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

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on by

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 Tarot card copyright 2004 by Michael D. Smith 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 Soul Institute by Michael D. Smith

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:

  1. 1975-ca. 1977: numerous story submissions, during which time “Space, Time and Tania” was published.
  2. 1980: “Where Eagles Have Unfortunately Landed,” a silly story slated to become part of my novel The University of Mars.
  3. 1984-86: The University of Mars and various stories intended to pave the way for that novel.
  4. 1991-1995: Sortmind and Property
  5. 2003-2004: Nonprofit Ladies
  6. 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 Cover Concept copyright 1996 by Michael D. Smith

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

Improvisation Gesture copyright 2011 by Michael D. Smith, and MicroI 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

The Nonprofit Ladies Tarot Card copyright 2015 by Michael D. SmithAfter 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:

  1. Animals–Wild / Nature / “Physics”
  2. Raw Tao
  3. Zany / Future / Sci-Fi
  4. Nonprofit Ladies
  5. Big Shared Nightmare
  6. Children / Beauty
  7. Libraries / Preservation
  8. Sorrow / Passion
  9. Art / Raw Energy / Sex
  10. Zen / Taoists / Science!
  11. Old Things–People–Society–Methods / History
  12. Absurd / Humor
  13. The Aristocracy
  14. Animals Interacting With Society
  15. Kids in Trouble
  16. Politics / Civilization
  17. 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

The Akard Drearstone Tarot Card copyright 2015 by Michael D. SmithI 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.

Excessive italicization

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.

Paul Zelinksy's Rapunzel on AmazonStudio Interior copyright 2006 by Michael D. SmithA 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.

16. Tower copyright 2006 by Michael D. Smith 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

Journals copyright 2018 by Michael D. SmithI’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

Sortmind copyright 1988 by Michael D. SmithIn 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

The Unexpected copyright 2009 by Michael D. SmithAfter 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:

Email to Double Dragon Publishing 3/5/11

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.

Deron's response 3/14/11

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.

copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

Zarreich – Publication at Last

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on by

So Zarreich is Finally Out There

Zarreich, a novel by Michael D. SmithFor 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.

copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

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Character Images

The Sortmind Draft One Project

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Why

Barbie-Esther Malroux, Sortmind Draft One Cover, copyright 2024 by Michael D. SmithI 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.

File Cabinet copyright 2024 by Michael D. SmithI’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:

Page 43 Sortmind Draft One copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

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.

Binders copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

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 …

Sortmind Draft One Cover copyright 2024 by Michael D. SmithCreating 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.

Copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

Dreams Used in Zarreich

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Emily Donne copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

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 copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

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 copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

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 copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

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 copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

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 copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

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 copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

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 copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

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.

copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

Zarreich – The Draft Covers

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Zarreich Draft Cover 1 copyright 2024 by Michael D. SmithI 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:

Zarreich Draft Cover 1 copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

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.

copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

Zarreich – Character Images

Zarreich: The Unexpected Second Draft

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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

  1. 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!
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

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

The University of Mars – Publication

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on by

The University of Mars by Michael D. SmithIn 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)

Part of cover design using using art by iStock.com/PitrisThe 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.

Part of cover design using using art by iStock.com/PitrisAstonishment

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.

copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

A Brief History of The University of Mars
More background

A Brief History of The University of Mars

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on by

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.

The University of Mars by Michael D. SmithI.  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.

copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

More background

The Soul Institute: The 2024 Update

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Flagship

I’ve just finished republishing The Soul Institute, my flagship novel. Exploring my main themes via numerous archetypal characters, complex at 183,000 words and 552 pages, TSI is nevertheless tight and reads quickly; I find its energies high all the way through.

The Soul Institute by Michael D. Smithpaperback:
Amazon (trade)
lulu.com (mass market)

eBook:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Smashwords

I certainly wouldn’t say the same about its problematic, sprawling, 377,145-word first draft. I’m leaving the history of the novel’s gestation to a forthcoming seventh installment of my Writing Biography posts, but the short history is that I printed a final manuscript of The Soul Institute in 1999 and considered the novel completed, ready to send to publishers. But I wound up leaving it untouched for ten years as I concentrated on shorter works, figuring that such a long novel couldn’t be published until after some shorter ones found an audience. I’d assumed this book might just need a little light editing.

Jipo Jarg Reconsidered copyright 1997 by Michael D. Smith

Jipo Jarg, vice president for Academic Affairs and disinherited heiress

So I was surprised to reread the novel in 2009 and find it required a major revision. Then it needed another tweak in 2011, another in 2014, and yet another in 2015 when I published it on Sortmind Press. I still consider the 2015 edition to be the final version of the Soul Institute story; by itself 2015 is still a good novel, but to correct typos, deal with some formatting issues, and cut some repetition, I issued an updated edition in 2020. Now I’ve made another update with a much better cover. I want my flagship novel in the best condition possible and ready for new marketing.

The novel describes a chaotic November at a small Texas coastal university founded on royalties from its unhinged director’s bestselling novel. It came from my recurring dream of a return to Rice University–not the common anxiety dream about getting behind in classes, but the urge to explore a vast, stupendous, mystic Source, the Other World, the sanctuary of a foggy university of Soul. The stories of several sets of characters eventually interlace:

  • TSI administrators and faculty pursuing farcical love affairs, power struggles, and fantasy life.
  • Students who came for the life of Soul but find themselves dismayed by the surfacing chaos.
  • Ninth graders at the local junior high school with their separate world of inhalant abuse and gang violence.
  • Members of a past paradise, Waxtor Carnationist College; though they have deep genealogical ties to TSI, Waxtor is the Other World they seek to return to.

Clean-up

Derrick Dexter copyright 1996 by Michael D. Smith

Derrick Dexter, chair of the English Department and refugee from Waxtor Carnationist College

To my dismay, I’ve known for some time that even repeated proofing will leave some typos and grammatical errors, especially in a long manuscript, even given the thorough 2020 refresh. So the time came last month to give the novel yet another scrubbing as well as a new wraparound cover to impart an improved feel to the printed object.

But though my initial plan was simply to use Grammarly for a quick error check, I soon saw I was in for a big project. I began to see formatting and style issues that impaired the reading flow, and I discovered that my 2020 reduction of characters’ italicized thoughts didn’t go far enough; the remaining italicized thinking now struck me as forced and awkward. I easily converted it to narrative voice or, where redundant, just cut it. Although I once overindulged in italicized thinking, I found it strengthened The Soul Institute to eliminate it.

As far as typos are concerned, Grammarly is useful for finding the true howlers, but is imperfect. I ran it three times because I noticed that it sometimes doesn’t catch all the errors, or might only catch three of the same four errors.

So I came up with thirty-eight embarrassing typos to correct, discounting hordes of formatting changes, hyphenations, and minor issues the average reader wouldn’t stumble over. Thirty-eight out of 183,426 words may indicate a 0.0207% error rate, but each of those thirty-eight will jerk the reader out of the willing suspension of disbelief.

I also updated the Waxtor genealogical chart that’s now included in trade and mass market paper editions, as well as the eBook versions.

Cover

The Soul Institute Wraparound Cover copyright 2024 by Michael D, SmithI took 117 new photos of chessmen (just counted) with a wraparound cover in mind, and discovered an interesting problem in my last couple designs: getting distracted by the loveliness of the entire back/spine/front image, which people generally will never grasp in its entirety. You must keep in mind that only the right half, the front cover, can be the focus. The wraparound in other words must serve the front cover’s impact. People will obviously note it’s a wraparound cover, but generally will never spread open the book from the rear to admire the full image. Weirdly, and this may be a result of how I compose images, way too many of my 117 photos emphasized the left side (thus the back cover) of the image.

There’s also always an interesting war going on between image and text. The text must be readable, even on a thumbnail, and the image and text mustn’t cancel each other out. The text color can also make or break the image.

Fairness

Moolka Waxtor copyright 2015 by Michael D. Smith

Moolka Waxtor, writer in residence, cousin to Derrick and his anima

As I wrote in this blog in October 2011, my goal in The Soul Institute from its first conception was what I’ve long called “Shakespearian fairness” to all characters. Each character, no matter 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 fully integrated into the framework of the story. I wanted to present all these character entities and what they meant 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 striving 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.

Fannin Richardson copyright 1996 by Michael D. Smith

Fannin Richardson, chair of the Art Department, passionate painter, secretly in love with the director’s wife

I marvel at this novel. What a gift from the universe this book was. Naturally working on this update makes me want to write another long literary novel, but I know from unhappy past experience that you just can’t force something like this. If it’s appropriate that I write another such novel, it shall be.

copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

The Soul Institute – Background

Relevant TSI Blog Posts
10/18/11: The Soul Institute
12/16/15: The Soul Institute is Published
1/11/16: The Soul Institute in Paperback
1/19/16: Jipo and Derrick
1/22/16: Mitar, Rhea and Inhalant Abuse – from The Soul Institute
2/4/16: Himal and Moolka
2/6/16: Fannin and Felicia: Wasn’t Art Enough Passion?
6/13/17: Milton Raeynold Glouair IV from The Soul Institute
4/10/20: The … 2020–Soul … Institute–Clean-Up!!!!!!

Supreme Commander Laurie Publication

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on by

Supreme Commander Laurie by Michael D. SmithUnited System Space Force leader Jack Commer has resigned to probe a dangerous cosmic irregularity, elevating physician/engineer Laurie Lachrer to take his place. But when she finds herself inexplicably transported onto his suicide mission, she must struggle to assert herself as the new supreme commander. Meanwhile fascist elements overthrow the United System and hunt Laurie as a traitor, and a malfunctioning, decades-old robot, in love with her, writes a sardonic science fiction novel asserting his own control over the narrative.

Published by Sortmind Press

paperback:
Amazon

 eBook:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Draft2Digital
Smashwords

The excellent cover art comes from Kara D. Wilson at Emerging Ink.

Supreme Commander Laurie, Book One in a series of the same title, follows Laurie’s new challenges. I decided from the beginning not to plot an entire novel series at once, but to throw whatever I had into Book One now and let subsequent novels explore newer themes. The first book pulls Laurie forward as the main character and pushes Jack back into a supporting character role. But along the way a couple interesting new characters threatened to take over the narrative.

Pulling Laurie

Laurie Lachrer was one of my favorite people in the Commer series. She began as a walk-on with a handful of lines in Book One, The Martian Marauders. As a nineteen-year-old USSF airman first class in 2034, she was mainly present to amaze the rest of the novel’s characters that Jack’s feckless younger brother John had such a stunning, super-intelligent girlfriend.

Forty years later Laurie became a main figure in the Commer series’ fifth book, The Wounded Frontier. By the 2070s she’s abandoned a succession of low-level United System Space Force jobs to reinvent herself as physician/engineer on the newest Typhoon spaceships, and though sixty-one, rejuvenation technology has kept her and most other series characters looking thirty to forty.

In the last Commer book, Jack decides to retire. But before flying the brand-new Typhoon VIII spaceship into a star in a doomed attempt to probe a dangerous cosmic irregularity, he issues a rather offhand last will and testament that promotes the stunned Laurie to admiral and makes her supreme commander of the USSF.

Her challenge is to assess whether she has what it takes to really be that leader. But as she begins to understand that the anomaly threatens the structure of the universe she’s finally driven to claim her new responsibility.

Pushing Jack

It was difficult at first to shoo Jack offstage, as well as other Commer series figures, but as I began focusing on Laurie, Jack naturally receded into a secondary character. Of course there’s no way the new book can ignore his final mission in Balloon Ship Armageddon, especially since Laurie mysteriously gets added to his crew on his dubious enterprise. This in turn led to further meditations on the nature of the anomaly at the center of the universe.

Since the novel emerges from his SF series, Supreme Commander Laurie includes relevant details of the Commer history to get a sense of how Laurie tackles her new role. But Books Two and beyond will definitely need much less, if any, of that background.

Surprises

Fathom the Doomboat Stars cover copyright 2023 by Michael D. SmithTwo ostensibly minor characters unexpectedly evolved into major forces: the insouciant Mickey Mal Michaels and the deluded but secretly honorable Major John West. Both are decades-old robots from the collector’s series Heroes and Villains of the Thirties, both eager to receive the latest robotic software upgrades.

A Lieutenant Mickey Mal Michaels HAVOTT robot was created with as much detail as its programmers could find about the dead Typhoon I turret gunner, including his online writing journal of 2.6 million words and his secret aspiration to be a science fiction writer. Absurd chapters of this interstellar anti-hero’s Fathom the Doomboat Stars are thus mixed into the narrative. The robot’s style is bombastic, sarcastic, and polluted by his insistence that he can just guess what is happening in the novel’s plot by using his AI methods to sort through billions of possibilities. But the weird thing is that he usually gets close.

After finishing the book I was struck by the stylistic similarities with Michaels’ style and my recently published Man Against the Horses! Four Theater of the Absurd Novelettes, which features four long freewheeling stories I wrote at age twenty-two.

Can Mickey Mal remain in the series? He does get sent on various celestial duties which we assume he’ll never return from. But who knows?

Robot Major John West, another HAVOTT recreation of a Martian Marauders character who died in battle in June 2034, finds himself in thrall to the new fascist president of the United System, Robert Easterling. Always eager to rise in the USSF organization and serve his human masters, he’s just been appointed Director of USSF Public Relations, since he’s a top expert with the USSF’s new business model of Frenzied Performance.

However, when sleazy Detention Services head Carla Posttner destroys the Typhoon VII spaceship at Easterling’s urging, West is horrified and begins to realize where his duty lies. Now he feels ashamed of ever having kowtowed to Easterling and his business jargon, and vows to rectify things as a loyal USSF man.

West was never arrested for his role in the fascist takeover. He might return in Book Two.

The first book also introduced some relatively minor characters I want to explore in subsequent books, including Typhoon III copilot Commander Mavis Wheeler, Detention Services guard Cadagasgar Wirlmann, Jonathan Commer navigator Lieutenant Pam Jonson, and Typhoon VI copilot Commander Saxon Greenhill. Though Greenville met an unfortunate demise during the Typhoon VII obliteration, he can always be reconstituted as a robot.

Supreme Commander Laurie - Kara Wilson's wraparound coverSelling Books

My final edits produced what I now think is a good novel. The cover kicks my ass to move forward with new kinds of marketing. If ever there was a cover to sell a book, this is it.

Most authors moan about marketing. I’ve had various seasons of committing to it, then withdrawing in favor of concentrating on the art itself, and I’ve heard other authors say similar things.

But why bother to write this stuff and publish it if you don’t make a valid effort to sell it? I decided not to immerse myself in marketing schemes in 2023 as I accustomed myself to retirement, but now I see there may be new tactics to explore. Above all cut out “marketing theater,” tasks that seem to promote your work but waste time and don’t give anything in return.

What reverberates for my writing right now:

  • Pushing Supreme Commander Laurie with a real eye to selling it. I like the term “selling the book” rather than “marketing the book.” If SCL is important, I should act as if it were!
  • Focusing on my flagship novel The Soul Institute with a new wraparound cover and a new feel to the printed object.
  • Continued musing on new kinds of fiction. Not necessarily beginning a new literary novel this year, but being open to it.
  • And of course also musing on SCL Book Two.

 

copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

Supreme Commander Laurie Background
Emerging Ink
Kara D. Wilson