“Back away from the novel and slowly put your hands on top of the Internet. Keep your mind where I can see it.” Sooner or later you come to this point. The time has finally arrived to push the novel … Continue reading →
In my just-published novel CommWealth, Allan Larson browbeats the Forensic Squad acting troupe into staging an infantile play he’s written called Cabaret. (Though he swears his play has nothing to do with the 1972 movie of the same name, one … Continue reading →
I’ve spent two and a half months moving sortmind.com from its ancient FrontPage HTML incarnation to WordPress–as a page-format site, not a blog. The new site focuses on the Jack Commer science fiction series, CommWealth, and other publishable novels, and … Continue reading →
As I did with my previous University of Mars post, I culled this essay from its original sortmind.com page. With the advantage of further perspective, I’m editing it considerably from the 2006 musings I made after scanning and editing the … 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 →
I just finished Draft 1 of Commer of the Rebellion, Book 6 in the Jack Commer series. It’s too early to judge what sort of novel this is, or even if COTR will remain the final title. I’m already feeling … Continue reading →
Not long ago I was astonished to rediscover childhood Jack Commer marketing tools. As outlined elsewhere, my first Jack Commer, Supreme Commander plots unfolded in the fifth grade, and by the eighth I’d abandoned the draft of The Martian Marauders … Continue reading →
Some characters from the first draft of Jack Commer #6, Commer of the Rebellion, now in progress. The text is taken from the rough draft, about two hundred pages so far, and is obviously open to revision. We had the … Continue reading →
Or: Wandering in the Wilderness with New Discipline, the Consciousness Expansion of Adolescence, and Many To-Do Lists This is an odd period to write about, and only this year, after I made plans to write about first The Gore Book … Continue reading →
A previous post, The First Childhood Appearance of Jack Commer, covered the origin of my space hero Jack in the fall of 1962 and my elation at writing the story “Voyage to Venus” for a fifth grade spelling assignment. That … Continue reading →
