Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

Take My Word for It

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJune 13, 2015

No one wants to take the author’s word for it that his or her writing is good–not the slush pile reader, not the editor, not the editorial board, not the marketing staff, not the sales force, not the average reader who’s never heard of you, not even your friends when you post a list of all your novels on your web site.

Because:

1) Reading and evaluating a novel involves a commitment to spend a great deal of time with a work. We all evaluate whatever we’re reading–we do so every second we’re reading, from page one to the end, usually two hundred or more pages, at perhaps between ten and sixty pages an hour. We evaluate the worth of these verbal constructions to our own lives, whether for entertainment or learning or understanding. Reading is work, and so is evaluating the worth of what we’re reading. It’s not undertaken lightly.

2) We need to establish trust with the author, and while that trust can only finally be fully established through the process of reading and evaluating, it can at least be heralded via some form of a letter of introduction. If you don’t have that letter of introduction, your work is regarded as a threat to a reader’s time. He or she will regard the list of novels on your web site with distrust. But if another person you trust tells you that you must read this book, you’re inclined to approach it with a similar trust. If a reputable publishing company markets the book, you’re also predisposed to consider the work with trust. But as has been affirmed repeatedly, word of mouth is the most powerful means of communicating trust in a work. The Internet translation of that term, “going viral,” has come to have the connotation of “the latest distraction of the hour.” Which is quite a different matter.

The quality of the writing itself is all that matters. And sooner or later, one person, then two, then three, then more, start finding the worth of your work. That’s how it must be. Your own letter of introduction to your work really doesn’t mean too much. Because no one takes your word for it.

On the Essential Meaninglessness of the Word “Metaphysical”

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJune 13, 2015

Come on, really–what DOES it mean?

Sending query letters to literary agents was one of my more useless wastes of time and energy, but one submission–and it might have been the last one to an agent, a couple years ago–brought me up short and made me clarify myself.

The agent had a detailed online form and it was almost like a job interview filling it out. I couldn’t rely on my glib query letter after a while–I was being asked things about my purpose and qualifications, about marketing, possible competing titles, and my proposed audience, and it was such a struggle to keep up that, after finishing as best I could, I finally thanked the agent in the comments section for having such a challenging web form.

But the most important insight to come out of looking at that form was that I finally realized that the word “metaphysical,” which I’d been using to describe my work, is nonsensical. I really have no idea what I mean by “metaphysical,” and I’m not sure anyone else does, either. It may mean “spiritual,” pertaining to spirit or soul matters, but it can mean so many different things–most of them having to do with “weird”–that I saw how idiotic it was to rely on it as an introduction to my work. Continue reading →

The Soul Institute

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJune 27, 2019

I finally returned to this novel and finished it last month. After an initial two drafts I’d finished what I thought was a final manuscript of The Soul Institute in December 1999, and I was proud of the result. Yet, inexplicably, I placed the manuscript securely in the desk drawer for over a decade. I think this was primarily because I assumed (I’m sure quite correctly) that an offering of 1,064 pages and 266,000 words by an unknown author was way too long to be seriously considered by traditional print publishers–and I had no concept of the e-publishing industry which was in its infancy at the time. I think the idea was to get one of my shorter novels published first and then TSI might be considered for a second one. But whatever the excuse, the real feeling I’ve had all this time about the 1999 TSI is shame that I didn’t even try to send it out. Putting it in the drawer was a signal that I was out of contact with my art. Yes, I was always writing nonstop and developing my craft, but now I see that doesn’t really mean much if you’re afraid to even try for publication. That feels like being 70% a writer. It feels as if you yourself are consigned to the desk drawer. And I didn’t realize until later that 70% commitment to anything is really psychic pollution.

But maybe the long wait was worthwhile, because, however much I was proud of the 1999 expression, another decade gave me new perspective and I could see the faults in the 1999 MS. and how the whole story could be strengthened. Two more drafts over the last year rearranged and simplified its plot, cutting the length about 25% as it reduced a great deal of interior character thinking and expositional verbiage. Now I’m eager to send The Soul Institute out, as I think this is my best novel so far. It’s still a long novel, 211,000 words and 853 pages, but speaking as a writer of both short and long novels, I feel the length is appropriate for this work, with its dozens of characters and their complex histories and interactions. And e-publishing can deal with this length better than print publishing anyway. Of course you don’t want a single line to be boring. But I do know that well-written long novels can be a special delight.

The Soul Institute explores a chaotic month at a small coastal Texas university founded on royalties from its Director’s bestselling novel. Midlevel computer technician Himal Steina embraces this vast foggy sanctuary when he’s appointed Writer in Residence at the Soul Institute and falls in love with one of its numerous faculty goddesses, unaware that he’s blundering into a catastrophic jumble of power lust, fantasy life, sexual upheaval, and gang violence. Several sets of characters eventually come together:

The administrators and faculty perusing turf wars and farcical love affairs amid TSI’s increasingly bizarre bureaucracy
The students who came to live the life of Soul and are dismayed by the underlying turmoil
The ninth graders with their separate world of inhalant abuse and violence.

My goal in The Soul Institute, from its first conception, was what I’ve long called a “Shakespearian fairness” to all characters. Each character, no matter what his or her moral or mental state, no matter how noble or ridiculous or pathetic, is an actor on the stage of your novel, to be respected and understood, given time to develop, and fully integrated into the framework of the story. And in the back of my mind, even while flailing at 70%, was the sense that I wanted to present all these character entities and what they meant to an ideal reader. This ideal reader is sometimes myself, especially in editing mode, but almost always winds up going beyond my personal concerns and striving to connect with other human beings who are open-minded and curious, willing to both severely judge my writing and learn from any honest energy in it. After I got my writing energy back to 100%, I could see this ideal reader even more clearly. You want the writing to be as perfect as can be for this reader. The ideal reader is totally on top of everything. There is no way to fool or shortchange this reader, just as there is really no way to fool yourself. For long, that is.

Novels Inventory, September 2011

Posted on September 18, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

Following is a list of my novels and novellas with terse little elevator pitch summaries and some notes as to their fates. If there are novel title links, they lead to their detailed info pages on the mothership, www.sortmind.com.

Just Finished

The Soul Institute, 2011
Himal Steina realizes his recurring dream of a mythic return to the sanctuary of a vast foggy university of Soul when he’s appointed Writer in Residence at the Soul Institute and falls in love with one of its numerous faculty goddesses. But as the Soul Institute splinters under the weight of its unhinged Director and his secret society of Overcrons, the Director’s teenage son consolidates command of the Paint Sniffing Gang, and panic and violence build in the small coastal Texas college town.

Published or About to be Published

The Martian Marauders, 2012
To be published Jan. 2012 by Double Dragon eBooks
After the evacuation of the Earth’s population to Mars, the crew of the Typhoon I spaceship must fight native Martian terrorists led by their new human Emperor, political agitator and traitor Sam Hergs. But Captain Jack Commer compromises the mission when he kidnaps the Emperor’s consort and falls in love with her. Book One of The Jack Commer series.

Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, 2012
To be published by Double Dragon eBooks
Jack Commer brings poor negotiating skills to the war with the fascist Alpha Centaurian Empire, losing his crew to Centaurian brainwashing as he and his wife are sent to be tortured on a barren planet. Book Two of The Jack Commer series.

Nonprofit Chronowar, 2012
To be published by Double Dragon eBooks
Ranna Kikken creates The Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth at her nonprofit Cat Farm, but its first conference in 2020 is destroyed when intruder Joe Commer time travels from 2036 to lecture CTESOPE on the coming breakdown of the solar system and the destruction of the Earth itself in 2033. Book Three of The Jack Commer series.

The First Twenty Steps, 2011
Available as an eBook from amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com
(Novella) An ex-convict finds himself mixed up in a motorcycle gang’s plan to heist a hyperspatial supercomputer. Continue reading →

Homage to the Wiess Cracks

Posted on August 27, 2011 by Michael D. SmithDecember 25, 2024

I never thought much about my stint as editor of the Wiess Crack until I began to see it as another piece of lost energy I wanted to reclaim from the beginning of my writing life.

In the small enclosed world of Rice University, late 1971 to May 1974, there was “word of mouth” about the Wiess Crack, a weekly humor publication consisting of two legal sized sheets folded in half to make an eight-page magazine. It was of course only one of a million things going on in that environment, but the Crack had achieved that word of mouth status, and it was read, talked about, looked forward to each week. As a web site at Rice today it would likely be ignored, just one of many accessible but psychically neutral ways to waste time.

Wiess rhymes with Rice, with a long “i.” The silly pun of the title wouldn’t work otherwise. Some friends from high school in Northbrook, Illinois wondered if I’d suddenly developed a speech impediment in 1970. Hadn’t I told them I was going way south to “Rice”? What was this “Wiess” business? And then I’d explain that Wiess College was my residential college, one of eight at Rice …

Some of the Wiess Crack’s popularity was due to its previous incarnation as a dull college student humor rag long before I took it over, as well as the fact that it was free and traditionally placed outside the dining commons of all the residential colleges shortly before Thursday evening dinner. However, I and my two principal accomplices, Bear and Joe, took it in an entirely new direction that caused renewed interest and controversy.

Maybe I’m remembering the Wiess Crack because of its similarities with the blog. My self-imposed weekly schedule, not always adhered to, was definitely a lot more structured than is my complete lack of a blogging schedule, but the pressure to keep putting something out–or else admit that the enterprise is stone dead–is similar. Then there is the same kind of feeling about those issues or posts that seem mystically fated to perfectly come together, that almost write themselves, versus those that feel like an obligation and a chore. Or those that weirdly combine both elements in one package.

Another similarity is the marriage of visual and verbal, and the added concentration needed to properly mesh image and word on this two-dimensional grid.

The First Year

I had three years with the Wiess Crack, and they all have different feels. The first year saw fifteen issues and a great deal of high energy experimentation. In Fall 1971, at the beginning of my sophomore year at Rice, the student editor of the Wiess Crack quit after producing a truly crappy and listless thing called “Atomic Crack!,” which I still have somewhere. I didn’t know–still don’t–how long the Thursday evening Wiess Crack had been published, though I found that it had a $200 yearly budget from the college and I’d seen enough issues to know that “Atomic Crack!” was the last gasp of a reasonably long tradition. Someone suggested I step into the vacuum that no one else had the slightest urge to fill, and instantly I knew I’d convert the abandoned putrid joke rag into a countercultural literary magazine. But in an unconscious nod to something I knew nothing of, namely marketing and product recognition, I kept the silly Wiess Crack name and logo, which we used to great advantage later on. The stupid pun would evolve into investigation of the crack in our mental foundations …

In point of fact I probably couldn’t have changed the name–I’m sure I would have lost the budget–but it never occurred to me to try, except in individual issues like The Death Crack.

The main contributors were, me, Joe, and Bear, and the three of us also became the core of our theater troupe Cosmic (sometimes Kozmik) Productions starting in January 1972. I only used my name and others’ in the second and third issues. After that everyone was always anonymous and, except for pseudonyms, uncredited. I became the Mysterious Editor, Bear became the Mysterious Anonymous Drama Critic, and Joe the Mysterious Contributor. But Cosmic Charley occasionally contributed bizarre moody pieces that still leave me shaking my head in wonder, and there were several others who contributed some great stuff. I can’t believe I had the gall to print a couple stories from my friend at Yale (found on the blog roll to the right) without asking his permission! Though I did credit him at least once.

In some of the early issues I allowed submissions from outside our group, but that proved disastrous. The quality was atrocious, not much better than what had appeared in old Wiess Cracks–and I’d only included them out of obligation to some idea of openness. Then I put a halt to that. By mid-February 1972 I was consciously aware that, as I put it, The editor must be a bastard. Even so, my own vision was often thwarted by my colleagues, for whom I’d be saving space but who might turn in some pun-crammed obscenity at the last instant. On some occasions I’d get so exasperated at something I considered brainless or offensive that I’d change a word or phrase, much to the writer’s subsequent displeasure upon opening his copy of the newly-printed Crack.

Yet I often stuffed some of my own mediocre writing in there–sometimes stream of consciousness stuff made up on the stencil–especially to fill the final page. And I had my own blind spots, as in the second year when I inserted as many Dylan references as the publication could safely hold.

Yet I was usually happy with the difference between my style, Joe’s, and Bear’s, and as I typed their work I would flow into it and appreciate it from their point of view. Overall, the triangulation of these three styles usually produced intriguing surprises, and often my cohorts’ jokes and trivia balanced something overwrought in my own work.

But this brings up the great tension theme running through all the Wiess Cracks. I was ambivalent about humor, especially the Rice brand, and not until my first real novel Akard Drearstone a few years later was I able to reconcile the humorous and the serious in my own writing. I wanted the Crack to be a literary magazine, but I struggled with my contributors’ jokiness and their fondness for salaciousness and trivia. At Rice, “humorous” meant an above-it-all, obscene, supercilious immaturity which I called “college boy.” And it was it dull. And there was so much of it around. After all, it was precisely this kind of trivial consciousness that disgusted me enough to want to head the Crack in a clear new direction. I wanted to chart passionate literary insanity, yet I admit I myself was often drawn to the jokiness. I think I was really looking for something like Jorge Luis Borges/The Twilight Zone. I hit that a few times, and Joe was a master at it, and those moments were what counted for me.

I was never fully in control until the last issue in April 1974, when I secretively made my own vision stick, sprang it on the public, and paid $150 for the experience.

In January 1972 we decided to put on three plays: my Total Annihilation: Camouflage!, one by Bear, and Ionesco’s Jack, or the Submission at Jones College, one of the two women’s residential colleges. Here Kozmik Productions was born, and we went on to produce a few more performances during our Rice time. However, Bear’s play was considered sexist by the Jones women and was canceled. Though we considered two Harold Pinter plays as a substitute, nothing came of that, so we were left with me and Ionesco. Bear directed Total Annihilation, in which I played the War Correspondent. There was a definite synergy between the production of this play and the creation of sophomore year Wiess Cracks. And I found I could use the Wiess Crack apparatus to make handbills for the plays.

What I Learned in Editor Mode

Basically, it was decision-making and responsibility. Writers can resent editors the way a peon worker can resent management. The peon knows he can do a better job until he gets a promotion into management and finds out that the weight of responsibility changes everything. So at core I sympathize with editors.

On a weekly basis, now aiming for Fridays instead of Thursdays, I gathered the materials, organized them and made final decisions, estimated how much could be typed into the available number of pages, drew the cover art, brought the art over to the print shop in the Fondren Library basement, typed the mimeograph stencils, got them to the Wiess secretary who ran off the copies on the Wiess mimeograph machine while incorporating the cover art (and later some interior art, which made things more complex), picked up the copies, collated and folded them (often with happy folding parties), and distributed them to eight residential colleges. Setting up the page parameters (8 and 1, 2 and 7, 6 and 3, 4 and 5) was simple at first, but grew into a major calculation effort by the time of the Two Hundred-Page Thousand-Page Wiess Crack.

I had use of the official Wiess Crack typewriter, an IBM Type B (first marketed in 1956, supplanted by the Type C in 1959). For typos, you spread on blue correction fluid which had to dry before you typed over it. Typing on blue stencil masters was new to me, but hey, I was a Rice student and could master that much. You insert the legal stencil landscape-wise on the 14”+ carriage, type Page 2 on the left half of the first stencil, then yank it out, then type Page 3 on the right-hand side of the second stencil, then type Pages 4 and 5 on the left and right of the third, then you put Stencil 2 back in to get Page 6 and then Stencil 1 back in to get Page 7. You may or may not have a half stencil for Page 8 to combine with the half page cover art you just got back from Fondren Library.

Probably the most difficult aspect of being editor was dealing with late, nonexistent, or mediocre/jokey submissions. So often it would be 1 AM on Friday, eight hours before I was to deliver the stencils for printing, and I’d be sitting at the Wiess Crack typewriter looking at a half-typed Page 5 and wondering where Bear or Joe’s story was. Sometimes I was handed something brilliant at 1:16. Other times … other times I went through my 1968-1971 writing folders looking for something …

But generally, we all had so much to contribute that I began expanding the Crack, putting out twelve, sixteen, and twenty-four-page issues, much to the annoyance of our Wiess secretary who had to run off all our precocious wisdom. I don’t remember how many copies we usually ran, but I would guess about 400, putting fifty at each residential college.

The Second Year

I only put out ten issues my junior year at Rice, but these consisted of 176 pages (I just counted) to the first year’s 152. I was still loyal to the countercultural literary magazine concept, but I had other things going on and by now the Crack felt more like an obligatory job. But The Eighty-Page Sex-Porno Extravaganza Crack that came out in January ’73–and had little to do with either subject–broke new ground. It included my first long sustained story (“The Cleaveriad”) and there was plenty of space to let the writers get expansive. The last issue of the year, The Death of Wiess College Crack, was a minor masterpiece and completely summed up my Spring 1973.

In preparing that spring to put on the immortal rock opera Beaver’s First Fuck, which Joe and I cowrote with some musician friends in order to investigate Ward, June, Wally, and the Beaver–what Joe termed America’s House of Atreus–I discovered that it was possible for Joe and me to stay up to 5 AM on Michelob and hack out a brilliant if typo-rich rough draft stencil devoted to marketing this play. That Wiess Crack got at least two hundred people crammed into the Wiess Commons for the play’s sole performance one early April Friday at eleven PM.

The Third Year

Around September of our senior year Joe and I were having a couple pitchers at the Zodiac Bar when we got the idea for The One Thousand-Page Wiess Crack. Around this time we also began thinking about how Kozmik Productions might go on after we graduated. We bought a $60 mimeograph machine and used it for a couple projects, made some plans for plays, and did put on some in November. Our second semester we got some sort of award/grant/permission to make a video of Beaver’s First Fuck, which turned out to be a major pain and which I lost interest in and let our director finish up on his own. I still recall my plans for doing a whole book of woodcuts and somehow using the mimeograph machine to publish it. But much of this planning was too vague for the real world. I think Joe and I both knew that Kozmik Productions wasn’t going to go much beyond May 1974.

In any case, in the Fall of ’73 I went before the Holy Wiess College Cabinet and proposed that I take the entire $200 Wiess Crack budget to create one issue of 200 copies of a Thousand-Page Wiess Crack. My request was approved, why I’m not sure. But despite the fact that what Joe and I originally envisioned was something akin to a religious revelation of everything we had experienced in the last four years, it soon became apparent that 1,000 pages was way too ambitious. I even took some old unfolded bad Crack runs and made a prototype Thousand-Page Crack just to see what it would look like. Imagine folding half a ream of legal-sized paper and you get an idea of how awkward and immense it was.

So it became the Two Hundred-Page Thousand-Page Wiess Crack, and even that was almost more than I could handle. To this date I wince at the monumental effort of collecting, organizing, and typing up all that verbiage on those blue stencils. I had to draw up a vast master plan to keep track of which pages would be on which stencil masters. There were several sides of illustrations that had to be matched with the correct stencils on the obverse. Collating 400 copies of fifty double-sided legal sheets of paper took days and days. Even folding the pages required new methods–you can’t just fold an entire copy in half, you have to make little groups of subfolds and then collate those. I did have some help on the folding but did everything else on my own. I still don’t understand how it all came together in the midst of a last semester so busy that I had to quit my part-time job in order to finish all my projects.

The 200-pager included greatest hits of all previous issues, as well as chapters from my second novel, The Fifty-First State of Consciousness. I was determined to make the 200-pager a solid, high-quality vision that would sum up my Rice experience. I took a lot of time with the yellow cover and planned every page so that I didn’t need to include any fluff as space filler. I wanted nothing in that last issue I wasn’t fully proud of, in either my own work or that of contributors.

For some reason the deal called for me to pay Wiess College back the $200 after I’d sold the copies. I made 400 copies and sold them for $.50 each. But I was chagrined that I made only $50 in sales, and I was upset than my Rice fan base was apparently so fickle that they’d only like my stuff when it was free.

However, the flip side is that I sold 100 copies, which really was decent. I wrote a check to Wiess College for $150, and when I got married and moved to Dallas, I gave Joe the huge box of the unsold issues, close to 300 Two Hundred-Page Thousand-Page Wiess Cracks. I still have ten or so copies.

Goodbye Crack

To the right is the cover of the Goodbye Crack issue of May 1972–the end of our “first season”–which shows me as the Orange Rhinoceros, then Bear, then Joe in his alter ego of Bullwinkle, the head of which he drew and I pasted into my drawing–in an homage to the cover of Cream’s Goodbye album. I’m pretty sure the cover suggestion came from Bear; I would never have thought of that myself.

A Google search on “Wiess Crack” found a 2004 discussion post hinting at the Wiess Crack’s existence in the mid-1990s, but the writer was vague about time, and I have no idea what really happened to the Crack after May 1974. There may be a few copies of our issues in the Fondren Library archives.

Finally, here is the list of our issues:

1971-1972

In Harmony With the Cosmic C (almost), 11/18/71
Ribbit–I’m Going to Eat You …, 12/3/71
Muriel, 12/9/71
Is This Life, Or Am I Really Going Insane?, 1/14/72
Franchesca’s Sex Whirlpool–Revisited …, 1/21/72
The Crack Sells Out, 1/28/72
Special Gotcha Dumbass Issue, 2/4/72
The Death Crack, 2/11/72
The Heap of Broken Images Crack, 3/3/72
Total Annihilation: Censorship! and Crack, or the Submission, 3/17/72
The Mindfuck Crack, ca. 3/31/72
Leave It to Beaver, ca. 4/7/72
Welcome to Duckworld, 4/14/72
The Special Armageddon Is Near Crack, 4/28/72
Goodbye Crack, 5/5/72

1972-1973

Bringing It All Back Home, ca. 9/72
Dead Armadillo Election Issue, ca. 10/72
In Harmony With the Cosmic C (almost) – Reprise, ca. 11/72
Special Just Let It Crawl All Over You Issue, ca. 12/72
The Eighty-Page Sex-Porno Extravaganza Crack, ca. 1/26/73
Untitled [abstract drawing], ca. 2/73
The Rice Crack, ca. late 2/73 or early 3/73
The Technicolor Yawn Crack, ca. 3/73
Beaver’s First Fred, ca. late 3/73
The Death of Wiess College Crack, ca. 4/27/73

1974

The Two Hundred-Page Thousand-Page Wiess Crack, ca. 4/19/74

What Does Your Muse Think of Your Writing Career?

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Michael D. SmithFebruary 23, 2023

What is Career Art? Art executed in the pursuit of success and recognition, seeking opportunities, rising, gaining influence and power. How is this any different at all from rising through an insurance organization?

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make a career in any profession–we need insurance agents, believe it or not. We’re all interested in making a living doing something we love. The point is that the art career with a life of its own no longer has anything to do with exploration or truth. Maybe that’s why, as an example, musicians can put out such crap along with a few good songs. You’re working fast, there are a million things going on, you trust your talent to help you keep rising, you have to fill out an album, you convince yourself this is good stuff. Other people’s agendas and your own chaotic inner forces are pushing in so many directions, and opportunities are rare and must be grasped quickly. There is little time to read, think, feel, evaluate, step back and see the whole.

In the same way, in your busy writing career you might try to pawn off a lesser quality chapter, a lesser quality character, a lesser quality novel, and naturally you have some reasons to justify this: other parts of this novel were excellent, this lesser section is nevertheless integral to the plot, I can’t be perfect all the time, I don’t have time to revise this, I need to move on to the next writing project, I don’t want to know my work is lesser quality, readers have no choice but to put up with it, hey, this is my blind spot and it’s none of your damn business anyway!

You can feel that ego-pressure in certain writer’s works, and often in your own. The anxiety to dominate some imaginary audience, to put yourself first with no thought of contribution, no concept of the flow of real power from the universe through you to the reader.

So many writers and artists are pursuing the career. They want to get published, recognized, remunerated. But how many really consider whether they have anything to say that might actually benefit another human being? Beyond diversion or entertainment, I mean? Do they have any premonition that their art could evolve to be of benefit to others? Or is it all just raw ego and competition? Scheming and manipulating to get ahead? Twisting themselves into karma-spewing monsters?

Will I get published? Make money? Sell art? With whom to schmooze? And will they schmooze back? Like a bad case of mental skin rash, absurd and illogical in itself, this anxiety has immense power, for it speaks to “survival.”

Think what life-changing gifts I’ve received from writers like Robert Monroe, Yogananda, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Kafka–and dozens and dozens of others, including writers of nonfiction who’ve truly educated me–and then try to imagine whether any of my own work could possibly have such a benefit for others–again, beyond “liking it” or “finding it funny.” I just don’t know the answer to this question. Or to the question: What would that benefit consist of?

Success, or, H-Band Noise

My story “Space, Time, and Tania” was published in 1977, and before long the editor of the literary magazine in which it appeared was writing me to ask: “When are you gonna send us another masterpiece?” Very flattering stuff. However, I blew him off with some weak excuse that I was so involved in writing a “monster novel” (the rough draft of Akard Drearstone) that I didn’t have any stories in the works–although I had a finished MS. of “The 66,000 M.P.H. Bicycle,” which might have been perfect. In reality I was upset by minor editorial changes in the Tania story (which, in retrospect, I see actually strengthened it) and, immersed in the numinous rough draft world of Akard, I was wary of the publishing world, other writers, editors, readers, comments, and criticisms. I was already withdrawing from any publishing ambition, preparing for the coming years in the wilderness, so it now seems.

Try on a scenario. Split off a parallel universe at this point. What if that editor wrote back (and these were mailed letters, this is late 1977) and said “What monster novel? What’s it about? Hey, maybe we could do an excerpt!” What if this twenty-five-year-old writer sent back a photocopy of the entire 150-page chapter “Dostoyevsky Commune?” Sprawling rough draft, misspellings, typescript to within 1/8th inch of the margins, handwritten corrections and crossouts, chronology and plot in disarray?

The editors love it! It’s so wild, freaky, counterculture, zany! With a passionate philosophy of–of something! They publish the entire thing in TINY type!

I’ve often wondered about that point in timespace, that invitation to send another story. And to think, given the ongoing insanity of media and culture, of what was entirely in the realm of possibility to happen next:

Readers of all ages, but especially kids in their teens and twenties, love “Dostoyevsky Commune.” The issue is sold out, and the little literary magazine actually turns a profit. Special reprints are made. The editor asks for another chapter. I give him three to choose from. He publishes them all in a special new issue ahead of his normal schedule.

March 1978: I mention that I’ve just finished the 1,587 page rough draft of Akard. The editor wants to read the entire thing. I balk at the cost of photocopying and mailing, but I do send it off. Turns out the editor has an extremely stonoid book editor contact in New York. This guy reads it in June 1978 and becomes frothingly enthusiastic about publishing it.

I consent to some minor corrections, and Akard Drearstone is published as a trade paperback in 1980. I never undertake the second draft of Akard that taught me so much about revising and focusing. I never even consider the possibility. I do have to change my boring name to Michael Orange Rhinoceros, but that’s part of the zaniness. The book has a growing kid following, and by late 1981 Akard Drearstone is a surprise bestselling counterculture novel.

I certainly never consider going to library school after this! I’m twenty-nine, famous, full of myself, I get on the Johnny Carson show where I make an absolute fool of myself, but what do I care? What does anyone care? My bio reads that I’m “at work,” as all first-time novelists are, on “a second novel.” As I did in real life, I have a great deal of trouble even figuring out what I want The University of Mars to do, and it meanders confusedly, cynically, quasi-philosophically before I abandon it–but I pack up the typescript and send it off to my new editor. I will never have the insights I eventually did have in 1982 about how to revise it into a decent novel.

What little I’ve done on The University of Mars is rushed into publication in 1983, and the novel becomes another instant bestseller. Its untidy incompleteness is celebrated as more counterculture freakiness/wisdom. Especially now that I’m the internationally famous Orange Rhinoceros, o.r. for short, and if I’ve never really developed as a writer I’ve at least mastered public speaking and the talk show circuit. I get into bar fights with other writers and trade insults with them on national television.

By 1990 The University of Mars is a required summer reading classic for the eighth grade throughout the country. By 2000 it’s won the Pulitzer Prize. I’m up for a Nobel.

Meanwhile my initial drafts of The Martian Marauders and Jack Commer, Commander, United States Space Force are published in 1987; I don’t allow a single change. Yet I’m miffed that these novels are judged to be setbacks, dull space opera as opposed to the sparkling dementedness of Akard, and I lash back with the sprawling rough draft of Sortmind (1991), in which I include ancient short stories stretching back to freshman year at Rice whether they fit or not. Sortmind gets bad reviews but I don’t care, my reputation isn’t dented, especially as I come back instantly with the colorfully obscene and wildly successful Property.

1999’s The Soul Institute is also a success, even though the rough draft makes little sense, the novel really has no ending, I’m sued for defamation, and I find myself wishing I’d never written it. In 2000 I toy with a plot for a new novel, Nonprofit Ladies, but just can’t get it together to write it.

I never create my own website because in real life I learned all that at my library work. Instead I have techie goons turn out slick marketing crap for me, with lots of pictures of my 20,000-acre estate in West Texas.

Yet I speak everywhere and dispense airy advice to would-be writers and to our culture in general. Even though sometimes I feel I’ve gotten away with cheating, I tell myself I’m in good company; I mean, all the Pulitzer books are pretty boring anyway. Why should I be any different? Anyway, I’ve made it. I sure don’t have to ever worry about working at an insurance company again!

Even though I have nothing left to say.

Schmoozing the Unknown

I’ve run through the above nightmare several times over the years in wonder. Because, given how things can work in American culture, all that potentially could have happened. And apparently has happened to many quarter- or half-developed artists who just couldn’t handle their early success. The point of the scenario seems to be my gratitude that somehow I have been prevented/preserved for this time. That my writing life is developing exactly the way it should have–in obscurity, protecting me from my own BS until I finally learned how to face reality and be honest with myself. From here on out I have the possibility of giving a gift to others.

I now seem to have a “writing life” instead of a “writing career.” That has made a real difference to me.

We are all probably stepping back in amazement at the sheer number of human beings who feel they have something to say and are all jamming the trillion electronic entrance doors all at once, blasting their self-promotions all over the Internet. But do we really imagine that our homemade marketing blitzes on every social networking site imaginable can do the real soul work for us?

How am I different from any of these others? Which of us could make a real contribution? And what is a valid contribution? Am I really up for it? And the unexpressed thought behind that is: “What do I need to do to tune myself up, de-pollute myself, express better?” Which also means “What exactly is the new work ahead to be?”

I can’t try to emulate what other writers are doing, especially the ones I admire, in the same way I admire Andrew Wyeth’s work but am certainly not about to go in that direction myself in my visual art. Though I know that nonfiction writers are doing incredible research and honestly synthesizing meanings, and writers of historical fiction are often getting it psychologically right, I simply have no appetite for that sort of research. My inner worlds are psychological, and I have a need to make up my own milieus. Any contribution I may make has to be based on my own authentic voice, not on any form of imitation or obligation.

Accept the fact that there is some sort of flow of millions of authors out there. Yes, there are many of small talent and large ambition who may worm their way to the front, but that’s true of anything. Word of mouth–which implies recognition of some kind of contribution quality to your work–is the most valid way–if you stop to think about it, it’s the only way–to reach readers, and there’s no way to fake that, even if marketers are designing web sites to try to do just that.

Complaints about the publishing world are ignoring its messy ongoing evolution. Good stuff and crappy stuff does get published, luck plays a huge part, everything is in flux, people want to read and publish exactly what they read and published before, “only better,” then they’re surprised by some entirely new development and then they want THAT. But we get those incredible gifts out of it all. It really is an honor to be part of it, even a part on the fringe.

We are all channeling these forces from the same source. It’s a matter of becoming more adept at allowing them through. The prime thing is the quality of your own work. Having something to say, or making a contribution, does not mean “being the most influential writer,” it means living up to your potential and seeing where you can come in appropriately. It might be a lot lower–it might even be a lot higher–than what you expected. But it will be appropriate.

The more I live and interact and try to contribute, the more this “I” of mine seems to be becoming like a character in a novel–the main character, who must be protected, understood, and in some sense enlightened by the structure of the novel itself. But not the same “I” that previously worried about his “writing career” and what it meant to his survival.

What Passes for an Artist Statement

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Michael D. SmithMarch 29, 2023

I don’t find artist statements useful. In fact, most of the numerous ones I’ve read strike me as obligatory but unintelligible fluff. But, as I begin to wallow into yet another reassessment of my visual art, I resurrect an older essay, “Visual Art 2007,” which I’m removing from www.sortmind.com and revising here. The essay still rings true but a few edits have updated it for 2011.

Manifestos come about because we’re battered by the hurricane of universal energy and we want to fix our methods, our shelters against that wind. But manifestos themselves get remixed into that hurricane. They wink in and out of existence.

The universe is looking for vessels into which it can pour its raw energies. We need to enhance ourselves to receive these gifts. To demand that the universe merely give us gifts (“I am an artist!”), to aggressively seek the transcendence which accompanies the gift, is self-defeating. That’s why artists burn out, go on ego trips, become dishonest, squander their energies.

We want methods because we want to be assured that the universe will still call on us. But our methods soon become empty rituals. We may have seasons of a certain way of doing things, but we need to be open to changing everything entirely. We need to recognize that any process has to be reevaluated when the universe decides that something new is to be poured.

The idea of making art as normal work is liberating. I’ve already done so with my writing. In the course of writing fourteen novels I’ve managed to remove the mystical high. There are no mystic rituals accompanying the act of writing, there is no “high” coming out of it, just fun work. When I’m writing I’m like a humble office worker doing a job he enjoys to the point of exclaiming “I can’t believe they’re paying me to do this!”

But visual art has rarely been like that. For instance, my former fixation on total spontaneity in painting was a mechanical grasping for a transcendent high. Despite calling it “improvisation,” my process was really a box of tattered kitchen recipes I’d pull out again and again, searching for a ritual that would always work. But I was cutting off meanings the universe might want to pour through me.

If there’s zero spontaneity, of course, then your work is a listless paint by numbers exercise. But enough spontaneity happens in even a planned painting to take care of that human need for unexpected results.

Pure improvisation can work, of course. Sometimes a wild exploration of new territory is called for. Sometimes your ego needs to get out in front and be aggressive. But even that’s just a way of signaling receptiveness to what the universe decides is to be poured next.

Transcendence is a byproduct of honest work–sometimes. But a desperate grasping for the transcendent just clogs your channels to the universe. If all I know to start with is restless improvisation energy, I just can’t stop. The first glorious mad brushstrokes soon lead to a dull confusion as I quickly jumble up the space, as my undirected hand/arm/color energy overwhelms the amount of canvas I have. I just keep burning off energy until I finally declare the painting to be “in trouble,” then agonizingly fight my way through to a final “acceptable aesthetic result.” Hopefully.

For art to have meaning, it has to have soul ideas. Experimenting is fine, but trial and error aesthetic problem solving, as the sole method, obviously wastes life energy and is out of tune with whatever deeply wants to come through.

When I’m in balance and in tune, I know when to stop. I’m beyond the restless urge to grab transcendence, I see the beautiful space I really do want, and I work to enhance it, instead of frenziedly attacking it.

Meaning needs planning, consideration, forethought, in other words, temporary methods for receiving and for exploring.

I’m ready to explore some newer meaning in my visual art, but I’m really not sure what the next methods will be. The recent large acrylic paintings in all their fun-but-blowsy improvisation definitely have marked a pivot point. Now I’m looking at colored pencil, drawing, realism, smaller works. I want to consider working in both abstraction and realism according to how the energies can best be channeled. Abstract artworks are like bizarre dreams you struggle to convey to a listener. Sometimes the result is necessary and resonating. Sometimes it’s confusing and boring! Sometimes a realistic image is needed to ground you in what’s real.

Large Paintings Show at the Renner Frankford Library, August 3-30

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Michael D. SmithFebruary 23, 2023

In August 2011 I’ll have four large paintings showing at the Renner Frankford library auditorium in Dallas. The link–URL also shown at the end of the post–takes you to the Renner page with hours and location. The show runs August 3-30 (hanging day 8/2 and pickup day 8/31).

This 7’ x 7.5’ canvas is one of four large ones I’ve done this year to exorcise an ancient demon of wanting to paint extremely large. Actually, I might want to paint these sizes again, but the vast scale of these unstretched canvases changes my procedures and materials dramatically, not to mention realities like supply expense, transportation, and difficulties in lighting and photographing. And the fact that often you’re standing in the middle of the painting while executing it. Also it made me wonder how pour artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Jackson Pollock dealt with wrinkles on the unstretched canvas. As well as cat hair and other miscellaneous debris. A large unstretched canvas has a surprising weight and is a challenge even to pick up or roll properly.

The original canvas I worked on was twice this size–7’ x 15’. Maybe I was trying to set some sort of personal size record and so offended the muse somehow, but when I painstakingly C-clamped the heavy awkward thing to a makeshift wall in my studio and finally took a look at it, I realized how bad it was. It was so large I could not get back far enough to take a decent picture of it. It was horribly dark and dull and static and ponderous, over-planned and … mediocre. I found myself unwilling to even look at the thing. I already knew it was a wrong-headed mistake, but when my wife Nancy gave some excellent comments on exactly why it was mediocre, I was consciously able to crystallize why I needed to cut the canvas in half and simply have fun doing some total sloppy improvisation on two halves.

Since all four of these large paintings are unstretched, they can be rolled and stuffed into my car from dashboard to rear window; however, this process mandates curtailing my usual love for built up texture. I wanted the canvases as light as possible, and with a flat surface to minimize damage while rolled up or being transported.

If I ever take it into my head to staple these canvases onto stretchers, which would reduce the overall size by a minimum five inches on a size, I might consider revising them with more texture and some additional color. In their unstretched state they seem like rough drafts of paintings, with all the awkward exuberant energy of a rough draft of anything. I found myself thinking as I did these large works that these were depictions of large paintings, something you might commission an artist to do as backdrop for a theatrical production about an artist who painted large scale …

link to Renner location and hours: http://dallaslibrary2.org/branch/renner.php

An Archeological Excavation of Akard Drearstone, Draft 1

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJune 27, 2019

If you’re well known and announce on your blog that you’re “going dark” to work on some major project, your readers may accept this in anticipation of some future gift. If nobody reads your blog and you announce that you happened to have gone dark due to some major project, well, this is not so impressive, as nobody missed you in the meantime and if anybody happened to, they don’t give a flip about your darkness.

In my case, which I suspect runs along the lines of the latter, a long-standing desire of mine shoved aside other writing projects, including blog.sortmind.com, for almost two months. This was to scan in and correct the entirety of the 1,587 page rough draft of my novel Akard Drearstone, written from February 1976 to March 1978. I’ve been asking myself if all this hasn’t been a waste of time and energies better spent on new fiction, but I think this dig into the past has been beneficial. Besides, I just finished a new novel in May, Seven of Cups/Beyond DamnStar, and here was an opportunity to relax with some easygoing archeological work. Obsessive, all-consuming, easygoing archeological work.

Continue reading →

Back to The First Twenty Steps For a Moment

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

I was able to place my heartwarming novella about a motorcycle gang on amazon.com, via their Kindle Direct Publishing program. So The First Twenty Steps can now be downloaded to either a Kindle or a Nook. The price is still $1.00, and the book is still available on Barnes and Noble.

This was an interesting experiment because it was a completely different (and not so straightforward) process than with Barnes and Noble’s PubIt, and involved saving a Word document as HTML and then having that converted with free third party software, MobiPocket Creator, into something called a “.prc” format, as opposed to PubIt’s .epub format, which seems to be evolving to be the standard.

I was able to use the same digital cover photo, and the two editions are identical. The Kindle URL is:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0054GQBHG

and PubIt meanwhile has updated my URL to:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-First-Twenty-Steps/Michael-D-Smith/e/2940012097644

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.

The novella is not available in print, but someday I may investigate the whole Print on Demand technology. I would love to see one of those POD machines in operation. Here’s an interesting overview of the pros and cons (or, as the article seems to indicate, mostly the cons) of POD publishing:

http://www.sfwa.org/for-authors/writer-beware/pod/

Feel free to write a review of The First Twenty Steps on either amazon.com or the PubIt site, or as a comment here on the blog. It would be nice to get a comment from someone other than Russian pharmaceutical spammers, BTW. And if anyone is setting up as blog and would like me to explain why blogs attract so much comment spam, and such spam’s relation to Google search results, let me know. WordPress has a nice add-on that blocks these creepy but often hilarious literary gems.