The Cold Spot

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Apologies for the unprecedented extra email earlier this week, but the producers were eager to spread the word on the day of THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT’s release. As ever, thanks for putting up with me.

If you haven’t listened to episode one of THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT yet, I’m putting my brief notes on the episode towards the bottom of this letter, after OBSERVATIONS. There will possibly be spoilers. This is your warning.

In case you wanted to listen but missed it, the team put it up here:

OPERATIONS

CHECKOUT

Little whispers of autumn on the breeze. If I’ve planned everything right - and let’s face it, that’s unlikely - this is my last full day at the keyboard for a while, because several days’ work in the garden has accumulated. Starting with harvesting the last of the rhubarb. But there’s a lot of cutting and trimming and mulching and replanting to do. And, while technically still being summer, the temperature has dropped enough to make it comfortable. As ever out here, we went from ten degrees Celsius to thirty-five in about ten minutes, with humidity that turned the air into hot soup. It’s nice out there now.

It’s been a busy year, I’ve gotten a lot done, but it’s also been a lot of stress - and in the middle of that sentence I’ve just had to stop to send money to a friend of my partner’s so she can get an emergency vet appointment for her cat, it’s been that kind of year - and I am very ready to check out of the world until next year.

Aside, of course, from this newsletter and my personal log.

Longtime readers know that going Full Hermit is when I get esoteric and stop making a great deal of sense. So that'll be fun.

Book and film talk may resume here. My library is bulging, and I just took possession of three box-sets of Rainer Werner Fassbinder films (none of which contains IN A YEAR OF THIRTEEN MOONS so I have to hope for a fourth volume).

Oh! Look at this:

DC Compact Editions are a drive to put key DC books into a “digest” format, which is essentially the standard manga size. This one is due July 2025. I’m going to be really interested to see how those pages work at a smaller size. But I love the idea of having that book in a paperback-novel format.

Announced some months back, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHAZARD EDITION is now being solicited for orders, so if you want one, tell your local comics store or bookshop this week. It is an absolutely beautiful edition: a remaster, with visual retouches and amendments all the way through and containing a wonderful additional gallery section.

ISBN: 9781534350755, Lunar Code: 0924IM307

ORBITAL

OVERDRIVE

Because I’ve had so much going on with the run-up to the show release and other work, my phone twitch has come back. So I need to summon up the discipline to sort that out.

I’ve been promising myself that I will experiment with short fictions all year, and haven’t been able to get around to it yet. That’s the sort of thing I need my full brain for, without distractions or additional stress. I already know what the covers will look like if I do decide to return to self-publishing. But it’s down to time and clear thinking space.

Mind you, cultural overproduction is a real thing. I was shopping for new books the other night, drilling down into a subcategory on Amazon, and found myself buried in a deep mire of obvious AI-generated books.

It gets really fucking strange. All the covers have the same vibe, the same weird typography, and there’s thousands of the bastards. And I was in the media studies section for god’s sake. What do other publishing categories look like?

I nicked this off Templesmith’s IG because I love it. Templesmith is currently in Australia having a facelift and I look forward to seeing him on an episode of BOTCHED next year.

(I told you I was going to do it, Ben.)

THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT

EPISODE ONE: “THE COLD SPOT”

Years ago, a cosmologist called Laura Mersini-Houghton came up with a theory about the CMB Cold Spot, a vast expanse of space that is colder than the surrounding void. Mersini-Houghton contends that the Cold Spot is the bulge where another universe is bumping into ours.

It has been stuck in my head ever since. Sometimes you want years, even decades to store an idea until you can make a story with it. This is why we keep notebooks, folks.

Sometime around 2020, I came across the following idea, advanced by Melvin Vopson: information is the foundational building block of the universe, and it has mass and potential energy. It is the fifth form of matter, and it’s what we’ve confused “dark matter” for. Calculations of the likely volume of information in the universe roughly correlate to the estimated volume of dark matter.

There was no world in which I wasn’t going to use that to tell a story with.

I’m always wary about using technical language in a script, because t’s just adding additional hurdles for actors. But I didn’t see a way around it for this show, so I just crossed my fingers and assumed there would be a number of takes for some scenes. Alicia Witt did not need additional takes, nor did she need pronouncement checks or explanations. She just knew.

Sigsand. The Sigsand Manuscript was the Necronomiconesque evil magic book in the stories of Carnacki The Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson. Hodgson, who was born thirty miles away from me, was an author, soldier and bodybuilder who once fitted chains to Houdini so tightly that the escape artist complained that Hodgson had injured him and jammed the locks.

Smack-dab between his birthplace and mine is Writtle, the birthplace of radio. And now you have the secret code.

The next episode, “Jack In The Box,” starring James Callis and Gildart Jackson, drops on August 27, I believe.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

• notes on the Robert Harris novel CONCLAVE, which has a film adaptation coming starting Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and Isabella Rossellini

• The Bypass: note on logging instead of blogging

• And a collection of posts from July worth looking at

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv.

And that’s me done with another probably-too-long letter. I hope you’re doing okay. And if you’re not doing okay this week, I promise you there’s a chance things will be better soon, so stick around, put on some music you love, take a deep breath and see what happens. Better days will come.

W