Supreme Commander Laurie Lachrer

Petite, red-headed Laurie takes up the responsibilities of Supreme Commander of the United System Space Force in May 2076, but by November she’s exhausted by the endless administrative hassles and the growing disrespect shown to her. But what’s this about changing her last name to Morgan?

Lt. Commander Rod Morgan

Brilliant and upcoming physician/engineer at thirty-five, assigned to saucer Pegasus II, Morgan is tall and slender, with well-defined pectorals, prematurely gray hair, intense deep-set gray-blue eyes, and is seemingly irresistible to women.

Captain Mavis Wheeler

Stunning at six-foot-one, the author of On the Use of Xon Technology as Electromagnetic Pulse Disruptor in Space Combat is appointed captain of USSF saucer Pegasus II, but soon finds herself disturbingly at odds with her mentor Laurie.

Cardecu

Chairman of the Dream’s Committee of Six which formed on the planet Umbrae when the Counselors came into contact with Jack Commer’s son and dog Trotter. Like his fellow committee members, Cardecu has adopted a permanent Beagle-human shape to better interface with Sol.

Lt. Commander Cadagasgar Wirlmann

Sandy-haired, ruggedly handsome, graduating top of his class at the USSF Academy, Cad was unjustly demoted to a Detention Services goon, but was determined to win back his piloting credentials. He’s now Laurie’s copilot aboard Pegasus I and shows far more initiative than anyone thought him capable of.

Carla Posttner

Sociopath jailed for her attempt to overthrow the United System in April 2076, but freed by her lover, President Robert Easterling, her a month later and reappointed director of USSF Detention Services. But in league with Easterling, she repeated the power grab the very next month and was jailed a second time. Then she’s chosen as Sol’s ambassador to the Dream.

Commander John Perkins

Director of  USSF Detention Services and Laurie’s bête noire, Perkins apparently exists to be of constant loyal service to Carla Posttner.

Cassie Wolfduy

A shrill, frizzy blonde with beady blue eyes, Cassie is the mother of the airman Laurie had to kill in self-defense. With assistance from Detention Service Director Perkins and the Anti-Spacer Foundation, her civil suit against Laurie gets upgraded to a murder charge in November 2076.

Airman Encar Wolfduy

Corrupt, dimwitted Detention Service goon killed by Laurie amid the brutal firefight aboard USSF saucer Pegasus I, May 2076.

copyright 2026 by Michael D. Smith

eBook:
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Books2Read (offers numerous distributors)
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paperback: Amazon

all words and images copyright 2026 by Michael D. Smith

The Benign Incursion, Book Two of the Supreme Commander Laurie series, is now available.

paperback:
Amazon

eBook:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Books2Read (which offers numerous distributors)
Smashwords

Synopsis

Supreme Commander Laurie Lachrer finds herself overwhelmed by galling administrative headaches in her first six months as supreme commander. In addition to resistance throughout the United System bureaucracy, she’s being sued by Cassie Wolfduy, mother of the corrupt USSF Airman Encar Wolfduy whom Laurie was forced to kill in self-defense the previous May. Laurie is also politically stigmatized as an inept Commerist, subservient to former supreme commander Jack Commer. But all these troubles pale in comparison to her guilty attraction to subordinate Rod Morgan, the brilliant young physician/engineer on spaceship Pegasus I.

Meanwhile, Laurie’s protégé Mavis Wheeler captains Pegasus II to a planet 92.5 light-years away to initiate first contact with an alien race called the Counselors, who offer to introduce humanity to what they call the Dream Culture. But the Counselors, who’ve taken the form of six-foot Beagle-human hybrids to interface with Sol, also turn out to be eager and influential spectators at Laurie’s murder trial.

Excerpt (Chapters 1-3 in PDF format)

Main Characters

I’m refreshing the character illustrations; those shown below are from 2025.

Supreme Commander Laurie Lachrer
Laurie takes up the responsibilities of Supreme Commander of the United System Space Force in May 2076, but by November she’s exhausted by the endless administrative hassles and the growing disrespect shown to her.

Lt. Commander Cadagasgar Wirlmann
Sandy-haired, ruggedly handsome, graduating top of his class at the USSF Academy, Cad was unjustly demoted to a Detention Services goon, but was determined to win back his piloting credentials. He’s now Laurie’s copilot aboard Pegasus I and decides to show far more initiative than anyone thought him capable of.

Lt. Commander Rod Morgan
Brilliant and upcoming physician/engineer at thirty-five, assigned to saucer Pegasus II, Morgan is tall and slender, with well-defined pectorals, prematurely gray hair, intense deep-set gray-blue eyes, and is seemingly irresistible to women.

Cardecu
Chairman of the Dream’s Committee of Six, which formed on the planet Umbrae when the Counselors came into contact with Jack Commer’s son and dog Trotter. Like his fellow committee members, Cardecu has adopted a permanent Beagle-human shape to better interface with Sol.

Carla Posttner
This sociopath was jailed for her attempt to overthrow the United System in April 2076, but President Robert Easterling freed her a month later and reappointed her director of USSF Detention Services. But in league with Easterling, she repeated the power grab the very next month and was jailed a second time. Then she’s appointed ambassador to the Dream.

Captain Mavis Wheeler
Stunningly beautiful at six-foot-one, the author of On the Use of Xon Technology as Electromagnetic Pulse Disruptor in Space Combat is appointed captain of USSF saucer Pegasus II, but soon finds herself disturbingly at odds with her mentor Laurie.

Commander John Perkins
Director of Detention Services and Laurie’s bête noire, Perkins sports a gray tunic, a thin black Sam Browne belt across his chest, and a huge black shattergun holster at his hip. He’s constantly in service to Carla Posttner.

Forces Clamoring for Book Three

The character situations by the end of TBI are getting me thinking about what would happen with these people in a third novel. That’s a good feeling. I can’t just ignore what happened with Rod and Laurie and expect a normal third book.

The disarray of the United System, left hanging at the end of TBI? Laurie left in exile? Still on the run?

Is Laurie actually pregnant from her single encounter with Rod? This is only mentioned as a fear in TBI, and maybe this can be used in Book Three.

Where does Laurie and Rod’s relationship go from here? Do they remain estranged, yet still deeply connected? Does this feeling of connection continue to grow?

How can she recover from the scandal image she now has? Marriage to “the adulterer Morgan” may make things look better to society, but she might feel guilty to be exploiting the marriage for PR purposes.

How does Laurie go about asserting her leadership? Since most civilians think of her as a scandal at this point? Or does she blow it all off? Maybe she offers her services to a distant star empire?

Maybe she goes to a Buddhist retreat and becomes the supreme commander of her Inner True Self.

Cad Wirlmann and Carla Posttner are slated for major roles in Book Three. Likewise Mavis Wheeler, promoted to even more responsibility at the end of The Benign Incursion.

I’m definitely continuing to phase out old Jack Commer series characters. Joe, Jack, Ranna, Amav, or Dar don’t need to constantly be mentioned, or return. Nor does exposition from the older books need to figure in.

Does Rod really retire from the USSF? What would be meaningful for him at this point? Maybe he joins a mercenary space outfit, or joins with the rebellious Maroxins at Groombridge 1618 who have developed their own space force.

Rod demonstrates cleverness and insight near the end of TBI. But he’s an adolescent. Is he worthless after all? He’ll have to grow a lot to deserve Laurie. Maybe by a Book Ten …

Does he vie for being a Supreme Telepathic Leader of Sol? A side effect of the Counselors is that he learns how to amplify telepathic powers. He seeks power to win Laurie back, or to at least equal her. They remain at odds throughout Book Three. Though the two travel back to Mars at the end of Book Two, wouldn’t they remain distant and awkward? Maybe they discuss his new telepathic powers and his ambitions upon leaving the USSF.

Laurie would need to renew her ties to the Fools of the Fire.

Does Rod decide to substitute a robot version of himself?

The Rather Existential Question Remains

I’m enjoying starting a new series featuring Laurie Morgan, and The Benign Incursion was a fun and high-energy project, but … what sort of writing do I really want to be doing? Could it be that I need to write some long experimental stuff, however disordered and strange it turns out, returning to the SCL universe from time to time to explore this sort of series SF?

This segues into musing that it’s true that we readers like series, like to see our favorite characters come back in fresh installments, and like the expected tropes of the genre we prefer. So … that’s familiarity. Ease of engagement.

But consider that, from the author’s perspective, it’s also familiar and easy. Do we end up writing our own fan faction about the initial world we built long ago? Where’s the experimentation? Where is asking the reader to think and feel their way forward into this difficult investigation, in order to learn and grow? Yes, I know that may be too much to ask; usually one reads for enjoyment and dislikes straining through something that probably looks like a calculus test. And if the reader is in fact inclined to search out new understanding, why would he or she take the risk of engaging with an unknown author’s long experiment?

So … much to muse on here after completing this novel.

copyright 2025 by Michael D. Smith

The Supreme Commander Laurie Series
The Jack Commer, Supreme Commander Series
Published by Sortmind Press

Three attic boxes disgorged model airplanes dating from as long ago as 1967. I think I’ve built around eighty or ninety since then, most in the sixties and early seventies, but I occasionally still do a few. Forty-eight still exist. The models obviously don’t approach the level of art, but they do represent 3D homages to beautiful flying objects, and several connect to my fiction.

This year saw an urge to build several more planes as well as to investigate the ancient ones I’ve retained all these decades. First, I purchased an old 1978 edition of an F-102 model airplane kit to renew, I think, my subconscious inspiration for my Jack Commer series’ Typhoon I spaceship, seen in Trip to Mars.

Then I spent a week putting together the astoundingly complex German W.W.I Gotha G.Vb long-range bomber, which was akin to building a ship in a bottle; I’m surprised the producers of the kit didn’t have me installing 1/72 scale spark plugs in the engine. I still boggle at the idea of being one of the three crew aboard this contraption somewhere over the English channel, at night, summer 1918.

Next I got a 1/48 scale Fokker Triplane and built it as an homage to my first 1967 triplane, translucent crimson and unpainted. Somehow that led to buying two more triplanes, painting one in camouflage and one in a dark green like the one my father built for me in the fifties.

Then the  B-17 dredged up awe at my father flying this bomber in World War II, as well as memories of the couple times I’ve walked through a real B-17. Matching its colors to my paint-spattered art table was challenging, and I decided that, commercial model or not, this well-camouflaged ship is now a mini-sculpture; it definitely supersedes the model airplane concept.

This led to dealing with two other models that had been sitting in boxes for years.

One was a 1971 edition of the Boeing F4B-4 carrier biplane from the 1930s, which I’d bought to represent the Mystery Yellow Biplane of Evil from Asylum and Mirage, in which frightened young urbanites cannot bring themselves to admit they’re hallucinating yellow biplanes–which are in fact real. Thus no 1930s decals on the mystery biplane.

Then I finally built the F4U-1 Corsair carrier plane, a glorious shape and a 2017 birthday present from a friend.

In addition to doing minor repair on fragile plastic airplanes crammed into boxes, I wanted to restore two items.

First was the German Albatros D.III, which somehow survived having a six-foot coat hanger-and-cotton ball flame glued to it as it was shot down by a Sopwith Triplane in my dorm room my first month at Rice. The plane remained basically intact for fifty-five years and just needed new paint and a snazzy gloss overcoat.

The other model brought up my 1979-80 fascination with the German W.W.II Me-163B rocket fighter, and the first version of The University of Mars which featured it. Yet I discarded any Me-163 models I built then, the same the way I’d trashed eleven or twelve Me-262 jet fighters from the seventies. I think rereading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich brought home the fact that these swastika-tailed devices were murder machines in service of a totalitarian empire, and I decided I wanted nothing further to do with them–though I did discover in the attic boxes three FW-190s and 2 Me-109s from my sixties era; one FW-190 was an early experiment in cotton ball flames.

In any case,  cut to this 1/48 scale Me-163 I built in the late eighties; I preserved its aesthetic shape by painting it in glossy non-regulation colors with no decals, I guess so I could think of it as a lovely object somehow divorced from Nazi Germany. Maybe that was fine at the time, but when I opened the attic boxes and saw this thing, I was disgusted with the cover-up it implied.

So I painted it flat gray with a reasonable approximation of camouflage. I’ve ordered decals for it, and will at least acknowledge the ghastly mixture of technological genius and collapsing empire this machine represents.

copyright 2025 by Michael D. Smith

More background:

Trip to Mars
Asylum and Mirage
The University of Mars

Fabulous Marsport featured on the cover

A sixth-grade boy reports that World War IV has rendered the planet uninhabitable, and that Jack Commer and the crew of Typhoon I must spearhead Earth’s evacuation to Mars.

Paperback from Amazon
Paperback from lulu.com
eBook from Amazon
The Complete Book on YouTube

Typhoon I blasts off for Mars

Porting Trip to Mars to Amazon was an experiment in translating the 2017 lulu.com paperback, 7” x 9” and still available there, to Amazon’s widest landscape format at 8.5” x 6”. At some point I may see about making a larger size, but for now, I’m happy with the Amazon version; its size feels right. The slight difference in rectangular ratio between the two versions mandated some finagling with the images and with font sizes for best fit, but that was again a good learning experience. But the images and text are the same as the 2017 version.

Einstein’s special theory of relativity explains why the moon is about to explode.

Along the way I learned about formatting images for bleeding off the page; all in all this has been a worthwhile endeavor, and I hope having the book on Amazon offers it to a wider audience. I had fun illustrating this book and I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on it. Even its sixth-grade origins have a certain charm for readers.

I also elected to put Trip to Mars out as a Kindle eBook, even though I expected a picture book to be a bit rough in eBook format. But the landscape images work well when viewed in landscape. Yes, that means you have to turn your phone or tablet sideways.

Jack flees a nuclear explosion with the secret plans for a new city of Mars.

For more background, I see no reason to repeat or plagiarize my previous post about the book, Trip to Mars, the Picture Book, or, How the Ship Became a Fantastical Theater Stage.

copyright 2025 by Michael D. Smith

I’m again pleased to announce that I’ve produced yet another paperback, New Akard 1979, that no one can buy–just like Akard Draft One Art Objects and The Sortmind Draft One Project. I didn’t fully realize how happy New Akard 1979 made me until I received two copies of the paperback today.

Why Would Anyone Resurrect an Ancient, Abandoned Third Draft?

New Akard 1979 is the October 1984 third draft of the long and difficult Akard Drearstone project, which went through twelve drafts and two major reboots before final publication in 2017.

Why did I spend a month revamping the ancient, abandoned third draft of a novel, and why am I bothering to blog about it now?

I intended from the beginning to eventually publish the novel; this third version, crafted with publishable product in mind, represents the original idea of the book–at the exact time in 1984 when I realized I’d fully outgrown this work and dropped it.

Now I want to see where I assisted the novel’s vision under that publishing mandate, and where publication concerns diminished it. What worked and what didn’t?

So in May and June I scanned and edited the 861 typewritten pages of New Akard 1979 with the goal of being faithful to the October 1984 version. I only made minor changes for clarity’s sake, such as standardizing title formats and correcting spelling. But there’s no overall style sheet; usage may employ 24 or twenty-four; AM, a.m., or A.M.; traveling or travelling. I left odd or inconsistent capitalization and almost all comma-separated run-on sentences, though I occasionally interrupted one of these with a period for ease of comprehension. The non-published paperback from lulu.com runs 308,752 words in 699 pages, and it came out looking very nice.

The Path to NA 79

The twenty-three-year-old’s sprawling, weird, experimental first draft of Akard Drearstone consisted of 1,587 pages in thirty-one chapters, an astonishing learning experience despite its many flaws. I knew as I wrote it that it badly needed major revision. The goal of Draft 2, 1978-1981, was to eventually produce a final typed manuscript and start publisher queries. Many of its thirty chapters went through third, fourth, or fifth drafts, and I experimented with all sorts of tricks and techniques, such as reformatting narrative into articles and transcripts, trying to make a long novel more palatable.

Before beginning the manuscript project, Fall 1980 to September 1981, I cut the first three slow introduction chapters and an unnecessary flashback chapter. Twenty-six remaining chapters, 1,128 typewritten pages, became the basis for my typed manuscript. I then typed 377 pages of MS. through September 1981, but at that point, dreading the continued typing duties and realizing I needed new forms of expression, I put the project on indefinite hold.

Three years later in October 1984 I bade a final farewell to the novel–so I thought at the time‑‑by cutting six additional chapters and making a photocopy of the novel for off-site storage. Now I called the novel New Akard 1979 because the events were set in 1979–another nod to consigning the book to my writer past. It was good to realize that the manuscript’s 861 pages were a refreshing 54% of Draft 1’s length, but what I basically felt was relief at having finally consigned the book to the desk drawer.

Old Publishing Concerns and Writer Ambition

Of course New Akard 1979 has major flaws. The first two long chapters are especially disappointing. They seem like safe, dull writing in service of “trying to get published.” In fact, most of the first chapters have a fearful editor-pleasin’ flavor which instead broadcasts a tone of insecurity about the vast topics the book purports to cover. Yet later on outrageous ideas, humor, and quirks start flowing, the chapters get stranger, the characters deepen, and the novel moves down a much more complex and intriguing path.

Part of the reason for the initial dullness may be because, while typing from the last completed drafts, I was still doing some amount of rewriting during the manuscript phase, tidying passages and trying to make them worthier of editor respect.

It certainly wasn’t as if my whole urge to revise was to knuckle down to what I thought publishers might find acceptable. The entire novel experience from 1975 to 1984 was complicated, an exhausting long haul of good and bad writing, revisions, surprises, unfolding energies, and many experiments to correct and consolidate.

It may be that I got discouraged because of that play-it-safe mode; I think that if I’d had word processing at the time, I might’ve rearranged the novel again in 1981 and essentially started over. A typed manuscript is just a notch above stone-carving, after all, and the 377 pages of typed manuscript were a formidable obstacle to any concept of reboot.

I know that my endless involvement with Akard and its published 2017 edition have answered its karmic role in my life, but there’s always been that feeling of regret at not seeing the 1981 typing through. It’s informative now to re-experience how ambivalent I felt about the concept of publishing back then–being both ambitious about a writing career and scared about how to pursue it.

I’d completely forgotten some chapters that never formed part of the final 2017 Akard Drearstone. A couple are really mindblowing, with excellent character interaction, and it was wonderful to bring these energies into the light.

Overall, NA 79 is not a bad attempt. I even think my goal of it becoming a publishable novel could have been realized–IF I’d found an editor who could’ve correctly seen that the first chapters are rather dull and convinced me to cut them and then start with the same concert bust where the final Akard does begin.

AI Makes Me Laugh

Okay, I’m shocked. I uploaded the PDF chapter scans into Google Drive, then used Google Docs to OCR them. Then, out of curiosity, I used the “Summarize this file” feature for each of them. The result was twenty-five single-spaced pages of mechanized zaniness and bizarre conjecture. The one for the first half of Chapter 1 says:

The document “01-FourHorsemen-A” is the first chapter of a story titled “Akard Drearstone.” It involves characters named Jim Piston, Akard Drearstone, Richard Autograph, and Crystal Synapse.

Here’s a summary of the chapter’s content:

• It takes place at a farmhouse where people are gathering for an evening. There’s a history of “dope oblivion parties” at this farm on Fridays and Saturdays.
• Akard can identify cars by the sound of their engines. People arrive, and Akard identifies some of them by their vehicles.
• Richard and Crystal are expected to bring a significant amount of money. They have a history of drug deals.
• The characters smoke from a shared pipe that belongs to Richard. There’s nostalgia associated with it.
• The farmhouse is described in detail, including its layout and surrounding structures like a barn and a shack.
• People at the farm engage in activities like throwing cinder blocks at wrecked cars.
• Richard and Crystal bring in $1500. The group discusses past and future drug deals.
• The group members discuss their financial situation, past musical projects (like the “Stompin Fuckholes”), and plans for future music.
• The ownership of the farm is explained. Akard owns 50%, Pete Sponge 25%, and Jim 25%. Richard, Crystal, and Bill Punish live there but own nothing.
• The group plans to play music later in the evening, possibly after taking acid.
• They move around the property, including the barn, and have conversations about their music and other philosophical topics.
• The chapter ends with preparations for a night of music and drug use, with several characters involved in various activities and conversations.

Is any of this true? Cogent? Valuable?

The Good, the Bad, and the Mediocre

I’ve always thought that the 1,587-page rough draft of Akard Drearstone consisted of one good novel, one bad novel, and three mediocre novels, and that by the time I got to the published 2017 Akard, I had the good, satisfying novel at last, truly about 20% of the original draft’s length.

So, back-of-the-envelope calculation, I would say that New Akard 1979 represents the good novel, though still interlaced with two of the mediocre ones. Still, it was quite the educational experience, and I’m glad to remember that the bad novel got vanquished so early. It’s been fun to take a refresher course about this entire process. I now have a polished version of very old, speculative, and unfinished energies that I feel also speak to my future writing.

copyright 2025 by Michael D. Smith

 More info on Akard Drearstone

Book Two of the Supreme Commander Laurie series finds Laurie plagued by endless administrative headaches in her first six months as supreme commander. In addition to resistance to her appointment throughout the United System Space Force bureaucracy, she’s being sued by Cassie Wolfduy, mother of the USSF airman Laurie had to kill in self-defense in Book One. She also finds herself politically stigmatized as a “Commerist” subservient to former supreme commander Jack Commer. But all these troubles pale in comparison to her scandalous attraction to Rod Morgan, the young physician/engineer on spaceship Pegasus I.

Meanwhile, Laurie’s protégé Captain Mavis Wheeler flies saucer Pegasus II to a planet 92.5 light-years away to help Jack’s son Jonathan James Commer deal with an alien race called the Counselors. The Counselors assist the races they encounter by creating a committee in the physical form of the new race. But Jonathan James is so inextricably linked with his Beagle Trotter that the Counselors assume they must be a single entity, and their resulting Committee of Six mistakenly takes on the permanent form of six-foot-tall combined Beagle-humans. When Jonathan James mentions that Sol may still be having trouble with the remnants of the Wounded, a deadly enemy hiding throughout the Orion Arm, the Counselors gladly use their long-range telekinetic powers to exterminate all nine thousand enemy operatives. But Captain Wheeler now understands that the giant benevolent Beagles can also wipe out Sol in a second if the United System fails to meet their increasingly strict requirements.

Draft 1 More or Less Finished

Draft 1A is 270 pages, 78,751 words, close to the length I’d originally envisioned for it. This is my twentieth novel. I’ll most likely take a break from it before polishing it to its final Draft 1B, which I feel will bring out the best sense of this first effort. Then Draft 2 will open the book to major restructuring; I already sense several areas that need work.

I’ve seen how important it is to give my new fiction project a title. A quick draft cover also helps.

Earlier parts of the novel now seem distant. “Who wrote this third chapter? I don’t remember it at all!” That’s both amusing and a sign of buried, unrefined energies. It’ll be interesting to see how this thing unfolds in a rereading. I also need to refresh myself on Book One, Supreme Commander Laurie, to make sure Book Two is congruent.

I can’t make a judgment yet on The Benign Incursion’s worth. Sometimes it feels sprawling and disconnected, other times I feel some interesting characters struggling for a voice. But it’s pleasing that the themes of the novel are aligning with where I’ve been the past couple years.

An odd spur to this novel dates from 1966. My 2023 post The Unknown Ending for The Martian Marauders explored my March 1966 notes for completing my unfinished eighth-grade draft of the foundational Jack Commer universe novel, The Martian Marauders, later rewritten and published in 2012. After the eighth grader’s last handwritten page 110, three notes glued to a sheet of notebook paper follow. But when I examined these notes in July 2023, the atrocious 1960s brown glue gave way on the right-hand note, and I saw a character name on the back, “Rod Morgan,” never used in the novel, no doubt intended as a heroic masculine character triumphing in the heroic masculine denouement of the novel. But now I knew I wanted to use Rod Morgan in a new Laurie novel. And I also realized that Laurie Lachrer, which began as a tossed-off name for what began as a minor character in The Martian Marauders, would sound much better as “Laurie Morgan.”

The Twenty Novels as I Count Them

(unlinked = not published)

1. Nova Scotia, 1973-1974
2. The Fifty-First State of Consciousness, 1973
3. Akard Drearstone, 1976-2017
4. The University of Mars, 1980-2024
5. Zarreich, 1981-2024
6. Parts I and II/Notice and Dream Topology, 1985-1992
7. The Martian Marauders, 1986-2023
8. Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, 1986-2023
9. Sortmind, 1987-2019
10. CommWealth, 1990-2023
11. The Soul Institute, 1994-2024
12. Nonprofit Chronowar, 2000-2023
13. Jump Grenade, 2008-2019
14. Collapse and Delusion, 2011-2023
15. The Wounded Frontier, 2012-2023
16. The SolGrid Rebellion, 2014-2023
17. Balloon Ship Armageddon, 2018-2023
18. Asylum and Mirage, 2022-2023
19. Supreme Commander Laurie, 2023-2024
20. The Benign Incursion, 2025-

copyright 2025 by Michael D. Smith

The Supreme Commander Laurie Series

That about sums up the seven novels of the Jack Commer series. You may not want to read all 531,743 words in one sitting, but you now have the entire Commer universe in one place.

Paperback
Amazon

eBook:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Smashwords

The thick object almost has to be held in your hands to be believed. I needed Times New Roman 8 to fit over half a million words into 823 pages, just shy of Kindle’s paperback limit of 828. Amazon reports that the book weighs 2.96 pounds. The eBook versions may be easier to hold.

The strange statistic for the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander – The Complete Series Omnibus is that the entire process just took one week. I bundled seven novels into one Word document on April 7th, finagled the document over the next few days, published it on April 12th, and received the paperback proof on April 14th. What started as a curiosity to see if I could arrange seven books into a printed omnibus turned into a project I’m now in awe of.

The physical paperback looks good. As I tweaked formats and repeatedly scrolled through 823 pages of my writing history, I found the omnibus evolving into a karmic treatise on my long involvement with this series. The published versions of the seven novels date from 2012-2021, but the series goes back many decades into childhood writing.

Yes, the type is tiny, but it’s readable and the inner margins are good. And who knows, I may sell a copy here and there. Again, the eBook is probably more readable for many people, and of course it’s just like having the complete Mark Twain on your Nook or Kindle reader, available at any time, right?

I hadn’t intended to make a bookmark for this tome, but the idea came for one that works well.

The omnibus was also a way of re-engaging with the Jack Commer books as I work on the spinoff series, Supreme Commander Laurie. Draft 1 of Book Two, The Benign Incursion, nears completion.

Quick Summary of the Murky Origins

My first fifth-grade story about Jack, “Voyage to Venus,” electrified my nine-year-old self.  Wow, this is cool, this is where I belong, this is what I want to be doing. In the seventh grade came a two-thousand-word effort I called a “novel,” Trip to Mars, positing a Final War so destructive it mandated the evacuation of the Earth in late 2033, a timeline still in place in the finished Jack Commer Series.

In the eighth grade I wrote 110 pages of The Martian Marauders, basically a Hardy Boys adventure set in space. It described the four Commer brothers’ discovery, after humanity evacuates to Mars, of telepathic Martian terrorists bent on taking back their planet. But halfway through I abandoned the novel, leaving two brothers dead and surviving Captain Jack and copilot brother Joe hanging helplessly in the ventilation shaft of a Venusian prison.

But twenty years later, after writing several literary novels, I ran across the handwritten manuscript and I knew I had to spring the Commer boys. So I typed out a hundred or so pages to conclude the story with new adult themes. This was all such fun space opera that a sequel soon followed, Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, where I explored the embarrassing ramifications of one-way Martian telepathy, a physician’s hopeless infatuation with Jack’s wife Amav, and Jack’s desperate attempts to keep his crew sane on his doomed expedition to Alpha Centauri.

But both novels remained rough drafts, with minor handwritten corrections, for the next couple decades, until a third Commer novel, Nonprofit Chronowar, presented itself and made me realize that Jack’s brother Joe had serious trauma issues about the Final War and the evacuation. By this time I considered the three manuscripts as a trilogy, and I revised The Martian Marauders and Jack Commer, stabilizing the three novels with massive fact, character, and chronology files.

The Martian Marauders was published in 2012 by Double Dragon Publishing. By 2021 there were seven published Commer novels. For a while I was embarrassed to admit that I’d begun my first published novel in the eighth grade, but finally I realized this was a wonderful asset for the series. Who publishes their eighth-grade novel?

Chronology Issues, with a Nod to Heroes and Villains of the Thirties

For those ready to fly to Hollywood to make Jack Commer movies and Jack Commer action figures, Book Four, Collapse and Delusion, already anticipated that. The first three books in the series are set in the timeframe 2028-2036; the next four go to 2075 after everyone’s been rejuvenated to look thirty-five. However, in the 2040s entrepreneurs come up with clunky AI robots marketing Jack and company’s early heroics, branding their robot set Heroes and Villains of the Thirties. These full-size HAVOTTs are based on both major and minor characters, and thousands are released for collectors who stage mock battles.  But these contraptions start wreaking havoc throughout the last four books as they get upgraded to astonishing levels.

Pushing up the years got me away from having to be too close in time to events that the books, after all, expect to occur in the next few years. It also allowed me to resurrect minor figures from the early novels and develop them into major characters in later ones. And of course I could bring back Jack’s insufferable dead brother John, or anyone really, as a robot.

The Last Words Challenge

Before writing the final novel, Balloon Ship Armageddon, I dared myself to end the book and the series with “And Jack Commer shot his spaceship directly into the sun.” So that’s how the giant omnibus ends. Did he and his crew survive this stunt? Supreme Commander Laurie posits the result.

Questions from the Overview

Spaceship Typhoon I’s shocking suicide reduces four Commer brothers to two. After the Final War, the evacuation of Earth, and telekinetic Martian terrorists, is eldest brother Jack fit to lead the United System Space Force? And has he ever recovered from decades of futile time war with the Alpha Centaurians?

And a Partial Answer, from Balloon Ship Armageddon:

“At the first shock of the unknown Jack Commer tended to veer straight into hysteria, then at the last second accept whatever circumstances were in front of him and start working with them. And bring everyone out alive. He was really quite endearing that way.”

copyright 2025 by Michael D. Smith

more information on the series
The UR Jack Commer: A Look at the Childhood Beginnings of the Commer Saga
The Irregular Origin of The Martian Marauders
The First Childhood Appearance of Jack Commer, September 19, 1962
Trip to Mars in Paperback
Supreme Commander Laurie

After all the trite and momentous journal and scrapbook entries, I began the novel last night, the first chapter, “Horseman of the Apocalypse.”

Well, I probably won’t have a writer’s block through all this–the only thing that stops me is physical fatigue–my mind could go on forever with it, except that I do get mentally weary of concept structures, unless they are particularly good.

My concern is not that I can’t write it, the house is great for writing & I will have time. But I’m concerned that the whole effort will be permeated by this Vonnegut-Brautigan cuteness which I really hate but which seems to perform automatically. Humor is fine, but it must be used as a tool like everything else. I want the effort to be cold and hard & precise. Not exactly “serious.” The first draft I’m going to blow apart, fight against my shallow tendencies. The second, condense it.

Influence of Kafka through this. A little fucky, but there is something to be learned from this “imitation.” I will ride with it for a while, then shake him.

The note presciently outlined a concern that was only resolved by writing the novel: the schism between seriousness and humor, left from my Wiess Crack editor days at Rice; should I write and publish dire, turgid, literary creations, or have fun with bizarre, even trivial concepts? Somehow Akard merged them into one expressive voice.

The first draft was much influenced by the style of whatever author I happened to be reading at the time: Kafka, Mailer, Dostoyevsky–as well as the New English Bible.

I’ve made no changes to the entry except to capitalize sentences; I usually left them lowercase in the journal. The photo shows the original final manuscript, 661,581 words after scanning to Word, and the published 2017 paperback, 122,360 words, or 18.5% of the rough draft. A much tighter and more focused novel.

copyright 2025 by Michael D. Smith

An Archeological Excavation of Akard Drearstone, Draft 1
More on the modern Akard Drearstone

I banked my painting energies during this time, calling a halt to solo shows, though I still painted and continued to place works in group shows. I also drew scores of novel character images for the website and blog, and turned a childhood story, “Trip to Mars,” into a fun picture book. But the primary urge was my writing. Following are its themes.

Theme 1. The Exoskeleton

The Writing Biographies haven’t allotted much space to the major decision I made in 1981, after seven years of enervating insurance accounting work, to find a better method of supporting my art. Librarianship, 1981-2023, succeeded–but also had its drawbacks, as I outlined in the 2023 blog post, “The Exoskeleton”:

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

I’ve often maintained that the deleterious effects of my library world structure were simply the waste of time and energy that could have been spent on art and writing. But now I see another issue: the type of energy demanded. Keeping up with the endless problem-solving and decision-making, ranging from trivial daily concerns to the momentous issues that either bolster or threaten your career, as well as the unceasing interaction with people, their expectations, ambitions, and conflicts.

The 2023 sketch

The following blog satire from 2016, Crisis! Restructure Major Metropolitan Library!, gives a hint at the career stress. Lest the reader scoff at the concept that library work is stress-free (so many candidates came to interviews armed with that erroneous concept), let me emphasize that while library work isn’t a life and death matter, any profession has its unique stresses that jar the human nervous system with similar flight or fight responses. The library world has confronted massive technological, social, and cultural changes over the past several decades, and daily addressing the needs of literally hundreds of people of all backgrounds and ages is extremely challenging. Then add municipal government, business fads, library websites, marketing, programming, and endless new gadgets to access an increasingly problematic Internet. While the Exoskeleton gave a background structure to my writing and painting–and a host of interesting topics to write about–in some ways it actually weakened them. The metaphor was:

Consider an astronaut who’s been in space for a year, but despite all his exercise in orbit, when he finds himself back on Earth he’s unable to walk.

Thus my goal in retirement the last couple years has been to rectify any artistic bone/muscle loss. There’s still so much to learn and to develop.

One aspect of the library world dovetailed with my art. I set up both an adult writers’ group and a teen writers’ group at the library and was delighted with the interaction with writers of all ages. We traded advice and learned much from each other.

After leaving webmaster and network administrator duties at Dallas Public Library in 2001, I found myself strangely outside technology for a few years, but around 2010 I reacquainted myself with Nooks, Kindle, iPhones, and eBooks as I could make use of them and teach them to library patrons. These refurbished tech skills neatly coincided with my 2011 publishing breakthroughs.

I’d long planned retirement from the library for January 2023, and while I was yet unaware of some of the Exoskeleton’s dubious side effects, I knew the change meant that both my writing and art would continue to evolve.

Theme 2. The Mike Archives

I’d long wanted digital backup of all my writing. In 2011 I picked up the pace, scanning a variety of older stories, letters, and essays, and by 2024 managed to scan to PDF or Word almost everything I’ve written. I’ll never return to much of this but I still want those digital copies. Though I’ve sometimes remonstrated myself for past-tripping, I’ve usually found buried energy in the older works. Even if some of this got a bit obsessive, it all has been a necessary prelude to new work.

In the following list of this era’s archives, items in bold are revisions I eventually published:

1. 3/22/11-3/27/11: “An Introduction to Synthetic Thinking”(1979), scanned/OCR’d
2. 5/19/11-5/26/11: “Helium Street” (1977), scanned/OCR’d
3. 5/19/11-7/13/12: Akard Draft One (1976-1978) scanned/OCR’d
4. 6/29/11-7/9/11: The Holy Dark Ages (1977 novella) edits
5. 7/26/11: “The Martian Holes” (1975) scan/print
6. 7/26/11-7/28/11: “Emerson’s Vast Hotel” (1972) scan/print
7. 7/31/11: Executed Beauty (1983 novella) title changed to The Psychobeauty
8. 8/5/11-9/14/11: The Soul Institute 2011, Draft 5A
9. 8/21/11: The Fifty-First State of Consciousness (1973) reformatting
10. 8/21/11: Nova Scotia (1973) reformatting
11. 9/14/11-9/16/11: The Soul Institute, Draft 5B
12. 10/8/11-11/9/11: Akard Drearstone 2011, Draft 10
13. 3/30/12: “Trip to Mars” (1964 story) edits
14. 6/20/12-6/23/12: “Roadblock” (1981) edits/print
15. 6/28/12-7/26/12: CommWealth 2012 edits
16. 7/14/12-12/28/13: Trip to Mars the Picture Book illustrations
17. 9/6/12-11/27/12: Akard Drearstone 2012, Draft 11
18. 3/14/13-4/21/13 “Damage Patrol” (1984) revision
19. 5/17/13-7/26/13 Journal 2008 input
20. 5/25/13-5/27/13 100 Dreams scanned/edited
21. 7/6/13 2009-2013 journals to single-file manuscripts
22. 12/14/13: CommWealth 2013 edits
23. 12/16/13-12/5/14: The Soul Institute 2014, Draft 6
24. 2/18/14-3/2/14: Journal 2007 input
25. 10/3/14: “Existence” (1967) input
26. 10/6/14: “The Saga of Billy Bam, Basketball Star” (1967) input
27. 10/3-10/11: Input of eight other minor 1967-era stories
28. 12/7/14-1/1/15: Journal #1, 1969-1971 input
29. 12/27/14: “The Individual” (1970) scanned/edited
30. 12/27/14: “The Mathematician” (1970) scanned/edited
31. 12/31/14: “Sam is Coming Home” (1970) input
32. 12/31/14: “The Salamander Raid” (1968) scanned/edited
33. 12/28/14: “War is Hades!” (1969) scanned/edited
34. 12/28/14: “The Perfect Cube” (1968) scanned/edited
35. 1/2/15-1/3/15: “Sam is Coming Home” (1987) scanned/edited
36. 1/11/15: “Underground” (1971 Version 2) scanned/edited
37. 1/18/15: “Underground” (1971 Version 3) scanned/edited
38. 11/13/15-11/15/15: The Soul Institute Draft 1
39. 12/17/15-12/18/15: Alternate Soul Institute created from The Soul Institute Draft 1
40. 2/18/16-3/26/16: Journal 1971 input
41. 4/9/16-8/14/16: Sortmind 2016, Draft 7
42. 10/15/16: “Randy and Laura” edits
43. 10/24/16-4/15/21: Nine Archetypes, experimental fiction from novel drafts
44. 12/20/16-1/8/17: Journal 2006 input
45. 2/2/17-3/5/17: Trip to Mars 2017 formatting for publication
46. 2/19/17-5/24/17: Ocean Singe Horror retitled Jump Grenade, Draft 2
47. 5/25/17-7/17/17: Akard Drearstone 2017, Draft 12
48. 7/17/17-10/21/17: Akard Drearstone 2017
49. 8/25/17-12/21/17: Sortmind Draft 8
50. 12/22/17-2/11/19: Sortmind Draft 9 to MS.
51. 1/30/18-2/23/18: Journal 1972 input
52. 2/28/18-3/2/18: “The Desirable Fuck” (1972) scanned/edited
53. 2/28/18-3/2/18: “Father/Children” (1972) scanned/edited
54. 2/28/18-3/2/18: “A Playful Story” (1972) scanned/edited
55. 2/28/18-3/2/18: “Elaborate Pantomime” (1972) scanned/edited
56. 2/28/18-3/2/18: “Larry Jones, Businessman” (1972) scanned/edited
57. 4/21/18-4/25/18: The Blue Notebook eBook Project (childhood stories)
58. 1/23/19-4/20/19: Journal 1973 input
59. 3/2/19-3/12/19: 1973 letters scanned
60. 3/31/19-4/9/19: 1973 Journal-Like Writings scanned/OCR’d
61. 4/20/19-4/22/19: “The Cleaveriad” (1973) scanned/OCR’d
62. 6/29/19-8/4/19: Jump Grenade Draft 3
63. 8/4/19-9/30/19: Jump Grenade Draft 4 to MS.
64. 12/18/19-9/6/21: “Perpetual Starlit Night” proposed as novel
65. 12/21/19-1/1/20: Akard Draft One Print Project
66. 4/14/20-4/20/20: Journal 2004 input
67. 3/11/21-3/25/21: The UR Jack Commer creation to final MS.
68. 1/18/22-2/4/22: Journal 2003 input

Theme 3: Publishing and Self-Publishing

January 2011 saw my foray into self-publishing with The First Twenty Steps, and then the unbelievable acceptance in March of The Martian Marauders by Double Dragon Publishing. I was delighted to at last be part of the publishing world. I told some staff at work, but it wasn’t until a coworker graciously brought it up in a staff meeting did it sink in that my world had shifted.

I was further encouraged when Deron Douglas, the publisher, announced he would accept new series novels if they maintained quality. So on April 28th I sent this email:

I’ve gotten on to the Double Dragon Authors site (and have requested access to the Promoting site), and I saw your April 12th post about multi-book series. I do have two more books in the Jack Commer series after The Martian Marauders: these are Jack Commer, Supreme Commander (59,100 words), and Nonprofit Ladies (81,000 words). I would definitely like to submit them to you whenever you would like.

They are both completed, with various kinds of short and long synopses also finished. I recently had revised all three to be fully congruent with each other, and I’m happy with the results; I think there’s good quality here. I’m now about halfway through a fourth novel in the series, and am finding that each book can zero in on different characters and probe their psyches more.

By May 3rd I had contracts for those. This was all stunning. I also had the experience of writing to another publisher still holding Jack Commer, Supreme Commander to request it be withdrawn from consideration.

Deron assigned an editor who sent me her Martian Marauders edits in late December 2011. This was my first experience using Word review/markup; though at the time I thought this last-minute editing was a normal part of the process, this was really my first hint of her tendency to procrastinate; hey, the book is to be published in ten days! But overall I was always pleased to work with her; she made some great suggestions and never tried to rewrite my novels. An ironic aspect of this process was the number of typos that went unacknowledged by both of us.

Yet I had a disheartening evening early in January 2012, right before publication. I later dismissed it, especially as it seemed a blip in the overall ecstatic feeling of publication, but to my consternation I now received fully edited versions of Jack Commer, Supreme Commander and Nonprofit Ladies from another editor Deron had engaged for those two books.

I was stunned by the number of changes in the first few pages of each book, and soon understood that the new editor had essentially rewritten the novels in a style I hardly recognized as my own. The changes actually seemed irrational and I felt the books were seriously marred. I gamely tried to hack the first pages of each book back to some semblance of my style, but it was overwhelming and I gave up. For some reason I didn’t feel I could approach Deron about this–he must have paid this new editor, right?–but I did email my concerns to my first editor, who intervened wondrously and decisively, writing Deron and copying me a screed about the author’s right to his own words. Deron then graciously allowed her to take over the editing for the second and third books.

In any case, I was thrilled to have a Martian Marauders eBook for sale with a fantastic science fiction theme cover which the multi-talented Deron created himself. I quickly made a publication blog post and updated my Martian Marauders webpage. But, unsure how this book’s evolution from an eighth-grade novel attempt would play with buyers, I deleted that background. Later I saw it as nothing to be ashamed of and expanded the book’s history in a blog post, The Irregular Origin of The Martian Marauders.

I wrote Deron on February 5th about my idea for a title change:

I wanted to ask you what you thought of changing the title to Nonprofit Chronowar. Seeing The Martian Marauders published got me thinking (a lot more seriously than I had previously) about how titles are perceived by the buying public, and I realized that “Nonprofit Ladies” does not really sound like a science fiction title. The women running the nonprofit organizations and their ineffectual attempts to come to terms with inexplicable solar system disasters are really just a subtheme. The main force of the book is space pilot Joe Commer’s war guilt and the United System Space Force realizing that all along it’s been fighting a war based on time travel.

The title Nonprofit Chronowar gives a nod to the first chapters where Joe scolds the naïve ladies and their Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth, but offers up the main theme of the book as well, marrying the two concepts in an interesting phrase that says “science fiction.” The title also indicates the futility of the war, which both sides know the Alpha Centaurians will lose seventeen years in the future, but which both have no choice but to fight anyway.

Deron replied that he welcomed anything that would strengthen the SF motif, and I felt better and better about my four-book series.

A paperback edition of The Martian Marauders followed in March. I’d assumed the eBook would need to demonstrate decent sales before a paperback was issued, but there it was. I was delighted with the arrival of a box of Martian Marauders paperbacks to give away and hawk at book festivals.

A librarian put in a word for me with the Frisco Public Library’s teen writing group, and in March I gave a short presentation there. I didn’t come to promote my book, just to demonstrate what was possible. What I really recall was the kids’ energies and ideas. I asked them how many wanted to write novels, and every hand shot up. That surprised me, as I would’ve thought it would be one-third poetry, one-third stories, and the third wanting to write novels would probably hide their hands. This inspired me to start a teen writing group at McKinney Public Library, where I saw equally intoxicating energies.

On May 14th Double Dragon accepted the fourth Jack Commer novel, Collapse and Delusion. Then Jack Commer, Supreme Commander was published in August. Another lovely cover, starring Jack’s wife Amav. But I was horrified to find a typo on the first page–then I discovered astonishing typos in both The Martian Marauders and Jack Commer. My Martian Marauders villain Sam Hergs had 39 instances of the incorrect possessive form of Herg’s!

I’d naively assumed that any manuscript I sent was without blemish. Or that an editor would catch minor ones. And I had no idea that, as you hurried to meet deadlines, you could easily make further mistakes in the act of correcting errors. I rather overburdened Deron with correction requests until I understood how burdensome it was for him to try to keep up with these changes from all his numerous authors.

In October, rereading the newly-titled Nonprofit Chronowar, I was struck again by remnants of the unintended sense of vulgarity I thought I’d fixed in November 2006, described in A Writing Biography, Part VII. I saw I could fix that by cutting one chapter and changing some other references. My editor agreed and I spent a couple days tightening and improving the book. It came out in May 2013 with another great Deron cover; I’d suggested the spaceships in an email but his take on it was awesome.

During 2013 I made other publishing inroads: Double Dragon had accepted my story “Perpetual Starlit Night” for its recurring story anthology, and it came out in Twisted Tails VII: Irreverence in February. Meanwhile I struck up correspondence with fellow Double Dragon authors, and one suggested the Ether Books website where my story “Roadblock” was published in December. The Book Daily website also reprinted three of my blog posts.

Another Double Dragon author steered me towards a title published by Class Act Books. I was still looking to traditional publishing and I was impressed with this title’s cover; in fact, I’d begun ruling out submitting manuscripts to web publishers displaying mediocre-looking covers. So I submitted my novel CommWealth to Class Act and it was accepted in September 2014, with a 2015 publication date. I was on a roll.

Meanwhile I came to terms with my websites. I’d been using WordPress for the blog but was still tied to FrontPage for my main site. I made hundreds of painful manual edits along with some rudimentary CSS to get the site looking solid, but it was obvious the manual era was over. I considered Joomla and Drupal for a new platform, but finally went with the WordPress I was familiar with; as usual I wasn’t curious about how things worked, I just wanted to create content. I converted sortmind.com entirely in 2015, and in October added another sub-site, press.sortmind.com, for Sortmind Press, intended as a more business-oriented platform.

At this time I began to find what could go wrong in publishing. My Double Dragon editor had some serious personal issues that kept postponing work on Collapse and Delusion. Though I sympathized with her, by early 2016, four years after submitting the final MS., I found myself pleading for some progress. Coincidentally, it turned out that she also worked for Class Act and the upcoming August 2015 publication date for CommWealth spurred her to finish that book for Class Act by late July.

I’ll return to Class Act, but to cut back to Collapse and Delusion, I finally wrote Deron about the situation; he said he was no longer using editors and that competent beta readers would work. So I engaged my wife Nancy and my new McKinney Public Library friend Kara Wilson, a fellow SF author, and got a polished MS. off to Deron in May 2016. Meanwhile I sent my editor a note I hoped was gracious, informing her we were taking both Collapse and Delusion and the fifth Jack Commer novel, The Wounded Frontier, off her hands, and said: “I’ve internalized much of what you’ve contributed to these works and this has provided a good foundation for my future writing and for examining the finished works with new tools.”

Collapse and Delusion came out in July 2016 with another great science fiction cover. It was also the first book to rein in the italicization and came off as the cleanest Jack Commer yet.

My interaction with Class Act Books in 2015 was a major prod to self-publishing. First of all, in contrast to what attracted me to this publisher in the first place–the other author’s excellent cover–the artist’s first cover for CommWealth was exceedingly mediocre. When I sent my painting “Property” as a suggestion for revision, the artist decided to use it instead. This was flattering; though the resulting new cover wasn’t overpowering, it worked decently.

In late July my editor finished CommWealth; I approved her corrections and she forwarded the manuscript to the publisher, who did a final copyedit. But what followed was much more extreme than the clumsy January 2012 editor pawings at Jack Commer and Nonprofit Ladies.

A few days before publication I got the CommWealth PDF galley and was told editing was done, but that I could note corrections on a separate Word document. But the “copyediting” threw the novel into chaos. Basically the book looked machine-edited, searching and replacing exclamation points with periods, removing almost all italic emphasis (though this influenced the reduction of italics in Collapse and Delusion), and making arbitrary changes to virtually every paragraph. Not only did it make the characters sound as if they were on Valium, it also introduced errors like:

“Don’t break the screen. I’m not gonna clean up that glass.” Jill said.

“Jill.” he whispered fiercely.

“Lisa. God, I love you.” Allan laughed, moving to grab her.

Other introduced errors included:

What a profile…that long dark hair and those piercing dark eyes…that blue bicycle shirt over his lean hard tors…— I’m not really shopping for a man, am I?

“Huh…?” Who cares about steady work? Everyone’s fixed for life with CommWealt, ahe’s beautiful.

Forensic Squad cab take turns always asking for it back.

These are only a few examples in just the first twenty pages and I wrote the publisher a long email in protest. Although I was ready to pull the book, losing the $200 for the cover and processing, I recalled an old piece of advice for complaints, which is to place your desired outcome in the first sentence:

Is there any way to return to the version the editor and I worked on in July and which she sent back to you early August? I’m not sure where the new edits came from but I’m finding that the whole tone of the novel is now so seriously off that it doesn’t even seem like my own writing.

The publisher relented and CommWealth was published as I wanted on August 15th. I was happy with it, though I didn’t sell a single copy from their website or through Amazon. Still, I did sell a few at book fairs.

The best thing about Class Act was its publicist, who got its authors web interviews. I did several and they were all hard yet fun work. But in early 2020 our publicist notified us that Class Act was apparently dead, its site moribund and its publisher unresponsive. I tried the publisher several times via email and letter, requesting her to pull CommWealth, but never got a reply. I even spent a long time doing obituary searches but turned up nothing. I sent copyright infringement protests to both Scribd and Amazon, and their Class Act pages were soon mercifully gone, leaving me clear to finally self-publish CommWealth with a round of improvements and a much better cover.

The Class Act expedience was quite educational and I’m not bitter about it. In addition to getting those great interviews, becoming aware of my italics overuse, and seeing what could be done to address untoward situations, it pushed me to self-publishing and boosted my confidence as a writer.

Double Dragon published the fifth and sixth books in the Jack Commer Series in 2018, The Wounded Frontier and The SolGrid Rebellion, with Deron incorporating my character images into the covers. But I think by this time most Double Dragon authors knew the end was coming. In July 2020 Deron informed his authors that he was selling Double Dragon to a British publisher. But since rights reverted to me and I wanted full control over my work, I opted not to go the British route. I bought rights to the six covers along with seven ISBNs for self-publishing the first six novels plus the seventh I’d been working on, Balloon Ship Armageddon.

I redid the series, not only to correct typos and excessive italics but to revamp the chronology to start in 2028 instead of 2021–just six months away! 2028 gave me some breathing space, but science fiction allowed me to rejuvenate all the characters, and despite earlier action still occurring from 2028 on, the characters now scheme and strive in the 2070s. I’m done with Jack Commer anyway, with a branch series, Supreme Commander Laurie, now underway.

It took me time to rethink traditional publishing with its lottery-ticket luck, popular tropes, good editors and bad. I’d sent one query for The Soul Institute in 2011 and one for Akard Drearstone in 2012, both mentioning my new credits with Double Dragon; their rejections didn’t hurt my pride but contributed to the sense that traditional publishing was a system beyond my control. I had much I wanted to accomplish instead of waiting indefinitely for my luck to break. My readiness to dump Class Act in 2015 and self-publish CommWealth, as I’d learned to do with The First Twenty Steps in 2011, was the turning point.

Now, much more wary of small new independent publishers dying in three years after selling zero copies of an author’s work, I finished my flagship novel The Soul Institute and published it on Amazon and Smashwords in December 2015. Using Sortmind Press felt right and I’ve never looked back. With a sense of things moving in the right direction, I feel none of the desperation to publish I had in earlier eras.

In 2017 I published Akard Drearstone and in 2019 Sortmind and Jump Grenade, the original idea of which came from a ninth-grade story. 2021 saw Balloon Ship Armageddon and the Jack Commer companion books The UR Jack Commer, a compilation of Jack origin stories, and The Balloon Ship Interviews, twelve character interviews originally posted to the blog. I’ve made little attempt to market those small paperbacks; I figure if anyone buys the complete Jack Commer series at a book fair I’ll toss them in for free.

The Damage Patrol Quartet in late 2021 pulled together four of my best stories; “Roadblock,” “Randy and Laura, “Perpetual Starlit Night,” and “Damage Patrol.” I’d briefly toyed with expanding “Perpetual Starlit Night” into a novel but finally saw that the story was perfect in itself. The collection came off well, even though I’d long ago decided that novels were my expression.

Marketing arose as a new task: websites, blogs, book fairs, interviews, sales, Amazon and other venues, eBooks and paperbacks and hardbacks, social media, and the much-resisted need for “branding” myself. Am I a science fiction author or a literary author? Should Michael D. Smith have a clever pseudonym? How do I present myself?

I set up the Writers’ Exchange group to discuss these aspects with other writers and treasured the interaction. After all these years of experimenting I feel comfortable with the self-publishing process, though there’s always much to learn. Of course I have to consider my current rank on Amazon (The Martian Marauders now at #7,300,960), low sales, lack of worldwide fame and shattering influence on twenty-first-century American culture.

But despite the lack of standard success I’ve been satisfied with my journey. I have some new novels to write and I’m looking forward to the total artistic control I’ll continue to assert. To quote from one of my favorite blog posts, What Does Your Muse Think of Your Writing Career?:

… somehow I have been prevented/preserved for this time. That my writing life is developing exactly the way it should have–in obscurity, protecting me from my own BS until I finally learned how to face reality and be honest with myself. From here on out I have the possibility of giving a gift to others.

I now seem to have a “writing life” instead of a “writing career.” That has made a real difference to me.

My Works Published by Other Publishers During this Period

• The Martian Marauders, Double Dragon Publishing, 2012
• Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, Double Dragon Publishing, 2012
• “Perpetual Starlit Night,” Double Dragon Publishing in Twisted Tails VII, 2013
• Nonprofit Chronowar, Double Dragon Publishing, 2013
• “Roadblock, ” Ether Books website, 2013
• Take My Word for It, republished on the Book Daily website, 7/10/13
• On the Essential Meaninglessness of the Word “Metaphysical” retitled “Unfocused Queries” and republished on the Book Daily website, 7/31/13
• How Do you Deal With Your Backlog?, retitled “Should you publish your backlog?” and republished on the Book Daily website, 9/30/13
• CommWealth, Class Act Books, 2015
• Collapse and Delusion, Double Dragon Publishing, 2016
• The Wounded Frontier, Double Dragon Publishing, 2018
• The SolGrid Rebellion, Double Dragon Publishing, 2018

Sortmind Press Self-Publishing 2011-2021

Showing minor revision uploads as I kept learning what works best:

• The First Twenty Steps, 2011
• The Soul Institute, 2015, 2020, 2024
• Akard Drearstone, 2017
• Sortmind, 2019
• Jump Grenade, 2019
• The Martian Marauders (Jack Commer Book 1), 2020, 2023
• Jack Commer, Supreme Commander (Jack Commer Book 2), 2020, 2023
• Nonprofit Chronowar (Jack Commer Book 3), 2020, 2023
• CommWealth, 2020, 2023
• Collapse and Delusion (Jack Commer Book 4), 2020, 2023
• Trip to Mars, the Picture Book, 2017
• The Wounded Frontier (Jack Commer Book 5), 2020, 2023
• The SolGrid Rebellion (Jack Commer Book 6), 2020, 2023
• Balloon Ship Armageddon (Jack Commer Book 7), 2021, 2023
• The UR Jack Commer, 2021
• The Balloon Ship Interviews, 2021
• The Damage Patrol Quartet, 2021

Theme 4: The Blog Voice

An early post, The Blog Evolving into the Entire Journey, described the blog becoming a new writing voice:

I foresee the blog gradually becoming a specialized body of work, and it should all be current, despite the past dates. Let it evolve on its own. Dare to make a few mistakes along the way.

The best thing so far about the sortmind blog is its mixture of essays and stories and art: creative work juxtaposed with ruminations on it. I want the blog to be a good overview of my writing and visual art, as well as the processes I use. An accessible repository of sample writing, drawing, and painting.

In no way do I conceive of this blog as anything like “social networking.” I can appreciate how blogs have developed as structured personal websites with comment and networking capability, but I just want to master the game as self-expression, and see where it leads.

My journal-writing and my essay-writing voices are personal. The blog created a combination journal- and letter-writing voice, and I want it to be as clear and direct as possible. The reader should know where I’m coming from and hopefully receive something valuable.

Most posts are reflections on writing or art processes; some are marketing, announcements, or reviews. Excerpts from novels and character drawings market a book but try to give something back. Each of the eight writing biographies describes a topic I’ve needed to explore. I dreaded starting each one, fearing there was no way to describe those eras, but I’m amazed each has turned out so well.

The most fun and compelling blog posts:

1. Five Query Letters, 8/9/10
2. Flashpoint’s Daughter, 11/6/10
3. Dystopias—And I’ve Written My Share, 3/13/11
4. My Visual Art is Somehow Literary, 4/12/11
5. An Archeological Excavation of Akard Drearstone, Draft 1, 7/19/11
6. What Does Your Muse Think of Your Writing Career?, 8/20/11
7. Homage to the Wiess Cracks, 8/27/11
8. Take My Word for It, 12/15/11
9. How Do You Deal With Your Backlog?, 2/29/12
10. Being a Novelist as Opposed to a Short Story Writer, 12/28/12
11. If No Internet or Word Processing, 3/9/13
12. The Irregular Origin of The Martian Marauders, 10/19/13
13. Default Forces, 3/4/14
14. Justification, or, Flush These Notes Out of My System Before They Wreck a Novel!, 7/5/14
15. A Writing Biography, Part I: First Efforts in The Gore Book, 9/24/14
16. A Writing Biography, Part II: The Blue Notebook, 9/28/14
17. A Writing Biography, Part III: Unhappy Kid Interlude, Yet Two Novels, Sort Of, 10/14/14
18. Homage Part 1: Farewell to The University of Mars, 4/4/15
19. Homage Part 2: The Zarreich Enigma, 4/19/15
20. My Ancient and Unfortunately Unshakable Visualization of the Solar System, 7/12/15
21. Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey and the Endless Slog to Sanctuary and Transcendence, 7/22/16
22. The Tower Treasure Project, 8/18/16
23. Crisis! Restructure Major Metropolitan Library!, 10/6/16
24. Three Legacy Novels, 6/18/17
25. Amid Work on Three Karmic Novels, 9/17/17
26. I’ll Write Your Book Blurbs, or, When Lilith’s Beloved Kentucky Horse Farm Goes into Bankruptcy …, 11/9/17
27. The Alpha Centaurian Stars, 3/19/18
28. Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 1: Rick Ballard, 4/26/18
29. Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 2: T’ohj’puv, 4/30/18
30. Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 3: Jonathan James Commer, 5/1/18
31. Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 4: Amy Nortel, 5/2/18
32. Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 5: Jack Commer, 5/7/18
33. Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 6: Amav Frankston-Commer, 5/9/18
34. Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 7: Waterfall Sequence, 5/11/18
35. Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 8: Ranna Kikken Commer, 5/13/18
36. Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 9: Joe Commer, 5/15/18
37. Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 10: Jackie Vespertine, 5/17/18
38. Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 11: Laurie 283, 5/19/18
39. Jack Commer Book Seven Interviews, 12: Laurie Lachrer, 5/21/18
40. Allan Larson Talks Back, 5/25/18
41. CommWealth and My Stint in the Theater, 8/9/18
42. The Karma of Fancy One-Line Blog Posts, 8/14/18
43. When the Shirt Hits the Fan: More Musing on Typos, and the Sortmind Editing Passes, 3/9/19
44. Jump Grenade – The Author Interview, 10/10/19
45. Shackism v. Sortmind, Part Three, 11/25/19
46. The Blank Zen Interview, 6/27/20
47. The Balloon Ship Interviews: Arrogant, Desperate Characters Audition for the Role of a Lifetime, 4/6/21
48. Interview with the Burlcron/Mercer/Singletree, 8/3/21
49. A Writing Biography, Part IV: The Perfect Cube and Beyond, 11/2/21
50. Walter’s Farewell Soliloquy–to Himself and to Draft 1 Caspra Coronae, 2/26/22

Theme 5. The Three Long Novels

I wanted to finish my main legacy work as I moved into new writing, and 2011-2023 saw the restructuring and publication of my three long novels, The Soul Institute, Akard Drearstone, and Sortmind. All are literary despite their absurdist elements.

The Soul Institute, 2015

Computer technician Himal Steina realizes his dream of a mythic return to the sanctuary of a vast foggy university when he’s appointed writer in residence at the Soul Institute and falls in love with one of its numerous faculty goddesses.

The Soul Institute is my flagship novel, lengthy and complex, but I think it reads quickly. It covers several sets of characters including Soul Institute administrators and faculty pursuing farcical love affairs and power struggles; the students who come to live the life of soul but are dismayed by the underlying chaos; and ninth graders in their separate world of inhalant abuse and gang violence. This is my only novel that adds a genealogical chart.

Akard Drearstone, 2017

A cinder block falls on lead guitarist Akard Drearstone’s head and leads to an alternate 1975 history of rock music as seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl.

I resumed this project dreading I might have to dump it for good. The first thirteen chapters were just not working, but when I hit chapter fourteen I began to feel the marvelous energy that had lurked in the novel from the beginning, and I was able to revitalize the structure and infuse Draft Twelve with modern consciousness. I left the book set in 1975 and thus it becomes my only historical novel.

I also set myself the challenge of using a young girl as a narrator, and it worked. Some of Akard’s characters are the most four-dimensional I’ve created. The music descriptions shine with renewed force; in fact, this was the first time I realized the emphasis is more on how the audience hears music as opposed to what the musicians experience.

Sortmind, 2019

An answer to any question is delivered in a telepathic instant, and a database of all our queries tracks the progress of a coming apocalypse. High school art students Oliver and Sam find themselves blindsided by urban terrorism and the malfunctioning, reality-altering Sortmind app.

I began Sortmind in 1987 as an expression of my early library career, but I eventually rebooted it as the story of a start-up company that telepathically provides all known information, and the ensuing urban riots. The book also chronicles two sets of aliens with opposing ideas about dealing with the malfunctioning human race, and serves as a Bildungsroman for the teen characters.

I’d sent the first version of Sortmind to publishers through the mid-nineties, but as I grew as a writer the daunting realization came that the novel was bloated and out of date. New drafts, cosmetic revisions, and frantic fixes only pointed to Book Abandonment. But with nothing to lose, I engineered a major reboot in 2016, which transmuted the novel, 45% of its original length, into something far beyond what I could have imagined in 1987.

The UR Manuscripts and Their Legacies

In homage to the first-draft energies of these three works, I made non-published eBooks and/or paperbacks of each.

Alternate Soul Institute, 2015

Draft 1 of The Soul Institute was 382,000 words, 200,000 longer than the final version, but it contains sprawling reflections and alternate plot, some of which, upon rereading, I couldn’t remember composing, as if some fan fiction writer had contributed his or her take on the book. Thus was born Alternate Soul Institute, an EPUB version confining itself to these unused sections. I know why I cut what I did from the monstrous first draft, but there are a lot of intriguing psychological chapters in Alternate Soul Institute, like outtakes and deleted scenes from movies.

Akard Draft One, 2020

Akard Draft One was my first breakthrough after two practice novels. I’d long wanted a digital copy; I didn’t even have a photocopy. I spent two months on a scanning project, editing the resulting manuscript but not proofing it against the paper manuscript. The 5 MB Word document is 681,656 words in 2,376 pages. I made non-published paperback copies on lulu.com just to be able to hold the dream of that first big novel in my hands.

Sortmind Draft One, 2024

The final 2019 Sortmind is so much improved over its first draft that no reader would consider returning to the original. But I discovered a clean photocopy of the typewritten Draft 1 and, sheet-feeding thirty pages at a time, I quickly got the entire 1,075-page manuscript into PDF format and then OCR’d it. Despite the first-draft problems there are intriguing reflections on technology and society; I appreciate this first version as its own completed 1980s thought, and made a hefty Sortmind Draft One unpublished paperback to celebrate it.

Theme 6: New Novel Notes and Beyond

As is certainly evident by now, the era covered by Part VIII concerns past energies and new exploration. I’m concluding the Writing Biography series here as the next stage hasn’t happened yet, though 2023-24 saw Sortmind Press publication of four more novels and another short story collection.

For a long time I’ve felt there’s another long literary novel rattling around. “New Novel Notes” from December 2015 on was an arduous attempt at a big book which I finally focused into the shorter novel Asylum and Mirage in 2022-2023. The “Asylum and Mirage Diary” chronicling its long evolution runs 144 single-spaced spaces. The final Asylum and Mirage in fact finished off these endless “New Novel Notes” and I have no desire to resurrect them. But the impulse for another long, complex, sprawling, character-driven novel wants to find expression in A Writing Biography Part IX.

Copyright 2025 by Michael D. Smith

A Writing Biography, Part I: First Efforts in The Gore Book
A Writing Biography, Part II: The Blue Notebook
A Writing Biography, Part III: Unhappy Kid Interlude, Yet Two Novels, Sort Of
A Writing Biography, Part IV: The Perfect Cube and Beyond
A Writing Biography, Part V: Space, Time, and Tania through The University of Mars, 1974-1982
A Writing Biography, Part VI: Failures, Successes, Rhythms and Swerves, 1983-1994
A Writing Biography, Part VII: Organization, Lost Energies, New Novels, Publishing, 1994-2011

I’ve already posted about the major projects this year, so there’s no need to go into further detail about them. But here’s an overview.

The 2024 Work

• February: Man Against the Horses! Four Theater of the Absurd Novelettes published on lulu.com as paperback, and as eBook on Smashwords
• March: Supreme Commander Laurie published on Amazon as paperback and eBook, and as eBook on Books2Read
• April: The Soul Institute 2024 updated and republished on Amazon as paperback and eBook, as eBook on Smashwords, and as paperback on lulu.com
• June: The University of Mars published on Amazon as paperback and eBook, as eBook on Books2Read, and as paperback on lulu.com
• July: Zarreich Draft 2 set up on lulu.com as a private access paperback, i.e., not for sale, to have a copy either as archival text or as a proofing tool. I’d essentially been thinking of Draft 2 as a restored print of an old black-and-white film (the fascinating but flawed 1981 Draft 1) and would have left it there. But holding the mass-market-size paperback stimulated further work on this novel and its eventual publication.
• September: The University of Mars Draft 1 PDF Project. In the light of rebooting this work in May and June, I wanted to revisit the original jumbled and eventually abandoned 1980-81 version, so I sheet-fed the old typescript with its alternate versions through my scanner. This was simple to execute and took maybe an hour. But Draft 1 is going nowhere except as a PDF to peruse at some point.
• November: Sortmind Draft One set up on lulu.com as a private access paperback. This work was about four times longer than The University of Mars, but I quickly scanned it and then OCR’d it through Google Docs; clean-up edits to the original text took much longer, but they were fun in their own crossword-puzzle way. Sortmind Draft One was a wonderful project, never intended to be published or conflict with the final Sortmind. As an object it seems perfect; no title on the cover, no blurb on the back, and rather hefty. My big Russian novel.
• December: Zarreich published on Amazon as paperback and eBook; as paperback on lulu.com; and as eBook on Books2Read

A Long and Forceful Era of Looking Backward

Looking backward seems to have come to a halt with Zarreich. I think I’m up to date now. There are no further novels to karmically resurrect from the past: student novels Nova Scotia and The Fifty-First State of Consciousness are out of the question; 1985’s Parts I & II was used in part for 2022’s Asylum and Mirage; any other rough drafts and autobiographical experiments are already digitized and certainly don’t need to be sent into the world.

I worked through all the past writing to integrate and understand it. Investigating 1981 writings this year brought out raw energies and returned me to the unresolved issues of the 1981 rough draft Zarreich. By the way, as I look at either the trade or mass market Zarreich, I’m struck by how well it reads; even as I published it I’d been slightly worried that the book might just be past tripping after all. But now I’m certain it’s not.

Bracketing the year with the blog posts Writing Biographies VI and VII also felt like an appropriate dealing with past energies. It felt good to bring the Biography reasonably up-to-date:

• 1/8/24: “A Writing Biography, Part VI: Failures, Successes, Rhythms and Swerves, 1983-1994”
• 12/19/24: “A Writing Biography, Part VII: Organization, Lost Energies, New Novels, Publishing, 1994-2011”

Both those periods needed to be written out. This blog post category takes a lot of time to ruminate on and structure, usually beginning with much longer essays filed with detail only I would care about; then I condense them into shorter posts intended for as much clarity to the reader as possible. It’s telling that I always prefer the shortened post to the essay version.

Unsure What to Do with Myself After All This Exertion

2024 also leaves me with detailed notes for the beginning of a second Supreme Commander Laurie novel. I’m feeling good about it, but also leery of starting it now just to keep busy. I definitely need to anchor a title for it and think it through to a middle and an ending–at least a rough draft concept of them.

copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith