Allhallowtide

Orbital Operations for 30 October 2022

Author

Warren Ellis
October 30, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

GREENWICH MEAN TIME

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, and the first day of Greenwich Mean Time, coming off British Summer Time. And it feels like it's been an insanely long summer. I suppose having three Prime Ministers and three Doctors Who in a month could have something to do with that, but on Saturday afternoon I was drinking an ale and sweeping autumn leaf-fall in 21C warmth. Long old summer. Long old year. Looking forward to wintering.

With the contracts now processed on PROJECT MONTMARTRE, we are about to begin the search for an artist that fits the bill. Unusually for me, this graphic novel series was conceived without an artist involved or in mind. I don't normally like to do it like that, but this is how this one shook out. So this next bit is going to be interesting and fun.

In the weeks and months to come, I expect there will be a ton of process talk about this series. It's in a format I haven't tried before, and there will be a lot of adaptation and learning. Also, it's a big swing in terms of structure and material and ambition.

I lost the early part of this week to processing other contracts and agreements, talking to my team a lot and the like, but now I'm deeply into writing PROJECT WRITTLE 2, the second audio drama podcast serial, while my production partners work on getting WRITTLE 1 up and running. Our main actor is now locked in for WRITTLE 1. And I'm on episode 102 of WRITTLE 2. Which means I've produced about 40 pages of first-draft script this week. A little behind where I wanted to be, but I'll take it.

Nine of those pages, produced in around 11 hours on Friday, are two long sections that are mostly monologue. This is, after all, audio drama. I am in the process of seeing what happens when I lean into it. I can't do quick cuts or all the other tricks in my visual-narrative toolbox. All I have are voices and sounds.

(If you're just joining me, I stick ridiculous codenames on projects I want to talk about but aren't yet officially announced.)

The weird thing about writing for audio drama, which I knew would be weird going in, is that there aren't spaces in it in the usual way. Silent sequences don't really work in audio, do they? You can't just order an establishing shot. 22 minutes of television can be eighteen pages of manuscript. 22 minutes of audio is feeling like it's heading to thirty pages of manuscript. This is why Dylan Thomas subtitled UNDER MILK WOOD "a play for voices." One of those things that seems obvious, but you don't discover how hard it is until you're into it and you have to tell a story using only voices and some sound effects. 22 minutes of television can be 18 pages because you're using fills: letting the pictures carry the storytelling over minutes. There are no fills in this. People need to be talking and things need to be making noise, densely, to carry the story.

It looks like our first recording block may arrive in December, and that's when I'll find out how wrong I've gotten it. And this is why I'm always there for recording sessions: so I can rewrite on the fly when I hear lines come out of the actors' mouths and know that I've gotten it wrong.

All of which is opposed to comics, where you can take as many manuscript pages as you like to describe a single page or even a single panel of a comic.

Perhaps related: in putting that together, I was reminded of this Eddie Campbell essay on the comics form, which includes the following observation:

The first problem to be addressed was what I have usually called ‘the cinematic principle’... It’s the idea that we’re always looking through a camera. In a comic book script it shows itself in ways that we have long stopped being conscious of. For instance, we will tend to automatically describe a view as being in long-shot or close-up. We have forgotten that these are movie terms. They have entered into everyday usage. But let’s look further. If we place a long shot beside a close up, we’ve introduced another cinematic technique, that of ‘cutting’.

My idea was to take ‘cutting’ away and replace it with a keen observation of body language....

He's not wrong. I have stolen a great deal from cinema and cinema theory over the years and adapted their effects for the comics form, but that can cause the same myopia Eddie addresses herein. And now I'm attempting an artform that, strictly speaking, doesn't include long shots and close-ups as such. I'm learning to speak a new language.

I love my job.

My name is Warren Ellis, and I’m a writer from England. These newsletters are about the work I do and the creative life I try to lead. I send them every Sunday to subscribers. Feel free to send your friends to orbitaloperations.com , where they can read the most recent letters and subscribe for their own.

I’m represented by Angela Cheng Caplan at the Cheng Caplan Company and David Hale Smith at Inkwell Management. Please add [email protected] to your email system’s address book or contacts.

BOOKS/FICTION

NO PLAN B

The Jack Reacher books are very much A Format now.

‘We’ll lose a lot more than money if this guy joins the dots.’

‘How could he do that?’

‘He could come down here. You said so yourself. He could dig around. He was a military cop. It’s in his blood.’

‘It’s years since the guy was an MP,’ Moseley said. ‘That’s what the lieutenant told me.’Hix tapped the tabletop. ‘What else do we know?’

‘Not much. He has no driver’s licence. No employment history, according to the IRS. Not since he left the army. No social media presence. No recent photographs exist. He’s a hobo now. It’s kind of sad, but that’s the bottom line. Doesn’t sound like much to worry about.’

Brockman said, ‘Hobo or millionaire, what kind of crazy person would travel halfway across the country because he read a few documents and saw an innocuous picture?’

Cue the theme music. I'd forgotten I pre-ordered the new Jack Reacher by Lee & Andrew Child, NO PLAN B, and it showed up on my Kindle the other night. The milieu is slowly being updated to reflect modern times, even as Reacher himself apparently ceases ageing and the "thirteen years since he left the army" becomes the "no matter what the date, Captain America came out of the ice five years ago" or whatever.

If you like the others, you'll like this one. Reacher has to go to a tiny town in America to sort out some powerful people who need a slap. There is a big guy who is Reacher's size. Reacher murders a bunch of people in horrible ways and everybody is pretty much okay with it. This will probably be my last Jack Reacher book. It's a perfectly fine Jack Reacher book, but I guess I've read them all now. It's become A Format, and, interestingly, there's pretty much no onboarding for anyone picking this up as their first Reacher novel. If you like the format and want some autumn comfort reading, this fills that gap very well.

NO PLAN B, Lee & Andrew Child (UK) (US)

I'm going back into my longggg book queue now, and am thinking about winter reading plans. I put some books down over the summer that I'd like to return to - for example, I'm still struggling through THE BLACK CIRCLE, a biography of Alexandre Kojeve, which is extremely dense, though littered with novelties:

Madness is thus a decidedly uncritical affair. To be stung by the gods is to be intoxicated with lies, stories, possibilities that may never be realized. But, as Socrates says, “Madness that comes from a god is superior to sanity, which is of human origin”

Stung by the gods. I kind of like that.

Anyway. If you've been reading along with this section, we're leaving the new releases behind and spending the winter in old books. (Unless I see something I absolutely have to read.)

This newsletter goes out to tens of thousands of you for free, but it does have costs, and buying me a cup of coffee will dull the pain. The tip jar's here if you want it. No obligation.

GOT MORE TIME?

KEEP READING

I haven't been on LTD much this week, as I was so eager to get started on WRITTLE 2, and that's where the majority of my focus will be during November, not least because it's really fucking fun to write. The down time is spent looking at my garden and shaking my head sadly at the ugly dead mess of it.

As you read this, I will be affixing a vertical planter and ten iron hanging pots, all of which which I found very cheaply on Amazon, to the east-facing fence and rueing my hubris in attempting to grow vegetables in the realm of the urban fox. But it's all experiments. Experiments are good.

Okay, that's all I've got. I have to go wrangle a monologue about monks and drugs. If you celebrate the goth christmas thing, have a safe and fun and artistic time. And if you don't, then please find five minutes to do something nice for yourself, to sit in peace and be glad you're alive in a world with so many wonderful things in it. Including you. Hold on tight. See you next week.

W