I finished my “Surf Tiki” painting today, Sunday painter that I am. I started work on this about two weeks ago, when I was reading up on Easter Island.

I’m about two-thirds done with Postsingular now. The book will probably have four long chapters and a short fifth chapter, and I finished Chapter 3 last week. This week I was cleaning up the long Chapters 2 and 3; I may try and get them published as standalone novelettes. Revising took longer than I expected.

When I proof my writing, I get disturbed about how many errors I find, and anxious about whether I can blend everything into the plot. Like I’m standing at a dam I’ve built and I’m seeing thirty holes spurting water at me.

Sometimes it seems like no matter how many times I’ve proof a passage, it ends up all marked up again on each go-through. As if the process were divergent rather than convergent.

Of course one reason this all feels like less fun than usual is that I’ve had a viral flu, I start out the day feeling okay, but by the afternoon I’m in a bubble. Disease = dis + ease. But I'm getting better.

To break things up I’m doing some of the proof-reading outside. On Wednesday, May 25, in fact I went to Santa Cruz and proof-read on Four Mile Beach, which was nice.

To relax I was also reading a novel by Kris Saknussemm called Zanesville which is pretty cool, good word play, Boschian imagery, kind of reminds me of how I wrote when I was younger, it’s science fiction but got marketed as a literary novel of the “magic realism” bent. SF is the genre that dare not speak it’s name. Hell no I’m not a Communist. I’m a Magic Republican. [Note to the terminally literal-minded: I'm joking.]

Saknussemm’s website is good too, by the way, he has this funny III Ching thing that is oddly similar to the three precogs in Phil Dick's story “Majority Report”, though maybe the Sak-man hasn't studied the SF canon that closely as yet, though it bears minute attention, yes. Welcome, Kris, come on in, plenty more room for weird SF writers!

Anyway now I got all my changes keyboarded in, and I did the patches to make it all fit. Whew.

Funny how something that seems so hard to change can really just come down to altering three or four sentences. It’s there’s a feature of the story that looms very large in my mind, like an obelisk, and when I go to take it out, I realize the obelisk was just three pencil lines.

And now that I’ve fixed these chapters I can turn to worrying about the chapters to come, which is painful in a different way.

[This man is not a science fiction writer; he's a Magic Republican.]

Writing is so much work. Every part of writing a novel is hard. The planning, the sitting down and creating, the revising. I guess the most fun part is when it seems to pour out and I’m having a good day. When I’m doing that, I stop worrying for a while, I forget myself and I’m happy and proud and even exalted and amazed to see what’s coming down or going up.

More precisely, that fun part is “the narcotic moment of creative bliss.” I just heard John Malkovich deliver that phrase, playing the role of an artist/art prof in Art School Confidential. That’s very right on; the operative word is “narcotic,” it’s definitely something you get addicted to over the years. Really I go to all this trouble writing a novel day after day month after month because (bring the band down behind me boys…)

“I’m waitin’ for the man, twenty-six dollar in my hand. He’s never early, he’s always late. First thing you learn is you always gotta wait,” quoth Lou Reed. Waiting for God(ot). Waiting for the Muse to *** on my ***. Waiting for the narcotic moment of creative bliss.

We saw this family playing great bluegrass in Santa Cruz, they had an ad for “Play It By Ear” software, maybe the guy wrote it. Nodded out on the narcotic moment of creative bliss.

On Thursday I was supposed to attend the Future's Technology Horizons Spring Exchange sponsored by IFTF, the Institute for the Future.

But I’m paralyzed by a flu virus; I walk around in a bubble all day with no relief in sight. In this altered state, I’ve been listening to a lot of Frank Zappa. I’ve become obsessed with his “Helsinki Concert” as recorded on Disc 1 of You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore, Vol. 2, particularly the last four minutes of “Pygmy Twylyte,” I creep around listening to it on my iPod, and I hear the guitar solos in my head all the time.

Be that as it may, here’s the forecast I would have shared at the Spring Exchange, had I been able to go there. And, hey, virtually I’m there right now, doing this. The following passage by the way, forms the opening to my latest fiction piece, “Visions of the Metanovel,” to appear in my collection Mad Professor (Thunder’s Mouth Press, late 2006 or early 2007).

The Singularity was brought on by some nanomachines known as orphids. The orphids used quantum computing and propelled themselves with electrostatic fields.

The self-reproducing orphids doubled their numbers every few minutes at first, fortunately they’d been designed to level out at a sustainable population of some sextillion orphids upon Earth’s surface. This meant there were one or two orphids affixed to every square millimeter of every object on the planet. Something like fifty thousand orphids blanketed, say, any given chair or any particular person’s body. The orphids were like ubiquitous smart lice, not that you could directly feel them, for an individual orphid was little more than a knotty long-chain molecule.

Thanks to the power of quantum computing, an individual orphid was roughly as smart as a talking dog, possessing a good understanding of natural language and a large amount of extra memory. Each orphid knew at all times its precise position and velocity, indeed the name “orphid” was a pun on the early 21st century technology of RFID or “Radio Frequency Identification” chips. Rather than radio waves, orphids used quantum entanglement to network themselves into their world-spanning orphidnet.

The accommodating orphids set up a human-orphidnet interface via gentle electromagnetic fields that probed though the scalps of their hosts. Two big wins: by accessing the positional meshes of the orphids, people could now effectively see anything anywhere; and by accessing the orphids’ instantaneous velocities, people could hear the sounds at any location as well. Earth’s ongoing physical reality could be as readily linked and searched as the Internet.

Like eddies in a flowing steam, artificially intelligent agents emerged within the orphidnet. In an ongoing upward cascade, still higher-level agents emerged from swarms of the lower-level ones. By and large, the agents were human-friendly; people spoke of them as beezies.

By interfacing with beezies, a person could parcel out intellectual tasks and store vast amounts of information within the extra memory space that the orphids bore. Those who did this experienced a vast effective increase in intelligence. They called themselves kiqqies, short for kilo-IQ.

New and enhanced forms of art arose among the kiqqies, among these was the multimedia metanovel.

In considering the metanovel, think of how Northwest Native American art changed when the European traders introduced steel axes. Until then, the Native American totems had been hand-held items, carved of black stone. But once the tribes had axes, they set to work making totems from whole trees. Of course with the axe came alcohol and smallpox; the era of totem poles would prove to be pitifully short.

There were also some dangers associated with the orphidnet. The overarching highest-level-of-them-all agent at the apex of the virtual world was known as the Big Pig. The Big Pig was an outrageously rich and intricate virtual mind stuffed with beautiful insights woven into ideas that linked into unifying concepts that puzzle-pieced themselves into powerful systems that were in turn aspects of a cosmic metatheory — aha! Hooking into the billion-snouted billion-nippled Big Pig could make a kiqqie feel like a genius. The down side was that kiqqies were unable to remember or implement insights obtained from a Big Pig session. The more fortunate kiqqies were able to limit their Big Pig usage in the same way that earlier people might have limited their use of powerful psychoactive drugs.

If the Big Pig was like alcohol, the analogy to smallpox was the threat of runaway, planet-eating nanomachines called nants — but I won’t get into the nants here…

Last week I was talking about how great I felt, but then I got the flu, and I’ve been sluggish, in a bubble, leafy. Still writing anyway.

Last month, I was working on variations on the idea of a metanovel, that is, the idea of much-larger-data-base work of fiction that authors might write after a computational singularity brings vastly enhanced memory and crunch to us all. I posted a series of three or four Borgesian or Lemesque descriptions of imaginary metanovels on the blog — if you start at the indicated link and read down from there you’ll find them.

And I recall some reader commented that these seemed “irrelevant,” which annoyed me, but now as I revise my nearly completed Postsingular Chapter Three: “Thuy’s Metanovel,” I realize that those long descriptions do in fact stop the narrative dead, and I’m drastically compressing them. By way of mitigating this loss to society, I collaged the cuts into a Borgesian story called “Visions of the Metanovel” and I’ll drop that into my new collection of stories.

By the way I’m changing my story collection's title from Freestyle SF to Mad Professor. Wiser not to put SF in the title and Freestyle, well, that was 20 years ago, dude…

The main thing I’m working on this week is finishing Postsingular Chapter 3: “Thuy’s Metanovel”. Here’s today’s version of the last scene.

“Nanomachine goo!” gasped Jayjay, his echoing voice seeming to come from every side. “The Ark of the Nants was been booby-trapped! The stuff’s all over me! Oh, it tingles, it stings! Get back, Thuy! And don’t forget that —” Jayjay gurgled and fell silent. In the local orphidnet, Thuy could see that her lover was fully enveloped by the rippling nanoslime. He twitched, spasmed, and dropped motionless to the stone floor.

Thuy cowered at the far end of the cave, remembering the rainbow sheen on Grandmaster Green Flash’s skin — like the surface of a rancid slice of ham. Jayjay lay mute and still. Thuy hated herself for being afraid to approach him. Her heart skipped a terrible beat and seemed to explode. And in that instant of extreme grief and despair, she finished creating Wheenk

The pieces of the metanovel came together like a time-reversed nuclear explosion. Today’s adventures at the fab, her love for Jayjay, her worries about the nants, the Easter Island shepherd boy who’d given her a cone shell, her mother’s face the day Thuy had graduated from college, her father’s bare feet when he tended his tomato plants, the dance Thuy had done down the rainy street one night while exulting over her metanovel — everything fitting, everything in place, Wheenk as heavy and whole as a sphere of plutonium. Critical mass. Thuy pulsed the Wheenk database to the Big Pig, terrified that her Great Work might be lost. The Pig understood; kindly she posted Wheenk to the global orphidnet.

Pain had produced artistic transcendence.

And now, having completed Wheenk, Thuy finally remembered Chu’s Knot. There was one final twist and wrap she’d been unable to visualize, but now she had the knack; it was a bit like time Kittie had showed her how to knit a Mobius strip. The Knot was perfectly clear in Thuy’s mind, hanging there in three-dimensional glory, revolving at the touch of her will.

Meanwhile the Pig was tending to a cloud of orphids surrounding the nant farm. And a second cloud of orphids was attacking the vile goo that enveloped Jayjay’s inert form. Thuy hadn’t even thought about him for nearly a minute. She was such a terrible, self-centered person.

“I could go to the Mirrorbrane now,” Thuy told the Big Pig. “But what’s the use? I don’t want to live without Jayjay.”

A streamer of the goo pushed across the cave, reaching for Thuy. Nimbly she moved out of its reach.

“You don’t look quite ready to die,” said the Big Pig, sounding amused. “Anyway, Jayjay’s not dead. He’ll be fine once the orphids clean that junk off him. But I’m keeping him here to make sure you return. Go on with you now. I’m open to whatever you learn. But, remember, I don’t want to wait past tomorrow.”

Thuy focused on Chu’s Knot. Nothing happened. Remembering how Ond and Jil had done it, she let go of her internal voice and interrupted her eternal writerly narration of her personal life story. She saw the spaces between her thoughts. She saw the spaces between the worlds.

She was off.