Visualization of the Solar System, 7/12/15
Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey and the Endless Slog to Sanctuary and Transcendence, 7/22/16
The Tower Treasure Project, 8/18/16
Crisis! Restructure Major Metropolitan Library!, 10/6/16
Three Legacy Novels, 6/18/17
Amid Work on Three Karmic Novels, 9/17/17
I’ll Write Your Book Blurbs, or, When Lilith’s Beloved Kentucky Horse Farm Goes into Bankruptcy …, 11/9/17
The Alpha Centaurian Stars, 3/19/18
Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 1: Rick Ballard, 4/26/18
Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 2: T’ohj’puv, 4/30/18
Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 3: Jonathan James Commer, 5/1/18
Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 4: Amy Nortel, 5/2/18
Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 5: Jack Commer, 5/7/18
Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 6: Amav Frankston-Commer, 5/9/18
Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 7: Waterfall Sequence, 5/11/18
Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 8: Ranna Kikken Commer, 5/13/18
Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 9: Joe Commer, 5/15/18
Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 10: Jackie Vespertine, 5/17/18
Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 11: Laurie 283, 5/19/18
Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 12: Laurie Lachrer, 5/21/18
Allan Larson Talks Back, 5/25/18
CommWealth and My Stint in the Theater, 8/9/18
The Karma of Fancy One-Line Blog Posts, 8/14/18
When the Shirt Hits the Fan: More Musing on Typos, and the Sortmind Editing Passes, 3/9/19
Jump Grenade – The Author Interview, 10/10/19
Shackism v. Sortmind, Part Three, 11/25/19
The Blank Zen Interview, 6/27/20
The Balloon Ship Interviews: Arrogant, Desperate Characters Audition for the Role of a Lifetime, 4/6/21
Interview with the Burlcron/Mercer/Singletree, 8/3/21
A Writing Biography, Part IV: The Perfect Cube and Beyond, 11/2/21
Walter’s Farewell Soliloquy–to Himself and to Draft 1 Caspra Coronae, 2/26/22

Theme 5. The Three Long Novels

I wanted to finish my main legacy work as I moved into new writing, and 2011-2023 saw the restructuring and publication of my three long novels, The Soul Institute, Akard Drearstone, and Sortmind. All are literary despite their absurdist elements.

The Soul Institute, 2015

Computer technician Himal Steina realizes his dream of a mythic return to the sanctuary of a vast foggy university when he’s appointed writer in residence at the Soul Institute and falls in love with one of its numerous faculty goddesses.

The Soul Institute is my flagship novel, lengthy and complex, but I think it reads quickly. It covers several sets of characters including Soul Institute administrators and faculty pursuing farcical love affairs and power struggles; the students who come to live the life of soul but are dismayed by the underlying chaos; and ninth graders in their separate world of inhalant abuse and gang violence. This is my only novel that adds a genealogical chart.

Akard Drearstone, 2017

A cinder block falls on lead guitarist Akard Drearstone’s head and leads to an alternate 1975 history of rock music as seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl.

I resumed this project dreading I might have to dump it for good. The first thirteen chapters were just not working, but when I hit chapter fourteen I began to feel the marvelous energy that had lurked in the novel from the beginning, and I was able to revitalize the structure and infuse Draft Twelve with modern consciousness. I left the book set in 1975 and thus it becomes my only historical novel.

I also set myself the challenge of using a young girl as a narrator, and it worked. Some of Akard’s characters are the most four-dimensional I’ve created. The music descriptions shine with renewed force; in fact, this was the first time I realized the emphasis is more on how the audience hears music as opposed to what the musicians experience.

Sortmind, 2019

An answer to any question is delivered in a telepathic instant, and a database of all our queries tracks the progress of a coming apocalypse. High school art students Oliver and Sam find themselves blindsided by urban terrorism and the malfunctioning, reality-altering Sortmind app.

I began Sortmind in 1987 as an expression of my early library career, but I eventually rebooted it as the story of a start-up company that telepathically provides all known information, and the ensuing urban riots. The book also chronicles two sets of aliens with opposing ideas about dealing with the malfunctioning human race, and serves as a Bildungsroman for the teen characters.

I’d sent the first version of Sortmind to publishers through the mid-nineties, but as I grew as a writer the daunting realization came that the novel was bloated and out of date. New drafts, cosmetic revisions, and frantic fixes only pointed to Book Abandonment. But with nothing to lose, I engineered a major reboot in 2016, which transmuted the novel, 45% of its original length, into something far beyond what I could have imagined in 1987.

The UR Manuscripts and Their Legacies

In homage to the first-draft energies of these three works, I made non-published eBooks and/or paperbacks of each.

Alternate Soul Institute, 2015

Draft 1 of The Soul Institute was 382,000 words, 200,000 longer than the final version, but it contains sprawling reflections and alternate plot, some of which, upon rereading, I couldn’t remember composing, as if some fan fiction writer had contributed his or her take on the book. Thus was born Alternate Soul Institute, an EPUB version confining itself to these unused sections. I know why I cut what I did from the monstrous first draft, but there are a lot of intriguing psychological chapters in Alternate Soul Institute, like outtakes and deleted scenes from movies.

Akard Draft One, 2020

Akard Draft One was my first breakthrough after two practice novels. I’d long wanted a digital copy; I didn’t even have a photocopy. I spent two months on a scanning project, editing the resulting manuscript but not proofing it against the paper manuscript. The 5 MB Word document is 681,656 words in 2,376 pages. I made non-published paperback copies on lulu.com just to be able to hold the dream of that first big novel in my hands.

Sortmind Draft One, 2024

The final 2019 Sortmind is so much improved over its first draft that no reader would consider returning to the original. But I discovered a clean photocopy of the typewritten Draft 1 and, sheet-feeding thirty pages at a time, I quickly got the entire 1,075-page manuscript into PDF format and then OCR’d it. Despite the first-draft problems there are intriguing reflections on technology and society; I appreciate this first version as its own completed 1980s thought, and made a hefty Sortmind Draft One unpublished paperback to celebrate it.

Theme 6: New Novel Notes and Beyond

As is certainly evident by now, the era covered by Part VIII concerns past energies and new exploration. I’m concluding the Writing Biography series here as the next stage hasn’t happened yet, though 2023-24 saw Sortmind Press publication of four more novels and another short story collection.

For a long time I’ve felt there’s another long literary novel rattling around. “New Novel Notes” from December 2015 on was an arduous attempt at a big book which I finally focused into the shorter novel Asylum and Mirage in 2022-2023. The “Asylum and Mirage Diary” chronicling its long evolution runs 144 single-spaced spaces. The final Asylum and Mirage in fact finished off these endless “New Novel Notes” and I have no desire to resurrect them. But the impulse for another long, complex, sprawling, character-driven novel wants to find expression in A Writing Biography Part IX.

A Writing Biography, Part I: First Efforts in The Gore Book
A Writing Biography, Part II: The Blue Notebook
A Writing Biography, Part III: Unhappy Kid Interlude, Yet Two Novels, Sort Of
A Writing Biography, Part IV: The Perfect Cube and Beyond
A Writing Biography, Part V: Space, Time, and Tania through The University of Mars, 1974-1982
A Writing Biography, Part VI: Failures, Successes, Rhythms and Swerves, 1983-1994
A Writing Biography, Part VII: Organization, Lost Energies, New Novels, Publishing, 1994-2011

The Major 2024 Book Energies

Posted on December 25, 2024 by Michael D. SmithDecember 25, 2024

I’m quite proud of the six books I assembled this year; I feel I’ve psychically moved forward with these projects and other unpublished work. But I’m also somewhat dazed to find myself at a stopping point. It feels strange, as if I might even … relax! And I wonder: what’s the next step after this?

I’ve already posted about the major projects this year, so there’s no need to go into further detail about them. But here’s an overview.

The 2024 Work

February: Man Against the Horses! Four Theater of the Absurd Novelettes published on lulu.com as paperback, and as eBook on Smashwords
March: Supreme Commander Laurie published on Amazon as paperback and eBook, and as eBook on Books2Read
April: The Soul Institute 2024 updated and republished on Amazon as paperback and eBook, as eBook on Smashwords, and as paperback on lulu.com
June: The University of Mars published on Amazon as paperback and eBook, as eBook on Books2Read, and as paperback on lulu.com
July: Zarreich Draft 2 set up on lulu.com as a private access paperback, i.e., not for sale, to have a copy either as archival text or as a proofing tool. I’d essentially been thinking of Draft 2 as a restored print of an old black-and-white film (the fascinating but flawed 1981 Draft 1) and would have left it there. But holding the mass-market-size paperback stimulated further work on this novel and its eventual publication.
September: The University of Mars Draft 1 PDF Project. In the light of rebooting this work in May and June, I wanted to revisit the original jumbled and eventually abandoned 1980-81 version, so I sheet-fed the old typescript with its alternate versions through my scanner. This was simple to execute and took maybe an hour. But Draft 1 is going nowhere except as a PDF to peruse at some point.
November: Sortmind Draft One set up on lulu.com as a private access paperback. This work was about four times longer than The University of Mars, but I quickly scanned it and then OCR’d it through Google Docs; clean-up edits to the original text took much longer, but they were fun in their own crossword-puzzle way. Sortmind Draft One was a wonderful project, never intended to be published or conflict with the final Sortmind. As an object it seems perfect; no title on the cover, no blurb on the back, and rather hefty. My big Russian novel.
December: Zarreich published on Amazon as paperback and eBook; as paperback on lulu.com; and as eBook on Books2Read

A Long and Forceful Era of Looking Backward

Looking backward seems to have come to a halt with Zarreich. I think I’m up to date now. There are no further novels to karmically resurrect from the past: student novels Nova Scotia and The Fifty-First State of Consciousness are out of the question; 1985’s Parts I & II was used in part for 2022’s Asylum and Mirage; any other rough drafts and autobiographical experiments are already digitized and certainly don’t need to be sent into the world.

I worked through all the past writing to integrate and understand it. Investigating 1981 writings this year brought out raw energies and returned me to the unresolved issues of the 1981 rough draft Zarreich. By the way, as I look at either the trade or mass market Zarreich, I’m struck by how well it reads; even as I published it I’d been slightly worried that the book might just be past tripping after all. But now I’m certain it’s not.

Bracketing the year with the blog posts Writing Biographies VI and VII also felt like an appropriate dealing with past energies. It felt good to bring the Biography reasonably up-to-date:

1/8/24: “A Writing Biography, Part VI: Failures, Successes, Rhythms and Swerves, 1983-1994”
12/19/24: “A Writing Biography, Part VII: Organization, Lost Energies, New Novels, Publishing, 1994-2011”

Both those periods needed to be written out. This blog post category takes a lot of time to ruminate on and structure, usually beginning with much longer essays filed with detail only I would care about; then I condense them into shorter posts intended for as much clarity to the reader as possible. It’s telling that I always prefer the shortened post to the essay version.

Unsure What to Do with Myself After All This Exertion

2024 also leaves me with detailed notes for the beginning of a second Supreme Commander Laurie novel. I’m feeling good about it, but also leery of starting it now just to keep busy. I definitely need to anchor a title for it and think it through to a middle and an ending–at least a rough draft concept of them.

A Writing Biography, Part VII: Organization, Lost Energies, New Novels, Publishing, 1994-2011

Posted on December 19, 2024 by Michael D. SmithDecember 19, 2024

It’s been difficult to write 1994-2011; this is quite a long era, from my thirties to my fifties, with several deluded sub-eras as well as breakthroughs. But the period seems anchored at each end: beginning with The Soul Institute charting a new course in my writing, and ending with a publisher accepting The Martian Marauders.

Some of the sections below are quite short, others more involved. But each is a psychic milepost along the way.

The Soul Institute, 1994-1999

The Soul Institute was the most problematic of my novels to write, but apparently needed to be. It eventually emerged as my flagship novel.

I began compiling ideas in 1993, including memories of ninth grade and the surreal dreams of returning to a college paradise which was sometimes Rice University, sometimes a vision of the Other World. The gloriously numinous first draft was also a disordered, problematic, sprawling, 381,949-word, 1,354-page first-draft mess.

At times I considered abandoning the novel, taking a years-long vacation from all writing, or abandoning writing entirely in favor of visual art. There was something frustratingly unfused in the first draft even as fascinating events and characters kept emerging. Finally the second draft’s major plot reorganization brought out a central vision based on those characters.

The novel describes a chaotic November at a small Texas coastal university founded on royalties from the director’s bestselling novel.

Several character groups eventually collide: the Soul Institute administrators and faculty pursuing power struggles and fantasy life in an increasingly malignant bureaucracy, the students who came to live the life of Soul but find themselves dismayed by the underlying chaos; and ninth graders at the local junior high pursuing inhalant abuse and gang violence,

I’d finished what I thought was a final manuscript in December 1999, and was proud of the result. Yet, inexplicably, I placed the manuscript securely in the desk drawer for over a decade. I think this was primarily because I assumed that an offering of 1,064 pages and 266,000 words by an unknown author could never be considered by traditional publishers. I had an idea of getting one of my shorter novels published first; then The Soul Institute might be considered for a second one.

The 2024 wraparound cover

I’d assumed that this novel was so well done that it might just need a little light editing. So I was surprised to reread it in 2009 and find it needed a thorough revision. Two more drafts rearranged and simplified its plot, cutting the length by about twenty-five percent and reducing a great deal of interior character thinking and expositional verbiage.

My goal in The Soul Institute was a Shakespearian fairness to all characters. Each character, no matter what his or her moral or mental state, no matter how noble or ridiculous or pathetic, is an actor on the stage of the novel, to be respected and understood, given time to develop, and integrated into the framework of the story. I wanted to present all these character entities to an ideal reader. This ideal reader is sometimes myself, especially in editing mode, but almost always winds up going beyond my personal concerns and strives to connect with other human beings who are open-minded and curious, willing to both severely judge my writing and learn from any honest energy in it. You want the writing to be as perfect as can be for this reader.

Life events during this period all had their influence on this novel:

I moved from my Texas History librarian position to be Dallas Public Library’s first webmaster, also dabbling in desktop support and network analyst roles, but by the end of 2000 I was done with this direction and returned to regular work as a branch library assistant manager. During this time I got involved with the first expansion of the Internet, including creating my own website.
I also dealt for three years with a head infection, finally cleared up in 1998, from a childhood car accident.
Cats entered our lives. Soon my wife Nancy and I had nine.

Another Lackluster Publishing Attempt

I covered this topic in A Writing Biography Part VI. But I quote from it because this attempt ran concurrent with The Soul Institute and is still an accurate assessment:

Sortmind went to thirteen publishers or agents, one of whom said he would read my 870-page manuscript for a dollar per page. He also said he really didn’t look at an envelope unless it said “Norman Mailer” on the return address. My novel’s final rejection came on March 31, 1995. I sent Property to thirty-eight publishers or agents, with final rejection on August 16, 1993.

That was enough for this round. I knew I was never supposed to give up, but I was just sick of the whole time-wasting process, and it was suppressing new writing. I was chagrined at the power of the literary gatekeepers and the logistics of just how long and costly it would be to send manuscript queries to a hundred publishers.

My publishing query eras through 2011:

1975-ca. 1977: numerous story submissions, during which time “Space, Time and Tania” was published.
1980: “Where Eagles Have Unfortunately Landed,” a silly story slated to become part of my novel The University of Mars.
1984-86: The University of Mars and various stories intended to pave the way for that novel.
1991-1995: Sortmind and Property
2003-2004: Nonprofit Ladies
2008-2011: “Perpetual Starlit Night”; “Starvation Levels of the Infinite”; Sortmind; Jack Commer, Supreme Commander; Nonprofit Ladies; The University of Mars; The Martian Marauders.

I declared around this time that the only thing I had true control over was the quality of my own writing. This concept became a challenge to take up over the next few years.

The 1996 First Twenty Steps Revision

The First Twenty Steps was a useful experience in eventually moving to self-publishing. A friend of Nancy’s read this novella and suggested that her father, who was starting a publishing company, might publish this 1984 tale of an ex-convict who finds himself mixed up in a motorcycle gang’s plan to heist a hyperspatial supercomputer. It was a tight, well-plotted story, but she had suggestions for a more concrete ending. I revised the book and emerged with a much stronger novella. It was exciting to encounter a new era in publishing with small independent publishers. I wasn’t too disappointed when the publishing company concept didn’t pan out; I’d managed to improve the novella and now considered it publishable.

Though I never tried to market the new digital version, in retrospect it seems that I knew all along that this novella was fated to eventually be my first self-publication; of course this is hindsight, but something about this feels right.

Art vs. Writing

I also touched on this topic in A Writing Biography Part VI: the different ways of marketing writing and visual art. You labor on a book for years; judging its merits requires a few days or weeks for reading and reflection. Whereas a painting hits you in an instant and you form an immediate assessment. You may even impulse-buy it. Thus a few hours or days on a single painting would probably net you more income than a novel taking six years. So sometimes I wondered if I shouldn’t chuck writing and just paint. After all, my painting energies had been ramping up since 1986, and I had dozens of completed paintings to show.

Starting in 2003 I had numerous art shows, some one-man, others group shows, and sold a handful of works. It was an eye-opening experience, and I met some wonderful artists along the way.

My last show was in August 2011 at the Renner-Frankford Library. I’d simply gotten tired of the effort involved; staging even a small show is a major undertaking. This one also reverberates because I designed it to showcase my recent experiments in painting very large, like seven by eleven feet, on unstretched canvas. It seemed like a fitting end to art shows. Of course, I may do more in the future.

Sortmind.com, 1999

In July 1999, during the time I was working as the Dallas Public Library webmaster, I was sent to a Dallas Morning News seminar about publicity for nonprofits. In an afternoon session I was abruptly inspired to create sortmind.com. I had enough webmaster knowledge to design a decent site, but had to stretch a bit to get it properly set up. I’ve always been proud of its October 24, 1999 start date; yes, I have a website from the twentieth century. I also named Sortmind Press after it.

The website functions as an overview of my writing and art, and I keep it current, both in content and technologically–though I don’t go all-out on the tech. I consider it indispensable to my marketing efforts, such as they are.

Nonprofit Ladies, 2000-2003

After finishing what I thought at the time was the final manuscript of The Soul Institute, I had the urge for another literary novel, but I wanted something more condensed than the exhausting Soul Institute. My library tech work and a new restlessness to move beyond it was one of the subthemes.

The original idea sessions became an arts and crafts project in sorting disparate ideas jotted down over the years, along with folders of photos, clippings, newspaper and magazine articles, recent dreams and any older writing that attracted my attention. Before long I had seventeen categories and I glued the most relevant clippings and notes onto seventeen large posterboards:

Animals–Wild / Nature / “Physics”
Raw Tao
Zany / Future / Sci-Fi
Nonprofit Ladies
Big Shared Nightmare
Children / Beauty
Libraries / Preservation
Sorrow / Passion
Art / Raw Energy / Sex
Zen / Taoists / Science!
Old Things–People–Society–Methods / History
Absurd / Humor
The Aristocracy
Animals Interacting With Society
Kids in Trouble
Politics / Civilization
Overviews

Then a poignant dream of “hyperlink teleportation” veered the novel into science fiction. At first I thought that Jack of 1986’s Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, was going to be a central character. Then I realized this would fall to his troubled younger brother, copilot Joe Commer.

Within three years I had the third part of a trilogy, completing The Martian Marauders and Jack Commer, Supreme Commander. Nonprofit Ladies could also stand on its own as a novel of current themes, and I sent two queries on it through 2004. Nancy was a major help when she went to a publishing seminar in 2003 and came back with the concept of sticking to Times New Roman 12 (instead of Courier 10) and sending thank-you cards. This helped me be more professional in my approach. But I think I knew unconsciously that Nonprofit Ladies wasn’t what it should be.

The 2002 Novel Urge and Perpetual Starlit Night

During the stressful period when Nancy and I were moving to Richardson and selling our Dallas house, even as I worked on Nonprofit Ladies, I kept envisioning another vast new novel on the scale of The Soul Institute. But after plundering my journals for ideas and sorting characters and plot ideas on notecards, I soon began to see that while there were some decent concepts there, I wasn’t in shape for a new novel. All I really had was another Soul Institute family saga, a clone of that previous novel.

Though I abandoned “New Novel” in September 2002, its ideas still called to me, and three years later I tried to shove them into a science fiction novel called Perpetual Starlit Night. But once again realized I wasn’t interested in the concept. “Perpetual Starlit Night” was really a short story, which I finally wrote in 2007, in which an archeologist arrives on a tiny artificial gravity platform in deep space to give a scholarly lecture to barbarian colonists, only to find that she, like them, is being incarcerated here as a barbarian criminal herself. The story was later published in Double Dragon Publishing’s 2013 anthology, Twisted Tails VII. I improved it and placed it in my collection, The Damage Patrol Quartet, in 2021.

The lesson here was learning not to be desperate for a novel. Don’t push things. You know when it’s the right time to move on fiction, and what the correct form of it should be.

Akard 2005 and the Italics Aberration

I began the Akard Drearstone 2005 Project intending to make a quick edit to address a flawed scene in the 1994 novel’s first chapter, but wound up revising the entire novel. But unfortunately–I still can’t fathom why–I wallowed into a bad writing habit which later polluted other writings.

This is the overuse of italicized thinking. Again, this relates to desperation to be published; I truly thought I could translate existing character thinking narrative into italicized thoughts to give the characters immediacy and high energy, jazzing up my books and making them more query-alluring. It was truly yucky in retrospect, but I continued to overindulge in this technique as I revised other novels during this period, including the three Jack Commer novels, Sortmind, The Soul Institute, and Property/CommWealth. This was a major negative detour. A small amount of italics is a spice, but I’d piled insane amounts of salt and curry on the text.

I eventually discovered that almost all character introspection works better as narrative rather than as present-tense italicized thoughts. Fortunately I came to my senses in 2015, and I’ve de-polluted all my novels since then, including ones already published.

Organization and Lost Energies

During 2000-2010 I found myself cleaning up past writings, not only to have publishable material on hand, but also to come to grips with the body of fiction I’d created over the decades. This included revising works of value, digitizing but not revising older works, and fashioning a couple new collections. I also began writing some new fiction.

Revised works:

The Martian Marauders – revised 2003-2010
Akard Drearstone – rewritten 2004-2005, revised August 2010
Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, USSF – revised 2005-2010
Sortmind – revised 2006-2009
Nonprofit Ladies – revised 2006-2010
Property / CommWealth – title changed 2009, rewritten 2010
The University of Mars – rewritten 2009
The Soul Institute – revised 2010

Digitized but left as archival editions:

Nova Scotia (1973) – scanned and copyedited, 2006
The Fifty-First State of Consciousness (1973) – scanned and copyedited, 2006
Zarreich (1981-82) – scanned and copyedited, 2006
Parts I and II / Notice and Dream Topology (1985) – scanned and copyedited, 2006
Plus numerous old stories, a few of which wound up in story collections Man Against the Horses! and The Damage Patrol Quartet.

New compilations from throughout my writing history, not for publication:

Poem Compilation, 2007, adding new as found or created
Essays Compilation, 2008, continued to the present

New work:

Ocean Singe Horror, 2008 – a novel based on a ninth-grade short story, later titled Jump Grenade.
Seven of Cups/Beyond DamnStar, 2011 – a novel which became Collapse and Delusion, the 4th Jack Commer novel.

It felt appropriate to contact this past (and lost) energy, to reread things I’d forgotten writing, and to recall how they once reverberated with other people. There is some good writing from 1981 on, no doubt about it. But I traced a mixture of delusion and dogged underground courage, with the final result a collection of passionate but flawed artworks along with the sharpening of some skills.

The Summer Art Career

As I approached early retirement from Dallas Public Library in April 2006, I’d been putting new energy into painting and art shows. My former psychic balance of 80/20–eighty percent of my energy devoted to writing and twenty percent to visual art–was veering toward 50/50. I seriously figured that I could sell paintings and stay afloat with the proceeds along with some part-time art gallery job. Hmm. Over the summer I pulled together my fanciest marketing ploys and visited numerous galleries in Dallas hoping to make some contacts and sell some art.

I saw abstract work similar to what I was doing, some worse, some much better. I also saw a wall-engulfing dull abstract in the design district with a ridiculous $32,000 price tag. Along the way I had a phone call with an art expert who wanted to know who I’d studied with–or should study with–at the proper university MFA program. I felt my energies draining in response. The insider contacts and the weird aristocracy of the gallery world were stifling. I didn’t want to compete with that stuff, hell, I didn’t even want to know it. I didn’t want to be in a studio every day churning out the improvised abstracts, nor for that matter did I want to be matting and framing a thousand drawings.

I got some of this out in 2008’s Ocean Singe Horror, featuring an art gallery owner and his daughter receptionist. This chapter title expresses it:

Snooty Art with Sexy Receptionists, or, Her Outfit for Any Given Day Costs More than You Will Ever Make Selling Your Paintings

While I considered myself professional enough to put my work up against other abstract artists, I now knew I wasn’t about to give it that final ambition push. Painting is necessary but it does exhaust me. It serves a psychological need that doesn’t translate into “art career.” It’s more than a hobby. It could even be a laid-back business, but it’s not a career. Whereas I literally can write every night, gaining energy each time. My real talents and love are in writing, and I wonder how I ever could have thought otherwise.

A final August 2006 visit to the Irving Arts Center nailed this realization. In a far sunny gallery were Paul Zelinsky’s wonderful original drawings for his book Rapunzel. What a moment that was for me, to see such excellent drawing and color in service of the story. I realized my own visual art was literary after all.

The Summer Art Career ended that instant.

I still showed paintings in various art shows through 2011, but I never returned to that deluded 50/50 balance. In August 2006 it was time to fully return to writing, but first, economic necessity brought me back to the library world. I figured it would again be a good place to nurture the literary energies. One interview at McKinney Public Library obtained a reference librarian position. No supervision, just good old-fashioned librarian work. I had no idea it would be the background for sixteen more years of libraries–even as the library hurtled into the technological future, dragging me along with it.

Right before starting that new job I painted a corner of my studio, a farewell to the Career.

The 2006 Vulgarity Insight

Three months into my stint at McKinney Public was the setting for a thoroughly unexpected November 2006 realization. A night at the Nonfiction Desk was quite slow, so I perused the HTML text of Nonprofit Ladies which I’d recently put on sortmind.com, unlinked so I could show it to only a few chosen readers. Keep in mind that although I’d broken off trying to send query letters on this book back in 2004, I still considered it a magnificent jewel.

I was prepared to find a few typos I’d later correct. Instead I was stunned to find broad strokes of vulgarity in Chapter One. This had never occurred to me before. Yes, my early writing during the ’60s-’70s counterculture had certainly been influenced by the new freedom to employ whatever obscenities we wished, but even my 1,587-page, 1976-1978 rough draft of Akard Drearstone hadn’t had this cynical, putrid feel. It wasn’t the story itself that was bad, or even the actual foul language, it was rather a weird, sarcastic, flippant tone that somehow surfaced behind my back the past few years. The Soul Institute Draft One, 1994-1997, didn’t have that feel, either. Where on earth had this come from? Was I trying to be flashy for publishers?

Or had I deliberately engineered a flawed and unpublishable novel? And in so doing kept myself insulated from the world of expressing, publishing, distributing, discussing, influencing? Would true success scare me? Did I secretly wish to stay hidden?

I still don’t know why my style veered in this jeering direction. I don’t even want to go find that 2003 manuscript and confirm what I saw that November night. In any case I realized that Nonprofit Ladies was anti-self and had to be immediately and thoroughly rewritten. This also implied checking the recently revised The Martian Marauders and Jack Commer, Supreme Commander for similar issues, but later rereadings confirmed that Nonprofit Ladies was the main recipient of the mysterious sordidness.

The need to revise Nonprofit Ladies completed the transition back to putting writing first, to the original 80/20 balance. The December 2006 painting, “16. Tower,” describes both the end of the Summer Art Career and the full turn back to writing. Observe what my protagonist holds onto and what he lets go.

The 2009 Digital Journal

I’d kept handwritten writing journals since 1969, but in late 2008 I spent a few hours reexamining my commitment to paper. I was surprised how fast I talked myself into a word-processed journal, how quickly I took to it in practice, and how useful it’s been since.

I mulled various drawbacks of paper notebooks:

Difficulty deciphering my own handwriting.
Not searchable, not copyable for use in essays or fiction.
Inability to edit.
Problems with ink bleeding through paper, fading over time, or even photocopying well.
Susceptibility to fire, wrinkling, tearing, water damage, cat damage.
Only one copy. No offsite storage.

I began the digital journal on January 14, 2009. I eventually worked out a method for adding entries throughout the month, proofing them as I went along, then printing one month at a time for a binder. Each year is one Word document. I’ve slowly been inputting previous journals, though this turns into an immense task reserved for fallow periods when I’m not engaged in new fiction.

The ability to search all the journals has been remarkably useful. My journal persona–somewhat related to my blog voice or letter-writing voice–has continued to evolve. Yet I’ve never been inclined to put the journal on some cloud-based app.

Sortmind Revisions in Light of Publication

In November 2005 it was time to revisit the 1994 Sortmind work and bring it up to date, but the Summer Art Career interfered, along with the revision of Nonprofit Ladies. By February 2007 I had a new and better Sortmind which, in retrospect, I call Draft 4; this relegates the 1994 “final MS.” to “Draft 3” and explains how Sortmind wound up with nine drafts before publication in 2019.

Of course Draft 4 was now crammed with the italicized thinking which so wondrously warped Akard Drearstone. Sortmind’s translations into italics were even more mechanical than Akard’s and boring to execute; I’m not sure why this wasn’t self-evident to me at the time. Yes, I improved the book in terms of updated characters and plot, but Sortmind was truly marred by this italics silliness intended to captivate publishers with the novel’s “high energy and emotional resonance,” as my query letters put it.

I should start every paragraph in this essay with this Richard Feynman quote:

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Desperate to market a long novel, I had the further bright idea of casting Sortmind into a trilogy, grandly titled “1. The World is an Art Supply; 2. Awaken the Sleep Within; 3: Pledge of Resistance, or Let Me Shatter Your False Assumptions and Replace Them With Some of My Own.”–this later “improved” several times, but who cares?

One of the editors I queried saw through the ploy, saying each sub-novel was too short and the thing as a whole too long. I had to admit that the book was never a trilogy but one big novel. By 2010 I’d gotten Sortmind formatted into one Word document and though I again called it my “manuscript,” it was really just Draft 6.

The lesson here was again, desperation leads to screwing your art. I also think I also knew by this time, but probably wasn’t ready to admit, that the 1980s architecture of this book was no longer working.

But all this was one more learning experience.

New Publishing Attempts

Marsport copyright 2009 by Michael D. Smith

Draft cover for The Martian Marauders

With numerous revisions underway I again turned my thoughts to the idea of sending off short stories as more cannon fodder to gain writing credits, then, as I discovered the new paradigm of eBooks underway, I began gearing my efforts in that direction.

In 2009 I overhauled my 1984 novel The University of Mars; it was a major reboot, structurally superior to its first version, but its over-the-top italicized thinking rendered it hard to slog through. Yet I considered The University of Mars as an ideal eBook candidate, along with The Martian Marauders.

Somehow this entire publishing effort started to feel better, especially when I began to interact with people who’d published eBooks and who were outside mainstream publishing. Though I knew there were flaws in my previous works, I was working to correct them. My early twenty-first-century revisions, uneven as some were, were pointing to new contribution. If you’ve completed the best manuscript you can and honestly send it out, you’ve done what you should. If the outer world is not fated to pick it up, so be it.

A tip I picked up from interacting with eBook publishers was getting all my manuscripts into one-file format. So far I’d gone through the word-processing era by making each chapter a separate document, fearing a whole novel file might be too large, but later I found that Word can handle a 32,000-page document.

The Blog, 2010

After much thought I began blog.sortmind.com, a WordPress blog, in August 2010. I knew from the beginning that it would go far beyond sortmind.com’s “repository” nature and involve communication, opinions, feedback, and community. It would stretch my conceptions of what I did on the web.

I had a backlog of essays as well as journal musings, which gave a hint of what I might be working on. I conceived of sample writing on various topics, clean, blunt, and purposeful, which others could comment on or not. I also wanted to showcase my visual art. But somehow the visual would all still be literary.

At the time I wrote the below in my journal, and it still applies:

I think above all the point is not to have any expectations of “success.” I do want the thing to just be fun and yet also “sober/responsible.” My art and writing are important to me and I don’t want to trivialize them or get involved with lowlifes, inflammatory opinions, or general Internet bullshit. Nor do I need any sort of diary or to get personal/confessional. In no way do I conceive of this blog as anything like Facebook or “social networking.” I can appreciate how blogs have developed as structured personal websites with comment and networking capability, I can now see the point of them, but for myself, I just want to master the game as self-expression, and see where it leads. I really don’t have expectations that it can lead to literary success, although it can be that “repository” for interested parties to see how I write.

The First Twenty Steps 2011 and PubIt

First blog post for The First Twenty Steps

First cover; bad font soon updated

The 1996 revision of my novella The First Twenty Steps proved prescient in late 2010 when Nancy got interested in Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-Reader and found out about the PubIt self-publishing platform, which has since morphed into Barnes & Noble Press. A crisp 25,000-word novella seemed just the thing to experiment with self-publishing.

I polished the 1996 manuscript and followed the at-the-time arcane PubIt instructions for getting the thing online as a Nook eBook. My first time doing this was anxiety-laden, anything but the routine way I publish on various platforms now.

The PubIt site asked me to name my “publishing house,” so naturally I settled on Sortmind Publishing. Later I preferred Sortmind Press, which has a more Gutenberg feel about it.

The First Twenty Steps debuted on PubIt on January 28, 2011, and publishing suddenly went from a decades-long unattainable dream to something I could have total control over. Yet I still thought of The First Twenty Steps as an experimental contribution, some sample work that might lead me to other publishers, and I began feeling out new marketing techniques via email, my website, and of course my new blog.

The Martian Marauders is Accepted

In 2009 and 2010 I sent queries to agents or publishers on The Martian Marauders (16 queries), Jack Commer, Supreme Commander (just 1), and Nonprofit Ladies (6) as standalone efforts to agents and eBook publishers. I had no idea how to market a trilogy; I had only a vague concept of how publishing one, out of order, might get the others accepted. I also sent the 2009-revised The University of Mars five times, but overall I was concentrating on The Martian Marauders, refurbished in late 2009 and geared towards eBooks.

Many of the eBook publishers were starting to use online query methods and forms, speeding up the process considerably. No more waiting two months for a rejection; just get onto the next venue. And I had new confidence with putting The First Twenty Steps on PubIt. I mentioned this in my March 5, 2011 submission packet to Deron Douglas of the Canadian publisher Double Dragon Publishing for my seventeenth submission of The Martian Marauders:

A week later I was working at the second-floor Reference Desk at McKinney Public Library; at 5:30 Monday afternoon I opened my email.

The eighth-grade Martian Marauders cover copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

The eighth-grade cover

What sort of sorcery was this? I hadn’t seen anything like this since 1976 when Pigiron Magazine accepted my story “Space, Time and Tania.” I was floored, immediately emailing back my overjoyed acceptance. Deron’s previous rejection of The University of Mars in 2010 had made me realize its 2009 reboot was not working, and I respected him for seeing that The Martian Marauders in contrast was publishable. He later indicated that other novels in DDP authors’ series would be accepted if they were of high quality, so within a couple months, at a time when I was also working on the first draft of a fourth Jack Commer novel, I secured contracts for Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, and Nonprofit Ladies.

The Martian Marauders by Michael D. Smith

The 2012 cover by Deron Douglas

The Martian Marauders publication was set for January 2012. It’s karmically interesting that McKinney Public’s second-floor Nonfiction Desk was the point of the Nonprofit Ladies vulgarity realization in 2006, and then, second-floor Reference the start of a new publishing mindset.

I later made other queries to publishers: The Soul Institute later in 2011, Akard Drearstone in 2012; Ethernet published “The Roadblock” in 2013 and Class Acts Books published my novel CommWealth in 2015. And Double Dragon published the first six novels of the Jack Commer Series, all with Deron’s excellent covers. As time went on I gravitated more and more to self-publishing, but that’s material for the next Writing Biography.

Why did it take me so long, from 1976 and “Space, Time, and Tania,” to succeed at publishing? For decades I castigated myself for my writing flaws and my so-called lack of ambition. Yet all the while I was living, gathering experiences, and experimenting.

And now life energies dramatically shifted.

Zarreich – Publication at Last

Posted on December 10, 2024 by Michael D. SmithDecember 10, 2024

So Zarreich is Finally Out There

For decades I’d considered this 1981-1982 novel an unpublishable first draft, but it was so rich and opened up such new territory I could never let it go. After a disastrous attempt at a second draft in 1983, I decided that Draft 1 was the real novel after all. Still, I thought it could never be rewritten. Until this summer.

paperback:
Amazon
lulu.com (mass market size)

eBook:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Books2Read (offers numerous distributors)
Smashwords

Synopsis

Jim Donne, a recent college graduate, comes to live in a small town after the death of his mother, only to discover that all his memories have been wiped out. Now living with what may or may not be his grandmother, he kills what he thinks is a gang leader invading her home. But he panics, wondering whether he’s overreacted to a harmless student prank, and he cuts up and hides the body.

He then finds himself under a ludicrously botched police investigation. Slipping into hallucinatory fevers, he tries to disappear into a stifling clerical job at a mortgage company in the ruined city of Zarreich. Yet he’s soon drafted into a secret commune of twelve dreamers in an underground university he can only faintly remember.

The Long Twisty History

The first references to “the nightmare city” came in these July 1978 journal notes:

plotless dream: the broken, surreal city (Chicago). the bridge, skyline, water, freeway, hassles. Also dream of long ago: Australian city–pathway–brown shops–& part of the above dream there as well. Q: does this city actually exist? & not just in my head? stupid question? the idea of actually building that city in the desert–as grim and “unuseful” as I want it to be–its grimness and its beauty would be a sculpture, not a mere city. freeways would suddenly start curving upside down. a large immense ugly red cathedral east of downtown, etc. and only 100 people would be allowed to live in it–it would be as large as Dallas or Houston.

In the spring of 1981 I embarked on an experimental psychological novel, incorporating some of my strangest dreams and the nightmare city.
Draft 1’s Part I, chapters 1-9, opened up such unwieldy and unnerving energies that I tried to suppress them in the trite, moralizing chapters 10-13 that made up Part II. The first draft was thus fatally flawed.
I continued to bury Zarreich’s meaning fully in a putrid 1983 second draft. This quote from my 2015 post Homage Part 2: The Zarreich Enigma sums up my revulsion:

I cut down the 363-page rough draft to a 154-page version which I retitled The Galaxies Groan Within. But a later rereading of both works astounded me with how rich Draft 1 was and how much of that wealth I’d abandoned in making Draft 2. The second draft Galaxies was astonishingly inferior to the wild, scary Zarreich. I’d never before worsened a novel in a second attempt, and it was sobering to see how it’s possible to leech the life from the huge psychic energies of a first draft.

I kept mulling the lovely, unsettling energies of Zarreich in essays and idea sessions over the decades. The 2015 blog post mentioned above was actually intended as a farewell to the book.
But in 2024 I finally faced my responsibility to Zarreich. I decided to at least make a reasonably cleaned-up version of the rough draft, not for publication but true to the 1981 vision.
Draft 2 pulled together a more or less real novel at last, but I still considered the book unpublishable. But I made a “private edition” paperback of it on lulu.com and ordered 2 copies for myself.
But, in making that paperback, I wound up creating such a good pair of covers that I then began seeing a new structure to the book, a new ending. The resulting Draft 3 soon implied a final manuscript and publication.
The final manuscript is a 2024 overlay of 1981 consciousness; I’d like to think that I’ve brought out the compelling novel that should have been written 1981-82, that is, if I’d had the slightest wish at the time to really know myself.

Decision to Publish

Draft 2 was notable for finally getting me, as well as Jim, straight on the fact that the commune express/goddess Diana was to be his real mate, not the troubled, sweet mess of Cindy Vespertine he was shackled with at the end of Draft 1. I also had to further develop Diana so she didn’t wind up as a mere girlfriend prize at the end.

But Draft 2 still didn’t feel publishable and not until I came up with new fiction for a Draft 3 ending in October did this entire effort start feeling worthwhile. Once I had a cogent Draft 3 in place I knew I could publish Zarreich in good conscience–not as a self-publishing ego trip.

Part of the urge to redo Zarreich was hunting past energies, especially after the unexpected success of revising the equally ancient The University of Mars this year. I can now say that I’ve come to terms with all my previous novels so that I can move on to entirely new and appropriate work.

My goal was to create the best writing I’m capable of. Along the way, Zarreich has metaphorized into something quite different from its original nature, though I do feel I’ve been true to the 1981 intent. This is now like a fable, or karmic investigation, or a description of an entire lifetime coalesced into one week. There are certainly huge negative aspects to Jim’s character; in fact he’s often quite the unreliable narrator, and I would despise him if I didn’t also have empathy for what he’s going through.

It’s an intriguing psychic milestone to declare that your final draft is done and that you’re now in manuscript mode. Much new reflection and writing improvement comes during this time.

The 2024 Covers and the 1978 Image

The Zarreich Trade Paperback Wraparound Cover copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

Trade paperback cover, using art by iStock.com/mppriv

The Mass Market Paperback Cover copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

Mass market cover from lulu.com, using art by iStock.com/bulgac

This summer I remembered I’d also drawn the nightmare city in 1978; I hadn’t looked at this image in years. The scan spans two pages and calls for some amazing graphic art talents I’m not going to develop right now:

The 1978 Zarreich copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

The 1978 Vision of Zarreich

There are some intriguing similarities between this drawing and the lulu.com cover–the curving freeway, for instance.

For the first time I decided to include the phrase “a novel by Michael D. Smith” because the title by itself doesn’t necessarily conjure up fiction.

The Statistics

After I scanned and edited the 1981 typescript, Draft 1 was 146,314 words. The published novel is 89,420 words. So I cut 56,894 words, and the final Zarreich is 61.12% of the original.

Most of the cuts were unneeded scenes, but much was simply better word choice and excision of repetitious Draft 1 verbiage, so in addition to vastly improving the novel I’ve saved my ideal reader from wading through something as long as one crappy novel. But I’m happy to report that none of the cuts censored the weird psychological explorations of Draft 1.

More Information
Character Images

The Sortmind Draft One Project

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Michael D. SmithNovember 18, 2024

Why

I sometimes reread first drafts of my novels, usually amazed by how the sprawling but somehow compelling mess eventually congealed into a publishable story–or in some cases, was so bad I abandoned it.

When I rediscovered the first draft of Sortmind, 1987-1988, I stumbled into a writing project with unexpected high energy. The rough draft, seen from my current position of not being under any pressure to rewrite it, and not really remembering huge amounts of it, is something I can appreciate as its own finished novel. There are first draft errors, but there’s good writing in this book all the way through, especially considering this is a rough draft.

I’m finding much of my writing legacy in this draft. If it weren’t for the fact that a better, and much rebooted, final published 2019 version exists, and that the 1987 computerization thoughts would need a lot of reworking, this thing might be cleaned up and presented as a massive Bildungsroman.

How It Came About

In my typewriter days I made photocopies as backups of my novels and so I have a lot of rather useless novel folders now. I figured I could pull some of them from my cramped file cabinets and store them in binders in banker boxes. As I did with other photocopies in the past, I intended to turn some of these into scrap paper. In fact, I assumed I didn’t need an old photocopy of Sortmind’s rough draft and was preparing to turf it as well.

But the photocopy looked pretty clean, and I figured I might want a handy digital copy to reread. Sheet-feeding thirty-some pages at a time, I quickly got the entire 1,075-page manuscript into PDF format. But something compelled me to go beyond that, and I found myself uploading the PDF chunks into Google Docs, which does a great job OCR’ing the text; then I glued it all together.

My instinct to save the photocopy was on target, as I finally discovered that, though it did get a few corrections in pen and obscuring marker, it’s essentially a perfect version of Draft 1, as opposed to the first typewritten version which was thoroughly marked up for Draft Two work. The difference between photocopy (left) and typewritten (right) is telling:

Getting all this formatted into a single Word document was a pain, but Draft One now incorporates the corrections and deletions made during the first draft (3/13/87-9/9/88), as well as those made on both typescript and photocopy through the beginning of Draft 2 on 2/5/89; I’m still astonished that I kept both typescript and photocopy congruent with updates during that time.

Thus Sortmind Draft One is a somewhat polished first draft, not the UR-draft. It obviously won’t be published since the 2019 version of Sortmind is the final one. Draft One’s word count is 401,571; the final’s is 132,854–33.08% of the original.

There are no changes to the original Draft One manuscript except:

Correcting typos and standardizing capitalization and spelling
Making formatting changes for clarity
Adding back a few items (17 total) deleted between September 1988 and February 1989 that struck as being part of Draft’s One’s flavor.

The Vast Differences

Since I dated every writing session, I know that Sortmind’s drafts ran:

Draft 1, 3/13/87-9/9/88
Draft 2, 2/5/89-6/21/90
Draft 3 to 1994 MS., 6/30/90-4/10/94
Draft 4, 2/13/06-2/15/07
Draft 5 to 2008 MS. (envisioned as a trilogy), 11/8/07-4/26/08
Draft 6 (trilogy concept abandoned), 5/17/10
Draft 7 (major reboot), 4/9/16-8/14/16
Draft 8, 8/25/17-12/21/17
Draft 9 to 2019 MS., 12/22/17-2/11/19, then various formats published by 2/14/19

Though the second draft shed much of the first’s meandering storylines, it was faithful to the initial vision, and I sent out numerous publisher queries for the resulting 1994 manuscript. The 2006-2010 versions likewise worked off the original concept as I struggled to get this lengthy book into what I thought was a more publishable shape. But I finally recognized my desperation here as I polluted the style with italicized thinking and tried to market the thing as a trilogy.

By the time I got on top of what I really wanted from this novel, I produced a major 2016-19 reboot which shortened the book, moved the action away from the library world, updated the technology, dramatically altered the plot, removed any consideration of eighties-era architectural considerations in favor of telepathy and alien contact, and centered and developed the characters.

Looking back at the original version, I’m struck by the immense amount of cut storylines, many of which I had forgotten writing. Here are some I dropped along the way. These weren’t just minor character mentions, either; they had themes that went through the book and reappeared at decisive plot points:

Laura Plaster, the assaulted alien, and Ben Plaster, her malignant stepfather
Lucinda Zavala Duce, Tree Leopard sorceress, and her alien friend Thalia from Cnzaar
Michael McNamara, Ufologist; he and Lucinda, long gone by the final version, have rich histories and serve useful purposes.
Seventeen-year-old Oliver’s award-winning adolescent short story, and his barn suicide attempt
Terrorist Edward Duce’s song-writing career twenty years previously at Darkforce Theological Seminary
Blar the hapless victim, Blar the inspirational leader, Blar rescued by aliens and transformed into an eloquent robot to calm a riot
Future demagogue Randall Perrine, Blar and Laura at the Tollhouse in the madhouse of “New Fascist Australia”
The Air War and Perrine as a Mindwiped bomber tail gunner in Nightmare Mode
Mitchell Krazmotik’s extensive Nightmare Mode in the scary slums of East Drulgoorijk, where he has illuminating engagements with Oliver’s sister Elise and the alien Shelley
Oliver and Suzanne’s thwarted romance in the face of the South Pacific Conference disaster
Suzanne the librarian-in-training kidnapped by the street person Geniushead
The library director’s pathetic attempts to salvage a failed love affair via lucid dreaming
Hostages held by For the Triangles Foundation militia on the freeway overpass
Barbie the cheerleader/Tree Leopard-sorceress

Draft One doesn’t contain the final version’s psychologically correct endings–Oliver choosing the real Teresa over the computer program Suzanne, and deciding to burn his apartment to wipe out the cesspool Edward Duce, but I can still see that its ending works pretty well. Oddly for one of my rough drafts, despite all the meandering storylines, this novel as a whole is one completed narrative that does hold together.

Originally the Telepathic Database problems were conceived of as worldwide until midway into the first draft, when it became necessary to limit all of the action of the novel to one city. Most of the edits to Draft One had to do with this issue. By the time of the final draft, this was developed as a telepathic app available only in the city of Canterra.

What was oddly prescient about 1987-88 Sortmind Draft One:

The Telepathic Database scraping content from all over the world
The Anti-Artificial Intelligence group
The addictive nature of searching, and potential Mindwipe
The nature of library databases, indexes, and networks
The shrill debates between rival left and right political factions, though in this case they fought about triangles on top of buildings.
Ruminations about library and city politics that would kepe unfolding through a few more decades

The Library-Centric Version

The library setting doesn’t bother me as much as it did when I decided to reboot the novel in 2016, but now that I’m retired from the library world, I can accept Draft One’s library emphasis more easily.

By the time of the final Sortmind of 2016-2019, I was eager to dethrone the library from the novel, eliminating all references to my earlier librarian career and replacing the library setting with a business start-up. I thought that writing about libraries demonstrated how much in thrall I’d been to libraries, that “Write what you know” had become cute and self-serving. I still feel there’s truth in that, but now I find myself rather glad to see my 1980s ideas about the library so well-documented. The only problem is that despite all the prescient stuff in there, it’s still 1980s tech and so there’s no way I’d feel comfortable releasing this as a “alternate Sortmind novel,” even if I figured out some way it wouldn’t conflict with the final Sortmind. Yet it’s good to see this original effort as a testament to that other profession.

As for New Fiction …

Creating this document was an amazing experience despite doubts along the way that I’ve just been locked into past-tripping. But there’s important energy here, and I have no fear of my new fiction voice going away.

I got the final PDF to lulu.com and made a quirky, 775-page “private access” paperback. I came up with a cover that reverberates, especially for a book that won’t be published–note the title on the spine only. I made good use of styles to keep the format adjusted as I got the MS. under the 800-page limit, and I think the final result looks good. I’m sure there are still scores of minor errors throughout this thing, but that’s not a concern.

I’m still amazed that, even as a rough draft with meandering sections that were long ago cut from the final Sortmind, this story holds together so well. It really is one of my foundational documents, like Akard Draft One.

In fact, I’m a little jealous of this amazing rough draft and for a while now I’ve felt the blunt energies for another long novel, despite the frustration of not knowing what it is to be. I think this issue is central to why I choose to go ahead and continue the Sortmind Draft One Project through a mere PDF to a final Word document and to an unpublished paperback.

Dreams Used in Zarreich

Posted on September 1, 2024 by Michael D. SmithSeptember 1, 2024

Emily Donne

Since one of Zarreich’s aims was to make sense of and tie together numerous Other World dreams I’d had over the years, I went through my journals in May 1981 to make a compilation of such dreams in preparation for the novel. I called these Other World dreams because they seemed to imply actual, real realms I was visiting in dreams, as opposed to being purely psychological scenarios.

I’ve always called this compilation 100 Dreams, but the final total is 121. Of these, 22 were used in the first draft; of these, 13 survived into the second draft (shown in blue text below). Three of the dreams came later in 1981 after the compilation, as I was underway on Zarreich.

I still have no plans to publish this novel, especially in its current Draft 2 condition, but I’m curious to keep investigating the forces behind Zarreich/

8/18/73

Library Raskolnikov dream: my little garret on the fifth floor of a surreal ancient library; my cheerful isolation yet politeness to other people. I drive in last nostalgic year to see about a job, to go over old memories.

10/25/73

I had been in the rural bathroom (in the college park) earlier, and the light worked then (as did the surreal gym and locker room). However, one night I parked my car and went inside, feeling very unsteady. The light would not go on. I was terrified, tried to urinate. I knew the walls were sick and green. The floor became alligator scales, greasy. I began to fall and fall. Suddenly I knew I had been poisoned, completely overdosed. In the space of seconds this nauseous feeling accelerated into total mind disorder, the perceptions broke apart in horror. I was dimly aware that I would keep accelerating until I became a vegetable person. “I must be crazy,” I thought, and this thought seemed to be an intense work of art on my part. I ran to the door and opened it: the gray night light came into the black bathroom.

1/16/76

The drive to a mythological college (Rice?) from Maryland to South Texas–complete isolation of myself there, the endless, fruitless drive. The vast curved yellow plain/ my love of the freedom in that situation. The University is a pleasure, and connotes union with the female.

Jim Cathedral

3/31/78

The corridors continue under the entire surface of the earth–they are international and non-denominational, like one big high school down here–I go five levels down, it’s a real basement, thinking of M. who works as an accountant on the surface (in a building, to be sure, connected to the underground). But that’s why no one has seen him recently–he works too much–late at night with his books and dingy office and dim yellow cheapass light. Meanwhile around one corner I find anarchy: kids my age living here in a level five commune. On a bulletin board I encounter pictures of Jim, obviously put there by Jim himself: Jim is a Japanese dude with sunglasses, very small, and is obviously the resident “kick-me” asshole. He has put up signs over his pictures which say: “The Greatest Commune Member,” or “Jim, the One You Love,” etc. After talking with some other California commune people, I verify that everyone dislikes Jim.

But he has power. He makes them play his “kick me I’m an asshole” game. I watch him being filmed in a Coca-Cola/sex commercial. His girl is flipping out at his asshole humor. “I’d sure like a Coke!” he says. I resolve to understand Jim better, though I fear his asshole games.

9/5/78

Speech to river university (Rice and Richland, deep night) concerning justice–me, alone, to cut down some attacker and/or defend an innocent, other aspects of this university.

Cindy Vespertine

9/9/78

We return to Rice–media center/dorm. Lunch bags–garden–midday–vine-covered house–everyone loose in the head. I read a women’s college magazine:

1) Interview with a Rock Star
2) “Sea Girl of Texas”–from the coast and obviously the editor, writes of her love for sex, but extremely poetic and full of soul. I see the editor in her (hospital) room–minor sex episode–everything so loose–night.

9:00 AM and my balcony (indoor) room–much exploration of consciousness to be done.

Peter Pentacre

12/30/78

Back room–A.’s commune–Illinois–me alone (TV there?)–I wonder at who originally bought this house and then forgot it, moved out as this neighborhood “went to seed” and drugs. Drug commune (C., D., and others). Green shades, green texture–my separation from commune (I’m a visitor). The most minor hint of Akard commune. Outside screen door, humid wetness (slight winter) and carport–a cat, black and white, is in my room–chicken carcass on a black mat outside in carport– I eat some chicken meat, but don’t allow cat any, as I don’t want it to have chicken breath, as it will sleep with me. Girl (Crystal type) hides behind sculpture in the hallway leading here:

Rest of commune involved in drug party. It is both 3 AM and dawn. House next door occupied by other freaks I don’t know–M. S.’s yard is the feel here.

C. slowly advances, laughing. I close my eyes and pretend I’m asleep. But she comes to my bed and (she is the anima). Nothing evil about her at all. She is good humored, but also a part of a commune which I don’t understand. The house is more M.s house. I am a total stranger at the place; my sleep in the little room smacks of doing penance. C. is not really supposed to have any contact with me.

1/11/79

I’m driving a car (and/or walking) on a completely conceptual interstate towards Los Angeles (which has taken on an “importance” in my thoughts recently). Strangely shaped blocks, symbols, kinetic sculptures, everywhere. The L.A. skyline looms ahead (no California mountains in the dream–it’s all a vast green plain)–equally cubist, blocked, insane, powerful, working well. To the north I see San Francisco (c.f. S.F. buried dream within past month–hotel, parents, insanity! Other World–same S.F. as this dream). S. F. is equally blocked–but the sculptures and buildings are “thinner” and “gentler,” more artistic and cultural. (Cut to rooftop speculation on bullshit in Dallas skyline–flying horse, clock, Republic National Bank rocket.)

I consider as I (humorously) travel on the interstate (shapes everywhere, I go at varying speeds to interact with all obstacles), the S.F./L.A. duality as being similar to the Dallas/Houston duality. Also, how neat it is that both skylines are visible on this Other World interstate. Interstate packed full of conceptual automobiles, people, problems–a great caravan of humanity journeying on this Interstate.

3/7/79

August night (complexion cream). Our house–behind it a garage apartment. “Similar to my old one.” An Interstellar Wombat picture there, but one I dislike. I set up two canvases up there, 5 x 5, on chairs, they tower over me, giant walls, one is I.W., with deep blue swirls and orange, the other is blank. I intend to “rewrite” I.W. on the new canvas. But I think that I could also paint right over I.W., do two canvases at once. I begin to like the deep blue tones, clouds of I.W. more.

Eric Cathedral

8/1/79

The shapes are the shapes of keys, concepts from intelligence tests, the mall is modern. It is the blocks of technology. I scramble to the railing and five or fifteen or fifty stories below me, the concrete of a more massive mall. Dizzily I fall backwards, vertigo, pebbled walks, planters, cheerleaders. But above the mall extends into more keys, blocks, levels–and the sky. The anti-vertigo is worse. Gravity slides. But I find a sunlit block of crabgrass. I concentrate on the crabgrass, and calm down. Later, in the lower mall, I explain it all easily.

12/4/79

S. or C. or both at first day of Rice–August 1970 (yet also, familiar summer–could be beginning of sophomore or junior year). Dark, cold monastic Wiess College–in summer, Saturday morning, and currently run by Catholic nuns and cheerleaders and bankers’ group. The second floor (stone) interior corridor. The two guys I met at 11/3 homecoming. Students start arriving. The marsh outside. Green-blue-brown. Damp and cold. Possibilities. S/C is my friend.

Larry Cathedral

12/17/79

It is May. Implying first house in Australia–as my dorm room. G. gives someone else speed. I’m afraid to ask but he gives me 5 or 6 beautiful hits. Near end of semester. The open-ended feeling/apocalypse and triumph. The deep night. The forest around the school. I plan to stay up all night. X. is there. “Where are they hiding all the speed?” she says. I offer her one of my hits, tell her of my plans–and tell her she can get more speed from G.

11/16/80

I have returned to Evanston to take a room and relive my past there–some necessity. All very compelling. An old poet and his two sons offer to go on a walk with me–at first I decline, but then I accept on the condition that we cover all the places I need to. White room with bright window–to the lake–

12/20/80

A community celebration, lasting for weeks, in a large indoor shopping center–and spreading out far past that. Total celebration mood–standing in line at ice cream store to get my 20th cup of beer. I am free to do exactly as I please.

1/20/81

I have a motorcycle with no hand grips–riding with X. in traffic–to weird stone amusement park stand run by middle-aged man and woman–bright morning–I put the bike in the back seat of the VW and drive it home. But then I pull into a gas station, deciding to take the motorcycle after all. When I start to pull it out, it turns into Ming, sleepy, fat Siamese. Ming puts his claws into the seat and refuses to be pulled out. I do succeed in getting him over a couple feet, but by this time he’s so pissed off that I decide it will be best to leave him alone. He goes back to sleep, and I resume driving. That very open and clear road–“to the north, running east/west through a relaxed urban space”–like North Rice Blvd. in Bellaire?–opening up into other “green urban” buried dream scenes.

1/31/81

The blue corridors … level X of an N-leveled library, university, etc.–this area being nothing but solid corridors. None of it is scary. I am exploring–I’ve come from the black and white corridors to the blue ones (related to an earlier “library levels” dream written earlier, I believe–probably the same structure.)

Dazzy Radbiest

2/7/81

In haunted house all night party–building a giant wrap-around table in different layers. Paintings, stairs, laboratory in it. My power (even “evil.”) All the personalities there–G. S. at the end driving his car up the Dark Hill as I prepare to leave the old millionaires’ burnt-out five AM conversation. We discuss (he is now D. U.) German grammar.

3/31/81

Dream: entire perspective of my life, nearing 30 … in terms of an open-ended house (Fair Haven, New Jersey atmosphere?) Traveller(s) in trucks visiting … S.? … with X., talking about direction of my life. Realization that I am on the verge of some great writing … in terms of that entire perspective. “I don’t mind if my life accelerates from 30 on out–as long as I get that powerful writing out …” Pond, morning twilight … vast spaces, prairie, beyond the house. Begins: Truck driver-me pulling into house? S. visit? summer night–then it becomes my open-ended house.

4/19/81

The village in the sunny valley (arranged as plain, valley, hill, 2nd plain–the first valley is the quaint village–the 2nd plain is the magnificent city built out of nothing.

Into this I come, a Jim Piston character, with my .38. I live in the first valley with my grandmother. But a guy next door strikes me as evil and so I shoot him– several times–but though I know I am doing damage, he keeps standing in the doorway laughing. In paranoia I keep loading my gun and firing it at this guy. In the kitchen. Finally I say to myself: “C’mon, you’re acting just like Jim Piston now.”

6/14/81

Driving VW with X. on a black rural road at night–which has been roadblocked–a hundred-foot-deep barricade–by the road’s construction workers, who are on strike. Anger and tension in the air–the workers, the cops, the stranded drivers. Sense of a giant interchange half-constructed behind the barricade. All headlights are turned off, and I realize I cannot see anything at all–it is complete and total blackness (such as I experienced in the cave near Llano in ’71) and I walk around the cop cars and the drivers parked at the side of the road maneuvering by “a sense of the volumes I can remember.” The blackness seems to be the result of the roadblock. I know the black fields go on, uninhabited, for hundreds of miles around us. Some of the cops do occasionally use a flashlight. X. and I have a long red flashlight. I shine it on the ground. “We will be able to survive, at least,” I say.

Matthew Gegenstand

7/20/81

Me downtown at night–rainy–in my raincoat w/suitcase–having so much trouble walking–fighting the wind. After a movie, or business consultation, “The Hilton” (the library)–needing more business, needing sex. Other people on the street (Commerce). Then: in “rental room” of “M.’s house” at night, He informs me that if I sign the contract, at 9:00 the next morning, S. will be here. Yet: I am horrified–it is 10:00 PM and X. must be home waiting for me–I gather my things and leave (instead of staying all night until 9 AM).

But: no conversation with X. shown in this movie. It is 9:00 AM the next day and I am greeting M. at the modern high school bowling alley. He says: “Come into my cubicle and we’ll discuss that contract.” (Dream ended here by alarm. Very deep–with all sorts of side situations, such as “my sunlit shack at the side of the road.”)

9/16/81

Dream: on Willow St., Fair Haven–1981 perspective–other world–beings–the sense of total release–the same as (tied into?) the “South Pacific series of islands and world geography dream.” Also triggered by this: the drive down “Lake Shore Drive” dream–Northwestern–or something–on the lake (very old dream). In a book I read about the sea and islands north of the U.S.S.R.–was tied into this feeling of: infinitely beautiful world–I am totally free to explore it–

Sunlight down Willow–somehow sunlight down to Hance Rd. (connecting the 2 schools?) in fog–the “beings” are on this street–from another planet? At any rate I am one of them.

Zarreich – The Draft Covers

Posted on August 29, 2024 by Michael D. SmithDecember 10, 2024

I cleaned up Draft 2 a bit since the previous blog post but froze it there and created a document for a potential Draft 3. Along the way I decided I wanted a cover to focus the project, and wound up creating such a good one that I seem to have prodded myself to someday publish Zarreich. It’s really up in the air; Draft 2 can’t be published but I’m not sure what will follow. Yet the cover seems to compel me. There are actually two draft covers; I bought two images, but the first (highway to city, iStock.com/bulgac) is better–though the second (brown city, iStock.com/mppriv) probably more accurately conveys what the city of Zarreich looks like:

I still don’t know whether to feel proud that I pulled “the real novel” out in Draft 2 or whether this is some idiocy I should be ashamed of! Would I want anyone to read Draft 2? I do need some time to consider whether I should attempt a Draft 3, a true reboot. A few interesting ideas for changes have arisen in the past few days, but it’s time to let this thing lie fallow awhile and see what subconsciously unfolds.

I see Zarreich as something that might develop and emerge, though I have the responsibility to make the right decision on whether to publish.

Zarreich – Character Images

Zarreich: The Unexpected Second Draft

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Michael D. SmithDecember 10, 2024

Diana Arbor copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

Diana of the Commune

This summer’s successful resurrection of The University of Mars got me wondering if I couldn’t do the same for another older novel I’d once declared dead. I’ve just finished a second draft of Zarreich, but this novel isn’t ready for publication, nor may it ever be. In fact, not committing to publishing helped me loosen up and write Draft 2.

Rough Synopsis

Jim Donne, a recent college graduate, comes to live in a small town after the death of his mother, only to discover that all his memories have been wiped out. Now living with his grandmother, he kills what he thinks is a gang leader invading her home. But he panics, wondering whether he’s overreacted to a harmless student prank, and he cuts up and hides the body. Soon he finds himself under a ludicrously botched police investigation. Slipping into hallucinatory fevers, he tries to disappear into a stifling clerical job at a mortgage company in the ruined city of Zarreich. Yet he’s soon drafted into a secret commune of twelve dreamers in an underground university he can only faintly remember.

Revisiting a 2015 Condemnation

Oceanmouth copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

Oceanmouth, sixteen-year-old car mechanic

I bade farewell to Zarreich in a 2015 blog post. The 1981-82 rough draft was a psychic mess. Part of my reluctance to revise was that although I initially broke my internal censors and taboos, I finally lost my nerve and re-censored the book in its final four chapters, carefully editing the original shocking forces into a nice, tidy ending. I further censored myself with a 1983 second draft that truly defanged the entire work. But I never bothered to look at that disastrous second attempt when I began revising Zarreich this year.

I had to ask myself whether there was any heart in the rough draft, any spark. Could it be rebooted without censoring? And what about the “Roadblock” chapters already published as a story in my collection The Damage Patrol Quartet? I decided I wouldn’t reread the published story but just revise the rough draft again–so I may have actually improved some phrases in comparison to the published work, which in any case lacks the necessary references to other action in Zarreich.

Two things struck me in reading Zarreich this summer: the twelve characters of the commune are surprisingly well-drawn, and the settings are detailed: the desert, the plants and flowers, the village of Eicsine, the ruined nightmare city of Zarreich. There’s much color and description in this novel; it’s not just conceptual.

One of the book’s foundational energies is the world of dreams and their relation to reality. Jim Donne’s endless blunders through endless psychic minefields are really just symptoms of a struggle to attain that perspective. It might seem that his week and a half in Zarreich is one lurid mental breakdown, but maybe all that’s necessary to get his attention.

Draft Two Goals

Reclaim the rough draft’s energy, bringing out the original story as best I can, even if the final result is uneven. I think I accomplished exactly this!
Get rid of all traces of censorship, especially the original vapid ending. I think I succeeded here as well. I also made new and integrating connections, though I’m still not sure precisely how to end the book.
Cut verbiage and get the novel into my modern style. I rearranged the original thirteen chapters into forty-seven. I cut 146,000 words down to 100,000. It all reads much better.

Character Drawings

In preparing for Zarreich in 1981, I drew ink sketches of the twelve commune members. I’m still agog that all twelve capture the essence of each character. After scanning these and printing them on textured paper, I used them for colored-pencil versions. They came out well, a good marriage of 1981 and 2024 energies that emphasize the importance of all twelve characters to this story.

Jim Donne copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

The upgraded Jim Donne

Jim Stunde copyright 1981 by Michael D. Smith

The original Jim Stunde

Chapter Titles

Here’s where they stand in Draft 2; I hope they add flavor to the novel’s description:

1. Jim Donne’s Arrival
2. Emily
3. Attraction or Friendship?
4. Regarding Emily’s Art and His Own
5. Dorch

6. Diana
7. The Investigation
8. Jim Nearly Confesses
9. Eric Comforts Jim
10. Nothing Superfluous About Her

11. Emily Taunts Jim
12. The Dilapidated Subdivision
13. The Doomboat Freeway
14. Jim’s Donation to the City
15. Cathedral Mortgage Corporation

16. Buddha Pong
17. The Defeat Lounge
18. The University of Zarreich
19. The Bathroom Elevator
20. The Corridors

21. All This Loveliness
22. Jim Cathedral
23. Larry Cathedral
24. Jim’s Research Project
25. The Shack Afterwards

26. Diana’s Own Sex Project
27. The Promise of Bed
28. The Awful and Cruel Party
29. Millionaires
30. Turtle Man

31. The Proper Grammatical Use of Dorch
32. Registration
33. Sea Girl of Cuxlacjs
34. An Inquiry into the Meaning of Tonight
35. The Bonfire

36. So I’ll Probably Marry Her
37. Jim and Oceanmouth
38. On to Drulgoorijk
39. The Roadblock
40. Polyhedrons

41. A Sad Journey to Work
42. Larry Helpfully Piles It On
43. The New Mail Boy
44. Maybe I’ll Let Him Live
45. Jim Finds the .38

46. The Transfer Center
47. Zarreichians

Steve Dorch copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

Steve Dorch: gang leader or student prankster?

Draft Three?

Maybe. But a third draft might imply publication desire. What I’d want from it would be a fresh overview of all these surging energies. Zarreich is still an experiment and I’m not sure if it should be released into the wild. Before making any decision I need time to assess this thing, and there are other writing projects like the Supreme Commander Laurie sequel I want to get to.

At times I’ve run myself down for past-tripping on this undertaking, as if I were merely taking on a knitting project, or academically playing with defunct issues. But I do feel important energy here.

Homage Part 2: The Zarreich Enigma (2015 Blog Post)
The Twelve Commune Members

The University of Mars – Publication

Posted on June 12, 2024 by Michael D. SmithJune 13, 2024

In a dysfunctional 2065 where religious zealots restrict the world to outdated twentieth-century technology, eighteen-year-old Zeke Venan dedicates himself to the life of the mind and to the further evolution of humanity. He drags his Australian girlfriend to an impoverished University of Mars in a bombed-out Texas city, but Tansley quickly pegs this school as a mockery of their dreams. Yet they both begin to wonder whether aliens have infiltrated this fraudulent institution to research their own psychological flaws.

eBook:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Books2Read (offers numerous distributors)
Smashwords

paperback:
Amazon
lulu.com (mass market size)

The Publishable Work

From 2005-2009 I polluted several novels with overuse of italicized thinking before seeing my error and revising them all back to sanity. In fact mastering this technique of retranslating italics convinced me I could produce a 2024 version of The University of Mars fairly quickly. Despite earlier disappointing versions of this novel, I’ve always found myself drawn to its story and its themes.

I’d really gone overboard with italicized thinking in the 2009 version, with three of the thirty-four chapters entirely italicized, and similar italics dominating almost every page. At the time I thought this technique infused the story with emotional resonance, but I finally saw how it slowed the reader down and muddled the narrative.

Simply changing the main character names to Zeke and Tansley transformed how I felt about this novel. I hadn’t expected Tansley’s Chapter Six and Zeke’s Chapter Seven to suddenly strike me as a compelling story. And as I converted italics to regular narrative I was surprised by the high-energy fiction underneath all that italicized clamor.

When I started this project I’d assumed the 2009 manuscript had several rambling parts, but I was heartened to find no plot holes or dull sections in the novel. I must evaluate for self-delusion, but I do navigate by high energy and I feel pangs of dread at letting crap stand. I don’t think I’m fooling myself with the structure of this novel. It all works, after forty-four years, and I’ve been able to infuse this novel with my current consciousness.

I also managed to reduce the book from 69,592 words to 57,923, saving you the reader from having to slog through 11,669 unneeded data bits.

A vision for a great cover hit me during the revision, and I was certain I had to make that cover and publish this book at last.

Astonishment

Of course it’s puzzling that I’m now excited about the same novel I once declared unpublishable. In fact, for most of my writing career I assigned this book the status of failed experiment. Now after publishing what I think is an excellent 2024 version, I’m astonished that I once emphatically rejected The University of Mars at two different eras in my life:

The 1984 typewritten manuscript was way overlong and meandering, though I was proud that a good story lurked in there … somewhere. I stopped shopping the novel in 1986 after rejections from twenty-three publishers and agents.
The 2009 reboot offered a compelling new structure, removing unnecessary characters and strengthening the plot, but italicized thinking polluted the novel and I called it unpublishable after seven rejections.

But now that I have a finished and I think valuable University of Mars, I guess I’ll live with this astonishment. This novel has meant a lot to me over the years, and it’s wonderful to see it finally surface.

A Brief History of The University of Mars
More background

A Brief History of The University of Mars

Posted on June 8, 2024 by Michael D. SmithJune 8, 2024

As I mull over a forthcoming post to celebrate the long-overdue publication of The University of Mars, I’ve reflected a bit on its extended history.

I. Draft 1, 1980-1981

The novel began with a longing to describe an archetypal University of Mind. Mixing in was a rereading of Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the mythic legacy of WWII. Then came a morbid fascination with UFO abduction literature. Soon I was churning out a science fiction “novel of ideas,” but after a while it got dull. Was incorporating a farcical short story about Nazi Germany’s Me-163 rocket fighter a good idea? Was all the belabored plot and exposition about the West Texas Revolution of 1999 just a tired joke? Where was the sensuous flood of characters, situations, or even sensuous ideas? I tried adding an autobiographical Part II about my second-semester sophomore year at Rice, but that in turn meandered aimlessly. I couldn’t bring myself to feel any enthusiasm about finishing this book and finally had to declare the experiment over at ten chapters and 250 pages. The decision was made easier by the fact that I had sighted a better novel.

II. Zarreich, Draft 2, and Manuscript, 1981-1986

Amid the ongoing confusion about what was wrong with The University of Mars, I kept returning to the idea of a psychological novel. I knew my writing was not adult; my early novels had aimed at serious issues but usually veered quickly into irony and cynicism.

Now Zarreich broke through my previous taboos. In this novel an adolescent comes to live in a small town with his grandmother, only to discover all his memories wiped out. He panics and commits a murder, then finds himself a member of a secret commune remembered only in dreams. Zarreich wound up being an extremely rich but disordered effort, yet its 1981-82 draft smashed my inner censor. I found a new voice in which the main character of The University of Mars could ponder his romantic feelings for the female lead, and I had my first practice writing from the female’s point of view. And I saw a way to a breakthrough ending.

Proud of my efforts, I typed a 320-page manuscript and sent The University of Mars to twenty-three publishers from 1984-1986. Yet I finally withdrew it from publication efforts not because I’d lost faith in the novel as a whole, but because I saw how badly it needed a tune-up. The eight chapters were overlong, with crazy detours, long unnecessary exposition, confusing flashbacks, and dialog that would would disappear for hours. I didn’t have one of the new PCs yet, but figured that if I did I could rewrite this book magnificently in three or four weeks. But as other novels beckoned I lost sight of The University of Mars.

III. 2009

By 2009 I’d scanned and edited most of my earlier typewritten novels. The University of Mars had been OCR’d but was in such a rough state that it really wasn’t much of a backup. I decided I might occasionally proof one or two chapters against the typed MS. just to have a final archival copy. But now I saw that there was indeed a lovely novel somewhere in there; in 1984 I just hadn’t known how to bring it out. So I consolidated characters, streamlined the plot, removed exposition, and chopped its eight dense chapters into thirty-four lively ones.

But the entire effort was fatally marred by a tactical writing mistake. For a few years I’d been adding more and more italicized thinking to my novels, feeling that italics added “fast and real emotion.” Otherwise excellent successive revisions of Akard Drearstone, Sortmind, and The Soul Institute, along with the first four Jack Commer SF novels, were polluted with characters thinking in highly irritating present-tense italics, sometimes for pages at a time–that is, before I sensibly translated all those novels back into useful narrative.

The 2009 University of Mars, despite its excellent new plot, was spoiled by overwhelming amounts of this putrid italicization; I’d never used so much before and still can’t conceive why I did that. Yet, apparently hoping that fast and real emotion would land a contract in the brave new world of eBooks, I sent the 2009 version to several publishers. But after a few rejections I began to realize what was wrong with the novel and declared it unpublishable.

See the merciless 2015 post, Homage Part 1: Farewell to The University of Mars, for a devastating analysis of everything wrong with the book, plus further ruminations.

The University of Mars wraparound cover copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

The wraparound cover

IV. 2024

The memory of that debacle was so ingrained that for years I continued to scorn The University of Mars as a failed experiment best left in the desk drawer. Yet earlier this year I found myself intrigued by the thought of just cleaning it up as an exercise, not for publication. The goal would be to simplify an existing book and bring it up to a respectable standard.

The major thrust would be rewriting italic thoughts into narrative, but I figured I might as well correct typos and cut down as much verbiage and exposition as possible as well as change boring or cute character names.

Then I was truly surprised to see, as I translated italics back into a real narrative, a compelling story underneath all that pollution. I saw that the 2009 version had in fact pulled together a great plot and characters. Tansley’s Chapter Six and Zeke’s Chapter Seven were revelations. A cover idea hit me and my enthusiasm for the project ballooned. At first I thought I might publish this in a low-key manner, maybe only as a small mass market on lulu.com, but as more and more fictional quality emerged from successive edits I began to see a true novel in front of me. Somehow I’ve reached back into an impulse from decades ago and expressed the real thing I’ve wanted all along.

More background