Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

The Exoskeleton

Posted on July 3, 2023 by Michael D. SmithJanuary 14, 2025

Mindful of one of my favorite saws probably picked up from The Internet, “There are two kinds of people: those who place people in categories, and those who don’t,” I nevertheless postulate that there may be three kinds of artist interaction with the world. Let’s assume a high level of talent and hard work/discipline on the part of the artist for all three categories:

Category 1. Good Fortune!

Those artists for whom something came together, either for enough influence to make a real living, or to at least have an audience, live the “art life,” and see some monetary return. The talent and dedication may be highest here, but luck and who-you-know play a part; any of us can cite numerous examples of trash art that enriched their creators.

These artists surely have experienced the down moods of the next two categories, but their success must have seemed fated, that somehow “This was how it was all supposed to happen.”

Oooh, and there’s the subset that this early fame destroys. I certainly have no idea how that works.

But as an example of where I’m coming from on this:

I arrive in Houston for my junior year at Rice having previously refused a claustrophobic college (dorm) assignment. I realize I must hunt for an apartment, but being utterly callow I have no idea how to get started. But a friend knows a friend who knows the perfect place: I do nothing but show up and meet the landlady. And so I loved that quirky garage apartment with its extreme privacy and it was the perfect place for art for the next two years. The wonderful thing just landed in my lap, but I had no idea how such good fortune came about, and I certainly never developed apartment-hunting skills. It was just damn good luck, and did seem “fated” to happen–though this story illustrates the value of maximizing your contacts, through which luck flows.

Category 2. Despair

These artists can never seem to get any traction and just give up. Other life events soon dominate everything. The world-ocean slowly covers their sand castles. Nothing is left.

Category 3. Perseverance

Exoskeleton copyright 2023 by Michael D. Smith

Throwaway sketch from initial notes for this post

These artists keep going no matter what. I know many of them. Which leads me to discuss my exoskeleton.

To support my art, in 1981 I developed what I called a “world structure” around a library career. It became a complex, evolving exoskeleton which sustained my art life well. Despite a few times when I probably admired the exoskeleton a little too much, and veered a bit off course, I stayed faithful with my art. Some accomplishments since 1981:

232 paintings
12 solo art shows, plus participation in 43 group shows–and some paintings sold
17 novels, 13 of these published; 3 novellas, 1 published; 4 other books published
238 blog posts
2.2 million words in journals

All that is solid work and can be built on. But the exoskeleton worked so well that the true inner skeleton for supporting an art life atrophied. I have had art, but an important sustaining force has been missing. Which is why, when I retired in January 2023 and took a look back at decades of a library world structure, I was surprised by a feeling of rootlessness.

I’ve often maintained that the deleterious effects of my library world structure were simply the waste of time and energy that could have been spent on art and writing. But now I see another issue: the type of energy demanded. Keeping up with the endless problem-solving and decision-making, ranging from trivial daily concerns to the momentous issues that either bolster or threaten your career, as well as the unceasing interaction with people, their expectations, ambitions, and conflicts. You can say all that is unavoidable in human life, but in a structure that’s not your real love, that’s just intended to provide support, it distracts you and diminishes your energies. You find it difficult to replenish yourself, and then discover that you need to spend much time working on the exoskeleton itself to make sure it can carry you through the days.

It’s the nature of the enterprise to snag as much of your attention as it can. It’s hard to do an eight-hour workday without falling into “the corporation’s” psychic needs. And trying to slack off during those eight hours, in the name of “conserving art energy,” actually requires more energy than simply getting the various tasks done as best you know how.

I’m still not sure whether I should’ve remained at some “proper level” to minimize the amount of energy the structure required. For instance, whether to seek to rise, to supervise, to take on more responsibility, and the concomitant question of how much money you need at whatever level you stop at, to maintain housing, food, transportation, and health, and to keep the art life going. Trade-offs in all directions. It was always a struggle, but I did keep coming up for air, painted and wrote.

The exoskeleton strikes me as being like the Hindu/Buddhist idea of the illusory ego self. It kept me going, but at such a cost. It protected the art part but actually weakened it in some ways. Consider an astronaut who’s been in space for a year, but despite all his exercise in orbit, when he finds himself back on Earth he’s unable to walk.

I’m not saying this ruefully; what happened, happened, and I’ve learned from it. And there’s always fuel for art here.

The good news is that in the absence of schedules and deadlines and projects and team-building and looking out for “the career,” I’m finally looking to the endoskeleton. Some accomplishments since retirement in January:

Novels: Published Asylum and Mirage and began Supreme Commander Laurie
Published 13 blog posts
Conducted 3 interviews with VoyageDallas
Created a fun trailer for my novel Collapse and Delusion
Began fresh experiments in two art journals
Error-corrected all seven Jack Commer novels and republished these
Digitized hundreds of pages of important older writing (stories, the Wiess Crack, letters, journals). Yes, some looking backward has been in order.

This initial period is taking longer than I’d thought it would, but I can feel it drawing to a close. I realize I’ve been putting off thinking about some of the creative plans I wrote up as I came up to retirement. I need to assess whether I’ve really needed to rest before going after them, or whether I really want to do them at all. In which case they could be standing for something else much better.

Footnote 1: I’m glad I’ve kept this account: https://sortmind.com/art/shows-and-exhibits/
Footnote 2: As for the journal count: For handwritten journals not yet digitized, estimate words per page and multiply by number of sheets stated on the cover of the notebook. Then multiply by 2 because of course you write on both sides of the sheets. All others use Word’s word counts. I know this sounds obsessive but I want to keep track of how much is left to digitize.

ChatGPT Edits My Elevator Pitch

Posted on June 19, 2023 by Michael D. SmithJune 19, 2023

One Paragraph

I asked ChatGPT for a one-paragraph summary of the relevant 518 words from my previous blog post (also reproduced at the end of this post) and got these 150 words. It’s rather sobering to see this rendered in about a second:

As a writer, I am driven by the pursuit of stories that resonate deeply on an emotional and thematic level, evoking a sense of déjà vu or the surreal sensation of living within a novel. Exploring the psychological novel genre, I blend elements of humor and introspection, avoiding the grim and embracing the transformative power of storytelling. Guided by the belief that every experience fuels my art, I observe, participate in, and process the world around me. From science fiction to literary works, my writing delves into the psychic landscape of contemporary existence, unraveling fresh inner territories. Influenced by science fiction films, books, and iconic creators such as Kafka, Heinlein, and Kubrick, my narratives spark curiosity with captivating “What if?” scenarios and draw readers in with laughter. Through my writing and accompanying character illustrations, I share fragments of myself, exploring the depths of human nature through a diverse ensemble cast.

One Sentence

Rather long-winded for the elevator. So I asked for a reduction to one sentence, and got 56 words:

I am an introspective writer who explores the psychological novel genre, crafting stories that evoke deep emotional resonance and a sense of living within a surreal narrative, while blending humor, curiosity, and transformative power to unravel the psychic landscape of contemporary existence and delve into the depths of human nature through diverse characters and accompanying illustrations.

A Sentence Suitable for the Elevator

Still long. I asked ChatGPT to cut the above in half, and got 36 words. Note its definition of “half” doesn’t produce 28 words.

As an introspective writer, I explore the psychological novel genre, crafting stories that evoke deep emotions and a surreal narrative, blending humor, curiosity, and transformative power to delve into human nature through diverse characters and illustrations.

What does all this mean?

Still computing. Can I really talk about myself like that? What is “transformative power”? In this case I gave ChatGPT actual text to chew on. I didn’t ask it to simply make up a marketing pitch from various keywords I might have supplied.

But consider: aren’t the above productions akin to concepts a reader might recall after reading my original 518 words below? What are people actually digesting from what we write? What if they even get some of it wrong?

The Original Human Attempt

Following is the relevant content of the post, a series of my marketing statements from various web interviews, and, so as not to confuse dear ChatGPT, omitting the last couple sentences referencing characters in my novel CommWealth.

What inspires me, as a writer, are plots that make deep emotional and thematic sense, like a dream or déjà vu; or the eerie feeling I sometimes get that I’m in fact living in a novel right now. I’ve always been drawn to the concept of the psychological novel. I’m not sure how well I’ve lived up to that genre, but I keep pushing on it. Somehow “humor” and “psychological novel” flow together for me; I don’t think I’ll be writing grim investigations like Crime and Punishment. Then again, never say never.

I have an odd mantra, dating back to my Rice University days as a shy introvert shrinking from interaction with an energy-sapping exterior world: somehow, in the middle of intense adolescent Sturm und Drang, this statement popped into my head: “There’s a super colossal mess jungle going on. It’s my business to get involved with it, any way I can.” I saw that I needed to observe, participate in, and process everything around me for my writing and visual art. My wife Nancy refined this later when she told me: “Everything you do in this life is for your art.” Whenever I feel oppressed by exterior obstacles, I just have to remember that they’re also fuel.

The world is an art supply.

My science fiction is a mashup of literary and space opera genres. My literary novels in turn are infused with science fiction and absurdist elements. My best writing is a solid investigation of “what’s been psychically going on recently,” and this includes even the fun, fast-paced SF plots. When it’s coming out well it opens up fresh inner territories to explore.

Science fiction films and books, absorbed since childhood, prompted my early writing, but they’ve also influenced the bizarre aspects that are part of almost all my work, including CommWealth, which after all has no spaceships or teleportation systems, just an outrageously crazed social order with hysterical, over-the-top characters. The Twilight Zone TV show, which produced much childhood terror, was a major factor as well. Later inspiration came from Franz Kafka, Robert Heinlein, and Stanley Kubrick, and decades of letters between me and my best friend Sabin, whom I’ve known since I was five, helped hone my writing style.

My best work begins with a good “What if?” For instance, “What if all private property were abolished? How would people live?” A detailed dream can also lend itself to that “What if?” question. Or looking at a flawed older manuscript, finally grasping its “What if?” and seeing exactly how to fix it.

I love it when I see someone reading my work and laughing; I then demand to know exactly where they are in the book. And I very much enjoy drawing the characters, and the drawings often give me feedback on their development.

I try to parcel pieces of myself to all the characters, both male and female. The ensemble cast format of CommWealth, in which half a dozen main characters take equal turns on stage, allowed me to represent my best and worst qualities across a wide range of characters and scenes.

Stuck in the Elevator with the President of the World

Posted on May 22, 2023 by Michael D. SmithJune 19, 2023

The President of the World copyright 2023 by Michael D. Smith

His Excellency the President

Still working on the snappy, one-phrase, brand-defining pitch you’re supposed to have ready when you find yourself riding an elevator with the CEO of Random House.

But all I have are concepts culled from various web interviews over the years, most of them for my novel CommWealth. Because these thousand loose words haven’t yet jelled, the only thing that might work would be … elevator malfunction.

Thus I find myself trapped between the 334th and 335th floors of the United World Building with the grim, barrel-chested, six-foot-eight President of the World. His Excellency’s infuriated phone call elicits the unwelcome response that repairs will require at least half an hour.

Alone with the towering, grunting, exasperated Präsident der Welt, I finally muster the courage to look up into his deep-set, icy blue glare, and begin:

What inspires me, as a writer, are plots that make deep emotional and thematic sense, like a dream or déjà vu; or the eerie feeling I sometimes get that I’m in fact living in a novel right now. I’ve always been drawn to the concept of the psychological novel. I’m not sure how well I’ve lived up to that genre, but I keep pushing on it. Somehow “humor” and “psychological novel” flow together for me; I don’t think I’ll be writing grim investigations like Crime and Punishment. Then again, never say never.

I have an odd mantra, dating back to my Rice University days as a shy introvert shrinking from interaction with an energy-sapping exterior world: somehow, in the middle of intense adolescent Sturm und Drang, this statement popped into my head: “There’s a super colossal mess jungle going on. It’s my business to get involved with it, any way I can.” I saw that I needed to observe, participate in, and process everything around me for my writing and visual art. My wife Nancy refined this later when she told me: “Everything you do in this life is for your art.” Whenever I feel oppressed by exterior obstacles, I just have to remember that they’re also fuel.

The world is an art supply.

My science fiction is a mashup of literary and space opera genres. My literary novels in turn are infused with science fiction and absurdist elements. My best writing is a solid investigation of “what’s been psychically going on recently,” and this includes even the fun, fast-paced SF plots. When it’s coming out well it opens up fresh inner territories to explore.

Science fiction films and books, absorbed since childhood, prompted my early writing, but they’ve also influenced the bizarre aspects that are part of almost all my work, including CommWealth, which after all has no spaceships or teleportation systems, just an outrageously crazed social order with hysterical, over-the-top characters. The Twilight Zone TV show, which produced much childhood terror, was a major factor as well. Later inspiration came from Franz Kafka, Robert Heinlein, and Stanley Kubrick, and decades of letters between me and my best friend Sabin, whom I’ve known since I was five, helped hone my writing style.

My best work begins with a good “What if?” For instance, “What if all private property were abolished? How would people live?” A detailed dream can also lend itself to that “What if?” question. Or looking at a flawed older manuscript, finally grasping its “What if?” and seeing exactly how to fix it.

I love it when I see someone reading my work and laughing; I then demand to know exactly where they are in the book. And I very much enjoy drawing the characters, and the drawings often give me feedback on their development.

I try to parcel pieces of myself to all the characters, both male and female. The ensemble cast format of CommWealth, in which half a dozen main characters take equal turns on stage, allowed me to represent my best and worst qualities across a wide range of characters and scenes. Allan, the narcissistic playwright and actor who forces the Forensic Squad theatrical troupe to stage his mediocre play, who hoards an unbelievable amount of consumer electronics and sports cars and isn’t above crime to get even more, might be my psychological shadow. Oddly, it’s Erica, the betrayed girlfriend of the ruthlessly charismatic bicycle mechanic Richard, who represents my best self. A professional model who’s initially scorned as shallow and incapable, she surprises everyone with her maturity and courage, and it’s her practical insight that finally undermines the CommWealth dystopia.

The President, eyes glazed, sighs in relief as the elevator finally starts moving. Yet it’s heading to the topmost, five-hundredth floor and the Presidential Suite, which takes up two acres of open space, three hundred sixty degrees of floor-to-ceiling window overlooking a gleaming futuristic city extending to clear blue horizon. Wordlessly the President gestures to the twenty-foot titanium desk of the Executive Secretary of the World, who extends to me a thin, forest-green envelope.

A publisher’s contract?
A check for a million dollars?
The ideal elevator pitch incorporating all the above?

More on CommWealth, in which members of a theatrical troupe find themselves leading a suicidal revolution against the CommWealth system, which has outlawed all private property.

Stay in Your Science Fiction Lane

Posted on May 17, 2023 by Michael D. SmithMay 18, 2023

At Last, a Generic Warning Easily Inserted After Any SF Title Page

Author’s Note

I am so terribly, shamefacedly sorry for having written this book from the vantage point of future space pilots, and for describing their reactions to aliens, space wars, and intergalactic intrigue, when of course I’ve never experienced any of these things and know nothing about them. For this I am truly, truly sorry.

I know real space pilots everywhere are not only offended but also deeply mortified by my presumption, and I apologize for the searing emotional damage I’ve so thoughtlessly brought into their lives.

Furthermore, if the above injuries aren’t horrific enough, there’s also the harm done to all characters I’ve recklessly libeled as “evildoers” or “villains.” Who am I to judge whether an interplanetary terrorist dictator is “evil”? Who am I to highlight the end of my novel with an insensitive depiction of his sordid death at the hands of a “hero” space pilot whom I likewise have no right to maneuver into such a tawdry, unknowable situation? How can I describe a character’s cruel psychopathic glee at the destruction of a planet when I’ve never blown up a planet myself? So I apologize to all evildoers, to all villains, to all antiheroes everywhere for having failed to truly understand and emphasize with them. Again, so dreadfully sorry.

Worst of all, I write about a future which I’ve never personally experienced. If that doesn’t disqualify me as an author, I don’t know what does.

I now fully, honestly, openly admit that I’ve never had the courage to become a space pilot, to blow up planets, or live several decades in the future. Readers, pilots, and villains, I am so wretchedly remorseful!

So terribly sorry for conjuring up such ludicrous and potentially harmful fabrications!

Well, you might as well take a look.

The Collapse and Delusion Trailer

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Michael D. SmithMay 15, 2023

Collapse and Delusion, Book Four of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander Series

available from Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and other online booksellers

Trailer created on canva.com
Jack Commer trailers on YouTube
Collapse and Delusion background

New Drawings

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Michael D. SmithMay 13, 2023

Some recent drawings since I retired from the library in January:

The CanvasRebel Interview

Posted on April 26, 2023 by Michael D. SmithMay 16, 2024

The CanvasRebel interview came out Monday, April 24, and includes lots of photos. CanvasRebel’s mission (from their website) “is to create a space for artists, creatives and entrepreneurs to be able to learn from their peers through the magic and power of storytelling.” Here’s the text of my interview below. I’ve done numerous other online interviews, but here I tried to come up with some unique answers to the interviewer’s questions.

Michael, appreciate you joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

Eighty percent of my creative output is writing, and twenty percent is visual art. This seems an appropriate balance for me. In both areas I keep learning by what I call “navigating by energy,” in that I choose whichever activity sparks the most energy. In that state both writing and art are fun and compelling, never a chore, and I’m motivated to keep exploring new techniques. I’ve never had anything approaching writer’s block unless I begin veering toward a low-energy state, such as an obligation to write a certain way, or to please or impress others.

I began learning about high energy in the fifth grade. Even then I wholeheartedly embraced the idea that I was a writer. Our class was told to write stories containing that week’s ten or so new spelling words, but I wrote my first story in that mood of fearful obligation, hating its insipid detective plot even as I composed it. But soon I found my high-energy kid science fiction voice with “Voyage to Venus,” starring my newly-minted space hero Jack Commer, who later became the focus of my Jack Commer, Supreme Commander SF series. Each subsequent spelling assignment became a chance to eagerly plot more SF.

Not only did I have full confidence that I could fit in all the spelling words, but I also knew they’d assist me and move the assignment into fantastic storylines and odd directions. I understood that I was easily mastering adverbial phrases and dialog where others in the class could not. It all seemed natural, as if I’d done this in a previous lifetime and was now simply picking up where I’d left off. When we had to read our stories aloud to the class, mine enthralled my classmates and even riveted the fifth-grade bullies who otherwise had it in for me.

So I wrote eleven stories for class, and composed twenty-three others on my own, compiling them into a blue notebook arranged by their event dates from 1860 to 6000. I made my share of mistakes; a couple stories were bad ripoffs of movies I’d just seen, and sometimes I gave up and turned the story into a joke. At the time I wouldn’t have been able to put into words that the mediocre, low-energy stories were great learning experiences, but of course that’s what they were.

One of the bizarre aspects of The Blue Notebook is the massive amount of flippant self-promotion plastered throughout, the flavor of which I’m sure I picked up from book covers, TV commercials, and movie posters. All this would probably have been fertile ground for a child psychologist. “The Gap in the Earth,” for instance, begins with the admonition that this is “A great novel by Mickey Smith.” At the end of “February 11, 1971, DOOMSDAY” we are told: “In three months the Earth will be at war with Guacoazezama. Don’t miss it!” Stories have titles like “Case 3 of the New Fritening Experiences,” and conclude that “This has been a Mickey Smith Film Presentation.”

I wonder why I can’t seem to market like that now!

Michael, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I write surreal, humorous novels where characters confront bewildering psychic forces. Sometimes they react badly. Sometimes they fight well. Usually all this happens is in a science fiction framework, but some of my novels are literary, including my flagship novel, The Soul Institute, where a computer technician seeks sanctuary as the writer in residence at a vast, mythic, foggy university. Even then, absurdist elements soon take over the story.

The idea of writing being normal work is liberating. In the course of writing eighteen novels I’ve managed to remove the mystical high; though unexpected things happen in any writing session, it still comes down to fun work. Visual art on the other hand works differently, and I don’t know why; it’s still surrounded by an inexplicable numinosity. I’m never sure what will happen when I take up pencil or paintbrush. But I can still tell the difference between high and low energy.

I have several writing voices: correspondence, journal, literary novel, science fiction novel (those two differ), and my newest one, a blog voice which has been a satisfying and expressive development. I’m definitely trying to make myself understood as clearly as possible.

Navigating by energy, in either my writing or my visual art, is another way of saying that I’m open to channeling energies; I’m certainly not the first person to note that the best fiction or best art seems to come from somewhere else. We need to enhance ourselves to receive these gifts. Set methods kill energy and 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 (or whatever it is) decides that something new is to be poured through us.

Visually, I work 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 me in what’s real.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

I seem to have always gotten the resources I need at the right time. Having come into my own as a writer and artist in the pre-Internet era, though, I’d have to say that it would’ve been much easier to have had Internet publishing, eBooks, websites, and blogs from the beginning. But I learned much from analog work.

My ancient manual typewriter had processed in the neighborhood of twenty thousand sheets of paper before I went electronic. I did finish a 320-page typescript of one novel, and it was quite a task to mail off not only query letters and sample chapters, but sometimes a manuscript box containing the entire novel.

The top value of word processing is the scarcely believable amount of time saved as a novel morphs from rough draft to MS. without entirely new manuscripts to retype. The ease of revising a final manuscript or even a published novel seems obvious now, but it was extremely difficult before word processing. And now it’s feasible to work on a lot of writing projects simultaneously.

In any case, the age of mailed typewritten manuscripts with self-addressed stamped envelopes is over, along with poring through the printed Writer’s Market and Literary Market Place for publishers, standing in line at the post office, dealing with handwritten corrections with proofreader’s marks, and waiting weeks or months for a response.

In the same way, showcasing my visual art on sortmind.com is so much easier than painstakingly taking slide photographs and arranging them into binders to be hand-carried to galleries. I’ve not done much with digital art so far, but intend to expand my skills there.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

In my novel Sortmind a chapter titled “So This is What the Lives of Non-Artists Are Like” describes a young artist character struggling to understand why he’s in thrall to a sociopathic political strongman. It’s fruitful for an artist to step back and realize that other people are interacting with the world entirely differently than you are. But you can’t be arrogant or disrespectful; human creativity manifests itself in all disciplines and throughout daily life and daily work. In that sense there really are no “non-creatives.” There are also many people who want to create art but who will have to remove some blocks to get there. Who knows what will happen with them?

This gets us to normal world interaction with work, organizations, and careers. Since almost all writers and artists need to support themselves, this can lead to a sort of split personality. In my case I retired two months ago after 42 years as a librarian. I’m still processing the entire career, as it mixed into my writing and art life, as a strange, rocky, detour-filled journey. I used to wonder if people from each world could hold me in contempt for selling out to the other side; artists could mock my management/library skills, and library staff could mock my pretensions of being an artist/writer. But now I see this as amusing; it’s not any sort of obstacle, and during all this time I’ve steadily been producing novels and paintings.

The library career, despite various deleterious effects such as the enormous amount of time spent doing libraries and not art, provided structure and funds for an art life. It also provided a treasury of themes and experiences for new art. Admittedly it’s not war correspondent / astronaut /deep sea explorer / famous actor / military hero experience, but it’s what life gave to me.

We read stories of successful artists or actors whose autobiographies stress such total commitment to their craft that at age seventeen they totally threw themselves into it without a look back, that they never mired themselves in other careers. These stories are inspiring, but then again, history is written by the victors. Think of all the artists who also threw themselves so heedlessly into nothing-but-art, and their lucky break, also well-delineated in the autobiographies, never came. What was their survival choice? I know perseverance is also a major factor in the success stories, and that my analysis is simplistic, but … how can one artist ever compare his or her story to that of another?

Asylum and Mirage: A Poetic Ancestor

Posted on March 10, 2023 by Michael D. SmithMarch 10, 2023

The previous post discussed the “33” story or novel attempt. I’d thought for a long time that since “33” is so surreal, it must have been sparked by dreams. But in perusing my 1985 journal from May to August, I didn’t find any such dreams; and I realized “33” was gestated out of idea sessions from May to July 1985.

So my memory of an 8/20/85 poem being the inspiration for “33” is incorrect, because “33” was completed August 2. Therefore, 8/20/85 represents an urge to go beyond that first story and consider what sort of novel could expand from there. And that turned out to be Parts I and II, one of Asylum and Mirage’s ancestors.

So here, in the untitled 8/20/85, we have an idea session typed as a rough draft poem. Some of it repeats the “33” storyline. New concepts surviving into Asylum and Mirage are the man who “wishes to paralyze others by mental force alone,” and the “gate to catch the unwary” that became nods to Reunion brainwashing, and the psychopathic hitchhiker who evolved into Thomas Tanner.

okay, so tell me what the themes are:
a soldier betrays his country and must wander back
from Siberia while facing constant threat of death.
a businessman plunders his own soul to keep coming out on top,
and then dies. his mistress carries on the struggle.
a dog frolics in the park of lightning bugs, unable to reach
any deeper for the full awesome mystery. a gate is set up
to catch the unwary, who are then tortured. years later,
deformed, they realize they could have escaped at any time.

a man wishes to paralyze others by mental force alone. he holds
up his hand at a shopping mall. another wanders in south Texas
with a revolver and a cruel grin, hitching rides on railroad cars
and always sure to get on intimate terms with his victims.

another man is a deacon at his church. he cannot admit
he is in love with the church secretary. her beauty and
practicality scare him, so he treats himself to more
years of climbing. Al and Paula fail to communicate on a date
at the end of the world.

so much suicide that we must begin to ignore it. a sense that
the main characters do not live in that dimension–if only we
could contact them, scream Billy and Sheila.

a cat rages at the stupidity of mankind. an exemplary man forgets
his identity at sunset. the party on the balcony takes
place.

an accident forces hundreds of automobiles to wait on the freeway
for hours at night, after the big day when the parachutes were handed out.

a writer descends into a basement and is subsumed into the boxes
of other people’s manuscripts he finds there. a housewife begins to
think seriously about the origin of the universe. a toy is
destroyed. an idea completed in one novel is said to be ready
for inclusion in a carnival of dreams.

the carnival of dreams is sold at a bankruptcy sale. a small-town
hoodlum is worked over by members of the local carpenter’s union.

a record album contains a fence at night, and the smell of freshly-cut wild grass.
power is fed through tubes into an ailing musician’s mind.
steps lead to a mountain.
the clouds drawn over the years continue to build in the darkness.

Asylum and Mirage Background

Asylum and Mirage can be found at

paperback:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
lulu.com (mass market)

eBook:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Draft2Digital

Asylum and Mirage: The Old 33

Posted on March 4, 2023 by Michael D. SmithMarch 4, 2023

In looking back at the long history of the ideas that led to Asylum and Mirage, I went back to a 1985 work, “33,” five loosely connected vignettes composed in the hope of fueling new novel ideas. “33,” so titled because it was thirty-three typewritten pages, proved to be a constructive warm-up for another novel, Parts I and II, a failure in itself but which in turn sparked concepts that eventually went into Asylum and Mirage.

To update “33” for a PDF I gave the story the kind of attention an editor would give to a manuscript that was good but needed some work, leaving the MS. in its own voice but in better shape. For a cover, I searched for my art from that era and was captivated by the only painting I did in 1984, “Last Page of the Last Journal.”

Here’s the first section, followed by a link to the whole story. The third section, “The Business Partners,” was the basis for a scene in Asylum and Mirage.

Chapter 1. Jupiter

“It’s certain,” Ming said, looking at the instruments they’d gotten from the ship and hauled into the tiny shelter. “We passed directly through the worst of Jupiter’s radiation belts. No wonder our minds are short-circuiting. We may have only hours left. Maybe even less.”

“God, how do you know?” Billy whispered. His voice came through the intercom speaker by Ming’s ears in perfectly modulated stereo, just like listening to the FM.

“Jupiter’s radiation belts have 400,000 times the lethal dose for a human being, that’s how I know,” Ming replied. “And you have to admit, our minds are the first things that are going.”

“I know. I feel altered … weird …” Billy said in awe.

Ming saw himself reflected in Billy’s mirrored visor. Ming wore a suit identical to Billy’s except for the blue helmet that marked him as an Administrator. Billy wore the bright red helmet of Astronaut. Ming chuckled.

“Huh? What’s so funny?”

Ming laughed. “Damn, this is exactly like listening to the radio! You sound like some sort of disc jockey!”

“Really? Is that so funny?”

“No, what I was actually laughing at was how quickly your training has evaporated under the stress here,” Ming said. “You should be telling me about the nature of Jupiter’s radiation field. I just picked that one figure out of my memory. You knew when we were thrown into the belts what the rad level would be.”

“Huh, I guess you’re right. Still, I can’t be expected to be on top of it all the time.”

Ming smiled, then realized that Billy couldn’t see the smile and so the communication was useless. The whole thing was like the radio, or talking on the phone. Ming looked around. Even now the instruments were showing a dangerously high level of radiation. Somehow Billy had sighted and tracked a small chunk of rock not half a kilometer long that was tracing an unstable polar orbit around Jupiter, most likely some asteroid fragment captured by the planet’s immense gravity. They were so close to Jupiter that they could clearly see the most minute details of the wind-whipped cloud patterns on the surface. Jupiter filled the entire sky. There was nothing but Jupiter. When Ming shut his eyes, the brilliance even through the visor was so overpowering that the effect was like standing on earth at noon on a cloudless day, drenched in sunlight and blue sky. Everything was blue.

Billy had chosen the rock for a landing–or perhaps more accurately, to tether the ship to, as either of them could leap right off this moonlet into the void with little difficulty–both to rest the overheated engines and to hopefully secure some more of the metals and ore that the Synthesizer ran on. “We could probably take off any time,” he said. “Wanna give it a try?”

Ming shrugged. “Sure. Any time.” He opened his eyes, squinted, and took in the painfully overexposed but somehow welcome light blast from the planet below. “On the other hand, we could sit here in the tent for a while.”

Billy’s red helmet swung around to survey the tiny little tent made of plastic and aluminum tubing that was supposed to shield them from the radiation sleet but which was doing no good, Ming knew. “What do you mean … for a little while?”

“I mean, why not just wait here to die?” This Billy was so dimwitted at times.

“Huh,” Billy replied. “I’m not so sure but that I wouldn’t like to try to make a run for it.”

“We can, if you want,” Ming said. “But we both know we won’t get far. Too much radiation, Billy. We both know it.”

“That’s true.”

“We could sort of think of this rock as our home. Our special place. This is a magnificent place, really.”

“I know, I was thinking the same thing, you know.” Billy paused. “You know, Ming, I wouldn’t normally say this to an Administrator, but–”

“Forget it,” Ming said. “I’m not really an Administrator. Not really.”

“I … I know what you mean. I’m not really an Astronaut. I mean, I’ve been doing it for years now, but … you know?”

“I know.”

“Damn, I can really talk to you, man! You listen. That’s amazing!”

“Yeah. So what were you about to say?”

“Well, I mean, I hardly know you, man, and I want to apologize. I mean, when they first assigned you to my ship, I thought: God, this guy’s gonna be the death of me. I mean, I felt from the beginning we wouldn’t get along.”

“And we didn’t, not at first. It took us weeks to get used to the other.”

“That’s right,” Billy said. “Well, I can hardly imagine how it happened, but I suppose I’ve always known I would end up … here, dying, here. Or rather: living here, I’m alive. That’s all that matters.”

“I know. I feel the same way. This experience–this entire experience. To be so cut off–from everything.”

“Even though we know we could blast off in the Shepherd at any time.”

“Right! But instead, deep down inside, we both realize we want to just sit here and take everything in.”

Billy leaned back and swiveled his helmet at Jupiter. “Yeah! We take everything in!”

“And–and this becomes–the high point–the absolute peak of our lives!” Ming cried, so overcome with emotion that he reached out and patted Billy’s oxygen pack.

“I knew you were going to say that! But it’s true!” Billy said. “It’s true! This is the sum of everything we’ve ever lived for! This vista! This realization! The very thoughts we’re thinking are dangerous, but we’ve been brought here to think them!”

“We are fundamentally, forever changed, Billy! Consider that!”

“We’re altered. This is the end of everything! God, it’s an honor to share this with you, Ming!”

“Billy, you will always be my closest and deepest friend … forever.”

“I know … I know …” Billy choked. “The same goes for me. I can’t believe it. God, Ming, we’re going telepathic. It’s amazing. I see so much in you.”

“I know. I see it in you as well.” But Ming had to pull back for a moment. Billy was slumped on his back, helmet lolling. Ming could easily read the disrupted patterns of Billy’s brain. The patterns Billy had accumulated throughout his life were indeed breaking down, but did that imply mere insanity? Or was Billy closer to the truth than he’d ever been? It had to be the latter, for Ming himself was closer to the truth than he had ever been, and he knew Billy was sharing the experience fully. Ming threw his head back and took in the full blaze of Jupiter and its streaming clouds. The asteroid must have entered a zone of higher radiation, because Ming felt his mental patterns slashing recklessly apart. The entire structure of his brain was coming apart. Jupiter was coming apart. He shared it all with Billy.

Billy was moaning and rocking on the hard rock so violently that Ming, fearing that Billy might inadvertently reach escape velocity, put a fat silver paw out and steadied the disintegrating astronaut. “Ming–” Billy gasped. “You’re right. This changes us–forever–fundamentally.” Billy coughed, and then stopped moving.

“And you will be changed fundamentally when you awake as well,” Ming said, settling back in the tent, heart surging with excitement and love for his own life, his own record of experience in this universe. And now Ming had to prepare himself to go under, to go underground, to enter the tunnel on faith alone, faith alone that the process of dissolution would in fact lead to a completely new awakening and a climbing out of the tunnel. For deep underground the tunnel widens into a plaza with grottoes and archways and vaults filled with indescribable and kind beings, and they exist to teach us the meaning of trust. All children discover this when they learn how to go to sleep.

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Asylum and Mirage: Themes and Issues

Posted on February 27, 2023 by Michael D. SmithFebruary 27, 2023

Art maven Reva McKee invites a hundred fifty guests to artist Dave Raavenscorr’s quirky warehouse studio, but they’ve really come to seek succor from the charismatic Marshall Singletree, the Great Migrator who escaped two Reunion brainwashing catastrophes in the south.

I keep mulling over various issues the book brings up. Here are some new ones, including unreliable narrators, character points of view, communes and theater stages, addicts and Nullity, and the ambiguous Reunion.

Unreliable Narrators: Infant Dave and Sociopath Thomas

Dave Raavenscorr

Thomas Tanner

These two characters offer third-person point-of-view narration. Though they may not embody the classic first-person unreliable narrator, their absurdly skewed perceptions qualify them for unreliability. Dave is in thrall to his Shadow side and showcases his predation mode when he tries to seduce what he thinks is a neurotic college girl. But he winds up baffled and horrified to find he’s latched onto Dr. Marina Nunn, promiscuous chair of the Lake University Music Department. Then we abruptly see him ruthlessly sized up from addict Caspra Coronae’s point of view; Dr. Nunn’s “mere addict” sees he’s still the same clueless jerk she knew in high school fourteen years ago.

Reva McKee

Dave secretly loves Reva McKee, but she’s supposed to be just a friend, and she’s also recently begun a nourishing relationship with the Great Migrator, Marshall Singletree. Regarding her as unattainable, trapped in his repressed fantasy mode, Dave picks up college girls ten or more years his junior, seething with senseless generalizations about how they act and look, how inferior they are to him. He certainly can’t see that his dedication to his art and his infantile sexuality cancel each other out.

But under the mounting pressures of brainwashing and the coming war, Dave finally has to sober up and assume vast responsibility.

Sociopath Thomas’ narration churns past Dave’s in a more frenzied key. He and Dave are entangled. As an addict, and as Dave’s Shadow personality, Thomas chooses Dave to be his legal sponsor.

Marshall Singletree

Thomas may catalog every inch of his former girlfriend Reva’s flesh in his icky domineering way, but in Reva’s narration, other dimensions of her appear as we see her awash in self-doubt as well as buoyed up by her new love with Marshall Singletree. She’s uncertain about her book club leadership role, but we do see she can get things done. While Thomas is unable to see past Reva’s stunning physical presence, Singletree, on the other hand, is a gentleman and knows the real Reva. He does throw a tantrum when he sees he’s about to lose her to Dave, but though he’s pathetic at that point, it seems entirely understandable.

It takes Thomas a long time to realize his true nature as a Reunion agent of terror and brainwashing. I enjoyed unraveling his mind with tornadoes and his crazed, improbable lust for the OverGeneral.

Eight Main Characters and their Points of View

I’m impressed that all eight of my drawings of the characters captured each one’s essence; I’m usually successful in about a third of such attempts. I was conservative in executing these drawings; there’s less abstraction than in most of my character sketches.

There are four main male characters, Dave, Thomas, Leon, and Singletree, with only unreliable Dave and Thomas getting point-of-view duties.

Jasmine Sung

Of the four main female characters, Caspra, Marina, Reva, and Jasmine, only Caspra and Reva, quite reliable narrators, have point-of-view narration.

Leon, Singletree, Jasmine, and Marina have no point-of-view scenes. I consider them all unknowable forces and so we don’t get inside their heads. I’m sorry Jasmine had to exit the novel so early. She had a strong walk-on part that took her beyond being a mere supporting character. Maybe I’ll resurrect her as a robot in a new science fiction series!

Communes and Theater Stages

Communes recur in my novels, groups or gangs with a shared mission, even if the members are at cross-purposes. For instance:

Akard Drearstone’s four-man rock group, and their farmhouse commune
The Soul Institute’s deranged twenty-person faculty as well as the junior high school paint-sniffing gang
CommWealth’s Forensic Squad theater troupe
Sortmind’s group of high school artist friends
Jump Grenade’s basketball team
The Jack Commer series’ Typhoon spaceships with their tight six-person crews

Communes allow for an ensemble approach to the characters; Asylum and Mirage’s eight main characters are a commune; Dave’s army company forms a larger commune.

I also want to set a theater stage where actors block out scenes, synchronize with each other, and get their lines perfect. On the night of the party we have these theater stages:

Marina’s dorm room, where idiot Dave gets in way over his head
Dave’s warehouse, where a hundred fifty drunk partygoers ignore their pending doom
The dream warehouse district, where Dave and Marina seek pleasure and escape but find Reunion madness
The addict holding pen with its drugs, bureaucracy, and murder

A month later, on the night of the final battle, these stages are set:

The shell hole, where spies open up to each other
The Victorian mansion of delusion and hallucination
The ruined warehouse, where Caspra confronts her disintegrating empire
Café Spike, where stunned survivors confront the future

I Swear the Following Symbolic Aspect was Written Unconsciously

During the first draft I realized that while I’d long ago posited Dave’s warehouse being on the second floor, I never bothered to ask if he owned the place or was just renting it, or what lay below. So now Dave buys the warehouse, but the sales contract lets the previous owners store their ancient printing press machinery in the dank, unfinished first level for a year. However, and I almost wince to consider the high school symbolism of this, the bright upper floor of vast bright art and partygoers, officially owned by Dave, can represent his ego, the way he thinks about himself, and the leaking cold storeroom of ancient printing presses below becomes his Shadow, everything he doesn’t want to acknowledge.

Addicts and Nullity

An explanation of Nullity’s true nature doesn’t come up until a third of the way into the book. People are disgusted by addicts and look down on them, even the government does with its crazed proclamations of addicts’ rights. Only later do we see the fear and the secret longing for Nullity behind this revulsion.

Are addicts doing themselves a favor by using Nullity to avoid painful hallucinations? But the drug must have some use because Reva finally needs it to come to grips with what Singletree really is.

I wanted the exposition about Nullity and Reunion to unfold as naturally as possible, reflecting the fact that people can’t bear to discuss these topics. The invitees to Dave’s art warehouse are like partygoers in Paris two weeks before the Nazis invade in 1940. Hopefully no dialog like “Professor, can you explain to me how this Nullity works?”

Marina and her Reunion Topology Opera

Marina Nicker Nunn

Marina’s a music professor and intends to create an opera, but can her notecards ever form one that would truly map the Reunion? She wants Dave to paint background scenery for her opera, her voice is musical, and she has the talent to pull it off. But she never gets past the notecard-making stage. I think she’s processing energy but unable to pull it together.

I tried on the idea that Marina, who declares she can’t say no to any man, has self-esteem issues, but that’s almost a cliché explanation. I see her more as a semi-foolish adventuress. She finally breaks down after her tryst with psychopath Thomas. Coming apart, she runs off for a month, lost in hallucinations, but I don’t think she ever gets fully brainwashed even as she conjures a fantasy of marriage to the murdered Great Migrator.

The Ending / Ambiguity / The Reunion in General

The ambiguity is intentional. After all, “mirage” is the theme. What is the Reunion after all? Is it even real? Is Singletree really a Seed of the Reunion? He’s weaker than he pretends, but when he appears to come back from the dead he certainly seems to embody Reunion evil. Or is that just the way his hallucinating captives see him?

Caspra Coronae

I think Caspra unconsciously realized she could be the OverGeneral and just as unconsciously took it. I doubt this was a plan to destroy the Reunion, but she gained psychic power just by grabbing–even inventing–the OverGeneral. After finishing the novel I realized that her inability to maintain control of the Reunion echoes Jonathan James Commer’s failure to fully assume the Alpha Centaurian Emperorship in Collapse and Delusion, but I think you can explore the same theme in different novels.

The group-mind theme is a constant with me. Rationally you’d think “group mind” can’t really exist, but then what’s the mechanism that allows people to go mad in groups?

I’m fascinated by sociopaths like Thomas and by crowd delusions, shared fear, and mass hysteria, which essentially is what the Reunion is. Although a lot of the ideas for this book go way back to 1985, much of the impulse to write Asylum and Mirage came from my horror of crowd delusions, even my dismay at the January 6th riot. A recent book, The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups, is full of amazing examples. I’ve wondered if it isn’t all a hormonal thing–people get energized, then trapped, by the rising adrenaline rushes of people around them. I wrote a blog post about people being able to rationalize anything.

Another inspiration was William L. Shirer’s The Collapse of the Third Republic, detailing how France fell apart as the Nazis invaded, how hundreds of thousands of refugees clogged the roads, how French soldiers fled at the mere mention that Germans units were coming.

I also listened to How Civil Wars Start (quite depressing) and then The Sinner and the Saint, where the author describes Raskolnikov’s fever dream in Crime and Punishment: a disease coming out of Asia that drives people mad with a fanatic individuality in which no two people can agree on a single fact, where everyone thinks their view of reality is the only valid one, where all fight against all, where armies marching to combat start turning on each other, where societies completely break down.

Leon Winter

Such insanity can’t be directly conquered. Just because Caspra realizes she’s deluded doesn’t end the Reunion. “Pulling its plug” is too tidy an ending. Yet she’s added another seed of distrust to the Reunion matrix.

The book winds down with sociopath Thomas and charming boy secret agent Leon in a bizarre, homicidal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern duet. I didn’t have to kill either of them off to make the plot work–but of course I did.

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