The store is at 866 Valencia Street, see directions here.

We’ll also be selling some of my older books, and my art book Better Worlds, and some high-quality prints of my paintings.

Hope to see some you there!

I squeezed in 23 of my recent paintings. Rina Weisman of SF in SF fame is doing a lot to make this happen—thanks, Rina.

The opening party was Friday, April 9, from 6-9 p.m. (We had a nice crowd that night, maybe 70 people. I sold a few books and prints. Thanks for turning out, guys!)

Here’s a video of the pictures after I hung them—a couple of hours before the actual show.

And the closing party on Saturday, May 22, from 6-10 PM, where I’ll also read with author Michael Shea as part of the SF in SF author series. I think the plan is that we’ll party from 6 to 7, have the readings (with breaks) and discussion from 7 to 9, and party a bit more from 9 to 10. Don’t feel like you have to come for the whole thing, but do drop by if you can. I’ll be reading some of the all-time gnarliest scenes from my Ware novels, soon to appear . m My readings will be some of the gnarliest bits from my forthcoming four-novel omnibus Ware Tetralogy. Michael will be reading from his kick-ass new novel, The Extra.

To have some stuff to sell besides paintings, I made a new edition of my book of collected paintings, Better Worlds, with paintings #1 through #66. I ordered twenty-five of them on spec, and I’ll be selling some of them at the parties at about the same price as on Lulu, charging $32 each—only signed and with no shipping charge.

I’m also planning to sell a few prints. This weekend I made about 20 high-quality prints of my paintings, using my new high-end Canon Pixma 9500 ink-jet printer and some classy 13” x 19” Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper. As always, you can also buy the prints online from Imagekind, but the ones I’m selling in person will be signed, and a (slightly) better buy, I’m thinking $29 each for the big ones.

A real bright spot on the art front: I’ve found buyers for the Hylozoic triptych, for Under the Bed, and for Octopus in a Funny Hat. But don’t worry, there will be plenty more pieces on sale at the show, see the price list on my paintings page for what’s currently available.

It would be cool if I could keep inching the art biz upward. Or not. Just painting for fun is okay, too. Whether or not it pays, turning painter seems like a good move for an aging writer. I remember as a teenager being impressed to learn that the geezer-writer Henry Miller was selling his dashed-off-looking paintings. Forget the words, just smear the colors around!

At the show, I’ll be offering my painting, Thirteen Worlds, for sale. Unlike my other works, Thirteen Worlds is also available as a Creative Commons Noncommercial-Share Alike hi-res download, so you can make your own print of this one. Cory Doctorow generously funded this release of Thirteen Worlds, which he’s using as an alternate book cover for his “freemium” story collection With a Little Help .

Retro old coot that I am, I thought I’d sold Cory the painting, and was all set to ship it to him—and he was like, “Oh, my place is too full as it is. Keep the physical object and sell it again. All I really want to buy are the rights to use the image as a cover. And…can you make it a Creative Commons release, too? That fits the theme of my book.” Sure, Cory!

On a completely unrelated note—to allay my pre-show jitters, I dove back into fractal programming for the last couple of days, and I figured out how to draw the quartic and quintic versions of the Julia sets and the Rudy sets. Rather than making a fresh post about this boring-for-most-people news, I just added the new material into my prior post, “The Rudy Sets.”

Freakin’ and a-geekin’!

I’m giving two talks at the Burwood campus of Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, this week. Both the Deakin talks are in the “Moot Court” room on the Burwood campus of Deakin University, Building C, Level 3. Here’s a map.

* Tuesday, Nov 24, 4 to 5 p.m., “My Life as a Writer”. We videoed this, and I hope to podcast it.

* Thursday, Nov 26, 1 to 2 p.m., “Life is a Gnarly Computation”. Here’s a link to a PDF file of the slides for the talk.

And I’m giving a talk on with Leon Marvell at the “Re:Live” conference at the University of Melbourne. The talk is at the Seminar Room in the Federation Hall of the Faculty of VCA and Music, University of Melbourne, 234 St Kilda Road. More info at the conference page.

* Friday, Nov 27, 3:30 to 5:00 p.m., “The Lifebox Soul Replicator”

Come hear me if you can!

Unrelated link: some guy blogged about buying a Kindle version of Hylozoic. which he’s now reading on his iPhone.

To get ready, I reworked and expanded the “Writer’s Toolkit” document that I use when I talk about writing.

I’ll be doing a reading at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, July 28, 2009, at the University of Washington Book Store in Seattle. More info here.

[Cod, salmon and Norwegians at the aquarium near Alesund.]

Saturday, July 11, 2009,
7:30 to 9:30 PM, (doors at 7:00 PM).

The Writers With Drinks show .

I’ll be reading from Hylozoic at this monthly show at the Make Out Room bar/club in San Francisco. The show will, as always be emceed by the redoubtable Charlie Jane Anders. As well as me, the evening features Derek McCormack, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, and Chelsea Martin.

Location: The Make Out Room, 3225 22nd. St. between Mission and Valencia,
San Francisco, CA. Admission: $3 to $5 sliding scale.

[Sphinx atop the Royal Theater in Copenhagen.]

Sunday, July 12, 2009.
2:00 PM

Dark Carnival Bookstore

Location: 3086 Claremont Ave, Berkeley CA.

Meanwhile, the following is a list of the upcoming readings to promote my latest novel, Hylozoic.

(Picture from 1982, accepting the first Philip K. Dick Award.)

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Saturday, June 06, 2009. 3 P.M.
Borderlands Books
866 Valencia St.
San Francisco, CA 94110
415.824.8203
MAP
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Sunday, June 07, 2009. 7:30 PM
Moe’s Books
2476 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley CA 94704
510.849.2087
MAP
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Wednesday, June 10, 2009. 7:30 P.M.
Books, Inc. in Mountain View
301 Castro Street
Mountain View, CA 94041
650.428.1234
MAP
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Sunday, July 12, 2009. 2:00 PM
Dark Carnival Bookstore
3086 Claremont Ave.
Berkeley CA, 94705
510.654.7323
MAP

The event is at 7pm at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. Admission is $25 (because it’s a fundraiser), but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

What is Sex?

Each of us is here as a link in a chain of a zillion reproductive sex acts. The pleasures of partnership and the orgasm help make us obsessed with having sex, even if we don’t know or care about reproduction. We might think of sex as any path that leads to orgasm. Note here the difference between sex with a person and, say, sex via pornography. In sex with a person, you’re talking about emotion, the positions of your limbs, touch across large skin areas, tastes, scents and pheromones. In the “artificial sex” of pornography, you’re talking about visual images, perhaps enhanced by recorded sounds. Amazing how little we’re willing to settle for! How might artificial sex improve? I’ll sketch some science-fictional scenarios.