2023 updated Sortmind Press cover

Where are the URLs?

Over the past seven years I’ve had the opportunity to be interviewed on various online blogs and websites. Though I’d saved the original webpages as files to my computer, for some reason I neglected to note most of the live URLs anywhere. Thinking it was really time to organize these twenty online interviews in one place, I finally pulled their live URLs into an Interviews page.

Most of the interviews relate to my novel CommWealth. I’d thought that most of the older ones might have become defunct by now, but to my surprise there are working URLs for all except one, for which I copied my portion of the interview to Word and then PDF.

Seventeen of these twenty interviews are true Q&A to the author, though all were online interviews where I could peruse the template questions and then write Word responses at my leisure; I have no idea how I’d do in a live interview. Hmm. Just writing that down may expose me to this actually happening. I await with trepidation.

The Beverley Bateman post of May 2018 is an interview with CommWealth’s Allan Larson character, but it still has that “author interview” feel. Likewise the two posts from Maryann Miller in 2019: her review of Trip to Mars including meeting me at the June McKinney, Texas author fair, and my interview with my character Colonel Laurie Lachrer for Balloon Ship Armageddon.

I have no plans to add any of my own blog’s fictional interviews with Jack Commer characters, or God forbid, the Orange Rhinoceros of 1974.

In 2020 I posted The Blank Zen Interview, my own unsettling interview questions. I’m not sure how I’d respond to most of these.

2020 Sortmind Press cover I’ve secretly hated

Featuring a Resuscitated, Error-Corrected CommWealth

One reason I got interested in these CommWealth-centric interviews is that I’ve just tuned up that comic/dystopian novel, which describes a society where no one can own anything. This is the same novel of 2020, but I cleaned up typos and made a badly needed new Amazon cover. I used Grammarly to ferret out errors. There’s much for any author to disagree with Grammarly about, but out of the hundreds of suggestions it offers, it does catch serious errors like these:

• This is really is all coming too fast
• No, because you’ve never make any sense!
• lead bullets than can harm the environment
• Wasn’t he was pulling out of the line

How dare such pollution persist over scores of my careful rereadings and edits, readings from friends, and work from beta readers and editors! I groan to give these examples but it seems we must be open about the persistence of these devils.

The 2023 Sortmind Press wraparound cover

I Think … CommWealth is Now … Perfect

The new Amazon 6 x 9 trade paperback’s wraparound cover is nearly identical to the lulu.com mass market paperback of 2020 that I’ve secretly considered for three years to be far superior to the dense brown one of the 6 x 9; how did I ever think that cluttered mess was appealing? The back blurb needed to rise to the top to make room for Amazon’s bar code, and I added the Sortmind Press logo, choosing the black and white version because the color one’s blue clashes with the cover photo.

The blue is hypnotic. I see the intrusive light with its overexposed moon slice as being the theater setting where the characters operate. I’m so pleased with how this book has turned out that I’m definitely reassessing it and will play it up more, especially at the North Texas Book Festival next month but also on my various web pages.

copyright 2023 by Michael D. Smith