So now I’m rereading the scanned manuscript for my 1981 novel of hyperdimensional nuclear terrorism, The Sex Sphere , getting it ready for a planned E-Reads edition in electronic book and the print-on-demand formats this fall. As with Spacetime Donuts, also coming out from E-reads this fall, I did a cover painting for it, and my graphic-designer daughter Georgia Rucker turned it into a cover.

I think The Sex Sphere is really one of my better books, even though it wasn’t that widely read when it came out. I’m not finding all that many things that need correcting. I had a nice, loose style then, and a lot of freedom; if you were writing paperback SF originals for Ace Books in the early 80s, it didn’t seem like there was much of a filter. Like clear channel border radio.

I’ve been painting a little again. I touched up my Collaborators picture of two authors (possibly me and Bruce Sterling) working on a story together. I relate to the apoplectic scribe on the left.

And I’m working on a new one called Alien Picnic. It’s a view across Silicon Valley that I’ve painted before, but this time I thought it would be cute to have a couple of giant eyeballs on an outing. I still want to add some houses on the hillsides, put some food on the picnic cloth, and layer on more texture.

I met my friend Emilio at the coffee shop the other day. He’s a programmer who gets lots of consulting gigs. He’s currently using C# for some kind of threaded voice-recognition app. We were talking about how programming takes a very high capacity for handling pain.

And, as usual, I’m hanging around in my back yard taking pictures of little things like this red fleece shirt drying. This sight made me think of William Carlos Williams’ 1923 poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 8:59 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.