Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 33

BIG AHA Art Show & Reading, Borderlands

Added Jan 19, 2014: I made a podcast of my talk, reading Q&A, and "art tour." You can click on the icon below to access the podcast via my Feedburner podcast station.

(Note that Feedburner only shows my most recent podcasts. For older audio files, see my archive on Gigadial, which runs back to 2005.)

I have an art show coming up, running from Jan 17 to March 15, 2014. A lot of the paintings were done for my new SF novel The Big Aha.

Poster for our show. These are the paintings I plan to hang. Click for a larger version of the image.

The show will also include four of Vernon Head’s table-top deco-style assemblagist California Funk sculptures.

Vernon Head’s “Constructions & Contraptions” for our show. Clockwise from top left: “Lost Mine,” “The Trout’s Dilemma,” “Mesa Motel,” “The Machinist.” 12 to 15 inches high. Click for a larger version of the image.

We’ll have an opening reception, reading, and guided tour of the exhibition from 5:30 until 7:30 or so. This will be on Friday, January 17, at Borderlands Books Cafe on 870 Valencia Street in the Mission district of San Francisco.

View Larger Map

Free pastries! This party is for the public, and it’s a thank you reception for my Big Aha Kickstarter supporters.

We’ll mingle, and around 6 or 6:30, I’ll do a short reading from the novel, then give the “guided tour” of the paintings, explaining their roles in the book, and then hang out some more. We’ll be selling hardback and paperback copies of The Big Aha, plus paintings, prints, and the latest edition of my art book, Better Worlds.

For more about my paintings, see my paintings page. I’m maintaining a public Facebook event page for the show as well. And you can find the event on the SF Chronicle’s SFGate listings as well.

“Frog Man,” oil on canvas, January, 2014, 20” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

By way of getting my final prep done, I just finished one more painting. This particular painting started out as a horizontal “landscape mode” canvas of a Monet-style scene with trees and cliff or a sky…made up of vertical daubs of paint left over from my painting before this one, “Woman With Jellyfish”. I let the landscape dry for two weeks, then had the idea of turning the picture to a vertical “portrait mode” orientation, and now the horizontal daubs were water. On a quick inspiration, I painted in the head and webbed hands of a “frog man.” He looks friendly, but I don’t think I’d jump into the water with him.

I also made some high-quality prints to sell at the opening. Ten-color giclee print on achival museum etching paper, with the prints mounted on acid-free mat board, individually signed, reasonably priced.

Prints of Rudy’s Paintings Click for a larger version of the image.

Art Show, Reading, & Reception: Borderlands, Jan 17

I have an art show coming up, running from Jan 17 to March 15, 2014. A lot of the paintings were done for my new SF novel The Big Aha.

The show will also include three or four of Vernon Head’s table-top deco-style assemblagist California Funk sculptures.

We’ll have an opening reception, reading, and guided tour of the exhibition from 5:30 until 7:30 or so. This will be on Friday, January 17, at Borderlands Books Cafe on 870 Valencia Street in the Mission district of San Francisco, with a few free snacks provided. This party is for the public, and it’s a thank you reception for my Big Aha Kickstarter supporters.

We’ll mingle, and around 6 or 6:30, I’ll do a short reading from the novel, then give the “guided tour” of the paintings, explaining their roles in the book, and then hang out some more. We’ll be selling hardback and paperback copies of The Big Aha, plus paintings, prints, and the latest edition of my art book, Better Worlds.

For more about my paintings, see my paintings page.

I’m maintaining a public Facebook event page for the show as well. You can find a map and more comments here.

By way of getting my final prep done, I just finished one more painting.

“Frog Man,” oil on canvas, January, 2014, 20” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

This particular painting started out as a horizontal “landscape mode” canvas of a Monet-style scene with trees and cliff or a sky…made up of vertical daubs of paint left over from my painting before this one, “Woman With Jellyfish”.

I let the landscape dry for two weeks, then had the idea of turning the picture to a vertical “portrait mode” orientation, and now the horizontal daubs were water. I started thinking about Fremont Lake near Pinedale, Wyoming, where I’d recently been cross-country skiing with daughter Isabel and her husband.

But this is, of course, a summer painting. On a quick inspiration, I painted in the head and webbed hands of a “frog man.” He looks friendly, but I don’t think I’d jump into the water with him.

End of the Year

It’s getting on towards the end of the year.

Nice shadow of some stained glass. I like to think that our universe is like the stained glass, the cosmic One is the light, and bright shadows are what we see.

We saw the Los Gatos Christmas parade a few weeks back. I wasn’t shooting all that well that day, but I like this mysterious news-photo-like shot of a baseball player in an old Cadillac.

Always love the kids blatting their horns.

“Woman With Jellyfish,” oil on canvas, December, 2013, 24” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

I redid my painting, “Woman With Jellyfish” this week. It looked too plain, and now it’s bright. Christmassy.

My painting show reception and a readingfrom The Big Aha be at Borderlands Books on Friday, January 17, from 5 to 7. I’m planning to hang most the paintings that appear as chapter heads in The Big Aha.

I wish you a peaceful holiday season!

Up to My Usual Activities

The Big Aha is out in ebook, paperback and hardback now. I’ve ordered a bunch of the paperbacks and hardbacks to mail out to my Kickstarter backers. Still waiting them to arrive. This whole process has more steps than I’d quite imagined. But I’m almost done.

Late-breaking news: A great review of The Big Aha by Giulio Prisco, published in Skefi’a and reposted in io9! The book’s first review and it rocks. Whew.

Early warning: There will be a release party and an art show for The Big Aha at Borderlands Books on Valencia Street in San Francisco on Friday, December 17, 2014. I’ll be mentioning this again…

What next? Over the last few months, I got back the rights to my three old “transreal” novels White Light, Secret of Life, and Saucer Wisdom . What is transrealism, you may ask? Read my 1983 manifesto on the topic.

I’ll probably be republishing those three novels via my Transreal Books early in 2014, as ebooks for sure, and probably as paperbacks as well.

While I’m at it, I might as well republish my old memoir/rant All the Visions . I originally typed All the Visions on a giant long scroll of paper, emulating the divine Jack K. working on On the Road. My usual activities.

Keeping the ball in the air.

Another project I’m looking towards in 2014 is to assemble my electronic journals into a fat book. I have about half a million words on disk for the period 1990 – 2012. I’m editing that and pruning it down. Maybe I can squeeze it into a single 800 page volume. My role model here is the phonebook-sized Andy Warhol Diaries of 1989. I read that sucker for about a year, a couple of pages a day. Would be nice to make a book like that.

Some of today’s photos are from an recent outing to the fields and cliffs above Four Mile Beach and near Davenport, north of Santa Cruz. This is a Davenport photo. The shot-up-sign archetype. “Words suck,” as Beavis and Butthead used to say.

There’s a nice balance between agriculture and ecopreserve on the coast above Santa Cruz. Fields of, like Brussels sprouts, fine. The point is that there’s no McMansions, no hotels, no roadside attractions. Just the cliffs and the beaches. Although, of course, there is the Whale City Bakery in Davenport, always worth a stop.

We saw a huge number of pelicans out there. There’s been a vast school of anchovies in the Santa Cruz Bay lately, and the birds, seals, dolphins and whales have been gorging themselves.

There’s always some surfers around, sometimes quite a few of them, but as it cools down and gets windy, you don’t see many people actually walking on the beach. If you’re willing to take a little trouble by, like, walking a half mile from your car, it’s not that hard to find solitude in the unpopulated zones of California…and, really, most of the state is unpopulated. The cities are just small spots. Our beloved anthills.

Something heavy and cosmic about seeing pelicans against a sunny sky. People used to wonder where the dinosaurs went, but now it’s commonly said that the thunder lizards didn’t “go” anywhere. They just evolved into birds. Pelicans are pterodactyls…but with feathers. Pterodactyls 2.0.

My cinemetographer/photographer friend Eddie Marritz was in San Francisco, and we had a tapas dinner with him, his daughter Leda, and Leda’s husband Tim Conkling. Tim’s a game programmer who recently started writing games on his own. Among other things, Leda runs an interesting writing blog with her friend Steph: Small Answers. A new post every Monday. I love the Marritz family—I got to know them because I went to college with Eddie’s brother Don.

This is a photo of Eddie that I shot on film, developed, and handcolored—sometime around 1970. I was in grad school. Had a lot of free time back then. No computers.

What else? These are some of the roots that my wife mashed for a Thanksgiving side dish. Handsome fellows, no?

Beautiful little slough behind Four Mile Beach. Very hard to even see this hidden bight of water, the topography is kind of weird. I love that S curve. Nature gives us so much, everywhere, all the time. When I remember to notice.

But, like I always say, we humans are part of nature too. Building our intricate hives. And those can look cool, too. This chandelier in the new Los Gatos library is made out of a giant wood shaving that’s knotted around on itself. The highlight is that slanting plane of sunlight. I rushed this shot, not wanting to alarm the library patrons, but you can improve a slightly blurry shot in Lightroom. Not necessarily sharpen it to death, but play with the sliders till the picture’s effects look intentional or preordained.

This was an easier shot, bang, it jumped at my eye. The back of a building along Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz.

I’m having a sale on my paintings this month, and I’ve managed to sell three of them in the last week. Check out the insanely low prices if you’re interested in a special New Year’s present for yourself or for a loved one.

Beauty in Chaos

I took a walk up on St. Joseph’s Hill in Los Gatos yesterday, bringing my camera along. The camera is always good company on a walk. You show things to it, and it helps you see.

I’ve been going up in the Los Gatos hills maybe once a week for the whole twenty-seven years since we moved here in August, 1986. So I’ve taken this walk about a thousand times. It’s always new. That’s the thing about nature.

Nature is a fractal, that is she has endless layers of detail, which bloom out faster than a mere linear rate. That is, if you look twice as close, you see three times as much.

Also Nature is alive, and always changing. As is the sky. Always the same, always different. Chaos.

The perennial Dover Books company reissued my 1987 popular science book Mind Tools last week. I’m happy to have good old Dover keeping one of my titles alive. When I was a boy in Louisville, I used to send off for Dover books on science.

I wrote Mind Tools in Lynchburg, Virginia, right before I moved to San Jose and became a computer scientist. I was gearing up for the transition from math to CS. In Mind Tools, I looked at the four main areas of math from the viewpoint that “everything is information.” The areas? Number, Space, Logic, and Infinity.

I drew a lot of illos for the book. While I was working on it, my little rented office in decaying downtown L’burg was like a mad scientist’s lab, with all these little models I was building. I had this idea of finding dot-diagrams to illustrate the “shapes” of most of the numbers less than a hundred or so. I wanted to have a supply of these images at my hand for drawing on friends’ and relatives’ birthday cards. You can find these particular “Mind Tools birthday dot” drawings of mine online here.

Here’s a phone pole near my house. I like the natural collages that we humans put together. You can look at cities or human development as being natural artifacts like anthills or beaver colonies or wasp nests or seashells—we’re living organisms, and we assemble this stuff. We’re part of nature.

There’s this one ancient shed that I often walk past in the hills of Los Gatos. I love its peeling pale green paint, and I hope the owners never fix it up. Beautiful branching crack here, and to make it lovelier, the paint is arched up into mathematically rich concave surfaces.

I always love looking at treelines along mountain ridges. The nice thing about natural curves and surfaces is that they don’t accord with any really simple algebraic formulae. They emerge as processes, not as graphs of simple equations. But the processes themselves do have mathematical qualities, but the details of the end results are unpredictable.

It’s chaos, in a good way. In a chaotic process, you can have simple natural laws that are producing results that are even in principle unpredictable. Why unpredictable? Because there are multiple systems involved (rocks, geology, trees, wind, rain) and because the systems are interacting over extended periods of time. As a rule, the only way to “predict” a natural process it to watch it run, and when it’s done, that’s your “prediction.”

We travel into the future at a rate of one second per second. No shortcuts.

More human colony-organism type activity here. Apparently the humans cap their “rebar” metal rods so that they don’t poke out their own eyes. Faint strands of symbiotic spider silk augment the “warning” tape. (See this higher-resolution image of the photo for the spider silk.)

Back to that weathered old pale green shed I love. Dig the hinge, isn’t it perfect? A semiotic heft to it. Hello, god.

A eucalyptus branch lying on the ground. Blown down by the wind. The plants don’t mind. They’ll rot into the ground, be eaten by ants, whatever. The endlessly cycling fountain of life. We’re part of it too. Your body will cycle, but your life is an “eternal” pattern in spacetime.

Hazy light on this winter day. Already looks like sunset in the mid-afternoon. The laurel trees grow in clumps.

Selfie shot for the day. Weird thing about iPhone camera: If you’re taking a horizontal shot of something in front of you, you have to have the “volume” buttons down, but if you are taking a selfie shot you have to have the “volume” buttons up. Otherwise the image appears upside-down on many (but not all) viewer apps. No use raging at these kind of things—you just learn about them and deal with them. Like an insect gathering seeds.

My self-deprecating “self-portrait,” called Louisville Artist, used as a chapter illo in my new novel The Big Aha , which features a new psychedelic era…only this time the drug is quantum mechanics. Jam your internal One/Many oscillator all the way over into the mystic mode! Check out the book for free (or buy it rather cheaply) online.

Bernal and the Mission

I’m pretty much done publishing The Big Aha now, although there still keep being little tasks. It’s easy to put a paperback on Amazon via their CreateSpace. But it’s been slow getting the final version of the paperback edition on Lightning/Ingram so that retailers other than Amazon can distribute it. I have a feeling that Lightning is a little overwhelmed these days, with the still-cresting wave of self-pubbers.

[I took some photos near Bernal Hill and 24th St. in the Mission recently. I always wonder about shoes on the phone wires. Love this shot. Did the Witch of Oz crash here on Halloween?]

Indeed Ingram now has an alternate interface to Lightning which is called Ingram Spark (Spark as in baby Lightning, I think.) See this page for some comparisons of possible earnings via Lightning, Spark, and CreateSpace.. The main financial difference between Ingram Lightning and Ingram Spark has to do with the discounts that you can offer to retailers. (As if there was any real money in these quixotic ventures.) Self-pub maven Aaron Shepard doesn’t like Spark, see this post and scroll down to see his earlier ones as well. All very chaotic, as usual.

Anyway, let’s look at some random snaps.

Our son Rudy Jr. and his wife Penny had a Halloween pre-trick-or-treating get-together. This young hipster woman, I forget her name right now, since I’m senile, she was wearing a dress with a lift-up flap labeled “Hello Titty,” and the flap covered a plastic window revealing part of her breasts. She told me she’d made a satirical superhero video called Hello Titty, and you can see it online. San Francisco art.

Another time, in mid-November, my wife and I walked from Bernal Heights down to Precita Park with our granddaughters. I saw a nice California chestnut tree, laden with fruit. Always an easy move to silhouette things against the ubiquitous wires.

It was a sunny day. I’m always into shadows.

Later we were in a playground on 24th Street, which is in some ways like Mission Street, very Mexican and Latino, but it’s a narrower street, and homier. One of the swings was like a flat UFO, I dug how it looked against the buildings in the background. The cube and the triangular prism.

That particular playground has a huge Aztec-type serpent sculpture that snakes all around. A little girl running next to it here.

There’s a very cool alley with murals off 24th Street near Harrison, it’s called Balmy Alley. Some the murals are kind of disconcerting, as they express the locals’ growing discontent at the potential gentrification of their neighborhood. The cops busting Mexicans and having coffee with white tech workers. The developers tearing down low-rent Victorians to put in glossy condos. You can see an evil invader monkey with a dollar sign in this amazing mural. I forgot to note down the muralist’s name, but maybe somebody can tell me.

You can see a ton of Balmy Alley images via Google Image search. And you can get higher level info from the muralist organization Precita Eyes, which has an center on 24th St, and even gives tours.

Other venues…here’s a cell-phone shot of the sun glaring on a Target Sign near Union Square in SF. Merry frikkin’ Xmas.

A lady with her T-Bird in Los Gatos. Old California.

The Precita Café. I like those festive colors and lights against the night sky. Kind of European, somehow. SF is a bunch of other countries.

England #4: Black Pharoahs? Homeward Gyre.

So now I’m slowly getting my life back, after the frenzy of putting together the various editions of The Big Aha and Notes for The Big Aha…see the book’s website for more info on all that.

Today let’s dig down into my remaining stash of photos from our trip to London and Oxford in early October, 2014. Come with me to Oxford by way of yon quaint and elegant Christ Church College garden gate…

Saw this lady frosting custom cakes all day long in a bakery within a roofed market. Felt a little intrusive to be taking her picture. But, wow, a cake factory.

I love shadows of odd shapes. Chains for manipulating the shutters of an Oxford dress shop. Very smart outfits on sale, rather dear.

Ah, giant lily pads. The SF fantasy of living on them, like a frog. You’d want to be fully amphibious for that. Last night, dropping off to sleep, I was imagining people who were somehow gene-tweaked to swim as fast as Jet-Skis. In the waves off Kauai.

The chapel at Christ Church College in Oxford has this cool window. The jigsaw-looking panels were pieced together from shards recovered from church windows broken during WWII. A nice symbolic thing. Shards of our personalities reconstructed into bopper minds someday, perhaps.

The last hotel we stayed in was the Pelham, right across the street from the South Kensington tube station in London. A really nice place, with a great view. Expensive, but not quite as bad as some of the other places we came across. On our last night, I watched a BBC showing of a documentary movie of the Stones playing a 50th anniversary concert in Hyde Park this year or last year.

It was great how happy the Stones were, Mick and Keith so jubilant, at peace, plying their trade. I’d like to write like that.

I’ve seen this big statue of a pharaoh in the British Museum before. The striking thing here is that—wow, the pharaohs were Black! Africans, my man! Such a lovely sculpture, so smooth and, what, over a thousand years old.

Another cool piece in the British Museum, shows some Assyrians swimming. They’re holding inflated bladders to help stay afloat. Dig the fish.

The British Museum was insanely crowded, a rainy Sunday, as full as Times Square on New Year’s Eve almost. You have to feel a bit ambivalent about the pieces in the museum as well—all of them looted from weaker nations by Imperial Britain back in the day. But, whatever the details, it’s always amazing to reach back in time and see the endless flow of human craft and intelligence. We really haven’t changed all that much in the last few thousand years.

Mandatory Ionic column outside the British Museum.

What’s this photo doing in here? It’s a hallway on the Stanford campus. Oh, it’s the tunnel leading from my British experience to my next level of existence.

Here comes God! A dodecahedron.

And now, tracing a long smooth gyre, I drift down to my home planet. But which part is land, and which part is sky…or is it sea?

What? You haven’t been to the BIG AHA page yet?

Bookmarks For Making Ebooks and Paperbacks

So The Big Aha is selling and getting out there. Nice post on it by Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing.

I’ve been working with publishing ebooks and paperback POD (print on demand) books for nearly two years now. It’s been a long learning process, and I’m nowhere near done. Like hacking my way through a jungle with a machete.

Generally, the best way to get an answer to a question is to Google search with the main words of your question and look through the links that you find. The official help files for given software products aren’t always the best sources of info.

As a public service I thought I’d make the following links available. I’ve grouped them into two sections: Epublishing and POD Publishing. I like to keep my links alphabetized, so I’ve prefixed the titles of my most-used links with “AAA.”

Last updated November 19, 2013. Permanent version of this post is online at

www.rudyrucker.com/pdf/ebook_pod_bookmarks.html

The categories listed include:

Calibre (free program for converting between EPUB, HTML, and MOBI)

Dreamweaver (Adobe program for working with HTML files)

Lulu, NOOK, and KDP (ebook distributors)

CreateSpace and Lightning (POD book distributors)

ID (InDesign, Adobe program for designing print books)

There ought to be some links for Sigil (free program for creating EPUB files), but there aren’t.

Some of my early musings on Ebooks can be found in my ebook, How To Make An Ebook. See also my series of blog posts on the same topic. I’m so worn out from making my The Big Aha, that I don’t have the energy to write a How To Make A POD Book. So for now this list of links must suffice.

Have fun. If you can call this kind of thing fun…

—Rudy

Epublishing


AAA E-junkie (Sellers) – Admin
AAA ISBN My Identifiers | Bowker | Identifier Services
AAA KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing): Bookshelf
AAA Lulu
AAA NOOK Press
Adobe – Digital Editions
BARNES & NOBLE | Rudy Rucker
Calibre User Manual
Dreamweaver Troubleshooting links
ebook how to – CNET Reviews
Ebook Conversion — calibre User Manual
Ebook convert straight quotes to curly quotes
eBook Formatting Paul Salvette in Bangkok:
Ebook, making your text Kindle-Friendly
Ebook: EPUB, MOBI, AZW and PDF Formats
Ebook: Fonts used in various eReaders?
Ebook: Fonts, CSS Font Stack
EPUB A Basic Sigil Tutorial
EPUB adding to iBooks via ITunes
Epub avoid split into several html files? – MobileRead Forums

EPUB Open Packaging Format (OPF) 2.0.1 v1.0
EPUB Overview — Sigil v0.4.1 documentation
ePub putting on Your iPad
Epub Reader For Windows 7
EPUB Reader Windows Software
EPUB Sigil Splitting Pages
EPUB tables MobileRead
EPUB to MOBI Conversion [Left Margin Problem] « Morning Cup O’ Joe
Font Size and Color — Support — WordPress.com
HTML – image as large as possible
HTML Anchor Bookmark Tag Links
HTML CSS Cheatsheet
HTML Fix Dreamweaver problem with large DOC import
HTML for the Kindle with Blockquote
HTML for the Kindle with Blockquote
HTML into ebook Sample Code

HTML td tag
ISBN buy and use at MyIdentifiers.com
Kindle Cover Size
Kindle eBook how to| Amazon Kindle 3 and Kindle DX Review and News Blog
Kindle from PDF
Kindle Guide Flags in a MOBI. “Start”
Kindle OPF, Guide
kindle-guide.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Lulu Book Distribution
PDFs splitting into multiple documents
Piracy Alert (Scribd)



POD Publishing

AAA Lightning Source Log In
AAA Log In – CreateSpace
AAA Login ISDN on Bowker
Amazon Author Central
Color Acrobat 9: Output Preview and Conversion « Layers Magazine
Color. ID PDF, Pantone colours look dull in Acrobat Professional
Color: AdobeRGB, sRGB or what?
Color: Work Process for Best Colors…
CreateSpace Bleed on Cover Template
CreateSpace Book Cost Calculator
CreateSpace Community: Creating a PDF for Print
CreateSpace Gutter Margin
CreateSpace Margins
CreateSpace Post Editorial Reviews on Amazon
CreateSpace Pre Order sales
Createspace vs. Lightning Source Costs
Createspace., Craddock’s Be Not Content
CreateSpace: Cover Template
CreateSpace: Self Publishing and Free Distribution for Books, CD, DVD
CS Entering addresses to ship to customers?
Dreamweaver: “Clean Up Word HTML” Error
htaccess file for limiting access to a directory
ID Anchor A Graphics Frame
ID Baseline Grid

ID crashes at startup
ID Creating book files
ID EPUB CS6 Export as EPUB
ID EPUB Exporting EPUB
ID Export to HTML
ID Fix Italic Overrides
ID Flow: Adding Text with Flow
ID Flow: Why is Smart Text Reflow so hard?
ID Headers
ID Highlight Overrides Script
ID How to Anchor Objects InDesign (not very helpful)
ID Import Graphics
ID Import Styles
ID Import Word file
ID Improve justified type settings
ID insert page spreads–Allow Pages To Shuffle
ID Justification
ID Keep Words Together with No Break
ID Keyboard shortcuts
ID Laying out frames and pages
ID Making a Book file (video)
ID Margin Sizes
ID Margins and Columns
ID Master pages
ID optical margin
ID Optical Margin
ID Page Numbering Tricks
ID Place graphics in a graphics frame

ID Print/Don’t Print Frame Outline
ID Remove Defaults and Saved Data
ID Running Header Text Variables Chap Title
ID save as Ebook
ID Suggested Layout Tips
ID Table Of Contents
ID Tabs and indents
ID Thread and Flow Text
ID Unlink a text file (the hard way)
ID Use Odd Page Break between Chaps
ID Why ugly tags in EPUB Export? Local overrides.
ID Working with graphics frames
ID Working with Word and InDesign
Image Word Resize Image Macro
InDesign Page numbering
Indie Author: Lulu vs. CreateSpace: Which Is More Economical For The DIY Author?
Lightning Color Shephard New 2013
Lightning / CreateSpace Pricing: Shepard Plan B (old)
Lightning / CreateSpace Pricing: Shepard Plan C (new)
Lightning B&W pricings
Lightning Book Cost Calculator
LIghtning Color prices
Lightning cover template
Lightning Creation Guide
Lightning Source 101 (Lightning Source Inc., print on demand, self publishing companies)
Lightning Standard vs Premium Color
MONKEYBRAINS – Support – Basic Auth
Proof Better-Looking Full Justification for Paragraphs in WORD
Proof Remove dupicate words in WORD
PS Em dash and en dash in Photoshop text — Photoshop for Windows — ClearPS.com
PS Fixed size selection
Reviews (Booklist Online)
Reviews (Library Journal)
Reviews (Publisher’s Weekly)
Rudy’s Blog Making a High-Quality Picture Book
Word: Removing Unused Styles

Two New Paintings. “Eyes,” “Woman With Jellyfish”.

“Woman With Jellyfish,” oil on canvas, November, 2013, 24” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

I’d gone to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with my wife, and we’d looked a big tank of sea nettle jellyfish. I made a little photo of my wife by the tank, and at first I wanted to paint that. But in the end, the woman in the painting didn’t look at all like my wife, and the painting’s viewpoint suggests that either we’re looking out from inside the tank at the woman, or maybe the jellyfish are floating around in the air instead of being inside a tank. Once I realized the woman wasn’t going to be a portrait of my wife I gave her green hair and made her look kind of cantankerous and space-punk. Maybe she’s “talking” with that big jellyfish.

Possibly she’ll turn up in a story or novel that I write in the coming year…now that I’m done with The Big Aha.

“Eyes,” oil on canvas, October, 2013, 20” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

This was an easy painting to make—I just did a lot of eyes. I didn’t particularly try to make them scary. I was more interested in them looking alert. I had fun with the colors, getting all the shades to be fairly even intensities of mild pastel colors. I think I might do a painting of “Snouts” next, with pig-snout disks.

As always you can find more info on my paintings at my Paintings page.

THE BIG AHA goes live!

The Big Aha

A Novel by Rudy Rucker

From Transreal Books. Paperback and Ebook. (Hardback coming soon.)

330 pages and 14 illustrations.

***

Biotech has replaced machines.

Qrude artist Zad Plant works with living paint.

Career’s on the skids, wife Jane threw him out.

Enter qwet—it’s quantum wetware!

Qwet makes you high, and gives you telepathy.

A loofy psychedelic revolution begins.

Oh-oh! Mouths in midair, eating people!

Zad and Jane travel through a wormhole—and meet the aliens.

Stranger than you ever imagined.

What is the Big Aha?

***

Browse the entire The Big Aha novel for free as an illustrated web page.

Buy ebook and print editions of The Big Aha.

More info at the website for The Big Aha.

And one more thing: Notes for The Big Aha , a book-length writing journal.

Click for a larger version of The Big Aha cover flat.