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Selection Box
Orbital Operations for 27 September 2022
Warren Ellis
November 27, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
This week: writing multiple storylines, things to think about
Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where we do not do the great Thanksgiving pause, but almost everyone I work with does. So, now I have sat down with a cup of Illy coffee - I developed a taste for it during a trip to Italy in the 90s, and it gives me the same joy now that it did then — I am, this week, just providing a small collection of things. A selection box.
Selection boxes were one of my favourite things about Xmas when I was very small.
As I write this, The Pause puts a pin in final casting for PROJECT WRITTLE 1, the first audio drama podcast on the slate, but it looks like we'll have all roles cast in another week or two. The logo treatment, from an old colleague of mine, came in on Friday, which was a pleasure to see. The LA entertainment business tends to hibernate until Jan 1 from here. Still writing the full outline for the first two PROJECT MONTMARTRE graphic novels, which now necessitates a tool I developed for something else:
TREES (all three volumes back in print, by the way!) was a great idea until I found myself actually having to write several separate storylines in it. I thought I'd just jump from one to the other in the scripting with no problems. Wrongggg. I couldn't keep the various threads straight. So what I did was write each storyline on its own, top to bottom, in its own file. The only time I've used Google Docs for scripting work. Once I had all the stories set, I decided where I would cut from one to the other. I gave each storyline a letter, and each section of the story a number. So, the China story was A, the Svalbard story was B, and so on. And so assembling the full book became a matter of deciding the cuts: whether A1 came before or after B1, and so on until all the stories were completely interleaved.
I should have known better than to try and write MONTMARTRE in any other way. If I do it any other way, one or more of the various storylines will be undeveloped and underserved. This is why some tv writing uses index cards and serial killer walls. I was on a show once that used a vast wide whiteboard to hold the entire season. I have, in the past, printed out all the storylines of a thing, cut out the sections and pasted them in a new order in a notebook with a Pritt stick.
The outline will end up the size of a novella. It's a big and complex story, and all its mechanics need to be settled in advance of scripting.
But not as bad at this: a zoomable, fully readable copy of Alan Moore's schematic for BIG NUMBERS.
Another thing I just turned up: a scan of Alan Moore's account of visiting the US for the first time, as published in an issue of ESCAPE in 1984. I've wanted to re-read this for a long time.
I loved ESCAPE, and used to read each issue to death. I owe Paul and Peter a lot for extending my education.
Without ESCAPE, I never would have known to drag my family into a Mariscal exhibition I noticed happening as we passed the Design Museum, and got to introduce his work to my daughter in wonderful style:
When I talk about gardening as horticultural therapy, I'm not kidding. The standard is social horticultural therapy, and if you have a community garden in your area, there's a good chance they'll offer a social horticultural therapy program. This is actually a good time of year to look into it, because you'll get to go through the whole growing year from cold ground and preparation to harvest. I do something different, a guided form: I talk to someone first or just pick a thing to work on myself, and do the work on it in tandem with a garden work session, because the thing about gardening is that you can't think about too many things at once without doing it. Having one thing in mind while doing one task is focussing and meditative.
And then a cat walks into the garden and looks you right in the eye as it shits in the flower bed you just cleared.
Here's Saturday's work. This bed is a dead nightmare that has been cleared once already, and then the wind and the late rainfall brought seeds and nutrients, and the crimson clover I sowed as green manure got smothered by leaf-fall. So I spent a few hours raking out the bed entirely. Smothered the bed with cardboard. And them covered it with compost. And then ran out of compost.
This will just receive an occasional weeding until spring, once I get all the compost I need. And then I'll adjust the contouring, sow wildflowers and pollinators, set water dishes in and basically try to grow myself a bee/butterfly area that also serves as a wildlife highway. After this summer's experiments, the plan for next year is pollinator wilding and food forest.
Polish poster for Godzilla vs The Sea Monster.
Ed James, who wrote the rather good THE HOPE THAT KILLS, is doing a virtual book launch for his new novel on Wednesday. Details here. If you click the "enter the giveaway" thing, you get two free ebooks as a direct download - I've read CUDDLY TOY, which is a fun, clever little thing.
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.
The tip jar helps me keep the lights on.
BOOKS/NON-FICTION
The piano player in the canteen barely attracted attention from the masters of revolutionary Petrograd. If they bothered to speak to him at all, they would notice nothing unusual in his destitute appearance and accentless Russian. Yet had the Cheka—the Bolshevik secret police—only known, their ultimate foe was sitting among them. Sir Paul Dukes, the greatest intelligence officer in the history of Britain’s MI6, ran a stunningly successful network of agents. He did this not while living in the sewers, or skulking in an attic, but hiding boldly in plain sight, as the pianist in the Cheka’s canteen.
A kindle single, SPYCRAFT REBOOTED. Short, obviously, but useful - it was a research purchase that got forgotten about and shuffled to the end of my queue, and then I needed it for research on a new idea.
Making people risk their lives, careers and reputation by handing over secrets entrusted to their charge is difficult, but the elements are straightforward. The acronym MICE (Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego) is a handy way of remembering the main approaches.
Some of it is probably very obvious, and it's written more as a primer than a specialist text, but there are handy perspectives and little nuggets like the above that have interest and utility. (UK) (US)
And now I descend into my winter reading projects.
CURRENTLY LISTENING
SPEKTRMODULE
Jim Butler regularly releases meditative ambient music on Bandcamp, all of which can be streamed for free a couple of times before the system asks you to pay. This one kept me company on Thursday morning.
And here's this week's seasonal music:
Apparently last week's YouTube link didn't work outside the UK. Sorry about that. Bloody Vevo. But here's a thing done in the same style, and for you old analogue music and recording nerds this may be amusing. In 1979 Mike Oldfield re-recorded the theme to the venerable British kid's tv show BLUE PETER, and they filmed him doing it:
GOT MORE TIME?
KEEP READING
I hope you're well, or as well as can be, and that the next week is kind to you. Do something nice for yourself, get some air and take in the winter. You made it to another one, and they're all kind of wonderful in their way. Have a stretch, have some soup, have a bit of pleasure at being here. I'm glad you're here, and so are other people. Take care, see you next week, and I hope you liked your selection box.
W