So I’m back from my stint on Charles Stross’s blog. I started with a post on digital immortality and went on to do a total of eight. I signed up to guest blog mainly as a way to promote the newly published US edition of my autobio, Nested Scrolls. And of course it’s an honor to work with Charlie.

[The awesome fountain in the Detroit airport.]

Today I’m going to be illustrating this post with photos I took during our trip to Brussels to give a TEDx talk in November. I’ll say a few more remarks about blogging, and I’ll bracket some notes on the trip beneath the individual pictures.

[There’s nothing like an irregularly-shpaed, fresh Belgian waffle made on a heavy iron cooker, quite unlike the frozen-and-heated straight-edged things you normally see.]

While blogging on Charlie’s Diary I posted some ideas about the novel I’m trying to get going, my working title is The Big Aha . Doing these early posts got me to polish my ideas and it makes the new project seem real.

[Chalk Space Invader icon on a restaurant’s discarded daily-specials blackboard. They’re everywhere!]

I get a heady, reckless feeling of working without a net when I post my ideas for novels that I’m still only vaguely planning to write. It’s like I’m flying in the face of the “don’t leave your game in the locker-room” adage. But I find it energizing, and a few of the comments are actually useful.

[Manikin Pis is one of the classic tourist attractions in Brussels. It’s nothing much, just a little statue of a peeing boy, supposedly set up by a happy father who’d found his lost child pissing at a particular corner. I’m posed like a degernate here with a vernacular copy of the statue—the copy includes, of course, a Belgian waffle.]

It’s not so much that readers’ comments show me how to build further on my ideas, it’s rather that they show me the objections to my ideas that will occur. And then I know to add material to disarm the objections from the start. And in doing this I end up clarifying my ideas.

[Lovely sunset down a long European street. I lived in Brussels for three months in the fall 2002 while I was working on my novel Frek and the Elixir and on my non-fiction tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. I had a grant to lecture on the Philosophy of Computer Science.]

Charlie Stross says he gets about ten thousand unique visitors a day on his blog, Charlie’s Diary, while Rudy’s Blog gets about three thousand a day. Charlie’s readers are very vocal, so if post on his blog it’s a bit like posting on Boing Boing. You need to keep a level head lest you become dispirited by ignorant gibes from a tiny number of trolls.

[A cool spectrum of gloves on sale in the St. Hubert gallery in Brussels, one of the earliest shopping arcades.]

Trolls get angry about certain controversial ideas. Like the many universes theory, which isn’t a notion that I care to use, at least not in The Big Aha. I’ll say more about this issue in another post. It’s not that I think the many universes idea is absolutely wrong, nor do I think it’s inevitably right. I’m simply making an aesthetic decision not to use it just now.

Many trolls have a strong emotional investment in the idea of digital immorality. Idea for a humorous SF story: “A Day No Trolls Would Die,” the title taking off on the title of the young adult classic about a farm boy and his beloved pigs. Digital immortality becomes available—but only for those obnox and obsessed trolls! So who’s laughing now?

Anyway, most of the comments on Charlie’s Diary were very friendly and helpful, and it was pleasant to have these daily interactions going on. So thanks to all those folks.

[A street performer blowing giant bubbles for tips. Symbol of the creative artist!]

When I post about my ideas for novels in progress, I have to fight back my atavistic fear of people “stealing” my “ideas.” But by now, I know that they can’t, anymore than someone could record an as-yet-nonexistent song on the basis of some scribbled notes by the singer. And really there aren’t any completely new ideas in SF, any more than there are new chords or new situations. It’s all in how you arrange them and trick them out.

[The St. Hubert shopping arcade itself. I love the shadow.]

This week I’ve been working on the names for my characters in The Big Aha, and on an outline. As I start this long ascent, I find a haiku by Issa (1763-1837) in a great book that Gerogia gave me for Xmas, The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass.

Climb Mount Fuji,
O snail,
but slowly, slowly.

Great stuff.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012 at 10:13 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.