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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’m five or six weeks behind on literally everything.

In this letter:

• Written out

• operations

• THE NEWS, with Lordess Foudre

• Collapser

• Raven Belasco’s weird fears

• Rain DeGrey on the road

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

• Am writing

• LTD

THE WORLD SERVICE

WRITTEN OUT

I’m kind of written out this week, to be honest. Had to get back into prose for a thing. It’s funny how I can crank out audio scripts at a rate of knots, tv scripts pretty fast, comics scripts comfortably at eight pages a day, but 500 words of prose wipe me out for the day. I think a lot of it is down to the fact that you can’t hide behind anyone else in prose. It’s just you and the words and you don’t have any actors or artists to make you look clever. When your prose is stupid, it looks stupid and you look stupid and there’s no shield.

I read somewhere that Brandon Sanderson, a fantasy novelist, bangs out 2500 words a day, every day. I haven’t read his work, maybe it’s deathless prose, but I have to admire the confidence and energy of someone who can produce that many words a day, even if it’s all just material for revision.

(Marc Andreesen, of all people, once suggested to me that if I produced half my usual word count a day, then the words would be of twice the quality. That, sadly, is not how it works. Also, if you follow that argument all the way down, the highest quality word count on any given day would be one.)

Incidentally, 500 words a day isn’t a bad count. That gets you a 70,000 word novel in 20 weeks. And if you think 70,000 words is low for a novel, then put down the Brandon Sanderson-sized fantasy doorstops and join the real world.

Sanderson is a really interesting figure, by the way, who’s built a giant company off leather bound copies of his books and massive Kickstarter-powered publishing projects. While everyone else has buried themselves in influencing and building out digital content companies, Sanderson’s built a multi million dollar company off… just books.

And cranking out 2500 words a day in pursuit of million-word novels without dying. While I would love nothing more than to write a great chain of 30,000 word novels like Georges Simenon or JG Ballard or Fleur Jaeggy. I think small. And that’s why 500 words empties me out.

Ballard, by the way, did 1000 words a day through force of will. Dorothy Parker once claimed that she only wrote five words a day and then changed seven of them.

OPERATIONS

• Did a foreword for the forthcoming collection of Ganzeer’s THE SOLAR GRID.

• Did the first draft (3000 words) for a prose project for a very curious company

• Sealed a book option deal for film

• Entertaining a tv option deal

• Finally made a start on the novella I contracted for late last year (blame the omni-mange)

• Scheduled a phone conference for a tv thing

• I have eleven different notebooks on the go right now

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

ORBITAL

• Angela Winter told me there was a new Stephen O’Malley record, which I had totally missed. SPHERES COLLAPSER is digital-only, but I think we all wanted to know what doom ambient played on pipe organs sounded like.

• YES WE DID

• It’s been a dismal week or two for me on the internet, because I’m finding so little worth reading. I dunno if everyone just gave up, hooked their chatbots to their content services and went home when the latest geopolitical binfire lit off,  but fuck me, March feels like the month that Dead Internet Theory bit in. I started this year determined to be more connected. It’s barely even spring and I find myself checking out. This week, I decided to just give up. I skim my RSS feed at the top of the day and then leave it alone until late evening, and then leave it again until the next morning. 

• But Collective Memory would be an interesting app if they weren’t pegging attention to some weird crypto token. “A new live-posting platform that tries to pull the internet back into the real world. The rules are deliberately simple: you can’t upload from your camera roll, you can’t use filters and you can only post what you’re seeing right now. Every piece of content – or “Memory” – is captured live and pinned to a specific place and time, turning the feed into a stream of moments happening across the world in real time.”

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This week’s bizarrerie starts with a fantastic word: paraskevidekatriaphobia.

That’s “fear of Friday the 13th.” Which apparently we have three of this year! Which, since I do not have that fear and I’m a certain kind of weirdo, delights me.

Apparently, the number 13 became unlucky sometime in the Middle Ages, which doesn’t feel very surprising, considering all the weird shit that was going on back then. Also apparently, in The Da Vinci Code, which is just one of those books I will never read, the phobia is said to have started in 1307, when Philip IV of France ordered the arrests of the Knights Templar on Friday, October 13. That’s all very silly, so I suggest Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, which has all the fantastic absurdity of that kind of stuff in it, but is also a beautifully written and honestly thrilling story.

I’m sure you have all been in a building that doesn’t have a 13th floor because of paraskevidekatriaphobia, which goes to show how pervasive such cultural myths can become. People who are really committed to it will often put in a pool and call it the “pool floor” or use the letter “M” to designate the floor where mechanical equipment is stored. Conspiracy theorists have suggested that the thirteenth floor in government buildings is not really missing, but actually contains sinister top-secret governmental departments (think of Red Dwarf and Mostly Harmless and sooooo many comics, tv shows, films, and video games.)

More numbers have phobias as well!

Tetraphobia — The Number 4 has it hard in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and other East Asian and South East Asian countries because in Classical Chinese, the pronunciation of the word for "four" is very similar to that of the word for "death."

Heptadecaphobia — I love this one. Number 17. In Roman numerals 17 is written XVII, which can be rearranged to VIXI, which in Latin means "I have lived" but can be a euphemism for "I am dead." In Italy, planes may have no row 17 and some hotels have no room 17.

Triakontenneaphobia —In some parts of Afghanistan there is a belief that the number 39 (13x3) is cursed or even a badge of shame.

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is for fear of the Number of the Beast! But can you even pronounce it?

Raven Belasco is the author of the BLOOD & ANCIENT SCROLLS series of novels and the novelette THAT LESBIAN VAMPIRE PIRATE STORY. Her website is at ravenbelas.co and her regular newsletter is at https://ancientscrolls.beehiiv.com/ .

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

^{50 Ghost Story Authors You Should Know:}

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

AM WRITING

I generally read a book a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Around fifty books a year. Reading is the first act of writing.

I fell back into the terrible habit of both reading and writing on my phone at night. The forcing mechanism to break that habit is keep a dying Kindle Paperwhite on charge next to my seat in the living room, and buy more books. So I pulled the trigger on something that had been on my list for a while, WRITING by Marguerite Duras. Because great writers writing about writing is always worth the time. Duras may be best remembered for writing the film HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR these days, but she had a long and storied career.

WRITING, Marguerite Duras (UK) (US)

SO TELL ME THIS:

Last week, I asked you:

What kind of content creator are you?

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Digital creator (126)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Physical creator (257)
383 Votes

via @beehiiv polls

Some people said there should be an option for both, but I was interested in how people separate themselves out. A lot of woodworkers, it turns out!

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.

• fogday (cognitive warfare)

• buds (catshit)

• dead internet (web slurry)

• meander (status)

• ghost of a useful computer (drugs, art)

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That’s me for this week. I have to go and stuff more music into my mp3 player. Take a break. It’ll do you good. See you next Sunday.

W