{"id":537,"date":"2008-08-10T08:51:55","date_gmt":"2008-08-10T16:51:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=537"},"modified":"2008-08-10T12:54:33","modified_gmt":"2008-08-10T20:54:33","slug":"questionable-taste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/10\/questionable-taste\/","title":{"rendered":"Questionable Taste"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every day I mess around with my writing a little\u2014journal, novel notes, stories, blog. Or maybe I paint. Writing keeps me going. It helps me wake up, helps me center. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As regular readers of my blog know, one thing I\u2019m working on these days is outline notes for a transreal novel with the current title Nested Scrolls. <\/em> It\u2019s about a writer who\u2019s trying to get it together in a world teeming with aliens. My life in a nutshell.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I enjoy my complex, layered, recursive, misleading ways of coping with reality and processing information. My mind is like an anthill, carting each twig of experience into this or that midden heap. If I can think of myself as a character in a transreal novel, then my life becomes more bearable, more mythic, less raw. Also it\u2019s a good way of amusing myself: a way to put reality in quotes, a way to handle life with pot-holders.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also been busily taking photos of, basically, nothing. Just things around my yard or house, or sights in the streets of Berkeley. Only rarely do I manage to shoot a somewhat journalistic picture of people, as in the playground scene above. I\u2019ve always wished I could do that more, but I\u2019m too shy to do it a lot. Instead I pick out color and light patterns or narrative nodes of meaning. Like the gutter reflected in the shiny veneer below.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The scanned and OCR-ed versions of Spacetime Donuts <\/em>and The Sex Sphere <\/em>arrived last week, and now I\u2019m proofing them for the planned E-Reads <\/a>editions (they\u2019ll be available in both the electronic book and the print-on-demand formats). The scans are very clean. Optical-character-recognition tech has really improved.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Content-wise, I\u2019m not planning to undertake any major editing. I mean\u2014I started writing Spacetime Donuts <\/em>in, like, 1976. That was thirty-two years ago, back when Nelson Rockefeller roamed the earth and the Rolling Stones were youth gods. Obviously, I wouldn\u2019t write these books exactly the same way anymore. But other than that, I hope to let them be. Like time capsules.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This said, I am finding a few little things that I want to tweak, such as grammar glitches or using the same word too often in a paragraph. Call it art-historical restoration. And then there\u2019s the dodgy matter of my questionable taste<\/em>. I\u2019ve always had this impulse to try and be outrageous, and back then I was fairly punk about it, not that I knew that use of the word \u201cpunk\u201d\u009d in 1976. But I\u2019m thinking I might sand down a couple of rougher spots…I\u2019ll decide about this after I\u2019ve read the whole book through.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It\u2019s odd, reading this blast from the past. At the start, Spacetime Donuts <\/em> feels like some half-finished, experimental spacetime hopper lifting off\u2014I definitely hear clunks and rattles. I was still learning to write, after all. But then it settles in for a smooth cruise through the subdimensions. And, yay, the budding cyberpunk characters bring down the government!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every day I mess around with my writing a little\u2014journal, novel notes, stories, blog. Or maybe I paint. Writing keeps me going. It helps me wake up, helps me center. As regular readers of my blog know, one thing I\u2019m working on these days is outline notes for a transreal novel with the current title […]<\/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-537","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\/537","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=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}