Lights Out For The Territory

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Which, if you've been following the UK news, may go full Fury Road by Xmas. I spent Friday making work notes while listening to BBC News, hearing everything get weirder and stupider.

Photo above is not mine, but found in a research trawl. May be related to something happening down the line.

I hope you're holding up okay. This is a short edition, as I'm doing a lot of mental creative heavy lifting and I want to keep my focus there. Meanwhile, things are cooking in the background.

As you all know by now, I have a fondness for audio drama. One of the standout American audio drama strands in the 20th Century was the horror anthology series LIGHTS OUT. My old colleague Tom Akel of Rocketship Entertainment reached out a while back about his plans for a LIGHTS OUT-themed comics anthology project, and asked if I'd be interested in doing a short for it. Which of course I was. And that got announced last weekend.

I liked LIGHTS OUT a lot - my story is a riff on my favourite episode — and I wanted to work with Tom again, and, to seal the deal, I got to write a story for an artist I've been wanting to wotk with for years, the amazing Kody Chamberlain.

More details to come.

Looks like I and another publisher will be cementing the deal for the long-gestating graphic novel enterprise designated PROJECT MONTMARTRE next week. This is something I'm really excited to share with you: another real bucket-list gig.

Hibernation time approaches. In the LA entertainment business, it's barely six weeks away. Everyone shuts down for Thanksgiving, and then the Xmas slowdown starts.

Me, I can barely get out of bed in the mornings. The old bear would like to sleep until Spring now. It appears, in fact, that some early humans did in fact hibernate. Our brains are built over ancient underground labs filled with tools and switches we've forgotten we ever owned.

I've always said Simon Roy is a genius, and one or two of you may even have listened, so maybe you'll be interested in his new Kickstarted book:

BOOKS/NON-FICTION

LIMBO

LIMBO, by Dan Fox, is a short book about limbo. It is, in essence, a series of lists and connections that one writes down when one has "writer's block," which is the condition of not feeling able to write the thing you're supposed to be writing so you write something else instead. LIMBO, in fact, was supposed to be another book entirely, but he wrote this one because he couldn't write that one.

There's a lot of free association. Dan Fox wants you to think it's unstructured, a performance of procrastination hypergraphia.

And he calls himself out on it, several times, intertextually:

But it's more like a guided meditation, a consideration of his history with his older brother, who left home to become a sailor and never really came back. It's a book about writing: the act of writing, the way we think about writing, the associations we make, the connections we perceive and curate. It's also a book about family: perhaps, more correctly, the stories that a family accrue. Anyone with an interest in writing, the mechanics and method of writing and how a writer's mind works will love this book. Also, anyone interested in limbo.

LIMBO, Dan Fox (UK) (US)

Yes, this has been sitting in my to-read queue since 2018. Told you I was working through the pile this autumn/winter!

And, yes, this is yet another Fitzcarraldo Editions book. Fitzcarraldo have only been going eight years and have already published three authors who went on to win Nobel Prizes. If you love books and you haven't been paying attention to them even through all the damn times I've mentioned them, it's time for you to take a look.

The balance of my reading this week has been on rewilding and regenerative gardening, none of which you want to hear about, just like I'm not showing you the mass of scratches and cuts I picked up while coppicing what turned out to be a stand of several veteran virburnums. Complain about the garden talk one more time and I'll turn this entire newsletter into a document of The Great Nazi Wisteria War Of 2022 and switch off the unsubscribe option.

CURRENTLY LISTENING

SPEKTRMODULE

RITUAL by SA BRUXA. That's your Halloween sorted. Ritual Industrial.

I did a terrible experiment when I was living in a bedsit in a particular house as a kid. I tended to sleep through much of the day and wrote until dawn threatened. My bedsit was an de-converted darkroom, more or less six foot by six foot, the smallest room in the house and pretty much as miserable as you can imagine from that description. Some of the other people who shared that house were awful. There was, for one example, the guy who, local legend had it, went insane after falling into a vat of soup. I once spent a week playing Diamanda Galas' "Litanies Of Satan" in the wee hours. After a week, people in the house started complaining of bouts of very weird and unsettling dreams happening for apparently no reason at all.

As you can see from that link, this wonderful record is now available digitally. Play it to your friends! Late at night while they are asleep

Okay. It's Sunday morning, and I have to finish some coppicing, fill in a hole where I ripped out a ten foot tree by its root (it's a trade-off - a stand of four buddleia means that nothing will grow around them, so I ripped out one, coppiced two and pruned one, and the resultant logs will provide both firewood and shelter for wildlife over winter), mulch some ground and wash out the mini-greenhouse. All that needs to be done before I lose the light, and I'm determined to also complete the first draft of a pitch document I've been working on since Thursday morning.

But, for now, a shot of espresso, and then some walnuts, an apple and a piece of cheese with a small glass of wine, and greeting the day. God only knows what kind of day and week it will be, but we've gotten through lousy times already, so we're all equipped to get through whatever's coming next. Relax your shoulders, tip your head up to look at the light, take a breath. Here we go. Take care, see you next week.

W