Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 62

Lost in San Francisco

I feel odd now, between books, and with Flurb done, too. Like I just got out of the pen. (Pun!) Or out of the cave. Trying to relax, to slow down the art factory machine. I should be paying attention to the world while I can. Enjoying it. Doing nothing. It's surprisingly hard, that.

I spent one evening listening to some of my old vinyl records. I came across a great oddball pscychobilly LP, Destination Zululand, by a group called King Kurt.

And I'm taking a few pictures (like those...

Flurb #9

Flurb #9 is now live.

Flurb is a free online Webzine of Astonishing Tales, edited and published by Rudy twice a year. The previous issue of Flurb has gleaned sixty thousand unique visits so far.

Check us out at www.flurb.net!

And return here to comment.

Many thanks to the wonderful writers who are helping to make Flurb possible.

The new issue includes a story by Danny "Groundhog Day" Rubin and mind-expanding surreal-SF stories by newcomers Christopher Shay, Kek, and Adam Callahan.

Plus Robert...

Emotive Interjections

This morning I was working on amassing photos to accompany Nested Scrolls. I only have digital photos going back to 2004. So I'm hauling out some of our old photo albums and scanning pictures out of them. The process is very nostalgic for me, here on the brink of old age.

[I saw a UFO today. Sorry for the poor image quality!:]

Nested Scrolls and Jim and the Flims are done, and I feel really good about that. I can kick back and write journal notes for six months or so. There are slight...

Postpartum

I finished writing Jim and the Flims this week and sent it off to my agent. I think it turned out quite well—this fall I was feeling a little lost in it, but I think I pulled it nicely together over the last few months.

In any case, I'm done with it for awhile. Eventually, as it moves towards publication, I'll be going over it at least two more times, but right now I'm off duty.

It's always bittersweet to finish working on a novel. I get to love the characters and their world, and I'm sorry ...

New Pocket Camera

Right now I don't have a small camera that I like to shoot with. The shots today are from my unloved old SONY DSC T2.

[An artwork on the wall of the studio/dwelling of the photographer Bart Nagel and his partner Bonnie, who invited us to a nice open house yesterday. Thanks, guys!]

My Canon G10, which I liked a lot and have been using regularly, stopped working about month ago—it was under warranty, being exactly a year old. I mailed it back to the factory repair service twice, and they...

"At the Core of the World" Near End of JIM AND THE FLIMS

Feb 16, 2010.

I got the first thousand words or so written on my chapter "The Goddess" today, the second-to-last chapter of my novel, Jim and the Flims.

The last couple of weeks, I've been working on a painting of the scene in this chapter, showing Jim and Val in the sea at Flimsy's core. I thought I finished the painting yesterday morning, but today in the afternoon, I revised it a little bit more after writing.

"At the Core of the World". Acrylic, 24" x 18". February, 2010. Click here for ...

The Ebook Maze Today

I've been taking a shot at figuring out the current state of the morass of ebook publication this week.

One basic distinction is that some ebooks are in encrypted formats with DRM (digital rights management) and some are in the so-called Multiformat, which means a non-encrypted format such, for instance, a simple Adobe Acrobat PDF file. John Siracusa has a fairly long (7 page) article about the history and future of ebooks, giving some background.

Today Troy Wolverton has an interesting...

Making a High-Quality Picture Book

I've been busy making some photo-album books and a new edition of my art book, now with 62 full-size paintings for $29 from Lulu: Better Worlds.

As regular readers of Rudy's Blog will know, I have an interest in creating art books and photobooks, whether for family gifts or for products that I can sell online as print-on-demand books.

I first did this in December, 2008, when I designed the first edition of Better Worlds , with only 47 pictures. (As mentioned above, the new version has 62.)...

Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day is February the second! I remember living in towns with rough weather—like Geneseo, New York, up near Rochester. And then there'd be a article in the paper every year about the so-called groundhog Punxsutawney Phil in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. (What a GROOVY town name!) It seemed like Phil would always predict a heartbreaking six more weeks of Winter.

I formed a bitter theory that this so-called groundhog was in fact a fact a robot on rails. I'd discuss this endlessly...

Massacres in Light Fiction?

I only have about three more chapters to write on my novel Jim and the Flims. Right now, our hero Jim Oster has been loaded up with ten thousand jiva eggs—the jivas being some nasty aliens who want to invade Earth. The cartoonist Jim Woodring designed the original models of jivas that inspired me.

[Image of painting, "Jivas," by Jim Woodring, 2008, which recently sold for $1200 at the Comic Art Collective.]

In the part of my book that I'm writing now, Jim Oster is in Santa Cruz, California, ...