Now and then aspiring screenwriters tell me they’d like to do a script of my novel Software. I encourage them, but don’t enter into agreements with them — the guys I want to make agreements with are, of course, producers. I definitely don’t want to p*ss away time collaborating on spec scripts. I prefer to p*ss away time making complicated web pages!

Here’s one of my favorite covers for Software (Avon 1987), with a classic-type robot tuning up a cute android-type robot. Not a scene that’s actually in the book, but, hey, it should be.

Software was in fact under option for the last ten years of the 20th Century, and I have eighty pages of journal notes about this experience, including three unsuccessful Software treatments I wrote during that period. And today, just for the hell of it, I decided to post this info as: Software in Hollywood (1990 – 1991).

Do note that the film rights for Software are presently available.

Like Software, Wetware won the Philip K. Dick award; I think I’m still the only person to get that award twice. This is the Japanese cover; just about all my science-fiction was translated into Japanese in the 1990s. I like this image a lot, it picks up on thing about couples soaking themselves in “love puddles” filled with a drug called merge.

Unfortunately Wetware is a little hard to find these days, I think Avon let it go out of print. This was maybe the most cyberpunk of the Wares. Some other guy wrote a book with the same title a year or two ago, not to be confused with mine. I was annoyed when that happened, and to make it worse, his publicity said something like “in tradition of writers like Philip K. Dick…” If they're gonna lift my title, what would be wrong with saying “in the tradition of Rudy Rucker…”?

I’ve had a good run in Italy lately, here’s the Italian Freeware. What seems to happen with individual countries is that someone will get hip to my work, and most of my books get translated over a period of five to ten years. Germany did me in the Eighties. France seems like it might be starting up.

The film rights to Freeware are under option to Multiversal Entertainment.

Last in the Ware tetralogy is Realware. Will I ever write another Ware? Probably not, but you never know. Right now, I wish Avon would publish the four together in a single massive volume, but I don’t think they want to bother.

Re. Hollywood, my best shot these days is that Michele Gondry wants to make a movie of Master of Space and Time, which he's optioned. I talked to him a little about it, and he's pretty encouraging. We'll see.

I did some more work on my Lifebox home page. Avalon (my publisher) sent me a PDF of half the book to post online: all of Chapters 1, 2, and 4 (out of six chapters in all).

So go to the Lifebox site and have a look. And then, buy it and/or post positive comments about it on Amazon!

The cone shells are waiting for you.

[Figure 2 of The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul. See my old Micronesian blog entry for a link to Scott and Jeanette Johnson, who took these photos.]

I got my first printed copy of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. It looks great. If you want to help me out, please go on Amazon and advance-buy a copy now. The sooner they get some sales, the better off I’ll be.

WARNING. Some negatively energized individual at a place called the “Reed Business Group” (specializing in “business to business services”) wrote a horrible review of my Lifebox book for Publisher’s Weekly, and Amazon has a contractual deal with PW that they print the PW reviews first. The attack is so uninformed and inaccurate that I’m guessing there’s something about my politics that teed-off this little b-to-b drone, who takes umbrage at my having met Tim Leary. Help me out of this minicrisis by ordering the book now, lest the Pig smother my Magnum Opus in its cradle. That CA image above shows my crying towel…

There’s better comments and reviews on the Lifebox web site, which I’ve been spiffing up of late. In the process I made a nice new build of my CAPOW program with about a 100 Meg’s worth of good pattern files to load; the big *.CAS pattern files have multiple CAs in them. You can download the new build of CAPOW by using the Download Software button on the Lifebox page.

The first CA group shown today, was “The Kind Rain.CAS,” the next is “AintPaint.CAS,” and the one below is “LuckyNumber.CAS.” Each of these images goes with one of the short-short stories that separates the chapters of my Lifebox book.

One other bonus on the newly upgraded Lifebox web site: a 66,000 word PDF of my writing notes for the book!

***

My blog's not broken, I’m just distracted. I got a new IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad X40, and getting that working the way I wanted took some time. It’s a nice machine. While it was on its way, I could check its progress from Shanghai to Oakland to Los Gatos. The computer stork flying here from China.

I’ve been driving around a lot, going to Fry’s for this and that. I picked up a SONY IC recorder, it records about 2 and a half hours of stereo onto a chip that I can then, after a number of intricate computer acrobatics convert into an mp3 file.

If I took pictures of my California surroundings with the energy I bring to foreign countries would it look interesting? Gosh, look at all those cars.

I saw a cute baby in Starbucks. Kicking and rocking and reaching for his hanging toys. I’m hanging out in coffee shops more, now that I have the laptop.

I was planning to record my lecture in my philosophy course at SJSU yesterday, but of course the switch was off for the first half. But I did get a file of me reading a draft of a new SF story I’m working on, “Chu and the Nants”. I had posted the 35 Meg stereo 128 kbps MP3 of me reading a new SF story and discussing it with students here for a few days, and got some feedback from my helpful readers about how the audio sounded (not great) and how I might upgrade posting an mp3 on a RSS enabled site into a true podcast. But now (Sept 23, 2005,) having mailed off the story last week, I learn the story has been accepted by Asimov's SF Magazine (hooray!), so I don't want to muddy those waters by leaving the low-fi draft-version audio up.

By the way, “Chu and the Nants” is, in a way, an Answer Song responding to a concept in Stross’s Accelerando that really bugs me, to wit, the idea that it might be “reasonable” to grind Earth up into a Dyson sphere of nanomachines capable of running us all as agents in a virtual Earth that’s “just as nice.”

I was back in Big Basin Park the last couple of days. I parked at the park headquarters, backpacked in to (near) Sunset trail camp where I spent a night, and backpacked out to Waddell Beach the next day, where my better half picked me up.

I say “near” because I couldn’t find the freaking Sunset trail camp (expected it too soon), and slept on a random outcropping near the trail. I learned that I’d brought the fly of my tent instead of the tent itself, so had to do a lean-to kind of thing. The Compleat Senile Camper.

I started out at the same little waterfall at Timms Creek where I was on June 15, 2005. I mistakenly called it Timkins Creek in the earlier entry.

By the way, one of my regular blog-readers, Mac Tonnies, asks what kind of camera I use. I have a 5 Meg SONY DSC-T1; It’s very small and fits in my pants pocket, which means that I can take a lot of pictures. I walk around blogging my life.

Of course there’s a newer model now, the DSC-T7, it’s even lighter, my wife just got one.

The camera has a Zeiss lens, which seems to take very nice pictures. I sometimes Photoshop them, doing a minimal CTRL+SHIFT+L for “Adjust All Levels” — although I don’t always accept that change, as it can wipe out subtle color tones as it would have in this lightly PhotoShopped picture of eucalyptus bark taken back in Los Gatos. I did end up adjusting brightness and contrast a bit on this one. Really, it would look better as a print.

A dendrogyph or tree-tiki on Sunset trail in Big Basin Park. Features burnt in by firebrands. Spooky in the lonely dusk. Slight fuzziness due to motion blur, even though I shot this six times.

The biggest problem with a tiny camera is blur due to hand tremor in low light. I wish the CCD was a bit more sensitive, as sometimes it indicates low light when I'd like to be able to shoot without flash. You can use the built-in Menu to set the “Film Speed” to 400 to get a bit more speed, but often that's not enough. I’m playing with the EV numbers now to see if I can gain anything that way, seems like a negative EV might use a shorter exposure.

I shoot in lower light without flash anyway many times, as flash tends to flatten out surfaces, and only works up to a few feet. I always laugh when I see people taking flash pictures of things like performers a hundred feet away, or mountains, or even fireworks.

The downside of shooting at low speeds with an ultralight camera is that the camera wiggles very easily — unlike a kilogram-mass “good” camera. IMHO, now that we have tiny CCDs functioning as miniature film, stabilizing mass is the sole advantage of big cameras — people are only still getting big clunkers out of inertia and fashion and a sense that it makes them look professional.

You could glue a brick to the SONY and have a more wiggle-resistant camera. I've seen tiny flexible tripods. Even better would be a a gecko-foot pad. But, lacking that, I squeeze imperceptibly between breaths, or use self-timer release so that I don’t even have to squeeze, or hold the camera pressed against a tree or rock or railing.

In this picture I held the camera against a rock. It shows a rock-filled creekbed in Waddell Creek near the sea, reminding me of the creeks in my boyhood home of Louisville, Kentucky — so many of the Kentucky streams are wide and flat and tiled with flagstones. In my memories it’s often autumn there.

Getting a self-timer picture of myself is always tricky.

There I am.

After sleeping at (near) Sunset trail camp I walked down to Berry Creek Falls, which was looking good. I had the place all to myself. That’s a real win with being retired, you can go places on off days.

I walked all the way to Waddell creek, leaves falling. I felt autumnal.

Hard to believe I’ll be sixty next March. I’m a persistent (so far) pattern, a standing wave.

There were some nice little butterflies. This picture uses a digital zoom, which breaks the highlights into pixelization.

I got a nice series of pictures of flow that first day at the little falls on Timms Creek.

Focusing on this one gnarly, ever-shifting pattern of flow. I used flash on the two close ones.

The real reason my pictures sometimes look good isn’t so much a matter of what kind of camera I have.

It’s because I’ve been continually taking pictures for nearly fifty years.

Photography’s been my hobby forever, something I do to express myself, and without worrying about making money off it.

It’s nice to have a blog to show them on. And then when I walk around taking pictures of things, I feel like I'm not alone.