{"id":7761,"date":"2017-11-06T12:13:32","date_gmt":"2017-11-06T20:13:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=7761"},"modified":"2017-11-07T10:55:15","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T18:55:15","slug":"on-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/06\/on-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"About Writing, with Pixel-2 Photos & More."},"content":{"rendered":"

Upcoming events: My 2011 painting \u201cA Skugger\u2019s Point of View\u201d\u009d will be part of the group show ILLEGAL<\/a>, curated by Kal Spelletich at the Luggage Store gallery on Market St. in SF. (\u201cP. S. We don\u2019t sell luggage.\u201d\u009d)<\/p>\n

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\n===Poster for the \u201cIllegal\u201d\u009d show in SF. Opening party Friday, Nov 10, 6-9.<\/em><\/p>\n

And I\u2019ll be at Windycon 44<\/a>, an SF con in Lombard, Illinois, near Chicago, from Nov 10 – 12, as Author Guest of Honor, doing some panels and giving a talk.<\/p>\n

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\n===Either this is Rudy\u2019s painting \u201cA Skugger\u2019s Point of View,\u201d\u009d or it\u2019s Rudy\u2019s view (including peripheral vision) of his audience while he gives his talk on \u201cCyberpunk Future\u201d\u009d at Windycon in Lombard, Friday, Nov 10, 8-9.<\/em><\/p>\n

By the way, all the images in the rest of this post were taken on my new Pixel 2 phone camera over the last few weeks. I’ll say a bit more about this furhter down. <\/p>\n

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I\u2019m rockin\u2019 it on Return to the Hollow Earth <\/em>these days, really pushing it along. I\u2019m about a third done. It\u2019s common to think of novels and films as having three acts. I\u2019ve written Act I, with two more to go. <\/p>\n

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\n===Rudy at the Luggage Store gallery, shyly joyful.<\/em><\/p>\n

With the two acts to go on my book, I need to concoct twice as many events as I\u2019ve already described. I worry about this, as I already have had so much stuff happening. And I can\u2019t easily see that far ahead. Foggy road. But it\u2019s always like this. The muse feeds me one scene at a time. And I hardly even pretend to make outlines anymore. <\/p>\n

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To keep me going, I always have a few big upcoming scenes in mind. This is my twenty-third novel, and by now I\u2019ve learned not to not to hoard my big scenes for later. Don\u2019t vamp while planning to do the big scene later<\/em>. Write it now. The muse always feeds me more big scenes once I\u2019ve written the ones I already have. It\u2019s can be nerve-wracking to work this way. To depend on the unseen and unseeable muse to step in, over and over, always handing me the next cue card. But it keeps working.<\/p>\n

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But I do a lot of stuff to get ready for the muse. I find ways to, like, invite her to sit down by my campfire here in the darkness. I use logic a lot\u2014I do have a Ph.D. in mathematical logic, after all. And I know a little bit about physics. So when something physical is happening, I might run some formulas and numbers to find out what has to be done. And when this is working well for me, the numbers turn out different than I expected, and this forces certain new decisions about how to write a scene.<\/p>\n

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\n===I\u2019ve been writing so much that my body is sore all over, and I need to start doing daily yoga again.<\/em><\/p>\n

I have a number of large creatures in Return to the Hollow Earth<\/em>. There\u2019s the giant flying nautilus with hydrogen in its shell. They\u2019re call ballulas<\/em>. The one in my novel is named Cytherea and she belongs to Edgar Allan Poe. My guys ride in the ballula <\/em>through the hole in a maelstrom at the North Pole. Normally ballulas <\/em>eat people so\u2014logic dictates\u2014I need for my guys to have, um, magic telepathic gems that can control Cytherea.<\/p>\n

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\n===Here\u2019s Rudy Jr. at the Luggage Store gallery with me, in front of googly eyes, and with a badass look.<\/em><\/p>\n

And there\u2019s these fat flying shrigs<\/em>, who are pigs in front and shrimp in back. Size ranging from a cow to to a three-masted ship. Very dumb. And there\u2019s a couple of krakens, three miles long, and one of them, Jumungo, is swimming in a circle underwater below the Arctic Sea to keep that maelstrom open (more logic here) and the other one, Fafnir, catches shrigs to eat and to feed to Jumungo, who is slowly, slowly brooding upon a clutch of two dozen eggs on her stomach.<\/p>\n

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\n===Kelp in Big Sur. Or neurons in my brain. A ganglion. As above, so below.<\/em><\/p>\n

To help the process along, I write a book of notes in parallel with each novel. When I\u2019m done the novel and the notes are about the same length. At first, when I\u2019m wiseacreing for the swing of thought (a phrase from Gurdjieff\u2019s intro to one of his books), the notes are much longer, and they continue growing all along, but at some point, I get into a bloodlust writing frenzy and the novel pulls ahead.<\/p>\n

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\n===Secret of the universe, revealed in a parking garage. The secret is, however, ineffable and cannot be spoken.<\/em><\/p>\n

And all along, when I don\u2019t know what to do in the novel\u2014or don\u2019t feel like doing it\u2014I go and put something in the notes. Making drawings, maybe, or a timeline, or a case-by-case discussion of what might happen next, or a to-do list of things I need to fix, or kvetching about not getting enough writing done. And none of this is actually where the ideas come from. The ideas come, as I\u2019m always saying, from sudden random thoughts, fed in by the muse. General principle: if an idea seems too wackball and out there to use\u2026then probably you should use it. Readers enjoy being surprised, so the book should keep surprising the writer too.<\/p>\n

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\n===I generally do not write about psycho human lurkers in the basement. Squid, okay, or krakens or man eating ballulas, but not lurkers. Too mass media. I write escape <\/b> literature, right?<\/em><\/p>\n

I got excited about the new iPhone 8 and iPhone X, but then after reading about them and about the competitors on the web, I decided to break out of the fold and get a Google Pixel 2 phone—as I mentioned above. Some say the Pixel 2 camera is better than the cameras in the new iPhones, although, of course, this kind of thing is endlessly debatable. The Pixel 2 has only one camera lens (unlike the high-end iPhones which have two lenses), but supposedly it makes up for this by automatically shooting a bunch of images and munging them together for each photo, achieving high dynamic range (detail both in the bright and the dark areas), knocking down motion blur, and suppressing low-light high-ISO artifacts.<\/p>\n

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\n===Wow! The tree is God<\/b>. I think the built-in HDR (high-dynamic-range) is what makes this looks so good. Also the Google Photo app’s “auto” setting is usally very nice.<\/em><\/p>\n

On the Pixel 2 camera, AI, in other words, is supplanting lens glass. Good image is all about having a lot of info about the thing you’re shooting. More info means more photons. Big glass lens means lots of photos being processed. But one might argue that if you quickly, sneakily, take ten shots each time you press the shutter release, then it’s like your lens had ten times the area. This sounds good, but even so the fine details and the low-light shooting of a camera phone is not as yet able to match a heavy duty big lens.<\/p>\n

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Anyway I\u2019m quite happy, and even pleasantly surprised, and even at times wowed by the Pixel 2 shots. As I said, all the images in this post were taken on my new phone camera over the last few weeks. Although, as I just said, if you zoom in, the detail sharpness never matches what I\u2019d get on my trusty Fujifilm X-100T with the largish wide-angle glass lens, or on my monster-lens Canon 5D. But, as the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you, and this often happens to be the Pixel 2 which, although larger than my old iPhone SE, fits in my pants pocket.<\/p>\n

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It has<\/em> been a bit of an ordeal for me to leave the familiar and well-thought-out user interface that that Apple products provide. By now I\u2019ve put in maybe fifty solid hours of, tweaking my Pixel 2 settings, posting on forums, searching for info on the web, and experimenting. I\u2019m still not totally happy with my new workflow from camera to desktop to online posts. But I\u2019m getting there. It\u2019s too complicated and geeky to go into here. But if you\u2019re a phellow photo phreak, you can check my forum discussions online<\/a>. Disclaimer: I\u2019m often wrong.<\/p>\n

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Other recent events now: Halloween, Michael Blumlein, Big Sur, walking around Los Gatos, and Blade Runner II<\/em>! Photos of all that here, with quick comments.<\/p>\n

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Halloween, we went up to SF and went around Bernal Hill near Precita Park. Kids line-up. I don\u2019t admit to knowing any of these rag-tag urchins.<\/p>\n

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Some of the adults in costume too. Love this psychedelic garage. The woman\u2019s wig glows, not sure how.<\/p>\n

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And a house of freaks all dressed like people from \u201cWizard of Oz.\u201d\u009d That might be the wizard himself with the glowing glasses. One woman had a little house atop her head, she was the house that fell on the bad witch.<\/p>\n

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\n===Rudy, Michael Blumlein, Carter Scholz, Kim Stanley Robinson, Richard Kadrey<\/em><\/p>\n

Sylvia and I went to a talk by Michael Blumlein, a fellow Freestyle Cyberpunk Transreal No Wave SF SF writer. We all had dinner together an a new Hungarian restaurant called Duna on Valencia St. Nice easy place, good food, decent prices. So great to sit around with other writers. They <\/em>understand. The months and years of work at the keyboard, the fuck-all scraps of recognition, the derisory levels of pay, the sweet solace of the craft, the joys of discovery, the pleasure of forgetting you\u2019re alive while you\u2019re lost in the subdimensions.<\/p>\n

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The big Blum himself. Last year we thought he might be dying, but he keeps hanging in here and maybe even getting better, which is great. We like having him around.<\/p>\n

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Sylvia and I drove down to Big Sur a week or two after they opened up the bridge, or overpass is more like it, just south of the village itself. On the way home we stopped at Phil\u2019s Seafood in Moss Landing. They had a great bluegrass band playing, \u201cGlad to Be Here.\u201d\u009d One of those gifts from the gods, to sometimes happen up on wonderful music.<\/p>\n

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Wonderful food too. At Phil\u2019s you order at the counter and sit at a picnic table, and they have tables out back on a sand dune sloping to the beach and the sun was setting, so fabu, with the *ping* crescent moon up there. It\u2019s so good to be alive. And every day is the only day.<\/p>\n