Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
What is a little deflating is to not score some huge advance. But I really do want to
write this goddamn tome, I think. My (latest) White Whale.
Certainly there would be some of my loyal readers, now and in the future, who would
be wistful if my fabled computer tome never got written. Including me, I guess, me as reader
of my own work.
If I don’t do this, then what?
September 15, Email to Greg (on Gratitude)
[Greg Gibson is a writer friend who tends to spend years crafting his writing
proposals so as to garner a big advance.]
Well, I'm gonna just write this book for a modest amount that seems to be as good as
the proposal will bring in. Having some offers is better than none, and I've seen quite a few
of my writer friends in the "no offer" bin these days. I'm working on generating the emotion
of gratitude, always a good one vis-a-vis life. The pub is Four Walls Eight Windows
(4W8W), who published my collections Seek! and Gnarl!, also reprinted Hacker and the
Ants and White Light. I see their books in all kinds of stores, they're a notch above small
press, I'd say. Owned by the one guy, John Oakes, which makes them more spontaneous in
their decision-making.
A difference between our situations is that I have this one specific book that I want to
write, and these days you're more after the eidolon of the book the publishers want. I
currently have a kind of odd working title, The Lifebox, The Seashell and the Soul. The
feeling being that publishers these times don't want to hear about computers. Of course they
figured out my book is about computers, and that it's wide-ranging, and that I'm a weird old
man, that I don’t see rosy futures or (flipside of banality) view with alarm, that I’m left coast,
the usual problems. Now that they've seen the proposal, it's not like I can change the slant
and send it around again, not as long as it's still fundamentally the same book.
It'll be about what I've learned and speculated about computers in the last twenty
years, with the anticipation that, in the process, I'll reach some new insights and higher
integrations. Like any other adventure, I don't really know in detail what I'll see before I set
out.
Writing this letter to sell myself on the project as much as you...
I'm ready. Rearranged my bookcase, moving the new ref books into place. Life's
empty when I'm not carrying a foetus in my brain/womb. No little kicks to the medulla. I
can't go without my endorphinic fix no longer.
Meanwhile: What is a computation? (Section 1.1).
Sign me, Grateful Writer
September 16, 2003. 4W8W Again.
So now Oakes made a final offer, better than I got for my last novel at least, and it’s
as high as we’ll get. Russell is letting him keep English rights.
September 21, 2003. Anxious.
I feel anxious about having enough stuff for the book, or if it’s worth writing. If none
of all those publishers wanted it, how good is it? Who cares about the computational
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