So Zarreich is Finally Out There

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

paperback:
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lulu.com (mass market size) 

eBook:
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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

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

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 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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