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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I will personally always believe that Chuck Norris snapped Death’s neck with a kick and then just changed his name and moved to a different town.

In this letter:

• Sunfall

• Vertical

• work

• brain cells

• skulls

• fog

• missing

• Eighties

THE WORLD SERVICE

SUNFALL

I’m mapping sunfall in the garden again. Our garden is north-facing, and shadier than I would like. This was fine when it was a family garden and plants were just decoration, but the kid moved out a dozen years ago (Jesus, seriously? Twelve years since my girl left home?), and a few years back I started reclaiming it after many years of neglect to try and grow stuff in earnest. I need the light to grow and ripen things. I am currently peering at the end of the garden, which often catches the most light, and thinking about building a structure there to plant soft fruits under and then net to protect them from birds and the local terrorist squirrel cell. I have fifteen more raspberry canes coming in, and I have to start the strawberry seeds next week. All the daffodils came up blind this year, so now I have to wait for the foliage to die back, dig up the bulbs, see if they need splitting, amend the soil and replant them.

These are my days: writing, (failing at) growing things, listening to music, reading, watching the occasional thing, sitting at the coffee shop or the deli, a sneaky run out to the Thai place for a plate of Weeping Tiger. Spring is here and I am waking up and amending the soil. If you’re a writer, you know this: you need the time to make the compost that the things grow out of. I once had lunch with a famous writer/director who told me that after a big project closed, the first thing they did was hide away with a bunch of books and turn the phone off, because they needed to “fill up again.” If you push and push and push the words out, eventually you run out of the inspiration for them. A big part of writing is reading, and a big part of writing is living, even if it’s just living alone and letting the outside world fill you up, even if it’s just building things that aren’t stories.

(Or aren’t just stories: because when I get those canes up and netted, the story becomes “what I grew for Herself’s breakfasts this summer.”)

If all goes to plan, I’m sending her off on holiday next week - got her a trip to the other side of the world with her friend for her birthday. Gonna be just me and the cats for a month, and the writing, the building and the growing.

OPERATIONS

• Waiting on notes for prose serial now codenamed PROJECT BASEL

• Closed a film option on one of my books with a production company and director

• Comics serial PROJECT SHANKILL now in production, I believe, and that’s a thing for this newsletter

• files uploaded to publisher for reprint deal PROJECT WALLOPS

• PROJECT EXPLOITS RIVER is being lettered, and the plan is for it to go into the pipe right after PROJECT LOST SIERRA

• Any and all of these things could go wrong at any time - it’s publishing, nothing is guaranteed.

• This is just the topslice of my daily work - I do a lot of creative consulting and other things under NDA, the sort of under-the-hood stress-free stuff that’s just aid and play.

• Somewhere out there is a vertical film that either Mike Leigh or Ken Loach shot for, I think, the British Film Festival as a promo for the event. I saw it years ago online and have never been able to find it again, but I think about it every time I see an article about vertical-video microdramas. I know that most vertical-video microdramas are soap operas, but I bet you there’s space to do serious material in that form.

ORBITAL

• Staff at New Data Center Powered by Human Brain Cells Need to Swap Out Cerebrospinal Fluid Every Day. I feel like that’s close to something I wrote in the Nineties.

• Fantastic trompe l’oeil work on graph paper:

• “Is social media over for creatives? Or have we just woken up to what it is?”

• “What’s Next For Social?”

• Because I figure some of you still want to work the socials. Personally, it’s all I can do to look at Instagram once every couple of days.

• We always pay attention to a new ambient record by Keith Berry

• Quentin Tarantino & Sylvester Stallone Team Up to Write and Direct 1930s Black-and-White Gangster Series. Tarantino has a lot of opinions I don’t agree with, but I’m actually right with him on Stallone’s PARADISE ALLEY being a good film. I watched it as a kid on tv - it came out in 1978 - and that was the first time I ever heard Tom Waits.

If you’re interested in weird stuff, or remember the excellent fringe publisher Headpress, and are anywhere near Manchester in May, this is for you: the Headpress 35th Anniversary event.

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This week’s bizarrerie is a favorite factoid that I wasn’t able to work into my book Blood Eternal, even those a chunk of the book is set in the neolithic and deals with the (possible) beliefs of the Near East in that time. Specifically: the skull cult.

From the proto-cities around Assyria and the southern Levant, there is evidence that people would bury their dead, exhume them later, remove the skulls, and, well, probably keep them on display in their homes. The skulls were sometimes painted, and even remodeled with plaster, which is eerily similar to how we re-flesh a skull in facial reconstruction today. There’s a skull from ancient Jericho from about 7000 BCE with the plaster still on—and cowrie shells for eyes—in the Ashmolean.

Other plastered skulls have been found at Ayn Ghazal in Jordan, Tell Ramad and Tell Qaramel in Syria, Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe in Turkey, and Atlit Yam off the coast of Israel. So this practice spread an impressive distance over the years we date the different sites.

I honestly think about this all the time. How has ancestor worship changed over the millennia? Was this as simple as keeping your honored ancestors around to inspire you and watch out over you? Or was it boasting of an important ancestor—“Check out Great-Grandpa over there on the ledge! He was the chief priest back in the day, so you’d better show this family some respect!” Sometimes I lean towards it being obviously very simple, and other times I feel the great gaping chasm of time, and despair that I could ever understand the mind of a Neolithic human. (Not that this stopped me from putting them in my book, mind you.)

Obviously, views on keeping human bones in your home have drastically changed since that day, although oddly, ashes are totally cool. I blame the insane “death care industry” for that—and there are plenty of future bizarreries from that topic to come!

Raven Belasco is the author of the BLOOD & ANCIENT SCROLLS series of novels and the novelette THAT LESBIAN VAMPIRE PIRATE STORY. Her website is at ravenbelas.co and her regular newsletter is at https://ancientscrolls.beehiiv.com/ .

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

I’m a finder, a specialist, the result of my experiences, first in Paris, then London, where I developed certain skills, or perhaps sympathies, useful to the process of finding people. Perhaps it is mainly a question of temperament: most of the missing are found in the memories and imaginations of those who knew them.

The third of The Finder Mysteries by Simon Mason, short crime novels that land somewhere between Simenon and Ballard in their affect. Mason really nails this one: it’s twisty and clever. A sex worker who supposedly died at the hands of a serial killer five years ago may not be dead - and she may not have been just a sex worker.

These books land in a way I appreciate: they have a weird sense of reportage to them, almost a chill (Ballard), but are small psychological detective stories about broken lives (Simenon). These books are all self-contained stories, and I am hoping there will be more of them.

THE WOMAN WHO LAUGHED, Simon Mason (UK) (US)

(30k word novels like these are precisely what I would love to be doing)

PICK ONE!

I was prevailed upon to make an Eighties playlist a while back. I have randomly scrolled it, and I’m going to list the eight tracks I can see. Which of these would you put on an Eighties playlist?

Last week I asked you:

How many books a year do you read?

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 0-10 (149)
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 11-20 (169)
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 21-30 (163)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 31-40 (120)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 41-50 (85)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 50+ (182)
868 Votes

via @beehiiv polls

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.

• The New Notebook System: Third Stage

• The New Notebook System: Fourth Stage

• springing

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And that’s me this week. Been a stressy week over here, but today I am taking a breath and just sitting in the light for five minutes. You should too. See you next Sunday.

W