Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

Balloon Ship Armageddon, Part 1 – Origins

Posted on October 11, 2018 by Michael D. SmithOctober 11, 2018

T'ohj'puv copyright 2018 by Michael D. Smith

The T’ohj’puv Pyramid

I completed my seventeenth novel on October 6. This is the first draft of Balloon Ship Armageddon, the seventh and last Jack Commer, Supreme Commander novel, a statement I make with crossed fingers because who knows whether I might ever want to take Jack up again? I can’t help but notice that the force of rough draft logic left in a couple hints for future work …

I say this novel is “completed” because to me a finished rough draft is in some sense a completed novel. Something has been psychically started and finished. A truly “final completion” to manuscript status is of course X units of time away.

I haven’t reread the book yet and will probably let that task slide for a few more weeks. I’ve already had the alternately delightful and disturbing experience, common to a reasonably long draft of 88,000 words, of looking back to earlier chapters, composed a couple months ago, that I’d completely forgotten having written. So rereading a first draft is often like reading someone else’s book, and ideally should be conducted as noncritically as possible, giving the story a chance to breathe before the foundation construction crew arrives for Draft 2.

It’s hard to come up with any sort of synopsis, or the kind of marketing paragraph you’re expected to provide for a final manuscript. The initial draft seems to have sprung out of the unconscious, and so we have the following dreamlike babble:

In Book Six, The SolGrid Rebellion, Jack’s rebellious son Jonathan James wound up trapped inside a solid chromium pyramid after being obliterated by a Martian shattergun. In Balloon Ship Armageddon he’s successfully separated out from the pyramid to become a Wounded robot, though the two companions trapped inside the pyramid with him, Rick Ballard and T’ohj’puv, die horribly. The Wounded are a robotic race that infiltrate civilizations in order to steal all the energy from their stars to create quasar artworks billions of miles away. Okay. So Jonathan James heads to the Greater Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way 163,000 light years away, and a concept that’s fascinated me from childhood. Jonathan James thinks he’s now a Class J Wounded, but finally realizes he’s in fact a Class A, the highest level, programmed to initiate an Anti-Dark Energy Lens that will destroy the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, including the troublesome Sol which has resisted Wounded attempts at takeover. The Greater Magellanic world Jonathan James conquers, Ailyuae, has no electricity, even down to the subatomic level, and for 124,400 years the leaderless Wounded robots deposited there have fought endless senseless wars floating in balloon ships, since the oceanic surface of the planet is toxic.

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The SolGrid Rebellion in Paperback

Posted on September 17, 2018 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

The SolGrid Rebellion, Book Six of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series, is now out in paperback at Amazon. The novel expands a theme introduced in the previous books, the possibilities of telepathic understanding shared among an entire race, versus justifying the fascist control of that telepathic system as a defense against possible hostile aliens. The Sol System has adopted the buggy SolGrid telepathic network designed by former United System Space Force officer Patrick James, but Jack Commer’s charismatic but troubled son Jonathan James instigates a rebellion against what he considers brainwashing. His followers include his lover Suzette Borman, exobiologist Jackie Vespertine, SolGrid First Assistant Sanders Hirte, and warrior dog Trotter.

I’m about two-thirds through the first draft of a seventh Jack Commer novel, Balloon Ship Armageddon, and the plan is to end the series with seven. It’s time to move on from this genre … probably … although, who knows?

The Karma of Fancy One-Line Blog Posts

Posted on August 14, 2018 by Michael D. SmithAugust 14, 2018

I don’t pay much attention to my list of ideas for blog posts, because new ideas keep arising and, when I do peruse my notes, I see many I’ve retained out of obligation and which I know I’ll never write.

Several have remained just a title and a single sentence of notes, but as one-liners describing the marketing life of a certain author, they have their own expression; as full-blown posts they’d be ponderous.

So, thinking entirely of the reader’s convenience, I purge them out of my system.

Blog Post 1. What We are Told to Do

What if what we are told to do to succeed may simply number us among the vast majority of merely OK writers?

Blog Post 2. Let’s Agree on a Common First Sentence

If it’s so damn important, it could be licensed for use in every novel.

Blog Post 3. Are You Ready for AI Authors?

What about when we’re competing with computers for authoring formula fiction?

Blog Post 4. Glory

Are you after “glory,” like some politician Civil War general?

Blog Post 5. A Very Special Jack Commer Christmas

Every Christmas for the last several years I’ve thought about writing this smarmy satire, but I have no notes for it, not even one line. The very thought of composing it makes me gag. I just can’t do this to my Jack Commer series, even though of course I know that a special Christmas story would guarantee bestseller status for all six books. But let the title alone suffice.

CommWealth and My Stint in the Theater

Posted on August 9, 2018 by Michael D. SmithMay 16, 2020

I used some of my amateur theatrical background in CommWealth, which focuses on the Forensic Squad acting troupe as it stages Allan Larson’s mediocre plays and later, during a tense, crazed rehearsal, explodes into bitter accusations of marital infidelity and political espionage.

The CommWealth system has outlawed all private property. Your house, your clothes, anything you possess, can be demanded by anyone to be enjoyed for thirty days. The actors in Forensic Squad adapt as best they can to the resulting chaos, but CommWealth probes their breaking of the Four Rules that ineffectually sustain the system. Several actors confront betrayals, double agents, and murder–and eventually find themselves leading a suicidal revolution.

As an actor, my major talent was my ability to memorize my lines, reflected in supercilious playwright Allan’s snotty dismissal of the supermodel Erica: “She just sorta memorizes her lines and delivers ’em. That’s not acting.”

In any case I was exposed in college to both mediocre actors and directors, and talented ones with large but fragile egos, and I suppose my ego was also on the line since I was acting as the War Correspondent in a comedy I wrote about high school romances called Total Annihilation: Camouflage! By the third performance my fellow Rice University student actors had grown bored and set out to sabotage my play with silly onstage antics. At the beginning of the second act, as the lights came up, the War Correspondent was to kneel with a handkerchief and mop up a small quantity of stage blood, show the gore to the audience, and declaim in traumatized tones about the apocalyptic quality of young love: “This … this is all that’s left …” However, as the lights came up on the parquet floor on Night Three, the War Correspondent was confronted with an entire bottle of ketchup poured into a twelve-inch puddle. Gamely he knelt and sought to soak up the mess with his tiny handkerchief. Hands spattered with dripping ketchup, he struggled to suppress his righteous authorial anger even as he fought not to laugh. Somehow he managed to deliver his well-memorized lines.

This episode definitely helped make the absurd theater scenes in CommWealth so rewarding.

eBook from Amazon | paperback from Class Act Books
More about CommWealth
Bonus! Total Annihilation: Camouflage!

Kevin Stukia, Rock Journalist, 1975

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Michael D. SmithJune 25, 2019

I got a great deal of enjoyment–or maybe it was the relief of offloading a big pile of Shadow–lampooning rock journalist Kevin Stukia, reporter for Ungodly Procreative New Jersey Suburbs Music Magazine, as he covers the dizzying rise of the Akard Drearstone Group in the summer of 1975. I worked on Akard Drearstone for decades, originally conceiving of it as the ultimate description of late sixties/early seventies counterculture; later I considered modernizing the story for the twenty-first century, but finally decided that it was a historical novel after all. So journalist Kevin Stukia, lead guitarist Akard and psychotic Jim Piston have been left back where they belong, in 1975, with no smartphones, Internet, GPS, or personal computers, and with that entire decade intact around them.

On his existentially unhappy wedding night Akard’s manager Harray Andreall will freak out on Stukia’s “evil, twisted little face” and “cynical nasty vague blue eyes,” but before that he welcomes all the publicity Stukia and UPNJS can give, including Stukia’s dazzling seventies-esque one-sentence paragraphs as he foists himself upon the Drearstone Group:

Okay, so I was a little late, the goddamn place was in the middle of nowhere and that dinky two-lane Appaloosa Road or whatever you call it was crammed with cars for the last twelve miles and so I missed most of the first set, big deal, but I finally got up close to the dirt area the group was playing on and I heard almost all of “Cop on a Ten Speed” and it blew my fucking mind and believe me that is the best fucking song to come out of the Youth Revolution and I knew I had to interview Jim Piston who wrote the damn music so I charged in there at the break but it was like the guy was in a trance, just tuning his bass guitar over and over and every once in a while letting out a bunch of weird little riffs with the amp turned down low so I could hardly hear it with all these freaks babbling and this huge guy with a red Afro telling me to leave Piston alone.

It was my first trip to the Drearstone farm and I tried to tell that big motherfucker that their manager Harray Andreall would vouch for me, I’d interviewed him for UPNJS just a couple weeks ago and the fucking article just came out like just this fucking Monday, man, didn’t anybody here read it, sure I had to catch Harray in Houston and I’d never been to the farm before but what the fuck, is there like some secret initiation rite I have to go through to interview a fucking bass guitarist?

Meanwhile there was this twerp holding a Nikon F2 and he was so spaced out he was taking pictures of my feet. He said his name was Preston something or other and he said he was documenting this whole thing, which pissed me off because our goddamn staff photographer Bonnie chose not to come to this event for some reason I’ll never know although she was with me in Houston, and I was already pissed that all I had was my tape recorder but no camera. When this Preston twerp saw I was from UPNJS he started frothing and saying he’d sell me all his goddamn pix for a thousand bucks so I just said, fuck off, kid, I don’t need pix of my goddamn feet.

Anyway, somehow word got around that The Press was here tonight incarnated as yours truly, and people relaxed a bit and after a while I figured out who was who and what was what, the things we have to learn in journalism school and all.

More about Akard Drearstone

As Long as We’re on the Subject of Jackie Vespertine

Posted on July 15, 2018 by Michael D. SmithJune 25, 2019

Here’s the final version of Jackie Vespertine, a completely digital version of the original pencil drawing which has its strange flaw as described below. I lack deep image editing skills but used newly discovered GIMP freeware to experiment with the original Jackie scan. Basically I only used the smudge tool and airbrush (the latter in great moderation), and the final result felt like a black and white oil pastel, just without benefit of fingers. I used smudge with extreme transparency on the eyes, nose, and mouth, not wishing to blur their definition. The resulting image is compelling, and somehow true to the original pencil drawing, don’t ask me how. But this has to be the final iteration of the Jackie Vespertine image.

I’d drawn Jackie’s original portrait in pencil on rough paper from an ancient (ca. 1999-2000) magazine advertisement which struck me forcefully as what the Jackie Vespertine of Nonprofit Chronowar must look like. But in using grid lines to scale the image up to an 11” x 8.5” sheet, I found out the hard way that erasing the light pencil grid on the rough paper presented some existential problems: the grid lines can be erased but since they’ve left their grooves on the rough paper, and since I made gradients by rubbing my fingers through the pencil, every time I erase the grid lines I erase part of my gradient, and when I re-smooth the gradient the grid lines reappear! I really didn’t have the heart to experiment further with erasure methods, and figured a scan would improve the image. But as you can see it did not. Yet the physical drawing still lives in a frame above my writing desk and, for me, is the most representative Jackie of all images.

Experimenting further with the scan, I found that if I saved it as a purely black and white image and lightened it, the grid lines disappeared. Yay. Now it looks more like a line drawing but retains the Jackie personality well. This became my standard Jackie image for website and blog.

In looking to have some possible images ready for a cover for The SolGrid Rebellion, I printed off two black and white images on the same rough paper–you’d think I’d have learned by now–and made a colored pencil and a watercolor version. The colored pencil version, which went through more edits right before it became the cover of the novel, is a much better image, and still holds the Jackie character, whereas feel the watercolor seems to be slipping into becoming another person.

These alternate Jackies pushed out an urge to deal with the grid line problem on the original pencil drawing. Thus the final GIMP version. I could fool with this endlessly, adjusting the gradient, adjusting the tone, but I’m done with it. What I noticed a long time ago, at least for myself: if you want realism, use pencil. Paint, at least at my level of expertise, always morphs the image into something I’m never quite comfortable with, because paint is inherently messy. Colored pencil, however, is an interesting blend of pencil and paint. In any case it’s better to draw some more character faces in good old pencil. I know how to use smooth paper to avoid the erased gridlines problem!

In this except from the SolGrid Rebellion, newly minted rebel terrorist Jackie winds up revealing way too much about her top secret work with the Committee to the Ywritt:

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Draft and Final Covers: The SolGrid Rebellion

Posted on July 13, 2018 by Michael D. SmithJuly 22, 2023

After Book Five, The Wounded Frontier, came out earlier this year, I had no idea when the The SolGrid Rebellion might be published. But I wondered if one of my images might again be used. I created this draft cover featuring Suzette Borman with that in the back of my mind, though again I really didn’t take it seriously as a publishable cover; it’s quite dark and has no color, for instance. Suzette’s character, and the theme of rejuvenation and its drawbacks, are nevertheless important; co-owner of a bar in Marsport along with her rather boring hotshot senator husband, she’s lived a hard forty-two years, but in her case the rejuvenation process, which normally just freezes one’s apparent age, has reversed her to a somewhat crazed nineteen. But I also knew I had a much better image and worked on colored pencil and watercolor versions of another important character, Jackie Vespertine, Joe Commer’s femme fatale from Nonprofit Chronowar.

I was surprised that June publication came up so fast, but of course The SolGrid Rebellion was long done and accepted by Double Dragon Publishing the previous year. In preparation for publication Deron Douglas again asked for image ideas. I reworked the colored pencil version the old-fashioned way, in colored pencil, and the resulting cover is radiant. Jackie is one of the main rebels against her ex-boyfriend’s malfunctioning SolGrid telepathic network, and she’s inexplicably renounced a professorship of exobiology and her work with a newly discovered alien species. Her own themes of rejuvenated life energy, and where to take her seventy-six-year-old self next, are central to the book.

I’ve heard the opinion that you shouldn’t put portraits of your characters on your book covers, apparently so the reader will be free to imagine what the character looks like on his or her own. But I think that’s a fallacy. I always treat any cover image as the artist’s personal conception of a character or idea, and certainly not as a final authoritative rendering. For example, take this well-known cover of The Idiot. Does anyone seriously think this should be Prince Myshkin? No, this is a sketch of a character concept, not a passport photograph. Likewise the colored-pencil drawing on the cover of The SolGrid Rebellion is just one idea of what Jackie Vespertine might be.

Book 6. The SolGrid Rebellion
When the solar system adopts the buggy SolGrid telepathic network designed by former Space Force officer Patrick James, Jack Commer’s charismatic but impudent son Jonathan James instigates a rebellion against fascist brainwashing.

Overview of the Six Covers

Draft and Final Covers: The Wounded Frontier

Posted on July 11, 2018 by Michael D. SmithJuly 22, 2023

Still working on the second draft of The Wounded Frontier in June 2013, I again wanted a fast image to plaster to the beginning of a draft EPUB version. But this time I knew I could do better than the jokes I’d used for Nonprofit Chronowar and Collapse and Delusion. I’d made a cover for publication once before, for my novella The First Twenty Steps, but I’d never considered trying to compete with a professionally designed Double Dragon Publishing cover. Besides, I hadn’t even submitted the novel to DDP yet.

At the time I was drawing panels to illustrate my sixth grade conception of a novel, Trip to Mars, and I chose this image of Jack and Joe Commer about to embark on a scouting mission to Mars in the aftermath of a nuclear war that has rendered the earth uninhabitable. Minor digital edits added stars along with a stark black and white framework, and I made the title and author clearly readable even in thumbnail size; this was a problem I’d never resolved to my satisfaction in the Twenty Steps cover, or any draft cover for that matter. So The Wounded Frontier cover was something of an education.

I get it that copilot Joe’s arm looks too stiff, and Jack’s neck comes across the same as he swivels to face the viewer. But these guys are filled with anxiety; upon them rests the fate of the 2033 evacuation of an entire planet! No wonder they’re awkwardly posed as we intrude upon their countdown.

When the time for final publication came in February of this year, I sent publisher Deron Douglas some character images I’d been doing over the years. I was honored that he chose by far the best in the batch, the watercolor of Colonel Laurie Lachrer. This was one of those special gift images that had emerged effortlessly; it also perfectly defined Laurie to me. Her quick and light treatment went hand in hand with the idea of taking a minor figure from Book One and making her a major series character, and The Wounded Frontier opened up new energy for the series as a result. However, I still expected that Deron would use his digital editing skills to improve the image, executed on rough paper and flaunting its colored pencil and watercolor nature. So I was surprised and delighted to see it unchanged in the published version, simply well cropped to the curved series frame. Definitely a superb cover.

Book 5. The Wounded Frontier
Jack Commer pushes for exploration far beyond Sol in the untested Typhoon V when a star thirty-four light years away abruptly vanishes, leaving the infrared signature of a Dyson sphere apparently built within one week.

Overview of the Six Covers

Draft and Final Covers: Collapse and Delusion

Posted on July 9, 2018 by Michael D. SmithJuly 22, 2023

In tossing off this image of Martian Star General Greeney Gooney–real name G’rea’nyaigu’nye, which humans have naturally come to mispronounce–I wasn’t originally thinking of making a cover for Jack Commer Book Four. But somewhere along the line I scanned and colorized the black and white line drawing, and from there it’s not too difficult for the novice to superimpose text like “Collapse and Delusion” and “Michael D. Smith.” Then this past month, long after final publication of the novel in 2016, I added the Double Dragon-like series blurb for “Book Four” to make a final alternate cover.

Here Greeney, a vicious enemy of the Commers in my childhood imaginings, vamps for the viewer with shattergun and knife, becoming the dreaded stereotype of the merciless killer Martian. True, he’d run the terrorist cell that murdered General Douglas in Book One, but by the time of Collapse and Delusion, forty years later, the human-Martian war is long ended and Greeney has since reinvented himself as mayor of Marsport and gone on to command Martian fleets in the United System Space Force. A true Martian wunderkind at the post-adolescent Martian age of 250 years, this genius knows exactly how far he can play with our fears on this cover.

As with all my alternate covers, I drew this image during an early draft of the book, and, like all, it not only doesn’t get close to Deron Douglas’s final version for Double Dragon Publishing, but would also hinder sales of the book!

The final is dazzling. The dark blue tones contrasted with brown, the spaceships surging forward with such grim purpose, the ballet of planets, moon, and sunrises, all perfectly mirror the book’s themes of societal collapse and disorientation, along with the multi-dimensional paradoxes of Star Drive and an alien telepathic net spanning seventeen solar systems. The curving shape of the spacecraft wings and even the left framing arc, common to all the books in the series, fall effortlessly into the rhythms of circle and horizon. Are those sunrises over the limbs of planets? Or world-destabilizing Xon bomb explosions? In any case the cover is an image of wholeness; somehow the scattered empire will find its way through the humiliation and defeat.

Book 4. Collapse and Delusion
Supreme Commander Jack Commer and his wife Amav journey to the paradise planet Andertwin for a painful visit with their reclusive son Jonathan James, author of a bestselling novel about the collapse of the Centaurian empire.

Overview of the Six Covers

Draft and Final Covers: Nonprofit Chronowar

Posted on July 6, 2018 by Michael D. SmithJuly 22, 2023

The first time it occurred to me to make an alternate Jack Commer series cover was a year before Nonprofit Chronowar’s 2013 publication, when I wanted to proof a late stage of the novel for errors. Colorized from one of my eccentric Tarot cards, my draft EPUB cover depicts Jack’s younger brother Joe immediately after being jerked from the embrace of his illicit lover Jackie Vespertine on Mars in January 2036 and inexplicably deposited back on the home planet in May 2020. Here he finds himself speaking at the podium of the first and only conference of the Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth, and he’s so traumatized that he begins blurting out the awful details of the next thirteen years, including the Final War, his role in the destruction of Earth, and the resulting evacuation of shell-shocked survivors to Mars. As the smug nonprofit ladies of a comparatively innocent era nervously tolerate this troubled intruder, only the mystic Russian Blue cat Churchill, an apparent traitor to head nonprofit lady Ranna Kikken, seems able to calm Joe down.

Of course I knew this cartoon image would never do for a real cover. The May 2013 final cover by Double Dragon publisher Deron Douglas stunned me with its brooding vision of a scene I’d imagined again and again but never actually wrote into any of the Jack Commer novels: a cinematic vision of an entire spaceport of ships blasting off in total defeat. I’d even drawn that image about six months earlier in Trip to Mars, the Picture Book, in an eerie if somewhat clunky attempt at a vision that would be a fantastic opening shot for a movie. I was also happy to note that Deron had again picked up the 1950’s spaceship (face it, the V-2 archetype) and multiplied it to distressing effect. This planet is done; we’re finished; we’re gone.

In looking through old blog posts I noted I’d previously looked at some of these old cover images and I’d also mused about the evacuation scene in much more detail. (Cue brooding Ralph Vaughan Williams music). No need to repeat that here.

Book 3. Nonprofit Chronowar
Jack’s younger brother Joe time travels from 2036 to lecture complacent nonprofit ladies about the coming destruction of the planet.

Overview of the Six Covers