Every day I mess around with my writing a little—journal, novel notes, stories, blog. Or maybe I paint. Writing keeps me going. It helps me wake up, helps me center.

As regular readers of my blog know, one thing I’m working on these days is outline notes for a transreal novel with the current title Nested Scrolls. It’s about a writer who’s trying to get it together in a world teeming with aliens. My life in a nutshell.

I enjoy my complex, layered, recursive, misleading ways of coping with reality and processing information. My mind is like an anthill, carting each twig of experience into this or that midden heap. If I can think of myself as a character in a transreal novel, then my life becomes more bearable, more mythic, less raw. Also it’s a good way of amusing myself: a way to put reality in quotes, a way to handle life with pot-holders.

I’ve also been busily taking photos of, basically, nothing. Just things around my yard or house, or sights in the streets of Berkeley. Only rarely do I manage to shoot a somewhat journalistic picture of people, as in the playground scene above. I’ve always wished I could do that more, but I’m too shy to do it a lot. Instead I pick out color and light patterns or narrative nodes of meaning. Like the gutter reflected in the shiny veneer below.

The scanned and OCR-ed versions of Spacetime Donuts and The Sex Sphere arrived last week, and now I’m proofing them for the planned E-Reads editions (they’ll be available in both the electronic book and the print-on-demand formats). The scans are very clean. Optical-character-recognition tech has really improved.

Content-wise, I’m not planning to undertake any major editing. I mean—I started writing Spacetime Donuts in, like, 1976. That was thirty-two years ago, back when Nelson Rockefeller roamed the earth and the Rolling Stones were youth gods. Obviously, I wouldn’t write these books exactly the same way anymore. But other than that, I hope to let them be. Like time capsules.

This said, I am finding a few little things that I want to tweak, such as grammar glitches or using the same word too often in a paragraph. Call it art-historical restoration. And then there’s the dodgy matter of my questionable taste. I’ve always had this impulse to try and be outrageous, and back then I was fairly punk about it, not that I knew that use of the word “punk” in 1976. But I’m thinking I might sand down a couple of rougher spots…I’ll decide about this after I’ve read the whole book through.

It’s odd, reading this blast from the past. At the start, Spacetime Donuts feels like some half-finished, experimental spacetime hopper lifting off—I definitely hear clunks and rattles. I was still learning to write, after all. But then it settles in for a smooth cruise through the subdimensions. And, yay, the budding cyberpunk characters bring down the government!

Stay tuned.

Right after his attack, my new novel’s character, Jim Oster, is thinking about sex a lot. Like—sex is one of the very first facts about the world that comes back to him. Zero and one, as it were. He feels a little surprised about reproduction—he can hardly believe the details. His woman friend, Anne Wowesse, says he’s like an id with no ego or superego.

In the first mornings, he sits on the hospital patio with his IV-drip and looks at the clouds in the sky. They drift along, changing shapes, with the golden sunlight on them. The leaves of a potted palm tree rock chaotically in the gentle airs, the fronds are clearly outlined against the marbled blue and white heavens.

Most of the other convalescents fail to notice their natural surroundings, but, be that as it may, the information is coming in from outside Jim. He’s not creating it. And now Jim is struck by the realization that the world will go on without him after he dies.

Or…? He thinks of the participant/observer maxim in quantum mechanics: “No phenomenon is real until it’s observed.” He begins to wonder—or even to hope—that some aspect of reality depends on being seen by Jim Oster. He is, after all, a bit of a writer, and he sometimes imagines that his journals and blog posts are altering reality.

Looking up at the clouds from the couch in his back yard, he sees a high-flying bird—a crane or a gull. Mentally reaching out to contact the fowl he feels he can see through her mind, feeling the rhythm of her wingbeats, enjoying the vast expanse of her view, with the coastline and the Pacific ocean visible. Jim imagines that bird sends him a telepathic message: “Thank you.” She’s grateful to Jim for making her real by seeing her.

But—naaw—if Jim were dead, the birds would still be flying, the Earth would be turning, and the sun would be rising in the sky just the same. He’s of no more lasting significance than a dead leaf scuttering across the patio. He finds this fact to be somehow horrible.

Jim doesn’t feel like his old self. He feels like his mind is a giant warehouse where an earthquake knocked everything off the racks, and he has to reshelve things one by one. “Oh, yes, that’s a steam shovel, that’s a potty, that’s a quartz crystal, that’s my first day of nursery school.” Repeatedly he remembers marrying Anne Wowesse, and how cute she was in her white hat and veil. Repeatedly he remembers that he never married Anne Wowesse at all.

The days and weeks fly by. He doesn’t understand how he used to pass his time. He’s continually ransacking his bookshelves, looking for some old volume to reread. He spends much of his time waiting to go back to sleep. Each day he looks forward to bed time at nine p.m. sharp. And he naps every day. He wants to act normal; when he greets people, he forms his mouth into a smile, as deliberately and artificially as if he were making an “okay” hand-sign. He feels he’s living a lie.

When Jim stares at a neutral-colored object such as the 1940s frosted-glass light fixture on the ceiling in his rented house, he seems to see the tint of the object change in slow waves. Faint pastel hues amp up and down, as if some unseen force were diddling the world’s color balance sliders.

Smells seem much more intense, the odors of drains, of garbage, and of fruit. The meaty, oily scent of the decaying skin fragments in his electric razor is almost unbearable. He’s tempted to stop shaving.

Is the change because he quit smoking after his attack? Or has something been reconfigured in his brain? Maybe there’s a piece of him gone missing. His once-powerful spiritual impulses are weak, and, in a possibly related change, he’s no longer goaded by the impulse to get high.

Slouched on a the lawn chair in his back yard one afternoon, Jim falls into a trance while studying the clouds. When he comes back to focusing on his immediate surroundings, he realizes that he hears the low tapping of fingers on a keyboard. He tries to maintain a calm appearance, but inwardly he panics, thinking that he’s inside a computer program or a video game.

But, whew, it’s just his daughter sitting in a chair behind his head, checking her email on her laptop. He twists his neck so he can look at her, to talk this over. And then he remembers that he doesn’t have a daughter. There’s nobody in the chair. Or, no, wait, he does have a daughter, and she’s visiting him, yeah. She is sitting there after all. Her name is—what?

Is Jim Oster losing it?

[Draft of the text in this post.]

I’d like for part of the novel to be Jim Oster’s memories of his boyhood, thus allowing me to transrealize some of the remaining unused segments of my autobiography. But for the novel to work as a story, I need some hooks between the old days and the present year (around 2010 ) in which Jim Oster is narrating.

A fan, Andy Valencia, wrote me in response to my blog post, “Nested Scrolls, Alpha Start,” suggesting that Jim Oster be somehow broadcasting his story to other worlds, perhaps by collapsing the info into diamond-weave nanobooks that he launches into space via a rail-gun. Andy also proposed that Jim might find some extraterrestrials’ nanoautobiographies on Earth.

I like the feel of these idea, but in order to give my book a fresh feel, I do want to avoid familiar notions of possible technology—sometimes we forget how unfamiliar the future is likely to be. I see the autobios as being more like biotech growths than like tiny abacus-precise tapestries of atoms. I think of seeds or animalcules that grow into scroll-patterned cultures, akin to lichens on rocks. Or of hive-mind algal blooms. Or of quantum-computing air currents.

We can readily suppose that alien autobios are all around us in these kinds of forms, and always have been. But—until Jim Oster’s breakthroughs—we haven’t been able to read these natural books. Note that natural books aren’t a new concept. For instance, my friend Brian Wallace has, I believe, an ancestor, Alfred Russel Wallace, who was a fringe scientist who said he could read the markings of shale as clearly as the pages of a newspaper.

For that matter, the Book of Mormon is described as originating in some marks on plates that the prophet Joseph Smith deciphered by using a “seer stone” or a pair of “stones of sight” known as Urim and Thummim. What if Jim Oster were to found a new religion based on a natural book that he finds in the form of the shadows of a eucalyptus tree’s leaves, or in the rustling whispers of a palm tree’s fronds?

There’s a bit of the hylozoism notion in the concept of natural books—as we’re talking about ubiquitous, logically deep information. I find it pleasant to suppose that the air is teeming with the biographies of extraterrestrials. Note that these aliens aren’t necessarily from other planets, they might be from the subdimensions or parallel branes. To me it’s always seemed like overkill to drag in aliens from millions of light-years away. Why shouldn’t they be as near as my heartbeat?

In any case, Nested Scrolls—or maybe it’s called The Natural Book—still needs a plot. We’d want to have some impending crisis that might end our world—and the aliens are enlisting Jim Oster to help save our shared reality. Save it from who? From some benighted humans—I might well bring back my favorite villains, the Heritagists. One can readily suppose that Heritagists have a hysterical, superstitious, witch-burning fear of the aliens. And they’re working on a Reality Cleansing Treatment to erase all the ambient alien autobiographies and alien minds.

Opening scene: Jim Oster in the hospital, recuperating from what they’re telling him is a mild stroke, caused by a cerebral hemorrhage. His long-term woman friend Anne Wowesse visits him—these two are both somewhat out of it, along the lines of the characters in Phil Dick’s A Scanner Darkly or William J. Craddock’s Be Not Content. This said, I think it clarifies and simplifies my story if I assume that Jim and Anne are both sober, perhaps even in recovery—this way, it’s more believable that their perceptions of the world’s workings are in fact true.

After visiting hours end, and Anne leaves, Jim is thinking over some of the things she said, and he becomes convinced that his so-called stroke or hemorrhage was in fact a Heritagist attempt to wipe the very scroll-nesting powers of alien empathy that Anne has been teaching him.

He escapes from the hospital in his gown and catches a ride with a not-so-coincidentally passing van of seeming hippie/punk musicians who are, we suspect, aliens. The odd musicians fan Jim’s mental scrolls back into life, and he becomes more and more certain that, yes, the consensus world-view is a lie. The evidence is right there in his memories—and in the tales that the other van members tell, Decameron style, as they motor down the coast to a disorganized hippie/punk festival to be held on the beach near Andrew Molera State Park.

The van band, Monkeybrains, comes on at sunrise, and when they start playing, the aliens and their subdimensional UFOs appear.

So I think I might as well make this new book a novel. I mean, Jack Kerouac didn’t write “memoirs,” nor did Burroughs or Ginsberg. They wrote transreal novels and poems! Some possible themes…

* A state becomes a sunken, glowing hole in the Earth, permanently lost.

* A character has a lasting relationship with an intelligent, humanlike being that he meets in a UFO.

* How it feels from the inside carry out fictional fabulation.

*The meaninglessness/meaningfulness of life, or reality/unreality of death.

As I mentioned before, I’m seeing the title for his novel as Nested Scrolls . I like the phrase because it describes the chaotic, self-organizing, artificially alive artificial life simulations that I love. And “scroll” is good, as it refers to a document or even a sacred text, and if the scrolls are “nested,” that’s fractal and self-referential and heavy.

I think I can get literal with the title, and have the book in the form of a memoir that an aging man is trying to write, and he begins finding extra stuff in the document. Maybe he can somehow zoom in—it’s an electronic document—and he sees stuff that he doesn’t remember writing. And he goes into time-travel flashbacks. And maybe some characters from the past show up. Nested Scrolls.

I have an unreliable narrator named Jim Oster, and a woman (maybe she’s a woman) that he lives with, Anne Wowesse. I like that name better than Weena Wesson; it’s an anagram with a wow.

Usually I put together a fairly thorough outline of a novel before I begin writing the book itself. But maybe this time I could do less of an upfront outline than usual. I have this urge to just dig in and get going. Later I could still do some outlining in any case, especially if I get stuck. And it’s not like the outline is such gospel anyway, I usually end up revising it a dozen or so times during the course of the book. But just for now, let’s try writing an opening scene.

The book starts with Jim Oster reminiscing about his life with Anne Wowesse.

Twenty years ago, I had a few days of publicity for appearing in an online sex video. My partner, Anne Wowesse, was rumored to be a saucer alien. Our video link was everywhere: “New UFO You!” But then the public’s fickle attention moved on.

I do feel it’s possible that Anne is non-human—this is something I periodically think about, as I still live with her. In certain moods, I can visualize her body as a tissue-culture grown from tweaked cow liver cells, and her mind as a holographically implanted alien engram.

Not that just anyone would notice this, whether by talking to her or by having sex with her—which is, I might add, not especially difficult. Live and let live.

Our Surf City neighbors regard Anne and me us as unsavory or even beneath contempt. But I’m dreaming of restoring us to the level of fame that we deserve.

What’s going to make the difference is the “scroll nesting” technique that Anne recently taught me.

Jim Oster wants to write his autobio, well not write exactly, he wants to make a kind of electronic version of his autobio, a pattern of nested scrolls that’s based on what he says or types. The scroll nester isn’t a computer-science kind of thing, it’s more like a cell phone earpiece that you talk to a lot. Jim himself isn’t a techie. For much of his career he worked as an assistant for a guy installing wooden screen doors.

What’s gonna happen with the scroll nester is that Jim Oster stares into the display and gets hypnotized and flashes back into the past.