“Dangerous Pass,” Journals, SF Scenes, Talk & Panel “Dangerous Pass,” Journals, SF Scenes, Talk & Panel

Author Archive

“Dangerous Pass,” Journals, SF Scenes, Talk & Panel

Monday, April 20th, 2015

Today’s eye candy, my latest painting. This one took me about thirty hours, a lot of layers and detail.

“Dangerous Pass” oil and acrylic on canvas, April, 2015, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

I painted Dangerous Pass to help previsualize a scene in my novel Million Mile Roadtrip. My chracters are on an endless world, and they’re migrating from one Earth-sized basin to the next. They have two flying mascots, one is a UFO named Nunu, the other is a blobby creature who calls herself Meatball. My party includes Villy and Zoe in front, being lovers, with Villy just a bit uneasy, and Villy’s younger brother Scud is in back. The cadmium-red Scud is on the alert, and he’s noticing that the stones in this mountain pass are…alive. The composition and vibe of this painting were inspired by Peter Bruegel’s Conversion of St. Paul.

My 828 page book, Journals 1990-2014 is on sale now
* Paperback ($24.95) Amazon.
* (Kindle) ($4.95) Amazon.
* (Kindle and EPUB) ($4.95) via Transreal Books

And you can read a hefty free sample of the Journals as an online webpage.

I’ll be giving a one or two hour talk on the Journals at the so-called “College of Santa Cruz” group on the 3rd floor of the Logos Books building on Pacific Ave in Santa Cruz at 7:15 on Friday, May 1. The door is in the back of the building. Talk title, “Rewriting My Past.”

Oh, and another upcoming event, on Friday, April 24, I’ll be on a Cyberpunk Panel at the University of Southern California in LA. Bruce Sterling, Marc Pauline, and other fellow droids will be there too.

We spent Easter with our son Rudy Jr. and his family. Got a nice big collection of eggs. And endless line. Love the bare feet in this photo, so human.

We also went to our grandson’s third birthday party at Rudy’s house. They have a toy plastic play house and they put up a towel so the kids could “fish” by holding a line over the towel and getting, maybe, a kid-drawn paper fish in the clothespin at the end of the line. This image is like a Fairyland tollbooth.

Sylvia and I stayed in downtown SF for two nights for my 69th (!) birthday. At the cute Hotel Boheme in North Beach. We hit the recently refurbished Coit Tower. This mural is bird related.

Another shot of son Rudy’s patio. I like the plants and the toys. It’s like a diorama of life in the early 21st century. All the picture needs is people.

The top of Coit tower has a nice open feel, with high arches and the open sky. Some of the little windows around the bottom open up and you can breathe in that high ocean-scented air.

Branches on the floor of an old growth redwood grove. Like calligraphy.

We saw this on another trip, this one up to Occidental, CA—a spot I’d never visited, between Sebastopol and Bodega Bay. A friend of mine, Roger House, and his wife Marylu Downing let us use their AirBnb cabin for two nights. (More photos of this trip in a later post.) I got to know Roger as he proofread the Journals. He has a great eye for typos. And another of my friends, Michael Troutman did copy-editing and fact-checking, helping to get the proper names spelled right, as well as picking up the remaining typos.

View from Coit Tower. Click for a larger version of the panorama.

SF really isn’t a very large city, but it’s a gem.

I always like getting out of the house.

It’s good to finally have the Journals done.

Posted in Million Mile Road Trip, Rudy's Blog, Upcoming Events | 1 Comment »

Mojo Working. JOURNALS Funded.

Tuesday, March 31st, 2015

I got my writing mojo back, returned from the underworld one more time, and I’m busy with my next novel Million Mile Roadtrip again, piling on the eyeball kicks, the unlikely incidents, and the rude dialog. Having fun with it. Kicking with my third hip. Like a Puppeteer, if you remember those three-legged guys from Niven’s classic Ringworld.

Here’s my current design for the cover for my Journals. You can click on it to make it bigger. I made it to the fundraising goal for my Kickstarter drive a couple of days ago. Many thanks to you kind and generous souls out there.

The odd thing is that, financially at least, I do better by self-publishing my books and running Kickstarters for them. Which is not to say that I might not go back to a commerical publisher for Million Mile Roadtrip — which is meant to be a book that can sell into the young adult market. At least that’s what I think, but publishers have been known to disagree with my judgements! I’ll have to see what happens. Even if I do have a commercial option for it, I may ultimately go the Kickstart / self-pub route anyway. In any case, Million Mile Roadtrip won’t be done till late this fall at the earliest. My characters are still just fixing up their car and they’ve got…a million miles to go.

Last week my wife and I hit this ancient North Beach bar called the Saloon. They have live blues there all the time and real x-section of people…not techs and yups all that much. Brown people in the mix.

I loved this one Hawaiian couple sitting at the bar near us. At some point, with no change of expression, the woman gets up and starts dancing—or, rather, making ritualized dance gestures with her arms, forearms up, forearms down. Love the dance gesture.

The band (Johnny Nitro and the Doorslammers) played one long, mostly instrumental, song with the chorus, “I’ll take you there,” and indeed the music did take me “there” to a land of peace and zonkfulness and clear white light.

“Saucer Hall” oil and acrylic on canvas, February, 2015, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

And then I turned around and used that song/experience in a new chapter for my novel called “Saucer Hall.” I love it when the real world snaps right on top of whatever I’m writing. The muse in action.

Contact sheet of some images to appear in my online Photo Supplement for my JOURNALS. Click for a gigundo zoomable version of the sheet.

If I can raise a little more dough for my Journals, I’ll put in the time to make an online photo supplement with lots of photos to plug into the text.

At this point in tech, it’s not practical to put the photos into the paperback/hardback or into the ebooks. For a print book, it makes the books too long and too unwieldy to edit, and for the ebooks, it makes the file too big to comfortably download. So I’ll just figure out some kind of web site design for posting the images.

Saw all these people digging for beach glass in Davenport, CA, last month. Like sea turtles laying eggs. Maybe the beach was, in the old days, a dump? (Thus the profusion of glass.) Always interesting to see a crowd of humans intent on something like this.

Hadn’t been to Davenport in awhile. Love the water-sculpted rocks, and the patterns of the seaweed. Mother nature, always the greatest artist of all.

Posted in Million Mile Road Trip, Rudy's Blog | 1 Comment »

Podcast #83. Rudy Rucker discusses THE HOLLOW EARTH

Tuesday, March 24th, 2015

March 24, 2015. Interviewed by Robin Ince for a BBC Channel 4 broadcast on the theme of the Hollow Earth. Tape made in my home by Mark Mollineaux. Doesn’t include Robin Ince’s prompts, just my statements about history of the Hollow Earth concept and about my novel The Hollow Earth.

Subscribe to Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

Posted in Rudy Rucker Podcasts | Comments Off on Podcast #83. Rudy Rucker discusses THE HOLLOW EARTH

My Journals Project.

Wednesday, March 18th, 2015

So I’m about to launch a new book, my Journals 1990-2014 written over the last twenty-five years. The finished volume is as long as three or four novels combined. A long-running adventure. Kind of tour of my life.

Me in 2004 leading students in Geneseo, NY, on a “reality tour” including the house where my novel White Light is set.

Editing the Journals was a pleasant, nostalgic exercise—and it’s given me a clearer idea about what kind of person I am. The image above shows an early marked-up draft proof, which has a different cover from the final version. The final cover is more like the one in the image below.

As I often do these days, I’m publishing the new book via Transreal Books, and I’m running a Kickstarter drive to raise money for it. If you sign up there, you get an ebook, paperback, or hadback—it’s not so different from placing an advance order. The books will be going out in May or June.

I made a nice video for the drive.

One of my inspirations was The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 1910-1923. I love Kafka’s spontaneous surrealism and his intimate tone. Another model is the mammoth Andy Warhol Diaries. I found Warhol’s book hypnotic. A portrait of a certain time.

What’s in my Journals?

• Introspection and philosophizing. I turn to my journals when I’m undergoing a personal crisis—I find it calming to write what’s on my mind. And I’m always looking for a easy path to enlightenment.

• Journalism. I like to describe the things that I see going on in the daily world around me. I’ve always enjoyed Jack Kerouac’s practice of using words to sketching the scene around me as it’s going on.

• Travel. I’m particularly likely to work on my journals when I’m on the road or on a day-trip. I have many series of entries in San Francisco, New York, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific.

• Writing notes. As a transrealist, I like seeing the world in terms of science-fiction, casting daily events as ideas for my books. It’s hard to keep writing year after year, and sometimes in my notes I’m encouraging myself to keep at it. Here’s a page listing my books and software whose creation is described in the Journals.

To give you a fuller overview, I’ve posted an extensive table of contents as well.

I don’t expect many people to read my hefty Journals straight through. Dipping in is fine. And of course the ebook versions of the book will be searchable.

Another approach might simply be for you to root around, subliminally guided by the muse. You’ll find what you need.

Posted in Rudy's Blog | 2 Comments »

Author Archive