The writer Nisi Shawl emailed me today, asking for the best and worst writing advice I ever received, with an eye to using my answer in the Clarion West’s spring newsletter. Here’s what I said.

The Best Advice on writing I ever read — and I don’t remember who said it, perhaps it was John Varley — was something to the effect that: “If you get a completely crazy idea for a twist on a scene, an idea you don’t think you dare use…go with it!”

The Worst Advice, which came from any number of boilerplate how-to-write articles is this: “Don’t think of starting work on the novel until you have a complete and detailed outline, and then stick to the outline!”

Of course it’s useful to have an outline, but it’s folly to imagine you can really know how things are going to end up once you’re five or ten chapters in. I revise my outline constantly as I go along. As for sticking to an outline, see the Best Advice!

[I bought two big tubes of my fave oil-paint colors yesterday, Cadmium Red Deep, and Cadmium Yellow Deep. You’re looking at $100 of paint. Cadmium is expensive.]

I’m working on Turing & Burroughs, and it’s going well. I’m leading up to the big scene that I painted in “A Skugger’s Point Of View” last week.

I don’t want the cops to know that Alan is making a run for Los Alamos in hopes of getting hold of an H-bomb, so I took out an earlier passage where he tells his companions Judy and Ned what he’s up to. I’m kind of sorry to see this conversation go, as I thought it was funny. But I saved it into my “Notes for the Turing & Burroughs” document, and maybe I can use some of it later. For now, though, here it is.

[One can never match Edward Weston’s photos of calla lilies , but it’s fun to shoot them anyway.]

“Me, I’m hip to the master plan, too,” bragged Vassar. “I picked up on it when were doing skugger conjugation. Uhn, uhn, uhn. Alan wants to blow himself up with a hydrogen bomb from Los Alamos. Talk about your clear-channel radio! Shedding his light.”

“That’s something of a caricature,” said Alan with a sigh. “And I would request that everyone does their best to hide this kind information from anyone outside our circle.”

“An atomic bomb?” said Judy, laughing. She took this for a joke. “In Los Alamos? I’d love to tape the sounds.”

“And be sure to get Alan’s last words,” said Vassar. “Th-th-th-that’s all folks! Quaaaaaaak!”

“Don’t always be a dumb-ass,” said Ned. “This is real. An H-bomb’s flash could spray skug vibes into everyone in the country. We’d be home free after that.”

“You guys believe in the skugs that much?” said Judy, changing tack. “I keep thinking this is more like—I don’t know—a virus that I caught, and I’ll be well by the time I’m in California.”

Back in January 15, 2011, I signed fan Ron Corral’s Kindle because he had The Ware Tetralogy inside it! This was at an “SF in SF” event where I read from my forthcoming memoir, Nested Scrolls: A Writer’s Life.

The reliable Rick Kleffel made a nice podcast of both my reading, and an interview with me before my reading, he just posted the interview on his blog “The Agony Column.” You can also get to the podcast via , click the icon below.

Today’s big, late-breaking, news is that my former San Jose State University computer science student Harry Fu has gotten his three-dimensional Belousov-Zhabotinsky-scroll cellular automata (3D BZ CAs for short) working again. I posted about this a few years ago, but link-rot set in, and now it’s all good again.

Way to go, Harry. Nobody’s ever seen three-dimensional CAs before except on supercomputers or using special hardware, especially not 3D BZ CAs, and our man Fu has these mofos working as a Java applet running Open GL!!!

Note the spontaneously forming scrolls. The first 3D BZ CA picture shows a 3D version of the Hodgepodge Rule, and this one is the 3D Winfree Rule.

Gnarly much? Live mushrooms, vortices, jellyfish.

So how can you, too, run Fu’s applet? Go to Fu’s Welcome to CA 3D page for an overview.

And then proceed to o Fu’s CA3D download page, which walks you through three steps for your Mac or Windows machine.

(1) Make sure you have the latest and greatest version of Java, this would be version 6 today. Anyway, go and get the JRE (Runtime Environment) for your Mac or Windows system. You don't need the full developer’s kit, just the JRE. (2) Get JOGL (Java bindings for Open GL). (3) Run Fu’s application locally, as ca3D.jar or run it in your browser at Fu’s 3D CA Simulation page (Caveat, right now the online version runs in Internet Explorer 8 for me, and in Firefox 3.6, but not in the current Firefox 4 RC1 release, although this prob may go away in the final Firefox 4. Harry says it runs in Safari on the Mac as well.). And in any case, it runs locally from the jar file.

Geekin’ OUT! And lovin’ it. You realize, of course, that your brain is a 3D BZ CA?

Today I went to a beach in Santa Cruz that I hardly ever get to, Panther Beach and its connected Hole in the Wall Beach. I myself like to call the whole spot Magic Door Beach because there’s an arch in the rock that leads from the one beach to the other. When the tide’s high, it can be hard to get through the door, but it’s worth it.

[The Magic Door]

Like many of the beaches north of Cruz, you do see a few nude people there, particularly in the summer, but it’s not totally what I’d call a nude beach. I don’t get to this beach as often as I’d like to, as the climb down from the highway is a little dicey. I took all but the last one of today’s photos there.

Part of what I did at the beach was to start marking up a printout of a draft of the next chapter of my 1950s alien-invasion beatnik-sf novel, Turing & Burroughs. I’ve been away from the book for nearly a month—what with that trip to Spain, and the revisions and copy-edits for my memoir, Nested Scrolls: A Writer’s Life, and for my fantasy/SF novel of the afterlife, Jim and the Flims, both due out in 2011.

When I’m away from a novel for this long, I begin to think I won’t ever get back. And I become almost scared to try, or perhaps it’s more that I feel queasy at the amount of inner work it’ll take to get plugged back into it again. The hardest part about writing is getting your head in the right place to do it.

[My old pal Jon Pearce came to the beach with me; his friend Nancy took this picture.]

I helped get myself cranked up for Turing & Burroughs again by finishing my painting of an upcoming scene yesterday, “A Skugger’s Point of View,” which I already posted about. I forgot to mention that those inchoate yellowish shapes at the borders of the painting are what I’m calling gazaks.

Gazaks are a type of soul or ghost, based on some subtle form of energy. You can kind of see them at the edges of your field of vision. Perhaps they use exotic microtuble structures in the air, little vortex filaments that link together into a mesh, and the nodes of the mesh might be exotic particles that are quantum-mechanically entangled with the neighboring nodes.

At the beach, I was telling Jon that, because I’m now shooting in 16-bit RAW mode, and editing my image files in Lightroom, it almost doesn’t matter what settings I put on my camera or exactly where I point it. The only two things you really need to do is to hold the camera still while you shoot, and to focus on part of the scene that you want to be sharpest. I can fix the rest of it at home.

What I’m coming to understand, in other words, is that settings you use on your camera (like White Balance or ISO or even exposure time) don’t really affect the image data that much. The settings are more like a filter for extracting the image you want to see from the underlying data. In effect, you can set you camera after you take the picture. And, espeically, if you’re in 16-bit mode, there’s enough data so you can coax out subtle colors and shades. This picture looked totally ordinary before I processed it—the sky was a uniform dull white, the rocks were black silhouettes, the spray was a smear, and the ocean was gray. Some kind of lesson here…about beauty being present beneath the surface…

After the beach I went off alone in Cruz. It was a nice warm day, and I spent an hour and a half working on Turing & Burroughs at a table on the porch of the Cafe Pergola in Santa Cruz, looking down on the very spot where I’d depicted my characters Jim and Weena as meeting up with the chracters Chang, Header, Ira, and Ginnie in Jim and the Flims. I was just revising that passage last week. So sitting there, looking at the spot, writing, I felt a nice moiré overlap of the trans and the real.

I finished a new painting today. In this painting, “A Skugger’s Point of View,” I wanted to render an extreme first-person point of view…in which we see the dim zone around a person’s actual visual field. The person in question is the Alan Turing character in my novel-in-progress Turing & Burroughs. He has become a mutant known as a “skugger,” and he has the ability to stretch his limbs like the cartoon character Plastic Man. He is traveling across the West with two friends, a man and a woman.

79. “A Skugger’s Point Of View”. Oil on canvas. 40″ by 30″. March, 2011. click to see larger version!

In this scene, Turing’s cohort is being attacked by secret police, one of whom bears a flame-thrower. Turing is responding by sticking his fingers into their heads, perhaps to kill them, or perhaps to convert them into skuggers as well. We can see Turing’s arms extending from the bottom edge of his visual field. Even though it’s not quite logical, I painted in his eyes as well because they make the composition better. As always, more info on my Paintings Page.

Tonight, my painter friend Vernon Head and I went to an art opening at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara. They had a show by Squeak Carnwath and a show by Stanley Goldstein.

The painting above is “Gone” by Squeak Carnwath, oil and alkyd on canvas, 2005. I liked this one a lot. Vernon and I got a chance to talk to Squeak—she lives in Oakland—a very pleasant and intelligent woman, at one time an art teacher at UC Berkeley, recently retired. She said “Gone” was to some extent in memory of seven artist friends of hers who had died, and the Etruscan style heads at the bottom could be viewed either as mourners or as the mourned.

Vernon and I were particularly impressed by Squeak’s color sense, her ability to mix such wonderfully mild and harmonious shades. In some of her paintings she goes ahead and sticks in a color wheel, just for fun. She says that color sense is her one great gift.

The other show was by Stanley Goldstein, who mostly paints domestic scenes or images from his daily life, almost like painted snapshots. He has terrific ability with color and shape. This one painting, “Francis Dancing By The TV” acrylic on panel, 1997, really jumps off the wall. Seen in the gallery, the blue of the TV is amazingly intense, in counterpoint to the rich orange-red of the quilt.

So now I’ll post the rest of my photos from Spain. Today’s pictures are from San Sebastian, a Basque-country resort town on the Spanish coast, a few miles south of the better-known resort Biarritz, in France.

San Sebastian is said to have the best tapas, or pintxos, bars in Spain. You take, or ask for, whatever you want from the platters on the bar, and somehow the waiters keep track of your tab. The stuff can be really great—with toppings like octopus, ham, anchovy, hake, shrimp, cheese, and the like. You do have to a bit wary, as the less-good places will have some tapas loaded with things like coleslaw or tuna salad. The place in this picture was in fact my favorite place, on the Calle Mayor in San Sebastian, I don’t remember the name. Totally jumping in there at 9 pm. Here’s a guide to San Sebastian tapas, but basically you just look for the places where the crowd fills the room.

A lot of the snacks include a special jamón ibérico or Iberian ham, which is very nearly unobtainable in the US. A whole ham sells for about 90 Euros, and they still have the original pig trotter intact at the top. Ideally the black Iberian pigs have fed primarily on acorns. I was kind of wondering if I might be able to smuggle one of the hams home inside my pants, taped to my leg. “Yes, I have a trotter on my knee—so?”

There’s a beautiful old square in the old part of San Sebastian, the Constitution plaza. The windows have numbers painted over them—at one time they used the square as a bull-fighting ring, and sold the window seats. The Constitution plaza is one of those lovely European hanging-out zones. People of every age sit in the cafes, chatting and relaxing. School children play soccer. Mothers with baby carriages exchange gossip.

And on Sunday, some local musicians play in one of the arcades around the plaza. I love the toddler on the bottom right, staring at the band. The tyke even danced a little. It’s amazing to me how, as soon as a child can stand, they have the idea of bouncing in rhythm and waving their arms.

San Sebastian sits on a round little bay, shielded from the most violent weather. The waves break in beautiful circular arc that runs around the whole bay. The beach is very gently sloping, which means that the tides move the waterline up and down by several hundred feet a day.

At my talk in Bilbao, I met an American artist, Lawrence S. Johnson, who lives in San Sebastian with a local woman whom he befriended while on a month-long 500-mile pilgrimage hike. Larry has read many of my books, found out about the talk via one of my tweets, and turned up. We spent a while day with Larry and his lady friend, it was great.

When we started walking, it was raining, but in a fairly mild, pleasant way. Larry and I walked on the wet sand and the ladies walked on the seaside promenade. I liked these cool layers of rock, turned at an angle.

At the end of the beaches along the bay we came to three iron sculptures, embedded into the rocks to make a piece called El Peine Del Viento, or The Comb Of The Wind, by the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida.

And then we rode a 1912 funicular train a few hundred meters to on overlooking promontory. The control room for the train was a little bit unsettling—like the lab in the original movie of Frankenstein
.

Atop the promontory was a nearly inactive (as it was February) amusement park for kids, a fairly low-tech set up. I dug the entrance to the Casa Del Terror, or House Of Horror. I’ve always been very frightened of those places, and haven’t been in one since I was a kid.

I was surprised to see a fortune-telling machine modeled on a famous sculpture in Rome, the Boca de Verita, or Mouth of Truth. The story goes that if you put your hand inside the slot like mouth and say something, the stone won’t let you remove your hand if what you said wasn’t true. I actually wrote about this in my book Infinity and the Mind, years ago. My paradoxical thought was to put my hand into the mouth and say, “I will not be able to remove my hand,” getting a statement that’s true if and only if it’s false.

And in this off-the-grid kiddie park, there was my old friend the Boca, jammed in with Aladdin.

We slept in an old place called the Hotel Niza, with a nice view of the bay. On Friday night, there was a fair amount of noise from young people partying on the beach—they only partied on Friday, not on Thursday or Saturday. But on Friday they were up until four or five am.

The bay was amazing at night, with the beautiful lights reflecting off it. When we’d go out for supper at about 9 pm, we’d walk along the bay to the old town. This photo reminds me a little of a Van Gogh painting we saw at a show in San Francisco this winter.

In the mornings and again in the early evening, hundreds of people promenaded along the path by the beach. The trimmed trees look kind of like sea creatures here.

In the early morning, fanatical locals would change into their suits at a bathing-club downstairs and head into the surf.

A beautiful old carousel by the beach was decorated with paintings taken from the masterpieces of art—how European.

And then our week was over, and we made our way back home via the Serra sculpture in Bilbao.