Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

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.

More background

Asylum and Mirage: A Note on the Cover

Posted on February 20, 2023 by Michael D. SmithJuly 22, 2023

The novel’s cover comes from my June 2005 abstract painting show at Dallas Public Library’s Bradshaw Gallery. As the previous posts about the book describe, I’d had the image of Dave’s art warehouse for many years, long before doing this exhibit, but the spaciousness of this show, how the large paintings so effectively filled that space, still resonates with me. Placing the panoramic view of the exhibit on Asylum and Mirage’s cover makes the book even more vital for me–though this isn’t Dave’s studio and I’m definitely not unreliable narrator Dave.

Notice and Dream Topology Tarot Card copyright 2015 by Michael D. Smith

One of AAM’s ancestors

No, this is not really what Dave’s studio really looks like. His space is more like the image in the cartoon I drew for the Notice and Dream Topology Tarot card.

Curiously in line with my old vision of an art warehouse, at one point during house-hunting in 2001, our realtor took me and my wife to a bizarre multistory former business in Oak Cliff (Dallas). The structure, on the market as a living space, was fantastically huge, raw during ongoing reconstruction, with a 50,000-gallon swimming pool nestled amid the almost inexplicable geometry of the place.

On the top floor was a light, airy space about twenty-five by forty feet which I drooled over as a potential studio. I grabbed a couple digital shots at the time, and just now crudely pasted them together to get the feel of the space. Well, we didn’t have half a million dollars for that surreal warehouse, but it still reverberates.

As for that vast June 2005 exhibit, not only do I still treasure the satisfaction of pulling it off, I recall just as equally the absolute exhaustion of preparing twenty-four paintings for transport and trucking, hefting the monstrously heavy and awkward things, staging them and hanging them in an incredible day-long effort by myself, then a month later taking them down, manhandling them back down the elevator and into the moving van I’d engaged, and finally seeing them home. Across the years, thanks again to the DPL Fine Arts staff for hosting me.

Other photos of the exhibit can be found on sortmind.com.

Background

Asylum and Mirage: The Publication

Posted on February 16, 2023 by Michael D. SmithDecember 25, 2024

Artist Dave Raavenscorr tries to seduce what he considers a neurotic college girl only to discover she’s Dr. Marina Nunn, chair of the Lake University Music Department and a refugee from the Reunion brainwashing disaster hundreds of miles south. Paranoid she’s contaminated him, Dave shows up late to a party his best friend is throwing in his honor.

Art maven Reva McKee has invited a hundred fifty guests to Dave’s quirky art warehouse, but they’ve really come to seek succor from the charismatic Marshall Singletree, the Great Migrator who escaped two Reunion catastrophes in the south. Yet no one can admit their placid college town lies in the path of mind-breaking Reunion armies.

Where to Find It

Amazon trade paperback and eBook
Barnes & Noble trade paperback and eBook
Lulu.com mass-market paperback
Draft2Digital eBook (links to many distributors)

Asylum’s Ancient History

The Wraparound Paperback Cover

Maybe nobody wants to hear how much struggle goes into a novel. I’d already given an overview of the book’s history in its first post, but this expanded view may give a feel for all the wrong turns and obstacles that went into this thing over quite a long time. In retrospect it can all seem silly. You may wonder: Why doesn’t the author just write the final version first?

Though some Asylum and Mirage ideas go back several decades, I now see them as just underpinnings to a new story, with new characters and fresh perspective. In contrast with two other novels, Akard Drearstone and Sortmind, which got major reboots from far earlier versions but which were essentially the same story at the end, I consider the final Asylum and Mirage to be a new novel, my eighteenth. It began with:

“33,” 1985

so titled because it was thirty-three pages of disconnected character and plot musings, including one scene positing the final novel’s nightmare Reunion Topology warehouse district. “33” was originally intended as a novel, but within a month I’d scrapped that concept and considered those thirty-three pages a decent warm-up for the first draft of

Parts I and II, 1985,

an extremely rough-draft novel about brainwashing and evil, featuring naïve artist Dave sent off to war. I considered Parts I and II a failure but lifted a chapter for the 1986 rough draft of

Jack Commer, Commander, USSF,

where the stolen material became the basis for the Alpha Centaurian Grid and the fascist Head figuring in all subsequent Commer novels. In appropriating that chapter, I felt I’d effectively killed off Parts I and II, and yet

Notice and Dream Topology, 1992,

appeared on the scene to demand a rewrite of Parts I and II. This second draft was vastly improved and had an uncanny Twilight Zone-ish feel, but I left it unfinished, completing just Part I, Dave’s party in celebration of his artistic success, along with one scene of spies uncovering each other in a shell hole. During this version I got fascinated with playwriting and so started all over again, mashing NADT Part I and its notes for Part II into

Linstar, 1992,

a play that was the worst writing disaster I’ve ever concocted. In disgust I let this whole Dave/warehouse/war universe slide as I wrote other novels, including my flagship The Soul Institute; then years later, hoping to craft a masterpiece literary novel, I hit a wall with

Failed Notes, 2002,

an attempt to sort hundreds of note cards of ideas into fiction before realizing it would merely be a dull repetition of TSI; nevertheless, I hoped something would come of these notes, and thus the first concept arose of

Perpetual Starlit Night as a novel, 2002-2005,

an attempt to create a science fiction novel from the failed notes. But when I finally saw there was really just a good short story premise there, I abandoned the novel idea and wrote PSN as a forty-page story (2007, later published in Twisted Tails VII, Double Dragon Publishing, 2013). New energy for writing short stories then came up with

“Starvation Levels of the Infinite,” 2008,

a decent if uninspiring revision of “33,” intended for publication, though I never submitted it. Some fun Jack Commer novels mercifully came along to cut off this obsession with older writing, but meanwhile I was assembling

New Novel Notes, 2015 on,

even grave-digging some of the old 2002 notes, coming up with a vague, unwritable plot involving reincarnation. But just like the older notes, without a central compelling urge to write an actual story, the idea-rich NNN ultimately proved to be a waste of energy. Except that I felt the surreal inexplicability of the unfinished Notice and Dream Topology could be an ideal vehicle for exploring some of the character archetypes NNN had dredged up. Thus

Nine Archetypes, 2016,

sought to keep NNN in play by pulling out character studies of nine female archetypes from rough draft versions of all my novels beginning with The University of Mars (1984-2009, unpublished and rightly so). Nine Archetypes generated 124 semi-interesting pages, but these scenarios turned out to be repetitive and unusable; in no way were they real fiction. Yet the NNN juggernaut plowed on, and one of its saving ideas was a

Possible angle on a Sortmind II, 2018,

four pages of (desperate?) notes for a Sortmind sequel incorporating my 1981 rough draft novel Zarreich as well as anything worthwhile from NNN. I quickly discarded this possibility, but the ongoing pressure to come up with a new novel with NNN overtones resulted in a flirtation with turning the already-published short story

“Perpetual Starlit Night”

back into a 2020 novel, exploring a long narrative different from the one I’d envisioned 2002-05. I dropped this plan in favor of keeping PSN as a story and I later published it in The Damage Patrol Quartet. But ongoing NNN/NADT novel pressure came up with the 2021 concept of adding my old novella

The Psychobeauty, 1983,

into the mix. It seemed to be a great idea at the time; I could simply finish Notice and Dream Topology by combining it with The Psychobeauty, in which ninety-seven percent of the earth’s population inexplicably commits suicide, ending civilization and leaving scattered refugees struggling to resist their own suicidal urges. But The Psychobeauty proved to be a sinkhole threatening to swallow NADT and change its tone and meaning. By now NADT dominated the new novel ideas, and, to help new character archetypes unfold

Interview Series 1, 2021,

interviewed five male and five female archetypes through 121 pages. The wonderful new characters volunteered plot and people developments I couldn’t have come up with alone, and in high energy we all churned out

Caspra Coronae, 2021-2022,

the first draft of the novel in 425 pages and 121,780 words. I had some regret at CC being close to earlier Parts I and II work, but this was a new novel in so many ways, and it was a valid experiment, even a risky one across several decades. Did I really manage to express any of that NNN and Archetype stuff? Or was this just an interesting rewrite of an old novel? Meanwhile

Interviews Series 2, 2022,

let the Draft 1 characters muse on their own desired endings, and in a series of complex negotiations we combined several main characters and changed the title of the novel to

Asylum and Mirage, 2022-2023,

which provided badly needed focus and finally pulled the novel together into a decidedly new work. “Asylum” connotes a somewhat fragile sanctuary, and “Mirage” is a dangerously wrong perception despite its undertone of loveliness. Together characters and I crafted a new ending by eliminating the old concept of “Part II” altogether and just continuing the narrative after Dave gets his draft notice. His untrained army company remains holed up in his art warehouse over the next anxiety-laced month as the cruel, brainless armies of the Reunion steadily advance.

Background Info

Caspra Coronae Draft One Blast-Off, July 3, 2021
Interview with the Burlcron/Mercer/Singletree, August 3, 2021
Walter’s Farewell Soliloquy–to Himself and to Draft 1 Caspra Coronae, February 26, 2022
Progress: Asylum and Mirage and the Title Change, April 25, 2022
Asylum and Mirage: The Draft 2 Milestone, June 17, 2022
Asylum and Mirage: Current Conditions, October 19, 2022
Asylum and Mirage and the Long Compositions, February 1, 2023

Asylum and Mirage and the Long Compositions

Posted on February 1, 2023 by Michael D. SmithFebruary 1, 2023

Asylum and Mirage, soon to be published, is my eighteenth novel, though some of its ideas and plot go back to 1985’s unpublished Parts I and II. To look back at my writing history, I made a list of novel composition dates from earliest drafts to either publication or abandonment. But I hadn’t expected to be taken aback by these statistics.

Novels in Order of Composition

Nova Scotia, 1973-1974 (unpublished)
The Fifty-First State of Consciousness, 1973 (unpublished)
Akard Drearstone, 1976-2017
The University of Mars, 1980-2009 (unpublished)
Zarreich and subsequent versions, 1981-1983 (unpublished)
Parts I and II and subsequent versions, 1985-1992 (unpublished)
The Martian Marauders, 1965 childhood draft, 1986-2020
Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, 1986-2020
Sortmind, 1987-2019
CommWealth, 1990-2020
The Soul Institute, 1994-2020
Nonprofit Chronowar, 2000-2020
Jump Grenade, 1967 childhood draft, 2008-2019
Collapse and Delusion, 2011-2020
The Wounded Frontier, 2012-2020
The SolGrid Rebellion, 2014-2020
Balloon Ship Armageddon, 2018-2021
Asylum and Mirage, 2021-2023

Longest Periods from First Draft to Publication/Abandonment

The Martian Marauders, 34 years from its 1986 adult version, but 55 from its eighth-grade 1965 rough draft
Jump Grenade, 11 years from 2008, but 42 from its original 1967 idea
Akard Drearstone, 41 years
Parts I and II ideas influencing 2023’s Asylum and Mirage, 38 years
Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, 34 years
Sortmind, 32 years
CommWealth, 30 years
The University of Mars, 29 years (2009 resurrection attempt unpublished)
The Soul Institute, 26 years
Nonprofit Chronowar, 20 years
Collapse and Delusion, 9 years
The Wounded Frontier, 8 years

Surprising New Clarity

Look at the epochs that have defined so many of my projects. In contrast, the last four Jack Commer series books went quickly, the way good what-if plots should unfold. Collapse and Delusion and The Wounded Frontier came out much faster than the above totals indicate, considering their original publisher delays and demise, and their eventual Sortmind Press republishing in 2020:

Collapse and Delusion, 16 months, Jan. 2011 to May 2012 accepted MS.
The Wounded Frontier, 13 months, Nov. 2012 to Dec. 2013 accepted MS.
The SolGrid Rebellion, 33 months, Aug. 2014 to May 2017 accepted MS
Balloon Ship Armageddon, 33 months, May 2018 to Feb. 2021 publication

Three Themes

Desire to revisit or fix old work, sometimes for positive, sometimes for negative reasons.
Difficulty figuring out what I want to say, the first draft of The Soul Institute being a prime example, but Asylum and Mirage being right up there with it insofar as idea gestation from 1985 goes; the actual new novel has been 19 months.
But that fun SF unfolds very quickly due to the compelling what-if at the heart of the story.

A Certain Karmic Method?

These statistics point to a certain karmic method I’ve used to try to understand things, and while I can’t say it’s been a good or bad technique, it’s somehow been a built-in function in my life. Not that it couldn’t change from here on out, and maybe should.

Seeing so many books taking decades to come to fruition has been eye-opening, and ties into a new urge to write some quick, high-energy SF. So I just wrote up my initial notes for Supreme Commander Laurie, Book One of a new Supreme Commander Laurie series. I want to use the series to explore whatever’s on my mind. The two Lauries will have a role in both Laurie’s and Jack Commer’s series universes, so Jack will still occasionally appear.

Asylum and Mirage: Current Conditions

Posted on October 19, 2022 by Michael D. SmithOctober 19, 2022

Artist Dave Raavenscorr picks up what he thinks is a college girl, but flees in panic when he discovers she’s Dr. Marina Nunn, chair of the Lake University Music Department and a refugee from the Reunion brainwashing catastrophe at Linstar two years ago.

His best friend, devotee of the arts Reva McKee, throws a party at Dave’s quirky art warehouse to celebrate his first one-man show. Her former boyfriend, poet and county bureaucrat Thomas Tanner, crosses swords with her new lover, the charismatic Marshall Singletree who escaped hallucinatory Reunion consciousness to offer his teachings at Lake. Dave shows up late, plastered and paranoid from his tryst with Marina, who follows him to crash the party.

I’ve finished Draft 3.3 of Asylum and Mirage, the third pass of this draft, and overall it works well. Draft 3.4 won’t just be one more simple editing, either; I want to see what other associations arise, especially for the last chapters.

Draft 2 was 95,649 words, 339 pages. Draft 3.3 is now is 83,509 words, 299 pages. So I’ve saved a reader 12,140 words–and most of this was just cutting out unneeded verbiage and strengthening the text. This last draft did clean out some other unnecessary exposition or repetition of earlier chapter explanations, but probably not more than two or three pages’ worth.

After playing with the triptych photos of my June 2005 painting exhibit, I came up with what seems like a good wraparound cover. It also works as eBook front cover only. I may well use this one; there’s no obligation to try out fifteen or twenty different versions (as I’ve agonizingly done before) if I think I’ve really hit on something.

Not only does choosing a title solidify your feel for the novel as you continue to work on it, a good cover is a beacon for pushing it out into the world. Using the 2005 exhibit makes this book even more personal.

I’ve been thinking Spring 2023 for a publication date, but if Draft 3.4, 3.5, and on feel like they’re morphing into the manuscript (which even 3.3 is threatening to do), I may have this out before the end of the year.

I used the short web page blurb for the back cover–didn’t want to clutter that space–but I came up with the 145-word blurb at the top of this page that I like.

I’m appreciating the October 2022 painting Asylum more and more. Maybe it isn’t a life-altering perspective or a stunning work of art, but it’s a good meditation. Yes, there probably should be a follow-up painting Mirage pointing in a very new direction.

It’s sometimes hard to see what the value of a painting is right away. And the process of painting it can be frustrating and exhausting, so I tend to be living inside the hassle even when I declare the painting finished.

What really got to me as I started the painting was the idea that I’ve arranged all sorts of obstacles to real creation. I have tricks, styles, methods, repetitions, all of which are unfreedom. Those methods should just be tools that I keep adding to, and they should never get in the way.

Publication of Asylum and Mirage is on the horizon. That means strengthening my overview of this work, not only to improve and integrate the final version, but to consider what this novel means to my life now. I can also consider what obstacles I’ve placed in front of my writing–less than visual art, I see, but it will be fruitful to contemplate this question.

Are You Ready for AI Authors?

Posted on July 28, 2022 by Michael D. SmithJune 19, 2023

This is not really a review of How to Market a Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market by Richard Fayet, free on Kindle, but the book is a useful guide and it did inspire further thoughts on something I’d been mulling for a while, namely, this post on AI. I also picked up a useful tip about creating a new series in my existing Jack Commer universe, and I’m looking forward to further brainstorming on that.

So if I can summarize the marketing advice in this book as I understand it:

Find an up-and-coming fiction genre niche.
Research that niche and write to it. Don’t stray into new niches that scatter your brand.
In the chosen niche, create a series, with an initial set of 3 novels released 30 days apart to take advantage of Amazon’s algorithms favoring new releases.
Write 4 series novels a year and publicize each through your mailing list.
When the series begins to get overripe, create a new series in the same universe to retain reader interest.
Sales and royalties accumulate.

But … don’t you think that we’ll soon have AI software that will be able to complete all aspects of this process with lightning elegance? The techniques are already here; just Google “AI book writing software” or “GPT-3.” Also see:

Soon there won’t be any need for human intervention. Those first three novels are generated in nanoseconds, along with a fascinating AI author bio. Software owners accumulate the royalties.

The more precise the niche and its rules, the easier it is to replicate the formula for success. And if new niches or conditions develop, won’t the AI need only a couple seconds to adjust and output a new bestselling series by the weekend? Will its readers care whether it’s created by you, or by a fascinating new AI author?

What do you discover about yourself when you write a book? Do you really think there’s a formula that works every time? What does the AI discover about itself in the process of writing a book? And what’s that worth to you?

Asylum and Mirage: The Draft 2 Milestone

Posted on June 17, 2022 by Michael D. SmithJune 17, 2022

Caspra Coronae, 31, former video artist, now a pleasant Nullity addict

A naïve and disconnected artist gives a party to celebrate his success, only to find himself drafted that same night into a mindless war against the Reunion, an apparently unstoppable army of hallucinatory consciousness.

I’ve finished Draft 2 and closed it off, even though I could go back and tweak it further, or try for a different ending. But I’m declaring this version done in favor of setting the foundation for Draft 3. Four synopses (six-page full summary; cut to three pages; cut to long teaser; further cut to web overview) have already put the novel into fresh perspective. Working with the eight main character descriptions, and starting to make drawings of them (five of eight so far) has also been contributing to Draft 3.

No matter that I’d just like to make this thing fall into place and be done with it, Asylum and Mirage is simply not finished. That’s okay. Calling this second draft done is saying I want to be open to anything that leads this novel to its correct ending.

Reva Veils McKee copyright 2022 by Michael D. Smith

Reva Veils McKee, 31, website designer, book club host, and art maven

It may seem odd to begin assessing Draft 2 before I reread it, but even though I’m in that delightful space where I’ve forgotten much of the structure and wording of the earlier scenes, I have a growing sense of overview. I can see some things to consider:

I’m still unsure (and I see this mentioned as well in my first blog post about the novel) whether the whole aspect of “who’s hallucinating what” has any real substance. Just how scary is this hallucination/Reunion stuff? Does it really hold together psychologically? Can a reader really get into it?
The character of Marina Nicker Nunn, so vibrant and strange in the first part of the novel, still seems more or less abandoned in the second part, even after two drafts. Marina has resisted further exploration after her brilliant beginning. Why?
Dave also needs some work. I can’t just have him “realize his inner powers,” he must demand Reva out of all the stress of the night. He’s reluctantly dragged into responsibility the same way he knows he has to take charge of a truly terrible painting and stick with it until it’s right.
All the characters in fact need further deepening. I think I kept trying to stretch a plot that so far really hasn’t jelled over characters who can’t keep up with it–or maybe they’ve gone on strike because they don’t want to keep up with it.
The last chapter, a transcript in which characters discuss what’s just happened to them, was a way of patching up the end of Draft 2. It repaired an initial final chapter which I declared was the worst thing I’ve ever written. This transcript won’t be in a final version, but it did showcase the concerns the characters have at the end of the book, as well as the reservations they voiced in their previous interviews. And it pointed to yet another chapter I need to write from Dave’s omniscience. That’s for draft 3. Meanwhile, this transcript felt like a satisfactory conclusion to Draft 2, and it resonates with my own questions about the nature of the Reunion evil. It also led to the realization that there really can’t be a tidy ending to senseless evil.

Marina Nicker Nunn, 43, promiscuous chair of the Lake University Music Department

Though these are all real problems, none really daunts me. A metaphor I’ve been using is how I make a drawing more intense over successive passes, making the colors even more vivid until I get a certain holistic feeling about the sketch and I know it’s done, it’s what I want. Thus Draft 2 is a few cycles away from being “impassioned” with color and line.

Probably the only true way to impassion any novel is to keep deepening those characters.

The unspoken fear inside Dave’s 167 partygoers works; but what the Reunion really is, or if it could be ended, I haven’t confronted yet. I joke about Star Trek movie villains being evil because they have tattoos and huge spaceships with narrow walkways stretching without guardrails across thousand-foot drops–but is my Reunion much different from that stock villain?

This may be an important step: the realization that such insanity cannot be conquered directly. It worked in my novel CommWealth because everyone was secretly relieved to see the property-less society die; people chose to rally to a sane new authority echoing their true values. Just because Caspra realized she was deluded to have Merged with the Reunion doesn’t explain much. “Pulling the Reunion’s plug” is too easy an ending. But maybe like Dave, she’s introduced another dose of poison into the Reunion.

Dave’s unwritten chapter could be an homage to that seductive telepathy. How he fully understands his captors, the brainwashed Colonel and Mrs. Markham, and Merges with them, flowing into the entire Reunion, polluting its evil, somehow hoodwinking it.

Somehow. As you can see, I have a lot to figure out here.

The Asylum and Mirage webpage

Progress: Asylum and Mirage and the Title Change

Posted on April 25, 2022 by Michael D. SmithApril 25, 2022

Caspra Coronae is now, halfway through its second draft, Asylum and Mirage. Hanging the essence of a novel on its title is important, and while Caspra Coronae has a lovely sound, it doesn’t convey anything about this novel, and would only do so if the book were all about a character named Caspra. She has a major role in this novel, but can’t carry the whole thing.

I wanted a title that hooks into the book’s inherent unease. As I threw out hundreds of words, “Asylum,” with its connotation of somewhat fragile sanctuary, kept recurring as a top choice. Then “Mirage” surfaced–dangerously wrong perception despite an undertone of attraction and loveliness.

The first part of the book: Anxiety, dread, foreboding. Hallucination, denial, illusion, fantasy.

The second part: Pattern, topology, investigation, art. Bravery, awakening, liberation.

So a naïve and disconnected artist gives a party to celebrate his new success, only to find himself drafted that same night into an unwinnable war against a savage, mind-manipulating entity calling itself the Reunion. Dave Raavenscorr’s hundred fifty partygoers, unable to acknowledge the growing hallucinations of the Reunion’s advance patrols, expect the charming Dr. Marshall Singletree to lead them on continual Migrations away from a formless catastrophe.

The Reunion has swallowed cities and towns in the south, and the armies of the brainwashed are now marching north to the college town of Lake Grafton. Two major governments have failed to stop the Reunion and have fallen. We are now ruled by a Third Constitution which is proving even more inept in dealing with the threat.

Nullity is a drug that can ward off hallucinations, but it’s highly addictive. Almost fifty percent of the population is now addicted to Nullity. The remaining half, worried about succumbing to Reunion phantasms, find themselves assigned as caretakers of these addicts.

In preparation for Draft 2, I had a glorious ride interviewing the novel’s characters, first as a group–not very satisfying–and then in five more interviews with either individuals (Caspra and Marina) or in pairs (Reva and Kina, Dave and Al, Thomas and Walter). Combining Dave with Al, and Thomas with Walter, truly liberated energy for Draft 2, and forced me to combine the dark and light sides of those characters.

It took me a while to admit that I also needed to combine Reva, Singletree’s lover, and Kina, Singletree’s daughter. I’d unconsciously known for a long time that the similarity between the two women precluded either having a satisfactory ending. Thus no Singletree daughter now exists; much plot had to be torn up not only for Kina but also for Al, an addict who kept adding inexplicable self-awareness to the point of evolving into a boring demi-god, and Walter, the most over-the-top, nasty evil jerk you could imagine.

I removed Marina from any point-of-view narration so there are now only four narrators: Dave, Caspra, Reva, and Thomas. This sets Marina up to be a much more unknowable force. The character combinations also posit a rational ending that completely eluded the first draft. Though the ending’s exact form remains up in the air, I feel the characters will point me there.

We now have a more ensemble-focused cast. Here are four female, then four male characters:

Reva McKee, 31

She’s a website designer who’s mapped Reunion movements, but by the time the book opens, the Third Constitution’s ban on the Internet has rendered her career meaningless. Now she investigates the art galleries in the idyllic college town of Lake Grafton and develops influential contacts. She gets Dave Raavenscorr, her new friend, his first Lake Grafton show, and she assists him in his art career and in developing the huge warehouse studio he’s just bought. She also starts a book club to honor the Great Migrator from the Reunion, Marshall Singletree, and soon becomes his lover.

Tall, long-legged, clear-voiced, with intoxicating dark green eyes, her short dark hair framing a sharp chin, Reva is breathtaking. Her stunning good looks and heroine aura radiate elegance, sexual confidence, and nobility. But she’s full of self-doubt, struggling to be a nice girl and repress herself even as she gives off that erotic vibe. The much older Marshall gets hold of her and forces her to reassess her life, and then, right when she’s vulnerable, her so-called friend Dave erupts with his own seductive powers.

Caspra Coronae, 31

Caspra is a former video artist, now a Nullity addict sponsored by Dr. Marina Nunn. Over the past ten years she’s been drifting through numerous dull clerical jobs in the Lake Grafton area. She’s petite, with brown, almond-shaped eyes set in a pleasant Nordic face. Her high, soft voice often seems hesitant, but one finds unexpected power behind it.

Dave knew her in high school, but only regarded her as an adolescent sex fantasy. When he meets her for the first time in fourteen years in Chapter Two, he becomes unglued, even as Caspra, who ought to show proper respect to any Nonaddicted, scorns him as “that immature dweeb from French class.” She’s an artist at heart, a patient observer of the chaos around her, and she takes pains to distance herself from the rest of the vulgar Nullity addicts populating this book. In fact, Dave has trouble believing that Caspra is really addicted, in her tight black evening dress slit far down in the front, in her high heels and fake pearls, her long blond hair elegantly done up behind her slender neck.

Marina Nunn, 43

Chair of the Music Department at Lake University, at 5’5” and 125 pounds Marina can look childlike at forty-three, which is why Dave at first assumes she’s a college girl. She has an odd round face and hurting eyes so dark brown they seem entirely black. Her disheveled hair is deep russet streaked with gold, and her voice is musical and expressive. She can disguise her great figure with loose brown sweaters, or blatantly present herself at Dave’s art opening in just three articles of clothing: two knee-high boots and a shiny unzipped silver jumpsuit, tight over the ample bust and excellently snug at the waist.

Like Reva, Marina has many art gallery contacts. She poses for life drawing classes, where she picks up so many young men that any horny college boy knows what she can offer and where to find her. She tells Dave, to his consternation, that he’s the only man she can say no to. She has incredible naïve courage, grappling with monstrous inner forces as she prepares her notes for an opera called Reunion Topology. Her out-of-control energies shock Dave’s partygoers, but she never resists displaying her ridiculous side–or her scary side. She finds it amusing that everyone at the university looks down on her as a whore, even as they acknowledge her academic expertise and power.

Jasmine Sung, 24

Jasmine is a music graduate student. She began working at Dexter Graphics a week ago where she met Leon Winter and became his lover that same night. She’s short, with tiny hands, liquid brown eyes, and silver hair in a cute bowl around her head. For Dave’s party she’s chosen a bright blue sweater outlining her unusually huge and voluptuous breasts. She has plastic blue eight-pointed stars on her sandals, and speaks in a startling baby girl voice. Jasmine feels complete; she lives in the moment and doesn’t think she needs to learn anything. One gets the impression that, bubbly on the surface, she long ago sank into a twilit realm where sex and death are the only remaining themes. She’s worried about her hallucinations and thinks small doses of her addict’s Nullity will keep her on track. When she volunteers for a special assignment, poet Thomas Tanner hands her a .38 revolver.

Dave Raavenscorr, 31

Dave is an artist who’s begun to sell his large canvases through a gallery Reva found for him. He’s also lined up a syndicated comic strip set to start in January of the coming year. He’s patiently saved enough money to buy a downtown Lake Grafton warehouse which has lain dormant for decades, and he’s just moved in with help from Reva and a former coworker, Leon Winter. New to town, Dave is clueless about Lake University, but starts drifting onto campus hoping to pick up women. He never succeeds until he meets Music Department Chair Marina Nunn.

Dave has prematurely graying hair matching deep-set gray eyes. He’s tall and lean, with a chiseled passionate face, big bony hands, a powerful chest, and huge biceps. All this would be impressive if he’d just stand straight, but he always seems to be hunching over to disguise his power. His eyes are dazed, his mouth loose, the planes of his otherwise hard face quivering. His nervous gestures make onlookers wince; his hands are unusually expressive, constantly describing structures in the air in perfect cadence with his rapid speech. He can come across as a scruffy overgrown sixth grader.

Reva had initially been disturbed by, and attracted to, his mixture of childishness and secret wisdom. Her magnetic surge towards Dave had initially been strong, but she finally convinced herself that he was destined to be a great friend, not a sexual partner. Over the last few months Dave and Reva have developed a nourishing friendship. He’s supported her book club and she promotes his art any way she can.

Everyone pegs Dave as a laid-back guy, but he’s a mystery to himself and perhaps even a destructive force. He creates art in raw power mode but presents it in puppy mode. The Third Constitution Army may even have a say about his muddled personality.

Thomas Tanner, 29

Thomas gives nightly poetry readings in Lake Grafton coffee shops and bars. His topics include his leaking dishwasher and the existential whine of his air conditioner. He’s well-published in the Lake University Tiresias. He’s 5’10”, with thin brown hair and a receding hairline. His overly thin face is lopsided with a constant irritating grin. Reva considers that his mesmerizing dark blue eyes had probably been what kept her dating him so long. By day Thomas is the assistant manager of the Frankston County Procurement Department. He has a photographic memory and attends all Marshall Singletree’s colloquia. He worships the Great Migrator, as Singletree is known. Thomas thinks he alone understands that philosophy.

Jealous that his former girlfriend Reva is such good friends with Dave, Thomas considers himself in competition with Dave for the title of Foremost Creator. He also can’t acknowledge how furious he is with the Great Migrator for stealing his girlfriend Reva three weeks ago. For Dave’s party, Thomas wears a rumpled rock group T-shirt and overly tight and none too clean jeans, with a huge golden V-shaped belt buckle pointing to his penile bulge. Like Jasmine, fearing the Reunion and hallucinations, he’s been taking calculated risks with his addict’s Nullity. And then something snaps him from mediocre poet into junior varsity psychopath.

Leon Winter, 27

Leon Winter is Marshall Singletree’s main assistant. An imaging software expert, he abandoned his Freestone College computer job when Freestone fell to the Reunion. Rescuing Singletree from the Freestone horror and Migrating hundreds of miles with him, Leon then found work in a graphics shop where he befriended coworker Dave. He’s charismatic, charming, smart and kind, with a smooth, almost feminine face, clear blue eyes, and short blond hair. He’s extremely attractive to women, and coworker Jasmine succumbs to him within a week of starting work at Dexter Graphics.

He’s writing a book called Hallucinatory Evil, and Singletree regards him as the only person capable of being his successor. Leon got into legal trouble with the County over his last addict, whom he’d talked out of his addiction to Nullity; the addict then sold the unused doses and wound up murdered in a parking lot. At Dave’s party Leon comes off as patronizing to Reva, and she begins to wonder what sort of compartmentalization, what sort of duplicity, he might be capable of.

Marshall Singletree, 55

Singletree is the Great Migrator from unspeakable psychic disasters in the south. Short, balding on top, with long silver hair to the sides, he has a smooth, hard head, mesmerizing brown eyes, a cruel mouth, a strong upper body, and a deep authoritative voice. He looks like a truck driver, or a dock worker, or a wrestler. Fleeing the Reunion conquest of Linstar, a major city four hundred miles south, he settled at Freestone College eighty miles north of the doomed city to study the Reunion phenomenon up close. There he wrote a bestselling book about why the calamity unfolded. Yet just a few months ago Freestone itself was overrun by the Reunion, and Singletree barely escaped with his young protégée Leon. At Lake University, he’s been awarded an honorary professorship and gives a colloquium every Friday afternoon.

Reva McKee founds a book club in honor of Singletree’s book and his philosophy. He then takes her as his lover, overwhelming her with romance and sexual satisfaction. But he has a shadow side cleverly concealed by fame and charisma. He fakes it with false modesty, claiming not to crow about himself while crowing about himself. He declares himself a bulwark against the Reunion, but can only think in terms of Migration from the enemy until such time as his followers become ready to turn and fight–although everyone knows nobody will ever be ready. Singletree has gotten quite comfortable with decades in the role of the strong man, but when Reva abandons him, he collapses in a second.

Interview with the Burlcron/Mercer/Singletree
Before starting Draft 1, I interviewed the Singletree archetype and discovered how his Shadow nature forecasts the downfall of the Great Migrator.

Caspra Coronae Draft One Blast-Off
The post includes the history of this long undertaking through the start of Draft 1.

Walter’s Farewell Soliloquy–to Himself and to Draft 1 Caspra Coronae
Walter merges into another character and exits the novel, but not before delivering a fine Shakespearian soliloquy at Marina’s request.

Walter’s Farewell Soliloquy–to Himself and to Draft 1 Caspra Coronae

Posted on February 26, 2022 by Michael D. SmithJune 17, 2022

When I recently re-interviewed the main characters of Caspra Coronae, it became obvious to all of us that Walter’s evil machinations and his over-the-top, humiliating death were merely dull plot. And that in fact the entire Part 2 of the novel was dull plot. Worse, it besmirched some intriguing character development in Part 1. Music professor Marina Nicker Nunn, who herself got thoroughly lost somewhere in Part 2, then suggested I make a fifty-page Shakespearean soliloquy for Walter out of his endless Part 2 ruminations on his metaphysical nastiness, and I decided to take up her challenge. Well, it’s not fifty pages, and it’s not iambic pentameter, but possibly I can channel a little Walt Whitman. So Walter gets merged into another character and exits the novel. I hope that what follows is an honorable farewell to a character who’s been in this book’s planning for years.

Somehow, rendered into verse, Walter’s chatter becomes an overview of the themes of Caspra Coronae even as I’m cutting this verbiage from the book. It does tell a story of sorts. Meanwhile I’ll thoroughly restructure the book before embarking on Draft 2.

It was totally black. No lights anywhere.
I took yet another rest among the trees,
broken right ankle blazing with pain.
I was definitively not holing up with Dave
in some suicidal Alamo-type disaster.
In the end it was just common sense that convinced me
to limp out of there on my own.

For Caspra Coronae didn’t really want to murder all our remaining soldiers.
She was so much more compassionate than that.
It was delightful to recognize her as OverGeneral of the Reunion,
the mistress of all wise brainwashing,
when all this time I’d worried where I’d fit in the hierarchy
and what cruel Master might squat at the top.

Surely the omniscient, luscious Caspra had forgiven me
for trying to rape and kill her, hadn’t she?
After all, wouldn’t a low-level Reunion agent like myself
naturally think it my duty to celebrate newfound Merge
via ritual murder of a brainless albeit sexy addict?

The enlightened and compassionate Goddess
must’ve understood I’d been overexcited by my new powers.
Certainly my continual ballooning of Merge was Caspra’s way
of offering Full Enlightenment to her most loyal subject.
For wasn’t she signaling to me, and indeed to all the Reunion,
I understand and love you, my darling irreplaceable Walter?

Yes, why wouldn’t the OverGeneral invite me to her bed
in celebration of her imminent victory?

In any case my Merge was really starting to work now.
Dave was certainly no match for Caspra,
and in a few hours he’d be freaking
as fifty thousand Reunion soldiers closed in on him.
It would’ve been interesting to Merge with the bastard
because sometimes I could get into the guy’s head
and snap some inner switch even I didn’t understand
and Dave would babble and I’d manipulate him for hours.

Caspra obviously wanted me to set up Reunion Headquarters.
I’d offer Dave’s giant art warehouse for this purpose
and Caspra would be quite pleased
with this gesture of total obeisance to her.

After all, as Dave’s addict
I was part-owner of that warehouse with all its lovely abstract paintings,
and once Dave was dead, there were legal precedents
for the property to be fully deeded to the bereft addict,
especially in the light of the addict’s excellent growing Merge
and his infinite faithfulness to the Reunion.

That meant I already owned the warehouse,
which included Dave’s huge bed up there.
Yes, Caspra would enjoy that.
I was really quite talented
in pleasing women in bed; all the ladies sensed that.
I took a ragged breath, filled with new desire.
Thank God this war was over
and one could look to the fulfillment of all one’s erotic needs.

There was the dark warehouse; would I need a key?
Or would Caspra telekinetically unlock it from afar?
Or was she waiting for me there now?
Surely I could get a least a cheap bottle of wine from a drugstore.
Maybe some fairly decent cheese, and crackers?
Also a couple boxes of ribbed, lubricated condoms?
On the other hand, wouldn’t the OverGeneral of the Reunion
laugh at the need for condoms?
Who cared about STD’s or pregnancy
now that final victory was at hand?

In fact, it might well be that Caspra wanted
to bear my son and groom him as the next OverGeneral.
I didn’t mind not being OverGeneral myself.
What a thankless task that would be.
Simply being Caspra’s eternal consort would be enough.
Of course fathering a line of Reunion OverGenerals definitely had its appeal.

I raised my right arm in stiff salute to the Goddess herself.
For surely that was Caspra up there singing out her blessing:
For you are to be Merged into Reunion, dear one.
This does involve the cessation of your consciousness.
You resist me? You refuse my voluptuous body in bed?
You refuse my shells and bombs penetrating your pretty paradise?

I hadn’t thought my Merge was that extensive yet.
I didn’t know how I could know so much in such detail.
The stress of impending death
propelled me to higher levels of Merge.
But the chilling thought came that maybe
this was how Caspra removed Merge
as punishment for all my broken trust with her.

Would I come out of this with an obedient, spastic body,
but no conscious soul? Would I even care I was alive
after Caspra Coronae shoved me into ecstasy
and scooped out my brains and adorned herself
with the remnants of my junior varsity Reunion glory,
leaving raw void for me?

How should I regard having every thought examined
and then feel that thought’s exact opposite,
its negation, jammed rough into my mind,
demolishing my entire structure
in an ever-growing flood of insanity?

I looked down at the 9 mm pistol
and thought of doing the job myself.
So much less panic in the end.
Easier on everyone.

Yes, I’d always been the outsider,
never quite competent enough
to truly be a part of Caspra’s Army of the Reunion.
Instead I was delegated to spy duty,
the most menial task in the hierarchy.
Spies had to repress themselves, act at least marginally good.
I was terrible at it so I went around killing people and screwing things up.

I was on the wrong side of the Reunion and the wrong side of Dave.
If I ran to embrace either, both would start firing.

But now I sensed trouble in the Reunion ranks.
One division had pulled out of the attack to senselessly maraud east.
Other troops began to fire upon each other.
There were riots behind me,
and shells of blue-green gas landed on friendly forces.
There were mass desertions as I reeled with the intensity of my own Merge.

New shells shrieked down and exploded.
Acrid smoke rose, and homeowners fell all around me.
Hundreds of tanks churned ahead of machine-gunning troops,
plowing up houses and trees as searchlights whipped all over the sky.
And I saw that the puffy blue-green explosions were God.

For I was touching God as He came to the opening battle of the Apocalypse.
I watched the hand of God move over the battlefield
wiping out life wherever it lingered,
rolling the tanks over the trenches, raising the proud hallucinatory gases.
I knew I’d united everything, I the spy had united all the Reunion,
all their fracturing armies, I knew them all, I read them all.

But even I was surprised to recall
the techniques I’d used to insert myself into Dave’s mind.
How easy it had been to paralyze his thoughts,
to know precisely where to reach in
and make the son of a bitch as evil as me,
to make him worship death and dread the same way I did.

I had the switch in my grasp but dared not touch it.
Gaps in the Merge kept that particular horror from me,
had prevented me from knowing that she intended
to perform the highest torture on her most loyal lieutenant.

Loyal? Hell, no, I’d run from Caspra. Betrayed her.
Why had I never been able to obey my Goddess?
I tried to rip into her mind but found a solid white egg at her center,
impenetrable, twenty miles across and weighing millions of tons.

Then why wouldn’t I remove my own Merge?
Surely as part of Caspra’s army I had to execute all her commands.
But maybe I was following them,
maybe I was unraveling my own Merge according to her plan from the start.

Thousands of muzzle flashes lit the gloaming sunset.
It was lovely, hypnotic.
Bright shell explosions blossomed everywhere.
Just one shell, I prayed, one shell to strike this tower square,
to wipe this dying ember of civilization.

A final ray of sunset shot through the stone towers
floodlighting my blackened toad face
as I invaded that celebration to strangle all minds.
Screams and booms and muzzle blasts merged into worldwide roar,
and I rose to the center of the entire short-circuited universe,
for now an entire army came to me,
white Reunion men tossing grappling hooks,
hoisting themselves to the next level, then the next.

I controlled them all, my mind slipping into their patterns,
accelerating faster than I’d ever imagined they could.
I had no idea what to do with the power I had over my people,
I knew I could fly right out of here, fly right off that balcony,
and my unconscious commands would spool out on their own forever.

There was spine-freezing predation in the beast’s dark eyes.
Everyone knew I could regain complete control,
could exercise my full terrible Merge,
the speechless horror it created in all those I touched,
the grisly things people had done
even while sickened to perform them in my name.

Sure it was a game; there was nothing magical about it.
It just took time and attention and energy
to figure out how to dig into a loose mind
and flip it your way in seconds.
The fraud works because deep down we all want it to.

I flowed into them all, suggested the scam, sprang the change.
Thousands of bullets traced hot vectors through me,
negating every thought and memory,
each bullet a particle of matter canceling
its corresponding particle of antimatter within me.
I spread further and further into the cosmos.
So it was peace to remove my Merge.
I never would’ve guessed that.

The Damage Patrol Quartet: Four Stories

Posted on December 23, 2021 by Michael D. SmithDecember 23, 2021

A feckless young architect falls in with a sixteen-year-old’s dubious trucking venture. Drug-addled Randy bemoans his fate as a slave employee in New Fascist Australia. An archeologist arrives on a tiny artificial gravity platform to give a scholarly lecture to barbarian colonists. And the Conscious Reach Corporation sets out to cure an entire city’s mental illness.

Amazon Paperback
Kindle eBook
Smashwords eBook in numerous formats

I don’t generally like short story collections. I prefer the long, developed narrative of a novel and don’t like the abrupt shifts to totally new characters and plot. When I see a story collection tacked onto an author’s list on Amazon, I figure they or their publisher just want to pad the list with lower-grade work.

But after listening to audio versions of two excellent Cory Doctorow short story collections (Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present, and Radicalized: Four Tales of Our Present Moment), I was struck by how the stories strengthen each other. If they don’t cover the exact same theme, the stories share a unified tone and worldview.

So I was inspired to offer four of my best stories, similarly unified in their plot twists and dreamlike perceptions. They’re also an homage to my childhood writing in that, like many of my kid writings, they’re influenced by the Twilight Zone, one of my two great childhood inspirations, the other being nineteen-fifties Grade B science fiction movies.

I’d been hesitant about this project until I got into it, but this endeavor has turned out to be much more rewarding than I’d first envisioned. All four stories have been open to new edits and improvements, even the two already published elsewhere. As far as I can see there are no other stories to add, and no other story collections I want to do. I’m primarily a novelist, and think of stories as idea test beds or novel practice. So I don’t have that many stories since my college experiments.

I just received the first proof copies of The Damage Patrol Quartet, and I find the short book absolutely lovely, much more important to me than I expected when I set out to do this project in September.

Two were previously published: “Roadblock” (Ethernet, 2013) and “Perpetual Starlit Night” in Twisted Tails VII (Double Dragon Publishing, 2013). Two, “Roadblock” and “Randy and Laura,” were originally part of longer novel drafts.

Roadblock

A feckless architectural school graduate falls in with a sixteen-year-old’s dubious trucking venture that takes them to the rural south in deep night. There they encounter a massive roadblock, and construction strikers with the power to eradicate all light.

“Roadblock” was originally a chapter in Zarreich, a sprawling, unpublishable rough draft novel that incorporated dozens of my most bewildering dreams, and which led an army of confused characters across endless psychic minefields. In this story, it’s pretty obvious that Oceanmouth is the perfect psychological dream companion.

Randy and Laura

Randy lives in the drug-addled delusion that he’s a slave employee at New Fascist Australia Toll Road Number One. Laura, who also works at the urban American gas station generating this fantasy, hopes to save enough cash at the menial job to escape both Randy and her tyrannical father, whom Randy worships as the NFA Gasoline Minister.

“Randy and Laura” also sprang from a dream, and would still work as a flashback to Randy Perrine’s bizarre past in my novel Sortmind, from which this story originated. But it would’ve merely been a long detour if I’d kept it in the novel.

Perpetual Starlit Night

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

A big plus to including this story in The Damage Patrol Quartet is leaving “Perpetual Starlit Night” as is, the perfect surreal story, no further explanations needed. Recently I’d had the idea of turning this previously published work into the first four chapters of a novel, and I came up with a fairly detailed plot for what would happen as Sairjin slowly accepted her inexplicable new life. But I’m not sure I ever deeply wanted to expand the story; it seems more fitting to have closure on it and put it out the way it is. In any case, having it here as a story doesn’t preclude later making it into a novel. I have to admit that something about the Shi Idnin character does beckon.

Damage Patrol

The Conscious Reach Corporation sets out to cure an entire city’s mental illness, one tormented soul at a time. IT technician Lucy earns a promotion to head the Damage Patrol unit, but her uncanny ability to reach inside the wounded and burn out their traumas leads her to the evil at the root of the corporation.

What can you say about a story that unfolded in half a second as you walked to lunch in downtown Dallas? What if you really had to update thousands and thousands of psychological messes? Who gave you that authority?