I finished writing Jim and the Flims this week and sent it off to my agent. I think it turned out quite well—this fall I was feeling a little uncertain, but I think I pulled the book together very nicely over the last few months. I’d even go so far as to say that Jim and the Flims rocks.

In any case, I’m done with it for awhile. Eventually, as it moves towards publication, I’ll be going over it again, at least for copy editing, but right now I’m off duty.

[The photos today are from my new Canon S90.]

It’s always bittersweet to finish working on a novel. I get to love the characters and their world, and I’m sorry to leave them. When I’m working on a novel, I have something to do all the time, something to think about. This latest trek took me a year and two months.

When I start, the finish seems mythical, imaginary, a dream. And I’ve heard novelists say that there’s a period in the middle when it’s like you’re rowing across a vast sea or lake—you can no longer see the starting point, and the ending isn’t in sight. And then, as the months wear on, I become desperate to finish, bent on bringing down my quarry. Putting it differently, carrying the weight of the incubating novel becomes unendurable. I long for deliverance. And then, in a rush, it comes.

For distraction I’ve been painting again. And I have my new Canon S90 to play with. It just arrived day before yesterday, and I haven’t really used it out in great shooting conditions, mostly I’ve been shooting in semi-darkness around the house. The image quality seems pretty decent, and the thing fits in my pocket. I’m still just barely learning how to tweak the thing for optimum image quality, so don’t judge the camera too harshly on the basis of today’s so-so pix.

I’ve been doing a little business as well. It looks like my memoir Nested Scrolls will come out in a collector’s edition from the high-quality PS Publishing in England late in 2010 or early in 2011. And the Tor/Forge will probably publish an edition in the US in the fall of 2011.

I’ve been straightening out my ebook contracts and editions, too. I dug out all my old book contracts and figured out who I’ve assigned e-rights to, and so on. And my agent and I are getting some of the contract clauses straightened out.

Even though ebooks probably accounted for less than 5% of publishers’ sales last year, writers, agents and publishers are getting the feeling that the e-wave is finally starting to rise—so we’re all paddling like mad to get into place.

It’s been raining pretty much this week, but the papers don’t seem to mention it. My theory is that the all-bad-news media only likes to report on rain:
(a) If they can say, “Well, we’re still having a drought, and this rain isn’t enough,”
(b) If they can report some hideous accident or power outage, or
(c) They can say, “We’ve had too much rain, and mudslides are imminent.”
Right now we’re getting just enough of the rain we need, everything is green and growing, and spring is inching forward—and it may not be news, but it’s wonderful.

So now what do with myself with my novel done? For sure I’m not going to dive into another novel right away. In the immediate future, I’ll be putting together issue #9 of my webzine FLURB. And then maybe I’ll write some articles and stories.

Or just relax and take it easy for a month or two. Walk in the woods, go to the beach, visit San Francisco, like that.

Right now I don’t have a small camera that I like to shoot with. The shots today are from my unloved old SONY DSC T2.

[An artwork on the wall of the studio/dwelling of the photographer Bart Nagel and his partner Bonnie Powell, who invited us to a nice open house yesterday. Thanks, guys!]

My Canon G10, which I liked a lot and have been using regularly, stopped working about month ago—it was under warranty, being exactly a year old. I mailed it back to the factory repair service twice, and they didn’t fix it either time. They’d say they’d fixed it, but it would still be broken. They finally said the problem was with the built-in, retractable lens cover, and that this is my problem.

I did some casual checking around and I think the repair could run $150 or $200, which isn’t really reasonable for a camera that cost me about $400 a year ago. So it’s farewell, G10. I took over 5,000 pictures with it over the year that I had it, so I got fair use out of it. Frankly, if you shoot a lot, you can’t usually expect a digital camera to last much more than a year.

One minor lesson here. Canon and some of its more favorable reviewers like to say that the G9, G10, G11 models are “built like a tank.” That’s a carefully crafted illusion. They make the cameras out of metal, so they do feel solid. But any retracting lens system is highly vulnerable to being shoved out of alignment. And you may not always be the only person who handles your camera. And even if the alignment problem doesn’t arrive, the leaf lens cover seems to be very fragile as well. It’s the heavy-duty SLR models like the Canon 5D that are built (somewhat) like tanks. The solid appearance of a G model is really just a cosmetic trick.

So now what do I put in my pocket? I considered dropping back down to the SONY Cybershot DSC T2 touch screen model that’s been moldering in my bookcase. But, stepping down to such a poor image quality is hard to take. The lens, the sensor, the processing—they all seem second-rate. And, for me, the dealbreaker for this model has always been that the frikkin’ touch screen doesn’t work reliably. No matter how hard I try and bend my will to the chip’s, no matter how many times I recalibrate it, even if I use my fingernail instead of my finger, only about sixty percent of my screen taps on the SONY DSC T2 will register and work. It’s not like the touch-screen problem is unsolvable, by the way—my impression is that iPods don’t have much of a problem. But I hate touch screens anyway. I much prefer the positive feedback of a button.

I could slavishly buy a Canon G11 for my walking-around camera, but there’s another problem with the G series that’s been bugging me all year with the G10. They don’t fit in my pocket. I have to wear them in an awkward belt-pouch, shove them into an overcoat pocket, carry them in a knapsack, or dorkily wear them on a strap around my neck. “Hi! I’m a goob!”

The whole digital camera industry changes every couple of years, and one of the new waves are the SPS (Shirt Pocket Size) high-quality digital cameras in the $400 range. Two of the main contenders here are the 2008 model Panasonic Lumix LX3, which has the glamour of a Leica-designed lens and the 2009 model Canon S90, which has the same sensor chip and processing software as the Canon G11.

I’ve been a Leica lover for decades, but I like Canons a lot too. If there were a new Panasonic LX4 out, then I might well go with that. And the fact that the Panasonic LX3 has a physical lens cap object instead of a leaf-based lens-cover is really very tempting. But…the fact that the Canon S90 model is a year more recent than the Panasonic LX3 makes a difference to my tiny lemming-like consumerist mind.

I cruised a number of reviews—over time, if you’re a camera-drooler, you learn that certain reviewers have tastes and shooting styles that match yours. My favorite reviewers, Ken Rockwell and Luminous Landscape, encouraged or at least abetted me in going ahead with the Canon S90. And Ken Rockwell’s posted shots with his S90 really knocked me out, they look like the shots I’ve been getting with my G10.

So I ordered a Canon S90 from Adorama today. You’ll probably be seeing images from it in my posts before long.

Feb 16, 2010.

I got the first thousand words or so written on my chapter “The Goddess” today, the second-to-last chapter of my novel, Jim and the Flims.

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a painting of the scene in this chapter, showing Jim and Val in the sea at Flimsy’s core. I thought I finished the painting yesterday morning, but today in the afternoon, I revised it a little bit more after writing.

“At the Core of the World”. Acrylic, 24” x 18”. February, 2010. Click here for larger image.

I wasn’t sure what to call the painting. I considered calling it Unknown Legend, because it’s so clearly an illustration depicting some specific chain of events—but nobody (not even me, at least not fully) knows what the events are.

That must be Val who’s helping Jim cut off a piece of that big jiva’s tendril. I figure Jim has his young friend Durkle’s sword.

(I might mention here that (a) I derive my images of the jivas from the cartoonist and artist Jim Woodring’s work and that (b) it’s really only a coincidence that the main character in my novel is called Jim—the book was well underway before I met Woodring or started using jivas.)

Initially I’d imagined that my Jim would be fighting his way past the jiva, but maybe we’ve seen enough jiva-fighting by now. This picture suggests that the jiva is dead or maybe just acquiescent—given that she’s somewhat passively allowing Jim and Val handle her tail.

That’s the goddess of Flimsy in the background. Maybe the goddess killed the jiva and told Jim and Val to cut off a piece of it for her to eat? Or maybe they’re supposed to get something special from inside the jiva? A huge gem for the goddess.

I like the concept of a huge gem, that has a good fairy-tale quality, finding a treasure inside the body of the slain monster. But maybe I don’t want to bring the gem thing in. I don’t absolutely have to make my story match the picture that I happened to paint. But I do, at least in principle, like the notion of letting my subconscious painterly process provide some input into the plot.

I don’t want to overly slow things up. At this point the author, the narrator and the readers are on the luge of dramatic exigency, racketing down the slope, longing for the climax.

Feb 17, 2010.

I’m still wondering what Jim’s going to do with that piece of jiva tail he’s slicing off.

Here’s a different slant on that gem-in-jiva idea that I wrote about yesterday.

Souls are more valuable then gems. In Jim and the Flims, souls take the forms of sparkling little “sprinkles.” So it’s better if Jim is getting sprinkles from the jiva, and planning to give them to the goddess.

When I was talking to the cartoonist and artist Jim Woodring at the Clarion West party in Seattle this summer, I casually said something like, “It’s no big deal to have a soul, anything can have a soul, it’s just existence, or maybe a little bit of computational capacity.” I was on my hylozoic kick. And Woodring draws himself up, acting flabbergasted. “A soul—a soul is by no means easily made.”

Suppose that I go with Woodring’s view of things. So the sprinkles/souls are rare and precious. And the goddess of Flimsy is more or less continually sending sprinkles down to the septillion inhabited worlds of our universe so that new beings can keep being born. So it make sense that she’d be recycling sprinkles.

But we might also suppose that Flimsy is, with some difficulty, producing new sprinkles as well. Perhaps they’re growing in the flowers of the water lilies of the Paradise Sea.

And, now, getting back to my painting, At the Core of the World, what if that jiva Jim is carving on is the Memsahib High Jiva, the fattest of them all, the Empress of all jivas who hooks into all the bobbling bulbs down in the Dark Gulf. And suppose also that this Core Jiva accumulates all the souls that her subordinates catch. And there’s a huge stash of sprinkles tucked into her body, maybe into the tip of her tail, and Jim’s carrying it up to the goddess of Flimsy.

Feb 18, 2010.

I had a good day. I wrote about 1,600 words and now the first draft of the “The Goddess” chapter is done. It helped to have the painting to think about. I’ll revise the chapter once or twice and move into the final chapter soon.

It’s hard to stay at it, but, on the other hand, I don’t want to stop. At this point it’s almost like an athletic thing, like finishing a hike. I’m driving myself, but in a fairly pleasant way.

I’m thinking now about my next revision—which I hope to do tomorrow or this weekend or Monday. I have to put in the sprinkles drifting out of the water-lily blossoms.

And I’m thinking it’s better if the jiva tail-tip is like the cap on a plastic squeeze bottle of mustard, and that the whole jiva is full of sprinkles. So instead of the sprinkles (= souls) being in the tip of the tail they’re in the main body fo the jiva. And the goddess sticks that main tendril of the jiva into herself, like she’s filling up a car with gas. Vrooom! She’s loading up with new souls to spew out into the septillion worlds.

I can’t quite decide whether the tendril—and then Jim and Val on their way back to Earth—go through the goddess’s navel or through her vagina. Maybe I just go with the navel, which probably makes the scene easier for the average reader to think about.

I’ve been taking a shot at figuring out the current state of the morass of ebook publication this week.

One basic distinction is that some ebooks are in encrypted formats with DRM (digital rights management) and some are in the so-called Multiformat, which means a non-encrypted format such, for instance, a simple Adobe Acrobat PDF file. John Siracusa has a fairly long (7 page) article about the history and future of ebooks, giving some background. More useful for authors is a nice survey of electronic publishing on the site of SFWA (the Science Fiction Writers of America), complete with very many useful links.

Today Troy Wolverton has an interesting article in the San Jose Mercury News about the growth of DRM ebooks in, unfortunately, incompatible formats. The problem is that different styles of DRM are likely to be used on the four ebook-reading devices: Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Apple iPad, and the Barnes and Noble Nook. Some of the existing DRM styles are Mobipocket, eReader, and Adobe EPUB.

Of course you might opt to read your ebooks with some simple reader program that can live on your computer or your smart phone—and in this case you wouldn’t want or need to get the DRM protected ebooks at all. But if have to use a DRM version, the eReader format can be read by using a free downloadable app that runs on pretty much any machine…so you don’t need to buy some proprietary hardware.

A not-exactly-related issue has to do with how much authors get paid when publishers sell their books in ebook format. Some of you may have heard that there was an argument about this last week between Amazon and Macmillan Publishing.

Some are floating the suggestion that there might be a 3-way split of 33% each for author, publisher, and distributor. Charles Stross has an interesting essay that touches on this idea in connection with Amazon’s recent (failed) showdown with Macmillan about ebook prices.

As for commercial ebook versions of my novels…here’s what I’ve learned lately about my own ebooks in print—I posted some of this in a comment a few days ago, but I thought I’d use in this post.

It was quite hard to unearth this information by the way. One question I might throw out there right now is this: is there any site which will search the entire web for all possible ebooks by a given author?

SPACELAND, HYLOZOIC, THE SECRET OF LIFE, MAD PROFESSOR, and HACKER AND THE ANTS are available from Amazon as Kindle books..

HYLOZOIC, THE SEX SPHERE and SPACETIME DONUTS can be found as ebooks on the Barnes and Noble site. They can also be found, with SPACELAND as well, on the two eBook sites eReader.com and Fictionwise …on these sites you have to do a Search for “Rudy Rucker” to find my books.

HYLOZOIC, SPACELAND and THE SECRET OF LIFE are available from the Diesel ebook distributor, and from Powell’s Books.

I don’t really know why the different sites list different books.

It’s perhaps worthwhile, though maybe self-defeating, for me to mention that one can in fact get some ebooks for free in pirated form. If you can figure out how to use it, and are comfortable with stealing intellectual property, the pirate bookz channel of the Undernet has pirated e-versions of a few of my novels, although not all of the ones mentioned above.

By the way, if you hunger for an honest, printed, paper omnibus edition of SOFTWARE, WETWARE, FREEWARE, REALWARE, this will be out from Prime Books at the start of April! You can pre-order it now from Barnes and Noble or Amazon.

And there’s no need to look for a pirated version of POSTSINGULAR as I myself posted a free Creative Commons version of it online a couple of years ago. Cory Doctorow talked me into it—he claimed it would help my sales, which didn’t really seem to happen for me, although a lot of people did download the book, and I was happy to see it getting out there. It’s not like I’ve ever made any real money from my commercial ebooks so far…

One topic I’d like to throw out there for input…suppose I wanted to sell some of my older books as ebooks myself—my older books don’t necessarily have ebook clauses in their contracts. Is anyone doing this? What are some good routes? Is it worth the hassle? Can you get listed on the big ebook distribution sites?

At this point, one thing to keep in mind is that the ebook market is quite small, and there is very little money to be made by ebook versions of anythign other than best-sellers. I guess the topic interests me because it’s an aspect of my typical-for-an-author desire to stay in “print”.

It looks to me as if none of my non-fiction books are available as ebooks. And among the novels, I don’t see ebooks of the Tor titles: MATHEMATICIANS IN LOVE, FREK AND THE ELIXIR, AS ABOVE SO BELOW: BRUEGEL, or SAUCER WISDOM. Among the books with other publishers, I don’t see ebooks of HOLLOW EARTH, ALL THE VISIONS, MASTER OF SPACE AND TIME, or WHITE LIGHT. I might dig out the contracts for these books and possibly produce ebooks of those whose electronic rights are unencumbered.

But at some point worrying about this can use up too much time—it starts to feel like trying to build my own gravesite monument in the waning years of my life, years that might be better spent walking in the woods…

Another topic that I’ll only touch on briefly is—royalties. Some of the more grasping and retrograde companies are trying to hold the royalty line at the paperback rate, something like 7 and a half percent of the ebook’s retail price. Others are offering 10 or even 20 percent of retail price. Or, again, I’ve seen the figures of 20 or 50 percent of the net, which is the amount the publisher actually takes in for the ebook. Most writers feel that, since there is essentially zero cost for producing an additional ebook once the file is prepared, the royalty should definitely be higher than what we get for paper books, which do cost money to produce. Nobody yet knows where it will settle down.