I finished another painting for my novel today, more info here: The Big Aha project. The new picture’s title is The Mr. Normals vs. The Myoor.

“The Mr. Normals vs. the Myoor,” oil on canvas, July, 2013, 24” x 18”. Click for a larger version of the image.

The picture has to do with a scene in the closing chapters of The Big Aha. My character Zad has created some creatures called Mr. Normals whom Zad has now sicced upon a sinister giant alien slug called a myoor. The myoor looks scared of them, which is good.

I made the Mr. Normals look like Gyro Gearloose’s Little Bulb in the old Donald Duck comics.

The other day I watched this very heavy Mexican SF movie called Sleep Dealer, which the cool Tucson artist Daniel Martin Diaz turned me onto recently. (Check out Diaz’s amazingly cyberdelic forthcoming book Soul of Science.)

The Sleep Dealer film’s is partly about the US taking advantage of Mexican workers. And the myoor is kind of flowing down across a border, and my Zad character looks kind of Latino in this painting, and I was also thinking about cross-border ethnic conflict here, so at another level the picture is a political parable…not that I would have a clear idea of what the Mr. Normal / Little Bulb figures would stand for under that interpretation.

But primarily the painting is about the events in The Big Aha. The way I painted Zad relates to two earlier paintings of him which I’ll reprint below, Louisville Artist and Night of Telepathy.

“Louisville Artist,” oil on canvas, October, 2012, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the image.

The way I painted the Louisville artist is kind of a self-deprecating joke about my personal self-image, or about the public’s image of artists or writers.

I mention Louisville because I was born there and lived there till I was 17, at which point my parents moved away and I went off to college. The Big Aha novel is in fact set in Louisville. Those tall things in the background are “house trees” that people inhabit in the biotech future.

What about the woman? She’s the girlfriend, Loulou, whom Zad takes up with during a period of separation from his wife. I had fun giving Loulou a really odd hair-do. Kind of Princess Leia thing.

“Night of Telepathy,” oil on canvas, November, 2012, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the image.

In this painting we see Zad and Loulou spending a night together in telepathic contact. What about those rats? Well, there happen to be a lot of intelligent rats in The Big Aha, thanks to “quantum wetware.”

And it’ll all seem perfectly logical in the end…

Dig this 4 minute video that a UK guy made to illustrate one of my public talks about hylozoism.

You may or may not know that (a) I published a novel called Hylozoic, and (b) that hylozoism is an actual honest-to-goodness official Wikipedia-listed word meaning the philosophical view that everything is alive and conscious.

The guy who made the new “Hylozoism” cartoon video is named Andy Simon, and he’s a recent graduate of Bath Spa University in Bath, England. The audio for the video is drawn from five videos of me that Andy unearthed. He hails from Weymouth, and is presently applying to film schools.

Quite awesomely, Andy uses old toons that feature living objects—and cartoons like this were a huge influence on me as a kid. Synchronistically enough, the video ends with me talking about “the big aha”! A nice poke in the ribs from the divine muse, that. Given that I’m spending all my time these days working to finish my next novel, The Big Aha.

My family and I were on the North Shore of Oahu early this month, fourteen strong, with the kids, the spouses and the grandkids. I have a bunch of photos from there, and I’ll run a few of them today and, here and there, point out some hylozoism connections.

Banyan trees are fairly common on Oahu, I love these things, how they spread out and send now new trunks. They’re the very image of a futuristic biotech house that grows itself. We spent a couple of days in Honolulu, near a park just after Waikiki Beach, and quite a few homeless people were living in this park—specifically, many of them were making the banyan trees their home. Despite Hawaii’s image as a vacation paradise, they have a very large homeless population. One guy told me that Hawaii doesn’t really have a middle class. A few rich people and a lot of poor people.

Anyway the Honoluluans use the park for all kinds of things. I saw a yoga class there as well.

Up on the North Shore, it’s all about surfing. You see surfers doing yard work or working as gardeners just so they can live there, waiting for the Banzai Pipeline type surf in the winter. Saw this cool surf shop in Hale’iwa.

We were staying in fairly old and beat-up bunch of cottages, very calm and mellow with nothing but a couple of super high palm trees between us and the beach.

Add in a sunset, and oh, baby.

One day we went to the Waimea Falls park, right by Waimea Beach, famed for it’s forty foot waves.

The park had all these great plants. The plants that sit around in bank lobby or top of your fridge or on your bathroom counter—those plants are dreaming of going to the tropics and getting big.

This one tree was all covered with thorns, scientific name Bombacopsis Quinata. Common name Don’t Climb Me.

I like how this heliconia looks like a tropical bird or fish. Everything alive in teh same kind of way. I was kind of lost in the park for half an hour, dazed by the heat and humidity, intoxicated by the scents of flowers, wandering around very very very slowly. Like a butterfly. Everything alive, even the rocks. Paradise.

The actual Waiamea falls were great. We were about the first people of the day to get up there. Some mellow Hawaiian rangers/surfers were there to give us all life-jackets. We swam across a deep rocky pool to this hundred foot waterfall pounding into the pool. With some effort you could get under the fall, find handholds in the rock, and pull yourself up so that your head went through the waterfall and maybe a little further to the legendary breathing space behind the fall. Where gnomes always hid their gold.

I hung in there for a very long and wonderful minute, letting the water pound onto my skull and my shoulders, and it felt like time rushing past, like a cascade of thoughts and memories, like fire, like the big aha and the White Light.

When I get out, I feel really high and wonderful. I babbled a little about it to one of the cool young guys handing out life jackets, telling him that I’d seen everything in the falls, and he looked at me closely and nodded. “You saw the fire?” he said, then added, “I’ve seen it too. They used to build ritual fires on a platform in there.” He gave me a friendly, brotherly nudge and sent me on my way.

A little later I saw the same guy, walking along talking and laughing with a black Hawaiian woman who was the exact image of a guide named Rayna who’d been with my group on what was one of the very best days of my life, kayaking in the rock islands of Palau near Micronesia, see my old post on this.

“Jake and Rayna start dancing and chanting, crouched, facing each other, their hands shaking in their air, slapping their thighs, vital and joyous as a pair of indestructible cartoon characters. Archetypes.”

So, elated as I was from Waimea falls, and seeing this Rayna look-alike talking with the guy who’d seen the fire in the falls like me, man, it was like seeing a pair of gods some down to Earth, or making themselves visible to me, just for a few minutes, the divine reality a part of my day.

Hylozoic, man. The boulder and the tree.

So, cool, the Kickstarter funding for The Big Aha is still going up. Yeah, baby! I’m casting off the shackles of the conventional pub biz.

I’ve formulated a new goal, which is to include an illustration for each of the book’s thirteen or fourteen chapters. This is the kind of thing I’d never be allowed to do with a commercial publisher. But I’ve looked at the production costs and my goal is entirely feasible.

My plan is that The Big Aha will include about fifteen of my paintings as illustrations, one per chapter, plus one on the cover.

So now I’m planning for several new paintings. But—not to kill myself with overwork—I’m going to repurpose some of my older paintings as well. I might use the Big-Aha-vision-type painting above, for instance, which is titled He Sees The Fnoor. Is that a Mandelbrot set in the sky? Or…maybe it’s an alien gub!

Here’s another type of Big-Aha-vision painting that I want to use. This one’s called Dawn. It’s a painting of my wife early in the morning on our back porch. It’s a Zen type of Big-Aha-vision painting—where the Great Enlightenment is right in front of you, if only you can learn to see it.

But don’t worry, I’ll have plenty of gnarly SF-style illos as well! Like the one I’m working on right now—this one’s called The Mr. Normals Versus The Myoor. I’ll let you have a look at it when it’s a little further along. This particular painting will be useful for me, as it’s a previsualization of what I’m going to write in the next chapter.

What’s a Mr. Normal like? Well, he’s a biotech robot akin to Gyro Gearloose’s assitant, Li’l Bulb. Has a lightbulb for his head. What’s a myoor? You’ll see.

My Kickstarter campaign to fund my next novel The Big Aha is coming along well—and many thanks to my backers. With any luck we may pass my targeted goal this week. [Update: We passed the target of $7,000 on June 25, 2013.]

Like a door opening up in the heavens! A glorious tunnel in the sky to Parnassus.

Last year I figured out the mechanics of making a novel into an ebook and a print book and getting it distributed online and even in few bookstores. It’s a more complex process than I realized at first—I put most of what I learned about making ebooks into a series of 4 blog posts, “How To Make Ebooks #1 – #4”. And with some trace of irony, I combined this material and cleaned it up a bit to make an ebook called How To Make An Ebook. And making a print book with InDesign is a whole other story, but I’ll blog about that at some later time.

Anyway, the point that I want to make today is that, once you know how to make and distribute your own ebook and print books, one of the main things you’d still want to have a publisher for is to pay you an advance on the royalties for your expected sales.

But, with any luck, Kickstarter lets you sidestep this need. Given that all of my backers will get an ebook of THE BIG AHA (and in some cases an paper copy as well), I am in effect doing advance sales. So in some ways the process is very similar to getting an advance from a publisher.

My readers are in effect my publisher now—and they’re kindly paying me my advance. With no intermediaries. Even better, they’re offering me more than precise remunerations for the goods offered, they’re open-handedly and generously encouraging me to continue my work by paying extra. So there’s an element of getting a grant here too.

I was discussing some of these issues with the writer Tim Pratt last month and he used a word I like. Disintermediation. As in, “Electronic publication really calls for disintermeditation.” That is, selling your creations as directly as possible to your consumers. With fewer and fewer intermediaries.

Sketch for “A Gub On Her Bed.”

Enough biz for the moment.

I have some creatures called gubs in The Big Aha . They appeared fairly early in my novel—I wrote about them in blog post called “Gubs and Raths” in November, 2012. At that point I just viewed as insignificant pests, on a level with dogs or pet pigs or rabbits.

But now, as I’m moving into the final chapters of my novel, I’m realizing that the gubs are incredibly powerful alien beings—very nearly at the level of gods. And I’m trying to get a clearer mental image of them.

So I made a nice lively sketch as shown above, kind of funny, at least to my eyes, messy, it only took a minute or two, and now I’m trying to translate that into an oil painting.

Draft #1 of Painting for “A Gub On Her Bed.”

What’s going on here is that a spotted gub is sitting on the bed in the apartment where my woman hero Jane lives. And Jane’s husband Zad is visiting, and they’re looking with some dismay at the fairly grubby gub on Jane’s bed. The spotted gub’s name is Duffie. They want him to leave.

This is only the first draft of the painting, and, yes, I know it doesn’t look that great yet. It’ll take maybe three more sessions to finish it. The gub looks funnier in the sketch with the slack neck and kind of looking over his shoulder; I want to put more texture into the wallpaper; give the gub some little paws; Zad and Jane should look livelier; there ought to be some object in the upper right corner like maybe a mobile or possibly a tiny distant gub seen through the window. A gubbess.

“A Gub On Her Bed,” oil on canvas, June, 2013, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the image.

So okay, on June 25, 2013, I got the third, and final, version done. Having two people made too much clutter, so I cut it down to just the woman and the gub. And I put a girl gub out there in the sky, she’s green, her name is Sedusa.

I always like the idea of a painting that seems like an illustration of some unknown proverb or fable. At a metaphorical level, the gub might symbolize some kind of marriage problem.

By the way, you can get paintings of mine as rewards for the higher levels of pledging to my Kickstarter for The Big Aha . If I raise enough money, I plan to make a nice new edition of my art book, Better Worlds. And I want to do some more paintings relating to the novel.

One more shift of gears in today’s post.

An issue which one of my backers raised is the question of whether I would miss having an editor—which is one of the other things that a publisher provides.

With commercial publishing in the underfunded state that it is, an author often gets very little in the way of editorial comments anymore. My sense is that the editors are mostly focused on acquisition and on promotion, and they tend not to have much time for tweaking your book.

This said, on many books, I’ve gotten a few telling remarks that really did make a difference. But over the years, I’ve been getting less advice all the time. Possibly at this point, with the experience I have, I don’t need so much editing advice anymore—maybe having an editor is more important when you’re starting out. This said, I do know there’s a danger of an unedited author letting his or her work bloat and become fatuous.

A simple editing option for indies is to show a draft of the book manuscript to a few trusted personal friends whose judgment you trust, friends who are willing to take the time you read your manuscript. Pretty much any kind of comment can be useful. You don’t have to do everything your friends suggest, but if something confuses them or throws them off, then it’s often pretty easy to fix it. And if you feel too unsure of what you’ve done, you can hire a freelance literary editor, although here you may be getting into dangerous waters, that is, you might pay a lot for advice that’s not necessarily very useful.

Whatever! My big issue right now is to write a few more scenes about Zad, Jane and the gubs!