Reminder: I’ll be reading at
Borderlands, 3 PM, Saturday, June 6, San Francisco and
Moe’s Books 7:30 PM, Sunday Jun 7, Berkeley.

I finished a new painting today, “The Abduction.” You can click on the image below to see a larger version.

I painted this scene to help visualize a chapter in my novel, Jim and the Flims. In the background we have a giant geranium plant that’s being used as a castle by a race of flying people called the flims. In the foreground, a man’s girlfriend is being abducted by an alien yuel who’s taken on the shape of a dinosaur. The sun is a glowing alien being that’s known as the Supreme Jiva and is shaped like a beet. On the left is my old dog, Arf. What could be more natural?

As always, you can get more info at my Paintings page.

And now I’m hoping to spend some time with the writing muse. Here’s a sculpture of her by my old friend Jim Skinner. Maybe she’s the reading muse, actually. I like how her bronze aura forms a quilted wingback chair…

Whew. My two week stint as Boing Boing guestblogger is over…I was on from May 18 – May 31, 2009.

My twenty-five posts branched into about 750 comments—most of them nice. Thanks, Boing!

Just to have the posts safe in one place, I’m saving them (without the comments) as a single page , here on my site. The originals, with comments, used to be on the Guestblog archive at BoingBoing—but that link’s dead now, you’d need to seek out an Internet backup site to see it.

Now to get back to writing Jim and the Flims! As I mentioned in one of my Boing posts, I have the idea that the King of Flimsy’s castle should look like a geranium that I painted. To help me get going on the next chapter, I’m now working on a second painting of a really big geranium with little people on it—this is just a detail of the picture, there will be other stuff going on in the foreground. I’ll show you the whole painting when it’s done.

It’s good to back home in the comfort of my own blog.

I’m still guestblogging over at Boing Boing this week (check their guestblog archives). I couldn’t use the following post because Boing blogger David Pescowitz beat me to the topic. But I thought I’d post my version here anyway.

Transpop hotrod artist (and demonic blogger) COOP has a show opening Friday at the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, CA.

Above is a photo I took of the Master when I visited his studio in April, 2006, , while he was painting one of the new works for this show. As my readers already noted, the photo includes an alien floater artifact in the foreground.

Above is a kiss painting from the show. The gallery has a preview link where you can view and purchase some of the works in advance.

Go git ‘em, COOP!

I’ll be leaving the Rudy’s Blog planet for the last two weeks of May—

—because I’m going to be a guest blogger on BoingBoing from Monday, May 18, 2009 to Saturday, May 31, 2009. I’ll try for one or two posts a day over there.

It would be nice to have some cool links, so do email suggestions to me, preferably with a subject line of “boing link.” I figure that regular readers of Rudy’s Blog might have a notion of what kinds of links interest me…

The guest blog stint is mainly to promote my new novel Hylozoic, which is already printed and goes on sale May 24, 2009. I’d like to get some good sales for this book in order to help me continue getting published by a strong mainstream press like Tor.

I’ll be doing a few readings for Hylozoic around the SF Bay Area in early June, you can check a list of the readings on my publisher’s site.

I already got a couple of good reviews for the book, by the way:

Rucker’s yarn of a future where everything—animals, rocks, the planet Earth—is conscious, telepathic and often irrepressibly chatty. Rucker’s approach takes a high-comic trajectory with a satirical edge… Serious, uproarious fun, with brain-teasers and brilliant ideas tossed about like confetti.
— Kirkus Reviews.

Bristling with cool ideas, bizarre but witty formulations and neologisms, Carrollian mathematical/logic puzzles, gnarly tech applications and gonzo speculations, wicked satire, hot sex, nasty aliens, anarchic plots, and psi powers … Rucker juggles the disparate elements of his plot with the zany aplomb of the Flying Karamazov Brothers. His vision of the future is a hopeful and inclusive one—and one hell of a party.
— Locus

Long time readers of this blog will remember that I painted a triptych to help gear up for writing Hylozoic, as shown in the image below. On the left, that ‘s Thuy Nguyen with the pigtails, catching sight of the nasty, subdimensoinal subbies. In the middle, that’s an alien flying manta ray called a Hrull, about to swallow Hieronymus Bosch. On the right, that’s Thuy and Jayjay flying towards the top of a transfinite beanstalk. (I’ll be posting a bigger version of this image over at BoingBoing next week.)

Clearly any reasonable person would want to order a copy of Hylozoic today!