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A Distant Moon
Orbital Operations for 4 September 2022
Warren Ellis
September 04, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
Hello from out here on a beautiful day on the Thames Delta, where I am weighing down wire mesh on my planters to stop cats and foxes from digging out my fucking seedlings. It's generally been a week of frustrations and waiting. That limbo space of a whole host of things almost but not quite eventuating. All you can do is shake yourself off and sow some new seeds, which is what I'm doing.
I don't watch South Park, so if this gif has any deeper contextual meaning, I am not aware of it. I've only seen one episode all the way through. The original hand-animated paper-cutouts video that was circulated in the 1990s, before the show sold. Garth Ennis got hold of a copy and we watched it at his place one night. I marvelled at its wondrous adolescent horror, and proclaimed it a weird one-off. I know nothing.
Anyway. Very frustrating week, but the freelance life is full of those. "Hurry up and wait," I call it. We just soldier on and hope that next week will be better.
As I write this, I'm completing my final rewrites on PROJECT WRITTLE 1 and working on the huge outline for WRITTLE 2 to pass the time. While working on WRITTLE, I haven't really touched my notebook, and am planning on sitting down with it tonight to catch up and start some new things. Always be moving. The Hurry Up And Wait freelance life means you should never have only one iron in the fire.
If I'm lucky, I have another month of sowing and growing time. The spectacular autumn sunsets are coming in - on Wednesday night we even went down to the seafront to watch it. Purple and orange clouds. And then it's settling in for the long winter. In this house, it is Soaking Raisins season. This is where we put raisins in small jars, pour alcohol over them to cover them, label them and put them away to steep until Xmas. They get used in holiday desserts. Rum is good. Amaretto is good. Experiment with whatever near-empty bottles of alcohol you have laying around.
Declan Shalvey sent me a couple of issues of his new series, OLD DOG, which he's writing, drawing and colouring, with lettering by Clayton Crain. Dec describes it as "WINTER SOLDIER meets MISSION IMPOSSIBLE," but there's some Bourne in there, some RED, some SIN CITY, some Wolverine, and a whole lot of masterclass Declan Shalvey storytelling. Final order cutoff is Monday, so drop your local comics store a note to tell them you want a copy. It's a lot of good old fashioned spy-fi fun.
I had a google around and found a preview.
With WRITTLE 1 done and WRITTLE 2 being developed as a very over-written outline, I need to turn my attention to WRITTLE 3, because it was proposed that we lead out with three projects. Apparently, at some point in the discussion, I said that, in times past, I would have led out with a done-in-one series, then a multi-part serial, and then an outlier that was done in a different way and attempted to break some new ground. WRITTLE 1 and 2 serve the first two, and I was reminded that WRITTLE 3 is the outlier. This is called being hoist by your own petard.
One way into this is the CITIZEN KANE position. It's Orson Welles giving the answers in this interview:
A: I thought you could do anything with a camera that the eye could do or the imagination could do. And if you come up from the bottom in the film business, you’re taught all the things that the cameraman doesn’t want to attempt for fear he will be criticized for having failed. And in this case I had a cameraman who didn’t care if he was criticized if he failed, and I didn’t know that there were things you couldn’t do, so anything I could think up in my dreams, I attempted to photograph.
Q: You got away with enormous technical advances, didn’t you?
A: Simply by not knowing that they were impossible.
"I didn't know there were things you couldn't do." It's an invitation to forget what you know and come to a space fresh. Imagine that whatever form or function in front of you is an impossible machine for presenting dreams. And instead of deciding the machine cannot possibly generate any given dream, figure out what you have to do to it to make it work right.
Decide you don't know it's impossible, and do it anyway.
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/NOPE
New Rule
New rule: I'm not buying any more books this year. I have a huge backlog of unread books, books I've been promising myself I would read, books I bought for 99p in sales and just let drift down the queue.
The queue includes Merlin Sheldrake's ENTANGLED LIFE, the Mel Brooks autobiography, Susanna Clarke's PIRANESI, the complete works of Kafka, all the Samuel Beckett novels and prose, Eimear McBride's STRANGE HOTEL, and about a hundred more... I keep going to easy reading instead of digging into harder material. So the books section here is likely to become a bit more historical...
I'm currently working through Rory Cormac's HOW TO STAGE A COUP, which is a little windy and repetitious, but is full of interesting nuggets:
In November, just three months later, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was ambushed, shot and killed outside Tehran. This was no ordinary murder. Fakhrizadeh was Iran’s top military nuclear scientist, and, rather mysteriously, the gunmen were nowhere to be seen. His heavily armed bodyguards could only haplessly shoot back into thin air. The murder weapon – a robotic machine gun – was equipped with artificial intelligence and controlled by satellite to target Fakhrizadeh, and only Fakhrizadeh. His wife, sitting centimetres away from him in the car, escaped unharmed.
And also:
...back in the early 1980s, Mossad helped create a holiday resort on the Sudanese shores of the Red Sea. To all the world it looked like the perfect place to dive among beautiful exotic fish, but the resort served another purpose in secretly facilitating the evacuation of thousands of Ethiopian Jews from Sudanese refugee camps.
The fact that I didn't seem to know other of these facts leads me to believe that I don't do nearly enough foreign policy reading, so that's another project for autumn and winter.
Okay, so after I wrote the above, THE CHILDREN OF ASH AND ELM popped up for sale at 99p. Last one. Promise. (UK) (US)
CURRENTLY LISTENING
SPEKTRMODULE
What a great title.
The music was recorded on Thursday 11th August 2022 in St Andrew's Church Raveningham, Norfolk, UK by Laura Cannell. Performed on Church Organ and Overbow Violin with field recordings of bells and a tawny owl from her garden. The mic was placed on a pew 4 ft behind her as she faced the pipes and keyboard.
Tags: contemporary classical, experimental folk, improvised medieval
That probably tells you everything you need to know about whether or not you want to listen to this. I love it. The organ notes and distorted bells on the last track are very Old Wyrd Britain. The whole album can be streamed for free on Bandcamp.
GOT MORE TIME?
KEEP READING
Okay. I'm off to learn how to 1) revive dead soil that even crimson clover won't germinate in 2) take rose cuttings 3) grow flowers that don't die a week after they produce a shoot. I will fail at much of this at first, but I will keep learning and keep trying. The alternative is to never try anything new and never learn anything, and that's no good. Try something new this week. Something small. Be okay with it not working perfectly first time. Nothing ever does. Do something good for yourself, take care, and I'll see you next week.
W