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The novel, The University of Mars, and all writing on this page copyright 2009 by Michael D. Smith

A Good Sense Of Life, But Dense, Meandering, Confused
The Dream of the Catalog Card
Early Themes
Then the Aliens Came
Abandoning Draft 1
Censor Breaking and Draft 2
Typing a Manuscript is an Irrevocable Commitment
That I Swore Never to Rewrite This Novel
Rough Scans and Painful Editing
Like a Block of Marble I’d Carved Into a Sort of Human Figure

A Good Sense Of Life, But Dense, Meandering, Confused

There was a lovely novel somewhere in the 320-page typewritten manuscript of my 1984 work, The University of Mars. Eleven people had read the finished second draft and enjoyed it, laughing in the right places, generally complementing the work, and I was ready to type it and send it to publishers.

I sent The University of Mars to twenty-three publishers and one agent from 1984-1986; three submissions were the entire novel. It was the first novel I ever submitted for publication. The last rejection was November 1986, from the $45 agent.

I could spend a lot of time on the $45 agent. His response greatly incensed me, as it was obvious he hadn’t bothered to read more than a few pages for his $45 fee, and had instead turned it over to his assistant, who obviously also didn’t read much further. They contented themselves with a rich deconstruction of the first two manuscript pages, which in retrospect is an ironic comeuppance for someone who regularly used this trick with English papers at Rice University.

Oddly, I was so upset about his belabored assertion that page one’s “Bill felt like” must read “Bill felt as if” that this comment is the only one I remembered for years. Despite my initial defensiveness that the criticism was unfair because Bill was “thinking colloquially” in this first paragraph, I knew I’d been ungrammatical and I’ve noted that I’ve since become a stickler for the correct use of “as if.” Even though many writers feel as if that’s not important.

But when I ran across and reread the agent’s letter a few weeks ago, I realized that he was exactly correct about the weaknesses of the novel. He just didn’t have to be so arrogant about it. Maybe he was angry at having to plow through even a few pages of over three-fifths of a ream of paper. I would probably risk being sued for $45 rather than wade through the entire ms. myself. Unless I was the one who wrote it! Which I unfortunately was.

My explanation in 1986-87 for why I finally withdrew The University of Mars from publication efforts wasn’t that I had lost faith in the novel as a whole, but that it merely needed a tune-up. I saw I hadn’t truly taken responsibility for every word, every mark on the page--and believe me, I see that even more today. I was also aware that if I’d had a computer at the time I could have reedited the ms. fairly easily. In any case, I knew I was approaching publishers, as an unknown, with ragged work. Two strikes against me instead of just the one of being unknown.

It was extremely disturbing to take a fresh look at The University of Mars in January 2009 and find almost all its writing earnest but dull. Even my adolescent first novel Nova Scotia seems more “the real me.” What the typed ms. represents is both some good effort (most of Chapter 1 in Australia, much of the “First Day in Class” chapter, the “Don and the Boys” murder-suicide chapter, and the startling, high energy ending), as well as an unwillingness to see around my own corners. Because I’d courageously, but clumsily, meandered through those 320 pages, kicking words and paragraphs and concepts around until some shaky control was achieved. But now I can see how your average reader (unless he was one of my eleven friends!) wasn’t going to wade through all that verbiage to find my structure.

The eight chapters were overlong (one was sixty-nine pages), there were crazy detours, long unnecessary exposition, confusing flashbacks, dialog would disappear for hours … and yet …

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The Dream of the Catalog Card

Library catalog cards have been obsolete since at least the time I typed my manuscript in 1984, but in November 2001 I dreamed of a catalog card about an abandoned novel that no one, except perhaps the dream cataloger, had ever read. Instead of writing down my dream I typed up the catalog card as I remembered it, and I’ve had it on my filing cabinet since. The scanner has picked up the white space where a magnet has held the card all these years:

It’s important to acknowledge that the 1984 University of Mars’ sense of life is somehow, despite everything, on target. I just didn’t fully know at the time how to bring it out. The 1984 manuscript really was a complete novel, just meandering, unclear, undeveloped, way too long.

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Early Themes

The University of Mars arose fitfully amid several life themes:

• In late 1979 I reread The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and was again astounded at both the horrifying reality of Nazi Germany as well as the mythic reverberations of the war and its continuing legacies. I’d also run across a book titled Rocket Fighter by Mano Ziegler, a German Me-163 rocket fighter pilot. The fact that this scarcely believable account was in the Dewey 629’s on the first floor of the old Dallas Public Library, where I would eventually start my library career, was also significant.
• I was making my first breakthroughs on creating new and nurturing world structures: taking the GRE, considering a master of fine arts degree, abandoning that to think about a creative writing degree, abandoning that, looking for new jobs, and finally, considering a library career.
• The idea of the University of Mind had been percolating for several years: an institution of mind and soul (repeated, more realistically/cynically, in The Soul Institute, 1994-1999), which it would be my fate to contribute to. This ideal university, somewhat based on the UTD-Dallas campus, would represent Civilization in its highest sense--and coincidentally be a refuge from my hated insurance accounting job!
• A related theme to the Life of the Mind was the further evolution of humanity. Evolution as filtered through the prism of what World War II meant, the mindless evil and the all-or-nothing struggle to eradicate it.
• In August 1979, in the middle of writing a letter to the Governor of Texas protesting nuclear energy in Texas (I’d been writing numerous such letters after Three Mile Island in March 1979), I found myself writing that I wasn’t protesting legitimate uses of technology, that technology was an important human endeavor--and a heretofore unacknowledged fear of technology relaxed, unknotted, disappeared.
• Finally, a first encounter with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged gave me the courage to pursue the library career and the Life of the Mind.

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Then the Aliens Came

The above themes were driving the first chapters of The University of Mars when newer ones entered the mix in December 1980 and January 1981:

• Although I’d written the chapters “The Flying Saucer Novelist” and “Don and the Boys,” both about terrifying encounters with aliens, I did so without knowing much about the alien encounter literature. Then--again from the first floor of Dallas Public--I picked up The Andreasson Affair and was as much horrified by it as I was by The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich the year before. And I read more and more of these books. I was fascinated and frightened by the 001.942’s in the old library, a month before I applied to work there. And so the Transcendatrons hijacked the manuscript.
• At the same time, to my chagrin, I realized my new “novel of ideas” was beginning to slide into silly science fiction games. Trying to inject more passion into it, I decided to launch a Part II of the book which would incorporate a 1978 idea of writing out every single detail of the second semester of my sophomore year at Rice ... a project doomed to utter failure within a couple months.

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Abandoning Draft 1

I started having trouble with The University of Mars early on. Was it getting dull? Was it really a “novel of ideas”? Was incorporating a farcical short story about Nazi Germany entitled “Where Eagles Have Unfortunately Landed” a good idea? What about all the extra plot and exposition caused by the convoluted history of the West Texas Revolution of 1999? Was this all just a tired joke? What happened to the initial high energy? In fact, why was the energy coming and going? Where was the sensuous flood of characters, situations, or even sensuous ideas?

As I left my mind-crippling insurance job and began a new career at the library, The University of Mars became ever more a pain in the ass to write, the characters flat, the “central idea” of the Life of the Mind merely an idea, with no spark. After much deliberation I finally had to declare the experiment over at ten chapters. The decision was made easier by the fact that I had sighted a better novel.

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Censor Breaking and Draft 2

Even as I was working on the early chapters of The University of Mars, I had an idea for a completely different kind of novel, not a novel of ideas, not a joke of any kind, but a novel attuned to dreams and power. The first note about what would eventually become Zarreich is from October 1980:

a new novel has been tempting me: a history of someone’s attempts to reach the “real” Other World (of dream topology)--the love of that realm--and bringing it all together in a self living in this world. a counterpoint to the “failed literal” attempt of U of M.

Amid the ongoing confusion about what was wrong with The University of Mars, I would keep returning to this idea of a psychological novel that would express so much more than what I was currently playing with. Once I started working at the library and felt a flood of liberated energy rising, I was ready to begin my psychological novel and take my writing in an entirely new direction.

Later, as I worked on The University of Mars’ second draft, I came to realize that Zarreich’s major contribution to my writing career was its censor breaking. In preparation for this novel I typed up one hundred dreams I’d written down over the past five years, fusing the major ones into an enormously deep and psychological plot. I found myself writing something that broke through all my previous taboos.

For even the obscene rock and roll drug world of my first novel Akard Drearstone and the irreverent extravagance of The University of Mars had failed to record anything real about male-female relationships, in fact, these novels couldn’t address real fears and desires of any sort. My writing was not grown up; Akard and The University of Mars often aimed at serious issues but usually veered quickly into irony and cynicism.

Zarreich wound up being an extremely rich but disordered novel. Yet its 1981-82 draft did break my inner censor, and I saw the way to rewrite The University of Mars into a real novel. I found a new voice which permitted Bill to ponder his romantic feelings for Karen and deal with their separation and later reunion. I also had my first practice writing from the female character’s point of view. And in a burst of high energy I saw a way to a breakthrough ending. This final Chapter 8 was a true triumph. However, it was naïve of me at the time to expect everyone to wade through three hundred pages to get to that triumph!

But I knew I had a complete story here. I was proud of my efforts, more than ready to commit to typing up a final manuscript and start sending it to publishers.

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Typing a Manuscript is an Irrevocable Commitment

It’s much more final than a computer copy. You’re setting concepts in paper stone, you’re mortgaging months of your writing time. A revision of a couple words will involve retyping one entire page. A major revision of the first chapter might necessitate six months of retyping the rest of the manuscript! Unless you want to send out something that looks like crap.

I was aware of word processing at the time of typing, but didn’t own a computer and I had never done it before. Yet I knew that a major screwup three lines from the bottom of the page could be corrected in an instant on a word processor. With typing, you rip the entire page out of the roller and start over. If you reread that page a month later and are dissatisfied with some wording, you simply … try to ignore the problem …

So I typed 320 pages of The University of Mars on my 1940’s manual Royal typewriter. Yet over the next couple years, as I sent out query letters and sample chapters and collected my rejections, I was growing more and more aware of the flaws of the typewritten manuscript. The $45 agent just confirmed what I was already suspecting.

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That I Swore Never to Rewrite This Novel

And as the years passed I came to feel that I’d grown so far beyond The University of Mars that I vowed it was the one novel I’d never rewrite. I knew it would have to be redone in a major way and I had no idea how to do that. By the turn of the century I had done and redone the Bill/Oliver/Urside character, and in a similar way I’d done and redone the infamous “Second Semester Sophomore Year,” both in fiction and nonfiction. I’d resolved the “aliens” theme to my satisfaction in Sortmind. Yet I’d always been proud of the 1984 manuscript’s excellent ending. And other good writing in spots. At one time I figured the book could be a YA novel if it were stripped of its truly gratuitous obscenity. About the best I could offer this novel was to take pity on its scrambled computer scan and painstakingly correct it from the 1984 typescript, but I vowed that I had no plans to ever revise or publish The University of Mars.

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Rough Scans and Painful Editing

I figured out years ago than it’s much better to have even old novels you don’t want to rewrite stored on computer so that you can have a backup copy, and offsite backup to boot. So all my novels have computer backup now. In some cases (Nova Scotia, Fifty-First State, Zarreich) I’ve brought the novels fully up to date as a “Final Draft 1 Manuscript” that will never be rewritten or marketed. In other cases, the computer files are only “rough-edited,” but a revision is of course possible. Up to January 2009 three novels and one novella had been scanned but never edited. One, The University of Mars, was in such a rough state that it really wasn’t much of a backup at all.

This is because a scan of my 1940’s Royal typewriter font produces something akin to gibberish. From this first chaotic Word document I apply various search and replace rules to make a rough edit, which gets the format looking good and can deal with many common scanning/spelling errors all at once.

Then I go through the chapters on the computer, correcting zillions of obvious errors without needing to consult the typescript. It seems this should go quickly, but you can spend hours just getting the rough edit a little ... less rough. At the end of this process you’re chagrined to realize that there are vast hunks of the manuscript that make little sense. Such was the case with The University of Mars, and in January 2009 I decided I might relax from other writing projects and occasionally proof one or two computer chapters against the typed manuscript, perhaps achieving the final proof over the course of a year or two.

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Like a Block of Marble I’d Carved Into a Sort of Human Figure

But soon I was proofing the entire 370 pages of the Word document. I was struck by the amount of energy I was giving this endeavor. And all at once it became obvious that The University of Mars could be rewritten--that it should be rewritten. There was force here, force commanding me to come to grips with the book’s lost energy. I felt as if I were revisiting all the questions of my ambition and purpose in writing that I’d set on a shelf for an extremely long time. Not just to correct writing mistakes or even consciousness mistakes in the novel, but also to feel the elemental passion that forces out of any of my novels, to see how some of that force was shackled a couple decades ago and to begin to work on why.

It was hard to admit that some of my energies had been frozen in The University of Mars world for all those years. Fred Diamond’s demented diatribes on “raw soul rough draft novels,” Ronald Flavor’s abduction by aliens, the destruction of his publishing career, his subsequent brittle paranoia--all somehow spoke directly to my current writing. I kept finding more and more resonance: Bill’s impulsiveness, his naïvety, his airy plans, his hysterical worries about Karen, the fact that the 1980 plot was set in the “far future” of 2009 …

So the narrative was there to be retrieved. It wasn’t just a collection of eight semi-related stories, there was a whole to it. The past energy locked into it was available. Like a block of marble I’d carved into a sort of human figure, but distorted, big, and rough. I could come back to it and fix it right this time. There were valid reasons for doing so.

So I immediately started making notes. I called the 1984 manuscript Draft 3 and opened up Draft 4 in February 2009, applying the lessons of recent novels: shorter chapters in the present moment, no flashbacks, one chronological order, narrator thoughts pushed into dialog and italicized thinking, and an emotional evaluation of every chunk--is it really needed? And is it addressing the present, timeless state of affairs?

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