Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

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:

Continue reading →

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

Draft and Final Covers: Jack Commer, Supreme Commander

Posted on July 1, 2018 by Michael D. SmithJuly 22, 2023

I finally finished the long-abandoned childhood rough draft of The Martian Marauders in early 1986, liberating heroes Jack and Joe Commer from their Venusian prison and updating the characters with adult concerns, including romantic lives. Or in Jack’s case, the lack thereof. It was great fun to come up with at least slightly plausible scientific explanations for the eighth grader’s absurd conception of science and the solar system. Finishing an abandoned kid novel was deeply satisfying, as was following any new themes that cared to surface in the high energy typescript. So I’m not sure why I felt a sequel was necessary, other than Jack’s fiancée Amav Frankston declaring at the end of The Martian Marauders that she and Jack would travel to Alpha Centauri and end the senseless war there.

In any case, a few months later I was into Draft 1 of Jack Commer, Supreme Commander. I’d never seriously considered writing science fiction before, but The Martian Marauders had shown me it could be fun. So I continued the high energies of the first novel while giving the shorter Jack Commer its own separate, fast-flowing plot. But upon completion I was unsure of the book, mocking it in my journal, and drawing this illustration of Jack which now strikes me as also hinting at derision. Jack looks old, chunky, and bilious. His science fiction city and 1950’s spaceship, his sash and medals, his green-tiled tarmac, all jest with the viewer. Okay, there’s a certain amount of comedy in the Jack Commer novels, but I never intend fashionable irony. At least the colors pull the image together, and I still like it overall, but I never considered this as any sort of cover until a few days ago when I realized I wanted a set of six alternate JC cover images.

Many drafts and years later, and shortly before publication of Jack Commer, Supreme Commander in August 2012, Deron Douglas of Double Dragon Publishing had emailed to ask for verbal descriptions of the main characters. I sent him some and also included the ’86 image of Jack. I was floored by Deron’s resulting cover. Not only did he go all in with Jack’s wife Amav, both redefining her for me while perfectly capturing what I’d always intended for her character, he anchored her with the red 1950’s spaceship. I’d never seen such a fantastic cover.

As opposed to the floating, anonymized, probably lost soldier on the cover of The Martian Marauders, Amav has planted both feet on her world. She’s self-assured and weaponized, claiming final success. She owns the spaceship and the hot swirling gas above it; even the giant Jupiter in the background bends to her will.

And the red flight suit shows up in subsequent novels. Yes, people have pointed out that it’s not Jack Commer, Supreme Commander on the cover. But I answer, of course not, that’s his wife; she is the book.

Book 2. Jack Commer, Supreme Commander
Newly-promoted Jack Commer brings poor negotiating skills to the war with the fascist Alpha Centaurian Empire.

Overview of the Six Covers

Free Akard Drearstone, The Soul Institute, and The First Twenty Steps, July 1-31

Posted on July 1, 2018 by Michael D. SmithJune 26, 2018

The Tenth Annual Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale starts July 1 and runs through July 31, and during this time my three titles from Sortmind Press will be free from the Smashwords site (links below). You can download Akard Drearstone, The Soul Institute, and The First Twenty Steps in numerous eBook formats including EPUB, mobi (Kindle), PDF, and more.

Akard Drearstone

A twelve year-old girl living at a rock commune near Austin, Texas in the summer of 1975 observes the rise and fall of the Akard Drearstone Group as she falls disastrously in love with the group’s severely disturbed bass player.

The Soul Institute

Computer technician Himal Steina realizes his dream of a mythic return to the sanctuary of a vast foggy university of Soul when he’s appointed writer in residence at the Soul Institute, unaware that he’s blundering into a catastrophic jumble of power lust, romantic chaos, drug abuse, and gang violence.

The First Twenty Steps

An ex-convict finds himself mixed up in a motorcycle gang’s plan to heist a hyperspatial supercomputer.

Draft and Final Covers: The Martian Marauders

Posted on June 27, 2018 by Michael D. SmithJuly 22, 2023

A few days ago I realized that of the six published Jack Commer, Supreme Commander novels, I’d made draft covers of the last four when working on early versions. Often I’ll make an EPUB or MOBI version of a draft, or even a nearly finished manuscript, just to reread and evaluate the book in an entirely different reading environment than the Word document or a printed copy. Doing so gives perspective and incidentally helps catch typos. Usually the draft cover is pretty crude, tossed off to just provide an image for the eBook, but I worked on some for a long time, like colorizing every pixel of the original black and white Nonprofit Chronowar image.

The first two novels had no such draft covers, but then I realized I had ancient images, contemporary with their first drafts, for The Martian Marauders and Jack Commer, Supreme Commander. So I came up with alternate book covers for them, and for all six novels I added the same blue band denoting series number as shown on the final excellent covers done by Deron Douglas of Double Dragon Publishing. I’ll muse about what the covers have meant to me in this and five subsequent posts.

Crude definitely describes my eighth grade Martian Marauders cover. When Mickey Smith set out to write his definitive Jack Commer childhood hero novel in the fall of 1965, the cover or title page, executed on the same 8” x 10.5” notebook paper as the book’s handwritten 110 pages, appears to be the first thing he did. It depicts one of the mysterious solar system disasters of the 2020’s and 2030’s, the collision of Jupiter and Saturn. An eighth grade boy is entitled to describe such an improbable event; after all, my 1950’s solar system map showed the two planets right next to each other. Looking closely, we can see that each planet apparently remained a perfect circle, executed no doubt with a pencil compass, up to the moment of impact; no messy tidal effects, Roche limits, or gaseous distortion, and Saturn’s rings remain true up to the end as well. However, give Mickey Smith credit for rendering the relative diameters of Jupiter and Saturn fairly accurately.

When the final adult version of The Martian Marauders came out in January 2012 from Double Dragon Publishing, I had no concept whatsoever of its cover until the publication date. And then I was overwhelmed with its rugged power and dark moody colors. A striking science fiction image, even if at first glance I couldn’t find my characters or the book’s plot in it. Does this floating soldier belong to Jack’s United System Space Force? Or is it a terrorist Martian? A robot? Why is he/she/it floating in orbit clutching a wicked SF weapon while a meteor shower (or worse, an asteroid shower) pummels the planet? The planet does have to be Mars, right? But in the face of the excellent image (and also, that I’d finally gotten a book published!) none of these questions mattered, and I finally decided that the cover represents the merciless, existential war the new human refugees on Mars have inadvertently sparked with an implacable unknown foe which, in my 1965-era first draft, was probably based on the Viet Cong. Whatever’s going on, the floating soldier is right in the thick of it, competent and lethal amid chaos and probable doom.

Book 1. The Martian Marauders
After the Final War and the evacuation of the Earth’s population to Mars, Typhoon I Captain Jack Commer fights native Martians led by their traitorous new human Emperor.

The Irregular Origin of The Martian Marauders

Overview of the Six Covers

Publication of The SolGrid Rebellion

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

The SolGrid Rebellion, Book Six of my Jack Commer, Supreme Commander science fiction series, has just been released by Double Dragon Publishing, with my colored pencil drawing of Jackie Vespertine, one of the rebels and a main character, as the cover. So far the book is up on Amazon (Kindle format), Kobo (EPUB format) and its Double Dragon page. It’ll eventually get to Barnes and Noble, iTunes, and other online venues, and a paperback edition on Amazon is also forthcoming.

Publication comes just as I’m underway on Draft 1 of the seventh book of the series, titled (at least for now) Balloon Ship Armageddon. The character interviews for a Jack Commer Seven in recent blog entries have been instrumental in getting this book moving. I’ve also decided that this seventh book will conclude the series … unless I change my mind someday. But it’s time to move onto some new work.

In Book Six, the Sol system has recently adopted the SolGrid telepathic network designed by former United System Space Force officer Patrick James, but it’s incomplete and buggy, and Jack Commer’s charismatic but troubled son Jonathan James decides to wage war against what he considers brainwashing. In the spring of 2076 he recruits an ensemble of cohorts including his lover Suzette Borman, a hard-bitten nightclub owner who’s been rejuvenated to look nineteen; Patrick’s girlfriend Jackie Vespertine, emissary to aliens in the Iota Persei system; Pat’s SolGrid partner Sanders Hirte, a former bar bouncer; and Jonathan James’ dog Trotter, bonded to him years ago in Alpha Centauri as warrior brother.

Smitten with the voluptuous Suzette and finally admitting that his dysfunctional SolGrid is paralyzing Sol culture, Pat accepts a place in the Rebellion. But he’s stunned when Jonathan James storms an orbiting museum and not only steals Typhoon II, Jack Commer’s ancient 2030’s spaceship, but also kidnaps Z’B, Emperor of the Martians. As Jack pursues Jonathan James he begins to understand that his son’s pirate crew is staging an armed rebellion against Sol.

More background

Monsterville, USA

Posted on May 29, 2018 by Michael D. SmithDecember 25, 2024

I’ve already written about The Blue Notebook, my fifth grade stories that channeled fascinating new energy and began defining me as a writer. Recently I was compelled by author’s karma to make an eBook out of The Blue Notebook, and the saucer from Guacoazezama, one of mankind’s most bitter enemies, was the perfect choice for the cover. How could I have foreseen in the fifth grade that one day I’d read these stories on my phone? One of them, “Monsterville, USA,” has reverberated for a long time, and I also used it as the title of a chapter in the ancient 1976 first draft of Akard Drearstone, only now it was insurance agents and record company executives, not dinosaurs, who were monsters.

As I was researching the notebook’s thirty-four stories for more of the wondrous kid planet and star names like Zorex and Ramaolousiono, which I wanted to include in my catalog of Alpha Centaurian Empire stars, I was again struck by the glorious and happy stupidity of “Monsterville, USA,” which effectively married my obsessive science fiction and dinosaur themes, and, incidentally, invented a form of firing squad I seriously doubt anyone else has ever come up with. There is also (very briefly) a female heroine, totally unusual for a fifth grade boy SF writer. So here’s the story, cleaned for spelling but otherwise the full unexpurgated version, the seventh of my infamous “Frightening Experiences” series; somehow even in the fifth grade I knew a series would sell.

Case 7 of Frightening Experiences
by M. Smith
MONSTERVILLE, U.S.A.

Chapter I
The Force Dome

At 3:30 P.M. Ralph Johnston, U.S. army and four others were in Ohio doing research.

In a big field Johnston shouted, “I saw something flash! Let’s go investigate.”

“Okay.”

Soon the five were very close to the flash. It was just over a hill. Johnston looked over first. There he saw a big round yellow force dome. It was not transparent so they could not see what was inside.

But then Johnston said, “We’d better investigate, boys. It could be aliens from Venus.”

“Okay.”

So they five went up to the dome and found out it was made of a very hard plastic.

“Boys, get me that dynamite,” Johnston said. “We’re going to find out what’s inside the dome.” Continue reading →