Trantor Group CEO Peter Trantor scrambles to reassure his latest client, the lovely but unreadable bank executive Anna Winstead, that his telepathic Sortmind app really isn’t as deadly as people assume. But he has some explaining to do when a … Continue reading →
Aside from a couple early practice novels, Akard Drearstone was my first real novel and my attachment to it has been deep. Was gestation to publication really forty-two years? Well, this novel has been on my mind since 1975; in … Continue reading →
I culled this post from the sortmind.com University of Mars page. I’ve always enjoyed this essay as a solid analysis of an unpublishable old novel, but it’s really a blog post, lost on a bazillion pages on sortmind.com, so I’m … Continue reading →
What would my or any current writer’s career have been like if there were no Internet or word processing, no eBooks or online publishers? Even if the invention of digital computing machines was inevitable, consider that there was no guarantee … Continue reading →
The following is a partial list of discoveries I’ve made in the last few years that have benefited my own writing, and which I also find myself attuned to as I read others’ writing. I’m not trying to pose as … Continue reading →
No one wants to take the author’s word for it that his or her writing is good–not the slush pile reader, not the editor, not the editorial board, not the marketing staff, not the sales force, not the average reader … Continue reading →
Come on, really–what DOES it mean? Sending query letters to literary agents was one of my more useless wastes of time and energy, but one submission–and it might have been the last one to an agent, a couple years ago–brought … Continue reading →
Following is a list of my novels and novellas with terse little elevator pitch summaries and some notes as to their fates. If there are novel title links, they lead to their detailed info pages on the mothership, www.sortmind.com. Just … Continue reading →
The First Twenty Steps a novella by Michael D. Smith available as an eBook for $1.00 from barnesandnoble.com Placing this novella for sale on Barnes and Noble’s PubIt site is an experiment. I want to see how e-publishing works and … Continue reading →
It’s odd to consider that, by definition, trust begins with complete strangers. Each must assess the level of honesty in the other. There is no “communal trust.” It’s always between two people. A hundred thousand people might trust a writer, … Continue reading →
