This week I’ve been working on a new painting called, “Owl Creek,” the name taken from the Ambrose Bierce story, “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a tale about a guy who thinks, for a time, that he’s survived being hung until auugh, he realizes different.

I spent yesterday and today in my studio (my back yard, on most days,) finishing the picture. I had to do some work to make the different areas match in terms of how tight they are, loosening up here, tightening there. I was wondering whether to put in any critters, or maybe even a hangman’s rope, but I think it’s done now. (Note that I keep changing what’s posted here, if you want to see all four versions, check my comment.)

By the way, the significance of the “Occurence at Owl Creek” reference is that, in thinking about the multiverse of late, I was specualting that in a different branch of the universe, I died this summer, and that I’m in this odd temporary stub of time, and the real branch is the one where I died. I’m just in the stub long enough to write my memoir, Nested Scrolls.

So this painting is in fact more sinister than it appears.

[My studio.]

Today what I’m “really” supposed to be doing is to go over the copy-edits for Hylozoic, and I will get to that right now. And for the rest of today’s post, how about a memoir excerpt…

There was a strange collection of boys in my seventh-grade driving group. An older boy named Owen was practically a psycho, always wanting to pinch and slug the rest of us. Another, saddled by his simpleton parents with the nickname Skeeter, was a radio buff, and one day he entered Faith’s car in a state of high elation. This was October of 1957, and he’d been listening to the radio beeps of Sputnik, the tiny new satellite that the Russians had put into orbit.

“It’s so…spooky and wonderful,” said Skeeter. “To hear that little thing calling down to us from up above the sky.” My mind drifted off with Skeeter’s, contemplating the miracle of a human-made object floating in space.

“Ow!” exclaimed Skeeter.

Owen had swung his plastic trigonometry triangle like an axe, bouncing its corner off the boy’s short-haired scalp.

My friend Niles loved science fiction every bit as much as me. We read all the SF books in the Louisville Public Library, and we even bought some SF paperbacks at the Woolworth Five and Ten Cent Store. We were excited about Sputnik, and we felt it was our duty to help the US to catch up with the USSR.

So we started building half-assed rockets. We didn’t even waste our breath trying to talk our parents into buying us stuff like powdered magnesium, potassium perchlorate, or steel rocket tubes. Instead we used recipes we’d invented or that we’d heard at school.

For one of our rockets we harvested the little red heads from about ten packs of matches, and stuffed them into a pointed plastic tube that had once held a flower. The fuel flared up wonderfully, spewing a fierce beam of flame. But instead of taking off, the plastic tube simply melted.

Niles and I usually had a small stash of firecrackers that we’d brought home from family vacations through the South, or that we’d bought from friends. We emptied out the powder from a whole pack of firecrackers, unrolling the layers of newspaper dense with wonderfully alien Chinese characters. We funneled the powder into a hollow rocket-shape we’d molded from Reynolds wrap, and lit it off with one of the firecracker fuses. The tin rocket raced around the ground in a widening spiral, spraying Nile’s leg with sparks.

This was too big a waste of firecrackers, so we switched to a more efficient technique. It turned out we were able to get a rocket-like effect from a single firecracker by making a mortar from two tin cans. One can was a little smaller than the other, so that they nested together. We’d drop the lit firecracker into the larger can, set in the smaller can, and—whoosh, the little can would fly thirty feet into the air.

Moving beyond mere rocketry, we soaked a shovelful of sand and gravel in gasoline, lit it, and tossed it high into the air, loving the movie-disaster look of the flaming pebbles.

Alarmed by our pyromaniac investigations, my mother bought me a safe rocket, a red plastic Alpha-One, which was powered by something very much like baking soda and vinegar—although the instructions called these the fuel and the oxidizer.

The Alpha-One was quite well designed, and we enjoyed many successful flights, with apogees in the hundred foot range. The thing was in fact still working twenty years later, when I unearthed it from a box of boyhood mementos and started launching flights with my own children.

As of today, my story about infinity, “Jack and the Aktuals” is online at Tor.com. If you read it there, do me a favor and post a positive comment on the Tor site! (I’m worried I’m going to meet with uneasy incomprehension.)

I had the idea for this story while I was doing a painting called “Giant’s Head,” up in Castle Rock Park last November, and I posted about it then.

If you like, you can listen to a podcast of me reading it on the www.Tor.com site, too. You can find the podcast on the Tor site, or click on the icon below to access the podcast via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

As I mentioned in the last post, I’m working on my memoir, Nested Scrolls, which, although not SF itself, is partly about becoming an SF writer.

Memoirs are so big anymore. I was reading the NY Times Sunday Book Review yesterday, and I saw two or three of memoirs reviewed. One memoir by some cosseted literary mandarin, aged 62 like me, focusing on how worried he is about death. Aren’t we all…

My own memoir is going pretty well, now that I vaguely know what I’m doing. The rest of this post is a quoted bit about my earliest efforts towards science fiction thinking.

My parents tended to send me to bed before I was really tired. So I’d play mental games while I was waiting to fall asleep. I developed a little repertoire of fun things to think about, fantastic powers like shrinking, breathing underwater, or flying through the air. Looking back, I can see that, all along, I was meant to be a science-fiction writer.

One particular evening’s imaginings stick in my mind. I imagined being an inch tall and walking around my room. The space beneath my bed was like a dim, dusty hall. The mouse that sometimes invaded our house was there, the size of a horse. He could talk, and he was friendly. I rode the mouse into the kitchen and got us two slices of apple pie with chunks of cheddar cheese. It was more than we could possibly eat, but we tried.

I made myself still smaller, the size of one of the dust specks I’d noticed floating in sunlit air. I drifted across the kitchen and through the grill of the window screen. Outside a gentle breeze set me down upon a blooming flower at the top of our magnolia tree. I took a swim in a dewdrop resting on the flower’s petals. Music chimed from the palace-like structure at the flower’s center. Perhaps a princess lived there.

My mind turned back to the sensation of drifting up through the air—and I switched to imagining I could fly at will. I often had flying dreams—in the dreams I’d launch myself by hopping backwards, and instead of crashing to the ground, I’d angle upwards and float on my back as if I were in a swimming pool. And now, just like in the dreams, I launched myself into the air from the back yard of our house. I shot up through the clouds and followed the light to downtown Louisville where the big buildings were. I circled all around them, and I flew under the Ohio River bridge. And now I shot straight upwards, higher and higher to where the air was cold and thin. Looking down, I saw the cities of Kentucky and Indiana as splashes of light.

But now—as so often happened in my flight fantasies—I suddenly lost the ability to fly. So long as I believed it was possible, I stayed aloft, but the minute I doubted myself, I began a long tumble. The air beat at my face and fluttered my pajamas.

And now came the best part of the falling fantasy. There was a hole in the ground below. I was falling into an endless empty void, a canyon or mineshaft that went down forever. Lave dripped from the distant rocky walls, small goblins peeped at me. But I didn’t need to worry about hitting bottom. I would fall forever and a day, on and on, world without end.

So today I finished the painting that I posted about yesterday. I’m calling it Georgia’s Tree.

I have a photostream going on Flickr: .http://www.flickr.com/photos/rudytheelder/ The slide show feature is cool. I’ll post more pictures in week or two— I’ll be working my way back into the past, adding more. These are mostly pictures you’ve seen on my blog.

You can buy quality prints of the photos at rudy.imagekind.com—where I’ve also made prints of The Wanderer and Georgia’s Tree available.

Speaking of photostreams, a guy called Clear Menser just sent me a link to his cool stream of gnarly photos, a few of which look like ones I could have taken myself. And you might check the UFOlogical Mac Tonnies stream as well. If you have a photostream to promote, post a link to it in a comment to my blog, comments with links take a few days to show up, but eventually they will.

On the literary front, I’m doing some work on what looks to be my next book: Nested Scrolls. It’s a memoir after all, and not an SF novel. Here’s a brief quote from the beginning which says something about what I’ll be trying to do:

I’m not so interested in the self-promotional aspects of a memoir anymore. As dusk slowly falls, what I’m looking for is understanding and—time travel. A path back into my past.

The thing I like about a novel is that it’s not a list of dates and events. Not like an encyclopedia entry. It’s all about characterization and description and conversation. Action and vignettes. I’d like to write a memoir like that.

Most lives don’t have a plot that’s as clear as a novel’s. But maybe I can figure out my story arc. I’d like to know what my life was all about.