Orbital Operations, 15 October 2024

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Autumn hit all of a sudden, and an overnight storm brought a few trees down. 17C temperature drop across two days. As you read this, I’m either sawing, lifting, writing or running around the house taking care of other stuff because my partner’s mother just got taken into hospital. This year is not done with us yet! So I wrote all the below on Friday before I got the call, and don’t have time to add to it. Next week!

On deck this week:

• Mixes on DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT episodes 1 and 2 are locked, and we should have that release date very soon. We are currently fiddling with the SFX on episode 3.

• Just got the go-ahead on an original graphic novella, the script for which I should be filing at the end of the month. Most of the heavy lifting is done - it’s an expansion of an overstuffed eight-pager I wrote in early summer, and I wrote a detailed outline for the expansion a month later. Codename it PROJECT HOPE.

• Processing shopping agreements and tv development documents.

• About a third of the way into first drafts of the big consult job.

• I still hate Zoom

• Waiting on contracts and updates. There’s a lot of this lately, and it does a number on hypertension, stress and anxiety levels.

• Grateful to Past Me for disabling social media. The BlueSky invites were very kind of you, thanks, but I am done. Also, I remember the days of having eight different social media accounts and have no wish to revisit them.

Related, I thought this was interesting:

I picked this up from the LRB Bookshop, to whom it is exclusive, in 400 numbered copies - it seems it’s still available. Author Iain Sinclair turned 80 this year.

I’m sure much to his horror, Iain Sinclair has become a British cultural touchstone. I remember discovering WHITE CHAPPELL, SCARLET TRACINGS around the age of 19 and being knocked flat by the thing. You have to remember, I’ve spent most of my life living an hour from London, and half my family came from the East End, and so Sinclair’s London rites and quests spoke very directly to the mists of my history.

If you’ve read the entire LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN cycle, you’ve met Sinclair - he is Norton, the prisoner-ghost of London. His influence stretches across all the back streets of the London-adjacent writers’ work and all who look for magic in the urban ancient.

Of his later work, I would also recommend AMERICAN SMOKE, which takes him out of London, much to his benefit.

I also treated myself to a Chromecast this week, and, after a bit of fiddling, connected MUBI and ARTE to it. (Tip - if the apps won’t install in the Chromecast, go into its settings, find the Google Play Store and hit STOP. The thing has a habit of hanging and leaving installs as “pending.” )

Thirty quid and a half hour later, I had access to my art films on the big screen, where previously I was limited to office and iPad for them.

Why do you care about this? Well, you probably don’t. Unless you too are ready to check out of a world where other machines decide what you watch, the streaming provision has all blended into slow beige and where standard broadcast programming is usually no more than a disappointment to you. And, honestly, one more ad for Lenor freshness boosters and THE GOOD SHIP MURDER and I’m going to become a spree killer. The point is: check your inputs and see if you can’t bring yourself something better than what you settled for yesterday.

Jessica Beshir is a hell of a filmmaker, by the way. If you get a chance to see FAYA DAYI, grab it. Here’s her short HAIRAT:

This world remains full of wondrous new sights and sounds.

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv.

From a recent newsletter by Dougald Hine:

Be good to yourself. See you next week.

W