Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

Harri McNarri from The Martian Marauders

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

Brilliant, argumentative Typhoon I Physician/Engineer who set the standard for all subsequent United System Space Force engineers. From The Martian Marauders:

Harri was aware of the other Typhoon crewmen coming up to view the body. A hundred yards past them, at the edge of the parking lot, a bright blue police force field had been set up. Dozens of Marsport citizens behind it strained to see what was going on. Harri turned back to the body of General John J. Douglas with professional interest. The blood had dried to a crimson crust in the virtually nonexistent Martian atmosphere, but Harri could tell that a lot of it had come out of the general before decompression had blasted his features into spoiled meat. Further down, on the naked torso, were numerous stab wounds.

“Under this second sheet,” Yao went on, “is the body of one of the things the general killed.” He whipped back the sheet.

The men gaped. Before them lay a small pinkish creature, its head curved back into a long fin running down its translucent white back. The entire body was no more than four feet in length. Not that the resemblance was exact, but Harri was reminded of human fetuses in the early stages of development. He mutely pointed to what appeared to be a missing eyeball in one of the two eye sockets.

Yao nodded. “Douglas apparently gouged one of the eyes out. We haven’t found it yet.”

“Sheesh,” Ken Garrison put in for all of them from behind Harri.

There was no apparent sign of clothing on the alien. The body was humanoid, but Harri had a hard time deciding if there were genitalia between the legs, and if so, whether it was male or female.

“What–is this thing?” Joe said, staring.

Yao shrugged. “Some of the civilians over there who first saw it in the parking lot have been calling it a Martian.”

Harri scanned the growing crowd behind the force field. “So they’ve seen it …” he said, letting the implications sink in for all the men. The noises in the night, the unease throughout the city …

The Martian Marauders is available as eBook and paperback from Double Dragon Publishing, amazon.com, and barnesandnoble.com.

Samuel Jay Hergs, an Excerpt from The Martian Marauders

Posted on September 17, 2013 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

“Well, all this brings us back to Hergs,” Jack said, “which was the main reason I called this meeting. We received the CogniSort summary on him and I’ve printed it out.” Jack held up what looked like fifty pages of paper. “Thought I’d familiarize you all with some of it before we get to Mercury.”

“Fantastic!” Jim laughed. “This is just like story time around the campfire!”

“A full dose of SynMorph might … not’ve been necessary,” Harri observed.

“Okay …” Jack said, scanning the first page of the document. “Full name, Samuel Jay Hergs. Born April 19, 1999, in Maine–specific town not known. Had a police record from fourteen: drug use, drug dealing, gang activity. Never made it through high school, and nothing more in the database on him after 2017 until 2024, when he was arrested for helping turn an anti-space protest in New York into a riot.”

“Oh, so he was one of those,” Joe observed. Jim remembered the massive protests when the United States Space Force was organized in 2024, with over half the federal budget being pumped into the agency. In the wake of the Neptune explosion and the Uranus flyby there was no way the USSF was going to be stopped. Nevertheless, there were significant numbers of people who thought that exploring space was foolish and that the money should go to repairing the gravitational disasters caused by the Uranus flyby.

“In 2032 Hergs published Towards a Socialist Solar System, which advocated the violent overthrow of the United Nations, the deaths of everyone currently in power, and the rise of a ‘solar proletariat’ to govern the system,” Jack went on. “He wanted any existing spacecraft to be used, and I’m quoting, ‘for the people, not for the exploitation of space and whatever indigenous peoples we may find there.’”

“I somehow missed that book,” Harri said.

“Cripes, what a loser,” Joe said.

“But the records show he did evacuate Earth on November 14, 2033. But then he disappears once he gets to Mars. He never registered a Mars address. His cohort Al Carson did the same thing.”

“So what’s he been doing all this time–recruiting disaffected Martians for the Cause?” Mickey Michaels put in. “And disaffected humans, too, I guess–but how did he find Martians when nobody else has since 2021?”

“If … if he, or anyone who was even slightly … psychic, I guess, just–tuned in to whatever thoughts were coming out of Martian minds …” Ken Garrison mused.

“Yeah! Maybe they could track the Martians down!” Joe said.

“That’s it! That’s it!” Garrison said. “He’s messed on something like AlphaFlare, lying around, totally screwed up, but open to the alien minds, and then–”

Is that why I felt I bonded with M’rrpla? Jim wondered. Because I’m higher than the Andromeda galaxy on Alpha SynMorph? But what burst out of him was: “Wow, this really is just like a ghost story! We’re all around the campfire, telling stories about scary things! That we know nothing about!”

More Jack Commer series images | The Martian Marauders

A Trailer for Nonprofit Chronowar

Posted on August 25, 2013 by Michael D. SmithJune 27, 2019

When I got a starter camcorder last year I found myself inexplicably unwilling to use it much, despite a long standing desire to make videos and some previous tentative experiments with the video function of my digital camera. I think this was due to being so used to framing and capturing still images that it was disconcerting to watch the world in my viewfinder moving and being recorded. Then the concept of merging numerous rough cuts into one video was new, as was getting used to the Windows movie making software, with all its foreign video concepts, that came with my computer. About all I could think to do was handheld pans which are unstable even with the image stabilization feature. Or walking around the garden or making movies of cats yawning.

Making the Nonprofit Chronowar video sparked a minor epiphany which I realized must also have occurred to the most dense of filmmakers a century ago. One of my outtakes was a close-up on the wind-up watch, and I found this a satisfying image except that, handheld, the object of course was shaking. When I used a tripod, the image with its moving second hand was remarkable. This odd little discovery, self-evident upon reflection, pushes me towards some further experimentation now.

The First Childhood Appearance of Jack Commer, September 19, 1962

Posted on June 30, 2013 by Michael D. SmithJanuary 9, 2026

Although I began writing at age seven in July 1960, I stopped after the demise of The Gore Book in the spring or summer of 1961. (More musing is forthcoming on the unholy Götterdämmerung of The Gore Book collaboration with my friend Sabin.) But in Fall 1962, in the fifth grade, my class was assigned to write stories into which students were to work the week’s new spelling words. My first spelling story was a dull Hardy Boys rip-off which I threw away in disgust soon after. I do recall hating the thing even as I wrote it.

But the second assignment was a breakthrough and it sparked a writing renaissance. I can still recall my elation at creating Jack Commer and realizing I was somehow home, that I’d found my path. Other science fiction stories followed both for class (like this story, many of these were originally titled “Spelling”), and on my own. The resulting thirty-four stories, arranged in a blue notebook in order of their chronology from 1860 to 6000, were my own “future history” long before I knew Robert Heinlein had beaten me to that concept.

Even though I was well-bullied in that fifth-grade era in Maryland, during the moments I read my stories from the front of the classroom, I had everyone in thrall, bullies included. In a way that answered everything.

Weirdly, as my teacher Mrs. Grammer must have intuited, stretching to include ten new words each week helped fuel my imagination. I can almost know which of the words in the following story were on that week’s spelling assignment.

Of course at the time I had no idea that decades later I’d write five novels about Jack Commer. In any case here’s how he first leapt from the forehead of Zeus, or Athena, or whoever he leapt from, on September 19, 1962:

“Voyage to Venus” (2033)

Nine astronauts were walking to a USSF meeting. I, Jack Commer, was one of them. When we got in the building, we heard a man talking. He said the next space flight would be to Venus. Then he said that four brave men would go. After electing I found myself one of those four.

Among me were Jim Coner, Pat Walker, and Henry James.

It was Oct 19, 2033 and flight day. Inside an X-45 mounted on top of a Titan V booster, was my follow astronauts and me.

Then…. 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-l-….. “Lift off!” We were on our way.

It took us 3 days to get to Venus. When we got there, we cracked up the rocket. We knew that we would not get back to Earth but still we could report our finds. So we got to work. Suddenly there was a rubbling sound. We turned, saw smoke, and there before us, stood a huge Tyrannosaurus Rex! Jim, Pat and I ran. But James stood there paralyzed. I rushed to his aid, but failed. With a cry of horror, James was lifted in the air by the sharp teeth of the monster. After he went away, I noticed that he came from a large cave. We decided to have breakfast and then explore the cave. For breakfast we had toast. Afterwards I noticed that the heat from our stove was low. Later we decided to report our finds to central control. They said they would send another rocket to get us.

Three days later the rocket came, and we boarded for home.

The End

The closest contemporary Jack Commer illustration I can find is from 1964’s Trip to Mars, at a point where a stowaway has foolishly leapt outside the Typhoon I without properly securing his helmet. Ship’s engineer Harri McNarri has “rushed to his aid, but failed,” one of my favorite lines from the above story.

Hopefully Fun Draft Book Covers

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Michael D. SmithJuly 22, 2023

I’ve been making my own EPUB versions of various working novels (using the Calibre program, which has gotten good reviews and which I recommend highly) to see how a novel comes across in that format, and to do yet another proofing for typos and errors. It’s amazing what errors jump out at you once your published book comes out in e-format, and to minimize this trauma you can make an experimental EPUB and catch a lot of errors on smartphone or tablet that you missed in a hundred rereadings of your Word document. Reading the EPUB takes you away from the computer and puts you in the reader’s frame of reference.

These EPUB versions cried out for covers, which I’m only too happy to supply. However, as the first case demonstrates, I’d never allow these draft covers to become a final published version. They’re more or less off the cuff, fun placeholders.

Nonprofit Chronowar and its Real Cover

The first image above shows my cover for a late stage Nonprofit Chronowar EPUB I made to proof for errors. Although this crude image describes Joe Commer’s Chapter One confusion upon time traveling from 2036 to confront the nonprofit ladies of the 2020 Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth, there’s no way it gets the feel of the novel as does the published cover by Double Dragon publisher Deron Douglas (right).

Nonprofit Ladies Draft 1

I made an EPUB of the first (2002) draft of Nonprofit Ladies, the original version of the final May 2013 Nonprofit Chronowar, just to reread it and celebrate the long history of this book following its publication.

The first and last chapters of the rough draft share similarities with the final version, but the middle meanders into unholy, confusing, and unpublishable directions. In fact I was struck by huge sections that I barely recall writing, passages that seem written by someone else.

It was an interesting exercise to create Nonprofit Ladies Draft 1 as one Word file; this involved pulling together its nine separate chapter files (I kept using separate chapter files until I finally realized in 2009 that a single file manuscript is the norm) and reformatting the entire thing as a newly-defined Normal style, which caused some loss of bold, italics, and centering. But since this project was only for my own rereading, I didn’t correct these problems or the numerous typos I encountered. A rough rendering of a rough draft.

I then cropped a March 2003 watercolor to make this cover. It conjures up a zany mood I’d like to remember the book’s first vision by.

Collapse and Delusion

Another image created for an error-catching EPUB reading file. It has little to do with the overall thrust of the novel. I made this picture of Martian Star General Greeney Gooney (real name G’rea’nyaigu’nye, which humans have naturally come to mispronounce) as the fourth novel of the Jack Commer series, Collapse and Delusion, was gestating. Greeney was cleverly mentioned in passing in the third novel, Nonprofit Chronowar, as running for mayor of Marsport, setting the stage for him to become a major figure in this fourth book, due to be published by Double Dragon Publishing.

I would definitely wince to see this cartoon become any sort of basis for the published cover!

The Wounded Frontier

This image was thrown together from one of my Trip to Mars images for the fifth Jack Commer novel I’m currently writing. I don’t have a real visual conception for this novel yet, so this image is again just a placeholder. I won’t create an EPUB copy of the ongoing drafts of this novel until I get to the manuscript stage and have something to proof. I don’t even have a handy little web page for it yet. This black and white image is bare bones and somehow reminds me of a textbook cover.

The First Twenty Steps

As an example of a cover I did produce for a finished publication (on Smashwords, Barnes and Nobles’ Nook Press, and amazon.com’s Kindle Direct Publishing), here is The First Twenty Steps cover. I put a lot of work into this one, though I know it’s not perfect. My main issue with covers seems to be finding a good lettering for title and author, distinctive letters that set themselves apart from the background. So far I’m dissatisfied with what I find in Word, Publisher, PowerPoint, Paint, etc. Another factor is making sure your image still conveys something (probably “Buy me!”) when shrunk to thumbnail size.

In any case, all these images are better than the generic “No image available” book covers you occasionally run across.

Jack Commer Series Images

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Michael D. SmithJune 27, 2019

I finally pulled together various Jack Commer images I’ve done over the past couple decades onto one web page. The impetus came from finding what I’d remembered as a mediocre, crudely done black and white sketch for the original Nonprofit Ladies manuscript of 2003. But it turns out that this March 2003 drawing was really ink and watercolor and (okay, so it IS a bit crude) and has a certain zing to it. It struck me as what a movie poster for the original version of Nonprofit Chronowar might have been. The main characters are all there, even the Martian Dar who had no direct role in Draft 1.

I seem to be developing a new style working on the various Trip to Mars, the Picture Book illustrations (blog post on THAT someday), so I’m looking forward to doing some new ones of the main characters of all the Jack Commer novels. As I add more, I’ll probably switch out some of the ones on the images page, some of which are as rough draft as the original Nonprofit Ladies. For example, we don’t really need three different copies of the various Tarot cards (from a separate project of seventy-eight absurd Tarot cards I made from 2001-2004), although I had fun editing these, sometimes pixel by pixel, and colorizing them in Paint, of all things. But, as a starting point, I wanted to see all the existing Jack Commer images in one place.

Nonprofit Chronowar, Book Three of the Jack Commer Series

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

The third book of the Jack Commer series, Nonprofit Chronowar, is now available from Double Dragon Publishing in numerous eBook formats including EPUB, MOBI (Kindle format), PDF, and HTML, as well as in a paperback edition.

The Overview

Ranna Kikken creates The Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth, but its first conference in 2020 is ruined when ex-astronaut Joe Commer time travels from 2036 to lecture Ranna’s nonprofit ladies on the coming breakdown of the solar system. Tormented by his role in dropping the superbomb that ended the Final War but rendered Earth uninhabitable, Joe has quit the Space Force, much to the disgust of his older brother Jack, Supreme Commander of the United System Space Force. In the audience, feckless young Urside Charmouth is horrified by the revelations from the future, fearing that he’s harmed the timeline with his own drug-like time travel experiments. He drags his unsuspecting girlfriend, Mandy, on an irresponsible time travel romp to 2033, where he finds proof of the coming destruction of Earth. Mandy then pulls herself and Urside to humanity’s new life on 2036 Mars, where she not only realizes that Mars is her true home, but also that she’s a reincarnation of an ancient Martian empress.

The Astonishing Cover

A few months ago, when publisher Deron Douglas asked me for any input I might have on a cover, I sent him some character descriptions of Ranna Kikken and the Russian Blue cat Churchill, another major character in the novel. I was assuming the cover would unfold more or less along the lines of the excellent Jack Commer, Supreme Commander cover. But Deron told me he started thinking about the Evacuation and then the concept came to him of the spaceships lined up ready to depart this planet forever. I was floored, not only by the 1950’s spaceship motif that also found its way to the Jack Commer cover, but by the fact that this cover fully evokes my own vision of the opening scene for a hypothetical Nonprofit Chronowar movie, a scene hammering in the guilt Joe Commer keeps returning to in the third novel.

As semi-proof of this outrageous claim, consider this panel from my ongoing illustration of my sixth grade “novel,” all of twenty pages, Trip to Mars–yes, the Jack Commer universe extends back that far! A vision of the spaceships lined up to flee the end of the world–which I’ve never communicated to anyone. I’ve envisioned this opening scene accompanied by Five Variants of “Dives and Lazarus” by Ralph Vaughan Williams. I’m not a classical music snob, and most references to classical music go over my head, but the first time I heard this piece I knew it was the music for my movie. However, at thirteen minutes it’s way too long for an opening soundtrack, and I’m already envisioning heated arguments with producer, cast, and crew on the set of Nonprofit Chronowar about this impossible opening scene, which begins with blue-helmeted UN soldiers forcibly removing Stayers–those who want to die on the wrecked Earth–from their ruined homes and driving them on dilapidated buses to what we finally realize is a spaceport, where we gradually see looming in front of us … thousands of spaceships spewing liquid oxygen under the ugly charcoal sky as they prepare to launch, dozens at a time … only Five Variants of “Dives and Lazarus” keeping our eardrums from being shattered by the roars of these desperate monsters revving for takeoff.

Look for Nonprofit Chronowar: the Movie when I force my way into Hollywood and learn how to direct films.

Back to the cover again after this fantasy: what’s additionally appealing is that the silver-gray spaceships look almost transparent, evoking time travel, fading in and out between dimensions …

Origin / The Long Revision / The Title Change

The novel was painfully pulled out of the Big Whatever over a period of thirteen years. Nonprofit Ladies, as the original title went, was originally intended as a purely literary novel. I also wanted it to be a short six-month project which would pull together recent life themes, and I began sifting ideas with a method which sometimes produces stunning results and which sometimes just wastes energy on bland organizing: collecting disparate ideas written on slips of paper over the past few years, adding new ones, then sorting them across a table until something jells. I included not only the saved notes, but folders of photos, clippings, newspaper and magazine articles stretching back many years, along with idea files, recent dreams, and any older writing that attracted my attention. Before long I had seventeen stacks of notes in these categories:

Animals–Wild / Nature / “Physics”
Raw Tao
Zany / Future / Sci-Fi
Nonprofit Ladies
Big Shared Nightmare
Children / Beauty
Libraries / Preservation
Sorrow / Passion
Art / Raw Energy / Sex
Zen / Taoists / Science!
Old Things–People–Society–Methods / History
Absurd / Humor
The Aristocracy
Animals Interacting With Society
Kids in Trouble
Politics / Civilization
Overviews

A dream coalesced the notes into a science fiction story. In the dream, I open a dull brochure and let my “cursor of attention” rest on a picture of a Houston school bus. The cursor shows the picture to be a hyperlink, and it warps me and a coworker straight there from Dallas, to that bus on a deserted Houston street. Now here’s a business opportunity, I think–to create human transport hyperlinks … we then link to Austin, where my coworker steals my car and drives north, abandoning me to a mysterious double life I’ve apparently led in Austin for some time …

So time travel became central to the novel. And somewhere during the sorting the Jack Commer science fiction series intruded, and I found that I wanted to explore some of the traumas the main characters endured in the earlier novels, especially Joe, with his guilt about having pressed the button that destroyed the Earth in 2033.

By 2003 I had a finished novel, which I thought was my best effort yet. In fact, Nonprofit Ladies became the most important novel in the series and I revised The Martian Marauders and Jack Commer, Supreme Commander to conform to the Nonprofit Ladies universe. I sent Nonprofit Ladies to a couple publishers, got a couple rejections, then inexplicably shelved it. And a couple years later I realized why.

After finishing fun revisions of the first two novels, I finally reread Nonprofit Ladies in November 2006. I had been so sure that it was the perfect book … and yet … as I moved through Chapter One, something seemed terribly … off about it. To my horror, I found I was reading something meandering, half-cooked, and even vulgar. This was a major turning point in my writing, and led me to the concept of how leaking libido can mar one’s art. While I saw that The Martian Marauders and Jack Commer were good novels because I was in heartfelt control of those books’ structures and themes, to my dismay I was finding something icky in Nonprofit Ladies, something sadly out of touch. As one small example, Ranna’s nonprofit was originally The Committee to End Bullshit on Planet Earth. Maybe good for a cheap laugh, but really, which is the better satirical name? What would a nonprofit lady really call her committee?

I don’t mean to run down my own book in a blog post. (Is that really the done thing, I wonder?) Therefore I won’t bother to catalog all the wrong aspects of that first version, although for some demented reason I’m looking forward to rereading the very first Ur-draft of the novel, 2000-2002. Suffice to say I really would have been ashamed if the original Nonprofit Ladies I’d sent queries on had somehow gotten published. I would be disowning it now.

Some of the original book’s lack of focus was undoubtedly due to starting with a literary novel and then finding that it ought to be a third Jack Commer novel. It also took me a long time to figure out that inserting characters from some of my older novels, as well as trying to cram in an ancient 1980’s short story, “Zorexians,” were just clogging up the book. Coming to grips with the structural faults of the original Nonprofit Ladies was a revelation, and after deciding that there was nevertheless a solid core to the novel, I thoroughly rewrote it, deleting huge chunks and adding huge chunks, weeding out the leaking libido, and finding the original vision I’d wanted all along, the vision I’d never been focused enough to attain until this extremely educational rewrite.

Then, in 2012, seeing The Martian Marauders published got me thinking, a lot more seriously that I had previously, about how titles are perceived by the buying public, and I realized that “Nonprofit Ladies” doesn’t really sound like a science fiction title. The women running the nonprofit organizations and their ineffectual attempts to come to terms with inexplicable solar system disasters are just a subtheme–and there are really just two nonprofit ladies I focus on anyway, Ranna Kikken and Hedrona Bhlon, the latter also having a major role in the fourth book, Collapse and Delusion. The main energy of Nonprofit Chronowar is space pilot Joe Commer’s war guilt and the United System Space Force finally realizing that it’s been fighting a war based on time travel.

So Nonprofit Chronowar gives a nod to the first chapters where Joe scolds the naïve ladies and their Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth, but offers up the main theme of the book as well, indicating the futility of the war, which both sides know the Alpha Centaurians will lose seventeen years in the future, but which both have no choice but to fight anyway.

The fourth book, Collapse and Delusion, is also scheduled to be published by Double Dragon Publishing, and, as anyone addicted to this blog knows, I’m now working on a fifth volume, The Wounded Frontier.

The eBook of Nonprofit Chronowar is also available in Kindle format from amazon.com, and in EPUB format from Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and Apple iTunes Store. A paperback edition is available from amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.

eBook length: 224 pages
paperback length: 218 pages
Published: May 23, 2013

Introduction to The Wounded Frontier

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

Who would ever have thought that the fascist Alpha Centaurian Grid, linking twenty trillion citizens of the seventeen suns of the Alpha Centaurian Empire to their psychopathic Emperor, would turn out to have an important benefit to humanity? I’m working on a fifth Jack Commer novel, which chronicles humanity’s somewhat reluctant 2075 decision to begin exploring beyond Alpha Centauri, only to encounter a far worse predator that, unknown to anyone, has been kept at bay for thousands of years by the Centaurian Grid. What exactly does lie outside our comfortable circle of firelight?

That’s all the detail to be revealed at this point. I finished the first draft of The Wounded Frontier a couple months ago and you just don’t discuss the plot until you’re finally done with the novel. I’m only now gearing up for a thorough revision.

A few weeks after finishing the rough draft, this painting came out, and I realized it was also to be called The Wounded Frontier, a sort of rough draft cover for a rough draft novel. My original plan was to have the pyramids firmly mounted on the ground by correct perspective shadows (which is left-brain fun but right-brain painstaking), but when I finished the colors and saw that the pyramids appeared to be floating like cold sentinels above a planet, I decided to leave them float and knew the painting was about the novel.

I was initially hesitant to reread Jack Commer 5, especially after reviewing the final sixty pages and finding myself mortified to see how conceptual that last section really was, and almost certainly confusing (and thus boring) to a reader. Then I read the first sixty pages and was mortified by how conceptual …

I even cringed at the original title, OutCurve: Legends of the Stellar Trolls, which I began hating halfway through the novel, and discarded upon completion of Draft 1.

At this point I’m not sure whether the uneven results of Draft 1 were due to exhaustion and lack of imagination, that I really pushed this thing at times when I shouldn’t have, like late night rough draft, writing when I had such a bad headache I could hardly think, or working on it every day instead of my old sane method of recognizing I’m best with two rough draft sessions a week.

But in further rereading I saw I’d hit a certain good stride in the middle parts of the novel, and I began seeing a revision based on the amount of energy and enthusiasm engendered by certain characters and situations; the ones with the highest energy obviously must come to the fore in Draft 2. I got excited about revision. The new title The Wounded Frontier itself makes me want to seize this novel and make it my best. A new structure is beginning to take shape; there is some good stuff in the novel and much of what failed is also a seed of what I still want to say–and of course there are many botched experiments that can simply be discarded.

The challenge is to be open to anything that improves the novel. But “improve” not just in terms of craftsmanship and “interesting stuff,” but to make a high-quality investigation. The fourth novel in the Jack Commer series, Collapse and Delusion, arrived “almost fully formed,” as sometimes happens to an author’s delight, but this fifth novel is a different matter–maybe in the same way that Nonprofit Chronowar (Jack Commer 3) was a difficult case and needed over a decade to come into focus.

I’m beginning to think that the novel did need to come out the way it did–hurried, with high points and low points, and needing a completely new approach for Draft 2. There is something I wanted to say at the heart of The Wounded Frontier, something about being seduced by power, of realizing you’d ceased to explore, of holding back. There is a kernel in this novel, a reason I bothered to write it, that must come out.

I want to keep evolving with each novel. I’m also learning about writing a series as I go along, and I see why we speak of the need to “reboot” a series. In other words, you’ve gotten too comfortable with your existing world and characters and are no longer stretching. You may also be making assumptions about what readers might expect in the characters and plot. After all, both you and the reader are going into the next novel with baggage from previous ones.

In my first conceptual ending, I found myself with fifteen or twenty characters standing around on an infinite plain talking about what just happened (yawn), and if they were lucky I tossed them a couple informational lines, like Tully in The Rat Patrol. Ranna, the heroine of Nonprofit Chronowar, was just along for the ride and since I felt sorry that she didn’t have any lines, I’d slip her one now and then. But its idiocy to assume you have dear readers slavering for such info.

And weirdly, even during the exhaustion phases of the rough draft I got a great idea for a sixth Jack Commer novel. No use cramming it into Number Five. Even as vaporware it seems interesting and quite writable. I have no idea how many Jack Commer novels I may write; I’ll definitely stop when it doesn’t seem like fun anymore.

In any case, the third novel in the series, Nonprofit Chronowar, should be coming out from Double Dragon Publishing sometime fairly soon, and the fourth, Collapse and Delusion, after that. By then I’ll have The Wounded Frontier fully revised and polished.

The First Twenty Steps on Smashwords

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Michael D. SmithJune 27, 2019

Now available on Smashwords in numerous e-formats

Just released from six years in prison, unsure how to meet basic needs, biker Harry finds a kindred spirit in Roberta, in thrall to a depraved motorcycle gang. But the passive-aggressive leader of the Cerberean Knights leads them into a major crime this evening as he seeks to pay back favors from the corrupt city council of One-West. As the motorcycle attack on the Dataflux computer building turns terrifying and surreal, Harry and Roberta find themselves outgunned by another biker gang belonging to a mysterious billionaire who intervenes to protect his secret hyperspatial supercomputer.

I recently discovered the eBook self-publishing/distribution site Smashwords and decided to continue the self-publishing experiments I began with my novella The First Twenty Steps, which I first self-published January 2011 on Barnes and Noble’s PubIt site (recently restyled Nook Press) and then June 2011 on amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. My original goal was to offer some sample work and to experiment with different e-publishing processes, and this year I decided that Smashwords’ approach was also worth pursuing. Though Smashwords also distributes to Barnes and Noble and amazon, I decided to opt out of using Smashwords to distribute to those two, and to leave the original PubIt/Nook Press and Kindle Direct Publishing processes in place, so that I can keep up with three different methods.

So The First Twenty Steps is now available at:

Smashwords (and the various sites it distributes to, like iTunes, Kobo, and Sony Reader Store)
Barnes and Noble (Nook Press)
amazon.com (Kindle Direct Publishing)

Continue reading →

Perpetual Starlit Night in Twisted Tails VII

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

My science fiction story, “Perpetual Starlit Night” has been published in the anthology Twisted Tails VII: Irreverence, edited by J. Richard Jacobs and available from Double Dragon Publishing in eBook and paperback formats. The stories in this ongoing anthology all have twist endings, and I’m honored to be included among the writers of sixteen “twisted” stories in this edition. Past themes of Twisted Tails have included Time, Fantasy, Apocalypses, Aliens, and Fear. Volume VII is devoted to “Irreverence.” I think “Perpetual Starlit Night” seems irreverent the way old Twilight Zones were: that is, not exactly respectful of your everyday sanity.

In the story, Archeologist Sairjin ShiriKor arrives on a tiny artificial gravity platform in deep space to give a scholarly lecture. However, the barbarian colonists scoff at her evident delusion that she’s anything but a criminal sent to be incarcerated on the changeless and apparently motionless platform.

Availability

Double Dragon Publishing (variety of eBook formats)
Amazon (Kindle format eBook)
Amazon (paperback)
Barnes and Noble (Nook EPUB format eBook)

Background

“Perpetual Starlit Night” was originally conceived as a novel and I spent hundreds of pages of notes on it until I realized that all I really wanted was the thirty pages which would’ve been the first three chapters of the projected novel.

To my chagrin I’d realized that the original notes for a literary novel more or less repeated what I’d already written in a previous long novel, The Soul Institute, and though I had an exciting opening for the subsequent science fiction version, the notes for the rest of the book seemed vague and boring. So I just kept the opening. I recently ran across the projected contents for the novel dating from August 2006, and can reaffirm that the projected Chapters 4-11 were pretty dismal in concept:

Platform! – Day 1

Interview with the Administratrix – Day 2

The Porn King – Day 2, immediately after interview

To the Warehouse – Day 2, “night” or “lights down.”

The Apartment – Day 2, “night,” right after previous chapter

The Wiess Crack – Day 3 [April 2013: I have no idea what this title is doing here]

The Agreement – Day 10–one week later

The Offices of Bathos and Smirk, Inc. – Day 10, “evening”

The Last Months, or, the Second Meeting with the Administratrix – Day 10, further in the evening

Arkady II – Day 10

Fantastic Dreams – Day 10

Notes for a novel have to be writable. There has to be a concrete situation, there have to be concrete characters and a concrete stage for them to act upon. I often start novels by collecting various notes I’ve accumulated over “the past psychologically meaningful unit of time,” then start sorting them, whacking them down and resorting as further ideas come into play, and I’ll toss in essays, journal entries, and recent dreams. Sometimes this process sparks a lot of imaginative leaps that do produce writable scenarios. But maddeningly, this method seems to fail at least half the time, and frequently leaves me thinking that I now have notes for a new novel, when in reality I just have a bunch of interesting ideas which don’t have novel legs.

“Writable” also implies: high level of desire to get on with the actual composition of the novel. If I don’t feel an immediate urge to jump onto the novel (like, tomorrow), my notes are probably vague obligations about stuff I think I ought to write.

But at least I’ve become more aware of the pitfall of abstract idea notes; even when deep into a novel, I usually distrust the notes for the future chapters and if I’m writing well, I immediately see which notes are writable and which are just “stuff I thought I ought to be attached to.”

There’s also the semi-amusing discovery that my notes for a Part I are often ninety percent writable, ten percent abstract ideas, and notes for the final Part V are ten percent writable and ninety percent abstract. Notes for chapter 1: “Harold rides a nuclear-powered motorcycle across the Mercurian desert, vowing revenge against the aliens who attacked his solar panel farm.” Notes for chapter 40: “Warring factions of all planets come together.”

I’m not alone here. I could cite several recent long science fiction novels I’ve read that began brilliantly and concisely but wound up lost in bloated abstraction, even as the author kept straining to render his or her ideas into “novel plot” and “novel dialog.”

In any case, it was a relief to abandon the notes for a long novel and instead focus on the kernel of “Perpetual Starlit Night,” which I thoroughly enjoyed composing and which seemed to express exactly what I wanted it to.

Excerpt

The sounds of the feast faded in the concrete stairwell. Lieutenant Irkady insisted on holding her elbow as they turned up the stairs, around and around a core of empty space marked by chipped black railing.

After several levels Irkady pressed a button on the wall by a door. “We have a visitor,” he called through the door. Then turning to Sairjin, his eyes lost in her cleavage, he murmured: “If there’s anything you ever need …” Then he tromped all the way down the stairs. Sairjin waited by the red door. She finally heard Irkady open the ground level door below to a swell of guffaws.

“Betcha a week’s Dr’ytgkk! Yeah!”

Then silence. The red door clicked. “Enter,” came a synthesized voice.

The door opened smoothly onto a room ten feet on a side. All four of its walls were black glass. Sairjin could see the twin rows of landing lights outside, but the Platform was otherwise dark. Beyond were a trillion stars, Sairjin knew, but she couldn’t see them for the reflections of the room’s lights. Only the runway lights had any meaning out there. The runway where she’d come, the runway she desperately wished to depart from.

Then she noticed the woman at the desk. An older woman, hair done up high above her head. Wrinkled face, large nose, and the same tight gray-green uniform Lieutenant Irkady wore. She appeared to be in excellent physical condition, with quiet coiled energy. She regarded Sairjin with large brown sympathetic eyes.

“Please sit,” she said, gesturing at an orange chair. “I’m Shi Idnin, the Idninistritrix of this Platform.”

“I–I heard the air only extends a few feet above your head!” Sairjin blurted, disarmed by the Idninistritrix’s high melodious voice.

Shi Idnin nodded. “Yes, a lot of people find that slightly unnerving. It’s the nature of the MacPherson, of course. It generates our gravity and atmosphere, but it can only do so much. We’d gladly keep our 1G and settle for only thirty feet of air.”

Sairjin finally took the chair. “I … I’m Sairjin ShiriKor. Thanks for … for having me. I’m your first speaker for the Conference, but I believe various–delays–will mean I start late–”

The Idninistritrix studied a computer screen. “Yes … I’ve been told about this Conference of yours.”

“Told …?”

Shi Idnin picked up a printout and winced. “I’m really quite … I suppose apprehensive … is the best way to put it. Really quite apprehensive about what this will do to our community.”

“You mean … my lecture?”

The Idninistritrix met Sairjin’s eyes. Deep brown understanding–but also–unease? Rejection? “That’s the first thing you must understand.”

Sairjin shot to her feet. “Excuse me, but I have to confess I’ve had quite enough of this … this rudeness! I came here to give a lecture to the Conference, but everyone is so … so unbelievably rude!”

“Well, it’s my job to break the unfortunate news to you that there is no Conference. There is no lecture.”

“Are you … are you kidding? Why didn’t they just tell me there’d been a change of plans?”

“There was no way to inform you. Sentence has been passed, I’m afraid.” The Idninistritrix looked at her printout in distaste. “But that it’s … this.”

“So it’s true, then! You’re barbarians! I can’t believe this! What are you even talking about? Why would you even advertise an archeological conference if you don’t even have the … have the civilized–the proper–”

“So it was an archeological conference, was it?” Shi Idnin said with a faint smile. She studied her screen again. “Yes, I see, fertility goddesses, and so forth. That would make sense, I suppose.”

“What are you saying? Just get me back to my ship and I’ll be on my way! This is unbelievable! I’ve been traveling for five weeks to get to this stupid conference!”

“I’m afraid … that’s just the Delusion you came with,” the Idninistritrix said slowly. “We all had it when we came. It’ll fade within a few hours. At most a day or two. Then it’ll all come back.”

“What’ll come back? I can’t believe this!”

“It’ll come back that there was never any conference. Never any lecture.”

“Are you crazy? I’m an archeologist! I have my doctorate from … from–” These barbarians have me so confused I can’t even think! “Talk to Knostner! He’ll know!”

“You’re not an archeologist.” Shi Idnin shook her head sadly. “It would certainly be comforting if our delusions were real, but … no.”

Sairjin banged her briefcase onto the Idninistritrix’s desk. Snapped it open. “I have my lecture in there, and the dissertation it’s based on! Knostner told me to take printouts because we weren’t sure what sort of projectors barbarians would have!”

But now she stared at a single bright yellow sheet of paper inside the open briefcase. She strained to read the bold letters upside down: I-N-C-A-R-C-E–

“Yes, I’ll need that sheet,” said the Idninistritrix, placing it beside her own printout. She pulled on a pair of glasses and read both documents. “It’s … really too bad. Whatever possessed you to think you could get away with this line of work?”

“With … with … with archeology?” Sairjin squeaked.

“There’s no archeology. Forget that. You might as well allow reality to surface.”

“That’s … that’s insane! You get my ship online and ready to depart this instant!”

“Your ship’s memory has been wiped. The ship itself has been requisitioned for the Platform as mandated by law.”

“Is … is this some kind of joke? Why are you barbarians playing with my head?”

“Sit down, please. You’re giving me a headache.”