I finished a new painting called “Gubs and Wormholes” this weekend, and I’m currently planning to use it on the cover of my novel The Big Aha. If I manage to raise a little more money, I’ll try and organize an art show and a launch party.

Draft Cover for The Big Aha based on “Gubs and Wormholes,” oil on canvas, July, 2013, 22” x 22”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

On Friday I got started on the final “Mother and Father” chapter of The Big Aha. The mother/father pair is:
(a) My married-couple characters Jane & Zad,
(b) My character Zad’s Mom & Dad,
(c) The green gub & the spotted gub shown in the cover image.

All three options at the same time. Plus the transreal echoes into my own life. It’s coming together very heavy and strange.

Just a few more scenes to write. And I know, more or less, what’s going to happen—although, as I always say, I never fully know until I’ve written the scenes. A novel-in-progress has its own hidden life.

I was influenced last week by Stephen King’s excellent novel 11/22/63, which has a lot of synchronicities and overlays. It’s a 340,000-word time-travel novel, and the hero keeps running into heavy harmonies. Here’s a nice passage where the narrator reacts to an intense coincidence:

“…when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? … A universe … surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”

Dancing with who? Your loved ones and your muse—but look out for the dragon.

I’m on the home stretch of my novel The Big Aha. Getting great support from my Kickstarter backers. Very stoked.

I’ve been averaging 300 words a day for about a year, which means I’m up to 95,000 words, with the final target probably 100,000 words. I track these things, like a miser counting his coins. The 300 word average means that, on good days, I write 1,000 words, but there’s plenty of days when I don’t write at all.

Just a few more scenes to write. And I know, more or less, what’s going to happen—although I never fully know until I’ve written the scenes. The book has its own life.

I like to print out my latest draft and then maybe lie on a camping mat in a shady spot in the backyard marking it up and scribbling out a new scene. Then type that in, maybe on my laptop on the couch, print it out, and repeat the cycle.

I just finished Chapter 14: Churchill Downs. Featuring that giant “myoor” creature I painted last week. I did about ten or fifteen type/print/mark-up cycles on that chapter. Scribbled & typed papers accumulating like drifts of snow. When I totally can’t face the stress/joy of writing anymore, I get into a painting, go biking, go to SF, or go to Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz, photo above.

It’s full-on summer here in Silicon Valley. July. The very heart of it. I love this month. The yottawatt sun! Lurking inside in the afternoons, with the attic fan drawing up air from the cool basement.

On the over-98-degree days, we crank up the central AC for a couple of hours. But I don’t like AC. Makes me feel like I’m riding in an airplane. Or deaf. In Robotic Mode instead of Cosmic Mode—as the qrude characters say in The Big Aha.

I’ll go out for walks in the dizzy heat, just for the intensity of it.

Talking to the plants and digging the gnarl. Clouds—can you imagine how excited people would be about clouds if for some reason they were rare and hard to see? All the things Nature gives us for free. If I can remember to see them.

Still happy about our blessed week in Hawaii. North Shore of Oahu. I’ve been emailing with my old Surfing-SF-story collaborator Marc Laidlaw. Maybe I’ll have time for more “Tales of the Tube” after The Big Aha.

Back at Santa Cruz’s Four Mile Beach here in this picture. I often think of this spot as being where my muse lives. It’s near a stone tower at the south end of the beach. I always like to go here and write EADEM MUTATA RESURGO in the sand, which means “The same, yet changed, I arise again.” That’s an inscription on the gravestone of a mathematician, Jakob Bernoulli, who studied a famous type of spiral curve (the logarithmic spiral seen on seashells such as the nautilus, or the humble snails). It also appears in my novel Frek and the Elixir. For me, it’s an encouragement for writing yet another novel. Since Frek, I tend to write in the wet sand at a beach pretty much every time I’m working on a novel. Good luck…or an invocation of the muse.

In good old California it always cools off at night. Love it when I’m out at Santa Cruz in the evening. If I’m at home, I’ll often do one or two more mark-up/type/print cycles on a lounge chair in back. Obsessive cycles of work…you kind of need to get that way to actually finish a book.

Obsessive or not, I’m really having a good time with my characters and my settings and my aliens these days. I love the things they say. And—oh those gubs! I’ll miss the whole gang when I’m done. On the other hand, it’s been a long haul, and I’ll be glad to sail my whaling ship into port. Laden with gub oil, scrimshaw and ambergris.

I finished another painting for my novel today, more info here: The Big Aha project. The new picture’s title is The Mr. Normals vs. The Myoor.

“The Mr. Normals vs. the Myoor,” oil on canvas, July, 2013, 24” x 18”. Click for a larger version of the image.

The picture has to do with a scene in the closing chapters of The Big Aha. My character Zad has created some creatures called Mr. Normals whom Zad has now sicced upon a sinister giant alien slug called a myoor. The myoor looks scared of them, which is good.

I made the Mr. Normals look like Gyro Gearloose’s Little Bulb in the old Donald Duck comics.

The other day I watched this very heavy Mexican SF movie called Sleep Dealer, which the cool Tucson artist Daniel Martin Diaz turned me onto recently. (Check out Diaz’s amazingly cyberdelic forthcoming book Soul of Science.)

The Sleep Dealer film’s is partly about the US taking advantage of Mexican workers. And the myoor is kind of flowing down across a border, and my Zad character looks kind of Latino in this painting, and I was also thinking about cross-border ethnic conflict here, so at another level the picture is a political parable…not that I would have a clear idea of what the Mr. Normal / Little Bulb figures would stand for under that interpretation.

But primarily the painting is about the events in The Big Aha. The way I painted Zad relates to two earlier paintings of him which I’ll reprint below, Louisville Artist and Night of Telepathy.

“Louisville Artist,” oil on canvas, October, 2012, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the image.

The way I painted the Louisville artist is kind of a self-deprecating joke about my personal self-image, or about the public’s image of artists or writers.

I mention Louisville because I was born there and lived there till I was 17, at which point my parents moved away and I went off to college. The Big Aha novel is in fact set in Louisville. Those tall things in the background are “house trees” that people inhabit in the biotech future.

What about the woman? She’s the girlfriend, Loulou, whom Zad takes up with during a period of separation from his wife. I had fun giving Loulou a really odd hair-do. Kind of Princess Leia thing.

“Night of Telepathy,” oil on canvas, November, 2012, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the image.

In this painting we see Zad and Loulou spending a night together in telepathic contact. What about those rats? Well, there happen to be a lot of intelligent rats in The Big Aha, thanks to “quantum wetware.”

And it’ll all seem perfectly logical in the end…

Dig this 4 minute video that a UK guy made to illustrate one of my public talks about hylozoism.

You may or may not know that (a) I published a novel called Hylozoic, and (b) that hylozoism is an actual honest-to-goodness official Wikipedia-listed word meaning the philosophical view that everything is alive and conscious.

The guy who made the new “Hylozoism” cartoon video is named Andy Simon, and he’s a recent graduate of Bath Spa University in Bath, England. The audio for the video is drawn from five videos of me that Andy unearthed. He hails from Weymouth, and is presently applying to film schools.

Quite awesomely, Andy uses old toons that feature living objects—and cartoons like this were a huge influence on me as a kid. Synchronistically enough, the video ends with me talking about “the big aha”! A nice poke in the ribs from the divine muse, that. Given that I’m spending all my time these days working to finish my next novel, The Big Aha.

My family and I were on the North Shore of Oahu early this month, fourteen strong, with the kids, the spouses and the grandkids. I have a bunch of photos from there, and I’ll run a few of them today and, here and there, point out some hylozoism connections.

Banyan trees are fairly common on Oahu, I love these things, how they spread out and send now new trunks. They’re the very image of a futuristic biotech house that grows itself. We spent a couple of days in Honolulu, near a park just after Waikiki Beach, and quite a few homeless people were living in this park—specifically, many of them were making the banyan trees their home. Despite Hawaii’s image as a vacation paradise, they have a very large homeless population. One guy told me that Hawaii doesn’t really have a middle class. A few rich people and a lot of poor people.

Anyway the Honoluluans use the park for all kinds of things. I saw a yoga class there as well.

Up on the North Shore, it’s all about surfing. You see surfers doing yard work or working as gardeners just so they can live there, waiting for the Banzai Pipeline type surf in the winter. Saw this cool surf shop in Hale’iwa.

We were staying in fairly old and beat-up bunch of cottages, very calm and mellow with nothing but a couple of super high palm trees between us and the beach.

Add in a sunset, and oh, baby.

One day we went to the Waimea Falls park, right by Waimea Beach, famed for it’s forty foot waves.

The park had all these great plants. The plants that sit around in bank lobby or top of your fridge or on your bathroom counter—those plants are dreaming of going to the tropics and getting big.

This one tree was all covered with thorns, scientific name Bombacopsis Quinata. Common name Don’t Climb Me.

I like how this heliconia looks like a tropical bird or fish. Everything alive in teh same kind of way. I was kind of lost in the park for half an hour, dazed by the heat and humidity, intoxicated by the scents of flowers, wandering around very very very slowly. Like a butterfly. Everything alive, even the rocks. Paradise.

The actual Waiamea falls were great. We were about the first people of the day to get up there. Some mellow Hawaiian rangers/surfers were there to give us all life-jackets. We swam across a deep rocky pool to this hundred foot waterfall pounding into the pool. With some effort you could get under the fall, find handholds in the rock, and pull yourself up so that your head went through the waterfall and maybe a little further to the legendary breathing space behind the fall. Where gnomes always hid their gold.

I hung in there for a very long and wonderful minute, letting the water pound onto my skull and my shoulders, and it felt like time rushing past, like a cascade of thoughts and memories, like fire, like the big aha and the White Light.

When I get out, I feel really high and wonderful. I babbled a little about it to one of the cool young guys handing out life jackets, telling him that I’d seen everything in the falls, and he looked at me closely and nodded. “You saw the fire?” he said, then added, “I’ve seen it too. They used to build ritual fires on a platform in there.” He gave me a friendly, brotherly nudge and sent me on my way.

A little later I saw the same guy, walking along talking and laughing with a black Hawaiian woman who was the exact image of a guide named Rayna who’d been with my group on what was one of the very best days of my life, kayaking in the rock islands of Palau near Micronesia, see my old post on this.

“Jake and Rayna start dancing and chanting, crouched, facing each other, their hands shaking in their air, slapping their thighs, vital and joyous as a pair of indestructible cartoon characters. Archetypes.”

So, elated as I was from Waimea falls, and seeing this Rayna look-alike talking with the guy who’d seen the fire in the falls like me, man, it was like seeing a pair of gods some down to Earth, or making themselves visible to me, just for a few minutes, the divine reality a part of my day.

Hylozoic, man. The boulder and the tree.