Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

75% off Akard Drearstone, The Soul Institute, and The First Twenty Steps: March 4-March 10

Posted on March 4, 2018 by Michael D. SmithApril 18, 2018

My titles will participate in Smashwords’ Ninth Annual Read an Ebook Week Sale from March 4 to March 10. You can download the titles in numerous formats including EPUB, mobi (Kindle), PDF, and more. Akard Drearstone and The Soul Institute are offered at $75% off; The First Twenty Steps is free during this week.

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.

The Wounded Frontier is Published

Posted on February 25, 2018 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

Double Dragon Publishing has just released The Wounded Frontier, Book Five of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series. I was honored to do the cover image of Laurie Lachrer, a minor spaceport technician in Book One, The Martian Marauders, but now promoted to Colonel and investigated more closely as one of the main characters in The Wounded Frontier. The new novel is now available in eBook format and a paperback edition should follow soon.

After the 2075 restoration of a benign telepathic Grid to Alpha Centauri, Supreme Commander Jack Commer returns home beset by bad news: his son’s housekeeper K’ufunb just suicided in a spaceship via a failed Warp Transfer, Mars is panicked by the renewal of the Grid, and ship’s engineer Draka Sortie is resigning to marry Martian Empress Mandy. Navigator Will Connors announces he’s quitting as well, and embarrasses Physician/Engineer Laurie Lachrer by revealing that the two recently started dating.

To top it, the star Iota Persei, 34.36 light years from Sol, has disappeared, and USS Jupiter is destroyed there after encountering a Dyson sphere 967 million miles wide. Jack readies the untested Typhoon V for Iota Persei, assigning Laurie to the ship and asking a reluctant Will to stay on as navigator.

Nobody ever considered that the fascist Alpha Centaurian Grid, linking twenty trillion citizens of the seventeen suns of the Alpha Centaurian Empire to their psychopathic Emperor, might turn out to have an important benefit to Sol. The United System Space Force embarks on exploration beyond Alpha Centauri only to encounter a far worse predator that, unknown to anyone, has been kept at bay for thousands of years by the Centaurian Grid. What exactly lies outside our comfortable circle of firelight?

Uncomplicated Redefinition

Posted on December 30, 2017 by Michael D. SmithDecember 30, 2017

I had the idea of painting a 12” x 9” November journal drawing onto a 50” x 32” canvas, but when the morning to paint came and I studied what had been a fun and meditative drawing, I found myself dreading its upsizing via paintbrush and acrylic. My initial hope was that I’d have a dazzling meditation object at the end of exhausting effort, but the more I studied the drawing, the more I realized that the tools I use in drawing are by their nature unsuited to painting. Paint has an inherently liquid and messy nature, and while in some cases a drawing (maybe sketch is a better word) can excellently anchor shapes in preparation for either abstract or realistic painting, trying to reproduce an existing drawing is … what’s the word? Foolish? Inappropriate? Boring? Shackling? A major waste of life energy?

Still, I had my idea and gamely set to the task a few mornings ago. Spice it up with a gradient background? Earth-tone brown? No, let’s try a celestial blue, then place the shapes in the middle. Okay. I was only a little daunted that the humidity was so low that even excessive glops of titanium white and cerulean and ultramarine blue kept drying before I got to work them across the semi-large surface. Though it occurred to me that oil would be much better suited to this particular effort, I figured winding up with big dry brushstrokes instead of some digitally perfect gradient was no big deal.

But after finishing the background, something klonked me on the soul and I realized the background gradient, in all its brushstroky messiness, could be what I really wanted, could be the entire finished painting. Because in the past I’ve had this same feeling about a background and then proceeded to stubbornly insist on my original intention to destroy it with fancy complicated foreground action-painting, I asked my wife Nancy to confirm whether I was done. Her enthusiastic response, including a heartfelt admonition not to place it in an upcoming art show so that she could meditate upon it herself for the next few weeks, was all I needed to fully declare this image complete.

The painting is not only a major answering force to recent psychic events, but it feels as if it’s also redefining what I want out of painting. Not the dreary struggle to produce “expression,” but the desire to create beauty and color to meditate upon. I think I’ve expected painting to be like writing, and it can’t be that. My previous painting methods tried to force the happy, necessary, and easy psychological expression of my writing into my visual work, but wound up turning painting into an onerous duty.

The title is Uncomplicated Redefinition. Maybe a little cumbersome! So what? The title means that I may have gotten a handle on what I want out of this medium. Visual art expression is not the same as writing expression. Drawing is not the same as painting.

Though I set out to do this painting as a chore, it became a liberation. How cool is that?

And I can let the original drawing just be itself. It doesn’t need to be redone, or blown up into some grandiose vision.

Free Akard, Soul Institute, and Twenty Steps: December 25-January 1

Posted on December 22, 2017 by Michael D. SmithDecember 22, 2017

My titles will participate in the Smashwords’ 2017 End of Year sale. All three will be free from December 25 to January 1. You can download the titles in numerous 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.

The Akard Drearstone Mass Market Paperback: A Photo Essay

Posted on November 30, 2017 by Michael D. SmithJune 26, 2019

It arrived in the mail the other day and once again, a cinder block falls on Akard Drearstone’s head and leads to an alternate 1975 history of rock music as seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl.

Regular 6” x 9” trade paperback, print-on-demand editions are beautiful objects, and give concrete substance to the eBook creations of indie writers, but I’ve also always wanted to see my works in mass market (sometimes called pocketbook) format.

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I’ll Write Your Book Blurbs, or, When Lilith’s Beloved Kentucky Horse Farm Goes into Bankruptcy …

Posted on November 9, 2017 by Michael D. SmithNovember 9, 2017

Writers know how difficult it can be to come up with a decent book blurb. How can we possibly distill our novel’s entire universe into one attention-grabbing slab of marketingese? The good news is that now you can just blow all that off and concentrate on getting that next novel underway. Just change the character and place names in your story to match the blurbs below–and watch your sales surge out of control!

When Lilith’s beloved Kentucky horse farm goes into bankruptcy, only an arrogant, shirtless cowboy from her past …

Chief Inspector Careen O’Raority immediately sniffs something amiss at a cat-infested East End tenement. Was the half-consumed corpse the work of the petite Abyssinian, the ebullient orange Maine Coon, or the crafty Calico? Or could it be that O’Roarity’s one-time detective partner, Lynx Point Siamese Sebastian Smith, has resumed his uncanny dealings with the Canine Corps? A Sebastian Smith Murder Mystery.

Jen has a secret Rob must never know…

Enslaved since childhood by the Imperial Directorate of Prison Planet Dorg, seventeen-year-old Rona Crypt survives with nothing but her sharpened wits, a well-nourished fury, and a four-foot length of rusty chain–eternally ready to lavish serious vengeance on every slimeball in the universe! Continue reading →

Akard Drearstone – The Blog Post, Part III: How the Songs Came About

Posted on November 4, 2017 by Michael D. SmithJune 26, 2019

The idea for Akard Drearstone came as I idly examined two sheets of blank square pink paper at my hated insurance job in August 1975. In a burst of inexplicable high energy it occurred to me to make these into a record album, which I proceeded to draw over the next hour, taping the sheets together to form a double album’s front and back cover with interior notes. I remember poring over the completed thing for days afterwards, enthralled with the results, song titles and band member names immediately calling forth plot and characters.

The Original February Death Trip copyright 2017 by Michael D. Smith

The pink album amid 1975-76 notes

I based the album on the character of Akard Drearstone, whom I’d first used in the Fall 1974 comic The Story of Lester Quartz’s Fantastic Journey, much of which was also drawn at my Praetorian Mutual Life Insurance Company desk, don’t ask me why. The 288-page comic can now be termed a graphic novel, though I had no idea of that concept at the time. In any case it showcased Akard Drearstone, his obscenely-titled rock group, and his assassination onstage by CIA agents.

Soon after drawing the album I wrote fourteen loopy songs, as a novel about these rock stars would need those off the wall, satirical tracks for their album, originally named February Death Trip but later simply Akard Drearstone. The emerging novel prompted a three-page outline that turned out to be surprisingly close to the massive 1,587-page, 661,581-word rough draft which exploded 1976-1978 into the Ongoing Work of Humanity. Continue reading →

Akard Drearstone – The Blog Post, Part II: The Akard Genealogy

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Michael D. SmithJune 26, 2019

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 fact, the character of Akard Drearstone had appeared a year earlier in a comic I drew. But my estimate is that over these decades I’ve spent approximately eight years on this novel. Its lineage can be traced through three different eras:

The Ancient One: The Original and Scarcely Believable (To Me, at Least) Volcanic Eruption of Ideas, Character, and Plot

Akard Note Cards 1975-76 copyright 2017 by Michael D. Smith

Note cards for the first draft, 1976

I went into Draft One, February 1976 to March 1978, with the plan that I’d I write out everything I could consider expressing. I was astonished at what flowed out: several dozen characters representing all the psychic forces I could imagine, and bizarre unfolding plots and subplots. Looking back on Draft One years later, I realized its 1,587 pages contained one good novel, one bad novel, and three mediocre novels.

Draft Two, May 1978 to October 1980, was an era of endless revisions and a growing awareness of the novel’s obesity and other shortcomings, all of which forced me to come up with some new rewriting techniques. There were also problems with attachment to the Holy Words of Draft One, writer’s ego trip, ambition, and publishing paranoia. The happy astonishment of Draft One gave way to a determined, ongoing worry about Draft Two’s prospects in this unpublished-author-hating world.

I typed 300 pages of MS. to September 1981, then wearily understood that this novel no longer expressed my current concerns, and that the physical typing was taking too much of my writing time. I had two other novels going by then and so could accept that Akard wasn’t everything.

1984 witnessed the clunky creation of New Akard 1979. Chagrined that I had no backup copy of the remaining chapters, I made a photocopy of twenty of them (out of the original thirty-one) and called the resulting 760 pages the finished novel, now titled New Akard 1979–because in 1976 I had set the plot in the “far future of 1979.” I was satisfied that this roughly cobbled version had put an end to the novel, and I was proud that I’d lopped off 50% of the original novel and strengthened the rest considerably.

Two: A More Mature Twelve-Year-Old Jan Pace Experiment Renaissance

But a 1992-94 revision demanded existence. After writing several other novels I realized there was unfinished business with Akard and I completely rewrote it with a new structure of putting myself inside the mind of a twelve-year-old girl as the main character. The 1994 Akard Drearstone was a good synthesis of all the personal Akard myths over two decades. I also decided to leave this novel set in 1975, and ever since I’ve considered it essentially a historical novel. My memory is that I wanted to consider this effort publishable, but … for some reason … I never got around to submitting a query letter …

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Akard Drearstone – The Blog Post, Part I: Publication at Last

Posted on October 30, 2017 by Michael D. SmithJune 26, 2019

A cinder block falls on Akard Drearstone’s head and he trades his print shop job for lead guitar. Months later, as the four members of the Akard Drearstone Group face the onslaught of national fame at their rural Texas commune, twelve-year-old Jan Pace nurses her crush for the narcissistic, paranoid bassist Jim Piston, growing up way too fast in a surreal summer between seventh and eighth grade.

eBook:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Smashwords

paperback:
Amazon

cover art by Michael D. Smith

The Akard Background

Over the past forty-two years Akard Drearstone has gone from being an unexpected if unpublishable flood of expression and experimentation, to an obsessive trial and an abandoned burden, to years of neglect followed by a renaissance demanding new integration, and finally to a determination to press this project to a conclusion, to make it the best writing I can do and push it out into the world. I’m not just polishing up some decades-old manuscript I’m feeling nostalgic about; there is some karmic life-destiny about finally publishing Akard through Sortmind Press. The cover and the glorious print version confirm that for me. What a lovely object has taken form!

The central vision for the novel was my secret desire after graduating from Rice to live in an artistic commune. Since I couldn’t do that, and being a rigorous introvert probably would’ve hated it anyway, the next best thing was to write about it. Akard emerged full-scale in one day in August 1975 as I constructed a satire record album cover out of scraps of pink paper. Three single-spaced pages of notes I typed a few days later charted the course of the first draft. From August 1975 to February 1976 I heavily inventoried dreams, recent ideas, and my bleak employment in an insurance company to throw everything into what I knew would be a massive work unlike anything I’d done before. It may be that the stretching involved in Akard, the disbelief that so much expression could flow out, is the reason I’ve been so committed to it. It was Akard’s tone and methods that began the evolution towards the rest of my novels.

Official Sortmind.com Website Synopsis

Jan Pace, a twelve-year-old girl at the Akard Drearstone commune north of Austin, Texas, watches Akard Drearstone and his fellow musicians setting up for what they think will be a small concert on their dirt parking lot. Jan, who knows she’s in love with the twenty-seven-year-old bass guitarist Jim Piston, tries to comfort him while he freaks on marijuana. Meanwhile, to everyone’s shock, thousands of Akard Drearstone Group fans have invaded the parking lot and the vast fields beyond.

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Amid Work on Three Karmic Novels

Posted on September 11, 2017 by Michael D. SmithJune 26, 2019

I’ve finished good drafts of the Three Legacy Novels outlined in the June 18 blog post. The question was: could I make the older manuscripts of Jump Grenade, Akard Drearstone, and Sortmind into fully modern, high quality expressions? Was there a karmic/fate reason for returning to their energies? If not, I knew I had to relegate their last versions to the desk drawer, along with clear and conscious reasons for my refusal to complete them.

I don’t feel I’ve been looking backward out of fear that my well may have run dry, though I’ve seriously considered whether looking at older novels may imply that. But I truly don’t feel I’m just trying to pad my writer’s résumé with a bunch of trashy old stuff. For instance, I have lots of experimental novels and novellas I have no further interest in working on: Nova Scotia, The Fifty-First State of Consciousness, Zarreich, The Galaxies Groan Within, Parts I and II, Linstar, Notice and Dream Topology, the Holy Dark Ages, The Psychobeauty, The University of Mars. I suppose I could always change my mind about some of these but they call up no deep reverberations. They were either just practice or their themes have been better explored elsewhere. I can feel massive new writing clamoring for expression; I don’t feel a further need to return to old stuff.

I wondered if I could publish all three legacy novels in 2017. I figured I probably did have time to at least get them into a more or less completed manuscript state–to do the real writing all three needed–but that finalizing them, doing the covers, publishing via Sortmind Press to whichever platforms I choose, then marketing the things, would involve toil and time pushing publication further out.

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