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A Writing Biography, Part IV: The Perfect Cube and Beyond

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on November 2, 2021 by Michael D. SmithAugust 4, 2023

Recapping Part III as the Author Seeks Sympathy for How Terribly Difficult This Post Has Been

May 13, 1968 PaperweightIn rereading Writing Biographies I-III I’m struck by how they stand outside my usual self-description. I remember all that history, but it was as if someone else interviewed me and wrote it up. Yet I haven’t felt up to doing Part IV, even though I’ve collected notes for this post since September 2014. Gluing high school and college consciousness together is problematic; I don’t know who’s going to make sense of, then interview, the 1968 adolescent who graduates from Rice six years later as a semi-mature young man.

It was fitting to end Part III with December 1967. I definitely learned to write that year. The lengthy 1967 letters between me and my friend Sabin Russell showed both of us mastering language and quirky, open, satirical, conversational styles–but there was little spark of adult consciousness yet.

It’s tempting to throw in way too much into this post, but, just as with Biographies I-III, this isn’t the place to expound on America in the 60’s, historical events of the time, the history of the counterculture, or my own biography, Rice University life, or the billion themes and influences of these years. Or to deride how adolescent so much of this writing was by its author’s very nature. My story summaries below try to put them in the best light possible, but feel free to wince.

The Salamander Raid, Two Cube Stories, and Claiming the Writer

The Perfect Cube copyright 2021 by Michael D. SmithAs mentioned in the Part II post, even as a fifth grader I had a sense of myself as a writer; I felt quite professional in turning out weekly science fiction stories. But during the Part III years I imploded and ceased to think of myself that way. Then 1968 opened up wondrously, and a sad little parable popped out in April, “The Salamander Raid,” about biologists hunting salamanders to extinction. The story marked a stunning change in self-awareness. I still didn’t dare call myself a writer, but I’d just written something that I recognized as a leap forward. Note that I also needed my English teacher to affirm that.

Another major step came in December. One night I lay miserably sick in bed, feverishly immersed in two events of the previous day; the first was the play I’d acted in for English class, Beckett’s Act Without Words, in which the main character stacks and sits upon various-sized cubes. The second was two red transparent dice I’d been examining before bed. I considered the number 27, a perfect cube, the cube root being 3. In the story that flowed out, a man invents and exhibits an absolutely perfect cube, not only in its 4” x 4” x 4” dimensions, but, much like the mathematical concept of a perfect cube, the object is implied to have mystical attributes. It’s so perfect it must be stored in full vacuum in a bell jar. But an angry young man (of course) smashes the jar, and the cube dissolves as the young man declares that “The world is not a place for perfect things.” I submitted “The Perfect Cube” as extra credit to my English teacher and her praise of it threatened to go to my head.

Mickey and Sabin in Chicago, August 1968 (Before the Convention)

Mickey and Sabin in Chicago, August 1968 (Before the Convention)

I knew I had something important here, though. As I wrote Sabin in June 1969: “I honestly feel ‘The Perfect Cube’ is the best thing I have ever written. Its dreamlike quality, its absurdity, its crazy logic, even the concept of absolute perfection as embodied in the Cube, have strangely appealed to me. Others have also found it interesting … And thinking deeper, I thought that it gave a sort of melancholy feeling that there is a serious basic flaw in life that cannot be corrected … Somehow I feel that I didn’t even write it, that it was written for me. It’s the weirdest idea I’ve ever thought of.”

It still seems scarcely conceivable how, even after coming up with “The Perfect Cube,” I failed to assert I was a writer. But the story propelled me onto new paths. The following month I wrote “The Individual,” about a man arrested for being a true individual, and March saw the high-energy satire “Farewell, Dear Toothbrush,” exploring the agony of consigning a loyal but spent toothbrush to the wastebasket. I also came up with an anti-war mockery of heroic World War II movies, “War is Hades!”

But “The Perfect Cube” nagged at me, and in May 1969 I followed up with “The Return of the Perfect Cube.” I have no memory of this sequel; all I can recall is that it was chaotic and echoed recent depression, and that I left it in penciled rough draft. Yet this didn’t matter. I’d at least attempted to get out something honest and up-to-date about myself. 2021 note to myself: Having something turn out poorly was just as instructive as having something turn out perfectly. It now strikes me as significant that in May 1969, after what was more or less a failure, I finally declared that I was a writer.

The Burning

Since “Farewell, Dear Toothbrush” and the sequel to “The Perfect Cube” no longer exist, I’ll take a slight detour to wonder at myself for burning some of this stuff in 1976, after reading Melville’s advice in Pierre, or the Ambiguities to burn your crappy writing so it mixes back into the unconscious, or whatever he said. I did get rid of some real junk, as well as rough drafts taking up space in my writing folders, but there’s much other writing I regret losing. In a couple cases I was able to reconstruct lost items, and I wrote off the loss of rough drafts as no big deal. I chose the victims in 1976 based on how adolescent they sounded to my so-called mature Akard Drearstone consciousness. I only burned items from 1968-1973, keeping everything from 1974 on.

Absurdity

My writing has always had absurdist elements. In looking over some old Sabin letters I came across a note about my 1969 high school assignment to research Theater of the Absurd and Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. I felt I was coming home, in the same way I so quickly took to perspective drawing in the seventh grade. Why haven’t I seen this more clearly before? I’ve often declared, for instance, that my literary work Sortmind isn’t really science fiction; but the absurdist elements and the underlying satire make it impossible to regard Sortmind as a depiction of normal reality. Likewise Akard Drearstone, CommWealth, and The Soul Institute are in no way normal. The Jack Commer science fiction series is true to its space opera functions, but even then, the background is outrageous. This thread goes through almost all the stories mentioned in this post. It’s intriguing to note that anything attempting to depict fully straight reality is generally a failure.

June 1969 saw “Barney’s Missile,” in which Barney’s job is to sit in a cockpit atop a nuclear missile and ride it on a breathtaking journey to the enemy’s capital city. He doesn’t even know there’s a war starting, but is exhilarated with his space flight. That’s another story I burned; wish I still had it. In October came “The Mathematician,” in which a zealous math student is killed by police for hoarding math library books. In November’s “The Man Who Believed in Antarctica,” a derelict on a park bench tells our young narrator that he’s going to Antarctica because no war has ever been fought there. Not bad, but in retrospect a creative-writin’-teacher-pleasin’ sort of story. Then came another effort burned in 1976 which I wish I’d kept so I could reexamine its dismal dullness: December 1969’s “The Party,” a ponderous attempt to explain how a kid at a society party philosophically knows he must kill himself. I berated myself for this one at the time, noting that I was “groping for my emotions in my Roget’s Thesaurus.”

Voices

JournalsMy senior year included a Fall 1969 creative writing class, which was demanding, highly beneficial, and life-altering, though it also had some of the drawbacks of any such class, like communal consciousness, sloganeering exhortations to write, sitting under trees to record “sense impressions,” and genuflection before Best Methods as Handed Down by Them. But the advice to keep a writing journal changed everything.

I’d initially resisted keeping a journal the same way I resist Facebook and Twitter now. A journal seemed antithetical to my writing methods, but I did see the need to keep writing ideas organized, so from November 1969 through January 1970 I made notes on 3 x 5 cards. Then I finally broke down and transcribed the cards into a silver spiral notebook, the first of what became scores of official writing journals. I had no journal voice at first, and the first notes were strident, mawkish, cute, or unwritable. Sometime in April 1970 I found my journal voice, though, and that was quite miraculous. I had a story-writing voice that was still pretty stiff and distant, though it could open up in satire. I had a Sabin-letter-writing voice that was loose and free and constantly developing. It was only slightly akin to the new journal voice, however. I won’t say that the journal voice was completely free; there were certainly things I wouldn’t discuss in there, but even those barriers broke down by the time I got to Rice later that year.

Through the high school years and into Rice I had yet another voice, deliberately pompous but strangely grounding: the aphorisms of Oliver the Giant Cat, which could be either satire or serious musings. Though I burned the fair copies of four binders of aphorisms, I found the rough drafts stored at my parents’ house in 1981. The five volumes of this era were: Live, and Strive for Happiness! (1969); Green Rainbows and Elephant Tracks in the Morning Mist (1970); The Odyssey of the Perfect Whirlpool (1971); Playground! (1972); and Spasm of Terror (February to October 1972, rough draft in a notebook, never finished).

Obligation Versus Energy

High school methods of writing included working off those early note cards or ideas in the new journal, but the flood of fresh awareness and early successes, and my willingness to open up to dreams like “The Perfect Cube,” meant that such notes no longer felt like the strained obligation of earlier plans, as, for instance, Summer 1967’s grim outline of writing projects. (Back to Part III if necessary.) Nevertheless, dire undercurrents of “should” continued for the next few years, probably up to the time of writing my novel Nova Scotia in 1973. I had not yet learned to follow the high energy; I hadn’t figured out that if an idea has no underlying energy, it’s not writable. Having energy doesn’t automatically make it easy, either. You have to be sensitive to where the energy is forming, and take on the task with vigor, whether it’s all spelled out for you or whether it demands experimentation, failure, and rethinking.

1970 stories were a mix of miraculously inspired plots, often from dreams, as well as those poorly-constructed obligation trips. January’s “Mr. Gray” was a somewhat sanctimonious riff on a man I saw drawing cash from a walk-up bank booth, notable for at least trying to muse on people outside myself. Published in our school literary magazine’s Brotherhood Issue (well-meaning middle-class high school kid consciousness), it seemed to bring me to the attention of the school as a writer. Hey, I did get a writing award and $5.00 in a school assembly at the end of the year.

March’s “The Bombers” came from a dream in which narrator-me and my friend plant bombs wherever we want, blowing up things and people as a practical joke, until one day I’m suddenly consumed with guilt. Another one burned to my regret. April saw a dream turned into the nightmare draft of “Underground,” in which soldiers must remove 40,000 dead Vietnam servicemen from an underground garage. Draft 2 in January 1971 was published in Rice’s literary magazine. At my former high school advisor’s insistence, in June 1971 I sent Version 3 to a literary magazine called The Leprechaun–but the submission came back “addressee unknown” and I joked that even the post office rejected my story. This was my first submission outside of school and the first time I’d seen Writer’s Market.

I also regret burning “Nice,” a precise document of where I was in April 1970, a bitter satire of everything being “nice,” including flooring our family Pontiac to 70 mph on a suburban road. But I discovered a new sense of revision consciousness with this one and kept polishing the draft over and over. My AP English teacher just wrote “Nice!” as a comment; I could tell she didn’t understand male teen angst.

I wish I still had August 1970’s “Another View of the Nonconformist,” for the same reason I’d still like to have “The Party.” This was a fairly long screed about the Man Alone in Nature who moves into a circular stone house in the woods. He considers it symbolic of ancient Greece and Primeval Truth–except that he’s haunted by the Race Track of Insane, Mechanized Society which he knows he’ll never escape. Yuck.

October 1970’s “Silhouette” was notable as the first story where I tried to write anything about sex. All I remember are stairs like an Aztec temple, and the guy and girl always finding obstacles and suffering. The writing was chaotic and unsatisfying. Of course I burned it in 1976, though I wish I still had it.

November 1970’s “Sam is Coming Home” was a major story, which I still have, taken from a nightmare in which I actually killed myself. Sabin was the model for the rational Sam in opposition to the troubled narrator. Writing this out seemed to fully answer a lot of adolescent torment. This story was carelessly shoveled into the first draft of Sortmind in 1987, though later mercifully removed.

The Cube Process copyright 2021 by Michael D. SmithEarly Rice style followed the high school writing methods, with a marked resurgence of attending to obligations instead of following writing energy. Thus I had various plans I either forced myself to write or else abandoned in guilt. But apparently I got so tired of suffering my first semester at Rice that I assumed a sort of airy philosophical stance, which I consciously based on the admonition to be cheerful in Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game.

January 1971’s “I Am a Freshwater Fish, and Water Diffuses In” is probably the best example of obligation-writing; I’d been down on myself for putting it off since the previous October. Something about a guy who designs toilet paper, then seeks some mystical experience on the beach. Yay. Burned 1976.

March’s “The Disgusting Bastard” was a decent story, albeit written in a smirking, creative-writing class style. The brainless (“unreliable”) narrator hears apartment neighbors Orange and Fitz arguing about Orange’s cringing personality, and Fitz eventually kills Orange. In “Flexible Contradiction,” Mortimer seeks what the title suggests at a society lady’s mansion, to everyone’s displeasure. A goofy story of no importance other than to illustrate my mastery of cheerful equilibrium.

May’s Total Annihilation: Camouflage! is a play in which a high school romantic quadrilateral is likened to negotiations between warring European powers. Funny, and a much better-executed illustration of my emotional distancing, it was later performed in two different venues at Rice and eventually became a blog post.

But my above-it-all posture would blow up over the coming summer. When I got home from my first year at Rice, I feared I was losing a good friend to drugs, and things got terribly serious. Fall writings started reflecting that, such as September’s “The Nearest, Most Easily Available Hurricane,” in which five boys drive to the city despite dire hurricane warnings. Two do psychedelics and when the hurricane hits so do the rest, going entirely crazy while the destruction mounts. All are killed but the narrator, who’s also poised to buy the farm any second.

October’s “Prelude, Hurricane, Disorientation, Upheaval, Winter,” has the narrator, after a semester of running mazes at The Institution, return home to parents who force him to work in a factory. Rebelling, he links up with his problematic girlfriend, but after severe weather destroys the entire area, he wakes up in his wrecked back yard to see the girl dead. Oh boy. “Elaborate Pantomime” laid out a Twilight Zone-like plot where a young student is teased about his preparations for nuclear war, but then it turns out to be real. Or did he just go psycho?

Wiess Cracks, Theater, and Collaboration

Goodbye Crack, 5/5/72 copyright 1972 by Michael D, SmithIn the Fall 1971 semester of my sophomore year at Rice, I jumped at the chance to edit The Wiess Crack, abandoned by its current editor. I saw Wiess College’s lame humor magazine becoming a real literary investigation. This led to a new practice of collaboration with friends and other writers, in the Crack as well as in plays that Cosmic Productions put on over the following years. There were deadlines, improvisations, last-minute decisions, chores, successes and failures. The blog post for the Wiess Crack goes into much detail. The magazine dominated my last three years at Rice.

January 1972 saw “The Desirable Fuck,” a short horror piece about mindless drugged-up twits just a notch above barnyard animals. Over spring break I labored on “Father/Children,” the first time I included a father figure (in this case me playing someone killed years ago from hallucinogenic drug warfare, having left my mind-scrambled teenage kid narrator behind), and a disturbing conjecture about how future generations might cope with drug-induced brain damage.

During this difficult semester, which included a course postulating that I’d actually have time to read all of Dostoyevsky, I began dropping some deeper psychic anchors for both visual art and writing. The most astonishing writing wasn’t fiction, but thirty-one single-spaced typewritten pages of “The Story of My Life Since November 18, 1971,” a letter to Sabin which I composed on the electric Wiess Crack typewriter over three days during spring break, well into the early mornings. What began as an attempt to record three months of events since my last letter to Sabin turned into a turbocharged mission to write out everything. The letter was a gift from the universe that allowed me to reexamine and redefine myself.

That spring several of us decided to put on a couple plays, one of which was Total Annihilation, in which I played the War Correspondent. The experience of working with what we eventually called Cosmic Productions, and the energies released in collaboration and acting, sparked immense and welcome creative upheavals, and we performed the two plays three times in March to good crowds. This first taste of the theater has informed all my writing since then.

On reaching home in May, I worked at McDonald’s for a few weeks, determined to prove I could hold down a job and earn my own way in some small measure. I wrote a cycle of ten poems, centered around recent self-transformation, which I worshipped–and which Sabin lambasted as the writing of an “incurable romantic.” At night I hung out with my suburban Chicago buddies who seemed so well-grounded in earthy urban existence; they were refreshing, nourishing, and necessary. During sophomore year the level of superficial jokiness had increased between members of my Rice group, probably from Wiess Crack consciousness, the plays, and the Rice milieu itself, and I was forcefully struck by the contrast between the unpretentious, survival-oriented Chicago gang and my airy, jokey, intellectual Rice friends. Balancing between these two poles had a definite influence on my writing; possibly shifting back and forth between the two helped me eventually integrate comedy and tragedy. More below.

The Counterculture, Sloppiness, and Experimentation

Imverted Cube copyright 2021 by Michael D, SmithIt would take a completely different essay to factor in the role of late sixties’ cultural cataclysms, social, political, artistic, and musical, as they affected my writing. How they influenced the precise satire of “The Individual” or “The Mathematician” in 1969, versus what effect they had on my summer 1973 work on Nova Scotia, with the Watergate apocalypse blaring in the background, is difficult to calculate. Of course they were major stimuli–I can hardly imagine not having been blown away by seeing 2001 in March 1969–but I can’t help feeling that my writing trajectory wasn’t nudged too far by the culture around me.

Yet a certain psychic vagueness manifested itself during my interactions with freak and hippie culture, and though I still sought to honestly explore, looking back I can see where a sloppy style took hold. Maybe this arose from a need not to know myself, to stay unfocused, but I think it was also inspired by the ease with which rock music lyrics frequently veered into the dazzlingly incomprehensible. It was probably further influenced by counterculture authors emulating this trend.

So I blasted out a lot of blurry, pyrotechnic, experimental quasi-fiction, along with endless stream-of-consciousness harangues in the journal and on the typewriter through 1975. Not until September 1976, a few hundred pages into my novel Akard Drearstone, was I able to reconnect with clear prose. Melville may have been right after all; immediately after the great garbage can burning of old writing in the summer of 1976, Akard rocketed into astonishing unknown territory.

The important exception to this sloppiness, akin to medieval monks copying ancient Greek and Roman texts for the day when reason would return to the world, was my unbending dedication to brutally clear and expressive poetry, especially from 1971 to 1973. Every word, every punctuation mark, was carefully evaluated for maximum impact. I kept my precision intact in poetry and it would eventually return to my prose.

The original subtitle of this post was “Sensitive Stories Bludgeoned by the Wiess Crack,” but that isn’t a fair description of this era. Few of my stories could be described as “sensitive,” in fact, that description might only apply to “The Salamander Raid.” But I was always aiming for something serious. I considered humor a nice sideline, even though it was definitely part of my personality and was amplified in letters to Sabin. If I wrote a long poetic panegyric to Oliver the Giant Cat, or smirked out a “Farewell, Dear Toothbrush,” I thoroughly enjoyed the ballooning energy, laughing my head off as I reread and reread those pieces, but I didn’t think I should import that sort of flippancy into what I considered the serious stuff.

Even so, as outlined above, my writing had always included absurdist elements. Not for nothing was The Twilight Zone one of my two great childhood inspirations, the other being 1950’s Grade B science fiction movies. Dreams and their illogic were always a notable source for story ideas, and my best writing throughout this era usually had uncanny twists, distorted perceptions, and bizarre underpinnings. But it wasn’t humorous.

In any case I didn’t take well to numerous Wiess Crack contributions from my two main contributors, Bear and Joe, especially the last-minute ones I had to take that were slightly more advanced versions of the chuckle-along style of the old Wiess Crack mode I’d just finished overthrowing. Before long my vision of a serious literary investigation into the philosophical aspects of surreal consciousness was polluted by dull Rice boy “Gotcha Dumbass” entertainment; there was even a Crack by that title.

Despite what I just said, learning to collaborate with Bear and Joe, and finding gems in other writers, was worth the entire experience. Finishing up senior year with the masterpiece 200-Page Wiess Crack was a psychologically necessary summation of my entire Rice experience. Despite the final semester’s confusion and overwork, this Crack came out clean and direct. I finally did learn the lesson, as I wrote at the time, that “the editor must be a bastard.” By the end of my time at Rice I’d gotten the Crack where I wanted it.

Though I wrote funny things at Rice, I never truly accepted them. It wasn’t until I was thoroughly warmed up on Akard Drearstone, 1976-78, that I discovered how surreal, serious, and humorous elements could mix and support each other.

I’ve often wondered–through never terribly much, and even less since I’ve published several novels–what my style and content would have been if I hadn’t run into the counterculture. The high school style of discovery, distance, satire, and precision gave way to meandering, sometimes irresponsible light shows that may have been necessary experiments at the time but which also added a lot of self-sabotage to the works, and to the chance of finding publishers.

But musing how I might’ve kept high school precision might also be a way of wishing to have stayed a teenager, that I shouldn’t ever have grown beyond that. Well, life intervened and showed new paths. And if something pristine is dented along the way, that’s life as well.

Fall 1972 through May 1973, my junior year at Rice, saw the second season of the Wiess Crack, done more leisurely and maturely. Major stories included October’s “Bloody Death Accident FUCK-UP,” in which our hero sinks into an annihilating death only to be transformed into a mystical entity, and January 1973’s “The Cleaveriad,” something of a novelette and of course based on our group’s incessant watching of Leave it to Beaver reruns. Young Beaver gets addicted to snorting pantyhose and shooting Drano, but at last cleans himself and embarks on a soul journey. The piece was thoroughly satisfying and dominated January’s 80-Page Wiess Crack. This writing was an exception to shunning humor–I just threw myself into this thing and loved the work.

Maybe I felt guilty for having all that fun, though, for within a month I’d returned to shoving out sterile, self-protective efforts like an untitled one-page masterpiece about a guy wearing cowboy boots and sitting in a restaurant watching things. Wow. But this late winter minimalism was badly shaken in the spring when a student in writing class astonished me–and I think the whole class–by doing the exact opposite, pouring out page after page of psychological and emotional insights into the lives of numerous fascinating, complex characters. So, hey, I tried the same with forty handwritten pages of “Five-Pointed Stars,” weaving a lot of male and female characters into an account of a serious car accident I’d walked away from the previous December. At the time I considered “Five-Pointed Stars” more experiment than art, but I note that I’ve never returned to the icy minimalist crap.

So, embracing fun and friends and fresh creation, that spring I collaborated with Joe, along with some good musicians, in writing Beaver’s First Fuck, a rock opera in which Beaver joins a cannibalistic hippie commune, murders his parents, and leads a revolution against the Mayfield bourgeoisie. This was glorious high-energy inspiration, and Cosmic Productions performed the rock opera in April at Wiess before a packed crowd. Imagine me, Gilbert, singing on stage. We also videotaped the production the following spring.

I had more fun collaboration over the summer as my Chicago friend Dan and I effortlessly spun out the plot of the novel Nova Scotia as we drove a panel truck to help a friend move. I quit my graveyard shift Dunkin Donuts job and, buying a 1940’s Royal Deluxe typewriter for $50, spent a month banging out the 116-page novel about Dan and Mike driving a Corvette at 350 m.p.h. from Chicago to Nova Scotia in one night in a demented quest to save the world. Writing a novel was immensely satisfying and answered so many ambitions. The second draft in spring 1974 served as a senior thesis, one of my forty Rice courses. Very fitting.

Kicked into the Future

Wrenches and Marbles copyright 2011 by Michael D. SmithSenior year’s Fall 1973 was a sober, serious time, with the background of the Yom Kippur war, the oil embargo, and Watergate. Fall writings of interest included October 1973’s “Political Revolutions,” from a dream of delivering newspapers to impossibly difficult rural locations. It emphasized dream logic and Wiess Crack readers liked it. In November and December I wrote The Fifty-First State of Consciousness, which I’ve always considered a real novel because it covers so much territory, even though it’s only sixty-three pages. Named like “K.” in The Trial, “G.” explores the fifty-first state of consciousness and links up with its Governor in the ultimate shopping mall metaphor for human consciousness. This was a heartfelt effort, if uneven in its only draft. But one of its later chapters was truly electric and has always seemed like the beginning of my modern novelistic consciousness.

Spring and Summer 1974 writings were a blur of short typewritten ideas and rough draft poems amid the hassle of The 200-Page Wiess Crack, a second draft and manuscript of Nova Scotia, and the Beaver videotape project. After graduating from Rice in May, I decided it was time for this new novelist to seek publishers, and I laboriously revised “Five-Pointed Stars” and a 51st State chapter, “Holy/Unholy,” for submission to literary magazines. Yet after researching some of these magazines at Fondren Library I got so depressed that I abandoned the attempt to enter what looked like a dreary, hopeless writing sweepstakes. I’d venture in again the following year.

In June 1974 I returned to my childhood space pilot Jack Commer in “The Martian Holes,” which covered the evacuation, in the face of the coming destruction of the Earth, of only the rich upper classes to Mars. A swashbuckling lack of focus, fun in itself, but not what I wanted to be doing. It still wound up, along with my 1968 essay on Jack for high school English class, in 2021’s The UR Jack Commer.

Amid plans for marriage, a six-week public health library job in Houston, a new motorcycle, Patty Hearst on the run, the Lester Quartz comic strip, Watergate’s finale and Nixon’s resignation, I relaxed over the summer, painting big canvases like Interstellar Wombat, Insect Brandishing the Jupiter Symphony, and Smiling Nancy–and I deeply relaxed about writing. Despite that ongoing sloppiness, the first parts of a long story, “Space, Time and Tania,” composed right before Nancy and I got married, were delightful. It was the start of regeneration and new exploring. I’d complete it in Dallas, revise it, and it would eventually find a publisher.

copyright 2021 by Michael D. Smith

Posted in A Writing Biography, Akard Drearstone, Dreams, Early Writing, Novels, Plays, Sortmind, Stories, Wiess Cracks, Writing, Writing Process | 1 Reply

Interview with the Burlcron/Mercer/Singletree

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on August 3, 2021 by Michael D. SmithJune 17, 2022

As recorded May 30, 2021 at Smith Writing Studios. Alfred Moid Burlcron, a major character in my novel The Soul Institute, emerged as a recurring archetype as I prepared for the novel Caspra Coronae. I interviewed him just after speaking with archetype Aria Laci Coronae, who was delighted to take on the Caspra role in the novel and who also convinced me to change Caspra’s last name to her own. I was uneasy at the thought of the abusive Burlcron playing the shamanic wise man Marshall Singletree (originally named Tarat Lysander Mercer), but I knew Singletree would prove much more fragile than first indicated in the novel, and I hoped Burlcron’s pompous energy would give new insight into the character. But of course Burlcron ran in still more bizarre directions–and unexpectedly strengthened Caspra Coronae.

Session I

The Burlcron Archetype copyright 1996-2021 by Michael D. Smith

The Burlcron Archetype, digitally revamped oil pastel

Mike: Welcome, Alfred, Aria and I just finished up.

Alfred Moid Burlcron: Wow! Aren’t you lucky, to get to interview such a fine piece of ass!

Mike: What?

Burlcron: Oh, don’t sputter all over me! We archetypes are all buddies, we can say anything we want to each other, about each other, whatever we want. It’s all cool. So chill out, dude.

Mike: You–you’re stoned! I can’t believe it! You can’t be stoned for this!

Burlcron: Well, so what if I am? Burlcron was a big doper, y’ know. Only way he could hold his genius together, y’know.

Mike: Oh, man, this is gonna be a disaster. I need you to be Marshall Singletree.

Burlcron: Hell, I can do Singletree. Easy as 1-2-3. Don’t sweat it, man. Hell, you know I won’t do dope when I’m actually onstage.

Mike: Crap! Crap!

Burlcron: And note I’m dressed exactly for Singletree! Yeah, we all know you can’t describe anyone physically worth a damn. But get this: tight white turtleneck over this massive chest! Man, this guy has amazing pecs! The women go nuts for him! And no way the sweater can hide these huge biceps! And look at these forearms like hunks of iron! And these big freakin’ meaty hands!

Mike: Aw, geez, I never authorized Singletree to look like that! You’re Burlcron, fifty-something, balding, slender, taller than what I envisioned Singletree as, as a matter of fact.

Burlcron: Okay, okay, I paid Konceptual Body Design a helluva lot to fashion the ideal Mercer/Singletree character. It hurt, lopping four inches offa me, I tell ya! But I do anything for art. Puff up my pecs like this, musta done ten million reps with the barbells.

Mike: Oh, man. But I guess this will work for Singletree.

Burlcron: Yeah, admit it, dude, this is what you had in your mind’s eye all along. And get a load of these super-tight jeans. Not as tight as Aria’s luscious yoga pants, but you get the genitally-oriented picture, and I’m sure all my lady fans do as well. And I may be middle-aged, but look at this fantastic male tush! And these huge leather boots!

Sound: Bam!

Mike: Dammit, don’t slam them on my coffee table! Dammit, you cracked it!

Burlcron: Just like Mercer or Singletree would crack your puny narrow mind wide open! Face it, man, you need me in this damn book just the way I am! A massive combination of Burlcron and Mercer to become this Marshall Singletree dude! A true leader!

Mike: With flaws, with flaws, remember. Dammit, my coffee’s everywhere, all over my notes!

Burlcron: Hell with it, man. Just crap of the real world. Let’s talk about the damn flaws, man. Do I ever know about flaws! I’m your man for flaws! Like banging Jipo in the Soul Institute meadow where anybody could’ve seen us!

Mike: Dammit, I need help for this novel, and you’re just off on your ego trip!

Burlcron: I’m perfectly in character. Burlcron was nothing but ego trip, and this Singletree guy, well, as far as we all know, he’s just doing a damn good job of hiding his ego trip, even from himself. So … do I get the part?

Mike: Dammit. You know it’s too late for any of the Archetypes to get axed now.

Burlcron: But you get your petty revenge soon, when I get blown away in Part I. Man, that’s a waste of a major archetype, if you ask me.

Mike: I need you to just play the part, as written, as the Burlcron Archetype. Not the Alfred Moid Burlcron of The Soul Institute, but a combination of all those characters: Mercer, Burlcron, Randy Perrine, Larry Cathedral, Waterfall Sequence. Or Don Easterling, Mavory Deltrang, or Alexander Harper. Or Gaspard Toland, Harray Andreality, or the Gasoline Minister.

Burlcron: Hell, I know ’em all. No big deal. Could do this crap in my sleep. So you’re saying you’re not gonna let me ad-lib this thing?

Mike: Oh, hell, of course you can ad-lib, if you stay in character. In the Marshall Singletree character. We even want ad-libbing. It’s the whole channeling thing, you know. But Singletree may turn out to be harder than you think, because he’s really a tragic character, and your last major turn, in The Soul Institute, was comic.

Burlcron: I really got shafted in The Soul Institute. Arrested by the TSI cops, lost my wife, my daughter, everything. Humiliated. All because I wanted the best Soul Institute possible. Piss on that! The only work I’ve had since then is the 2019 Sortmind revision, and I was just needed to overdub a few lines for Gaspard Toland. I hope you remember that even though that was damn minor, I got a Heroes of Consciousness nomination for that bit.

Mike: Yeah, I remember. You really threw all your talents into a minor but necessary role there, and it worked. Thanks for that.

Burlcron: Look, Mr. Author. Mike. I mean really. I want to live. I don’t think Singletree really needs to die for his sins in the book. Sure he crumbled, sure he turned his back on his own principles, mainly because he wanted to stick it in Claudia more than he wanted to save humanity, but, hell, man, does he really have to die? Couldn’t he just become one more addict that everyone feels really sorry for and like, always freaked out about?

Mike: Interesting. Mercer/Singletree does have to come completely apart psychically in the novel. And if you could handle that scene, maybe there’s no reason he actually has to die. He just becomes a ruin, a passive burden to the new company.

Burlcron: Maybe he gets addicted to Revenge, and gets Walter for a Sponsor! Because Walter could never really prove he was addicted. Get this: Walter really did pull out his gun and point it at Singletree’s head, but he fired and missed! And Billy grabbed the gun away before Walter could fire again. Singletree’s now deaf in his right ear, or something.

Mike: On the other hand, his death at Walter’s hands is completely unexpected and shocking to the party, and shows how completely evil Walter is.

Burlcron: Yeah, but you’ll note that after he dies, the partygoers sort of continue the party just like before. No way that would work in real life, man, even in this weird dystopian society you’ve got going. What would really happen is that someone would call the cops and they’d show up and everyone would go home. Or get taken down to the station. No way Dave would go into his room and open his draft notice, just like that.

Mike: Huh. A convincing argument, I admit. I was truly set to have Singletree die. I see you’re getting into character after all. You’re sounding more like Singletree and not like Alfred Moid now.

Burlcron: Of course, of course! Another possibility is that I survive Walter’s shot, I’m broken and ridiculed like before, but now Walter is assigned as my addict.

Mike: That could lead you two in interesting directions in Part II. Is one of you the Phoxl Head?

Burlcron: Even though everyone knows you don’t want a Head.

Mike: Right. But the question remains: is one or both of you addicted, and who’s the Sponsor then?

Burlcron: In any case, Walter’s attempt on my life is what galvanizes Billy into taking command. Singletree can’t function in the army itself, he’s just sort of a hanger-on.

Mike: Okay, got it. But I really haven’t fully decided if Singletree lives or not.

Burlcron: Damn! Look, if he dies, maybe he comes back like Banquo’s ghost or something! Delivering wise, mystical, scary crap to everyone in the middle of the night, from beyond the grave. Maybe even in the shell hole.

Mike: Well, what he says wouldn’t be wise, because he’s been unmasked as a fool in Part I. Maybe he’d spurt out more nonsense that everyone knows to be idiocy. Ironic comments on what’s happening, like a Greek chorus.

Burlcron: Sheesh. I’ll do it either way, dude. Guess I have to. Don’t remember signin’ a contract, but hell, I need the damn work. You know you got me over a barrel, man.

Mike: C’mon, it ought to be an actor’s challenge, to play “Burlcron” in a different key. You’ll have to develop the weaker/Shadow side of Mercer/Singletree. Faking it, being unknowing and self-deluding.

Burlcron: You’re saying I don’t know how to act that kind of crap right now?

Mike: You’re going to have to work on developing that. Your ego-trip nature right now is preventing you from seeing Singletree’s flaws.

Burlcron: Crap! You can’t psychoanalyze me like that!

Mike: Sure I can. I have to. But I need you to see all this yourself. I mean, here we have Singletree, in all his false modesty about not claiming to be a real leader or a resolution to the Phoxl, nevertheless surrounding himself with worshippers, exerting his charisma to the max, bedding the much younger Reva to Kina’s total consternation, writing this book Liberating the F**k, all the while crowing about himself while claiming not to crow about himself. Claiming to lead humble Migrations with all this philosophical BS, mesmerizing everyone.

Burlcron: So the mother goes down hard. Maybe even needs to die. I can see that. Dammit. Maybe Part II needs to be totally void of Singletree.

Mike: It’s the only way Dave can eventually assume leadership. Otherwise he’d be looking at that Singletree shell and wondering “What would Mercer do?”

Burlcron: Yeah, I get it. Singletree buying the farm means total change.

Mike: And we need Kina numb, not just embarrassed on behalf of her father, pitying him, etc. He succumbed at the party, but then he went out cleanly. Even as a martyr.

Burlcron: Huh. Maybe you’re right.

Mike: I haven’t made my mind up yet, but going back and forth with you on this, I think we need his shocking death, and Billy’s order for Leon to bury the guy out in the pen.

Burlcron: Then won’t Billy also buying the farm in Part II repeat that?

Mike: I don’t think so. Billy will die a hero. And it all shows that innocent Dave, essentially third on the list, really has to ramp himself up to assume command.

Burlcron: Damn. Okay, I guess I can fit into this role and do a good job. Like I’m dressed for the Singletree part already, y’know. I had Konceptual cut four inches cut off my height. Maybe we need more. Like Burlcron is 6’4”, maybe Singletree should be much shorter than six feet. Like 5’9” or something.

Mike: Yeah, maybe.

Burlcron: Hell, I’m gonna need more dope for that.

Session II

Mike: You did it! You’re 5’9” now!

Burlcron: Yeah, it was a trip, all right. Konceptual has this robotic surgeon that whips off another three inches in like half an hour, but staggers it all over the body, like it’s not like they whack off your feet or anything and you know I did the whole thing on my lunch hour ’cause you know I wanna prove like I really want this part and all.

Mike: Great, great. I really appreciate it. You really do come off as Marshall Singletree now.

Burlcron: ’Course on such notice it turned out Konceptual ran outa dope, and all they had was this LSD! What a rush, man!

Mike: What?

Burlcron: Don’t sweat it, man, and it’s a really good thing, really, ’cause I can see that it’s like canceling out the marijuana and so things are getting even more like really, really serious about now and what was really weird was that I didn’t feel any pain with the first hack job ’cause I was so stoned, but man, you feel everything on acid and I shoulda thought of that before taking it but it was all they had and it was like, okay, I’m gonna go through this pain that’s like half an hour they said, but you know it felt like ten thousand years and like I experienced every shred of the pain and like, I didn’t care! You just don’t care anymore! Like, wow!

Mike: I can’t have Marshall Singletree on acid!

Burlcron: Why not, man, because like I’m in complete control now, in fact a lot more in control because like I say I’m canceling out the dope stone right now, which I admit scatters the hell outa your freakin’ mind but now this acid is clean, man, it’s restructuring the very me which I am!

Mike: God, God …

Burlcron: No, like really, I’m clear now! I see how to do this Marshall guy perfectly! I can act on LSD, you know! Anybody can! It’s so simple!

Mike: Maybe we’d better do Session II another time. If there is another time, and if I ever write this goddamn novel!

Burlcron: No, really, man, dig it! We need to throw a lot of really fantastic consciousness into this thing and now I’m it! I’ve got it all! Amazing, really, when you think about it, like, really, I’m both in control and out of control enough to have enough control to look at that cool table of characters you laid out for the novel after our talk last night, I mean really, I’m so in control I can analyze it just like I can analyze a Milton poem for English class! I swear to God!

Mike: Is this what lurks underneath Marshal Singletree’s savior-of-the-human-race exterior?

Burlcron: Yes! Yes! Exactly! The old coot is living the dream! The true spirit of consciousness! But nobody believes him because he’s insane. So he has to hide that. With this tremendous ego trip, and his turtleneck sweater! Like right now I’m amazed at your new table of characters, and for calling the novel Caspra Coronae! That’s what you did decide to call this damn thing and it’s perfect even though it won’t fly and it’s probably just a temporary thing but if you can get Caspra to really open up it’d be even more consciousness! Wow! Man, I saw Aria naked when she went in for her first session and I thought, wow, I mean, wow! She’s perfect for Caspra! Caspra’s so perfect even if what I’m saying can’t possibly make sense! Does that make sense? Man is she a piece! Can you let her know how bad I have the hots for her?

Mike: Well, c’mon, Alfred, look, I have no idea if anything I’m saying now means anything to you–

Burlcron: No! No, of course not! Wow!

Mike: But what I was going to say was that I needed to clarify the characters for the new novel, assign everybody an addict, and incidentally have Al Raavenscorr take on the Tommy Dreech/Bobby Holland role. I think having Al play so many different personas will work out well. From the reader’s standpoint, he’ll initially seem to be acting out of character at each step. That’ll be interesting.

Burlcron: Wow! Yeah! Let me do it! I’ll play both Al and Singletree! A dual role!

Mike: C’mon, man, you know that’s not possible. As for calling the book Caspra Coronae, well, if Caspra grows enough into her character that the novel could support that title, fine. Seeing the madness of crowds from her point of view might carry the book. Maybe not. In any case, it’s a decent working title. Or hell, I might call it something else tomorrow.

Burlcron: Call it Marshall Singletree!

Mike: Dammit, Alfred, are we seriously postulating that Marshall Singletree is insane? That some disturbing force in the Burlcron archetype means that he spends his whole life faking being the strong man, and then when Reva leaves him, he collapses in a second?

Burlcron: I’m not insane! I have control, man, I would never betray your cosmic novel like that! Because once my mind gets really raring, like I’m starting to see how I’d really merge into this Singletree guy cause like he’s really, really together most of the time, it’s just that he can’t handle sex! Well, who can, really, but maybe there’s this thing with his daughter, this Kina babe, like she’s jealous when her dad starts screwing Reva but what if there’s something weird going on with the two of ’em, I mean like Kina and Marshall, just like Burlcron had with his daughter Lisa in The Soul Institute? Which reminds me that I’m not kiddin’, man, I’d really like to get into that Aria Laci Coronae vixen in a second!

Mike: Oh, come on, Alfred, this is really out of line. You need to show respect to the other archetypes.

Burlcron: Well, you can’t have her! Aria and I happen to be great buddies, by the way, and we kid each other about sex all the time! Anyway, she says to me, like in the strictest confidence, man, that you were drooling for her!

Mike: I was not! Sure I was a little embarrassed at first, but so what? And I thought I made myself clear that as the commander of this task force I see all the archetypes as major forces to be respected! If I describe their bodies or their sexual acts it doesn’t have any bearing on my own life, it’s all part of channeling the forces into the novel.

Burlcron: You can’t control us!

Mike: I don’t want to control you. But I can and do send you into battle according to the needs of the novel!

Burlcron: That sounds like total fascism! No wonder this novel sucks! You’re a goddamn militarist is what you are!

Mike: Are you peaking on your LSD yet, mister? Are you going to get some brains back? Because I need you to give me some input on Part II!

Burlcron: Yeah! Bring Singletree back! Even if he’s dead! Maybe he’s just a corpse they carry around, like some holy relic.

Mike: What?

Burlcron: Yeah, like some of the worshippers just can’t let him go. When Billy orders Leon to bury him, Leon refuses and says Singletree’s comin’ with us, man, deal with it, man.

Mike: That’s–brilliant! Like the relics of some medieval saint! During an attack, he’s always carried to safety first!

Burlcron: Then whoever wants to hallucinate that he’s saying really wise BS just sneaks into the tent with the body bag and unzips it!

Mike: Oooh … yuck.

Burlcron: Like that was a real acid insight there, man.

Mike: Maybe he’s in the shell hole with Leon and Dave and Al and whoever.

Burlcron: Everyone’s in the shell hole! The whole main cast!

Mike: Well, that might be a stretch.

Burlcron: Get this: I play Singletree dead and rotting! Because of course the true believers think there can’t be any corruption! But there is! Who’s gonna admit it first?

Mike: And I still have to get everyone to Houston, and Stone Street. They find this old creaky cart and walk it down the I-45 shoulder. It takes them weeks.

Burlcron: They finally find a big wooden coffin and seal me in it, ’cause I do stink now! Kina’s a zombie by now! So’s Reva, but more from missing my huge member in her! I was the best thing she ever had, you know, or at least she thinks that, because of course Al’s really the best thing she’s ever had, but at any rate, and when they get to Stone Street, they put me up on the second floor of the main commune house! I have a room to myself there!

Mike: And you’re lit by candles all night long!

Burlcron: Yeah! Can you see it? I play myself rotting! With a few really eloquent soliloquies here and there! Like coming from Hades itself! Man, this is the role of a lifetime!

Copyright 2021 by Michael D. Smith

The interview is lightly edited to eliminate Burlcron’s worst vulgarity, and to spell out my abbreviations for various novels. I left intact various character names that I can’t expect a reader to know anything about.

Posted in Asylum and Mirage, Caspra Coronae, Character Images, Dystopia, Interviews, Novels, The Soul Institute, Writing, Writing Process | 1 Reply

Caspra Coronae Draft One Blast-Off

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on July 3, 2021 by Michael D. SmithDecember 25, 2024

What is This Thing?

Dave Shows His Paintings copyright 2021 by Michael D. Smith

Dave Shows His Paintings

There were no longer any issues blocking the fiction, and I began Caspra Coronae on June 24. I finally realized that although my plans are incomplete, whatever is unresolved is just going to have to come out during the fiction process. After work on four chapters, it already feels like an entirely new novel, not just a revision of its forebear, the incomplete Notice and Dream Topology, and that version’s older rough draft, Parts I and II.

Nevertheless, right now the only way I can describe this experiment is to quote from the previous novel’s description on sortmind.com:

In Part I a naïve and disconnected artist gives a party to celebrate his career, only to find himself drafted that same night into a mindless war. In Part II he becomes a sergeant leading frightened yuppies against an unstoppable Army of Evil. A partial second draft, Notice and Dream Topology, was revised into a play titled Linstar, which unfortunately proved to be a bombastic failure. However, Notice and Dream Topology, in cutting out Part II, the interminable war itself, has some promise and I may revise it. And I might want to write a completely new Part II.

I don’t have a web page for the new novel and won’t do one until I figure the book out, at least to some degree, after Draft 1. I also haven’t drawn any character portraits yet. But I do have the image cropped from the Tarot Card for Notice and Dream Topology, artist Dave showing off his new art warehouse.

Oddly, the book I’m working on is already 263 pages in length. While I’ve significantly altered the ancient Notice and Dream Topology manuscript with new characters, new chapter divisions, and numerous cuts and rearrangements, in no way can I consider the yet-to-be-revised parts as fiction. The working MS. has a structure I’m both making use of and treating as extended notes for massive change. It’s really just Part I of a novel that was never finished, so whatever Part II follows will be entirely new.

Future blog posts will look at the novel’s ongoing successes and failures, including any moment when I realize the project isn’t working and I abandon it. But I think it’s time to just push this thing out quickly and see what’s there. Caspra Coronae could simply be an experimental herald of some new writing I can’t imagine yet. I need to explore, and if the investigation seems unfocused or too revealing, so be it. There’s nothing to be gained from holding back.

I also see that this particular blog post may come off as psychically unorganized, but this is probably due to my not being sure where the fiction is leading.

It’s intriguing to be in this position. I’ve wondered: if I happened to be a bestselling author, would I be discouraged from trying an experiment like this?

A History in Brief of Not Letting Something Go

  • The first iteration of this project was a short story titled “33” because it was thirty-three pages of bizarre, disconnected dreams that became a warm-up for the first draft of a novel about brainwashing and evil called Parts I and II.
  • I considered Parts I and II a failure but lifted a chapter for Jack Commer, Supreme Commander. That chapter became the basis for the Alpha Centaurian Grid and the fascist Head which figures in the Jack Commer novels; by appropriating that chapter, I felt I’d effectively killed off Parts I and II.
  • But I couldn’t drop the novel and a few years later made a second draft called Notice and Dream Topology. This one was unfinished, rewriting just the rough draft’s Part I, Dave’s party in celebration of his artistic success.
  • Becoming fascinated with playwriting for a while, I then tried to finish Notice and Dream Topology by turning it into a play called Linstar, which is the worst disaster I’ve ever concocted. I forced myself to skim it recently just to make sure I don’t repeat its errors. It can be summed up as: Really Evil People Saying Really Evil Things to Really Confused Good People.
  • A decade passed and I was again struck by the surreal inexplicability of Notice and Dream Topology. Could it possibly function as a standalone novel without further revision, or did it need a new Part II to complete whatever mission it was supposed to have?
  • From 2016 on, between work on the last three Jack Commer novels, I mused on new novel ideas, including investigations of character archetypes from previous novels and a vague, unwritable plot involving reincarnation. Nothing came of all that until I realized that the unfinished Notice and Dream Topology plot could be an ideal vehicle for exploring these archetypes.
  • After completing the Jack Commer series this year, I interviewed five male and five female archetypes. They volunteered plot and character developments I couldn’t have come up with without them; they were also touchingly supportive of each other. In early June I committed to calling the new project Caspra Coronae–more on this odd but lovely choice below. I did confirm that coronae is the plural of corona, for what that’s worth.

 

Obstacles to Writing Caspra Coronae

Old Writing. Is it okay to look at past writings which might be brought up to date as new novels? Is this the way my writing life has been destined to unfold, or is it a way of putting off new explorations? Can there be any explorations in the old stuff? Is looking at old writing similar to how therapy might explore childhood traumas? Backward-looking, but strengthening current foundations?

Caspra Coronae herself. She was a minor character in Notice and Dream Topology, but she had incredible force there as an addict who behaved nothing like one. I like the idea of calling the novel Caspra Coronae so much that I’m trying to think of a way to elevate that minor but fascinating character into something that will make the title work. It’ll be a challenge to figure out how to propel Caspra forward, but her new energies have already risen fast in the first three chapters.

The Evil Problem. The Nature of The Reunion. Notice and Dream Topology concepts never jelled because I never worked out what it all really meant. That may be fine for a puzzling Twilight Zone script, but in making this into a novel I need to be on top of what all that stuff means. Is it evil we’re talking about, or just fear? “The Reunion” is brainwashing, hallucinations, and incomprehensible horror, but whoever is marketing this evil knows how to repackage it in a welcoming way. But what’s its real nature? I don’t really know where to take that. If delusion and the madness of crowds is such a part of human nature, how can a novel plot fix that?

Uncertainty about Part II. Notice and Dream Topology’s mysteries would be intriguing to a reader, who’d naturally await resolution of them in Part II. But though I’ve sketched out eight vaporware chapters of a Part II, I have no more clue than the reader. Part II can’t be a struggle between good and evil that plays out like some video game, as I tried and failed to do in Linstar. We have to have a real reckoning with the fear. We need to keep walking through what the characters would really see, and feel, and do, in the terrible situation where Part II begins.

Literary, or The Final, Novel. In reviewing my published novels, I was struck by a more or less even split between literary and science fiction:

Literary Science Fiction
Akard Drearstone

CommWealth

The First Twenty Steps

Jump Grenade

Sortmind

The Soul Institute

The Martian Marauders

Jack Commer, Supreme Commander

Nonprofit Chronowar

Collapse and Delusion

The Wounded Frontier

The SolGrid Rebellion

Balloon Ship Armageddon

Even if many on the left column have absurdist aspects, that’s just background flavor; all those are literary works. While I don’t rule out more science fiction in the future, or would ban it from a new novel, I need something massive and grounded right now.

I might as well get the fear question out. Is there pressure to make this book any sort of final statement? Despite feeling ageless, I begin to see that not every project will get done. I don’t want to waste any time, or more importantly, any energy on fruitless detours, looking backward to old work, or what I call “quilting,” that is, the enjoyable craftwork of turning out one pleasant, not terribly important, novel after another.

I’ve refused to believe I have nothing left to say. I’ve tried to examine whether declaring that I still have much more writing ahead is mere bravado. But I really don’t feel I’m deceiving myself.

Successes So Far with Caspra Coronae

The ten interviews with the archetypes. The ten archetypes represent recurring character types found in most of my novels. Interviews with them spanning 120 pages were a major contribution and forced me to think of the novel as completely new, not just a revision of the old Notice and Dream Topology. They differ from the interviews I did with Jack Commer characters in that they use insider shorthand about my past writings, and the archetypes focus more on the nature of their personalities rather than the story, although some of them gave me great plot ideas. I may post some of the interviews on the blog anyway. Most of the archetypes become point-of-view narrators. As I started writing, I cut them from ten to eight, but the two cut ones keep clamoring for a say in the novel.

The ensemble nature of the plot. My hope is that each of the eight characters will have equal status and their own evolution in the spotlight. This may or may not prove to be at odds with elevating one of the archetypes, Caspra Coronae, as the title of the book. Does that mean the book has to be mostly about her? What will her function be? In any case Dave’s disastrous party winds up creating an accidental commune, a perfect testbed for ensemble characters.

Strong Part I structure. I can make use of the excellent energies of the original second draft, Notice and Dream Topology, even as I know the new characters will thoroughly transform it. This seems a good way to approach this novel: set up the new situations within the existing structure, even as the characters burn that structure for liftoff fuel. Then they help me launch an unimaginably new Part II into orbit.

Confidence in the fiction flow. You put so much effort into notes and plans, but then the flow of actually writing the fiction makes you realize how relatively unimportant those plans are. The first four chapters have treated the notes I’ve slaved over as almost inconsequential, and yet new energies are flowing which easily integrate these notes, or discard them, at the whim of the muse.

The Main Characters So Far

Four Male and Four Female Archetypes Their Assigned Addicts
Marshall Singletree (55), mystical, charismatic leader of Migrations from Evil Gabriel Aaron (21), passive and doomed, killed at the party
Leon Winter (27), Singletree’s main follower, brilliant, charming, and cold Jasmine Sung (24), Leon’s new girlfriend, who conceals her addict status until she’s assigned to him at the party
David Torus Kroner (31), naïve and immature, but who’s found success as an artist Walter Malloye (31), psychopathic gang leader who assigns himself as Dave’s addict at the party; unclear whether he’s really addicted
Al Raavenscorr (36), apparently an addict, who keeps adding inexplicable self-awareness
Kina Singletree (31), Marshall’s daughter, a majestic woman who diminishes herself as the leader of a silly book club Tarl Deladier (25), Walter’s stooge, assigned at the party
Marina Nicker Nunn (43), music professor, reckless and courageous, daring to experiment with hallucinations that scare everyone else Caspra Coronae, assigned to Marina weeks ago
Reva Veils McKee (29), Marshall Singletree’s new lover Al Raavenscorr, assigned at the party
Caspra Coronae (31), an addict, but unusually composed and intelligent; Dave was obsessed with her in high school.

The What If

I’m still not entirely sure of my What If, the question that propels the novel, though of course that’s never stopped me before.

Maybe the What If is: “What if people wake up to the nature of their own evil, and their own participation in the madness of crowds?” But they won’t know how, I don’t know how, to vanquish that for all time, which is where I’ve thought the novel was supposed to end up. There is no clever sci-fi plot twist that will do that. The best the characters can do is offer a vision of an alternate future.

Another What If comes from interviewing the over-the-top Marina Nicker Nunn:

“In any case I’ve studied all the Marina archetypes from Naomi Kugel in Akard Draft One, through Moolka and Boots Emerson in The Soul Institute and Amy Nortel in Balloon Ship Armageddon, and believe me I’ve definitely got the energy for this part. So many forces within me. I can’t say I really control any of them, but they’re all here at my disposal somehow. In any case, Mr. Mike, I can’t tell you how happy I am to be here chatting with you about this wonderful, wonderful novel of yours! I’m definitely up for making it an outstanding success!”

So … what if all these forces start demanding expression, and resolution?

copyright 2021 by Michael D. Smith

Posted in Asylum and Mirage, Black Comedy, Caspra Coronae, Character Images, Dystopia, Interviews, Literary, Novels, Tarot Cards, Writing, Writing Process | 2 Replies

The Selector

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on June 10, 2021 by Michael D. SmithJune 10, 2021

I16. Tower copyright 2006 by Michael D. Smitht was eight o’clock. All was well, except that the Animals had somehow crept into the Selector Box and short-circuited the entire Darwin Building. As the Selector, it was my duty to investigate. Yet, at eight o’clock, I’d just finished keying in my report, which said “All is well.” Once I’d sent it, I couldn’t very well change it, could I? Well, I hadn’t actually sent it yet. The system had gone down when we lost power. But the report had been stored before the Selector Box went out, so all I had to do once we straightened this mess out was push the SEND button. By the time we got the power back on, all would be well and my report would be true. The downtime would show up on some statistics at the end of the quarter, but nobody would have to know it was due to the Animals, and nobody would probably care anyway. I wasn’t about to change my report for any Animals, that was for sure.

It was spring. The Darwin Building had been completed four weeks previously, and it towered above downtown Zarreich like a giant electric toothbrush. At least that’s what all the architectural magazines said when we’d opened, and they had to know. The Darwin Plaza was covered with pebbled concrete, which we’d by now determined was the cause of our problems. These pebbles proved to be an ideal breeding ground for the Thankless Animals in this muggy spring. We’d originally called them Thankless Animals because the first night the building had opened, the four of us on duty–I as Selector along with my three peon clericals–noticed that when we tossed huge chunks of dripping red meat at the Animals, the Animals simply absorbed the meat into their bodies through their paws without even using their eyes to locate the meat. They didn’t look at us, appear happy at the prospect of a meal, or acknowledge our presence or the meat’s presence in any way. They simply absorbed the meat as they walked over it, never breaking stride.

That first night McHurty was simply amused. The next night he was dead. One of the Animals had gotten into the building and absorbed him. Flashg was with McHurty and saw the whole thing. In fact, Flashg had been petting the Animal when McHurty had walked over. McHurty had “just been sucked into the Animal,” as Flashg described it, and two of Flashg’s fingers had also been absorbed. Later that night we discovered an Animal-sized hole in the side of the Darwin Building.

We didn’t call them Thankless Animals anymore, because that had been a joke, the kind workers make to pass the time. Now we just called them Animals. In my reports I simply said “an animal,” trying to make it sound like it could be a dog or a cat, something like that. No reason to excite the Central Politburo, after all.

But the Darwin Building now had hundreds of Animal-sized holes all over the first floor. The lobby and the elevators were full of holes. When we came in for work at seven PM, at dusk, we’d see the furry gray creatures padding about on their business. They never took notice of us.

We’d never gotten a replacement for McHurty, so we were short. And Flashg was constantly upset about his fingers. He couldn’t work the Laser Processor anymore, or at least claimed this was the case. And the other night clerical, BGGTY, was so terrified of the Animals that it was generally all up to me. BGGTY and Flashg would sit around trembling and complaining all night while I got the work done.

Strangely, the day staff of seven thousand never complained about the Animals, which had been seen throughout downtown Zarreich at all hours and which, it had just become known, had so seriously weakened the First Insurance Bank that it had been condemned as unsafe a couple days ago and boarded up. We expected it to fall any day now.

So far the Animals had been smart enough not to fool with the Selector Box, though. They probably knew that the Selector wouldn’t tolerate any interference there. I’d been keeping pretty good track of the Animals and feeding the data into the computers, and we could all see that the Animals pretty much contented themselves with concrete, glass and steel, and occasionally plastic and leather upholstery. We didn’t worry about the electronic switching system with its miles of wiring and circuitry that was the nerve core of the Darwin Building, its communications lifeline and its raison d’être. But now evidently the Animals had gotten into the Selector Box. I couldn’t understand how they thought they could get away with this, so I had to assume that it was just a misunderstanding on their part and that we could persuade them to leave the Box alone.

I had BGGTY and Flashg lower me by rope thirty-six stories down the open elevator shaft. I swung onto a ledge and forced open a panel behind which lay the Darwin Selector Box. The panel fell out of my grasp and sailed a couple hundred stories down the elevator shaft. After a while I heard it clink on the basement floor.

The shaft was dark, but the Selector Box still retained a mild phosphorescent glow from the accumulated energy buildup of its four weeks in operation. I pulled out the only tool necessary, my two-foot-long screwdriver with its built-in flashlight, and I played the beam along the circuits of the Selector Box. Sure enough, behind a small auxiliary computer four gray Animals nibbled on exposed wires. It was the first time I’d seen them use their mouths and teeth. All other damage had been accomplished through the use of their absorption paws. The thought hit me that maybe their use of teeth was an attempt to generate some sort of mythological terror. If so, these Animals were failures. They didn’t scare me in the slightest. Then I had the disturbing thought that I normally never have any thoughts about mythological terror. Why should I be having any now? I tried to shrug the odd feeling off.

One of the Animals turned to me and smiled.

“Listen, we’ve been meaning to have a talk with you for a long time,” it said.

“Put down that screwdriver,” said a second Animal. All four ceased nibbling. Curiously, now that they’d stopped, their paws began to sink into the slabs of the Selector Box, absorbing their way through the metal and wires.

I held the screwdriver at my hip like a lance. “Some other time,” I bantered back. No Animals were going to get the better of me.

“He won’t put the screwdriver down,” said another Animal.

“Pity,” said the first Animal, with a supercilious smirk. The four Animals had now absorbed their way up to their knees in the Selector Box.

“C’mon, what’re you critters doing in the Selector Box, heh-heh,” I said, trying to get these Animals to laugh or something, maybe see the whole thing as a joke and get out. Repairing the damn box was going to take up the rest of the night anyway. If I could get these Animals out of here in short order, I could get down to work.

“We live here,” said an Animal. They were now sunk to their chins in the Selector Box. The phosphorescent glow of the Box had been fading all this time, and now it was as dim as a blown-out match.

“Flashg and BGGTY are dead,” said the first Animal, his smile protruding from the lifeless circuitry of the Selector Box as he sank still deeper with his mates.

“We absorbed them,” said another Animal.

“Well, what’s that to me?” I said.

“Nothing,” agreed the first Animal.

“Are you going to put that screwdriver away or not?” said another.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve got work to do. And if you boys’ll just move on–” I waved my hand in the direction of oblivion.

“Most certainly,” said the first, supercilious Animal as all their ears and tails sank fully into the Selector Box, leaving Animal-sized holes.

All the lights in the building came on. The Selector Box glowed with thousands of rainbows.

“Well, that’s that,” I said. The rope that Flashg and BGGTY had been holding for me was nowhere in sight. Or rather, now that the lights were on up and down the entire elevator core, I could see it falling noiselessly down the shaft into the square black hole beneath me.

Noticing that the elevator shaft was exactly as wide as my outstretched arms and legs, I straddled the space and began fingering and toeing down the levels to the lobby. My report was waiting to be sent on.

copyright 2021 by Michael D. Smith

Posted in Dreams, Stories, Writing | 1 Reply

The Balloon Ship Interviews: Arrogant, Desperate Characters Audition for the Role of a Lifetime

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on April 6, 2021 by Michael D. SmithApril 6, 2021

The Balloon Ship Interviews by Michael D. SmithIn developing Balloon Ship Armageddon, the seventh and final Jack Commer, Supreme Commander adventure, I interviewed twelve characters from the previous six books, wanting to know what motivations and energies they could bring to the project. Each character got a post on the blog over four weeks in 2018, by turns musing, arguing, and pleading with their creator for a chance to star in this last Jack Commer saga. All surprised me with their eloquence and their concerns, even those characters who were eventually cut from the book. Should I mention that I keep laughing out loud as I reread these interviews?

The Balloon Ship Interviews is a companion to The UR Jack Commer. Like that book, it’s not part of the Jack Commer science fiction series, but auxiliary background. Here’s what Sortmind Press has just come up with:

Smashwords eVersions. Normally $1.99, but coupon code SN78J makes it free in numerous eBook formats, including EPUB, MOBI for Kindle, and PDF.
Mass market paperback on lulu.com. This does have a price, but, just as with its companion piece The UR Jack Commer, it’s petite and gorgeous.

Looking at the interviews three years later, after completion of Book Seven, I’m struck by how well all twelve stayed in character. Though they all had major roles in the first draft of the novel, five were eventually reduced to minor functions. Waterfall Sequence, Ranna Kikken Commer, and Jackie Vespertine proved to be essentially side characters muddling the plot, so they disappeared except for mentions in the final MS. T’ohj’puv and Joe Commer wound up with merely supporting roles, but the remaining seven formed the core of the book.

Rick Ballard was initially slated to be written out after a ghastly death in chapter one, but his icky, testosterone-laced personality barged into the rest of the interviews and infiltrated the final novel as well. Jack’s son Jonathan James confronted his reputation for major, ego-tripping chaos creation and stepped up to a demanding role. Jack and his wife Amav underwent some necessary psychological discoveries about themselves and their marriage.

Amy Nortel found her promised niche as a truly over-the-top evil genius vixen. That’s her on the cover, Jack’s old high school English AP teacher, rejuvenated to twenty-five. She’s the actress who shows up for the audition determined to dominate the show, and she almost did.

That role fell to two characters: the brazen Laurie Lachrer 283 robot and the human she’s modeled on, genius physician/engineer Laurie Lachrer. Human Laurie, originally to have been fully replaced by her robot twin for this book, surprised me by fiercely protesting her exclusion and haranguing her way back for a major role. She and her robot argue about who’s the most qualified Laurie, and the quarrel continues into the novel.

Twelve Balloon Ship Interviewees copyright 2021 by Michael D. Smith

The Twelve interviewees

These are the original blog posts, identical to the book’s content:

Rick Ballard, bombastic, ego-saturated seducer
T’ohj’puv, ancient tetrahedral robot for creating Martian Empress gowns
Jonathan James Commer, Jack’s troubled, insecure son
Amy Nortel, Wounded doctor and Jack’s old high school English teacher
Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, United System Space Force
Amav Frankston-Commer, Jack’s wife and planetary engineer
Waterfall Sequence, cloudlike entity of the Ywritt race at the star Iota Persei
Ranna Kikken Commer, Joe’s Commer’s wife and negotiator with the Ywritt
Joe Commer, Jack’s brother, Deputy Supreme Commander, and perennial sidekick
Jackie Vespertine, Ranna’s sister, Joe’s former femme fatale, and influential exobiologist
Laurie Lachrer 283, insolent robot seeking to supplant the human she’s modeled after
Laurie Lachrer, the human version, Jack’s new genius physician/engineer

I needed both The UR Jack Commer and the Balloon Ship Interviews to wind down from the major 2020 projects of re-editing the entire series and publishing Book Seven, Balloon Ship Armageddon, earlier this year. Yes, I may return to Jack someday, but for now, I’m done with him and there’s some new stuff to investigate. Which this blog will no doubt agonize over and celebrate.

copyright 2021 by Michael D. Smith

The Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series
Origins of Jack Commer (Smashwords series page)

Posted in Balloon Ship Armageddon, Character Images, Interviews, Jack Commer, Novels, Science Fiction, Sortmind Press, Writing, Writing Process | 1 Reply

The UR Jack Commer: A Look at the Childhood Beginnings of the Commer Saga

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on April 4, 2021 by Michael D. SmithDecember 25, 2024

The UR Jack Commer by Michael D. SmithOkay, why revisit this early stuff????

After publishing seven Jack Commer novels I felt a need to pull together Jack’s entire history starting from my first fifth-grade story about him. That was the story that electrified my nine-year-old self. Although I’d already written several science fiction stories, “Voyage to Venus” was the first time I’d finished one and said to myself: Wow, this is cool, this is where I belong, this is what I want to be doing! It began my writing path. I also debuted here as an entertainer; when I read my SF stories to the class, even the enemy class bullies were spellbound.

So Sortmind Press has come up with:

Smashwords eVersions. Normally $1.99, but coupon code MP85G will make it free in numerous eBook formats, including EPUB, MOBI for Kindle, and PDF.
Adorable little mass market paperback on lulu.com. This does have a price, but it’s a lovely volume.

To keep this book and a short forthcoming companion, The Balloon Ship Interviews, feeling separate from the published series, I decided to publish only mass-market paperback versions of each on lulu.com, and to offer them in various eBook formats on Smashwords, but not make 6” x 9” trade paperbacks or add them to the series lists on Amazon or Smashwords. I consider them promotional in nature, somewhat like the marketing postcards you hand out at book fairs.

The UR Jack Commer consists of early and later experiments that never made it to the published Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series. Included also is high school’s “The Legacy of Jack Commer,” which was probably the real spark of this book. It took me quite some time to hunt down my ancient box of high school essays to find this class assignment that had reverberated over the years. I’d never forgotten it, but upon discovery it wasn’t quite how I’d remembered it.

The UR Jack Commer by Michael D. SmithKid consciousness unfolds in increasing maturity through the first few stories and the abandoned eighth-grade draft of The Martian Marauders. Then “The Martian Holes” showcases my wild, sloppy, but somehow still amusing post-college writing style. The interviews with Jack in “Zorexians” develop a new adult flavor; in addition to finally admitting that he’s way in over his head with the sexy, unattainable Jackie Vespertine, Jack also muses on his long acquaintance with me and critiques my writing procedures.

We conclude with an aborted 1987 attempt to rewrite the eighth-grade version of The Martian Marauders. There were numerous difficulties integrating child and adult consciousness which I didn’t resolve until years later, when I resurrected much of this first dropped chapter and revised the book into a fast-paced adult novel, then wrote a cycle of Jack Commer novels.

copyright 2021 by Michael D. Smith

The Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series

Posted in Early Writing, Jack Commer, Marketing, Martian Marauders, Novels, Science Fiction, Sortmind Press, Stories, Trip to Mars, Writing, Writing Process | 1 Reply

Presenting Balloon Ship Armageddon, or, Nine Astronauts Were Walking to a USSF Meeting, or, Jack Commer Shot his Spaceship Directly into the Sun

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on March 3, 2021 by Michael D. SmithApril 4, 2021

To the Astute Reader of This Blog

Balloon Ship Armageddon by Michael D. SmithCertainly the reader will recognize in the “nine astronauts” phrase the fifth-grade, September 19, 1962 first line of “Voyage to Venus,” introducing space pilot Jack Commer. It’s elegantly followed, of course, by Jack’s musing farewell to the series from his published blog interview. That’s a lot of decades of Jack Commer, during which time I’ve reveled in the childhood-to-adult themes of this series, channeling new writing through old myths and old visions. But I still don’t know why Jack has stuck with me for so long.

In any case Sortmind Press has just published Balloon Ship Armageddon, Book Seven of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series.

Amazon paperback
Amazon eBook (Kindle format)
Smashwords eBook (multiple formats)

Jack Commer’s murdered son Jonathan James finds himself recreated as a bio-robot of the Wounded, a race that destroys stars for kicks. Eight hundred years later he rises to captain Balloon Ship Armageddon on a toxic waterworld in the Large Magellanic Cloud, but he’s terrified by the ancient, inexplicable star map in his cargo hold that warns of an abrupt termination of the universe.

Wounded soldiers abandoned in the Cloud have yearned for the mystic return of long-departed Class A Wounded Draka Sortie, and their redemption from 124,400 years of inexplicable warfare and suffering. On realizing she’s been appointed executor of Draka’s estate, Dr. Amy Nortel claims that the myth actually means the construction of a Dyson sphere in the Large Magellanic Cloud that will destroy the entire Orion Arm of the Milky Way. But the executor documents transmitted in the last frantic milliseconds of Draka’s life are fragmentary and corrupted, and it turns out that Dr. Amy has no clue what Anti-Dark Energy really entails.

The Jack Commer Series Overview

The Jack Commer, Supreme Commander Series by Michael D. SmithWith the shocking suicide of the Typhoon I, the most powerful military spaceship ever built, the four Commer brothers are reduced to two. After the horrors of the Final War, the evacuation of Earth, and an unexpected conflict with native Martian terrorists, is eldest brother Jack really fit to lead the United System Space Force? Yet despite stress bordering on hysteria he always seems to come up with the proper solution. Shy with women but easy with command as opposed to his passionate, guilt-ridden brother Joe, when promoted to Supreme Commander Jack passes over numerous ambitious admirals and holds onto power for decades with the newest rejuvenation technology. But has he ever really recovered from the responsibility of overseeing forty years of futile time war with the Alpha Centaurians?

Written to be the Seventh and Last Jack Commer, but Contains a Loophole for an Eight

Even as I composed Balloon Ship Armageddon’s rough draft in 2018, I was feeling that the original Jack Commer series publisher wouldn’t continue much longer, and that I’d probably self-publish this final book. The end of the Jack Commer series is karmically coinciding with changes in how I’m viewing this entire publishing trip. Some course corrections are needed, which I will no doubt muse upon in future posts.

Upon finishing edits and republication of the first six books, then putting out Book Seven, I have a sense of “overwhelming exhausted accomplishment,” but so far I can’t find any grander philosophical and blog-worthy perspective than that. I’m certainly glad I got the chance to redo the first six books, and that this process also informed Book Seven. As for whether or not Balloon Ship Armageddon is the final Jack Commer, I’m at peace with that for now. I  can say it is or it isn’t and not feel any pangs either way.

I did realize after completing the novel that it does share characteristics with the steampunk genre. I mostly appreciate that genre for its visual aspects; just think of the time traveler’s chair in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. But I was also somewhat startled to grasp how extensively Balloon Ship Armageddon emphasizes themes of negativity, unresolved crap, sin, annihilation, ignorance, and deluded fantasy life. Yet all the while I remained focused on Jack’s sunny and perhaps naïve confidence that he can pilot a brand-new Typhoon VIII straight into an Anti-Dark Energy star and navigate straight to the n-dimensional source of the problem. His robot dog Edward calls that “rewriting the universe.”

Maybe Jack will do that in Book Eight.

copyright 2021 by Michael D. Smith

Balloon Ship Armageddon – more info
Jack Commer Series on Amazon | on Smashwords

Posted in Astronomy, Balloon Ship Armageddon, Interviews, Jack Commer, Novels, Publishing, Science Fiction, Self-Publishing, Sortmind Press, Writing, Writing Process | Leave a reply

The SolGrid Rebellion, Endings, and Continuations

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on December 21, 2020 by Michael D. SmithDecember 21, 2020

The SolGrid Rebellion by Michael D. SmithWhen the solar system adopts the buggy SolGrid telepathic network as a defense against alien intrusion, Jack Commer’s impudent son Jonathan James instigates a rebellion against what he considers fascist brainwashing. His tiny army includes his lover Suzette, the wife of Jack’s Typhoon VI weapons officer; exobiologist Jackie Vespertine, emissary to aliens in the Iota Persei system; and the telepathic Beagle Trotter, bonded in an ancient Alpha Centaurian ritual to Jonathan James as warrior-brother. Jonathan James even convinces Patrick, the computer hacker who designed SolGrid, that his dysfunctional creation is wrecking Sol culture.

Sortmind Press has just republished The SolGrid Rebellion, Book Six of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series, with the cover featuring my drawing of one of the six rebels, Jackie Vespertine.

Amazon paperback
Amazon eBook (Kindle format)
Smashwords eBook (multiple formats)

The SolGrid Rebellion was originally published in 2018 by Double Dragon Publishing. As with all the books in the series, I reedited the novel for clarity, but kept all plot and characters unchanged. As I mentioned in the previous post for Book Five, the original publisher had stated that as long as submissions met high standards, every new book in an author’s series would subsequently be published, so I was again determined that Book Six would be my highest-quality writing.

Finishing the Jack Commer Republication Project

Suzette Borman copyright 2014 by Michael D. Smith

Suzette Borman, rebel

Over the past six months I’ve achieved a long-desired goal of republishing the first six Jack Commer novels through Sortmind Press. It’s hard to believe and I feel a little numb now, yet I’m also proud of finally closing out a megadose of editing, proofing, and publishing consciousness. I’ve learned much from this entire process and these six books are seeds I’ve planted for the future. They are stylistically much better than their original versions, books I’m proud of and which I can confidently market, as well as possibly later seek to sell to royalty publishers.

Consider the page totals for this series:

The Martian Marauders: 376
Jack Commer, Supreme Commander: 204
Nonprofit Chronowar: 288
Collapse and Delusion: 244
The Wounded Frontier: 340
The SolGrid Rebellion: 354

So I’ve just finished editing 1,806 pages of fiction since early July, and between October 16 and December 18 I published six books on Amazon and Smashwords.

The Worst Error I Found in The SolGrid Rebellion 2018 Publication

After much wincing, the only thing to do is laugh. From Jonathan James Commer interrogating Jackie Vespertine about the alien Ywritt race’s quantum computer capabilities:

Even though he leased a slew of quantum commuters from the Ywritt.

Yes, I corrected this in the 2020 edition!

More Books in the Series?

Trotter copyright 2017 by Michael D. Smith

Trotter, telepathic Beagle rebel

Would I have written more Jack Commer if Double Dragon Publishing hadn’t picked up The Martian Marauders in March 2011? It’s hard to say. I’d been thinking of the first three books as a trilogy for years, though I’d also been sending queries to publishers treating each book as a standalone novel, which any of them really could be.

But I’d already written Draft 1 of Book Four, Collapse and Delusion, by March 2011, and was committed to some sort of series, though I don’t recall having any plans at the time for anything beyond a fourth novel. But I do think having Double Dragon accept my series was an inducement to keep writing more. However, I wrote Book Seven, Balloon Ship Armageddon, at a time when I correctly suspected Double Dragon might fold. In contemplating something like a negotiating tactic for the book’s uncertain future, I wondered if offering it to Double Dragon as the final Jack Commer novel might somehow sneak it in just in time. Not a great creative state to be in, and the July news of the sale of Double Dragon and termination of my existing contracts came at just the right time for all seven books in the series.

I’m only now considering in what ways the first three novels form their own psychic expression distinct–possibly just to me–from the last three published books. Books One to Three, and Books Four to Six, do seem like two separate trilogy-like gestalts / themes / projects / life oceans.

Jonathan James Commer copyright 2019 by Michael D. Smith

Jonathan James Commer, Supreme Commander of the SolGrid Rebellion

I created the first three, with some of their plot ideas extending back to the eighth grade, in the mood of feeling beneath publishers, in thrall to systems beyond my control, and with no real hope of publication. The third novel, originally titled Nonprofit Ladies, even veered into a somewhat cynical and snarky tone. That book has since been thoroughly rebooted, and in fact the retitled Nonprofit Chronowar now strikes me as being one of the most ambitious projects I’ve ever undertaken.

But the first draft of Book Four, Collapse and Delusion, was composed in a new mood. By that time I’d gotten an indie publisher’s request to see the full manuscript of the second book, Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, and I’d self-published my novella The First Twenty Steps through Barnes and Noble. I’d also just started blog.sortmind.com and was happily exploring a new direction in seeking publication via eBooks. Writing energies were opening up, and I finished Collapse and Delusion in 2012, knowing that Double Dragon would take it. There was also something newly grown-up about Book Four, and it led to further confident exploration in the next novels.

Editing the first three books was a major accomplishment, not only for correcting a number of errors and dealing with stylistic issues, but for encapsulating a past era of writing in contrast to the new era of the last three–the last four, actually, counting Book Seven, Balloon Ship Armageddon, which I’m looking forward to finishing and publishing early next year.

Series Conceptual Issues, and the Main One in The SolGrid Rebellion

As happened with some of the other novels, working on all six at once sometimes prompted me to examine conceptual issues and provide further explanation. In 2018’s The SolGrid Rebellion, Jack’s wife Amav recalls an experimental dip into the telepathic SolGrid the previous December as if it had been her first such experience. But I’d forgotten that in the previous book, The Wounded Frontier, she’d been fully immersed in a much worse Grid a few months before that. So it was good to revise as follows:

“Oh, of course!” Amav shuddered. Like Jack and Joe, she’d dipped into SolGrid just once in December and had been appalled by a couple seconds of contact with everything. She’d also seen in those few seconds how many USSF secrets she happened to know were leaking out. Some of the security cleanup after SolGrid came online was for concepts pulled out of her own mind.

Of course, try as she might to forget, December wasn’t the first time Amav had known Grid consciousness. She could barely force herself to recall last July, and her insolent son’s demented attempt to restore the Alpha Centaurian Grid and name himself Emperor. But for half an hour Amav had known the full ancient Centaurian horror of it. She’d tried to tell herself and everyone else, including Jack, that she didn’t remember much, or that she’d succumbed against her will, but that was pure self-delusion, for she recalled every humiliating detail. Deep down she’d chosen to follow her own son’s command to seduce her old friend Phil Sperry, just so JJC and his cohort Clopt could record some idiotic human sexual code for their nasty software. She’d spent months trying to convince herself that she’d simply been temporarily brainwashed, but for half an hour last July she’d readily ridden her uncontrollable lust for poor Phil, oblivious to Jack who’d been so seriously injured that he might have died right next to his frenzied nude wife straddling Phil, begging him to bang her brains out. Yeah, it hadn’t gone anywhere near intercourse, but so what? The shame of it was more than enough.

So in December she’d dared herself to sample SolGrid to prove she could handle it, that July had just been an aberration impossible to repeat. And in a way the experience had been beneficial, because it was obvious that this SolGrid software was different. There was no sense of brainwashing; you always knew you could come out. But it was hard to admit that the flavor of being inside SolGrid was the same as last July, with the identical temptation of possibly deciding after all to refuse to leave such paradise.

What really scared her was that the Technique, as it was called, for entering SolGrid seemed at first as complicated as learning a new programming language. But after the first rough steps of alien logic, the SolGrid software proceeded to teach you how to memorize the rest of the Technique. The entire process took three seconds. And once you had the Technique, you never forgot it. Millions of Sol citizens now used SolGrid daily, but where were their minds after three and a half months of use? How could anyone, especially a genius like Patrick James, contend that SolGrid offered an enlightened new way of sharing intimacy with billions of people? That it would make the present SolNet digital network look like Neanderthal cave drawings?

Jack had told her that although he remembered the Technique himself, he wasn’t sure he could call it up so quickly, in contrast to Amav who was worried about just how fast she could. When Jack said he wanted to start meditating, she was afraid it might inadvertently lead him into the Technique. But he’d assured her that, as far as his limited experiments showed, meditation and SolGrid were mutually exclusive mental states.

Amav thought she should take up meditation herself, if only to ward off the irrational fear that she might slip into the Technique in a moment of anger or stress.

And remain in this brave new Grid, saturated in overwhelming, unfocused erotic fantasy, forever.

Copyright 2020 by Michael D. Smith

Jack Commer series background
Amazon Jack Commer series page
Smashwords Jack Commer series page

Posted in Balloon Ship Armageddon, Character Images, Collapse and Delusion, Commer of the Rebellion, Double Dragon Publishing, Early Writing, Excerpts, Jack Commer, Martian Marauders, Nonprofit Chronowar, Novels, Publishing, Science Fiction, Self-Publishing, Sortmind Press, The First Twenty Steps, The SolGrid Rebellion, The Wounded Frontier, Writing, Writing Process | Leave a reply

The Wounded Frontier, Including Stellar Trolls

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on December 11, 2020 by Michael D. SmithDecember 18, 2020

The Wounded Frontier by Michael D. SmithWhen a star thirty-four light-years away vanishes, leaving the infrared signature of a Dyson sphere inexplicably built in one week, Supreme Commander Jack Commer readies the untested Typhoon V for the star Iota Persei, roping in a talented replacement engineer doubtful of Jack’s command capabilities, and cajoling a navigator beset by decades-old combat trauma into postponing his retirement for one last risky mission.

The Wounded Frontier, Book Five of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series, is now republished by Sortmind Press.

Amazon paperback
Amazon eBook (Kindle format)
Smashwords eBook (multiple formats)

Replacement engineer Laurie Lachrer, shown on the cover, was a minor character in Book One, The Martian Marauders. An Airman First Class technician assigned to service Jack’s 2034 ship, by 2075 the rejuvenated Laurie has become the foremost physician/engineer in the United System Space Force.

The working title of the book was a mouthful, Outcurve: Legends of the Stellar Trolls. I can’t really recall what “Outcurve” was supposed to mean, but I postulated a race that would lurk under our superspace bridges (just like the troll in The Three Billy Goats Gruff!) to block our way to further exploration.

We’ve always longed to reach those impossibly distant lights, and so concepts of superspace and wormholes, either human-generated or else just existing for us to discover and exploit, have formed the backbone of so much science fiction. But what if we encounter something that decides to block those journeys?

The Wounded Frontier was originally published in 2018 by Double Dragon Publishing, and the republished novel has, like the previous four in the series, undergone some editing clean-up while retaining identical plot and characters. Since the Double Dragon publisher had outlined that every new book in one of his published author’s series would also be published as long as it met high standards, The Wounded Frontier was the first novel which I knew would be published before I even began outlining it. That was a very interesting and also sobering experience. Though it’s the fifth book in the series, I’d already completed the first three novels and finished Draft One of the fourth book at the time the first novel, The Martian Marauders, was accepted for publication in 2011. Therefore I approached the composition of Book Five with a mixture of confidence and awe, determined to make it even better than the previous four.

The first hint of the Wounded:

“Hey, Jack, this is Lee,” came over the intercom.

Jack slammed his fist on his armrest. “Dammit, senator, are you quitting too?”

“Huh? What’s going on, Jack? I just got this message from Marsport.”

Jack shook his head. “You don’t know that Draka and Will both just quit the USSF? Just like that?”

“No, wow, I had no idea! I’ll have a talk with ’em if you want. But really, this is more important.”

“What’s more important, dammit?”

“Look, I just got a call from Ranna.”

Joe swiveled at the mention of his wife’s name. “So why’s she calling you?”

“And how is she calling you?” Then Jack remembered Borman’s new Senator Comm equipped with superspace radio. Although events a few weeks ago had forced Jack to shatter Borman’s specialized comm, Borman had asked Joe to bring a new one when the Typhoon III came to pick up the IV crew.

“It came on the official business circuit. Ranna said the Time Committee was in emergency session, and she had to get right back to it. Said she was sorry she didn’t have time to chat with you, Joe.”

“Politics,” Jack muttered. “I thought the damn Time Committee was wrapping things up now.” Joe’s wife Ranna was the Chronology Coordinator on the Time Committee and was number two in the organization behind Dar, but now that Dar had retired, who knew how the Committee would fare? But with the end of all Heuristic Time Transitions on May 29th, which finally closed the 2013-2075 time disturbances created by the Alpha Centaurians, wouldn’t the Committee just be studying the whole phenomenon from a historical perspective?

“Well, the thing is, Jack, the Time Committee got involved because there’s really no other explanation that anyone can see.”

“For what?”

“Well, this star just disappeared. Well, not exactly disappeared, but–”

“What star?”

“Iota Persei. It just suddenly disappeared. They don’t know exactly when, because it’s not like we’re monitoring the damn thing every second. It was there a few days ago as far as they can piece it together, then a few hours ago an astronomer noticed it was gone.”

“Gone? How can that be?” Jack pulled out his comm to refresh his memory. They were all supposed to know all the stars within fifty light-years of Earth, but it was a long list and it was difficult to keep them straight. He scanned the first couple lines:

Iota Persei. Yellow-orange main sequence dwarf star. 1.3 mass of Sol. Distance from Sol: 34.36 light-years. Age: approximately 8.1 billion years.

“We can’t do any fine observations with our sensors while we’re in Star Drive,” Joe pointed out, “but as soon as we’re out we’ll run some.”

“That’s fine. Lee, did you say the thing disappeared? Not a supernova?”

“That’s the thing Jack, it just winked out! As far as visible light, that is. They started measuring the infrared, and Jack, they say it’s totally consistent with a Dyson sphere!”

Jack’s mind raced. A giant shell around a star, capturing all its energy, except for that infrared leak. “That’s not possible! It’d take thousands of years to build one, and the engineering problems, the orbital mechanics, would rule that out.”

“Jack, all Ranna’s saying is that our measurements point to a Dyson sphere.”

“It can’t be!”

“Unless it is,” Joe put in. “Who are we to say it can’t be done just because we can’t understand the orbital mechanics? All they need is smart enough computers.”

Nobody had ever considered that the fascist Alpha Centaurian Grid, linking twenty trillion citizens of the seventeen suns of the Alpha Centaurian Empire to their psychopathic Emperor, might have had an important benefit to Sol. Now the United System Space Force embarks on exploration beyond Alpha Centauri only to encounter a far worse predator that, unknown to anyone, has been kept at bay for thousands of years by the Centaurian Grid. What exactly lies outside our comfortable circle of firelight?

Copyright 2020 by Michael D. Smith

Series background

Posted in Character Images, Double Dragon Publishing, Jack Commer, Martian Marauders, Novels, Publishing, Science Fiction, Sortmind Press, The Wounded Frontier, Writing, Writing Process | Leave a reply

Collapse and Delusion, The Seven of Cups, and Unexpected Redemption

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on November 30, 2020 by Michael D. SmithNovember 30, 2020

Collapse and Delusion by Michael D. SmithThe ongoing stylistic cleanup of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series continues, with Collapse and Delusion, Book Four, just republished by Sortmind Press:

Amazon paperback
Amazon eBook (Kindle format)
Smashwords eBook (multiple formats)

Collapse and Delusion picks up from the last exploding spaceship scene of Book Three’s 2033, and takes us to Nonprofit Chronowar’s promised wedding of September 17, 2038, where Alpha Centaurian security forces time-kidnap Jack Commer’s infant son Jonathan James to 2049, along with Phil Sperry, the greatest systems engineer in USSF history, as well as former art gallery director Hedrona Bhlon. While Phil succumbs for the second time in his life to Centaurian brainwashing, struggling with soul-wrecking guilt about his treason to the human race, Hedrona refuses to Convert to the worship of the Alpha Centaurian Emperor and is sent to become a gladiator in rocket-powered death duels invented to distract the Centaurians from the looming May 14, 2053 demise of their empire.

We finally land in 2075 with all the core characters still active, thanks to new rejuvenation techniques, and we follow Jack and his wife Amav on their journey to a backward agricultural world to get a look at the disintegration of the Centaurian Empire in the aftermath of its lost war with Sol. Their estranged son Jonathan James has chosen to remain secluded in the shattered Centaurian empire and has written a bestselling novel about the collapse of Alpha Centauri, a book which also manages to heartlessly ridicule one “Hack Blommer, Supreme Salamander of the United Sneeze.”

Phil Sperry copyright 2013 by Michael D. Smith

Phil Sperry, former USSF physician/engineer

Though Collapse and Delusion focuses on the broken relationship between the insolent, ego-saturated Jonathan James Commer and his parents, it also dwells on the character of Phil Sperry and themes of psychic survival. Locked for years in shared telepathic despair with trillions of Alpha Centaurians, Phil feels cast out of humanity, in contrast to his lover Hedrona’s heroic adaptation to new life and new energy. Yet, brainwashed once by the Centaurians in 2035, then for a second time from 2049 to 2053, Phil finally understands that his hellish decades of delusion have in fact been necessary so that he can face the third and most tempting fantasy. And this time he offers a solution to free not just himself but twenty trillion lost Alpha Centaurian souls as well.

Of course, there’s no way he can suspect such future redemption on May 14, 2053, his last day of Brainwashing II:

The Seven of Cups looked like any sled other except for the bright color scheme: the royal blue HEDRONA BHLON painted along the stern, and her personal blue, yellow, and red Tarot card across the top surface of the sled. The sled was a flat slab of metal seven feet wide, eleven feet long, but just six inches thick. The twelve thrusters, each a four-inch circle, were recessed into the aft panel. Likewise the two-inch maneuvering thrusters along the sides and top and bottom corners of the craft were flush with the surface to keep the aesthetic impression of a cold hard rectangle.

The interior of the slab consisted entirely of a HtkARR 658 Prime Antimatter engine, except for the volume required for a thousand rounds of two-inch explosive shells and a feeding mechanism up to the gun mount.

Hedrona Bhlon copyright 2014 by Michael D. Smith

Hedrona Bhlon, Foremost Gladiator of the Sled

Phil looked away from the creepy image on the surface. She’d deliberately chosen that damn Tarot card to gall him. He should never have admitted it scared him. Did she really want to take advantage of any weakness she could find? The card was human pollution, just one more infiltration of the Centaurian system. It was killing them.

He had to calm down. Nothing was killing them, nothing was killing their dear Emperor, all was well, didn’t they all know that down deep?

No, that was the illusion. They were dying. The Tarot card was real and they knew it.

Phil couldn’t stop the accelerating anxiety. Since all events throughout Alpha Centauri were instantly known by all citizens, as mediated by the wisdom of the Emperor, the Alpha Centaurians had never worried or speculated about the future. But ever since the Martian Emperor Dar had broadcast relevant portions of his Amplified Thought proofs that the Empire would cease to exist on May 14, 2053, something evil had found its way into the Grid.

They’d never needed fortune-telling, but now it was everywhere, imported from Sol. Tarot and I Ching and Ouija boards and God knew what else had all leaked in. Everyone was using it. They knew it was blasphemous, but they had to have something to combat Dar’s goddamn astrology, didn’t they? To combat today, May 14, 2053?

Phil was ashamed that each time he came to Cssarr he made Hedrona sit with him over his own Tarot deck. On every reading she insisted that the cards spelled doom on May 14, 2053, and Phil heatedly offered a counter-interpretation based on the same cards. But even as the Alpha Centaurian citizen knew perfectly well he was right, the human being still within him knew he was blowing smoke.

It was the Seven of Cups that came up, every time, whether Phil asked the Tarot about himself or the Empire. It was the Waite deck image, the man shocked to confront seven cups floating in the clouds, each holding a promise: love, sex, fame, riches, power, even mystical revelation. They were all so obviously illusions. And they annihilated Phil even as he wanted them so badly.

And Hedrona would laugh. As he shivered and babbled all his fears about the Seven of Cups, she’d cackle with delight. She’d painted the card on her sled to tell the entire Empire that Phil’s whole life was an illusion. He was deluded, the Empire was deluded, and everything was collapsing.

Copyright 2020 by Michael D. Smith

Series background
Waite Seven of Cups

Posted in Character Images, Collapse and Delusion, Dystopia, Editing, Excerpts, Jack Commer, Nonprofit Chronowar, Novels, Publishing, Science Fiction, Sortmind Press, Tarot Cards, Writing, Writing Process | Leave a reply

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