Stuck in the Elevator with the President of the World

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The President of the World copyright 2023 by Michael D. Smith

His Excellency the President

Still working on the snappy, one-phrase, brand-defining pitch you’re supposed to have ready when you find yourself riding an elevator with the CEO of Random House.

But all I have are concepts culled from various web interviews over the years, most of them for my novel CommWealth. Because these thousand loose words haven’t yet jelled, the only thing that might work would be … elevator malfunction.

Thus I find myself trapped between the 334th and 335th floors of the United World Building with the grim, barrel-chested, six-foot-eight President of the World. His Excellency’s infuriated phone call elicits the unwelcome response that repairs will require at least half an hour.

Alone with the towering, grunting, exasperated Präsident der Welt, I finally muster the courage to look up into his deep-set, icy blue glare, and begin:

What inspires me, as a writer, are plots that make deep emotional and thematic sense, like a dream or déjà vu; or the eerie feeling I sometimes get that I’m in fact living in a novel right now. I’ve always been drawn to the concept of the psychological novel. I’m not sure how well I’ve lived up to that genre, but I keep pushing on it. Somehow “humor” and “psychological novel” flow together for me; I don’t think I’ll be writing grim investigations like Crime and Punishment. Then again, never say never.

I have an odd mantra, dating back to my Rice University days as a shy introvert shrinking from interaction with an energy-sapping exterior world: somehow, in the middle of intense adolescent Sturm und Drang, this statement popped into my head: “There’s a super colossal mess jungle going on. It’s my business to get involved with it, any way I can.” I saw that I needed to observe, participate in, and process everything around me for my writing and visual art. My wife Nancy refined this later when she told me: “Everything you do in this life is for your art.” Whenever I feel oppressed by exterior obstacles, I just have to remember that they’re also fuel.

The world is an art supply.

My science fiction is a mashup of literary and space opera genres. My literary novels in turn are infused with science fiction and absurdist elements. My best writing is a solid investigation of “what’s been psychically going on recently,” and this includes even the fun, fast-paced SF plots. When it’s coming out well it opens up fresh inner territories to explore.

Science fiction films and books, absorbed since childhood, prompted my early writing, but they’ve also influenced the bizarre aspects that are part of almost all my work, including CommWealth, which after all has no spaceships or teleportation systems, just an outrageously crazed social order with hysterical, over-the-top characters. The Twilight Zone TV show, which produced much childhood terror, was a major factor as well. Later inspiration came from Franz Kafka, Robert Heinlein, and Stanley Kubrick, and decades of letters between me and my best friend Sabin, whom I’ve known since I was five, helped hone my writing style.

My best work begins with a good “What if?” For instance, “What if all private property were abolished? How would people live?” A detailed dream can also lend itself to that “What if?” question. Or looking at a flawed older manuscript, finally grasping its “What if? and seeing exactly how to fix it.

I love it when I see someone reading my work and laughing; I then demand to know exactly where they are in the book. And I very much enjoy drawing the characters, and the drawings often give me feedback on their development.

CommWealth, a novel by Michael D. SmithI try to parcel pieces of myself to all the characters, both male and female. The ensemble cast format of CommWealth, in which half a dozen main characters take equal turns on stage, allowed me to represent my best and worst qualities across a wide range of characters and scenes. Allan, the narcissistic playwright and actor who forces the Forensic Squad theatrical troupe to stage his mediocre play, who hoards an unbelievable amount of consumer electronics and sports cars and isn’t above crime to get even more, might be my psychological shadow. Oddly, it’s Erica, the betrayed girlfriend of the ruthlessly charismatic bicycle mechanic Richard, who represents my best self. A professional model who’s initially scorned as shallow and incapable, she surprises everyone with her maturity and courage, and it’s her practical insight that finally undermines the CommWealth dystopia.

The President, eyes glazed, sighs in relief as the elevator finally starts moving. Yet it’s heading to the topmost, five-hundredth floor and the Presidential Suite, which takes up two acres of open space, three hundred sixty degrees of floor-to-ceiling window overlooking a gleaming futuristic city extending to clear blue horizon. Wordlessly the President gestures to the twenty-foot titanium desk of the Executive Secretary of the World, who extends to me a thin, forest-green envelope.

A publisher’s contract?
A check for a million dollars?
The ideal elevator pitch incorporating all the above?

copyright 2023 by Michael D. Smith

More on CommWealth, in which members of a theatrical troupe find themselves leading a suicidal revolution against the CommWealth system, which has outlawed all private property.

Stay in Your Science Fiction Lane

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At Last, a Generic Warning Easily Inserted After Any SF Title Page

Author’s Note

I am so terribly, shamefacedly sorry for having written this book from the vantage point of future space pilots, and for describing their reactions to aliens, space wars, and intergalactic intrigue, when of course I’ve never experienced any of these things and know nothing about them. For this I am truly, truly sorry.

Spacemen 1 copyright 2023 by Michael D. SmithI know real space pilots everywhere are not only offended but also deeply mortified by my presumption, and I apologize for the searing emotional damage I’ve so thoughtlessly brought into their lives.

Furthermore, if the above injuries aren’t horrific enough, there’s also the harm done to all characters I’ve recklessly libeled as “evildoers” or “villains.” Who am I to judge whether an interplanetary terrorist dictator is “evil”? Who am I to highlight the end of my novel with an insensitive depiction of his sordid death at the hands of a “hero” space pilot whom I likewise have no right to maneuver into such a tawdry, unknowable situation? How can I describe a character’s cruel psychopathic glee at the destruction of a planet when I’ve never blown up a planet myself? So I apologize to all evildoers, to all villains, to all antiheroes everywhere for having failed to truly understand and emphasize with them. Again, so dreadfully sorry.

Worst of all, I write about a future which I’ve never personally experienced. If that doesn’t disqualify me as an author, I don’t know what does.

Spacemen 2 copyright 2023 by Michael D. SmithI now fully, honestly, openly admit that I’ve never had the courage to become a space pilot, to blow up planets, or live several decades in the future. Readers, pilots, and villains, I am so wretchedly remorseful!

So terribly sorry for conjuring up such ludicrous and potentially harmful fabrications!

copyright 2023 by Michael D. Smith

Well, you might as well take a look.

New Drawings

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Some recent drawings since I retired from the library in January:

all images copyright 2023 by Michael D. Smith

The CanvasRebel Interview

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Smith Studio copyright by Michael D. SmithThe CanvasRebel interview came out Monday, April 24, and includes lots of photos. CanvasRebel’s mission (from their website) “is to create a space for artists, creatives and entrepreneurs to be able to learn from their peers through the magic and power of storytelling.” Here’s the text of my interview below. I’ve done numerous other online interviews, but here I tried to come up with some unique answers to the interviewer’s questions.

Michael, appreciate you joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

Eighty percent of my creative output is writing, and twenty percent is visual art. This seems an appropriate balance for me. In both areas I keep learning by what I call “navigating by energy,” in that I choose whichever activity sparks the most energy. In that state both writing and art are fun and compelling, never a chore, and I’m motivated to keep exploring new techniques. I’ve never had anything approaching writer’s block unless I begin veering toward a low-energy state, such as an obligation to write a certain way, or to please or impress others.

I began learning about high energy in the fifth grade. Even then I wholeheartedly embraced the idea that I was a writer. Our class was told to write stories containing that week’s ten or so new spelling words, but I wrote my first story in that mood of fearful obligation, hating its insipid detective plot even as I composed it. But soon I found my high-energy kid science fiction voice with “Voyage to Venus,” starring my newly-minted space hero Jack Commer, who later became the focus of my Jack Commer, Supreme Commander SF series. Each subsequent spelling assignment became a chance to eagerly plot more SF.

Not only did I have full confidence that I could fit in all the spelling words, but I also knew they’d assist me and move the assignment into fantastic storylines and odd directions. I understood that I was easily mastering adverbial phrases and dialog where others in the class could not. It all seemed natural, as if I’d done this in a previous lifetime and was now simply picking up where I’d left off. When we had to read our stories aloud to the class, mine enthralled my classmates and even riveted the fifth-grade bullies who otherwise had it in for me.

So I wrote eleven stories for class, and composed twenty-three others on my own, compiling them into a blue notebook arranged by their event dates from 1860 to 6000. I made my share of mistakes; a couple stories were bad ripoffs of movies I’d just seen, and sometimes I gave up and turned the story into a joke. At the time I wouldn’t have been able to put into words that the mediocre, low-energy stories were great learning experiences, but of course that’s what they were.

One of the bizarre aspects of The Blue Notebook is the massive amount of flippant self-promotion plastered throughout, the flavor of which I’m sure I picked up from book covers, TV commercials, and movie posters. All this would probably have been fertile ground for a child psychologist. “The Gap in the Earth,” for instance, begins with the admonition that this is “A great novel by Mickey Smith.” At the end of “February 11, 1971, DOOMSDAY” we are told: “In three months the Earth will be at war with Guacoazezama. Don’t miss it!” Stories have titles like “Case 3 of the New Fritening Experiences,” and conclude that “This has been a Mickey Smith Film Presentation.”

I wonder why I can’t seem to market like that now!

Michael, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I write surreal, humorous novels where characters confront bewildering psychic forces. Sometimes they react badly. Sometimes they fight well. Usually all this happens is in a science fiction framework, but some of my novels are literary, including my flagship novel, The Soul Institute, where a computer technician seeks sanctuary as the writer in residence at a vast, mythic, foggy university. Even then, absurdist elements soon take over the story.

The idea of writing being normal work is liberating. In the course of writing eighteen novels I’ve managed to remove the mystical high; though unexpected things happen in any writing session, it still comes down to fun work. Visual art on the other hand works differently, and I don’t know why; it’s still surrounded by an inexplicable numinosity. I’m never sure what will happen when I take up pencil or paintbrush. But I can still tell the difference between high and low energy.

I have several writing voices: correspondence, journal, literary novel, science fiction novel (those two differ), and my newest one, a blog voice which has been a satisfying and expressive development. I’m definitely trying to make myself understood as clearly as possible.

Navigating by energy, in either my writing or my visual art, is another way of saying that I’m open to channeling energies; I’m certainly not the first person to note that the best fiction or best art seems to come from somewhere else. We need to enhance ourselves to receive these gifts. Set methods kill energy and become empty rituals. We may have seasons of a certain way of doing things, but we need to be open to changing everything entirely. We need to recognize that any process has to be reevaluated when the universe (or whatever it is) decides that something new is to be poured through us.

Visually, I work in both abstraction and realism according to how the energies can best be channeled. Abstract artworks are like bizarre dreams you struggle to convey to a listener. Sometimes the result is necessary and resonating. Sometimes it’s confusing and boring. Sometimes a realistic image is needed to ground me in what’s real.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

I seem to have always gotten the resources I need at the right time. Having come into my own as a writer and artist in the pre-Internet era, though, I’d have to say that it would’ve been much easier to have had Internet publishing, eBooks, websites, and blogs from the beginning. But I learned much from analog work.

My ancient manual typewriter had processed in the neighborhood of twenty thousand sheets of paper before I went electronic. I did finish a 320-page typescript of one novel, and it was quite a task to mail off not only query letters and sample chapters, but sometimes a manuscript box containing the entire novel.

The top value of word processing is the scarcely believable amount of time saved as a novel morphs from rough draft to MS. without entirely new manuscripts to retype. The ease of revising a final manuscript or even a published novel seems obvious now, but it was extremely difficult before word processing. And now it’s feasible to work on a lot of writing projects simultaneously.

In any case, the age of mailed typewritten manuscripts with self-addressed stamped envelopes is over, along with poring through the printed Writer’s Market and Literary Market Place for publishers, standing in line at the post office, dealing with handwritten corrections with proofreader’s marks, and waiting weeks or months for a response.

In the same way, showcasing my visual art on sortmind.com is so much easier than painstakingly taking slide photographs and arranging them into binders to be hand-carried to galleries. I’ve not done much with digital art so far, but intend to expand my skills there.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

In my novel Sortmind a chapter titled “So This is What the Lives of Non-Artists Are Like” describes a young artist character struggling to understand why he’s in thrall to a sociopathic political strongman. It’s fruitful for an artist to step back and realize that other people are interacting with the world entirely differently than you are. But you can’t be arrogant or disrespectful; human creativity manifests itself in all disciplines and throughout daily life and daily work. In that sense there really are no “non-creatives.” There are also many people who want to create art but who will have to remove some blocks to get there. Who knows what will happen with them?

This gets us to normal world interaction with work, organizations, and careers. Since almost all writers and artists need to support themselves, this can lead to a sort of split personality. In my case I retired two months ago after 42 years as a librarian. I’m still processing the entire career, as it mixed into my writing and art life, as a strange, rocky, detour-filled journey. I used to wonder if people from each world could hold me in contempt for selling out to the other side; artists could mock my management/library skills, and library staff could mock my pretensions of being an artist/writer. But now I see this as amusing; it’s not any sort of obstacle, and during all this time I’ve steadily been producing novels and paintings.

The library career, despite various deleterious effects such as the enormous amount of time spent doing libraries and not art, provided structure and funds for an art life. It also provided a treasury of themes and experiences for new art. Admittedly it’s not war correspondent / astronaut /deep sea explorer / famous actor / military hero experience, but it’s what life gave to me.

We read stories of successful artists or actors whose autobiographies stress such total commitment to their craft that at age seventeen they totally threw themselves into it without a look back, that they never mired themselves in other careers. These stories are inspiring, but then again, history is written by the victors. Think of all the artists who also threw themselves so heedlessly into nothing-but-art, and their lucky break, also well-delineated in the autobiographies, never came. What was their survival choice? I know perseverance is also a major factor in the success stories, and that my analysis is simplistic, but … how can one artist ever compare his or her story to that of another?

 

 

 

Asylum and Mirage: A Poetic Ancestor

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Asylum and Mirage by Michael D. SmithThe previous post discussed the “33” story or novel attempt. I’d thought for a long time that since “33” is so surreal, it must have been sparked by dreams. But in perusing my 1985 journal from May to August, I didn’t find any such dreams; and I realized “33” was gestated out of idea sessions from May to July 1985.

So my memory of an 8/20/85 poem being the inspiration for “33” is incorrect, because “33” was completed August 2. Therefore, 8/20/85 represents an urge to go beyond that first story and consider what sort of novel could expand from there. And that turned out to be Parts I and II, one of Asylum and Mirage’s ancestors.

So here, in the untitled 8/20/85, we have an idea session typed as a rough draft poem. Some of it repeats the “33” storyline. New concepts surviving into Asylum and Mirage are the man who “wishes to paralyze others by mental force alone,” and the “gate to catch the unwary” that became nods to Reunion brainwashing, and the psychopathic hitchhiker who evolved into Thomas Tanner.

okay, so tell me what the themes are:
a soldier betrays his country and must wander back
from Siberia while facing constant threat of death.
a businessman plunders his own soul to keep coming out on top,
and then dies. his mistress carries on the struggle.
a dog frolics in the park of lightning bugs, unable to reach
any deeper for the full awesome mystery. a gate is set up
to catch the unwary, who are then tortured. years later,
deformed, they realize they could have escaped at any time.

a man wishes to paralyze others by mental force alone. he holds
up his hand at a shopping mall. another wanders in south Texas
with a revolver and a cruel grin, hitching rides on railroad cars
and always sure to get on intimate terms with his victims.

another man is a deacon at his church. he cannot admit
he is in love with the church secretary. her beauty and
practicality scare him, so he treats himself to more
years of climbing. Al and Paula fail to communicate on a date
at the end of the world.

so much suicide that we must begin to ignore it. a sense that
the main characters do not live in that dimension–if only we
could contact them, scream Billy and Sheila.

a cat rages at the stupidity of mankind. an exemplary man forgets
his identity at sunset. the party on the balcony takes
place.

an accident forces hundreds of automobiles to wait on the freeway
for hours at night, after the big day when the parachutes were handed out.

a writer descends into a basement and is subsumed into the boxes
of other people’s manuscripts he finds there. a housewife begins to
think seriously about the origin of the universe. a toy is
destroyed. an idea completed in one novel is said to be ready
for inclusion in a carnival of dreams.

the carnival of dreams is sold at a bankruptcy sale. a small-town
hoodlum is worked over by members of the local carpenter’s union.

a record album contains a fence at night, and the smell of freshly-cut wild grass.
power is fed through tubes into an ailing musician’s mind.
steps lead to a mountain.
the clouds drawn over the years continue to build in the darkness.

Asylum and Mirage by Michael D. Smithcopyright 2023 by Michael D. Smith

Asylum and Mirage Background

Asylum and Mirage can be found at

paperback:
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Barnes and Noble
lulu.com (mass market)

eBook:
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Barnes and Noble
Draft2Digital

Asylum and Mirage: The Old 33

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33 by Michael D. SmithIn looking back at the long history of the ideas that led to Asylum and Mirage, I went back to a 1985 work, “33,” five loosely connected vignettes composed in the hope of fueling new novel ideas. “33,” so titled because it was thirty-three typewritten pages, proved to be a constructive warm-up for another novel, Parts I and II, a failure in itself but which in turn sparked concepts that eventually went into Asylum and Mirage.

To update “33” for a PDF I gave the story the kind of attention an editor would give to a manuscript that was good but needed some work, leaving the MS. in its own voice but in better shape. For a cover, I searched for my art from that era and was captivated by the only painting I did in 1984, “Last Page of the Last Journal.”

Here’s the first section, followed by a link to the whole story. The third section, “The Business Partners,” was the basis for a scene in Asylum and Mirage.

Chapter 1. Jupiter

“It’s certain,” Ming said, looking at the instruments they’d gotten from the ship and hauled into the tiny shelter. “We passed directly through the worst of Jupiter’s radiation belts. No wonder our minds are short-circuiting. We may have only hours left. Maybe even less.”

“God, how do you know?” Billy whispered. His voice came through the intercom speaker by Ming’s ears in perfectly modulated stereo, just like listening to the FM.

“Jupiter’s radiation belts have 400,000 times the lethal dose for a human being, that’s how I know,” Ming replied. “And you have to admit, our minds are the first things that are going.”

“I know. I feel altered … weird …” Billy said in awe.

Ming saw himself reflected in Billy’s mirrored visor. Ming wore a suit identical to Billy’s except for the blue helmet that marked him as an Administrator. Billy wore the bright red helmet of Astronaut. Ming chuckled.

“Huh? What’s so funny?”

Ming laughed. “Damn, this is exactly like listening to the radio! You sound like some sort of disc jockey!”

“Really? Is that so funny?”

“No, what I was actually laughing at was how quickly your training has evaporated under the stress here,” Ming said. “You should be telling me about the nature of Jupiter’s radiation field. I just picked that one figure out of my memory. You knew when we were thrown into the belts what the rad level would be.”

“Huh, I guess you’re right. Still, I can’t be expected to be on top of it all the time.”

Ming smiled, then realized that Billy couldn’t see the smile and so the communication was useless. The whole thing was like the radio, or talking on the phone. Ming looked around. Even now the instruments were showing a dangerously high level of radiation. Somehow Billy had sighted and tracked a small chunk of rock not half a kilometer long that was tracing an unstable polar orbit around Jupiter, most likely some asteroid fragment captured by the planet’s immense gravity. They were so close to Jupiter that they could clearly see the most minute details of the wind-whipped cloud patterns on the surface. Jupiter filled the entire sky. There was nothing but Jupiter. When Ming shut his eyes, the brilliance even through the visor was so overpowering that the effect was like standing on earth at noon on a cloudless day, drenched in sunlight and blue sky. Everything was blue.

Billy had chosen the rock for a landing–or perhaps more accurately, to tether the ship to, as either of them could leap right off this moonlet into the void with little difficulty–both to rest the overheated engines and to hopefully secure some more of the metals and ore that the Synthesizer ran on. “We could probably take off any time,” he said. “Wanna give it a try?”

Ming shrugged. “Sure. Any time.” He opened his eyes, squinted, and took in the painfully overexposed but somehow welcome light blast from the planet below. “On the other hand, we could sit here in the tent for a while.”

Billy’s red helmet swung around to survey the tiny little tent made of plastic and aluminum tubing that was supposed to shield them from the radiation sleet but which was doing no good, Ming knew. “What do you mean … for a little while?”

“I mean, why not just wait here to die?” This Billy was so dimwitted at times.

“Huh,” Billy replied. “I’m not so sure but that I wouldn’t like to try to make a run for it.”

“We can, if you want,” Ming said. “But we both know we won’t get far. Too much radiation, Billy. We both know it.”

“That’s true.”

“We could sort of think of this rock as our home. Our special place. This is a magnificent place, really.”

“I know, I was thinking the same thing, you know.” Billy paused. “You know, Ming, I wouldn’t normally say this to an Administrator, but–”

“Forget it,” Ming said. “I’m not really an Administrator. Not really.”

“I … I know what you mean. I’m not really an Astronaut. I mean, I’ve been doing it for years now, but … you know?”

“I know.”

“Damn, I can really talk to you, man! You listen. That’s amazing!”

“Yeah. So what were you about to say?”

“Well, I mean, I hardly know you, man, and I want to apologize. I mean, when they first assigned you to my ship, I thought: God, this guy’s gonna be the death of me. I mean, I felt from the beginning we wouldn’t get along.”

“And we didn’t, not at first. It took us weeks to get used to the other.”

“That’s right,” Billy said. “Well, I can hardly imagine how it happened, but I suppose I’ve always known I would end up … here, dying, here. Or rather: living here, I’m alive. That’s all that matters.”

“I know. I feel the same way. This experience–this entire experience. To be so cut off–from everything.”

“Even though we know we could blast off in the Shepherd at any time.”

“Right! But instead, deep down inside, we both realize we want to just sit here and take everything in.”

Billy leaned back and swiveled his helmet at Jupiter. “Yeah! We take everything in!”

“And–and this becomes–the high point–the absolute peak of our lives!” Ming cried, so overcome with emotion that he reached out and patted Billy’s oxygen pack.

“I knew you were going to say that! But it’s true!” Billy said. “It’s true! This is the sum of everything we’ve ever lived for! This vista! This realization! The very thoughts we’re thinking are dangerous, but we’ve been brought here to think them!”

“We are fundamentally, forever changed, Billy! Consider that!”

“We’re altered. This is the end of everything! God, it’s an honor to share this with you, Ming!”

“Billy, you will always be my closest and deepest friend … forever.”

“I know … I know …” Billy choked. “The same goes for me. I can’t believe it. God, Ming, we’re going telepathic. It’s amazing. I see so much in you.”

“I know. I see it in you as well.” But Ming had to pull back for a moment. Billy was slumped on his back, helmet lolling. Ming could easily read the disrupted patterns of Billy’s brain. The patterns Billy had accumulated throughout his life were indeed breaking down, but did that imply mere insanity? Or was Billy closer to the truth than he’d ever been? It had to be the latter, for Ming himself was closer to the truth than he had ever been, and he knew Billy was sharing the experience fully. Ming threw his head back and took in the full blaze of Jupiter and its streaming clouds. The asteroid must have entered a zone of higher radiation, because Ming felt his mental patterns slashing recklessly apart. The entire structure of his brain was coming apart. Jupiter was coming apart. He shared it all with Billy.

Billy was moaning and rocking on the hard rock so violently that Ming, fearing that Billy might inadvertently reach escape velocity, put a fat silver paw out and steadied the disintegrating astronaut. “Ming–” Billy gasped. “You’re right. This changes us–forever–fundamentally.” Billy coughed, and then stopped moving.

“And you will be changed fundamentally when you awake as well,” Ming said, settling back in the tent, heart surging with excitement and love for his own life, his own record of experience in this universe. And now Ming had to prepare himself to go under, to go underground, to enter the tunnel on faith alone, faith alone that the process of dissolution would in fact lead to a completely new awakening and a climbing out of the tunnel. For deep underground the tunnel widens into a plaza with grottoes and archways and vaults filled with indescribable and kind beings, and they exist to teach us the meaning of trust. All children discover this when they learn how to go to sleep.

copyright 2023 by Michael D. Smith

Asylum and Mirage by Michael D. SmithBackground info

paperback:
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eBook:
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Asylum and Mirage: Themes and Issues

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Asylum and Mirage by Michael D. SmithArt maven Reva McKee invites a hundred fifty guests to artist Dave Raavenscorr’s quirky warehouse studio, but they’ve really come to seek succor from the charismatic Marshall Singletree, the Great Migrator who escaped two Reunion brainwashing catastrophes in the south.

I keep mulling over various issues the book brings up. Here are some new ones, including unreliable narrators, character points of view, communes and theater stages, addicts and Nullity, and the ambiguous Reunion.

Unreliable Narrators: Infant Dave and Sociopath Thomas

Dave Raavenscorr copyright 2022 by Michael D. Smith

Dave Raavenscorr

Thomas Tanner copyright 2022 by Michael D. Smith

Thomas Tanner

These two characters offer third-person point-of-view narration. Though they may not embody the classic first-person unreliable narrator, their absurdly skewed perceptions qualify them for unreliability. Dave is in thrall to his Shadow side and showcases his predation mode when he tries to seduce what he thinks is a neurotic college girl. But he winds up baffled and horrified to find he’s latched onto Dr. Marina Nunn, promiscuous chair of the Lake University Music Department. Then we abruptly see him ruthlessly sized up from addict Caspra Coronae’s point of view; Dr. Nunn’s “mere addict” sees he’s still the same clueless jerk she knew in high school fourteen years ago.

Reva McKee copyright 2022 by Michael D. Smith

Reva McKee

Dave secretly loves Reva McKee, but she’s supposed to be just a friend, and she’s also recently begun a nourishing relationship with the Great Migrator, Marshall Singletree. Regarding her as unattainable, trapped in his repressed fantasy mode, Dave picks up college girls ten or more years his junior, seething with senseless generalizations about how they act and look, how inferior they are to him. He certainly can’t see that his dedication to his art and his infantile sexuality cancel each other out.

But under the mounting pressures of brainwashing and the coming war, Dave finally has to sober up and assume vast responsibility.

Sociopath Thomas’ narration churns past Dave’s in a more frenzied key. He and Dave are entangled. As an addict, and as Dave’s Shadow personality, Thomas chooses Dave to be his legal sponsor.

Marshall Singletree copyright 2022 by Michael D. Smith

Marshall Singletree

Thomas may catalog every inch of his former girlfriend Reva’s flesh in his icky domineering way, but in Reva’s narration, other dimensions of her appear as we see her awash in self-doubt as well as buoyed up by her new love with Marshall Singletree. She’s uncertain about her book club leadership role, but we do see she can get things done. While Thomas is unable to see past Reva’s stunning physical presence, Singletree, on the other hand, is a gentleman and knows the real Reva. He does throw a tantrum when he sees he’s about to lose her to Dave, but though he’s pathetic at that point, it seems entirely understandable.

It takes Thomas a long time to realize his true nature as a Reunion agent of terror and brainwashing. I enjoyed unraveling his mind with tornadoes and his crazed, improbable lust for the OverGeneral.

Eight Main Characters and their Points of View

Eight Main Characters copyright 2022 by Michael D. SmithI’m impressed that all eight of my drawings of the characters captured each one’s essence; I’m usually successful in about a third of such attempts. I was conservative in executing these drawings; there’s less abstraction than in most of my character sketches.

There are four main male characters, Dave, Thomas, Leon, and Singletree, with only unreliable Dave and Thomas getting point-of-view duties.

Jasmine Sung copyright 2022 by Michael D. Smith

Jasmine Sung

Of the four main female characters, Caspra, Marina, Reva, and Jasmine, only Caspra and Reva, quite reliable narrators, have point-of-view narration.

Leon, Singletree, Jasmine, and Marina have no point-of-view scenes. I consider them all unknowable forces and so we don’t get inside their heads. I’m sorry Jasmine had to exit the novel so early. She had a strong walk-on part that took her beyond being a mere supporting character.  Maybe I’ll resurrect her as a robot in a new science fiction series!

Communes and Theater Stages

Communes recur in my novels, groups or gangs with a shared mission, even if the members are at cross-purposes. For instance:

  • Akard Drearstone’s four-man rock group, and their farmhouse commune
  • The Soul Institute’s deranged twenty-person faculty as well as the junior high school paint-sniffing gang
  • CommWealth’s Forensic Squad theater troupe
  • Sortmind’s group of high school artist friends
  • Jump Grenade’s basketball team
  • The Jack Commer series’ Typhoon spaceships with their tight six-person crews

 

Communes allow for an ensemble approach to the characters; Asylum and Mirage’s eight main characters are a commune; Dave’s army company forms a larger commune.

I also want to set a theater stage where actors block out scenes, synchronize with each other, and get their lines perfect. On the night of the party we have these theater stages:

  • Marina’s dorm room, where idiot Dave gets in way over his head
  • Dave’s warehouse, where a hundred fifty drunk partygoers ignore their pending doom
  • The dream warehouse district, where Dave and Marina seek pleasure and escape but find Reunion madness
  • The addict holding pen with its drugs, bureaucracy, and murder

 

A month later, on the night of the final battle, these stages are set:

  • The shell hole, where spies open up to each other
  • The Victorian mansion of delusion and hallucination
  • The ruined warehouse, where Caspra confronts her disintegrating empire
  • Café Spike, where stunned survivors confront the future

 

I Swear the Following Symbolic Aspect was Written Unconsciously

During the first draft I realized that while I’d long ago posited Dave’s warehouse being on the second floor, I never bothered to ask if he owned the place or was just renting it, or what lay below. So now Dave buys the warehouse, but the sales contract lets the previous owners store their ancient printing press machinery in the dank, unfinished first level for a year. However, and I almost wince to consider the high school symbolism of this, the bright upper floor of vast bright art and partygoers, officially owned by Dave, can represent his ego, the way he thinks about himself, and the leaking cold storeroom of ancient printing presses below becomes his Shadow, everything he doesn’t want to acknowledge.

Addicts and Nullity

An explanation of Nullity’s true nature doesn’t come up until a third of the way into the book. People are disgusted by addicts and look down on them, even the government does with its crazed proclamations of addicts’ rights. Only later do we see the fear and the secret longing for Nullity behind this revulsion.

Are addicts doing themselves a favor by using Nullity to avoid painful hallucinations? But the drug must have some use because Reva finally needs it to come to grips with what Singletree really is.

I wanted the exposition about Nullity and Reunion to unfold as naturally as possible, reflecting the fact that people can’t bear to discuss these topics. The invitees to Dave’s art warehouse are like partygoers in Paris two weeks before the Nazis invade in 1940. Hopefully no dialog like “Professor, can you explain to me how this Nullity works?”

Marina and her Reunion Topology Opera

Marina Nicker Nunn copyright 2022 by Michael D. Smith

Marina Nicker Nunn

Marina’s a music professor and intends to create an opera, but can her notecards ever form one that would truly map the Reunion? She wants Dave to paint background scenery for her opera, her voice is musical, and she has the talent to pull it off. But she never gets past the notecard-making stage. I think she’s processing energy but unable to pull it together.

I tried on the idea that Marina, who declares she can’t say no to any man, has self-esteem issues, but that’s almost a cliché explanation. I see her more as a semi-foolish adventuress. She finally breaks down after her tryst with psychopath Thomas. Coming apart, she runs off for a month, lost in hallucinations, but I don’t think she ever gets fully brainwashed even as she conjures a fantasy of marriage to the murdered Great Migrator.

The Ending / Ambiguity / The Reunion in General

The ambiguity is intentional. After all, “mirage” is the theme. What is the Reunion after all? Is it even real? Is Singletree really a Seed of the Reunion? He’s weaker than he pretends, but when he appears to come back from the dead he certainly seems to embody Reunion evil. Or is that just the way his hallucinating captives see him?

Caspra Coronae copyright 2022 by Michael D. Smith

Caspra Coronae

I think Caspra unconsciously realized she could be the OverGeneral and just as unconsciously took it. I doubt this was a plan to destroy the Reunion, but she gained psychic power just by grabbing–even inventing–the OverGeneral. After finishing the novel I realized that her inability to maintain control of the Reunion echoes Jonathan James Commer’s failure to fully assume the Alpha Centaurian Emperorship in Collapse and Delusion, but I think you can explore the same theme in different novels.

The group-mind theme is a constant with me. Rationally you’d think “group mind” can’t really exist, but then what’s the mechanism that allows people to go mad in groups?

I’m fascinated by sociopaths like Thomas and by crowd delusions, shared fear, and mass hysteria, which essentially is what the Reunion is. Although a lot of the ideas for this book go way back to 1985, much of the impulse to write Asylum and Mirage came from my horror of crowd delusions, even my dismay at the January 6th riot. A recent book, The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups, is full of amazing examples. I’ve wondered if it isn’t all a hormonal thing–people get energized, then trapped, by the rising adrenaline rushes of people around them. I wrote a blog post about people being able to rationalize anything.

Another inspiration was William L. Shirer’s The Collapse of the Third Republic, detailing how France fell apart as the Nazis invaded, how hundreds of thousands of refugees clogged the roads, how French soldiers fled at the mere mention that Germans units were coming.

I also listened to How Civil Wars Start (quite depressing) and then The Sinner and the Saint, where the author describes Raskolnikov’s fever dream in Crime and Punishment: a disease coming out of Asia that drives people mad with a fanatic individuality in which no two people can agree on a single fact, where everyone thinks their view of reality is the only valid one, where all fight against all, where armies marching to combat start turning on each other, where societies completely break down.

Leon Winter copyright 2022 by Michael D. Smith

Leon Winter

Such insanity can’t be directly conquered. Just because Caspra realizes she’s deluded doesn’t end the Reunion. “Pulling its plug” is too tidy an ending. Yet she’s added another seed of distrust to the Reunion matrix.

The book winds down with sociopath Thomas and charming boy secret agent Leon in a bizarre, homicidal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern duet. I didn’t have to kill either of them off to make the plot work–but of course I did.

copyright 2023 by Michael D. Smith

More background

Asylum and Mirage: A Note on the Cover

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on by

Asylum and Mirage by Michael D. SmithThe novel’s cover comes from my June 2005 abstract painting show at Dallas Public Library’s Bradshaw Gallery. As the previous posts about the book describe, I’d had the image of Dave’s art warehouse for many years, long before doing this exhibit, but the spaciousness of this show, how the large paintings so effectively filled that space, still resonates with me. Placing the panoramic view of the exhibit on Asylum and Mirage’s cover makes the book even more vital for me–though this isn’t Dave’s studio and I’m definitely not unreliable narrator Dave.

Notice and Dream Topology Tarot Card copyright 2015 by Michael D. Smith

One of AAM’s ancestors

Bradshaw Gallery Show, June 2005No, this is not really what Dave’s studio really looks like. His space is more like the image in the cartoon I drew for the Notice and Dream Topology Tarot card.

Curiously in line with my old vision of an art warehouse, at one point during house-hunting in 2001, our realtor took me and my wife to a bizarre multistory former business in Oak Cliff (Dallas). The structure, on the market as a living space, was fantastically huge, raw during ongoing reconstruction, with a 50,000-gallon swimming pool nestled amid the almost inexplicable geometry of the place.

Warehouse Studio?On the top floor was a light, airy space about twenty-five by forty feet which I drooled over as a potential studio. I grabbed a couple digital shots at the time, and just now crudely pasted them together to get the feel of the space. Well, we didn’t have half a million dollars for that surreal warehouse, but it still reverberates.

Bradshaw Gallery Show, June 2005Bradshaw Gallery Show, June 2005As for that vast June 2005 exhibit, not only do I still treasure the satisfaction of pulling it off, I recall just as equally the absolute exhaustion of preparing twenty-four paintings for transport and trucking, hefting the monstrously heavy and awkward things, staging them and hanging them in an incredible day-long effort by myself, then a month later taking them down, manhandling them back down the elevator and into the moving van I’d engaged, and finally seeing them home. Across the years, thanks again to the DPL Fine Arts staff for hosting me.

Bradshaw Gallery Show, June 2005Other photos of the exhibit can be found on sortmind.com.

copyright 2023 by Michael D. Smith

Background

Asylum and Mirage: The Publication

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on by

Asylum and Mirage by Michael D. SmithArtist Dave Raavenscorr tries to seduce what he considers a neurotic college girl only to discover she’s Dr. Marina Nunn, chair of the Lake University Music Department and a refugee from the Reunion brainwashing disaster hundreds of miles south. Paranoid she’s contaminated him, Dave shows up late to a party his best friend is throwing in his honor.

Art maven Reva McKee has invited a hundred fifty guests to Dave’s quirky art warehouse, but they’ve really come to seek succor from the charismatic Marshall Singletree, the Great Migrator who escaped two Reunion catastrophes in the south. Yet no one can admit their placid college town lies in the path of mind-breaking Reunion armies.

Where to Find It

Amazon trade paperback and eBook
Barnes & Noble trade paperback and eBook
Lulu.com mass-market paperback
Draft2Digital eBook (links to many distributors)

Asylum’s Ancient History

Asylum and Mirage by Michael D. Smith

The Wraparound Paperback Cover

Maybe nobody wants to hear how much struggle goes into a novel. I’d already given an overview of the book’s history in its first post, but this expanded view may give a feel for all the wrong turns and obstacles that went into this thing over quite a long time. In retrospect it can all seem silly. You may wonder: Why doesn’t the author just write the final version first?

Though some Asylum and Mirage ideas go back several decades, I now see them as just underpinnings to a new story, with new characters and fresh perspective. In contrast with two other novels, Akard Drearstone and Sortmind, which got major reboots from far earlier versions but which were essentially the same story at the end, I consider the final Asylum and Mirage to be a new novel, my eighteenth. It began with:

“33,” 1985

so titled because it was thirty-three pages of disconnected character and plot musings, including one scene positing the final novel’s nightmare Reunion Topology warehouse district. “33” was originally intended as a novel, but within a month I’d scrapped that concept and considered those thirty-three pages a decent warm-up for the first draft of

Parts I and II, 1985,

an extremely rough-draft novel about brainwashing and evil, featuring naïve artist Dave sent off to war. I considered Parts I and II a failure but lifted a chapter for the 1986 rough draft of

Jack Commer, Commander, USSF,

where the stolen material became the basis for the Alpha Centaurian Grid and the fascist Head figuring in all subsequent Commer novels. In appropriating that chapter, I felt I’d effectively killed off Parts I and II, and yet

Notice and Dream Topology, 1992,

appeared on the scene to demand a rewrite of Parts I and II. This second draft was vastly improved and had an uncanny Twilight Zone-ish feel, but I left it unfinished, completing just Part I, Dave’s party in celebration of his artistic success, along with one scene of spies uncovering each other in a shell hole. During this version I got fascinated with playwriting and so started all over again, mashing NADT Part I and its notes for Part II into

Linstar, 1992,

a play that was the worst writing disaster I’ve ever concocted. In disgust I let this whole Dave/warehouse/war universe slide as I wrote other novels, including my flagship The Soul Institute; then years later, hoping to craft a masterpiece literary novel, I hit a wall with

Failed Notes, 2002,

an attempt to sort hundreds of note cards of ideas into fiction before realizing it would merely be a dull repetition of TSI; nevertheless, I hoped something would come of these notes, and thus the first concept arose of

Perpetual Starlit Night as a novel, 2002-2005,

an attempt to create a science fiction novel from the failed notes. But when I finally saw there was really just a good short story premise there, I abandoned the novel idea and wrote PSN as a forty-page story (2007, later published in Twisted Tails VII, Double Dragon Publishing, 2013). New energy for writing short stories then came up with

“Starvation Levels of the Infinite,” 2008,

a decent if uninspiring revision of “33,” intended for publication, though I never submitted it. Some fun Jack Commer novels mercifully came along to cut off this obsession with older writing, but meanwhile I was assembling

New Novel Notes, 2015 on,

even grave-digging some of the old 2002 notes, coming up with a vague, unwritable plot involving reincarnation. But just like the older notes, without a central compelling urge to write an actual story, the idea-rich NNN ultimately proved to be a waste of energy. Except that I felt the surreal inexplicability of the unfinished Notice and Dream Topology could be an ideal vehicle for exploring some of the character archetypes NNN had dredged up. Thus

Nine Archetypes, 2016,

sought to keep NNN in play by pulling out character studies of nine female archetypes from rough draft versions of all my novels beginning with The University of Mars (1984-2009, unpublished and rightly so). Nine Archetypes generated 124 semi-interesting pages, but these scenarios turned out to be repetitive and unusable; in no way were they real fiction. Yet the NNN juggernaut plowed on, and one of its saving ideas was a

Possible angle on a Sortmind II, 2018,

four pages of (desperate?) notes for a Sortmind sequel incorporating my 1981 rough draft novel Zarreich as well as anything worthwhile from NNN. I quickly discarded this possibility, but the ongoing pressure to come up with a new novel with NNN overtones resulted in a flirtation with turning the already-published short story

“Perpetual Starlit Night”

back into a 2020 novel, exploring a long narrative different from the one I’d envisioned 2002-05. I dropped this plan in favor of keeping PSN as a story and I later published it in The Damage Patrol Quartet. But ongoing NNN/NADT novel pressure came up with the 2021 concept of adding my old novella

The Psychobeauty, 1983,

into the mix. It seemed to be a great idea at the time; I could simply finish Notice and Dream Topology by combining it with The Psychobeauty, in which ninety-seven percent of the earth’s population inexplicably commits suicide, ending civilization and leaving scattered refugees struggling to resist their own suicidal urges. But The Psychobeauty proved to be a sinkhole threatening to swallow NADT and change its tone and meaning. By now NADT dominated the new novel ideas, and, to help new character archetypes unfold

Interview Series 1, 2021,

interviewed five male and five female archetypes through 121 pages. The wonderful new characters volunteered plot and people developments I couldn’t have come up with alone, and in high energy we all churned out

Caspra Coronae, 2021-2022,

the first draft of the novel in 425 pages and 121,780 words. I had some regret at CC being close to earlier Parts I and II work, but this was a new novel in so many ways, and it was a valid experiment, even a risky one across several decades. Did I really manage to express any of that NNN and Archetype stuff? Or was this just an interesting rewrite of an old novel? Meanwhile

Interviews Series 2, 2022,

let the Draft 1 characters muse on their own desired endings, and in a series of complex negotiations we combined several main characters and changed the title of the novel to

Asylum and Mirage, 2022-2023,

which provided badly needed focus and finally pulled the novel together into a decidedly new work. “Asylum” connotes a somewhat fragile sanctuary, and “Mirage” is a dangerously wrong perception despite its undertone of loveliness. Together characters and I crafted a new ending by eliminating the old concept of “Part II” altogether and just continuing the narrative after Dave gets his draft notice. His untrained army company remains holed up in his art warehouse over the next anxiety-laced month as the cruel, brainless armies of the Reunion steadily advance.

copyright 2023 by Michael D. Smith

Background Info

Caspra Coronae Draft One Blast-Off, July 3, 2021
Interview with the Burlcron/Mercer/Singletree, August 3, 2021
Walter’s Farewell Soliloquy–to Himself and to Draft 1 Caspra Coronae, February 26, 2022
Progress: Asylum and Mirage and the Title Change, April 25, 2022
Asylum and Mirage: The Draft 2 Milestone, June 17, 2022
Asylum and Mirage: Current Conditions, October 19, 2022
Asylum and Mirage and the Long Compositions, February 1, 2023