Surfing the Gnarl by Rudy Rucker Page B

ever write longhand? Do you own a pencil?
    In my back pocket I almost always carry a blank sheet of printing paper folded in four. I write ideas down on the paper, and when I get home, I type the notes into my computer; generally I’ve got a notes document going for whatever book I’m working on. I do write longhand on my pocket notes paper. Sometimes I can’t read the writing later on. I used to take copy-books on trips with me and write longer passages in them, but now I almost always travel with a laptop.
    Does anyone ever “own” a pencil? They’re just things you rummage for, briefly use, and immediately lose. But now and then, if I have a pencil, I might use it to draw something on my pocket square of paper. More commonly I use a Pilot P-700 pen, preferably Extra Fine. I’ve been using these for going on fifteen years now, and I worryabout them going out of production. Every now and then I buy a big stash of them, like fifty or a hundred.
    You sometimes collaborate on short stories, with Paul DiFilippo, Marc Laidlaw, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, Eileen Gunn, even myself. Is this laziness or ambition?
    As I already mentioned, writing is a somewhat lonely activity, so I enjoy collaborating on stories. There’s no reason not to. The thing about short stories is that they’re really hard to sell, at least for me. There’s only a very small number of story markets, and often I end up having to publish a story in
Flurb.
And even if I do sell a story, it pays very little, and it can take several years before the story appears. It’s not a satisfying market at all. So I might as well have some fun in the writing process by collaborating.
    When you write together, it’s something like a musical collaboration, a spontaneous give and take. I find that, in order to blend the prose, I tend to imitate the other author’s style. Like the way that actors in Woody Allen movies usually seem to talk like Woody.
    If you could spend twenty-four hours in any city on the planet, with money in your pocket, which would it be?
    First of all, I’m not going for just twenty-four hours. Why travel so far and turn right around? That’s idiocy. I’m staying for at least four days and maybe a week.
    As for destinations—I’m a huge fan of New York City. I love the noise—you hear it as soon as you get out of the airport, a filigree of sirens overlaid onto a mighty roar. The museums are great, and I know a fair numberof cozy, inexpensive restaurants filled with hipsters and city slickers. I’d catch some ballet, and maybe a rock band. Just walking the streets in NYC is a great entertainment as well. And as long as you’re paying, Terry, maybe I’ll stay at the refurbished Gramercy Park Hotel.
    I’d love to spend a week in Koror, a funky town in the archipelago of Palau. I’d go diving, riding a Sam’s Tours boat out to the Blue Corner, which is perhaps the greatest dive spot in the world. I’d probably stay at the Palau Royal Resort, and I’d snorkel at the hotel beach, admiring the richly patterned mantles of the giant clams.
    A lot of scenes in my SF novels are drawn from my dive experiences. SCUBA is really the closest thing we have to floating in outer space and to visiting alien worlds. Well, NYC is fairly alien as well. Life in the hive.
    Your film career was cut short after
The Manual of Evasion.
What went wrong?
    Well, you’re talking about the acting part of my film career.
The Manual of Evasion
movie was also called
LX94,
as it was made in Lisbon in 1994. Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson starred with me, and some excerpts are online, although the complete movie is hard to find. The director of that movie, Edgar Pera, is a really good guy. I went to visit him in Lisbon again in the summer of 2011.
    In terms of movies, what I’d really like is for one of my novels to be made into a film. We came close with
Software.
It was