Harray Andreall’s Wedding Night, July 1975

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Harray Andreall copyright 2017 by Michael D. Smith

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, Akard decides to throw a demented wedding reception at his rural Texas commune to honor manager Harray Andreall. But on the way to the commune Harray fights with his bride, the Exponentialist philosopher Michelle Morgan, in front of two hundred guests at the Austin airport.

“Dammit, keep quiet, bitch! Everyone’s gonna think we’re assholes!”

“Ah, fuck you, jerk!” Michelle wrenched open a glass door and stomped away.

“You can’t call yourself mindful!” Harray screamed after her. “You’ll never be able to call yourself mindful!”

She was gone, mixing into a group of well-wishers. Harray went to a public phone and opened the Yellow Pages to Electrical Contractors. Damn, it was bad again tonight. But maybe he should try to keep up with the feeling this time. Retain his calmness, his complete lack of mood.

Like, the Buddhists said that the true disciple attended to the path without getting hung up on being the disciple. In a way that described Harray perfectly. He’d never made the mistake of taking this mindfulness meditation seriously. He just used it where necessary. And that made him a true disciple, a monk of the path, didn’t it?

So Harray had a responsibility to himself and to the universe to make sure Michelle’s petty anger didn’t prevail. He might be damn depressed, but he could still observe, still let karma work itself out.

But he regarded the dull people moving through the terminal and sighed. It was hopeless. Two hundred losers heading off to one more party to distract themselves, to act out their same asshole karma over and over again … and he knew this was what Buddhism was all about. All is suffering.

But the Buddhists saw the suffering and got some sort of cosmic perspective out of it, whereas Harray’s stupid depressions led nowhere. He shuddered to think of all the trivial crap he performed like a machine every day, never grasping any of it. No matter how much he watched his damn breathing, did he ever get any cosmic perspective? Shit, no! Maybe it was time to blow off a little steam. Maybe there wouldn’t be any cosmic perspective, but Harray could still work himself into a damn good snit. He could overwhelm a roomful of plastic partygoers with one of his foul moods, and it would serve them right.  His despair would show them just how miserable their own lives truly were.

Akard Drearstone by Michael D. Smith

Deeper into that same night, contemplating the dissolution of his hours-long marriage, Harray finds a dead body packed in ice on the second floor of the commune barn. Though he tries to convince the sullen members of the group that their musical experiment is worth continuing, Harray’s boss gets arrested on murder charges, the record company veers towards collapse, and Harray is dumbfounded to discover a second killing perpetuated by another band he manages.

copyright 2019 by Michael D. Smith

Akard Drearstone – more info

Free Akard Drearstone, Soul Institute, First Twenty Steps

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The Smashwords End of Year Sale starts December 25 and runs through January 1. 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.

The Soul Institute by Michael D. Smith

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 and falls in love with one of its numerous faculty goddesses.

Akard Drearstone by Michael D. Smith

Akard Drearstone

At their Texas commune in May 1975, the four members of the Akard Drearstone Group begin to feel the onslaught of national fame as twelve-year-old Jan Pace, daughter of a commune couple, falls in love with the narcissistic, paranoid bassist Jim Piston.

The First Twenty Steps by Michael D. Smith

The First Twenty Steps

The motorcycle attack on the Dataflux computer building turns terrifying and surreal as ex-con Harry finds himself outgunned by a rival biker gang. Can his enemies really be protecting spaceship navigational equipment?

Copyright 2018 by Michael D. Smith

The Soul Institute by Michael D. Smith
Akard Drearstone by Michael D. Smith
The First Twenty Steps by Michael D. Smith

Ronan of Space (The Falkrow Narratives Book 3), by Kara D. Wilson – Review

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Ronan of Space by Kara D. WilsonThough Rhys Falkrow, now grown to full adulthood, still figures prominently in this final book of the Falkrow Narratives and links the three novels together, his seventeen-year-old son Ronan now takes center stage and matures through a series of fast-paced adventures.

The setting is a future Earth, unrecognizable to us, which long ago devolved into pre-industrial cultures alien to, and warring with, each other.  Books 1 and 2 describe how a young Rhys was flung here years ago as a refugee from the disintegrating spaceship of the advanced Caelestis race, and how he learned to survive on this primitive Earth, make contact with its different cultures, and eventually assume a leadership role.  But in seeking to shield his son Ronan from the high tech, collective mindset of Caelestis, Rhys has kept Ronan in ignorance of his heritage and has more or less abandoned him and Ronan’s mother Kallen.  As Book 3 opens Ronan is little more than an angry juvenile delinquent.  If Rhys was always set outside both the future primitive Earth as well as the world of Caelestis, which disowned him years ago, Ronan is even further outside both, never really belonging to Earth culture nor ever aware of his Caelestis heritage.  Though Rhys’ goal was to let his son know what it was to be fully human, he’s set up conditions that have blocked Ronan from truly understanding himself.

Secrets have been kept from Ronan, and he resents it.  Yet the truth cannot long be denied when Rhys, now commander of Caelestis military operations in Earth orbit, announces emergency evacuations in the face of invasion by the Alphas, a race of evolved humanoids who are eighty percent artificial, function as a computerized hive mind, and wield technology far beyond anything Caelestis has seen.  The Alphas are here to exploit Earth resources, but the descriptions of their schemes are no science fiction cliché: the author posits methods of harvesting our planet which are an unforgettable nightmare.

As Ronan begins to numbly absorb the new developments and his connection to Caelestis, astounding native talents start welling within him, and he’s propelled into the heart of a danger he was never prepared for.  He shares impulsive qualities and leadership skills with his father but, perhaps because of his isolation, before long he begins to transcend his father’s somewhat narrow views of the possibilities the crisis offers.  His eventual contact with a rebellious Alpha, Cassius, completely redefines the nature of the human/Alpha conflict; the ways Ronan and Cassius establish a basis for communication and learn to respect each other set a fascinating cornerstone of this book.

As with Ms. Wilson’s previous two books in the series, Rhys of Earth and Rhys of Quadrant Six, the author’s storytelling skills make a long narrative unfold effortlessly, as imaginative scenes and fresh plot easily pull the reader through an intriguing story.  Nothing is extraneous; there are no unnecessary detours.  The ending is psychologically satisfying and concludes the series well, but we are free to picture Ronan expanding ever further in the future.

review by Michael D. Smith

Ronan of Space at Amazon

Balloon Ship Armageddon, Part 3 – Jack Commer’s Arc

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Spacemen, Novel, Earth copyright 2018 by Michael D. SmithIt’s not time for a final assessment of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series, but after completing the first draft of the seventh and (probably) last book, I’m beginning to reflect on the long journey from The Martian Marauders to Balloon Ship Armageddon. Space captain Jack Commer has been with me since September 1962, first appearing in four of the thirty-four science fiction stories in my fifth grade Blue Notebook. He and his three brothers then starred in my first attempt at a novel, Spring 1964’s Trip to Mars, and then the unfinished eighth grade draft of The Martian Marauders, a book which I happily rediscovered, completed and rewrote as a modern novel decades later.

I refrained from sprinkling self-serving promotional links into the above paragraph, but we need to get them out of the way or else I’ll have to repeat all that content here.

A Writing Biography, Part II: The Blue Notebook
Trip to Mars in Paperback
The Irregular Origin of the Martian Marauders

The idea for a seventh book to conclude the series originated with Jack’s wife Amav’s declaration at the end of Book Six, The SolGrid Rebellion, that she and Jack ought to mount a search for their traitorous son Jonathan James, who’s just been rendered into a million pieces of jagged glass by a Martian shattergun but, still alive, has been reconstituted as one-third of a solid chromium pyramid. Apparently Jonathan James is heading to a star thirty-four light years away to seek assistance from the deadly Wounded race of artistic exterminators Jack has been battling for the last two books. But there was no plot beyond that, which Jack and Amav both lamented in their blog interviews with me this spring.

I’m not killing off main characters in Seven, or otherwise making an Eight impossible, as, who knows, I may want to compose Eight a few decades from now. I think I’ll relax more working on this novel if I leave this option open. The thought of permanently abandoning some characters like Dar or Kner or Suzette Borman is hard. Worse is the idea of merely tossing them into the seventh book to “resolve them all” as Heinlein did to his galaxy of characters at the end of The Number of the Beast–very tired writing there.

It may be that you’re doing yourself a favor by not writing sequels and returning to the same characters. The often-delivered line from authors, “And then the characters spoke to me and told me their story wasn’t over,” etc. etc., could also be a way of staying comfortable with an arts-and-crafts level of consciousness. Consider Dostoyevsky exploring many of the same themes in new books but always extending them with fresh characters and plot; dynamic beings like Raskolnikov, Rogozhin, or Dmitri Karamazov may share similar forces, but they have wholly unique life stories behind them.

Am I writing fan fiction of my own work? Easy to grab onto Kirk and Spock and run with them, eh?

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Balloon Ship Armageddon, Part 2 – Problematic Composition

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Ranna Kikken Commer in 2076 copyright 2018 by Michael D. Smith

Ranna Kikken Commer in 2076

I felt disconcertingly cold towards Balloon Ship Armageddon, both during its writing and in the week after finishing it, until I wrote the previous blog post on its origins, including a silly overblown synopsis. At once I felt a strong new connection to the novel, and a desire to fully feel what it means to end the Jack Commer series. The composition of the book has had its ups and downs, including the realization that I’ll probably have to eventually self-publish it. (Unsure of that yet–more later.) Though novel forces did channel themselves into the writing sessions, much as they’ve always done, I’ve also felt distant from the book during a time of several stressful interruptions from daily life. Unconscious energies seem to have pushed this story in certain directions I hadn’t planned, but in retrospect I welcome them all.

Selected observations written from February 19th through October 6th will now take over in a crude emotional timeline. The notes are usually several days to a week apart:

The vaporware of a Jack Commer 7, which I do want to write but don’t want to feel rushed on.

The 2/20 visionary dream of space wars and empires.

The concept of new writing can be unsettling, because you’re not inside the magic consciousness of the novel yet and so doubt it can be done. Well, it may just be time to start pulling together some notes and just get started. See what happens.

I sense I’m closer than I think to new writing. Not quite ready to jump into a Chapter One just yet, of course, but it may be closer than I suspect. I think JC Seven may be the first one of some new kind of writing.

Now I can feel a major shift: I’m looking to “new novel” not out of a desire to “prove I can do it,” but because I need it to grow.

Okay: the decision has been made (and I leave that in passive voice because somehow that’s how it happened) to start JC 7 as soon as practicable. Even today’s writing session is starting it. There are enough ideas to get it rolling, and even if it’s a failure, so what? But now I’m seeing that the seventh book should conclude the series. The series has no overarching plot, but there can still be a conclusion, and I can be done with the series and characters on my own terms, not just “I wrote six of them and never got around to doing more.”

Jack Commer, Supreme Commander by Michael D. Smith

Jack’s wife Amav dominating the cover of Book Two, Jack Commer, Supreme Commander

So more Jack and Amav, and whatever characters I think need some amplification, but this time all expressed in a testbed of new writing and new energy. I want JC 7 to be fun storytelling; just see where it goes. There is also some research on neighboring stars to do, some framework to set in place. Rereading the first books in the series is also probably a good idea.

Some more thoughts and integration-yearning on a Jack Commer Seven this past week, along with the blog post on the Alpha Centaurian stars. JC 7 still needs some great focus, as right now it’s just sort of run-of-the-mill plot. Then again, many of my novel notes started this way. I remember thinking the original Collapse and Delusion notes weren’t that much of a story.

I’m having that “pre-novel malaise,” like the initial feeling of coming down with a cold. But somehow all this seeming negativity is pointing to something uncanny and new.

The main writing news is that I’m happily 12,000 words into interviewing twelve of the characters for Jack Commer Seven, having done six of the twelve since 4/1, and it feels like a mixture of notes and fiction, very therapeutic and with some good surprises. So about halfway done, expecting ca. 40-50 pages single-spaced.

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Balloon Ship Armageddon, Part 1 – Origins

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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

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The SolGrid Rebellion at AmazonThe 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?

Copyright 2018 by Michael D. Smith

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The Karma of Fancy One-Line Blog Posts

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Cosmicness copyright 2015 by Michael D. SmithI 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.

copyright 2018 by Michael D. Smith

CommWealth and My Stint in the Theater

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CommWealth by Michael D. Smith at Amazon 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.

Copyright 2018 by Michael D. Smith

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

Kevin Stukia, Rock Journalist, 1975

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Kevin Stukia copyright 2017 by Michael D. SmithI 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:

Akard Drearstone eBook and paperback from AmazonOkay, 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.

Copyright 2018 by Michael D. Smith

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