Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

Dystopias—And I’ve Written My Share

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Michael D. SmithMarch 24, 2020

Try on the idea that concern about, interest in, or desire for Apocalypse is really an ego trip. That you can’t imagine future generations superseding your mortal, contemporary consciousness. If I die, it all must die with me. Whether you postulate the apocalyptic dystopia coming next week or several hundred years from now, your basic urge is to assert the primacy of your consciousness over that of future generations. Basically, you do not wish future generations well. You refuse to seriously consider a prosperous human society in the year 9782.

Few science fiction dystopias seem to be set much further than a few hundred years ahead, as if that’s as far as we can imagine, or that we need to feel somewhat bodily close to the time period in question. The science fiction novels that do go extremely far into the future, thousands of years distant, generally have a more relaxed view of vast cycles of empires rising and falling, with human nature more or less staying stable. Many of these even postulate a complete forgetting of “Old Earth,” which becomes a sort of myth, and they make the reader feel comfortable with that concept. It’s never really a tragedy that Old Earth is forgotten; in a way it’s a relief.

Continue reading →

Activity | Cleanup | Foundations | New Work

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Michael D. SmithFebruary 23, 2023

Where I’ve been the last two and a half months–not really offering excuses for so few blog posts, but that was one of the outcomes.

The Sculptures Exhibit

In January I set up my exhibit of twelve sculptures at Park Forest Library. I’d already finished a certain dance with sculptures in December, and my 3-D energy seems to be on hold for now, so in a way this exhibit was a bit anti-climatic. But it was satisfying, looked good, and, as with any art exhibit, took a lot of planning time and psychic energy.

The First Twenty Steps Revision and PubIt

On January 28th I finally pushed the button on barnesandnoble.com’s PubIt site that published The First Twenty Steps. It was a good sense of accomplishment, an end to the whole Phase I of getting 20 Steps rewritten, primed for publishing, and put on the site. Organizing my thoughts about the novella and learning the PubIt process has been very good. I’ve been submitting novels to print and e-publishers for a few years now, and though the inevitable series of rejections doesn’t daunt me, this is all an extremely slow process, and I was impatient to put something out there and see what happens. As for Phase 2, I’ve done some initial marketing and will keep experimenting with that effort over time.

The Older Stories Project

I’ve ridden my writer self hard over the past five years, especially accelerating this past year so that most of my novels and novellas have a 2010 or 2011 completion date. I know the positive reason for this: the shocking awareness of how off much of my past writing had been, and the urge to quickly bring it psychically up to date so that I can finally move forward again with an accomplished body of work as a foundation.

In January and February I scanned in the last eight of my older stories and painstakingly proofed them against their original typewritten copies, completing a years-long project of putting all my fiction into digital format. I undertook all these scanning projects both as practical backup and as a hunt for past energies. I think I’ve kept perspective in knowing that the past energies by themselves aren’t really fuel for new creation, but a sort of strengthening of foundations for new exploration.

Here are the story energies:

	Words	Pages
33	11,800	44
Alan Ice on Morningcide Drive	10,301	35
Chapter 32	14,018	50
Damage Patrol	15,882	59
January 1st	5,301	20
Man Against the Horses!	12,640	45
Oliver	21,689	76
Perpetual Starlit Night	7,962	33
Randy and Laura	14,712	58
Roadblock Zarreich	4,880	19
Space, Time, and Tania	14,320	49
Starvation Levels of the Infinite	9,292	37
Summer Burning City	1,475	6
The 66,000 M.P.H. Bicycle	9,340	24
The Highland Park Cadillac Races	18,447	64
The Selector	1,551	6
Tollhouse	19,099	75
Twenty Years Ago at Darkforce	9,585	43
Where Eagles Have Unfortunately Landed	12,631	46
Zorexians	23,317	78
	238,242	867

I was surprised to realize that, despite my turning away from the short story form decades ago, I do have 867 pages of (mostly long) stories and that is no small accomplishment. Playing with my spreadsheet, I find that I’ve submitted 357 pages of these as stories to publishers (including the published “Space, Time, and Tania,”) and another 293 have been offered as parts of novels or stories I’ve queried about.

What most of these stories have in common, aside from being too long to be published as stories and too short as novellas, is an urge toward the novel. Many of them are divided into chapters and seek to play out their action on a novel-like stage. They’re not just padded and word wasting. So I think my realization was accurate, during the writing of my first real novel, Akard Drearstone, that I was intended to be a novelist and not a short story writer. The forces behind these stories were longing for novelistic expression all along.

Would I rewrite any of the above stories? I’m doubting that for almost all of them. “Perpetual Starlit Night,” “Starvation Levels of the Infinite,” and “Roadblock Zarreich” are current anyway. “Twenty Years Ago at Darkforce” and “Randy and Laura” might someday fly, an updated “Damage Patrol” as well. But basically I’m looking at these 867 pages as archives. A record of where I’ve been. While I’m committed to taking care of my “writing career” and seeking sane publication where possible, I’m not going to scrape up old stuff hoping to find something to throw out into the publication maelstrom. I have lots of new energies opening up. The spreadsheet above is just an example of some of the foundation work going on.

The Big Paintings Project

In February I did the first of three big paintings, Improvisation Gesture, an experiment in doing a large format, seven feet by eleven feet, on unstretched canvas on the floor. To keep the canvas lightweight and amenable to being rolled, I made the paint layers fairly thin, with none of my usual sand, ceramic stucco, or other texture mediums. The result is more like a tapestry than a typical painting.

Full improvisation was the plan for the first of the three. As I’ve long suspected, the large mural-like size allowed me to spread my restless painting energy over a wide space, avoiding the constant reworking on a smaller canvas into a complicated mess that must eventually be saved from itself. Working on the floor was like sending some urban kid out to a farm to play. There was also a surreal feel of not doing a “real” painting but a theater set “depiction” of a 1950’s action painting.

When I first starting using acrylic paint, my brushstrokes were arbitrary and amateurish. I didn’t even realize this until the mid 90’s, when I saw that paint was really—paint! A physical medium, not just “filling in color blocks.” I then sought texture buildup because I could eliminate the use of brushes, or make their strokes nonapparent in the volcanic buildup of texture. But for the thin paint on the large unstretched canvas I just used paper towels to eliminate all strokes. The final result is “itself.” I can’t say now whether this is an excellent painting or just good practice.

At 77 square feet this is the largest continuous surface I’ve ever done. The 2004 triptych was 75 square feet but in three 25 square-foot paintings. All this isn’t important in terms of impressing myself or others with big numbers, but does highlight the physical challenge of learning how to control such a large space.

I have a couple more paintings planned in this large unstretched format. In the future, I can always stretch these over (big!) frames and even add more texture if I feel like it. Initial showings can be stapled to a wall or affixed with other creative means. The final stretching would lop 5” off all sides and result in an image that looks more or less like the initial one on sortmind.com.

Seven of Cups/Beyond DamnStar

One of the main reasons I wanted to push 20 Steps out and finish the stories, as well as make a solid start on the big paintings project, was so that I could clear some timespace for Seven of Cups/Beyond DamnStar, a new novel I began on January 18th. It’s not autobiographical at all–this is the Jack Commer universe, after all–but pertinent to current concerns, and, in contrast to all the psychically necessary archival work described above, refreshingly up to date.

This is my first new fiction since Ocean Singe Horror in 2008. I’ve never lost confidence in my ability to channel the new stuff. I did much of that throughout all my recent novel revisions, but Seven of Cups was the first numinous blank sheet in quite a while. This blank sheet is much different from starting a journal page or composing an essay or a blog post. And while the novel springs from various little blank sheets of assembled and ruminated notes, the novel itself is somehow completely separate from them.

I can feel a lot lining up behind what I’ve already done. I’m allowing it to be whatever “it wants to be,” and it’s a relief to not have to care about being polished, accessible, or publishable. No query letters or synopses to compose. I feel no need to hurry up and get the project done, though I’m impatient to see how it all turns out. But I recognize that it can’t be pushed like a rewriting project or a scanning/copyediting project. Of course I want it to be an excellent work, but—you just have to take it as it comes.

I have a feeling SOC will crowd out other endeavors for a while.

The First Twenty Steps

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJune 28, 2019

The First Twenty Steps
a novella by Michael D. Smith
available as an eBook for $1.00
from barnesandnoble.com

Placing this novella for sale on Barnes and Noble’s PubIt site is an experiment. I want to see how e-publishing works and I regard this short work as one of my best plots. I’m not intending to self-publish all my novels in this manner, but I do want to put this contribution out there and see what happens. I want to experiment with e-publishing formats and processes, and to offer some sample work.

And since the PubIt site asks me to name my “publishing house,” why naturally I settled on Sortmind Publishing.

The First Twenty Steps is 25,730 words, 96 pages in Word, and 60 pages on the Nook or the free “Nook for PC” app. (Nook owners will recognize that there are a lot more than 60 screens of text.) The novella is not available in print (yet!) but that’s the whole point of PubIt, which offers only eBooks.

Harry, the novella’s hero, is an ex-convict, just released from prison in the afternoon, who later that night finds himself mixed up with a motorcycle gang’s plan to steal a supercomputer from the dreaded Dataflux building. He finds a kindred spirit in Roberta, who’s in thrall to the gang’s passive-aggressive tyrant, Alexander. Falling in love, Harry decides he must help her by infiltrating himself into the gang and eventually escaping with her. But when Alexander announces that the gang will commit a major crime this evening to pay back favors from the corrupt city council, Harry realizes that their plan was doomed all along, that he and Roberta have compromised themselves by their contact with Alexander’s evil. And then the motorcycle attack on the Dataflux computer building turns terrifying and surreal … Continue reading →

Sculpture

Posted on January 16, 2011 by Michael D. SmithFebruary 23, 2023

While my visual art has primarily been geared to painting and drawing, I occasionally do some sculpture. Three-dimensional design is high energy and compelling. The factors of gravity and balance are a delightful challenge, and they ground me in what’s real. Instead of a painting exhibit, I offered to do a January 2011 sculpture exhibit at the Park Forest Library in Dallas, primarily because this branch has four glass cases excellent for displaying sculpture, but not so much for paintings, which have to be small and propped up in four 3-D spaces each about 24” x 24” x 48”.

Once I realized that I needed a few more sculptures to round out my first choices for this exhibit, I had a great time this past fall nailing and gluing and painting. The energy is so high that I definitely could turn out a couple of these every week for … how long? I don’t know. Let’s say X, X being equal to whatever amount of timespace and energy is necessary to work out whatever sculptural karma needs working out …

However, not only did I call for a hiatus on sculpture energy for a while as I assess the direction of my visual art, but space limitations alone will hold down the number of sculptures I make. Even the smallish ones I make take up a lot of room. They can’t be stacked like paintings, or hung on the wall. And eight cats pose a direct threat to their continued existence.

The gamma burst of sculptures this fall made me realize how important sculpture is to me, and I was surprised to realize, as I reviewed old photos going back to college days, how many I’ve made. Not a huge amount, maybe seventy to a hundred, but I can see several recurring themes in them.

Sculptures have always been fun and easy to make because I’ve rarely thought of them as “art,” just a sort of glorious 3-D exercise, and my materials are frequently leftover wood from constructing painting stretchers or bookcases, offhand debris that doesn’t seem like expensive art supplies. But they can be glued and nailed and painted. They are balanced slabs and struts, with right angles dominating, like demented architectural models. Their meaning is simply themselves; they’ve never needed to express emotions or philosophies. And when they outlived their usefulness, or collected too much dust or became household clutter, I’ve easily deactivated the things, often using their wood for new sculptures. Most of my sculptures no longer exist.

I find I can gaze into and through them in fascination, discovering new relationships between the parts, new spaces. I can muse on their self-evident forms and postures and gestures. I call them meditation objects for that reason.

The sculptures also lend themselves to investigatory digital close-ups. In fact, these seem to work much better at describing the quality of a given piece that does the traditional full shot with two lights at different distances.

Because I now see the sculptures as important, I gave them their own section on sortmind.com. The sculptures are in no particular order, but the seven beginning on page four of the index are a representation of some of my early work.

Since I didn’t learn elementary techniques of photographing my art until the late 80’s, my photos of these early sculptures are careless to say the least, or else nonexistent. It’s funny that I would snap a shot “for the record” with my flashcube-weaponized Kodak Instamatic, but not bother to make sure I got all of the piece, or in any way seek to avoid recording a toilet in the background, before I dropped the cartridge off at Eckerds drugstore for expert, archival quality processing. As an example see the color-faded photo of The Cotton Sculpture, my most significant one from my Rice days. The Cotton Sculpture is probably the largest one I’ve done at 6’ high; only a handful of my sculptures have been this large.

But I can just imagine the gravity, weight, balance and cost issues inherent in moving to much larger work than that. Factor in X again (plus Y = rural Texas farm to store all this stuff in the sun and the rain) and I would love to explore some larger sculptural issues.

Timespace/energy X is defined by however the actual work goes, of course. We make up X as we go along. We’re building the starship on the way up.

The Art Supply Barn

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Michael D. SmithJune 28, 2019

On a cold morning I visit the second floor of an art store and I see folks I’ve been out of touch with for years. They are passionate, hearty, close to the world, not given to cynicism or hip irony. At the same time they’re all artists or musicians–or bikers. I discover they’ve all signed up to go into the army. They’re changing their lives because there is a dire crisis and they are needed. They briefly take me upstairs to the dark third attic level, where the old man lives who originally founded this art barn years ago. He’s revered by those below, but all the same, there’s a reason he’s retired up here and secluded among all his antiques and the memorabilia of his years as an art store owner and art director. Back down in the bright gray light of the second floor, which doubles as a bar, everyone is in good humor, and I apologize for not coming by more often. I explain that my finances for art supplies have been limited recently.

Outside on the misty street, I hold onto an orange dog, a rounded beast with short fluffy hair, big as a tiger. I chuck it under the chin as I wait for Nancy to pick me up in her Mustang, a light blue 67 model with commercial lettering on the side. She pulls into the art barn parking lot to get turned around, but just then the founder sticks his head out a third story window and yells rudely at her not to block the parking lot. She yells back defiantly, just as rudely, and as she starts maneuvering out of a tight space I look up to see the ballet company through the windows of the first floor. Twenty esthetes dance and whirl, practicing their craft, but these shadows in the window have not volunteered for the military. They are not the caliber of the men and women on the second floor.

I tell Nancy everything that happened. But she says seen that movie before, and starts playing it on the car’s DVD player. The blue screen shows diagrams for editing and amplifying the story. I can add some commentary from what I’ve just witnessed.

How Have TV Show Plots Affected Novel Writing Over the Last Sixty Years? (English Graduate Program Thesis II)

Posted on December 26, 2010 by Michael D. SmithJune 28, 2019

A second (and final) graduate thesis, which I again give to someone else to execute, would explore the evolution of novel plots since the development of television. We’ve had to be influenced by television and its time constraints. By 8:28 PM it’s apparent that the bizarre medical problems aboard the Enterprise are the result of an alien virus planted by the same sleazy folks who’ve sabotaged the anti-matter drive. After the 8:30 commercial break Kirk tells Bones to develop an antidote. Bones feverishly works in his lab until about 8:50, at the same time that Scotty is sticking some gadget into the anti-matter drive with three seconds left before the Enterprise explodes. At 8:55 Bones tests the antidote on himself, going into a brief seizure which freaks everyone and signals that all is lost. But by 8:57 he’s up and about inoculating 400 crewmembers, and at 8:59 Kirk is signing off on Yeoman Rand’s clipboard and cracking jokes with Spock and the doctor … as the theme music rises …

This could be a pretty open-ended thesis, and I imagine it’s been done in some form before. It might seem that I’m implying that TV show plots have caused a deterioration in novel writing. But I’m basically wondering how television has affected novelists, for both good and ill. A couple (several?) generations of writers have arisen with television. How has it affected them?

Has TV generally made novels better? Has it made them worse? Has it had some effect, but not enough to seriously affect the quality of novels?

Why did we start writing? What influenced us? What do people want in a story? What storytelling rules are universal? hat about movies or plays as an influence? r the Internet for that matter?

TV plots are not necessarily bad–but they do need to fit into time constraints. There have always been rules or guidelines, from Aristotle’s Poetics to Save the Cat. Time constraints are nothing new. Plays ran a certain length of time or had a certain number of acts. Films have had time and structure rules from the beginning.

It’s possible that films, lending themselves to longer development of plot and character, have had more of an effect on novels. My first fifth grade science fiction stories were more influenced by Grade B science fiction movies than TV shows. I think I was more influenced by a combination of movies and boys books, like the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, Jr.

My brother lent me The Tower Treasure to read at night, after visitors’ hours, under a circle of light in my hospital bed where I spent two months recuperating from a fractured skull. I was seven years old and this first Hardy Boys book was the first chapter book I ever undertook. And it was a difficult task that nevertheless pulled me on and on. It was like The Brothers Karamazov to me–what could such a long sustained narrative mean? What was it pointing to?

For me personally, then, television wasn’t much. But perhaps it was much more for a few generations and sub-generations of novelists. A wide-ranging study of novel structures before film, after film but before television, and after television, might be illuminating.

N-CAT warned that I’m no expert on television, not having watched it in thirty-five years, according to her. Actually, I watched Star Trek: Enterprise and the Invasion mini-series, so I do have at least a little twenty-first century experience.

The Blog Evolving into the Entire Journey

Posted on December 16, 2010 by Michael D. SmithJune 28, 2019

Old Things

My first blog entries have been oddly coalescing around past writing. I’ve wondered at the look backwards: “A Mule for Billy” and “Five Query Letters” from the 90’s, Total Annihilation: Camouflage! from my Rice days, “Case 9 of the New Fritening Experiences,” written recently in homage to 5th grade science fiction stories, and “Roadblock Zarreich,” rewritten from an 80’s story.

Is this an attempt to reclaim old energy? Finding jewels in the mud? Or am I just plundering my cache of old work, lazily donating to charity used shirts and pants no one really wants?

I’m getting the blog off the ground at a time when I’ve finally gotten clear about what I’m doing with my writing. And the thought has struck me that maybe the blog had to begin with an address to lost energies or the old path. That I’ve been putting up some old energies I should have published–somewhere–at the time. That I’ve needed to consider my path as a writer and what I’ve tried to accomplish with my work.

I’ve had various phases of seeking publication, then getting discouraged and going underground, all the while composing new works “not for publication,” then emerging to try again. Each of the below Waves of Publishing Attempts (except Wave 4) has been marked by scores of submissions and rejections.

Wave 1, after my graduation from Rice University, concentrated on stories and continued until “Space, Time, and Tania” was published in PigIron Magazine in 1977.

Wave 2 began with the early version of my second novel, The University of Mars, finalized in a decent (not great) 320 page typescript. But Wave 2 was marked by a Career Art stance, as I tried to get all sorts of mediocre little stories published in an attempt to gain credentials for the novel. The whole effort sickened me, and after twenty plus rejections on The University of Mars came my 1986 ambition crash, which lasted in various forms through 2008.

Wave 3 saw a flood of new and better novels, including Sortmind and Property. But after these two utterly brilliant works garnered their scores of rejections slips, I got mad at “the game” and declared that publishing was just like buying a lottery ticket. Did I really I consider my novels as just … cheap lottery tickets, no longer the glorious psychological exploration? At any rate, okay. I take my toys and go home.

Interlude: By the late nineties, I could professionally write the long, complex, necessary but flawed The Soul Institute, create a final manuscript along with a languid draft query letter, and … stick everything in my desk drawer for an entire decade.

Wave 4: I assemble, in both truth and delusion, a vulgar and messy Nonprofit Ladies, self-judged as perfect, from 2000-2003. The 15% token effort to send queries on the 2003 NPL hardly counts as a Wave, though.

Wave 5: During the last few years of reexamination, I’ve confirmed what I must have privately suspected all along: that despite some great initial ideas, my previous manuscripts were wordy, tangled, and confused, and of not much value to anyone else. I recall how shocked I was in late 2006, taking what I thought would be a leisurely tour through the “final” Nonprofit Ladies, and seeing just how sordidly off it was. But that was an awakening, and drove me to revise my major novels (including Sortmind, The Soul Institute, and Nonprofit Ladies) to accord with my new clarity. After starting to interact with the world of e-publishing, I feel I’m writing and submitting professionally, coming to the table with real contributions, not just lottery tickets.

Repository Blog

The best thing so far about the sortmind blog is its mixture of essays and stories and art: creative work juxtaposed with ruminations on it. I want the blog to be a good overview of my writing and visual art, as well as the processes I use. An accessible repository of sample writing, drawing, and painting.

In no way do I conceive of this blog as anything like “social networking.” I can appreciate how blogs have developed as structured personal web sites with comment and networking capability, but I just want to master the game as self-expression, and see where it leads.

Don’t Dump Old Essays Here

I have a tremendous cache of personal essays written over the past couple decades, recently assembled into their own digital folder in preparation for the blog. I just counted ninety-six of them, with over 950 pages! But as I began the blog I quickly established that most of them–almost all of them–won’t work here. This seriously cuts down the data dump I’d somehow assumed would be easily available to fuel the blog. Not only were many of the essays written simply to get perspective on current novel projects of their time, but their personal nature isn’t the voice I’m looking for here.

And most of my essays are uncooked as far as publishing goes. In fact I’m beginning to realize that writing something is NOT the same thing as publishing it! And a blog IS publishing. I’ve found my journal and essay voices, and they’re not the same as the publishing/blog voice.

The Schedule

I’ve also found–as I’m sure many bloggers have–that I can’t start trying to produce blog entries according to a schedule, or think that someone out there is waiting for a post. The blog’s calendar structure seems to demand a consistent output. It seems that even if I want it to be a repository of a hundred pieces of writing and art, the only ones people are supposed to find worthwhile are the last couple weeks at most–everything else to be considered outdated.

But realize: 1) People who’ve read it so far are NOT breathlessly awaiting the next post; they’re too busy for such worries. And 2) This sort of scheduling is nothing that periodical editors and writers haven’t been dealing with for hundreds of years. In fact, I dealt with it as editor of the Wiess Crack at Rice. The deadline … what to say? What to put out there?

I foresee the blog gradually becoming a specialized body of work, and it should all be current, despite the past dates. Let it evolve on its own. Dare to make a few mistakes along the way.

And although the number of items I’ve rejected may seem daunting to my original plans, this is actually a beneficial purge of unwritable stuff, and means I must fall back on new and honest energies. I can’t just string together old stuff and fake it.

Universal Concerns / Voice

In cutting down much about myself, I focus more on universal concerns.

It’s not that I’m trying to hide my viewpoints, but that my personal history doesn’t need to be involved here–or at least not thrust forward as the primary thing. It seems silly to inflict my personal history on others, just blasting out older essays that were musings about my next writing, my past writing, my publication efforts, etc. That would be like the editor of Ladies Home Journal writing an intro piece for the magazine that veers off into all sorts of crazed worries and fantasies instead of trying to focus this month’s issue in the reader’s mind.

The blog is less personal than an essay. I think this is appropriate. However, my own character will still be in the blog. There is something proud about a blog post, like wearing Sunday clothes. It’s the same person, and the person isn’t lying or presenting a distorted self, but all the same there’s a fresh new level of formality and dignity.

It’s an interesting challenge, to both advance personal views while trying to be universal. I’m rather surprised that almost all my essays don’t have that universal quality. Trust and Is Abstract Art More Difficult? did, but even then they both required some adjusting of personal items for their blog versions.

The voice itself lives at the strange intersection of journal, essay, blog, and novel idea musing. It will be important to keep these functions separate, and not to get hung up on synchronizing them.

How can a blog post be heartfelt, true, interesting, and important–at least to some degree‑‑but not overly personal, confessional, or self-serving?

Super Colossal Mess Jungle / Actual Practice

I’m beginning to see how much I need to reevaluate this blog business. I think the main thing should be to have fun with it, perfect it aesthetically, and keep in mind getting involved with the Super Colossal Mess Jungle–any way I can. It’s quirky, humorous, and there is a focus to it all, however undefined. The structural limitations of the blog format somehow add to the quirkiness.

As long as the SCMJ is operational, all is OK, even some mistakes are OK, because I’m adhering to the foundation I first declared I wanted. I want to get some new essays written now. I do see a place for some of my older stories that never saw an audience when they should have, but I want to intersperse the old and new, and I feel I’m building up a self-portrait of myself as a writer.

I want exploration, homage to the entire writing journey, and a sense of ease to the process, not necessarily meaning “easy writing” of the posts themselves.

The blog now strikes me more as an art gallery, and the posts up now are things on the walls. I can interact with “the public” as I do at a gallery reception. It is public.

Although I sense a new resistance to doing the blog, at the same time I’m beginning to see that this is one of those times when I need to push through the reluctance in search of real energies, in the same way that there were certain English papers I’m glad I was “forced to write,” as they did clarify my thoughts. The blog is pushing me to develop more of a public writer persona, which I think I need.

Above all I don’t want to develop any pollution voice, writing for some imaginary audience. I’ve already been through that over the years, and I don’t think I do it anymore, but–there’s no guarantee I’ll never develop that mental skin rash again. I do write for an ideal reader, but that’s different. For I am also the ideal reader.

How Did “They” Get Started? (English Graduate Program Thesis I)

Posted on December 4, 2010 by Michael D. SmithJune 28, 2019

They’re building a new Starbucks down the street. They’re about to raise interest rates. They’re planning a new freeway through my back yard. They’re thinking of putting in a new sewer line. They’re coming out with more efficient electric cars. They’re bringing the prices of laptops down. They’re raising the cost of gasoline.

But who exactly are they? The use of they to mean any person, business, or governmental body proposing a direction, making a decision, or acting, is so commonplace that I’d be surprised to find one person who claimed he or she never indulged in it.

When did it start? How would you track when we began to use they in this sense? Except perhaps for letters to the editor, archived newspapers wouldn’t provide reliable answers, as even today newspapers or news sites clearly state that “Starbucks is opening a new store at …”, or “The Department of Sanitation proposes new sewer lines for …” No news source uses they in this sense of “those in control”–at least, that I know of. It seems editors expect reporters to find out exactly who is doing what.

So … this topic would make a fine English graduate program thesis, one which I would never undertake myself and therefore hand off to the first interested English graduate student. I’m even having trouble finding out if anyone has already done this project–because they is so commonplace!

The only research I’ve made is to note how The Oxford English Dictionary (compact edition, 1971) describes one use of they: “As indefinite pronoun : People in general; any persons, not including the speaker … Much used colloquially and dialectally instead of the passive voice.” The OED cites uses in this sense in years 1415 and 1565.

But this doesn’t explain our use of they to mean “omniscient powers in control.” They is oral shorthand for some frequently nameless authority, often but not always feared or scorned. I’m struck by the OED’s wording, “any persons, not including the speaker,” which can sound somewhat paranoid in this context.

There may be a possibility of tracing early use of the authority they through novels, songs, poems, films, letters to the editor, and other places where vernacular or colloquial expressions are recorded. Possibly start with 1800. Search microfilmed newspapers to find such a use. Search Google Books. Visit libraries holding books from the 1800’s. Go back or forward fifty years at a time until you find your first hit, then narrow the timeframe.

Unfortunately, they also has quite a few other uses! Making up search strings, or just wading through old microfilm, will be quite a task.

What does it mean? Why do we continually fall back on They’re offering specials at Target when we mean “Target is offering specials”? Is it psychic laziness? An aversion to precision, to the responsibility to know something about what’s going on around us? I was also struck by the OED’s phrase: “Much used colloquially and dialectally instead of the passive voice.”

Is it the fear that they control everything? That they are the unknown and thus the enemy? And not only is there nothing we can do about it, we’re too afraid even to use the passive voice?

Is there an active voice for this sort of thing? That is, precisely describing the events of daily life around us?

Flashpoint’s Daughter

Posted on November 6, 2010 by Michael D. SmithJune 30, 2020

What’s up with bones, daughters, and duplicate titles?

Several years ago I began to wonder why so many novels had the word bone in the title, and I went through the library catalog to make an extremely long and astonishing (but by no means exhaustive) list. I recently updated the list of “bone” titles, trying to include only novels, though I may have inadvertently picked up a few biographies or nonfiction, which can be equally enamored of bone. Here are a few of the titles:

A Bone From a Dry Sea, Bad to the Bone, Blind to the Bones, Blood and Bone, Bone by Bone by Bone, Bone Crossed, Bone Dance, Bone Deep, Bone Factory, Bone Harvest, Bone Mountain, Bone of My Bones, Bone to the Bone, Bones of Empire, Empire of Bones, Dead Man’s Bones, Dragon Bones, Dragonfly Bones, Feast of Bones, Harvest of Bones, House of Bones, Lovely in Her Bones, The Lovely Bones, The Bone Garden, The Bone Orchard, The Bones in the Attic, The Bones in the Cliff, Trail of Bones, and Zero at the Bone.

You can only marvel that the use of bone in novel titles has not yet been universally derided as a cliché. What is an author or publisher trying to convey with such a title? Are we really supposed to be so thrilled, scared, or impressed? I’m not commenting on the content of books themselves; as an example, I recently read Deborah Crombie’s Dreaming of the Bones, ostensibly a “police procedural” but in reality an excellent literary work.

The fact is that bone is a strong word. Its use as a marketing concept doesn’t change its connotations of death, rot, fear, vulnerability, horror, or the obverse of all those qualities: underlying structure, strength, permanence or at least relative permanence, the truth, the end of denial, the beautiful deep architecture transcending the day-to-day.

Bone has a great sound, and that may be why it gets overused. It also instantly signals mystery or thriller; only in rare cases do we get a philosophical overtone of Hamlet in the graveyard. But using bone so much may be like playing “Stairway to Heaven” over and over and over and over …

After bone, I began to consider the overuse of daughter. So I made another list of novels with “daughter” in the title. Again, biographies make use of the word and I may have snagged one or two of those. While the word can be used a variety of ways, the most common seems to be: The X’s Daughter, where X stands for a profession, as in:

The Colonel’s Daughter, The Courtesan’s Daughter, The Dreamthief’s Daughter, The Executioner’s Daughter, The Fortune Teller’s Daughter, The Gold Miner’s Daughter, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, The Mapmaker’s Daughter, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, The Minister’s Daughter, The Mortician’s Daughter, The Narcissist’s Daughter , The Optimist’s Daughter, The Piano Man’s Daughter, The Preacher’s Daughter, The Prodigal Daughter, The Red Queen’s Daughter, The Serpent’s Daughter, The Spinner’s Daughter, The Storyteller’s Daughter, The Tailor’s Daughter, The Thief Queen’s Daughter, The Virgin Queen’s Daughter, and The Witch’s Daughter.

Amy Tan (The Bonesetter’s Daughter) and Ted Dekker (BoneMan’s Daughters) manage to incorporate both our words.

Daughter also has a great sound, though not as striking as bone. But daughter too is rich in associations and these titles are striving for more honesty than bone used as a thrill word. Daughter connotes vulnerability, innocence, hope, possibility, inheritance, continuation, entitlement, empowerment, pride–as well as their opposites when the parent-child relation is poisoned and those positive qualities are thwarted–which often seems to be the theme in these daughter novels.

But, though I know that many of these daughter titles are high quality fiction, what is the point of going to the same well over and over again and pulling out the same tired title form? There must be some marketing angle to it, but it just doesn’t make sense to me why an author would want to have a title that looks like everyone else’s.

Or IS everyone else’s. Welcome to Flashpoint, where the third list, which I started compiling years ago along with the Bones list, shows just a small sampling of identical novel titles. Try Flashpoint (or Flash Point) with at least thirty-four titles by authors including:

Bernard Ashley, 2007
Linda Barnes, 1999
Sneed B. Collard, 2006
Frank Creed, 2009
Suzanne Brockmann, 2004
Jane Donnelly, 1981
Katherine V. Forrest, 1995
Connie Hall, 2008
James W. Huston, 2000
Nancy Baker Jacobs, 2002
Stephanie Newton, 2010
D. A. Richardson, 2006
Jill Shalvis, 2008

Or Second Chance (or The Second Chance, 2nd chance) by

Judy Baer, 1991
Jackie Calhoun, 1991
Jerry B Jenkins, 1998
Almet Jenks, 1959
Claire Lorrimer, 2000
Dan Montague, 1999
James Patterson, 2002
Hildegarde Schneider, 1987
Vian Smith, 1966
Alan Sillitoe, 1981
Danielle Steel, 2004
Kate William, 1989
Chet Williamson, 1994

Other duplicate titles with numerous authors include: Against All Enemies, All That Glitters, Brothers in Arms, Dead Ringer, Dead Wrong, Deception, Deceptions, Desert Heat, Exile or The Exile, Fire and Ice, Fire and Rain, Firestorm, Flesh and Blood, Gates of Hell, Pendragon, Ransom, Riptide, Running Scared, Sacrifice or The Sacrifice, The Sandman, Scarecrow, Secret Admirer, Sleeping Beauty (excluding fairy tales), Sound of Thunder, Split Second, and White Lies.

There are also several novels titled The President’s Daughter.

I’m sure I could make the duplicates list much longer, but I started it with random searches through the library catalog and by testing certain “cool-sounding” titles for matches–which I almost invariably found. But this task was tremendously time-consuming, as opposed to doing keyword searches for bone and daughter.

It can’t simply be that publishers are unaware of these duplications. It’s a simple matter to consult a library catalog, amazon.com or another source to see what’s out there. Something about these titles must strike either the author or publisher as catchy, marketable, safely familiar, or impressive to the masses. Yet many of these titles are pretentious and bathetic, and I wonder at how anyone can be taken in by them. And I still can’t fathom how anyone can issue a new Flashpoint knowing that a fairly famous author published a Flashpoint just a few years ago. There will undoubtedly be more Flashpoints in the future. And I suppose we are expected to be tingled anew by each new appearance of that title.

And while I don’t think much of the other extreme, finding some outlandish and wacky title to make absolutely sure your novel is unique, I certainly don’t want any of mine to be on that duplicates list. I do check before settling on a final title. In fact, it was the discovery of other novels called Property that led me to rename my novel of that name to CommWealth. My first student novel, Nova Scotia, probably does share its title with a travel guide.

Of course, sooner or later one of my novel titles may be duplicated, or has been already and I just don’t know it yet. But that’s life. In any case, it’s a good thing we can’t copyright titles.

Exhibit A: “Slime in the Mind,” by Edward Duce (The Politically Correct Theology Student Song)

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Michael D. SmithJune 28, 2019

Deleted from an early version of my novel Sortmind, the chapter “Twenty Years Ago at Darkforce” (its 9,600 words omitted here), recounts theology student Edward Duce’s interrogation before the Feminist Trial Board of Darkforce Theological Seminary. Duce, the future founder of Sortmind’s paramilitary For the Triangles Foundation, struggled to employ all-inclusive language, but it still took him forty pages of transcript to demonstrate that his song, brazenly and disrespectfully performed during “Celebrate the Feminine Week,” was in fact entirely satisfactory to his inquisitors and in full accordance with Carnationist religious doctrine.

hold my stinking hand
it’s the best our crippled atrocities will permit
as I betray the LORD with my gland
collapsing into a gore-overflowing cesspool where Mind must numbly split

imprisoned in these crotches that shall never rise
we notice that somehow the LORD always seems to thwart all our sallow dreams
as we nurse our miserable pus, sing and weep for piteous victims we also despise
we stand ready to be sliced to atoms by GOD’s avenging beams

yes, think of all the grime that’s in the air
you sit on a solid porch but it turns to liquid despair
sit in here, and then we’ll sit out there
and feel the scary moonlight on the chair …

He or She will blow us apart with His or Her Song
as we struggle towards our hopelessly insane just desserts of grace
we’ll accept our civilization’s death throes as being certainly not wrong
when our angry LORD uses kingdoms lacerated with pain to attack the human race

oooh, in the slime of our minds
our worthless slimy minds
in the slime of the Mind …