The Cat Days Of Summer

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’m not ready for summer to be over. (And neither is mancub!) I haven’t done enough yet. Summer can’t be over! I still have half a case of summer ale left! Here’s the cocktail I bought herself last week.

I haven’t made it outside enough this summer. But I have to say, generally, while the year hasn’t been without its challenges, it’s been a really lovely time so far. 

THE WORLD SERVICE

Catching up on watchlists this week. I’ve been making brief notes on LTD. Been watching a film every night.  Tuesday I had to pull a eleven hour writing day, so it was pleasant to switch the phone back to Approved Entities Only and just settle in with a glass of mead and let the world happen to itself on its own. 

I hit Instagram with hammers until I basically turned it into a messaging app, and that’s where I’m leaving it for a few months. I’ve knocked 25% off my daily phone screen time over the last couple of weeks. And I found an ad-supported classical music channel on cable, so that’s what the television does now. 

Can we ban “needle drops” from all films for like five years? Because at this rate everyone’s favourite song will be ruined by being yoked to some bullshit movie’s mediocre scene that couldn’t be arsed to survive on its own merits. Hire a fucking composer. 

Off to a gig at the Jazz Centre on Saturday. I was intrigued by vibraphone jazz, in a quartet with NO SAXOPHONE. I like metallophones and percussion instruments generally. 

And I just realised I have lunch that day too AND I need to stop in at a couple of places to buy food so I am moving quickly along.

Wiley Wallace.

Karina Kristoffersen McKenzie.

Florentina Holzinger.

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

Graphic novella PROJECT EXPLOITS RIVER has now moved to lettering phase, with an old colleague of mine taking care of that.

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.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

ORBITAL

NEO

Hugh Howey has created a novel-writing application for Mac and Windows, and it’s free on GitHub.

That’s pretty amazing, right?

Sadly, on my Windows install, it sets off Smart App Control, and if you turn off Smart App Control, apparently you can never turn it on again without doing blood magic. Maybe you’ll have more luck!

A message from our supporters this week:

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Been talking to director, artist and writer Kevin Mellon for a while now - he can be found at his website and Substack - I was looking through his shop this morning, and look at this gorgeous cover art:

There’s all kinds of stuff at his shop, so go and take a look when you have a few minutes.

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

THE KILLER’S MARK, MW CRAVEN (UK) (US)

This is the most recent of the Washington Poe novels. In the previous books, Poe was a detective for the National Crime Agency, working with autistic computer genius Tilly Bradshaw. The books were funny, cracked along at a fine pace, and had a venal dark streak in them. At this point, Poe has married hot goth pathologist Estelle Doyle and lives in a country house, Tilly is a national asset for the Security Service, and she and Poe have left the NCA to start a private detective agency. In this book, a constellation of characters from previous books show up, which threatens what I call the MASH problem.

The first two MASH novels by Richard Hooker and William Butterworth are good. The second moves the characters from Korea to Maine. The next couple of books add more characters. A couple of books later, the books are in an absolute rigid template of all the characters coming back in every book and doing the same thing. And there are like fifteen of those books. The writers fell in love with all their characters - or, worse, decided their audience did.

MW Craven is a smart writer. He got bored of the NCA set-up, the serial killer of the year thing, and decided to go another way. And the crime story in this one is twisty and inventive and things get really fucking violent and horrible. But he’s starting to accrue more recurring characters, and he’s clearly fallen in love with them. And that can freeze a series. I still kind of feel like the previous book should have been the last one, which I know is uncharitable. And Craven continues to surprise as a creator of crimes. However, the point is reached, as it has been with Ed James’ ROB MARSHALL sequence, where you can’t enter the series anywhere other than the earliest books, and that the gain of pleasing familiarity in returning to beloved characters becomes a welter of them all showing up, with not enough space for any of them to be more than sketches, and the MASH problem takes hold. (Ed James deals with this by occasionally killing a bunch of them.) If you’ve read the others, read this one, it’s fucked up and the caveats are minor (he still can’t do an American voice, for example). But I think this is where I get off and wait for him to start a new series with everything he’s learned from this and the Ben Koenig sequence. 

Last weekend I was gifted two new books.

IN HER MIND A DARKNESS by LS Johnson is a surprisingly uncomfortable evocation of awkward mid-teen years, in all their threat, fear and sense of impending doom. It brought me right back to those days in my life. And then it gets really disturbing. It’s a squirming read.

It’s a 100-page story - Johnson shared with me that she self-publishes because she writes at “weird lengths” which publishers don’t like, and we’ve talked her about how the novella doesn’t fit anywhere these days - and, to my knowledge, only available from her website.

MUD DUCK, Travis Malone (UK) (US). Notes on this one next week, just wanted to thank Travis for it, and to thank LS Johnson for her sending her book to me too.

A new AAASMR music show from Angela Winter. All stored away on Mixcloud for you to listen whenever. Thank god.

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

• pretty sure I gave a story idea away

• brief notes on the film LET THE CORPSES TAN, which was a fun watch

• brief notes on the film FLUX GOURMET, which I enjoyed but I can see why others weren’t as captivated

• brief notes on the film IS GOD IS, which I thought was great

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AND FINALLY

SOEUR L’ENFER

In her human disguise as Nina Courson, she is appearing in the film ELECTRIC MEAT, directed by Dan Schaffer, who is making the Soeur videos but better known to many of you as the graphic novelist who did DOGWITCH among other things. Here’s the ELECTRIC MEAT page with the trailer.

You made it this far, all the way into the year of our hell 2026, and you should be proud of yourself. I’m proud of you. Do something nice for yourself today. Hell, do it twice. See you next week.

W