Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

Some Secondary Sortmind Characters

Posted on August 12, 2019 by Michael D. SmithAugust 12, 2019

Barbie Malroux, Canterra Art Institute cheerleader and architecture student

Witness his miserable entanglement with that girl in math. He groaned to consider his downfall here. The girl was everything he always said he despised. First of all, her name was Barbie. God, what a sickening name. Secondly, she really didn’t belong at the Art Institute. She wasn’t any sort of artist, but her parents evidently wanted her at CAI. He’d seen some of her rigid, childish drawings tacked to the walls of the commons, and was ashamed of himself for even knowing that kind of girl. Apparently she claimed to have pretensions of being an architect, but after seeing those drawings Sam knew she’d never make it. There was zero creativity there.

Thirdly, Barbie was a cheerleader. If there was anything that Sam had railed against in his four years at CAI, it was the existence of the football program and the mindless cheerleaders, with their airline stewardess smiles and their boundless chirping energy. They were allowed to wear their purple and white uniforms to class. One day he’d been outraged to see Barbie’s pom-poms stashed under her chair.

The problem was that Barbie, with her long red hair and her small-breasted, slender, five-foot, two-inch body, with her freckled nose and sparkling blue eyes, sat next to him in three of his classes and was the cutest female he could imagine. Conversations were now required at the beginning and end of each class. Barbie looked up at him with those bright eyes and smiled at everything he had to say, including his wisecracks about cheerleaders, now subtly toned down so as not to offend while still allowing him to express his disapproval of everything she was.

Randall Perrine, Oliver’s father and co-founder of Citizens Against Telepathy

Randy Perrine was short, angular, and tense, with overly large ears jutting from crewcut russet hair going gray. He hunched over papers on the desk, jabbing them with a bony finger, apparently unaware that his rigid jaw was half an inch from ramming into the desk microphone.

Perrine jerked up from his reading, deep-set gray eyes putting the entire room under surveillance, and he struck Sam as being a paranoid monkey in a business suit, ready to spring up and dance a simian jig on the Council dais, waving an AK-47 and screeching gibberish curses. Sam fought to keep from laughing out loud at this image. He could definitely save it for a short story. “Paranoid Field Marshal Monkey with an AK-47” already started plotting in his mind.

Edward Duce, founder of the Open Telepathy Foundation

Duce leaned to the microphone. “Greetings, Madame Mayor and honored members of the Canterra City Council. I formed the Open Telepathy Foundation last October for the express purpose of combating the regimented insanity of Citizens Against Telepathy here in Canterra. As a minister, I can assert that the Sortmind app is our last best chance of establishing true communion among the peoples of this world. The Trantor Group has inadvertently opened up human consciousness through this app. As such, Sortmind belongs to the people. It should be free, and unlimited. We understand that Mindwipe and Bleedthrough are minor problems to be solved. In this we stand with complete solidarity with Mr. Trantor and his company.”

“You pretend to be this peace-loving, happy-ass organization, but all your demonstrations turn into riots,” Toland shot back. “Your buddy Plill here has been arrested a dozen times for inciting violence!”

“Charges are always dropped, because they can’t prove a thing!” Plill sneered.

“And it’s only because Perrine’s brownshirts wade in with clubs,” Duce added.

“There are no brownshirts! You repeatedly use that irrational term!” Randy Perrine shouted from the right table.

“Why, then, any term you like! Fascists who disrupt our spiritual rallies!” Continue reading →

The Main Sortmind Characters

Posted on August 5, 2019 by Michael D. SmithAugust 5, 2019

Oliver Perrine, Canterra Art Institute student, painter

Peter Trantor regarded the lanky youngster looming out of the dim elevator with Suzanne at his side. “Well! Oliver! Glad you could make it! I’m Peter Trantor. Welcome to the command seat of the Trantor Group.” He waved at the expanse of windows showing the lighted towers of Canterra in the darkening sky.

Oliver Perrine stared back in consternation. Peter took in the disheveled strawberry blond hair and the suspicious deep-set eyes.

Go easy on him, Peter, Suzanne transmitted. He almost made a pass at me just now. Think he thought there’d be nobody in the building tonight. But he’s a good kid.

“Oh, right … hi there,” Oliver said, finally sticking out his hand to accept Peter’s shake. “I guess I’m here for the tour?”

“Right,” Peter said, pulling up subtext to Suzanne’s comments to the effect that she wished she were seventeen herself, and that she might even have responded to Oliver’s awkward approach. But his Vice President for Sales couldn’t know he knew this; Peter had reserved UnderDocument Mode to himself.

Sam Emersonn, Canterra Art Institute student, Mitchell Emerson’s son, Oliver’s best friend, writer

Sam’s February Paintbrush article, “In Defense of the OTF,” was considered rabid even on a high school campus which was probably ninety percent OTF supporters in the first place. Here was the son of one of the founders of CAT publicly suggesting that all CAT leaders might be better off “executed by the people” than left to their destructive, culture-destroying ways. He’d been forced to write an apology a couple weeks later, but nobody could tell if he meant it or not.

Sam was practically a professional, regularly getting his articles into the Paintbrush the past two years. Oliver’s crappy paintings were listless shit compared to that. Sam would be an important writer someday.

Peter Trantor, CEO, the Trantor Group

Anna Winstead. Could she possibly find him attractive? Hadn’t Margaret said he was good-looking? Something about his mouth and chin being “finely sculpted”? She’d told him that their first time in bed. Said he moved fluidly, “like a cat on a crowded mantelpiece.” Maybe Margaret thought she was a poet. But she’d done wonders for Peter’s ego. Up to the point where she took up with that Tad asshole. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t spoken to her in a year. God, she’d been everything.

Maybe if he worked out more. He wasn’t a beefcake. How could you be a beefcake at a hundred twenty pounds? Peter ate and ate and never gained an ounce. Did women really want beefcake? Could Peter possibly reprogram himself into beefcake? What would that take? Hell, this Winstead woman had been laughing at him. Laughing at him for being a cat on a crowded mantelpiece. She had a boyfriend and she was laughing at him and suing him even now.

Should he try to access all her JIS info again, see if he could make sense of it? He could feel tens of thousands of questions lining up in his spent mind. But what if he really was close to Mindwipe? What if Anna Winstead was the query that pushed him over the edge? Continue reading →

The Sortmind Chronology

Posted on August 2, 2019 by Michael D. SmithAugust 2, 2019

At the risk of polluting this blog with an imperfect and overly long document, I’m adding something that’s not meant to be read, but just perused in order to show the lengths an author has to go to nail down chronology. The Chronology file is one of three main files for Sortmind, the others being Characters and Facts. Those two files are equally long.

It’s possible that not every date in the Chronology document is as precise as it could be. I may have inadvertently left in dates corresponding to early drafts or cut chapters. Nevertheless, I wanted the file to be as accurate as possible to avoid plot conflicts.

Although year dates are mentioned nowhere in Sortmind, I used the year 2017 to establish the events of the novel, since I wanted to refer to precise days of the week. There’s no use having an eventful school day on a Saturday, for instance. The chronology contains dates back to 1945 for references to characters’ pasts, but below I’ve omitted everything except “2016” and “2017,” which comprise three-quarters of the Chronology file.

The novel opens on April 13, “2017.”

2016

Monday 2/15: First PortaLawyers go on sale.

Late May: Oliver’s paintings gain attention at CAI Art Show.

June: Sam gets construction job for the summer.

July: Over the summer, Pat and Porter go beyond beer and dope and discover the joys of hard liquor and whatever drugs they can find at the Art Institute.

Friday 8/5: Sortmind app released by TTG.

Monday 8/22: CAI school year begins. Godwin Shaw transfers in from another city.

Monday 8/22: Saviors of Earth by Curtis Tillotson published. He had published a few books before, but Saviors of Earth becomes a bestseller by October.

Wednesday 8/31: Sam breaks with his parents and moves into his own apartment in the run-down area just south of CAI. Sam pays for it all out of construction job income, although his parents, alarmed that he says he’s dropping out of school, offer to pay for his education through college, so it isn’t a total break after all.

Monday 9/5: Sam buys a used 1996 car.

Tuesday 9/6: CAT formed.

Tuesday 9/13: date TTG instituted subscription fees. Also called the Restructure. Setup fee, annual subscription, and exorbitant searching fees.

Wednesday 9/21: Roseparker made VP for Software Development.

Sunday 9/25: Suzanne is activated.

Continue reading →

A New Portrait of Jonathan James Commer

Posted on July 21, 2019 by Michael D. SmithJuly 12, 2020

Jonathan James Commer copyright 2019 by Michael D. Smith

This baleful mood was captured in ink, acrylic, and gouache on canvas-covered board, 2019

Jonathan James is Jack Commer’s insolent, troubled son, the author of the bestselling Alpha Centaurian novel, A Fragmented Encyclopedia of Recent Self. He was also briefly Emperor of the Alpha Centaurians, later leader of a rebellion against the SolGrid surveillance system, and eventually a Wounded robot dedicated to the destruction of the entire Milky Way.

From The SolGrid Rebellion, Book Six of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series:

Tall, skinny JJC gave the impression of being frail until you noticed those powerful biceps and forearms. He sat with the women to either side, Jackie on his left and Suzette to his right.

The bastard thought he understood women so well. Maybe that came from frying his brains on being AC Emperor, with trillions of Alpha Centaurian females running amok in his mind, worshipping him. In any case the ladies sure flocked to him. A lot of people had underestimated JJC, Pat thought sourly. Including himself.

Pat set his wine down and tried to ignore Trotter slurping at a bowl of water. “Okay, guys, look, anyone can see there’s something up here.”

Forks momentarily halted. JJC looked up with a smile. “Something–up here?”

“C’mon, anyone can see something’s going on here. You call this dinner, you say it’s the last time we can get together, and–so what’s the deal?”

JJC grinned. “Why don’t you just dip into your little SolGrid and find out?”

“C’mon, you know damn well that’s not how it works.” Any idiot knew that if the others weren’t participating in the Grid, Pat wouldn’t find any information unless he happened upon some other person privy to whatever JJC’s knew. “So you call this dinner–”

“I didn’t call any dinner. I invited my friends here because I wanted their company. I’m not some hotshot corporate president who calls dinners.”

Pat blinked at the insult. Okay, so he’d called a few dinners here himself as SolGrid president. But the others weren’t SolGrid, just Pat and Sanders. Jackie had her own projects to attend to and had never shown any interest in the company, and Suzette had her own complicated life running between her husband back on Mars and her new lover Jonathan James. Jonathan James and his damn telepathic dog!

“Okay, okay,” Pat said, “I just wanted to say I know your little secret and it’s damn stupid if you ask me and I can’t believe it of any of you.”

The others were silent. Pat had a moment of satisfaction seeing JJC blink, but Jonathan James took a sip of his golden wine and recovered. He turned to the numerous other tables in the restaurant and assessed the noise level. Pat followed his gaze to the windows, to the icy mountains beyond the small buildings of New Houston’s main street. Above it all loomed all the giant yellow sphere of Saturn undergoing reconstruction by the Martians.

JJC turned back. “I’m surprised, Patio. I really didn’t think SolGrid could pick that up if we were Dark.”

“Grr … uff!” Trotter put in with a hint of warning.

Pat winced. He kept forgetting that the dog understood every word they said. He was also thoroughly tired of JJC’s irritating nicknaming habit. How things had changed between them since the first dinner Pat last December! He and Sanders had been deep into creating SolGrid when Jack Commer’s son showed up asking for an interview. Hirte had maintained that JJC might have some insight into the software, but Pat had protested that everyone knew that the twenty-eight-year-old had burned his brains out screwing with the fascist Alpha Centaurian Grid last year. But since JJC was his old friend Jack’s son, Pat reluctantly agreed they could take some time out and invite the kid to dinner.

Two things surprised Pat at that first dinner. First, instead of applying for a job, JJC pleaded with Pat to scrap all plans for SolGrid, but seeing that Pat wasn’t budging from his fresh United System contract to build just such an application, Jonathan James then began a campaign to introduce safeguards to guard against any Alpha Centaurian-style brainwashing. Pat wound up promising a dozen add-ons which he always found excuses never to implement. There was just no time with the threat of the Wounded.

The second revelation was even more astounding. It was painfully obvious that both Jackie and Hirte’s girlfriend Suzette were smitten with the young man. Jackie was almost seventy-six but rejuvenated to mid-thirties, and she was drooling. Pat’s own girlfriend, drooling for this brain-damaged fool! And Suzette Borman, forty-two but never rejuvenated, looking so hard and used up by life that she scared Pat, was giggling and swatting JJC’s thigh and hanging onto his shoulder. Lee Borman’s wife, who’d been having an affair with Sanders Hirte for God knew how long.

Pat had recoiled in disgust at JJC’s charisma. It was an unruly and much more powerful version of his father’s leadership charm, and over the next few months Pat had gotten more than enough of it shoved down his throat. But before long JJC was somehow part of the SolGrid group, even though he was passionately devoted to dismantling it.

“Look, it’s been obvious something’s been up for a while. This opposition to SolGrid you have. And now somehow you’ve brainwashed everyone else into it.”

JJC narrowed his eyes. “Let’s not use that term if you don’t mind, Mr. Patster.”

Urside Charmouth’s Dented Painting

Posted on July 11, 2019 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

Feckless young Urside Charmouth, heedless experimenter with Heuristic Time Transition, is horrified by the revelations from the future, fearing that he’s ruined the cosmic timeline with his drug-like time travel romps. He then wastes the universe’s final HTT revisiting his high school graduation night, only to slingshot into his own distant future.

From Nonprofit Chronowar, Book Three of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series:

Urside plunged down a long dim hallway but found himself at a dead end. A simple white door to his left. He opened it, the meager hall light falling into a large dark space. Must be the garage. Wonder what kinds of cars these rich old farts have. He reached inside to flip a switch.

Light blasted the space from dozens of floodlights along all the walls. Unmistakably an artist’s studio, thirty feet by thirty feet, ten feet high, with two large abstracts underway on easels. Dozens of paintings on the walls, bright color everywhere. A large flat file with ten drawers, the expensive kind Urside had always wanted for storing drawings. Two waist-high workbenches crowded with jars of paint, brushes, drawing paper, and colored pencils.

“Wow …” Urside muttered. He came up to the larger of the two paintings in progress.

This one was at least five by eight feet, in fact it was so large it seemed to chop the studio in half. It was layers and layers of cascading blue ocean, with shards of half-buried orange, red and purple. Damn, this is just like that dream I had about doing a giant messy blue painting. No real shapes in it, just tones. I’ve never really dared to let the canvas just be a mass of tone. Wow, this is a cool direction.

The other painting was four by five feet, mostly white space with a few jagged abstract primary colors falling from the upper light to the lower left. Along the walls were similar tonal experiments, in all sizes. Atop the flat file lay spiral-bound journals fattened with watercolors. A couple lay open to broadcast more abstract energies.

Urside perused one of the journals, feeling only slightly guilty. Look, I’ve got a right to be interested in this artist, I’m a fellow artist appreciating another artist’s work.

Besides, I’m out of phase with all these people, with the owners or the house, with whoever this artist is. So I can look. The artist would want me to.

He was surprised to see rigorous pencil sketches of nudes in the journal as well as abstract color. The nudes, both men and women, were glorious, rough but with excellent volume and proportions. The artist obviously wasn’t aiming at perfection, but he was solidly hitting the subject. The white spaces around the nudes were the same as the white spaces in the abstract works.

Urside’s own abstracts were boring and muddy. There really was no energy to them, and Urside had seriously considered giving it all up. Like that stupid abstract graphic novel I started in January. Hell, I only did five sketches! It was as silly as that idea I had in high school about writing a whole novel about a trip to the gas station!

The few good paintings Urside had done seemed to come at random. He’d start a blank canvas hoping to improvise until he hit some abstract passion–but hours later he’d find himself numbly staring at some messy travesty. He had no control over the energy. Last November he’d finally gotten so angry at a two by three-foot painting that he overpainted it in napthol crimson, a transparent blood red. But the effect was powerful. Drowned in the cleansing red ocean, insipid blue rectangles became floating murky purple hulks, with streaks of yellow-orange straining to break to the surface. And Angry Consciousness 51 became the passion Urside needed. It hung over his bed at the Cat Farm and every day he saluted it as the kind of work he was on this planet to do.

The Fifty-First State of Consiousness copyright 2019 by Michael D. Smith

The Fifty-First State of Consciousness starring as Angry Consciousness 51

Urside glanced up and short-circuited. Then laughed. God, he’d been thinking about Angry Consciousness 51 and he could have sworn he saw it hanging above one of the dark blue workbenches! That shows you what memories can do! Superimpose the old image on–

But something like Angry Consciousness 51 really was hanging on the wall over the workbench! Odd, another red two by three-foot painting that reminded him of–

No! It IS my painting! Jesus God, it can’t be! It’s my goddamn painting! Urside stared at Angry Consciousness 51 for a full minute without thinking. He moved to the workbench like an astronaut approaching an alien artifact.

Somehow Angry Consciousness 51 had wound up here, in this artist’s studio!

Urside couldn’t think. He examined the artifact. It was definitely Angry Consciousness 51. But he was shocked to see white gouges on the painted black sides of the canvas. There were scratches and dents along the bottom. The acrylic texture was clotted with dust.

Urside stood back. The entire canvas looked old. Urside had given a painting to a friend years ago and when he’d visited him in February he’d noted how beat up the painting was. “Well, I’ve moved about six times since you gave it to me,” John had said, then grilled him for restoration advice Urside knew nothing about.

No more of his paintings in here. He must just have gotten rid of that one, his best one. At least it had an honored place here. He loved the colors in this studio, the bright light. In fact, if he ever got the brains together to build a real studio for himself, it would be like this.

Dozens of photographs hung on the walls. Many were close-ups of objects on tables, paperweights or plastic soldiers or puppets. Some were holographs, some printed on paper. Sunshine or high wattage artificial light bathed the objects.

Christ, here was a picture of Urside as an old coot! A damn old coot with a crooked smile on his face! Sitting on a high stool in this studio!

Urside scanned the studio again, eyes latching onto object after object after object.

The crimson Fokker Triplane I built in the ninth grade! Last time I remember that was high school! Had it in my room! How the hell can it be here now?

The black pot with green stripes I made at the Cat Farm when Ben was teaching me how to use the potter’s wheel! The stupid thing was lopsided, it was a goddamn mess–

The white cube clock I got for Christmas my first year at Northwestern, the one I stared at for twelve hours, freaking out on Jerry’s dope–

The photo I took of the Cat Farm staff in November 2018!

Urside swallowed. If … if he knew himself … if he had always known that he would keep writing, for the rest of his life, in journals he’d started in January 2013 as a senior in high school … then there would be a writing journal …

On the workbench. A spiral notebook, this one with pages in a rainbow of colors. Paper. Not a computer, not a laptop. Urside picked it up, saw the notecard halfway through the journal, the same kind of notecard that always marked the last passage in his journals. Urside numbered his journals, and he was up to number 8. Opening to the first page, he wondered if …

Journal #83. September 4, 2074.

In his own handwriting. The same multiplicity of colored pens Urside always used. He was pleased to note that the handwriting was firm and legible, although he couldn’t make himself understand the simple English words on the paper.

Nonprofit Chronowar Background

Free Sortmind Press Titles in July Smashwords Sale

Posted on June 26, 2019 by Michael D. SmithJune 26, 2019

The 11th annual Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale runs July 1 through July 31. The eBook versions of my literary novels Akard Drearstone, Sortmind, and The Soul Institute, as well as my science fiction novella The First Twenty Steps, can be obtained for free from Smashwords during July.

	Sortmind A startup company’s telepathic Sortmind app Mindwipes ten thousand users in the city of Canterra, and political factions battle in the streets over whether telepathy should be free or outlawed.
	The Soul Institute Himal Steina realizes his dream of a mythic return to the sanctuary of a vast foggy university of Soul when he’s appointed writer in residence at the Soul Institute and falls in love with one of its numerous faculty goddesses.
	Akard Drearstone A cinder block falls on Akard Drearstone’s head and he trades his print shop job for lead guitar. As the four members of the Akard Drearstone Group face the onslaught of national fame at their rural Texas commune, twelve-year-old Jan Pace nurses her crush for the narcissistic, paranoid bassist Jim Piston.
	The First Twenty Steps Just released from six years in prison, unsure how to meet basic needs, Harry finds a kindred spirit in Roberta, in thrall to a depraved motorcycle gang. But the motorcycle attack on the Dataflux computer building turns terrifying and surreal, and Harry and Roberta find themselves outgunned by another biker gang protecting a top secret hyperspatial supercomputer.

Paperbacks?

If you’d prefer paperback copies–not part of the sale–try these links:

Akard Drearstone – Amazon
Akard Drearstone – lulu.com mass market size
Sortmind – Amazon
Sortmind – lulu.com mass market size
The Soul Institute – Amazon
The First Twenty Steps – Amazon

A Coherent Balloon Ship Armageddon

Posted on June 25, 2019 by Michael D. SmithJune 25, 2019

Alert to the Sortmind Blogosphere

I finished the second draft of Balloon Ship Armageddon, Jack Commer Book Seven, on June 22. While I wonder why I’m bothering to inform this vital sphere, which I suspect consists solely of myself, that I finished a Draft 2 of anything, I do want to record my satisfaction upon finally creating a coherent book structure out of a complicated and confused first draft.

Draft 2 cut ninety pages of nonessential secondary characters and six meandering subplot chapters, and the last fourth of the book required new writing and rethinking of the novel’s direction. Unusually for me, as normally even my second drafts are fairly messy affairs, I kept rereading and reworking all Draft 2 chapters as I was going through the novel, continually editing earlier parts to make them congruent with ongoing developments, so I feel the book is now well-focused.

There’s a lot of thinking ahead for a Draft 3, of course. While I could reread and finagle Draft 2 for a couple more weeks, I decided I needed to close this draft and move into the mindset for Draft 3, a vision of a finished novel. I may (or may not) plunge right into Draft 3.

The Premise of Balloon Ship Armageddon

The idea for a book to conclude the series originated with Jack’s wife Amav’s declaration at the end of Book Six, The SolGrid Rebellion, that they needed to mount a search for their traitorous son Jonathan James, who was murdered by an opportunistic rival and then reconstituted as one-third of a solid chromium pyramid. In Book Seven a wacky doctor in the Iota Persei star system separates him out into a lower class Wounded robot. Dr. Amy Nortel, however, is a Wounded robot herself, a member of a race that destroys entire solar systems for the thrill of stealing their energy. She also gloats that she’d been planted in Jack’s past as his high school English AP teacher.

Meanwhile Jonathan James rises to captaincy of Balloon Ship Armageddon on the bleak, Anti-Dark Energy sea world of Ailyuae in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, 163,000 light years from Sol. There he finally realizes he’s programmed to initiate a Wounded Trans-Simultaneity weapon that will destroy the Milky Way, and possibly the entire universe.

Psychic Space for New Writing

Another factor in announcing that I have a fairly complete seventeenth novel is that Balloon Ship Armageddon has been intended as the seventh and final book in the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series. In positing an end to this series I wanted to open space for completely new writing.

Oddly, though, after finishing Draft 1, I found the best way to get a compact and satisfying Book Seven was to stop considering this novel any sort of definitive ending to Jack Commer, and no longer kowtow to dozens of series characters who were begging for some nebulous karmic resolution. Draft 1 was in fact littered with Grade B characters yakking about their desired series conclusions. Maybe, liberated from the obligation to happily end the greatest science fiction series of all time, some of those cut Draft 1 chapters and secondary characters could be part of a forceful Jack Commer Eight. Who knows? In any case they weren’t needed for Seven.

So What About a Jack Commer Eight?

Right now I have no urge to either forcefully declare the series over, or to continue it. Yet I see I’ve hinted at a future Jack Commer novel in Balloon Ship Armageddon’s ending, where Jack and several series comrades have just embarked on a dangerous mission to a multidimensional Uninhabitable Sphere of leftover karmic crap from the beginning of the universe. However, I seem to have left Jack with such a mindblowing assignment involving cosmology and the metaphysical source of good and evil that no Book Eight can possibly come out of that.

Balloon Ship Armageddon – more information

The First 1982 Sortmind Plot

Posted on March 25, 2019 by Michael D. SmithJune 25, 2019

During my first semester of library school I wrote out six short science fiction plots; at the time I wasn’t serious about them, though in retrospect I see I might have fused them into a semi-interesting novel. In any case, Number 6 arose from my experience in the frustrating and time-consuming introductory Reference class, in which, way pre-Internet, we hunted down hundreds of scraps of trivia from dozens of printed reference sources in different libraries–simulating a day of hectic patron interaction.

But a class near the end of the semester on the emerging reference databases gave me hope; it was obvious that no reference book, however recently published, was equal to the searchable, always current online database. From there it was a short step to the convenience of the Telepathic Database, which along with Library Director Peter became the focus of Sortmind many years later. Thus, from November 29, 1982:

Plot 6. The War Returns to Alpha Centauri

Peter gazed out the window of his library and surveyed the rolling sunny hills of the suburb of Klawza on Alpha 7. He was in a disagreeable mood. Statistics had just been compiled which indicated that the Telepathic Database was not working out, as Peter’s predecessor Holbin had hoped. Holbin had designed the Telepathic Database in an attempt to give the libraries of Klawza, the Imperial Capital of Wisp, an unlimited information resource, completely flexible and available for a small sum for any who wished to subscribe. Holbin had thus eliminated the need for a reference section in any of the Klawza libraries and in fact had gone a long way toward convincing other libraries on Alpha 7 to abandon their own reference methods and instead pool all their resources into the Holbin base.

However, as Holbin had feared on his deathbed, and as Peter had suspected himself the last few months, the results of the first Ten Year Statistical Evaluation of the Holbin Telepathic Database were far from encouraging. In fact, the Database might just have to be dismantled entirely. This left Peter with the extremely unpleasant task of having to rebuild traditional computer-based information bases in all the libraries of Klawza, of which he was now the Director.

The Telepathic Database had seemed perfect at first: instead of hunting for information in any of fifteen million databases, in addition to a few million book reference works still left from the preceding century, one simply paid 55 credits a year and entered the Holbin Base. Holbin technicians then recorded your brainwave pattern, transferred it to their main computer, into which had been loaded every conceivable scrap of information ever–ever–recorded anywhere, and set up the Telepathic Energy Field from the Computer to the subscriber’s brain. When one wished to locate information on any subject, one didn’t bother turning to a computer terminal to hunt for the answer. The answer was just automatically sent via the Telepathic Database to one’s brain–one was certain the answer was correct because of a certain sensation transmitted along with the answer. The Verifying Sensation, Holbin called it.

Unfortunately the statistics were now pointing up the unfortunate fact that not only was the Verifying Sensation addictive in itself, in that subscribers to the Database were generally asking what 2 and 2 was, just to get a dose of Verifying Sensation, but also that Verifying Sensation was, for either pleasure seekers or serious information gatherers, damaging. The bottom line was that after five years of subscribing to the Telepathic Database, one could expect to have one’s mind burned out. Brain transplants had been tried in a few cases, but they had unfortunately failed.

Peter had cancelled his own subscription to the Holbin Base yesterday.

Sortmind background

When the Shirt Hits the Fan: More Musing on Typos, and the Sortmind Editing Passes

Posted on March 9, 2019 by Michael D. SmithAugust 20, 2019

There’s not much more to say other than that we thoroughly despise typos, as they momentarily jerk us out of the reader’s trance not only necessary to a fictional story but to any writing; in order to fully sink into the manuscript, we want reassurance that the author is truly in command of every mark on the page.

To my chagrin I generate some of my worst typos when editing a final manuscript. I won’t say in which of my novels my worst typo appears, but it’s enough to mention that in desiring to make “The gravity was astounding strong” into a pithier statement, I merely lopped off the fifth word without noticing I needed to change the fourth, to come up with: “The gravity was astoundingly.” And of course a sharp-eyed reader caught that after publication.

There are numerous recommended methods for self-editing and proofing, including reading the manuscript backwards and reading it aloud. Sometimes I’ll read sections aloud, but I’ve never tried that for an entire novel. Just now I took the manuscript of my unpublished novel Jump Grenade and sorted it in ascending order, to get an amusingly random succession of paragraphs. That may be worth looking into as a proofing method.

But the main topic of this post is the image of the Sortmind proofing hash marks before publication. I really wanted to find errors, and as you can see my beta reader and I found more than I would have assumed. Most were fairly minor, but I often made a little dot on the mark to indicate an astoundingly groaner. During the passes I variously made an eBook of the draft to experience the text in a different mode, turned grammar check pitifully high, and magnified the text to 220% to slow myself down.

But at some point you just have to let it slip into the world. I hope there are no blunders in Sortmind, and if anyone finds them in any degree, please let me know, for in having Total Artistic and Publishing Control I can always issue a second edition.

Sortmind background
Sharp-Eyed Reader’s website – Thank you, Faith!

Free Sortmind Press Titles March 3-March 9

Posted on March 1, 2019 by Michael D. SmithMarch 1, 2019

The eBook versions of my literary novels Akard Drearstone, Sortmind, and The Soul Institute, as well as my science fiction novella The First Twenty Steps, can be obtained for free from Smashwords from March 3-March 9 during the 10th Annual Smashwords Read an Ebook Week Sale.

Akard Drearstone

A cinder block falls on Akard Drearstone’s head and he trades his print shop job for lead guitar. Months later, as the four members of the Akard Drearstone Group face the onslaught of national fame at their rural Texas commune, twelve-year-old Jan Pace nurses her crush for the narcissistic, paranoid bassist Jim Piston, growing up way too fast in a surreal summer between seventh and eighth grade.

Sortmind

A startup company’s telepathic Sortmind app Mindwipes ten thousand users in the city of Canterra, and political factions battle in the streets over whether telepathy should be free to all or outlawed. Oliver and Sam, two high school art students whose fathers head the fascist Citizens Against Telepathy, struggle with art, friendship, love, and family–as well as urban warfare, secret societies, hysterical rumors of alien invasion, and the malfunctioning, reality-altering Sortmind.

The Soul Institute

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

The First Twenty Steps

Just released from six years in prison, unsure how to meet basic needs, Harry finds a kindred spirit in Roberta, in thrall to a depraved motorcycle gang. But the passive-aggressive leader of the Cerberean Knights leads them into a major crime this evening as he seeks to pay back favors from the corrupt city council of One-West. As the motorcycle attack on the Dataflux computer building turns terrifying and surreal, Harry and Roberta find themselves outgunned by another biker gang belonging to a mysterious billionaire who intervenes to protect his secret hyperspatial supercomputer.