“The Baby Garden.” Acrylic on canvas. 24″ by 18″. April, 2009. Click the picture to see a slightly larger image. More info at my paintings page.

For the last month or so of working on Jim and the Flims, I’ve been nibbling away at a painting of how it’s gonna look when Jim and his new ghost girlfriend Ginnie make it over to the other side, that is, the land of Flimsy, which is both a parallel world with its own natives, as well as being a place where the spirits of some people from our world go after death (as newly decided in the previous post, and thanks again, by the way, for all the supportive comments).

As I’ve mentioned before, these days, when I’m stuck for story images, I like to paint instead of just thinking. I’ve always done little drawings of my scenes before writing them, but now I enjoy the more heavy-duty process of breaking out my kit of acrylic paints. The painting takes longer, and I get more deeply into it than into a drawing.

My inspiration for the motif (art term for the subject of a painting) was van Gogh’s The Sower—a man sowing seeds into a field. In my story the sower’s name is Monin. And I’ve got two people greeting him, they just came out of that interdimensional tunnel visible in the door of a house that’s a limp Brussels Atomium made of lavender spheres. These two are Jim and Ginnie.

The kicker in the picture is that the sower is casting baby-seeds into the field, and we see human heads—and the head of one green alien—sprouting up. I probably won’t have the green alien in this scene in the novel, nor do Jim and Ginnie necessarily look exactly like this—my book paintings are more like dreams or premonitions about my stories than being totally accurate illustrations.

[The helpful, prancing dog of the right brain retrieves the ball. Arf!]

In the morning the seeds in the garden will have grown—they’ll be human-like bodies, with their legs rooted in the ground, and with no intelligence, like blank-slate clones. All of them look like copies of Monin, the sower. Some jivas come and sting the bodies, implanting larvae. The jiva larvae eat up the bodies and burst forth as new jivas.

That’s the practical reason why I need this garden, see. I want the jivas to be savage parasitic flesh-eaters—like wasps who lay their eggs in the flesh of paralyzed hosts (I love the use of the word “host” in this context). But I don’t want the jivas’ flesh-eating to be a problem for the locals in Flimsy, so we have these “jiva gardens” full of clones for the jivas to grow inside of.

And later, Jim can grow a clone of his own body, and put a yuel inside the clone’s skull to produce a zombie fake Jim who can perhaps join the merry roller-derby surf zombies of Santa Cruz…

I’ve been feeling anxious about Jim and the Flims, my novel-in-progress. I think it’s useful to stay in a frame of mind of doing it my way, rather than trying to make it commercial. As has been rather amply demonstrated by my previous eighteen novels, it’s highly unlikely that any novel I ever write will be a giant commercial success. The skittish fen are suspicious of me, and forever more will be. So why should I start groveling and bowdlerizing and self-censoring and hobbling myself—especially if so doing vitiates my joy in writing?

I feel cornered, backed up to a cliff’s edge, and that I should try harder to be commercial. Hand in hand with that comes a feeling of rebelliousness. My instinct is to give “them” the finger and jump. And maybe, in the long run, that is in fact the most commercial move. (And keep in mind that “they” only exist in my head, that is, “they” are a certain set of voices in my ongoing tourtured-artist-type internal dialogue.)

[My painting Big Sur at Lucia, started at Lucia Lodge on my 63rd birthday. Prints at rudy.imagekind.com].

Maybe I flip my wig and go totally surreal with Flimsy. Random crazy stuff, like in the Alice books. I have an idea for a garden of growing clones for sacrificing to the jivas, and that’s a nice fresh image. As a working method, I could go for shock-effect after shock-effect, picaresque style, enjoy it locally, and that’s all it is.

But, face it, flipping isn’t enuf. I need a story-thread to keep myself wanting to sit down and write every day. When a book is going well for me, working on it is as interesting to me as reading someone else’s novel—I’m eager to find out what happens next.

Another issue is that I need some consistent overarching relationship between our world and the alternate world “Flimsy” that Jim visits. Today I’m entertaining the idea that Flimsy is in some ways the afterworld. I did use this move in White Light, which was largely set in a kind of afterworld. So I’ve mined this vein a bit, but certainly there’s more ore in the seam. How might the alternate world “Flimsy” in Jim and the Flims be the afterworld?

(Afterworld 1) One possible move is the traditional one of giving the character a health crisis, then segueing into increasingly bizarre adventures, and then he realizes that he’s actually dead. “And then Jimmy Olsen realized he’d been dead during the preceding N chapters, and that all those mad adventures had been afterlife experiences.” [When I say “Jimmy Olsen” I’m riffing off those old Superman comics where cub reporter Jimmy Olsen kills Superman, and in the last panel of the comic, Jimmy Olsen falls out of bed, and says, “Oh, it was only a dream.”]

A downside with the Jimmy Olsen move is that the longer you postpone the reveal (that is, the larger N is), the more annoying it is for the audience. Like they’ve been reading along, and taking the story seriously for chapter after chapter, and suddenly you’re telling them you’ve been scamming them.
And once a reader actually does know that the character is dead, the adventures take on a special interest of a different kind.

This said, if the main character is dead, this takes some zest out of the story, as who cares, after all, about what happens to a dead guy? And he can’t really die, now, so what does he have to worry about?

(Afterworld 2) A second way to write about the afterlife is to use Dante’s move in his Inferno. Dante himself isn’t dead, he’s on a tour of these other worlds. It’s like an exploration of alternate universes. Note that Niven and Pournelle already wrote an SF pastiche of Dante, so I wouldn’t want to copy any particulars, just the general notion of a living guy exploring the afterworld—which is, again, the move that I used in White Light.

Kicking up the spook factor, maybe one or two of those three surfers that Jim meets before he leaves are in fact dead, they’re ghosts or zombies? And maybe half the people at the surf party are dead, too. Surf zombies. That would be cool. I still want the drama of killing the obnoxious boss surfer Header with an axe, so maybe Header is alive—but I guess he could be a zombie, and then he gets back up to his feet even with his brain gone and his head axed, all Vault of Horror style. Gnarly, dude. If Header’s a zombie, then I can keep using him as a character even after he’s been killed…

Is Jim’s mysterious woman friend Weena something like an angel or a devil? Well, she’s from this other world, which might be the afterworld, so maybe she’s a ghost. Or maybe that world had native-born people as well as ghosts that have emigrated there from here.

I do like the idea that Ginnie is a ghost—this is the surfer woman whom Jim falls in love with. And once they’re in Flimsy/afterworld, Ginnie is substantial and he can make love to her. There can be some prefigurings of Ginnie being a ghost before she tells Jim or before he figures it out. She’s hard to see when it’s dark. Other people don’t seem to notice her.

And maybe, what the hell, further into the book, widower Jim meets up with his dead wife Lucy over in Flimsy. Kind of an Orpheus and Eurydice number, I think I’ve never used that pattern before, hooray, or wait, in White Light, the guy does get a girlfriend over in the Land of the Dead, but it’s not his ex-wife. Man, I’d be hooking into a silo fulla corn with a dead wife routine, wheenk to spare, very commercial. Especially when Jim can’t bring her back from Flimsy to his homeland. Tearful fade-out. [Here’s a post where at the end I explain what I mean by “wheenk”.]

Friday morning we went to see the gardens at Filoli, an estate between San Jose and San Franciso near Woodside, CA. The first view of the gardens, shown above, is perhaps the most impressive. You step through an arched door in a brick wall and there lies—arcadia. Another world. The square-trimmed trees in the background give it an especially magical look.

I reflexively tend to think of viewing gardens as being boring, but it was definitely worth the trip—although it’s good to get there early before the people overwhelm the nature. I’ll be using some more Filoli pictures in coming posts.

We spent a couple of nights in San Francisco, for the Easter weekend, staying on Nob Hill, atop extremely steep streets coming up from Union Square. I saw this great woman giving her dog a treat on the way up.

I picked up a fresh copy of Wm. Burroughs, The Soft Machine, at City Lights Books, with a nice pink cover, and reread some of it. Long time no see. Its chapters seem fairly independent of each other. Some aren’t too badly cut-up. One chapter I read, like dada pulp SF, “The Mayan Caper,” gives me some ideas for how things might be in Flimsy. A few quotes.

Setting up for time travel to Mayan times. “Then he injected a blue fluid of heavy cold silence as word dust fell from demagnetized patterns—from a remote Polar distance I could see the doctor…”

After the transition. “Suddenly he sat up talking in Mayan—The word curled out his mouth and hung visible in the air like vine tendrils—I felt a strange vertigo which I recognized as the motion sickness of time travel…” Note that Burroughs uses that same phrase, “the motion sickness of time travel” in Yage Letters, to describe the nausea prouduced by the psychedelic yage vine drug.

[A rubbed-out Mickey Mouse logo on the sidewalk outside the now-defunct Disney store. Sign of the times.]

“I lay down in the hammock and immediately felt the stabbing probes of telepathic interrogation.” That’s a classic SF phrase, takes me back to the Andre Norton books I read as a boy.

At the frequent celebrations, “…the priests appeared in elaborate costumes, often disguised as centipedes or lobsters…”

“I made recordings of the festivals and the continuous music like a shrill insect frequency that followed the workers all day in the fields.”

[An ivory cougar in the Filoli mansion.]

Burroughs loved the idea of altering reality with cut-up sound and music. As it happens, while I was in SF, I had a chance to talk to an old friend, Jack Vad, who is a sound tech for the SF Symphony Orchestra.

Jack said, “Being a sound tech can be like being a dental hygienist or like being a sculptor.” Sometimes he’s just tweaking and cleaning, sometimes he’s molding sounds. He has really good software, it got a lot better in the last two years. He used the word “detune” to mean change the pitch. For fixing a sour note, you used to have to detune all the instruments, and had trade-offs where fixing one was messing up the others. But now the soundware lets you isolate a particular line of music, an individual instrument, and detune that alone.

Not all that great a step from this to Burroughsian reality control with your sound chip…

[My recent painting, “The Flims,” showing a jiva on the left and a yuel on the right.]

I’d been hung-up trying to figure out what things are like in this world Flimsy where my character Jim goes in my novel-in-progress Jim and the Flims.

So now, under the aleatory influence of The Soft Machine, I’m thinking of Flimsy as a slave society. And that it’s those seemingly pleasant jivas running things—even though they look like fairly benevolent flying turnips. The jivas are the controllers in Flimsy.

So the nice-seeming jivas are bad. Conversely, the scapegoat yuels are in fact rather neutral about us, and even at times goodhearted. And at some point our hero Jim finds this out.

I think of this kind of plot-twist as a flip. I did a flip in Spaceland, with the Kluppers and Dronners. At some point Jim will be captured by the yuels and learn how to talk with them, and then he’ll learn the truth—this moment is the reveal. Joe Cube got his reveal in Spaceland when he finally talked to a Dronner.

I see the bad jivas as objective correlative for a pocket computer, like an iPod or Blackberry—they glom onto you and give you power and link you in, but they control you.

The yuels don’t talk like we do, they use exclusively telepathic glyphs. Jim’s dog befriends a yuel. A yuel is an objective correlative for an emergent hive behavior.

Last weekend we went to see a bout between two teams of the Santa Cruz Rollergirls at the Santa Cruz Civic Center. What I totally couldn’t believe was that the place was SOLD OUT, and we could barely get tix to get in! People are so frikkin’ organized anymore.

The bout we saw was the Beach Flats Betties vs. the Lost Girls. I might pedantically mention that in Santa Cruz, the Beach Flats is a somewhat low-rent area, and of course “betty” is an old surfer slang term for “woman.” Everyone involved seemed kind of punk, in a 21st Century way.

I had a little trouble figuring out the rules for roller derby, but a friendly young woman explained it to me, and back home I looked it up in Wikipedia. Basically each team has a “jammer” who scores points by lapping the pack.

The women wore impressive shiny pants, and looked awesome on their old-school four-wheeled skates. I think that’s Raven von Kaos of the Lost Girls in the middle.

And I think this is Lulu Lockjaw of the Beach Flat Betties jammin’ through the pack.

The MC was a rather stout middle-aged woman in tiny jeans shorts and a miniature red cowboy hat. When some heavy metal music came on, she started capering around on the stage doing knee-bend dancing—what a hoot.

Even the intermission was great, they had unicyclists, mini cyclers, jugglers on stilts, and hula hoopers in wild costumes—everyone parading round and round the rink slowly to music, including the Ramones—just local amateurs of all ages having fun. It was like a Fellini movie.

It takes a relaxed Cruz-type vibe to carry off this kind of thing—some communities would be all SERIOUS about it. A wonderful evening.