{"id":2576,"date":"2010-09-05T16:41:43","date_gmt":"2010-09-06T00:41:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=2576"},"modified":"2010-09-07T11:59:45","modified_gmt":"2010-09-07T19:59:45","slug":"she-has-a-pet-hollow-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/05\/she-has-a-pet-hollow-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"“She Has a Pet,” Hollow Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I put a lot of energy into putting out the monstrously cool issue #10 of my webzine Flurb #10 <\/a>. It\u2019s off to a good start, we\u2019ve already had ten thousand visits, so go take a look if you haven\u2019t yet.<\/p>\n


\nShe Has a Pet, August, 2010, oil on canvas, 24″ by 18″. Click for larger version.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

I did a little work on a new painting, I\u2019m calling it \u201cShe Has A Pet.\u201d\u009d This picture began as a landscape painting in a hot, dusty park near Cupertino, California. In the park, I was thinking about Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants, but I didn\u2019t actually put in the elephant until I got back home. The landscape seemed like it needed something big to pep it up. And, as I added layer after later to the picture, I came up with a somewhat mysterious encounter between a woman leading the elephant, and a man she meets. The title is a bit of a joke, as in, \u201cI met a nice woman, but she has a pet.\u201d\u009d I was also thinking of someone who carries a lot of personal baggage. But ultimately, I\u2019m getting at something more general, mythic, and imprecise. An encounter. As always, more info on my artwork is at my Paintings <\/a>page.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is what the landscape actually looked like. I was there with my painter friend Vernon Head, who\u2019s mastered a much more realistic style than mine. You can see his picture in his Facebook album here<\/a>, he titled it \u201cFremont Older Open Space (final)\u201d\u009d.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The new issue of Locus <\/em>is all about the history of steampunk science-fiction. I always feel like the SF scholars should mention my 1989 novel, The Hollow Earth<\/em> in this connection, but usually they don\u2019t. The book\u2019s new edition is still in stock at Amazon<\/a>. I wrote about more about the history my writing of this novel in an earlier post, \u201cWriting the Hollow Earth<\/a>.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I was telling Vernon we should start doing outdoor paintings of buildings in town, like this storehouse at the local Rural Hardware store, but he\u2019s not into it. I can see painting this scene, though, and tweaking it into a warehouse at an alien spaceport. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I finished writing my SF story with Paul Di Filippo last week, it\u2019s called \u201cFjaerland,\u201d\u009d and it deals with a somewhat Lovecraftian \u201ceel man\u201d\u009d who lives beneath the waters of a Norwegian fjord. It\u2019s always fun to work with Paul. Our normal authorial voices are quite different, but when we get going together, we meld into a nice harmony that\u2019s different from either one of us alone. And Paul\u2019s very efficient about getting an SF story done\u2014he\u2019s written more of them than anyone I know.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still making some plans towards a novel featuring computer pioneer Alan Turing and a race of alien beings called skugs. I\u2019m leaning towards a three-act structure like I\u2019ve used in so many of my novels. It\u2019s the old Monomyth pattern: Departure, Initiation, Return. i) Alan meets the Skugs, ii) Alan goes to Skugland via a magic door, iii) Alan comes home and kicks butt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently I put a lot of energy into putting out the monstrously cool issue #10 of my webzine Flurb #10 . It\u2019s off to a good start, we\u2019ve already had ten thousand visits, so go take a look if you haven\u2019t yet. She Has a Pet, August, 2010, oil on canvas, 24″ by 18″. Click […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2576"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2591,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2576\/revisions\/2591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}