This morning I was working on amassing photos to accompany Nested Scrolls. I only have digital photos going back to 2004. So I’m hauling out some of our old photo albums and scanning pictures out of them. The process is very nostalgic for me, here on the brink of old age.

[I saw a UFO today. Sorry for the poor image quality!]

Nested Scrolls and Jim and the Flims are done, and I feel really good about that. I can kick back and write journal notes for six months or so. There are slight differences between journal notes, travel notes, and writing notes. The journal notes aren’t necessarily about anything significant in the outer world. They’re more like the free play of thought—and a way of finding out what I think and feel.

Today I went to yoga class. Still in my sweats, I’m typing in my laptop journal here in the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting shop. Daily life seems so precious. The cafe around me feels like a lovely reef in shallow water. We’re anemones, we patrons, mollusks, crustaceans, fish—splashes of life and color in the eddying and all-pervading fluid of the air. And our innards are aglow from the luminiferous aether, yas. I like the sounds and colors, and the shapes and voices of people. The ambient music sets up sympathetic vibrations in my nerves.

[The Canon S90 brings out the full gnarl of your favorite subjects!]

Two attractive forty or fifty year old women are sitting at the table in front of me, engaged in an animated conversation in Japanese. I like the way that foreign languages include expressive sounds that are different than ours. I’m talking about sounds that might play a role like our “uh, oops, hmmm, yuck, huh, aha, eek, heh, grrr, yum, ugh, er, yay, whee,” and so on. Of course I can’t be totally sure, but I feel like I can recognize the interjections because they’re inflected in a special way. Maybe “interjection” isn’t quite the right word—I’m looking for the technical linguistic phrase that means “a vocalization that carries emotive meaning even though it is not a dictionary word.”

When I was a grad student at Rutgers, I attended a seminar at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study with a Japanese math professor, Gaisi Takeuti, who helped me with my thesis work in set theory. We became friends and I had lunch with him every week. I loved listening to him. He had this way of interspersing his somewhat rickety English with these great, deeply informative sounds, Japanese versions of emotive interjections.

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.