As I mentioned in the last post, I’m working on my memoir, Nested Scrolls, which, although not SF itself, is partly about becoming an SF writer.

Memoirs are so big anymore. I was reading the NY Times Sunday Book Review yesterday, and I saw two or three of memoirs reviewed. One memoir by some cosseted literary mandarin, aged 62 like me, focusing on how worried he is about death. Aren’t we all…

My own memoir is going pretty well, now that I vaguely know what I’m doing. The rest of this post is a quoted bit about my earliest efforts towards science fiction thinking.

My parents tended to send me to bed before I was really tired. So I’d play mental games while I was waiting to fall asleep. I developed a little repertoire of fun things to think about, fantastic powers like shrinking, breathing underwater, or flying through the air. Looking back, I can see that, all along, I was meant to be a science-fiction writer.

One particular evening’s imaginings stick in my mind. I imagined being an inch tall and walking around my room. The space beneath my bed was like a dim, dusty hall. The mouse that sometimes invaded our house was there, the size of a horse. He could talk, and he was friendly. I rode the mouse into the kitchen and got us two slices of apple pie with chunks of cheddar cheese. It was more than we could possibly eat, but we tried.

I made myself still smaller, the size of one of the dust specks I’d noticed floating in sunlit air. I drifted across the kitchen and through the grill of the window screen. Outside a gentle breeze set me down upon a blooming flower at the top of our magnolia tree. I took a swim in a dewdrop resting on the flower’s petals. Music chimed from the palace-like structure at the flower’s center. Perhaps a princess lived there.

My mind turned back to the sensation of drifting up through the air—and I switched to imagining I could fly at will. I often had flying dreams—in the dreams I’d launch myself by hopping backwards, and instead of crashing to the ground, I’d angle upwards and float on my back as if I were in a swimming pool. And now, just like in the dreams, I launched myself into the air from the back yard of our house. I shot up through the clouds and followed the light to downtown Louisville where the big buildings were. I circled all around them, and I flew under the Ohio River bridge. And now I shot straight upwards, higher and higher to where the air was cold and thin. Looking down, I saw the cities of Kentucky and Indiana as splashes of light.

But now—as so often happened in my flight fantasies—I suddenly lost the ability to fly. So long as I believed it was possible, I stayed aloft, but the minute I doubted myself, I began a long tumble. The air beat at my face and fluttered my pajamas.

And now came the best part of the falling fantasy. There was a hole in the ground below. I was falling into an endless empty void, a canyon or mineshaft that went down forever. Lave dripped from the distant rocky walls, small goblins peeped at me. But I didn’t need to worry about hitting bottom. I would fall forever and a day, on and on, world without end.

So today I finished the painting that I posted about yesterday. I’m calling it Georgia’s Tree.

I have a photostream going on Flickr: .http://www.flickr.com/photos/rudytheelder/ The slide show feature is cool. I’ll post more pictures in week or two— I’ll be working my way back into the past, adding more. These are mostly pictures you’ve seen on my blog.

You can buy quality prints of the photos at rudy.imagekind.com—where I’ve also made prints of The Wanderer and Georgia’s Tree available.

Speaking of photostreams, a guy called Clear Menser just sent me a link to his cool stream of gnarly photos, a few of which look like ones I could have taken myself. And you might check the UFOlogical Mac Tonnies stream as well. If you have a photostream to promote, post a link to it in a comment to my blog, comments with links take a few days to show up, but eventually they will.

On the literary front, I’m doing some work on what looks to be my next book: Nested Scrolls. It’s a memoir after all, and not an SF novel. Here’s a brief quote from the beginning which says something about what I’ll be trying to do:

I’m not so interested in the self-promotional aspects of a memoir anymore. As dusk slowly falls, what I’m looking for is understanding and—time travel. A path back into my past.

The thing I like about a novel is that it’s not a list of dates and events. Not like an encyclopedia entry. It’s all about characterization and description and conversation. Action and vignettes. I’d like to write a memoir like that.

Most lives don’t have a plot that’s as clear as a novel’s. But maybe I can figure out my story arc. I’d like to know what my life was all about.

I started a new painting today. I’m sort of copying Georgia O’Keeffe’s The Lawrence Tree. She painted this around 1929, while visiting the former ranch of author D. H. Lawrence near Taos, New Mexico.

“There was a long weathered carpenter’s bench under the tall tree in front of the little old house that Lawrence had lived in there. I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree…past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.”

I like the way the trunk and branches in Georgia’s painting look like…the body and tentacles of a giant squid. She boldly abstracts away from the texture of the trunk, rendering it as flat. She also has some really nice fuzzy edges on the foliage. I like the way a few stars peep through the needles of the tree, which is said to be a ponderosa pine. I have a somewhat similar tree in my yard.

In some books and prints, The Lawrence Tree is shown with the trunk at the lower right, but a number of scholars feel that Georgia wanted the trunk to be at the upper left, with the tree disconcertingly growing down (into the Hollow Earth?). Larry Clark makes the point that if you lie on your back at the base of a tree with your head near the trunk, you will indeed see the trunk at the top of your visual field, as shown below.

I’m calling my version Georgia’s Tree, and I’m not precisely copying it, it’s more that I’m using it as a composition. I don’t look at the original too much, as it’s so dauntingly great.

I’m leaning towards having shades of green in the foliage instead of black like Georgia, and towards having some light on the trunk…maybe it’s moonlight. And I want to put in the stars, even though my picture sort of looks like daytime, well I can darken everything down a little. And I think I need to increase the contrast between the branches and the foliage and maybe add more branches. Possibly I put in an alien aircraft with running lights—maybe Georgia wouldn’t mind.

And here, for a change of pace, is a grafitti mural from CELLSpace in San Francisco!