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Lights Out For The Territory
Orbital Operations for 16 October 2022
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:
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/NON-FICTION
LIMBO
One August morning in 1986, a 25-foot shark became stuck in the attic of a terraced house in Headington, a suburb of Oxford. The fish appeared to have plunged head-first from the clouds, although there had been no reports of a freak deluge of cats, dogs and chondrichthyes the previous night. Like all sharks, it snuck up without asking first.
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.
Don’t all writing projects careen off course and digress themselves towards new destinations? Possible exceptions: car user manuals, medical texts, protocol for deploying nuclear missiles. Best to stay on topic in those genres.
There's a lot of free association. Dan Fox wants you to think it's unstructured, a performance of procrastination hypergraphia.
If only I could write myself out of my funk, like Anthony Trollope, who claimed to start each day at 5.30 a.m. and write 250 words every fifteen minutes, for three hours. I was too old for the live-fast methodology of Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote 60,000 words of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde in a six-day cocaine binge.
And he calls himself out on it, several times, intertextually:
For Kafka, the experience of writer’s block was having ‘to see the pages being covered endlessly with things one hates, that fill one with loathing, or at any rate with dull indifference.’
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.
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