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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Last week, I managed to bust the Gmail container limit and got the dreaded “VIEW ENTIRE MESSAGE” cutoff. Sorry about that. I am adjusting accordingly.

Autumn be here. Big rain, finally. Pulling out the chukka boots, and the leather trainers I bought cheap a few weeks back, and cleaning cat puke off the Drover boots, because you can guarantee that if any of these hairy bastards throw up, it’ll be on something of mine.

In this letter:

• A few notes on writing

• Pens and paper

• The News, with Lordess Foudre

• Deliberate Disconnection with Rain DeGrey

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

• Roberto Bolano’s ANTWERP

• LTD

• Soeur L’Enfer

THE WORLD SERVICE

A FEW NOTES ON WRITING

Every story idea should contain something you don’t know, so you have something to write about.

Remove useless friction from your workplace. That thing you always have to move or fiddle with in order to start work? Bin it or permanently put it somewhere else. Useful friction is, say, putting your to-do list or your daybook on top of the laptop, so you have to look at it before you start work.

Have a little ritual that starts the writing session. Doesn’t need to be elaborate. Just the thing that trains your brain into “it’s writing time,” same as looking at sunlight first thing in the day tells your brain it’s time to go. For me, it’s just sitting down with coffee and water, putting on a record and checking the workbook before I open the laptop.

We don’t write to say what we think about something: we write to find out what we think about something.

If you don’t do some form of commonplace - anything, paper or digital, that lets you capture thoughts and quotes and pictures and references and links and interesting things - start one this week. That’s the reservoir which future-you can tap when you need it most.

Pick one thing to finish before the end of the year. Just one. So that in four months you can look back on the last third of 2026 and say, “I did that.” Your brain will thank you.

I read somewhere that the first episode of THE BANANA SPLITS aired fifty eight years ago this week and I may need to lay down in a field and wait for the dirt and weeds to cover me.

OPERATIONS

PENS AND PAPER

I was going to do a whole thing here on the new pens I ordered over a week ago. But they never showed up. Which is annoying, as I am very much cycling back to pen on paper as the primary method. Example:

I picked up a generic business card stand, a mini-clipboard and a fresh pack of Silvine record cards.  Stood them up portrait-style in the holder on the desk (where the old iPad used to live), along with the mini-clipboard - which, like the index cards, is 3 inches by 5 inches.  

I’m returning to the way I did things long ago: always on paper. Live long enough and you go full circle, I suppose.

What exactly is the point of all this?

Handwriting fixes ideas in the memory better. Thinking on paper is more fluid: you get to think around the notion more flexibly. Making things by hand is better for your brain than talking to a robot, and developing ideas works better on a page than on a keyboard. 

(And protecting your brain is likely to be a real creative and commercial asset in a few years.)

As seen here: HP Lovecraft’s notemaking:

Georges Simenon famously jotted down rough details of a story on the back of a large envelope before he sat down to write a MAIGRET book.

New project codenames: we’re waiting on the contract for PROJECT EARLING, a 48pp graphic novella. PROJECT HY-BRASIL is a serialised graphic novella I broke ground on earlier this week, that’s now in scripting. PROJECT WYTHMAIL is a serialised graphic novella I figured out last week, that’s now in scripting. The latter two are intended for this newsletter.

And I’ve pulled this old thing off the shelf again, for reasons that, hopefully, will become apparent next year:

I’m breaking out an A5 hardback notebook for this one.

I am starting to become concerned that I will have to put some kind of “AI is not used in the writing of this letter” line in the template at some point.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Graphic novella GHOST DRIVE STATION by myself and Lordess Foudre is out on November 18.

The order code/UPC is: 70985304934000111. If you want a copy, drop a note to your local comics shop or bookstore, or stop in there, and give them that code. Nobody orders for the shelf any more, so if you want to be sure of getting a copy, tell your store.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics, and there’s at least one other major reprint project in the works from them that I’m writing a large essay for right now.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics on November 24.

Last week, I asked you:

Which film are you going to go and see?

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ DIGGER (85)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 DUNE PART THREE (164)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ AVENGERS DOOMSDAY (80)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ WERWULF (86)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ CLAYFACE (9)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ WICKER (74)
498 Votes

The next poll should be - Given That The Correct Choice Was Clearly WERWULF, This Is What’s Wrong With Me:

• fear of fur

• a dog ate the good part of my brain

• WWWWOOORRRMMMMMSSSS

• Willem Dafoe is my sleep paralysis demon

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.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

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

ANTWERP, AGAIN

I can’t be a science fiction writer because my innocence is mostly gone and I’m not crazy yet …

Re-read Roberto Bolano’s short book ANTWERP this week. It’s one of those books I seem to find something new in, every time. This time, it’s clearer that he was test-driving the obsessions that led him to THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES and 2666. Technically, it’s a crime story, but it’s splintered, it’s broken memory and the sense of an audience witnessing a fractured monologue. Fundamentally odd. Perhaps even wyrd.

There are also germs of books he’d never write, little seeds scattered around that never quite got the rain they needed:

He used to make the rounds of the old city of Barcelona. He wore a long shabby trench coat, smelled of black tobacco, and almost always happened upon the most unusual scenes a few minutes in advance. In other words, the screen flashed the word unusual to make him appear. “I’d like to have a word with you in private,” he’d say.

It’s a difficult, fragmented, wonderful little book.

Loneliness is an aspect of natural human egotism. One day the person you love will say she doesn’t love you and you won’t understand. It happened to me. I would’ve liked her to tell me how to endure her absence. She didn’t say anything. Only the inventors survive.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. The current format is between one and three posts a day. Like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

STATUS: the daily noon-ish roundup post

• new James Ellroy book

• my missing Rainer Werner Fassbinder film, IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS

• blood and meat

• “killed two of her ghosts”

• writing problems

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AND FINALLY

SOEUR L’ENFER

“Dear Embryo.” I’m going to warn you now, this one is emotionally hard going. Fucked me up the first time I heard it, a few months back.

Right! Let’s see how that worked!

I’m off to dinner and the never-ending challenge of Not Getting Shitfaced From The Wine Pairings. Let’s see how tomorrow works out. Chances are good that it’ll be better than today.

W