{"id":5039,"date":"2013-12-11T18:55:55","date_gmt":"2013-12-12T02:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=5039"},"modified":"2013-12-11T19:52:58","modified_gmt":"2013-12-12T03:52:58","slug":"up-to-my-usual-activities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2013\/12\/11\/up-to-my-usual-activities\/","title":{"rendered":"Up to My Usual Activities"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Big Aha <\/em><\/a>is out in ebook, paperback and hardback now. I\u2019ve ordered a bunch of the paperbacks and hardbacks to mail out to my Kickstarter backers. Still waiting them to arrive. This whole process has more steps than I\u2019d quite imagined. But I\u2019m almost done. <\/p>\n

Late-breaking news: A great review <\/a>of The Big Aha<\/em> by Giulio Prisco, published in Skefi’a<\/a> <\/em>and reposted in io9<\/em>! The book’s first review and it rocks. Whew.<\/p>\n

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Early warning: There will be a release party and an art show for The Big Aha <\/em>at Borderlands Books on Valencia Street in San Francisco on Friday, December 17, 2014. I\u2019ll be mentioning this again…<\/p>\n

What next? Over the last few months, I got back the rights to my three old \u201ctransreal\u201d\u009d novels White Light, Secret of Life, <\/em>and Saucer Wisdom <\/em>. What is transrealism, you may ask? Read my 1983 manifesto <\/a>on the topic.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll probably be republishing those three novels via my Transreal Books early in 2014, as ebooks for sure, and probably as paperbacks as well.<\/p>\n

While I\u2019m at it, I might as well republish my old memoir\/rant All the Visions <\/em>. I originally typed All the Visions <\/em>on a giant long scroll of paper, emulating the divine Jack K. working on On the Road<\/em>. My usual activities.<\/p>\n

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Keeping the ball in the air.<\/p>\n

Another project I\u2019m looking towards in 2014 is to assemble my electronic journals into a fat book. I have about half a million words on disk for the period 1990 \u201d\u201c 2012. I\u2019m editing that and pruning it down. Maybe I can squeeze it into a single 800 page volume. My role model here is the phonebook-sized Andy Warhol Diaries <\/em>of 1989. I read that sucker for about a year, a couple of pages a day. Would be nice to make a book like that.<\/p>\n

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Some of today\u2019s photos are from an recent outing to the fields and cliffs above Four Mile Beach and near Davenport, north of Santa Cruz. This is a Davenport photo. The shot-up-sign archetype. \u201cWords suck,\u201d\u009d as Beavis and Butthead used to say.<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s a nice balance between agriculture and ecopreserve on the coast above Santa Cruz. Fields of, like Brussels sprouts, fine. The point is that there\u2019s no McMansions, no hotels, no roadside attractions. Just the cliffs and the beaches. Although, of course, there is <\/em>the Whale City Bakery in Davenport, always worth a stop.<\/p>\n

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We saw a huge number of pelicans out there. There\u2019s been a vast school of anchovies in the Santa Cruz Bay lately, and the birds, seals, dolphins and whales have been gorging themselves.<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s always some surfers around, sometimes quite a few of them, but as it cools down and gets windy, you don\u2019t see many people actually walking on the beach. If you\u2019re willing to take a little trouble by, like, walking a half mile from your car, it\u2019s not that hard to find solitude in the unpopulated zones of California…and, really, most of the state is unpopulated. The cities are just small spots. Our beloved anthills.<\/p>\n

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Something heavy and cosmic about seeing pelicans against a sunny sky. People used to wonder where the dinosaurs went, but now it\u2019s commonly said that the thunder lizards didn\u2019t \u201cgo\u201d\u009d anywhere. They just evolved into birds. Pelicans are pterodactyls…but with feathers. Pterodactyls 2.0.<\/p>\n

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My cinemetographer\/photographer friend Eddie Marritz <\/a>was in San Francisco, and we had a tapas dinner with him, his daughter Leda, and Leda\u2019s husband Tim Conkling. Tim\u2019s a game programmer who recently started writing games on his own<\/a>. Among other things, Leda runs an interesting writing blog with her friend Steph: Small Answers<\/a>. A new post every Monday. I love the Marritz family\u2014I got to know them because I went to college with Eddie\u2019s brother Don.<\/p>\n

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This is a photo of Eddie that I shot on film, developed, and handcolored—sometime around 1970. I was in grad school. Had a lot of free time back then. No computers.<\/p>\n

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What else? These are some of the roots that my wife mashed for a Thanksgiving side dish. Handsome fellows, no?<\/p>\n

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Beautiful little slough behind Four Mile Beach. Very hard to even see <\/em>this hidden bight of water, the topography is kind of weird. I love that S curve. Nature gives us so much, everywhere, all the time. When I remember to notice.<\/p>\n

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But, like I always say, we humans are part of nature too. Building our intricate hives. And those can look cool, too. This chandelier in the new Los Gatos library is made out of a giant wood shaving that\u2019s knotted around on itself. The highlight is that slanting plane of sunlight. I rushed this shot, not wanting to alarm the library patrons, but you can improve a slightly blurry shot in Lightroom. Not necessarily sharpen it to death, but play with the sliders till the picture\u2019s effects look intentional or preordained.<\/p>\n

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This was an easier shot, bang<\/em>, it jumped at my eye. The back of a building along Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m having a sale on my paintings this month, and I\u2019ve managed to sell three of them in the last week. Check out the insanely low prices <\/a>if you\u2019re interested in a special New Year\u2019s present for yourself or for a loved one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Big Aha is out in ebook, paperback and hardback now. I\u2019ve ordered a bunch of the paperbacks and hardbacks to mail out to my Kickstarter backers. Still waiting them to arrive. This whole process has more steps than I\u2019d quite imagined. But I\u2019m almost done. Late-breaking news: A great review of The Big Aha […]<\/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-5039","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\/5039","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=5039"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5045,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5039\/revisions\/5045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}