Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, with a Nod to the Crab Emperor

Posted on November 11, 2020 by Michael D. SmithNovember 11, 2020

With the shocking suicide of spaceship Typhoon I, the four Commer brothers are reduced to two. After the Final War, the evacuation of Earth, and battle with Martian terrorists, is eldest brother Jack fit to lead the United System Space Force? He leads a peace mission to the fascist Alpha Centaurian Empire, but his marriage to planetary engineer Amav Frankston unravels under the pressures of his new command. He loses his crew to Centaurian brainwashing, and he and Amav are hauled before the dismembered Crab Emperor to face the Maximum Alpha Centaurian Torture.

The republished Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, Book Two of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series, is now available from Sortmind Press.

Amazon paperback
Amazon eBook (Kindle format)
Smashwords eBook (multiple formats)

As with all six books in the series, the reedited Book Two has no changes to any plot or characters from the first 2012 edition. The 2012 cover, an image by first publisher Deron Douglas of Double Dragon Publishing, originally lacked a Book Two designation, but over the years this cover has worked out delightfully as an image for the entire series, featuring as it does Jack’s intrepid wife Amav Frankston-Commer.

Several people have told me this is their favorite Jack Commer novel. In writing it, I worked through some intriguing emotional themes. Four of the chapters are crew diaries, each offering a different angle on the ongoing Centaurian attempts to convert Jack’s crew to worship of the Crab Emperor. As his Typhoon II personnel undergo alien brainwashing one by one, Jack Commer has ordered the surviving crew to keep diaries to track their mental states. But the diaries mainly probe or bounce off Jack’s shadow side as his confused, petulant, and even violent nature erupts in response to the crisis. The painful disintegration of his marriage is thrown into fresh light by his wife Amav’s last entry. And a near-catatonic twelve year-old boy manages to tweak Jack’s ego with one final science fiction entry which Jack uneasily dismisses as pornographic.

The Crab Emperor

A dream of the dismembered Crab Emperor effortlessly slid into the novel. Definitely powerful, and probably worth some psychological analysis. Translated into the novel, the dream pinpoints the moment when Alpha Centaurian Ship’s Archivist Polot discovers the true nature of his beloved Emperor, with whom twenty trillion Alpha Centaurians are expected to remain in constant telepathic contact.

This same giddy terror was everywhere in the Receiving Hall. Where was the Emperor? The source of the Wisdom of the Grid? What the hell was that box doing there?

The faces of those standing near betrayed obvious panic. Most of these nobles and functionaries, like Polot, were seeing the Emperor for the first time. Others had been in previous attendance, but their demeanor, though more controlled, appeared no less disquieted.

At a signal from Glarzj the audience rose. Now Polot could see through the glass cover of the box. The Emperor was a Scihk. One of the revolting crab monsters from the Alpha X water world. Polot could feel the entire audience gag. That entire planet had been declared a forbidden Zone of Psychosis after the Chemical Wars seven centuries ago.

A woman next to Polot made the mistake of gasping: “Oh, flidpzxbck, what a pile of scluzzk!”

A Tarl guard instantly hauled her out of line and pulsar-tubed her head off. She collapsed to the green tile, which, interacting with a damaged organic being, secreted noxious chemicals that turned the rest of the woman’s body into twisted strands of blue gas.

Everyone pretended not to notice. Polot met the gaping eyes of Jack Commer. Then Jack, then everyone, turned back to … the Emperor. The Crab Emperor.

But the Emperor wasn’t a real Scihk Crab. He couldn’t be. The Crabs were five feet wide and stood four feet high on their six legs. This one looked like a Crab that had been cut up with a laser and shoved haphazardly into the purple box. Except that the creature was alive. Its yellow-orange legs writhed and thumped in that enclosed space, blood gushing through the moist tissue of scores of disconnected body parts. Every motion contradicted another. Nothing fit together. At times the creature seemed to be on the verge of thrashing right through the glass and flopping in pieces all over the floor.

One of the prisoners threw up. Two guards were on the woman Polot recognized as Sheila McCasland. Pulsar tubes appeared and flashed. Even as she hit the tile, two thirds of her blasted to nothingness, Sheila looked more complete, more at harmony, than the Emperor could ever possibly hope to be. She turned to blue gas.

Series background
The Original Crab Emperor Dream

The Martian Marauders, Now Digitally Remastered for Your Enjoyment

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Michael D. SmithOctober 20, 2020

The republished The Martian Marauders, Book One of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series, is now available from Sortmind Press.

Amazon paperback
Amazon eBook (Kindle format)
Smashwords eBook (multiple formats)

After the sale this year of the original publisher, I’ve decided to republish all six books in the series and add a new seventh book. All are receiving error corrections and fresh editing, especially the first three. But in all cases these are stylistic corrections; there are no changes to any of the stories, any aspects of their plots, and none of their characters.

What I’ve done with The Martian Marauders is like a modern digital clean-up of something like the 1960’s Star Trek series. You could decide to watch the original faded color shows … or you could opt for the digitally remastered, much more exquisite experience.

So The Martian Marauders is definitely digitally remastered. I really did use amazing modern word processing tech on this project!

I’m also compressing the first thirteen years of the series’ chronology to five, which mostly affects the first and third books. But aside from changing a few things people say and some explanations to make all six novels in the series congruent, the chronology edits also don’t structurally alter the books.

Condensing the timeline also feeds into the intriguing idea of how we might react to some overwhelming near-future catastrophe, in this case an inexplicable breakdown of the solar system, and how we might come up with some unheard of rescue technology by the end of the 2020’s. Though our scattershot response to COVID doesn’t really encourage much optimism, nevertheless, when faced such a series of existential astronomical disasters, wouldn’t we ramp up our science and engineering in an astonishing hurry, just as two twentieth century world wars, as well as the Cold War, brought quick, fantastic technological development?

I sanitized old formatting in The Martian Marauders manuscript by using what Smashwords calls “the nuclear option,” i.e., saving the entire text to Notepad, then copying and pasting to Word, stripping all formatting and styles. This results in extremely clean text. While I think most authors would gulp at so drastic a solution, I finally realized that the Word formatting in the first three books had been riddled with underlying formatting complications. I’ve since learned to use Word styles more efficiently.

So after nuclear war on The Martian Marauders, I had to thoughtfully decide what I wanted included as far as italics and italicized thinking went–very little as compared to the first version.

I marvel at the new polish and readability I’m able to impart throughout. Especially worthwhile is a heightened awareness of word choice, and grappling with the mortifying psychic shadow of typos and conceptual errors. I forced myself to thoroughly reread any new edit, as many of my worst errors have come from fast editing that passes spellcheck but leaves a few deleted words hanging around the paragraph. It is awful to again and again stumble across correctly spelled phrases which were obviously mangled in editing, or incorrect words you’ve glossed over a hundred times, like:

They were going they to the spaceport.

Yes, there was something to this being quiet and taking in all in.

Jack sighed. “Fine, John. Let’s go ahead and patch it though us so we can all hear it.”

Somehow grammar check doesn’t catch most of these. And it’s so easy to read that paragraph over and over and over through the years and never catch it, along with editors and readers. I had been so sure when the book was originally published in 2012 by Double Dragon Publishing that it was perfect and contained no errors at all.

Republishing also sparked the urge to design a Sortmind Press logo based on a crop of a 2009 painting which I’ve used for Sortmind Press, and, as any avid reader of this blog will note, is also cropped for the blog header image. The new logo wound up on the back cover of the paperback.

New work on The Martian Marauders has been a psychic gift. I feel the book is no longer something I finished in the past according to my talents of the time, but a piece of writing that reverberates with present consciousness. I feel quite energized again about digitally remastering the whole series. I’m getting the books the way I want them. I feel that I’m finally bringing out the real stories–which, paradoxically, have always been there. Yes, it’s space opera in one sense, but I’ve also explored a lot of my literary territory here.

I boggle at the rough page and word count totals for the series, the first book done, the rest undergoing edits:

The Martian Marauders	383	97,434
Jack Commer, Supreme Commander	198	58,608
Nonprofit Chronowar	272	74,941
Collapse and Delusion	228	59,124
The Wounded Frontier	319	84,368
The SolGrid Rebellion	333	90,136
Balloon Ship Armageddon	277	70,626
	2,010	535,237

Two thousand pages. Half a million words. It never seemed like that much when I was writing them one by one.

This is the first time I’ve seriously considered, now that I fully own the publishing process on the series, that I really don’t have to end with Balloon Ship Armageddon, Book Seven, originally envisioned as the last book in the series. I’m free to go in any direction. Although there are some problems here, since Seven posits, and the unwritten Eight calls for, Jack literally saving the entire universe. What would be left for a Nine?

From the opening of The Martian Marauders:

The five hundred-mile-wide crater had been thoroughly radar-mapped, though nobody had ever seen it. They all knew the ground was still burning eight months later. Copilot Joe Commer looked away. All he could picture was the red-orange lava beneath all that soot.

“You know, I still can’t believe it,” he muttered. “Those were the Himalayas.”

His older brother Jack shrugged from the command seat to his left. “Are the sensors deployed?”

Joe took a breath. “Yep, they’re out. All five up and running. No problems.” Far to starboard hung the icy white fragments of the moon, beginning its eons-long spread into a complete ring. Joe listened to the whirring of the ventilation fans and the beeps of the electronics. The Control Room of the Typhoon I was brilliantly lit, and the reflections of its interior curved through the cockpit window, obscuring the line of twilight on the ruined planet below.

It was the first run where they hadn’t come to pick up a passenger shell. Nothing to do but drop off a few sensor satellites. Nobody else to rescue, nobody who wanted to be rescued. They were really saying goodbye.

Joe shuddered at the charcoal blanketing most of the planet. He could all but smell the death below. How could he ever have lived there?

The United System had declared June 5th the final day for mandatory evacuation, and three days ago the USS Celeste had picked up four hundred refugees, all against their will. There were only handfuls of human beings left down there anyway, all doomed, but they’d made their choice. What good did it do anymore to send USSF troops into the refugee camps, taking casualties fighting the diehards, just so they could haul a few survivors back?

Series background

The Jack Commer Resurrection

Posted on July 18, 2020 by Michael D. SmithJuly 18, 2020

I suppose that could be a clever novel title if I ever do an eighth Commer novel, but it refers to the republication of my Jack Commer, Supreme Commander SF series. My publisher, Double Dragon Publishing, was sold to a British publisher earlier this month, and although I had a choice to continue with the new publisher, I decided I really want to self-publish the series so I can update the books, especially the first three, at my leisure. At this point I own the six covers and have new ISBN’s ready for publication by Sortmind Press.

I’d actually made my decision long ago and had already made extensive notes for updating this series. In 2018 and last fall I’d reread the entire series, and while I definitely see all six published works as a complete expression, each with its own valid soul, I was bothered by the overuse of italicization and some other stylistic problems in the first three novels. They’re still great stories but I found the style overdone, even jarring in places, as opposed to the smooth story-centered workings of the last three.

There’s also the vexation of finding typos in a published manuscript and having no control over their correction. Back in 2012 Double Dragon had generously allowed corrections of numerous typos in the first two books, but somehow during a 2015 re-upload of the files the original manuscripts and their errors were reinstated. Can’t figure that one out, but it has definitely irked me.

A further issue is the chronology of the series, which seemed radically distant when I began the first book years ago. Asteroids start falling into the sun in the spring of 2020, and more solar system disasters pile up through the twenties. Finally we get the Final War in 2033, which forces humanity to emigrate to Mars. A recent blog post bemoaned my series finally going out of date this year, reinforcing the lesson to set your SF stories decades, maybe centuries ahead. Which is one reason why the series jumped to 2075, with rejuvenated characters, starting with Book Four.

The problem is that much of The Martian Marauders plot centers on the timing of spaceships moving between planets in the solar system arrangement of June 2034. Although my spaceships are so fast that they don’t need months-long orbital mechanics calculations to arrive at other worlds, they do have their speed limits and the planets really are depicted at their June 9, 2034 distances. Pushing the entire series a couple more decades into the future would unravel all that. Doable, but a huge error-prone job, and the anxiety 2036 characters have in Book Four about the long wait for the 2053 cessation of time-scrambling warfare would be lost.

Recently I’d considered leaving all the chronology intact and marketing the series as “alternate history” with 2020 asteroid disasters and the resulting worldwide unease mirroring our COVID 2020 anxieties. But that stank even as I conjured it.

But when the news about Double Dragon hit last week I had an immediate and wondrous inspiration, seeing the chronology problem in a way I hadn’t considered before. I could use 2028-2033 as five years of apocalyptic unease, in counterpoint with dizzying technological advance, and keep the same chronology after that. Yes, in eight years the series will again be out of date, but somehow this all makes emotional sense. Since I’m ready to move on from Jack Commer, I want to polish up Books One through Seven, have them out there, and move on to more literary work. If I return to space opera I’ll make a new series.

The change from Double Dragon also clears up a problem I was about to address with the publisher, namely, how to proceed with the seventh and last Jack Commer novel, Balloon Ship Armageddon, currently in final manuscript polishing. I’d figured Double Dragon was about to close and had already decided to self-publish BSA through Sortmind Press, but it was a relief not to have to do any back and forth with the publisher about Book Seven. Knowing I can proceed with the novel on my own terms, with my own cover, is a great boon. I’m not sure where Balloon Ship Armageddon will come in the new updating. I really don’t want to wait until Books One through Six are all done, though that may be the most logical path.

I’ve scoured sortmind.com and blog.sortmind.com for all mentions of Double Dragon as well as buy links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other venues. I didn’t revise the history of the novels or mention of normal publication news over time, though, just removed incorrect links.

It’s funny how the Double Dragon change, in tandem with the Balloon Ship Armageddon finishing the Jack Commer universe, has made me realize how important the series has been to me, including its weird eighth-grade origin. Yes, it’s space opera, but I’ve also explored a lot of my literary territory here. And now I’m seeing a closed circle which I want to perfect.

Publishing all seven is going to be a big task, but I accomplished stylistic revisions of The Soul Institute and CommWealth fairly easily the same way earlier this year. Above all I want a calm, centered, orderly process, and in the meantime I must get started with some new writing. It’s not unreasonable to think I could publish one of these novels per month. And exactly as with The Soul Institute and CommWealth, I’m changing the style of the first three books, not the plot or the characters. In compressing the first thirteen years of the chronology to five, I’m changing a few things people say and some explanations, but that won’t affect the structure of the books. I’m not about to start rewriting the novels. I have full trust in all seven of them.

Jack Commer, Supreme Commander Series – Overview

New CommWealth Paperbacks

Posted on July 4, 2020 by Michael D. SmithJuly 4, 2020

The CommWealth system, introduced just six months ago, has outlawed all private property–including the right to your own body. Two paperback editions are now out for the republished CommWealth:

Amazon trade paperback
Lulu.com mass market paperback

eBook versions are also available:

Smashwords eBook
Kindle eBook

And there is a new CommWealth interview on Smashwords.

Overview

Introduced six months ago, the CommWealth system has outlawed private property. As the story opens, playwright Allan Larson is walking in the rain, spies a new Porsche, and demands the owner relinquish the car. By law, the owner must comply. Everything is free in this society. You just ask for it. To avoid subtle retaliation, there’s a thirty-day waiting period before the former owner can ask for anything from the new owner. People do try to hide as much of what they’ve got as possible, but they’re castigated as Hoarders, and surprise inspections of homes, and publications of people’s inventories, are common. Often you’re called up at night and asked for several of your items, with instructions on where to leave them for pickup.

Allan has adjusted well to this new society, easily claiming umbrellas, mansions, and motorcycles from fellow citizens. Still obsessed with his ex-girlfriend Lisa after their breakup, Allan invokes the laws of CommWealth to demand ownership of her. Meanwhile bicycle mechanic and fledgling actor Richard Stapke seduces Jill Constantine, co-owner with her husband Steve of the Cup of Fog coffee shop, headquarters of the theatrical troupe Forensic Squad.

After a drunken Richard discloses that he’s secretly been writing novels and plays for years, Allan incautiously spreads the word that Richard’s a genius. But an official CommWealth claim is made of Richard’s entire literary output, and the resulting five-volume Stapke Intimacies not only reveals Jill and Richard’s affair, but brings to light a twisted history of betrayals, double agents, and murder that propel Steve Constantine and other Forensic Squad members into a suicidal revolution.

The concept of property touches us all in deep psychological ways we often don’t want to think about. Just think about “your toothbrush,” for example. The exaggerated ideas in CommWealth nevertheless encompass real ethical concerns:

Theft, greed, unconsciousness, hiding, cowering, power-lust, political intrigue, manipulations, danger, courage.

Insinuations, hoarding, unfairness, envy, demands for pity, demands for others to share, obligation, guilt trips.

Beneath the apparent farce are these realities: privacy, dishonesty, cheating.

CommWealth Background and Character Images

I Threw Jump Grenade a Little Further

Posted on July 3, 2020 by Michael D. SmithJuly 4, 2020

A psychopathic Junior Dropout Basketball League star kills a radio announcer with hand grenades, then blows up an entire sports arena to erase all witnesses.

Published by Sortmind Press, Jump Grenade is now available in numerous eBook formats from Smashwords. I published this short novel on Amazon with Kindle Select status in October 2019, but in the meantime decided that I’d rather have more places and formats for the eBook version, and so, after Select status expired this June 28th, I also published the eBook on Smashwords. Once you buy from Smashwords, you can download the book from its website in numerous versions:

EPUB (for instance, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple Books. Kobo, etc.)
Mobi (Amazon Kindle format)
PDF
HTML
and other formats shown on the product page

Smashwords also ports the book for sale at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, and other venues. Jump Grenade is still available in these formats:

Kindle eBook
Amazon Trade Paperback
lulu.com mass market paperback

Bonus! Ineffable Satanic Software Horror

I’d assumed I could make a quick upload of Jump Grenade to the Smashwords site after the book’s Select status expired on Amazon, but I found myself locked in a truly insane struggle which I couldn’t solve through 1:00 AM and which I finally had to force myself to disengage from. The problem was the Mobi version which displayed all red font in some attempts, and a mixture of black and red font in others. And so I plunged into the maddening whirlpool of “doing the same thing over and over in the expectation of different results.”

I do give myself credit for sticking with different experiments and at least I didn’t collapse at my desk at 3:45 AM hammering away at Ineffable Satanic Software Horror. I knew around 12:50 AM that one last experiment was all I had left and that I had to shut down and rethink this. And much refreshed by sleep, and after checking a troubleshooting passage on smashwords.com, I found that there was a Body Text style in red font, that, though not currently used in the document, was underlying/influencing the Normal. Once that style was removed, the book finally went through all right in Mobi (Kindle) format.

Then the next day I found that I needed to finagle and resubmit the document to ward off some mysterious Table of Contents problem in the EPUB version. I didn’t even want a table of contents! But after my Satanic lesson I just calmly figured out the problem and in so doing restored the dedication to my wife Nancy which I initially assumed wouldn’t work in this version.

All very educational. I seem to have a little better understanding of Word styles now and if I ever want to build a table of contents, I have the tools. I do try to keep the novel clean with only two styles per document: Normal and Centered. But others seem to lurk.

Super Bonus if You Keep Reading this Post! A List of Major Characters

Billy Bolamme, sixteen-year-old wunderkind of the Junior Dropout Basketball League, a shamanic force of death and destruction who changes his name to Ocean Singe Horror on an LSD trip during a basketball game
Guenevere “Universe” Ryder, art gallery receptionist, Billy’s sixteen-year-old girlfriend, and unwitting accomplice in thirty thousand murders
Hiram Pebley Bolamme, Billy’s father, coach and owner of the Bolammes basketball team, an ineffectual, dreamy art gallery owner as well as a wealthy do-gooder who started the Junior Dropout Basketball League with his wife Madeline
Dan Ryder, Bolammes regular announcer, Universe’s father, and the man who must finally summon the courage to confront Billy
Frank Chester, former Bolammes player, now Bolammes co-announcer, but unfortunately quite doomed

Double Extra Bonus! Other Characters

Madeline Bolamme, Billy’s mother and the director of the Bolamme Center for Hurt Feelings
Mongar Frederick, detective with the Plattville Homicide Bureau
Emala Ryder, Universe’s mother and dean of the Billy State University School of Library Science
Jonathan Mueller, surviving witness of the Baltimore disaster who dies after giving testimony about Billy’s involvement

Jump Grenade Background

The Blank Zen Interview

Posted on June 27, 2020 by Michael D. SmithJuly 3, 2020

I’ve done about a dozen web interviews and I always found them like writing a midterm exam where, despite all the agonizing left-brained hassle, you felt you’d pulled something valid or interesting together. In response to these interviews I came up with my own set of questions I might ask another author, but I find they work just fine being left blank. They can serve as issues to muse about without having to sit down and hash out any final answers.

What would you like to see in a positive review?

Postulate a negative review. What would the inevitable troll with an axe to grind say about your book?

Or: write a scathing negative review of your own book. This may seem like marketing suicide, but it may spark some interesting self-evaluation. Just don’t publish it.

Why is your genre inspiring to you? Why are you working in this genre?

What do you fear most in contemporary society? Is there anything in your writing that reflects that?

What do you find most assuring, impressive, or rewarding about contemporary society? And is there anything in your writing that reflects that?

Is there any way your writing expresses an appreciation of human civilization since the beginning? It may be quite a stretch to answer this, but even a shirtless cowboy should be able to BS his way through this one.

Given all the book blurbs from other authors you’ve read, analyze your own book blurb as to its chances of snagging interest or a sale.

Do you use facts files, character files, etc.? At the end of a novel, are they useful? Well-ordered?

Which of your characters do you think your readers would find most memorable? Least memorable? For the least memorable, how could you rewrite/upgrade that character?

How do you promote or market your work? Are there efforts that you feel are more productive than others?

How do you take care of your prime writing instrument, your body?

Have you kept some of your earliest writings? Do you ever return to analyze them for strengths, failures, ongoing life themes?

Is self-publishing an option for you? In what ways does it affect how you approach your writing?

Do you have a sense of your work progressing towards higher levels? Or does that not interest you?

Recent Smashwords interview featuring CommWealth

The CommWealth Republication

Posted on June 13, 2020 by Michael D. SmithJune 13, 2020

A. Property

What if anyone could ask for anything you owned and keep it for thirty days until someone else wanted it … your home, your car … even your body? Members of the Forensic Squad theatrical troupe find themselves leading a suicidal revolution against the CommWealth system, which has outlawed all private property.

CommWealth was originally published in 2015 by Class Act Books, but after it became apparent earlier this year, after queries to fellow Class Act authors and to Amazon, that the small publishing house had, as far as anyone could tell, ceased to exist, Sortmind Press was right there to step in. I checked my Class Act contract and found I could sever it by giving 60 days’ notice, and that technically it had lapsed without renewal in 2017 anyway. The entire experience has been a valuable lesson, but the important outcome was that I was able to get a freshly edited version of my novel published as:

Smashwords eBook (which ports to Barnes and Noble, Kobo, iTunes, etc.)
Amazon trade paperback
Amazon eBook
lulu.com mass market paperback

B. Copyediting

The original 2015 cover

As with the April update of my flagship novel The Soul Institute, the changes are a thorough copyediting rather than revision. The novel has the same plot and characters, just with a much improved style, mainly clearing up an old habit of relying on italicized character thoughts, as well as overuse of exclamation points.

I was surprised to find so much italicized thinking lingering in the 2015 version, as I thought I’d cut a lot in the final Class Act edits. In translating italicized character thoughts back to narrative, I found there was a low-key, conversational aspect to them which fits the tone of the novel. Much of it simply wasn’t needed, repeating what should be obvious to the reader. A made-up example of such overreach:

Gunshots echoed crazily and McPherson collapsed on the concrete, a softball-sized hole in his chest.

Oh my God! They shot him! He’s dead!

Interestingly, there were cases where I let characters just speak their thoughts and saw that they worked much better as speech. Usually italicized thinking is intended to be information withheld from other characters, yet sometimes it was perfectly in character for the person to just speak his or her line.

I wound up translating all italicized thinking back to narrative thought. There is not one italicized thought in this novel now. It just worked out that way.

As with the 2020 Soul Institute copyediting, I also cut as many hyphens and ellipses as I could, along with meandering “Well … uh–I mean–” dialog. Of course, if that punctuation did add strength to a passage, it stayed. But usually it doesn’t mean anything to the reader.

I find it strange that I ever veered onto the florid stylistic path of over-italicization. I feel I’m returning to my real voice after what may really have been an unconscious and misguided desire to perfume my writing to attract publishing suitors. I looked up the one phrase I thought so apt in query letters from the last major push for publishers, this one dated 12/17/09:

The University of Mars aims for high energy, humor, intense character interaction, and strong emotion. Extensive use of dialog and character thoughts are used to keep the feelings flowing through the narrative.

I now see that as deluded. And I just now noticed that it’s ungrammatical; it should be “is used.”

C. The Covers

1) The main cover, replacing my Property painting image. The original one was okay, but didn’t really pop. My wife Nancy was instrumental in converting me to this choice from several other great ones, but this image really does work well for getting across what the book is about.

2) The mass market paperback cover. Lulu.com has redesigned its publication process but I found that the template for making a single image cover wasn’t working well for the main image. But this led me to go back to a wraparound cover experiment I’d been playing with, which bleeds nicely to the entire cover, front and back. There was something electrifying about developing this cover with its quirky approach to the CommWealth themes.

D. Next Steps

I’m very pleased with a clean-up which has made CommWealth a much stronger novel. And because of the high energies I’ve felt doing this book along with Akard Drearstone, Sortmind, Jump Grenade, and The Soul Institute, I feel that, after some time experimenting with space opera SF, a return to literary novels is the next phase. I have to admit I’ve soured on submitting to outside publishers; it just seems like a waste of time, and for what? To repeat small publisher Amateur Hour? Getting that sort of publishing credit is close to useless and you can see what happens when the business flops.

So the energy seems to be to write well, and write new stuff, and publish it well on Sortmind Press and try to figure out sane ways of marketing and selling. To push the revamped CommWealth and The Soul Institute, for instance. Not to take a dozen science fiction novels to a book fair and just get the reaction, “Well, you sure write a lot!”

More CommWealth Background

Complaints, Fight Songs, and Daily Technology

Posted on May 21, 2020 by Michael D. SmithMay 21, 2020

I wrote this piece of satire after perusing some older journals, but to my dismay I realized that if I’d actually run across this passage in a previous journal I might have thought it was a real entry. It’s bugged me for years that a subset of journal entries begin with complaints that my consciousness has been dim, then morph into fight songs urging me to rise above the squalor. Sometimes I was warming myself up to a day’s writing session, but in any case the final result is just a fluffy bunch of words taking up journal bandwidth. So with a certain amused shudder I present this self-satire. Maybe there’s a novel character in here somewhere.

I think I’m now strong enough to finally acknowledge that I’ve been overly tired, frazzled, distracted, and unconscious for quite some time. Yet I feel that this point in my personal history, and this realization, were fated to come, in their exact karmic instance of this moment, now, when I am at last fully prepared to finally realize that I’ve been wasting valuable life energies on mindless aspects of existence that may seem important to the trivial self, but which in fact contribute nothing to my ongoing fate. I must be resilient and grasp the possibilities instead of worrying about such negativities.

Above all I must remember that I am an artist, inserted into this world for a purpose, and that I must maintain a new and responsible vigilance, a more modern and more appropriate interface with the universe, a more direct art identity, at all times. That means 24/7 awareness. I have been so unconscious for so long. BUT I’ve finally realized that I must now, finally, at this exact moment, step up, with newfound courage, based on my deepest values, to the responsibilities facing me as a human being who, for whatever reason fate has decreed, has been called upon to create art, to open up to the world and process these energies instead of wasting them in dull entertainment or futile delusions.

The fight will be endless, but I vow to make it a worthwhile struggle! For my destiny demands it! Above all consciousness must be maintained, and this means that, despite all obstacles of this world, I must become more fully honest, conquering all fears with the full mindful intention of moving forward. Yes, perhaps decades have passed in “merely reasonable consciousness”; but now it is finally time to reclaim that karma once and for all!

I think that’s enough. A send-up of every complaining journal entry, and every italicized and exclaimed exhortation to conquer it, that has marred the journals. I’m both laughing and wincing as I reread it.

Once more back to this blog’s founding statement: I think “There is a Super Colossal Mess Jungle going on. It’s my business to get involved in it, any way I can,” is more than enough direction, and includes the daily technology to support it: get involved and stop complaining. Whatever state of mind you’re in is the starting point. Follow whatever energies arise.

The Super Colossal Mess Jungle 2.0

Posted on April 30, 2020 by Michael D. SmithApril 30, 2020

Following up on the building of the red stretcher and stretching its canvas, here’s the sequence of the completed painting, though as usual I forgot to chronicle all of it, so we see just a couple major steps and the final result before gloss medium varnish. But there was some good learning along the way. I actually did two acrylic paintings Friday, April 24, the entire process as exhausting as usual. And I unexpectedly wound up with a third archival object.

Basically I focused on the 41.5″ x 31.5″ main canvas, destined to be designated Painting 318. Here’s the stretched canvas ready for two coats of white gesso, but I have no photo of the gleaming primed canvas. That dazzling white always looks good in bright light. Here we have the beige tone of the raw canvas.

Before I began the main painting, though, I wanted to try a pouring experiment on a 16” x 20” canvas. I’d bought some pouring medium and thought I’d have a fun ten-minute swirl of thick interesting colors as a warm-up.

I was too dispirited by the resulting mess to take any photos.

Though I got to a point where the image looked like a reasonable poured-paint conclusion, with red and yellow clouds (again, no photos), I was dissatisfied with the almost total lack of control. The thing looked mediocre, with a lot of mud swirled into those bits of bright color. Though I’ve used thinned and spattered acrylic as backgrounds for paintings, allowing a certain level of chance, I’ve always done this with some deliberation, moving around the canvas and throwing the colors where it seemed best. Pouring eliminated most of that sense of control. I found that tilting the canvas to get lovely weird patterns was merely … distressing.

So I scraped off vast volumes of mud and started again, using 318’s black lines and similar colors, intending the smaller painting as a companion to the larger one.

So, back to 318 and its initial syrupy black lines. Though this painting had its improvisational aspect, I was working off a colored pencil sketch I’d done a few days earlier and had a sense of the final result in mind. I wanted a forceful color-field gesture as opposed to the anarchic turmoil of a fully improvised painting. Those abstract expressionist ones are frequently the most problematic, and for this day I’d decided I didn’t want that sort of combat.

Some of the colors filled in with rough texture: ceramic stucco, glass beads, and sand. I’m obviously failing to show all the steps; I just got too involved to keep documenting.

The final painting before its thick coat of Liquitex gloss medium. I definitely wanted a high gloss on this thing. The background color is hard to photograph for some reason I’ve yet to discover. It looks gray but it’s actually a sort of butternut, consisting of acrylic bronze mixed with cerulean blue and titanium white; it looks warm as opposed to the grayish nature of this digital snapshot. I must practice my exposure settings. It occurs to me that this phenomenon mirrors the confusion between Civil War Confederate “butternut” uniforms being taken for and referred to as “gray.”

After one coat of gloss medium, the final painting, “Super Colossal Mess Jungle 2.0,” image manipulated to show close to the actual colors.

Meanwhile the smaller painting, No. 319, “Companion,” 20″ x 16″. It’s crowded as compared to 318, but I like that. Usually my “companion paintings” are mere experiments that don’t have much force, but somehow this does.

The studio at the end of a long day, 9:20 PM. During the process of working on both paintings, I noticed that while I’d gotten dispirited after the first pouring mediocrity, and fatigued on both paintings near the end, I didn’t descend into my usual acrylic desperation. I didn’t succumb to blind urges to just fix and finish the damn things. In fact I felt some intuition on colors coming into play toward the end.

Finally, we have the third so-called painting of the day, “Paint Pouring Disaster Archive,” 6″ x 12.25″, in wood, acrylic, and glue. The only indications of the mud left over from scraping the second painting were four pieces of 1″ x 2″ wood propping up the canvas, but all four were thoroughly soaked with 319’s final muddy color. I glued and c-clamped the dried strips together, and somehow the final result has its own magic and serves as the archive for this painting day.

I was stumped for titles. Trying to conjure some, I made my own tag cloud:

black blog clouds coat colors conclusion control couple disaster dissatisfied documented dots draft experiment gloss image intended journal lack large lines medium mud paint photos point post pouring process quick reasonable red redone scraped sequence shots similar sketch stretching strips table total volumes yellow

I thought to work in the word “progression” somewhere, but that finally struck me as one of my typical bombastic painting titles. I considered that “lucid” might somehow fit, though that immediately seemed like a worse ego trip. Note to self, and in fact to everyone: do not ever title a painting “Lucid Progression.”

Then I recalled the “Super Colossal Mess Jungle,” and the perfect title was there. “Companion” instantly jelled for the second painting.

The manifesto about the SCMJ can be found as this blog’s founding statement from 2010:

“There is a super colossal mess jungle going on. It’s my business to get involved with it, any way I can.”

The original acrylic “Super Colossal Mess Jungle,” 38″ x 38″, from sophomore year at Rice. The phrase was silly but it has stuck. It lovingly mocks chaos even as it accepts it, but it also:

tells me what I need to do with the SCMJ around me: get involved with it.
provides a simple, robust technology: any way I can. That is, interact with chaos using whatever energies and talents I possess, with an implicit caution that there are other paths I cannot, should not, follow. Appropriate interaction.

The sophomore painting demonstrates its own acceptance of the boisterous, often incomprehensible outer world; somehow the chaos holds together in its own rhythm.

Now here in version 2.0 there’s a different, organic order: energy flowing in one set of related directions, somewhat planned, open to improvisation and color experiments. And in its showcasing of the consequences of abandoning all control, even this day’s pouring disaster was a lesson in Super Colossal Mess Jungle.

Stretching the Canvas

Posted on April 22, 2020 by Michael D. SmithApril 22, 2020

This almost has to be demonstrated in person before it makes sense, but I’m giving it a verbal try here.

First, vacuum the floor to get up items like cat hair. Unroll the canvas on the floor.

Place the completed stretcher (here showing my recently completed 49½” x 31½” red stretcher) upside down on the canvas, only the tips of the quarter round finishing strips touching the canvas.

Use scissors (the kind of craft scissors that can cut through rough cloth like burlap work great) to cut the canvas so that the overhang on all four sides is more or less the same, at least five inches on all sides.

D uring the following procedure keep straightening the canvas under the stretcher as you go along. The goal is to work from the centers of the four sides to the four corners.

On the middle of one side, wrap canvas around to the back of the stretcher, tauten it minimally, and place 3 or 4 staples a couple inches apart on the reverse surface (NOT on the side of the stretcher).

Go to either the right or left side from this original stapling and repeat this minimal tautening process. Don’t go to the opposite side yet. Now you have two sides stapled only in the middle, at right angles to each other.

The “full tension” stretching takes place on the two sides opposite these first two sides. Get in the middle of an “opposite” side and pull the canvas toward you almost as hard as you can. You’ll develop a feel for this: it is possible to do this in excess and rip a low-grade canvas. You might also bow the stretcher bars inward, but this usually happens on larger than 3 foot by 3 foot stretchers and on stretchers without cross braces.

Garden gloves are useful, as you can get slight canvas burns from pulling. Commercial pullers are also available. I usually get my feet on the stretcher bar and push it away as I pull the canvas towards me. Then deliver three or four staples to hold the canvas in place.

Repeat this process on the opposite side.

The above step more or less established how tight this canvas is going to be. The process of stretching always starts in the middle and works to the corners. If you’re doing something larger than 3 feet by 3 feet, you’ll probably want to establish another matched set of preliminary tautened side, then fully tautened opposite side, to all sides needing it, working your way to the corners.

Each corner is dealt with one a time. This is how I do but, but you may invent your own technique. First I pull the loose canvas to a right corner, tauten it and staple it in place.

Then at the other side of the corner I pull the remaining loose canvas to the left, tauten it, wrap it over the corner, tighten that, and staple it. It takes a couple times to get the hang of it.

You can either do the left or right side of the corner first, but I always do mine the same way, first moving right towards a corner, then going to the other side of the corner and pulling the canvas to the left to do the final wrap, because my hands have memorized those motions.

Turn the canvas over so that the painting surface faces upward. I was told in my first painting class at Rice that a quarter tossed on it should bounce. There should be a certain amount of give. The goal is “taut,” not “overtightened.”

Check for ripples in the canvas which may occur along the edges. If there are any, you can remove staples with a staple remover and try retightening the canvas at that spot and. The first few times you do this you may need to redo a whole side. You can always remove all staples and just start over.

Preparing the Canvas for Painting

Use a handheld vacuum on the canvas surface or find some other method for removing the cat hair unless you want to integrate this and other floor debris into your painting.

Gesso the canvas. Gesso is a ground incorporating paint pigment, chalk, and binder. It isn’t needed for pre-primed canvas, which is already coated with gesso. Gesso provides the color surface (usually white, though you can buy colored gesso) upon which your paint will be applied. Since oil and acrylics are not entirely opaque, the gesso ground has an effect on the colors. One layer of gesso will work, but you’ll notice you’ll get a much brighter white by using two coats. Gessoing is also a good psychological preparation for getting into the painting.

Appendix 1. Supplies and Tools

Canvas roll. You can buy from dickblick.com or danielsmith.com, to name a couple art supply outlets. The longer the roll, the more expensive. You’ll see a wide variety of quality. I use unprimed duck, medium weight. Though prices seem expensive, you might get six paintings out of one roll. Ungessoed canvas is much easier to stretch and less expensive.

Scissors
Garden gloves to avoid canvas burns

Staple gun and staple remover

Gesso. Overview at https://www.dickblick.com/categories/canvas/primers/