It rained about five inches last week—what we call a storm in California. I love to see water do its thing. So much beauty, all there for free, gone in a moment.

I have a couple of new links today. My young friend Brendan Byrne has started an ezine called The Orphan with a couple of his pals. It’s a zine for fragmentary stories or articles that are somehow fated never to see formal publication. I contributed a piece called “Catalog Notes for the Secession,” involving some catalog copy that an artist asked me to write for him…and then changed his mind about using.

My other link is to an interview with me on a website called Self-Publishing Review. I did self-publish my art book Better Worlds last month. And with POD (print on demand) and ebooks coming on stronger all the time, you really have to wonder what publishing really means anymore.

You can read my interview at that site, but I will quote one riff here that I thought was funny. I wrote this in the context of me discussing why you’d bother to use a publisher at all if, at some future time, all a publisher was going to do was to produce POD and ebook versions of your work—as opposed to distributing paper copies in bulk. Even though you can do this yourself, a publisher can still provide an advance and a modicum of promotion.

Re: promotion, for mid-list writers like me, promotional media advertising isn’t really a factor. My publishers mention each of my novels in a multi-book ad in the SF trade zine Locus, and that’s about it. But they do send out review copies. Of course a self-publisher can send out ebook review copies for no cost—but this is really a mass spam ad. And reviewers are, of necessity, adept at ignoring spam. Having a commercial publisher lends credibility. That is, if my book comes out under the aegis of a familiar publisher, people feel assured that the work is of professional quality—as opposed to being the maunderings of a senile madman.

Would that work as a memoir title? The Maunderings of a Senile Madman. No, no, that wouldn’t be a wise move.

Something I didn’t explicitly say in my interview, by the way, is that blogging is, in and of itself, already a form of self-publishing. Maybe we’re going to slowly let go of the notion that to “publish” something is to have it pass through the hands of an office in a skyscraper in a big city. Maybe publishing doesn’t really have an unbreakable connection with commerce. Maybe it’s like rain, your words and images pelting down on the world, sending out their little circles and fading away.

Oh, one other thing I forgot to mention in my interview is that it costs nothing, that is $0, to make your book available in POD on Lulu…they make their money by taking a small cut of each POD copy they sell. For $100, Lulu will get you an official book barcode and have the book listed on Amazon…but I think you can actually to this yourself for less. The point is: self-publishers no longer need to hand over thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to predatory vanity presses…even though there are POD publishers who still try to follow the old vanity press model of selling their authors multiple “editing, distribution, and promotion” packages.

I finished my lastest painting, Four Mile Beach. Painting number 50! I was out there en plein air on the last day before the storm moved in. The waves came out well—I did that part in under an hour, right there on the beach. I reworked the cliffs and rocks at home. I like this picture a lot. Sometimes the easy ones are the best. Click here to see a larger version of this painting.

It’s been raining hard all day, very unusual here. I like the waxing and waning of the drops sweeping across the roof. Think of all the vibrations in all the drops…

I don’t have much to say today. Suffice it to say that I’m still grappling with the shape of my novel, Jim and the Flims. And I did another layer on some parts of my new painting, Four Mile Beach. I might finish it in a couple of days.

For me, writing is very much a matter of groping. Exploring possible paths through the story universe to find one that’s both surprising and with a kind of inevitable story-like feel. This is a flight of stairs in an apartment building on Telegraph Hill, where we were this weekend. There’s a clock on the wall at the very top of the stairs in this picture, but my obnoxious camera battery died before I could reshoot and get the exposure right.

I like this scene, it’s an example to me of how certain physical situations have the feel of concrete symbols: a hemmed-in flight of stairs with a clock at the top. Life in a nutshell. Bridges are like that too.

An equliateral triangle on a cop flasher. Not an archetype, just a shape.

In Berkeley I often walk past a dilapidated motel-like home for seniors on Shattuck Avenue. These vents against the dramatic sky are again archetypal. The vents connect the individual souls within to the higher Gnarl above.

Friday we had dinner at the home of my fellow Kentuckian and SF writer, Terry Bisson. Terry was going on about how photography is the lowest art form — because he thinks it’s easy to do (hah!) — and this reminded me to take some pictures. Dig this ant-decorated napkin beside a plate of Valentine’s cookies. Relatively easy to shoot, yes, if you’ve practiced using your camea for a considerable time, but to see the picture there to be plucked, ah, there’s the tricky part.

The Bisson’s granddaughter had a cool paper toy that she’d gotten as a favor at a birthday party. We all played with it. I thought of the cases of plaster models of curved surfaces that the old-school European mathematics departments have on display—relics from the days before the chips ate our brains.

I’ve pretty much photographed all the bric-a-brac in my own house, but Terry’s house had new stuff to shoot. I like the orange/yellow color on their walls. Maybe I cold put some weird gods and goddesses walking around in the land of Flimsy in my new novel. When I’m as uncertain as I currently am about my story, I’m wide open to influences from stuff that I see. Inhaling metric tons of sensation, with my sensitive baleen filtering out the twitching krill.

Terry’s wife Judy is a quilter, she has stacks and stacks of them. Here’s one in progress. Lovely stuff.

Bisson himself! My pal.

I also saw my artist friend Paul Mavrides and his friend Mimi Heft this weekend. That’s Mavrides on the left.

And I got together with my old college friend Greg Gibson as well, but I didn’t get any pictures of him. Greg was in San Francisco for the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, representing his company Ten Pound Island Books. It’s kind of scary how old we’re getting. But the books are older. Some very cool stuff on display, this great underground river of images and words, forgotten but not gone.

[Photo copyright (C) Embry Rucker 2009. Shot for DC Shoes.]

I was just looking at some of the pictures in the “Current” portfolio of my photographer nephew Embry Rucker. Wow. Maybe this woman lives in Elfland! I asked Embry for more info, but he just said: “i forget her name – she’s in some rock band in LA – or was last year, she could be a suburban mom by now for all i know.”

I was out at Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz yesterday, working on a new painting. I’ll be layering on more versions of this one…

Several surfers paused to inspect my progress. They approved. “That’s my beach!”

My writing problem today is that I haven’t decided what it’s going to be like in Flimsy. What are some options? Before listing options, note three desiderata to keep in mind.

Playable. The world should be able to support a story. In particular Jim should be able to move around it as a human character, and he should be able to interact with the flims in fairly comprehensible ways.

Meaningful. The world should transreally represent something that’s important to me, and should carry some satiric or philosophical subtext.

Wonderful. The world should be beautiful to think about, and somehow be essentially different from any environment in our present or past world.

So here are some possible worlds that come to mind.

The Afterworld. Whatever I decide on for Flimsy initially, we might eventually reveal this world to it overlap with the afterworld—and then have a big scene where Jim meets his dead wife. The “surprise, this is heaven” move is however a bit of a genre cliché, and corny, and plot-wise it’s a kind of retrograde step to meet his dead wife, and, come to think of it, I used the afterlife in White Light. So I think I’d rather not do this here.

[A cartoon I drew as a hippie in 1970 for the Rutgers campus newspaper. The somewhat reactionary joke in it actually was something I’d seen on TV show, Laugh In.]

Cartoon world, with cartoon conventions. Fine, but if I do this, I immediately face the same what-is-the-nature-of-Flimsy question all over again, for I have to ask what kind of underlying world this is a cartoon of. Of course when I mention cartoons here, I think of Frank, and of the jivas that Jim Woodring draws—and maybe the yuels would look like spiders—but to make this playable at novel length, I think I’d need for the flims to take on a more humanoid form most of the time. I think that, rather than having a cartoon world, I might better have a somewhat realistic humanoid world, but with cartoon physics.

Fantasy kingdom. The default for “fantasy” these days is a medieval land with nobles, knights and dragons. But it’s hard for me to get very excited about such a world, as it’s so burdened with received ideas, so fannish, so non-transreal. To make a fantasy land that’s meaningful and vibrant for me, I might rather suppose that it’s a rural world like the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel. But I have in fact written about this B & B rural world in As Above So Below and in Hylozoic. So, wait, how about a fantasy world that’s…Elfland! I’ll break out a new section for that.

Elfland. I think this might I what I really want to write about. A land where magic is real, and it’s not the Middle Ages. So elves, goblins, elementals, and so on are in fact real, but they live in the world of Flimsy that’s slightly askew from ours. Note that I wouldn’t want to be overly tendentious about matches between Flimsy and the folk mythology of our fairy tales, as this leads to mere name-checking. What might it be like in my Flimsy Elfland? I could have a kind of episodic picaresque, like a trip through America, and we encounter a variety of scenes, each with its own odd natives.

We might start in a rural Elfland akin to the Grulloo Woods of Frek and the Elixir—recall that the Grulloos were like goblins, and their bio-tweaked tools were effectively like magic. Transreally, this is my country childhood near Louisville, Kentucky. And then we segue to a small town, like all the little villages I lived in over the years: Highland Park, Geneseo, Lynchburg, Los Gatos. It’s like our contemporary world, only with things like magic that works, things like flying carpets, genies in bottles, spells, demons. And then, near the end, we get to the capital of Flimsy to deal with the issue of installing Ayaka as the Jotei, or Empress. And maybe this city is like Kyoto. And we might also visit the power center of the yuels, which is a brutal immense Manhattanesque city. Maybe for the finale, Flimsy segues into a dreamscape or into a surrealist scenario, like the Magritte world they visit at the end of Frek and the Elixir.

It would be good to have some specific and radical difference to the laws of nature or the nature of society in this other world.

In our world, it’s easy to change something physically or to build a machine. But it’s hard or impossible to affect something with your mind. What if it were the other way around in Flimsy. They can teleport stuff, but they can’t put together a wagon or a flight of stairs. They’re unable to build a window that lets in light and keeps out the wind and rain, they count on teeking away the droplets one by one—or maybe they train the house wall to do the teeking, maybe the house teeks something like a force field barrier within the window frame.

Would they even need a house in a telepathic Elfland? It doesn’t protect you from teleporting thieves or ruffians. Any protection is, once again, going to be teek-based. We might set this up by having Weena be very awkward with physical things. She’s not used to using her muscles to do stuff. But, back to the point, sure we want houses in Elfland. So it’s what I call playable.

Do understand that I use the world “Elfland” with a touch of irony and in somewhat the same spirit that I might touch a sore gum-canker with the tip of my tongue. The very corniest (yet somehow among the most memorable) verses we had to memorize in school were these:

The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

— From “The Princess,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson

I can still hear John Cadden reciting this my ninth grade English class, little John with his cozy Kentucky accent…

As I’ve mentioned in this blog, I’m working on a novel called Jim and the Flims in which we have two worlds, the “real” world of Fatland and the alternate world of Flimsy.

In traditional style, I see a tunnel connecting the worlds. The tunnel between the worlds is in the basement of a crumbling Victorian house in Santa Cruz. The house, inhabited by three surf punks, is called the whipped Vic around town. Most of the time you can’t see it. You have to walk a certain labyrinthine path to get there.

How does Jim Oster find the whipped Vic in the first place? I’ll suppose that some higher being from Flimsy led him there the first time—she sent Jim signs in the form of a colorful bird flitting from tree to tree, a bird that was really an apparition of a jiva under the being’s control.

Now—this higher being in Flimsy is, let us say, a disenfranchised Queen or Princess whom Jim is supposed to help to power. But “Princess” too pedestrian a word, so I’ll use a Japanese word. A “kougou” is the wife of an Emperor, but a “jotei” is an Empress herself. So I call her a Jotei.

As it happens, the lovely Japanese-Italian actress Rosa Kato (see these Japanese commercials) played a girl named Ayaka in the 2007 Japanese TV series Jotei, based on a manga comic of the same name, which is about how the school girl Ayaka who, aided by a handsome underworld boyfriend, becomes the “empress” of the Osaka demimonde of bar hostesses. (Hostesses, the Japanese never tire of asserting, aren’t actually prostitutes.)

Initially I was seeing my Jotei character as being from a truly royal family of Flimsy jivas and she’s blocked from her throne by an evil anti-intellectual yuel. But, yeah, maybe it should somehow be like an Osaka nightclub scene…with the bad guys being Japanese gangsters in the pay of psychic polluters who, like, send out telepathic spam. That could be cool.

Anyway, we’ll suppose that Jotei Ayaka helped Jim get to the whipped Vic the first time around, but now the yuels are harassing her, and she can’t project an image of her jiva over to Fatland to help guide Jim, so Jim and Weena have to get back to Flimsy on their own. So they run all over Santa Cruz looking for some trace of the three surf punks from the whipped Vic.

Here I need to ponder what kind of beings these punks are? Are they (a) regular humans, (b) flims, (c) some kind of interworld beings like security guards in airports or like aphids living on the “flower” of the whipped Vic, or (d) are they organelles or parts of the Whipped Vic “house” itself—as if they were pistils on a flower.

I’ll go with (a). It could be that lots of people know about Flimsy—the psychics and schizos and stoners and meditators. The three surf punks are locals who’ve found out how to squat in the twilight zone or interbrane or tunnelspace as we might best call it. In this case, it would indeed make sense to ask other surfers around Santa Cruz about these three. Suppose that Jim asks (as I was thinking the other day) one of his daughter’s high-school surfing pals.

So now I need to invent that character. His name is Chang. He teaches introductory surf classes to goobs at Cowell Beach by the pier. He’s cynical, and a randy con man, but also kind of an enlightened surf sage who truly doesn’t care about anything. He’s ethnically Asian, but very much a Santa Cruz California boy. The guy who first owned my blue Haut surfboard that I bought second-hand was named Chang, so I like that name. Perhaps our Chang has bleached the tips of his hair to be blonde.

Chang escorts Jim and Weena to a wild party at the Whipped Vic that evening. During the day they have to dodge the yuels, and we get to see Dick Simly burst open to birth out two dozen jivas that fend off the yuels. But in the process, Jim is seen and is accused of murdering Dick Simly.