Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

Sinner’s Opera by Linda Nightingale (or, I Can’t Believe I’ve Read a Vampire Novel!)

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Michael D. SmithSeptember 2, 2014

I found Sinner’s Opera a psychologically astute page-turner. The characters from the protagonist vampire Morgan D’Arcy and his love Isabeau down to minor supporting cast all work well, propelling the reader through a mesmerizing plot with twists up to the end. I find myself looking forward to a sequel.

Since I’ve never read anything in the vampire romance genre before, I approached Sinner’s Opera in terms of human emotions and motivations. The reader can’t help but feel sympathetic towards the male half of the romantic pair, Lord Morgan D’Arcy, who’s been a vampire since the 1600’s, though Morgan also strikes me as a good depiction of a manipulative psychopath. Nevertheless Morgan has some heartfelt desire to know real love and empathy–all on his own terms, of course.

The various vampire laws and vampire powers in this novel work excellently, integrating into the characters’ development and never becoming mere plot devices. The vampires may initially strike the reader as being inordinately powerful, yet they require these attributes in the face of other inherent shortcomings, like destruction by sunlight or the need to replenish life energies through murder. Teleportation or the ability to rise from mortal wounds seem natural, integrated facets of the vampires, and the casual arrogance with which they wield these powers strikes me as similar to how a nineteenth century British colonial administrator, imbued with centuries of imperial power, might feel towards the natives he feels he benevolently rules. This metaphor is not too far from how Morgan views the object of his love, the genius geneticist Isabeau Gervase. While Morgan feels deep passion for Isabeau, he’s genuinely surprised to find that she has her own view of their relationship. It’s amazing how he can manipulate her and keep her in the dark, how he can mold and control her in the name of his own concept of love. His desire to father a child with her involves keeping it a secret from her–as well as from fellow vampires who’ll punish him for transgressing vampire law.

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Who is Jack Commer, Supreme Commander?

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

With the shocking suicide of the Typhoon I, the most powerful military spaceship ever built, the four Commer brothers are reduced to two. After the horrors of the Final War, the evacuation of Earth, and an unexpected conflict with native Martian terrorists, is eldest brother Jack really fit to lead the United System Space Force? Yet despite stress bordering on hysteria he always seems to come up with the proper solution. Shy with women but easy with command as opposed to his passionate, guilt-ridden brother Joe, when promoted to Supreme Commander Jack passes over numerous ambitious admirals and holds onto power for decades with the newest rejuvenation technology. But has he ever really recovered from the responsibility of overseeing forty years of futile time war with the Alpha Centaurians?

from Book One, The Martian Marauders:

“Did you find all that in the Martians’ minds as well?” Jack snapped.

“Yeah, Jack, I had to look, after all …”

“Yeah, you had to look.” Of course his brother would have taken the opportunity to explore all the back corridors of the Martian mind while Jack hung at the vent and contemplated the complexities of Martian language and Amplified Thought. In fact, it was probably because Joe was so intent on Martian sexual practice that he’d knocked the stupid grating onto the Council floor in the first place. Damn it all! It was just like Joe.

His younger brother dated scores of girls in all the colonies, on the barren asteroids and the surviving moons of the major planets. Joe knew all about girls, and women, and the difference between them. And he’d sit in the copilot seat on those Typhoon missions and crack insipid off-color jokes for hours. The old adage, “Those who talk about it, don’t do it,” apparently didn’t apply to Joe. He talked and did, and talked and did. Occasionally he’d get semi-seriously caught up in an affair at some outpost–Lucia from Ganymede was the last big one Jack recalled–and be moody and silent for a few weeks, but soon he’d shrug it off, contact one of his numerous girlfriends, and the putrid sex jokes would crank up again.

Was Joe one hundred percent devoted to duty? It wasn’t just the sex talk that bothered him–every once in a while Joe would burst out with some enormous emotion that embarrassed every crewman on board, like declaring the Earth was a death trip and he was glad to have left it behind. Sure, sometimes it turned out that Joe had broken a lot of buried tension with that sort of wild remark–McNarri once said Joe was the unofficial spokesman for the group’s emotions. But what the hell did that mean? In any case, how could Joe indulge in all these emotions and sexual escapades and still focus on the job of copiloting the most deadly spaceship ever made?

Sure, men had feelings. But wallowing in them like that? All that talk about women’s breasts and asses and clitorises, those crude jibes about every female body he saw?

Jack didn’t talk. And he didn’t do. He never had. Well, at least he wasn’t a virgin anymore–that curse had followed him up through last year, at age twenty-nine. The cleaning lady at USSF HQ on Titan … blowsy, big-boobed, and drunk, she’d followed him to his room, asking what he might need …

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Trip to Mars, the Picture Book, or, How the Ship Became a Fantastical Theater Stage

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Michael D. SmithJuly 12, 2020

My first “novel,” Trip to Mars, was fifty-five penciled pages in a small yellow notebook, starring Jack Commer and outlining the horrors of a 2033 World War IV and the evacuation of Earth’s surviving population to Mars. Was the sixth grade and the spring of 1964 really fifty years ago? This ancient story is a childhood prequel to, and the inspiration for, my published Jack Commer series, where many of the 1964 details still find expression. In 1964, of course, 2033 was the far future. Now it’s just nineteen years away!

I’m not sure what prompted me to create Trip to Mars, the Picture Book over the past year and a half, but I had enormous fun with it. The resulting PDF file is way too large to distribute at 109 MB, but I found that if I recreated it as a PowerPoint file I could then save it as a WMA video that loads easily on YouTube and takes just a few minutes to play:

Trip to Mars, the Picture Book on YouTube

So Trip to Mars is now a silent movie! Full screen is best for reading the text/captions. There’s no music yet–I suppose I should think of something.

Unless you’re a really fast reader, the introduction is the only part that can’t be read during the approximately ten-second video transitions, but you can pause at that point if you want to read the whole page, or for that matter if you want to linger on any of the illustrations. But I included the salient points of the introduction in the YouTube description.

Background

I expanded the twenty-page MS. (all of 2,646 words) into sixty-five pages of a few lines each, illustrated each page in pencil, then scanned the results. Of course, this means the words in this “Draft 1” are limited to a scanned Times New Roman 12.

I refused to change any words from the original story other than correcting misspellings, but the text works well for this project, and as the introduction belligerently states, “if there are awkward phrasings and illogical plot developments, that’s part of the flavor.” I think of this project as an homage to the writing it later inspired. I used my generic Sortmind Press as the publisher for now, but I need to figure out where I want to take a final version. PDF? EPUB format with its attendant image hassles? Print? In any case a final version will involve cropping the images and having separate text with larger fonts.

The 1964 notebook also had numerous crude drawings, some of which I used for new image ideas. One aspect of the new drawings that I’ve really enjoyed is that there are spaceship interiors which just cannot be. As the introduction explains:

The exterior views of the Typhoon are more or less consistent, but echo the fact that I drew the ship somewhat differently every time I rendered it in scores of childhood drawings. I had fun with interior views, which are a series of theater stages and absolutely cannot be reconciled with the layout of an actual ship about the size of a space shuttle. And I never worried about depicting any of the characters consistently.

Some concepts that never would have occurred to me in 1964 found their way into the picture book:

Panel 5 depicts some of the equations of Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity.
Panel 18 has a copy of the astronomer Schiaparelli’s 1886 drawing of Martian “canals.”
Panel 22 is an homage to the paperback cover of Heinlein’s Have Space Suit–Will Travel.
Panel 38 reveals for the first time what an Xon bomb actually looks like!
Panel 62 depicts a Marsport Automated Transport System bus, which later becomes a flippant robotic character in The Martian Marauders.

Trip to Mars is the 1964 kid’s view of Mars, tempered by nuclear war fears and the Kennedy assassination five months before, which inspired the events in panels 10-12. I can also still recall the sense of shock in the air when the first Mariner 4 pictures came back in 1965 to reveal craters and no canals–and an atmosphere too thin for my astronaut heroes to breathe.

At the North Texas Book Festival, April 5, 2014

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

I will be representing Double Dragon Publishing and selling my first three Jack Commer novels (hopefully!) at the North Texas Book Festival in Denton, Texas, Saturday, April 5, 2014. I’ve never done a book festival before so I’m not sure what to expect, but I find myself thinking it may be like opening night for a group art show, only with tables and books. Famous last words.

I actually volunteered to be a speaker, figuring I ought to at least make the attempt, but to my 20% chagrin/80% relief, I’ve just found that I didn’t make the cut. That’s OK, as this whole thing will be new enough without that stress. My topic would have been the irregular origin of The Martian Marauders, the first book in the series. Which I wrote about in a blog post a while back anyway. This is such an easy story to tell (because it’s true) that I don’t think I’d have any serious trouble giving it as a talk.

Here is the URL for the North Texas Book Festival which includes location, time, authors attending, and background info:

http://www.ntbf.org/

Righting an Ancient Injustice – Review of Ascarion by F. T. McKinstry

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Michael D. SmithJune 27, 2019

A deep psychic imbalance manifests itself on the island of Tromb in the Gray Isles, where the inhabitants play by their own rules and practice ancient and unapproved magic. Each of its four castle towers was to be commanded by a son, but the king and queen only produced three, and their daughter Rhinne, who became Sentinel of the North Tower, is shunned by the people of Tromb for supposedly condemning the island to its malaise. However, the causes of the imbalance prove to go much deeper, as this fast-paced novel brilliantly proceeds to investigate.

Ascarion, the fourth book in the Chronicles of Ealiron, is a rich and satisfying fusion of characters and themes from the first three volumes, and points the series in new philosophical and psychological directions. The opening scenes describing the unease on Tromb are unforgettable. The royal castle becomes a metaphor of timeless stagnation, injustice, and oppression. The architecture of the four towers with their claustrophobic circular underground seems a perfect breeding ground for evil as oborom warlords, a dark order claiming the undersides of the island, begin emerging from the depths under the command of Dore, Rhinne’s power-mad brother, and her father, King Ragnvald, whose soul has been taken over by a god seeking to hide an unthinkable past crime.

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Default Forces

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Michael D. SmithJune 27, 2019

I’ve grown quite enamored of this painting I did a couple weeks ago. But I hated it and cursed the monster as I fought to hook it and lash it to my little boat for hour after demented hour like the Old Man and the Sea. Finally admitting failure to achieve anything near the original plan, I just gave up on it. Later that evening, however, I began to see that the painting must have demanded to depict some sort of default energy state …

But during the awful hours of execution what was going through my head?

Forget it, this is the end, I have NO IDEA what I’m doing! I should never have tried to fool with this gloppy CRAP it doesn’t do what I want it to do but then WHEN DID IT EVER??? I’m DONE with abstract painting forever, no scratch that I’m done with ALL PAINTING FOREVER!!!! Why are these damn colors behaving like the STUPID CHEMICALS they are when I want them to be METAPHYSICAL TRANSCENDENCE???? Instead I get muddy GLOP! The damn paint isn’t making any SENSE! It’s NEVER made any sense!

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On Achieving a Slice of the Dream

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Michael D. SmithJune 12, 2015

Novel publication by a royalty-paying publisher is a major milestone, and feels a hundred times better than self-publishing. It means a lot that Double Dragon Publishing has acknowledged my potential. I’ve also enjoyed learning much more about this entire process than I think I could have with just self-publishing.

However, this isn’t the old print era where you got an advance against royalties and a marketing department selling your work. A lot of your attention and writing time is immediately diverted to Internet and otherwise marketing, to tooting your own horn, to setting yourself up on website, blog, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and whatever the next big thing is, to constantly being on the prowl for new marketing venues. Now this isn’t a bad thing, as explaining what you’re about can be clarifying–and may result in sales! It’s all new experience for growth. However, the realization soon sets in that you’re quite on your own. And there are times when you must choose between working on the newest novel or spending a great deal of time and energy describing your published work to a nebulous audience which in all likelihood isn’t even aware of your presence.

The main pitfall of such marketing efforts is to lose energy and get disheartened. But there can’t be any desperation about this process. You’re just putting out some seeds here and there; some may indeed grow down the line. Keep returning to your own work and the real reasons you write.

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Jim Commer from The Martian Marauders

Posted on January 4, 2014 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

Typhoon I Navigation Officer and the third of four Commer brothers. From The Martian Marauders:

Jack and Joe swiveled to him. “C’mon in. Shut the door behind you and take a seat,” Jack said, indicating the third seat at the rear of the Control Room.

Jim did so. “What’s up?”

“Well, we’ve got three hours before we hit Mercury, not much to do … and … well, I’m sorry, Jim, but this is really the only time we can talk. I know it’s awkward …”

Jim looked back and forth between his two older brothers. Like him, they were wearing their clean red, white, and blue ship uniforms. But they looked embarrassed. Jim tried to think what he could possibly have done to get dressed down by his brothers.

“Well … well … what’s going on?” he managed.

“Well … it’s John,” Jack said. “We have to do something about him.”

“Oh …” Jim said.

“I mean, I don’t want to be ganging up on him, but really, this just can’t go on.”

“Are … you sure we should be discussing it … now? I mean … on this mission? I mean, with everything at stake?”

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Laurie Lachrer, an Excerpt from The Wounded Frontier

Posted on December 12, 2013 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

The Wounded Frontier has been accepted for publication by Double Dragon Publishing. In Book Five of the Jack Commer science fiction series, Supreme Commander Jack Commer pushes for exploration far beyond Sol in the untested Typhoon V when a star thirty-four light years away abruptly vanishes, leaving the infrared signature of a Dyson sphere apparently built within one week.

Laurie Lachrer, last seen in a walk-on part as a teenaged spaceport technician in Book One, The Martian Marauders, has by 2075 gone through the specialized USSF Medical and Engineering School with an eye to becoming one of the elite physician/engineers to fly on the Typhoon–class spaceships. To Jack’s astonishment the shy, petite redhead of 2034 has graduated number one in her med school class and in the top three percent of Engineering.

From The Wounded Frontier:

“The big question is,” Jack continued, looking back and forth between Laurie and Will, “can you two work on the same ship?”

Laurie sat back, avoiding Lee Borman’s eyes, which wasn’t too difficult as they seemed locked on her chest. Why was this damn little senator/turret gunner leering at her? Why was Jack haranguing Will like this?

“Well, we–we never planned to be on the same ship anyway–uh, sir … I mean, you know Will’s resigning, after all–”

Jack calmly scrutinized her. She felt Lee’s ongoing leer travelling up to her cheeks, then falling dreamily back to her breasts. She fought the urge to close her dress with her fingers. It wasn’t possible, there was so much skin and so little fabric–

Why am I in this goddamn dress? Why didn’t I insist on staying in uniform?

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The Irregular Origin of The Martian Marauders

Posted on October 19, 2013 by Michael D. SmithDecember 25, 2024

My science fiction novel The Martian Marauders was published in 2012 by Double Dragon Publishing. I really didn’t write it in the eighth grade!

Well, okay, it’s true that the somewhat dysfunctional Commer family and the history of the evacuation of Earth in 2033 have been with me since the 1960’s. I was in the eighth grade in the fall of 1965. That fall and the following spring I got through 110 handwritten pages of a novel called The Martian Marauders, basically a Hardy Boys adventure set in space. But halfway through I got bored, and though I still have some rudimentary 1966 notes about completing it, I abandoned the novel, leaving Captain Jack Commer and his brother Joe hanging in the ventilation shaft of a Venusian prison for the next twenty years.

The Commers had been around long before they blundered into this predicament. In September 1962 I wrote a story, “Voyage to Venus,” for a fifth grade assignment, introducing my hero Jack Commer, who appeared in several other stories that year. As outlined in a previous blog post, I recall reading these science fiction stories in class to the wide-eyed attention of my classmates.

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