Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. It has been sunny and glorious, way too glorious for February. I’ve been walking up to a new coffee shop to work in the notebook and disconnect from everything for a bit. People keep saying “spring is just around the corner!” as if they have no memory of the false spring we get every bloody year. The omni-mange is still in my system, but I feel much better. As I write this, the final lettered pages of PROJECT LOST SIERRA should be being uploaded to the publisher, and I live in hope that I will have actual news on that book one of these years. Onwards.

In this letter:

• State of the bag

• Stephen Fry brown-trousering the naughty

• frigging in the rigging

• winter skies

• books in circulation

• I watch films on my own because I have no friends and nobody likes the same films as me anyway

OPERATIONS

STATE OF THE BAG

People keep asking for the current bag load-out for some reason. I’m not sure it’s changed much since whenever I did this last, and it is not that interesting, but here it is:

This is the carry of a half-connected person, really. The bag was a gift from my daughter a few years back. To the right of it is a bluetooth keyboard that connects to the phone (and stand), for those days where I need to be producing digital text all the time. Next to that, four pens.

Under the keyboard is the Kodak Charmera, a low-fi digital camera I’m playing with. Under the Charmera is a generic Chinese mp3 player with generic Chinese IEM earbuds. To the right of those is a notebook cover containing three notebooks. This one is the Wanderings Passport, which contains my daily thinking notebook and notebooks for LTD and this newsletter.

The notebook changes from day to day. I have four notebook covers working - the Wanderings Passport, a newestor Field Notes-sized cover, a generic Chinese A6 cover, and a handmade cover that can hold six Field Notes notebooks that I bought from a maker on Etsy. This probably sounds like overkill, but if you think on paper then it’s infrastructure: working across several projects in the same notebook can make it harder to connect up trains of thought, even with indexing.

To the left of the mp3 player is a pocket ashtray, Victorinox Huntsman Swiss Army Knife, a NORD solid scent pod, and two Shay and Blue scents.

On the bottom, an Anker Power Bank, Ultra-Compact 5,200mAh Portable Charger.

Not pictured: an iPhone, Kindle Paperwhite (on charge), various medicaments, the fucking reading glasses I have to resort to on eyestrain days now.

Earbuds get factored in, depending on the day: on a fully-connected day, it's the Airpods, on a noise-cancelling day it’s the Echo Buds, on a day when I need to catch up with podcasts it’s those HTCs, which are open-ear. And yes, even cigarillo boxes are ruined now. (I’m trying to cut down on cigarettes again.)

Not much EDC gear-porn here, right? I was working a version of this bag in the 1990s - I carried a digital camera and an mp3 player back then, too, and I had a palm computer with a foldaway keyboard and its own modem. And I think it was L’Eau par Kenzo Pour Homme as the scent, back then.

I imagine most of you don't imagine me as someone who wears scents. I imagine a fair few of you expected this bag to be more tech-heavy, too. But this is where I am: I want my phone to stay in my pocket when it’s not being used for specific tasks, and I otherwise want things I can sense. I want my days to be longer and I don't want to waste them just blasting my eyes and working the scrolling-thumb. Right now, this is my carry for working and living in the world.

ORBITAL

• We have cable tv. There are like 900 channels. Sometimes there’s nothing worth watching on any of them. This is my experience of the internet now.

• Blogs Are Back appears to be a new and free RSS reader and blog discovery system. Haven’t played with it yet - I’m all in on Feedbin and Reeder - but if you want to start with collecting RSS-enabled websites in a reader, it could be a good beginning for you.

• “THE INTERROGATOR centers on former MI6 agent Conrad Henry and his elite team. When conventional methods have failed, Henry’s quirky charm, superior intellect and mind-bending behavioral maneuvers make him the only man able to lockpick the minds of the world’s most dangerous criminals." This is a new US tv series starring and written by... Stephen Fry. On FOX, which of course gave us HOUSE, starring Fry’s old comedy partner Hugh Laurie. I am fucking fascinated.

This week’s bizarrerie is delightful: same-sex pirate unions! I came across this tidbit during the research for my novelette That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story, and sadly never got a chance to work it in.

These unions were called “matelotage,” which is an utterly perfect word because in French it means "seamanship" and in English it sounds like a pun on “mate.”

The sailors/buccaneers in question would set up this partnership with agreements to share their incomes from, you know, pirate stuff. The “matelots” would fight together and protect each other—but if that didn’t work, the surviving one would inherit their partner's property in the case of their (undoubtedly brutal) death.

This was happening in “Golden Age of Piracy” times, and stood in stark contrast to the British Royal Navy’s Articles of War—see item XXIX: “If any person in the fleet shall commit the unnatural and detestable sin of buggery and sodomy with man or beast, he shall be punished with death by the sentence of a court martial.”

Of course historians do their usual amount of “they might just have been good friends,” and probably there were some matelots who were strictly platonic, but when you’re out on a ship for months at a time with mostly other men around (women generally being considered “bad luck” to have on a ship), all the comforts of a relationship would likely have been enjoyed.

This really is a piece of history that got buried deep because of homophobia. The preferred view of pirates is so virile and ruggedly masculine, that even if they are violent outlaws, they are safely heterosexual ones and thus worthy of a manly sort of idealization. The fact that the effeminate Cap’n Jack Sparrow and the queer-as-fuck characters of Our Flag Means Death were just as likely is either charming or upsetting, depending on how you feel about queerness and who is frigging whom in the rigging.

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.

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

CIRCULATION

Book notes are continually lacking here this year. Recent and current reads include:

THE BIG THREE, Neel Burton, is a potted history of the lives and thoughts of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and is more entertaining than that sounds, at least in part because Burton is quite happy to call the great philosophers and their various associates and contemporaries out when they’re being complete dicks.

…the almost centenarian Cratinus defended his own drinking with the line, ‘You’ll never fashion anything clever by drinking water!’

Wolfram Eilenberger’s THE VISIONARIES covers four female philosophers who were 20th Century contemporaries across ten years - I read his other book, TIME OF THE MAGICIANS, which I enjoyed. Weil, Arendt, de Bouvoir and Rand. Hell of a mix. 

Even if no one else did, time itself would ensure that whatever work one had done came to nothing, consigning it to eternal oblivion.

M: SON OF THE CENTURY by Antonio Scutari is a sort of fictional biography of Mussolini, and I believe it’s recently been adapted for tv. Gorgeously written, scabrous and cinematic. One of those books where you can even sense the lighting. 

On April 6th, the socialists fighting with the communists for the vacant supremacy proclaimed the “Bavarian Soviet Republic” governed by Ernst Toller, an utterly incompetent playwright. His foreign affairs appointee, already treated several times in a psychiatric hospital, declared war on Switzerland because it refused to lend sixty locomotives to Soviet Bavaria.

PIRATE ENLIGHTENMENT, David Graeber, is a popular ethnographic study of the legends of a historical pirate utopia, finding that pirate retirement settlements on Madagascar probably affected Madagascan democracy. More fun than it sounds. 

John Plantain was born in Chocolate Hole, on the Island of Jamaica, of English Parents, who took care to bestow on him the best Education they themselves were possess’d of: which was to curse, swear, and blaspheme, from the time of his first learning to speak.

I am saving the light fiction reads for spring. I have the new Ed James and the new Mick Herron sitting there waiting for me, among others, and I’ll do those before Molly Crabapple’s big book lands in May. 

I saw Sunfish Starfish live the other month, and the closest thing to that experience is their marvellous ambient/drone record THE BLACK SWALLOWER. (It was among the best sets I’ve seen at Konsztrukting Soundz, and edited to add damn Lev has gotten summary videos up (Sunfish Starfish start at 19.17 - on the night, they filled the room like Philip Jeck):

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Currently I am doing one big post a day. (Most days.)

SETTLE THIS FOR ME:

We’re going to do films again, because I just took a look at the film release schedule for 2026. Here’s the thing about the films I like to go and see at the cinema. I go in the afternoons, and sometimes I am practically the only person in the auditorium. THE BRUTALIST was blessed by precisely six other viewers. So:

Last week I asked:

What deserves the Best Picture Oscar this year?

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Bugonia (30)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Frankenstein (27)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ F1 (12)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Hamnet (23)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Marty Supreme (20)
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ One Battle After Another (162)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ The Secret Agent (36)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Sentimental Value (10)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Sinners (176)
496 Votes

via @beehiiv polls

That's me done for this week. I’m going to finish off the piece of work in front of me, open a bottle of heather ale and sit down with a book. Do something nice for yourself today. Today is never as bad as you think it is - and believe me, I have had some very bad days - and tomorrow might be better, so stick around. See you next week.

W