Interview with the Burlcron/Mercer/Singletree

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on by

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.

Caspra Coronae Draft One Blast-Off

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on by

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

The Selector

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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

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

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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)

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

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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

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

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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

The SolGrid Rebellion, Endings, and Continuations

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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

The Wounded Frontier, Including Stellar Trolls

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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

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

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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

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Waite Seven of Cups

Nonprofit Chronowar Redux

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Nonprofit Chronowar by Michael D. SmithFormer space pilot Joe Commer inadvertently time-travels from 2036 Mars to wreck the first 2028 conference of the Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth, scaring the nonprofit delegates with tales of the imminent breakdown of the solar system and war with a psychotic Alpha Centaurian Empire. Tormented by his role in dropping the superbomb that ended the Final War but rendered Earth uninhabitable, Joe has quit the United System Space Force, much to the disgust of his older brother Jack, Supreme Commander of the USSF. Meanwhile, in the audience, feckless young Urside Charmouth is horrified by the revelations, fearing that he’s ruined the universal timeline with his own drug-like Heuristic Time Transition experiments.

The republished Nonprofit Chronowar, Book Three of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series, is now available from Sortmind Press.

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

The cover, created for the book’s first 2013 publication by Deron Douglas, intuitively picked up on my central image for the novel, the evacuation of Earth after the Final War, with spaceships on the tarmac lined up to depart this planet forever. I’ve always been floored by the cover, not only by the 1950’s spaceship motif that reverberates with my earliest reading of science fiction, but by the evocation of my own vision of the opening scene for a hypothetical Nonprofit Chronowar movie, a scene hammering in the guilt Joe Commer keeps returning to in the third novel.

The novel focuses on the second Commer brother Joe, as well as new characters Ranna Kikken, director of the ludicrously hopeless Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth, and the much younger Urside Charmouth, despairingly in love with her and journeying through time looking for alternative Rannas to love him back. The book, laced with Joe’s war guilt, does seem darker than the rest of the Jack Commer books, but it has always been an ambitious undertaking. The scenes of passenger shell disasters are still a little hard to take. So far this book has been the most difficult to reedit: not only with the series’ new compression of chronology from 2020-2033 to 2028-2033, but also with some fleshing out of a few topics; time travel can be rough!

Yet, as with all six books in the series, the reedited Book Three has no changes to any plot or characters from the first 2013 edition. I compressed the first thirteen years of the chronology to five, but aside from changing a few things people say and some explanations, the book’s structure is unchanged.

Heuristic Time Transition in Brief

Heuristic Time Transition came into public consciousness with Amherst von Goertner’s popular book, Guide to Heuristic Time Transition in 2027. Von Goertner was a popular professor/writer on HTT and spiritual matters. He’d been researching the phenomenon since 2023 and claimed to have done 55 HTT trips. His influence peaked with his book’s publication and his resulting Internet blog, television appearances, and scholarly reviews of other books on the subject.

He was not an Alpha Centaurian plant but several Centaurian operatives were assigned to monitor and influence him.

Though many people claimed to have Time Transitioned, society as a whole treated the phenomenon like accounts of out-of-the-body experiences. HTT was basically a rumor and a fad between 2027 and 2036.

Then in 2035 physicist Anton Glasgow at the University of Mars published research claiming to verify Heuristic Time Transition as a real physical phenomenon, though his investigations were limited to quark behavior. Even then, other scientists considered HTT merely a theoretical possibility.

But beneath all the controversy was the fear that some time-traveling bozo was eventually going to destroy the universal timeline. The fear was not unfounded, because Heuristic Time Transition was designed to produce precisely that result. The Alpha Centaurians just naively assumed that all such extinction would be limited to Sol.

Sortmind PressItalicized Thinking at its Height

To say that I had overused italicizing thinking for many years is quite an understatement. I often wonder where and why I picked up this habit; all I can remember is thinking that it was adding some sort of spice to my fiction. Well, some occasional italic thinking can bring out new flavors, to continue this rather awkward metaphor, but nobody wants you to dump half a carton of salt on your novel. The first three Jack Commer novels simply had too much of this spice, and it seemed to reach its apotheosis in Book Three, marring its drive and vision.

I’m still amazed at just how much italicized thinking, CAPITALIZED ASTONISHMENT WORDS, and … babbling … ellipses–and hyphens–2013 Nonprofit Chronowar contained. There was so much italicized thinking to redo, in addition to the new series chronology having most of its effect in this novel, that I found I’d generated numerous new errors in my first reediting pass. Sometimes I’d review a redone paragraph and notice things like:

How she Ranna be allowing this?

Which hopefully I can laugh at. I have gotten quite humble about just how many errors you can leave in a manuscript with the best of intentions.

Conceptual Update, Including Bonus Excerpt

Chronology compression sparked some thoughts about how we could have developed massive new tech in the 2028-2033 period, especially considering that in 2020, very little of what I describe for eight years from now seems possible. There was one allusion to a possible explanation in the 2013 Nonprofit Chronowar, where USSF Public Relations Head Robbert Geswindoll, who worships what he calls Celestions, muses about new tech:

Formidable weapon, eh? Shatter-enhanced Electron Oblivion Sequencer, just developed over the last couple months. Our top engineer says the idea for it came to him in a dream. A dream inspired by the Celestions! Praise the Celestions!

I realized that the Centaurians’ attempt to manipulate time might have other unintended consequences, i.e., the leaking of their brilliant but often faulty technology into human science from 2028-2033. This actually stabilizes the entire series chronology starting in 2028. So I added the bolded paragraph below, where Alpha Centaurian refugee Polot tries to explain things to a very drunk Urside Charmouth, who’s inexplicably found himself at a 2075 party celebrating the end of all Heuristic Time Transition:

“Alycia told me about Alpha Centaurians. The war, how bad it is and all. Are you seriously saying they started all this HTT stuff?”

“My Chronowarp was just to view the past. Theirs was to participate, to destroy. They wanted to land in your rear and wreck your solar system before you ever had a chance to develop Star Drive. But they also got hold of my permanent HTT technique and took over lost souls, the way I took over Huey Vespertine.”

“That’s crazy! You’re just playing some sort of mind game!”

“You don’t believe they had hundreds of agents among you? That they made up the whole religion of Celestionism to brainwash people into becoming part of the Alpha Centaurian Grid?”

“That Celestion thing? That stupid cult? You’re saying Celestionism is really–”

“Yep. One giant stealth maneuver! They even got to be buddies with your Central Asian Powers, and they gave CAP the Xon bomb.”

“That’s crazy!”

“They inadvertently gave you guys a hell of a lot more. Where do you think all this new high-tech stuff has been coming from the past few years? The AC’s were boggled when they found out that their Celestion BS was leaking AC tech to you guys! The AC versions were usually more primitive, like the Warp Transfer they’ve never gotten straight. But suddenly some Earth scientist wakes up from a dream about how to make Star Drive! The Zarj were horrified to watch you guys subconsciously getting inspired by all their own tech!”

“Look, man, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be a jerk, I mean, sure I’d like to believe you, but I’ve seen so much the past few weeks, all this stuff about Mars and this Final War, and Alpha Centaurians, and I just can’t take it!”

“Right, right. Anyone would be utterly discombobulated, I’m sure. Especially if they’d been driving themselves batty for months experimenting with HTT.”

Urside opened his mouth. “I need more wine to process this.”

Copyright 2020 by Michael D. Smith

Series background