The Sun Comes Up Anyway

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Starting this week, a new comics series on Orbital Operations, COLLIDE, with Jerome Eyquem. COLLIDE was previously PROJECT MACHU PICCHU.

I’m writing this bit outside, on what is forecast to be the last sunny day for a week. We’ve had our council elections, which were somewhat grim, but also kind of understandable. Not going to complain about it, not when everything else everywhere else in the world is a hell of a lot worse, and not when the sun is out, the mancub is chasing his tail in the garden and there are any number of good things to live with.

In this letter:

• Psychoses and syndromes

• A big book

• The News, with Lordess Foudre

• The first two pieces of COLLIDE

• various bits and pieces

• Deliberate Disconnection - it’s finally spring over there

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

• reading and listening

• Relay

THE WORLD SERVICE

PSYCHOSES AND SYNDROMES

I almost booked myself a ticket to a gig in Amsterdam this week. The ticket was twenty euros. The flights would have been around two hundred quid. A hotel would have been another few hundred. Then meals and taxis and general travel expenditure. Several hundred pounds for a two-hour twenty-euro gig. At which point, all my trained behaviour kicked in and and I closed all the tabs. I grew up poor and stayed poor until I was into my late twenties or so. And then I spent from then ‘til now as a freelancer, and have supported my family with an overdraft more than once. It is built into me to not spend a lot of money on myself, because work is always fragile, I have other people to pay for and eventually the work will run out.

This is basically Freelancer Psychosis. Which often goes hand in hand with Impostor Syndrome. More of us have it than you might think. I have stood in the lobby of an expensive hotel with a multiple-award-winning best-selling author and heard them whisper in my ear, “I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t belong here.” Very few of us get over it or relax into it.

Very few of the creative people you see talking online genuinely thought they’d be in that position, or even considered the possibility that people might listen to what they had to say - or were trained to deal with those demands. There ain’t a manual. You have to learn on your feet. You don’t have a playbook for when, for example, a reader contacts you to tell you that they and your friends don’t know if they can enjoy your work if they don’t know your position on some social or political issue. Which, believe me, is a thing that happens. And Freelancer Psychosis and Impostor Syndrome tell you, shit, the jig’s up, and that’s often when you see creative people behaving weirdly online.

Never assume that your favourite creatives have their shit together more than you.

And then, of course, I re-upped my membership with Tablet Hotels after having let it expire in 2020, booked two other gigs, disconnected for the day, went to the deli, had several glasses of expensive wine and blew the afternoon chatting and reading and drinking. Because I’m still me.

OPERATIONS

Finally getting into writing the novella PROJECT SODA SPRINGS, which I signed the contract for at the end of last year. This year has been a beast, and it’s way past time to knuckle down. Energy remains fleeting: lots of ideas, not enough sustained juice or time to get them all in action.

This monster arrived in via UPS:

It’s a $150 doorstop. I’m guessing it contains the twelve issues of THUNDERBOLTS I did, which I recommend to you because they comprise some of the finest storytelling work I ever saw Mike Deodato do. The scripts on the first six were passable with some good jokes - I’m still fond of the tv ads for Thunderbolts toys - and the scripts on the second six not so much, but Mike fucking killed it the whole way through. I assume this book is out now.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix.

ORBITAL

Elsewhere

Dirty Little Zine and Dirty Little Library - a web app for making foldable one-page zines and a library to upload them to so other people can find them. I think this is an excellent idea.

NASA photodumped 12,000 new images from the Artemis II mission.

“Aesthetic laundering” - Palantir and Lockheed Martin selling merch.

This two-minute-three-second thing from Charli xcx might be the oddest thing I’ve seen come out of the mainstream in a little while: cold, funny, very meta, cynical, mad with signs and signals.

People are building NEUROMANCER-style “cyberdecks,” only without the trodes or the function.

Headline of the week: Humanoid robot becomes Buddhist monk.

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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

BOOKS AND MUSIC ETC

These are all the unfinished things circling around my desk in bits this week:

Also obtained, OCEANINE, Jolanda Moletta, an all-vocal album created with eight other singers, which is fantastic.

Currently reading THE REVOLUTIONISTS (UK) (US) and HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY (UK) (US) and THE PASSAGE OF POWER: THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON Vol 4 (UK) (US) and:

THE NOMA GUIDE TO BUILDING FLAVOUR (UK) (US), which was gifted to me because everyone knows I am a sucker for a Rene Redzepi book. (And I’ve been making my own herbed salts for years.)

Some haunted sounds: NIGHT RITUALS by The Death Enigma.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Currently, I do one post a day, with maybe an additional note in the evening to log stuff. The daily note is like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

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PLAYLIST

RELAY 10may26

A short playlist of some of my more recent music purchases.

RELAY: 10may26

Links are visible when you hover over each track in the list. Start the first track and it will autoplay through the list.

I’m using Buy Music Club - it sits within Bandcamp’s protocol of allowing two free plays of any track on the service.

And that’s me for this week. See you next week for more new stuff. Have the best seven days you can.

W