gonna die in a norwegian forest soon No Images? Click here ORBITAL OPERATIONS
Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where I am working to finish a few scripts and I am so tired with so many aching muscles that all I really want is for someone to drug me and put me to bed for a month. Seriously, just dart me in the neck and tell me what to do. I'm on a plane to Norway in nine days and it's going to take most of my remaining strength just to get in the car at 7am that day. And it's now 815pm on Sunday and I have to do one big push to finish this script and then break down the structure of the talk I have to give at Shadow Channel, so this newsletter is just going to be the stuff I put in it during the week. ++Reminder: there will be NO newsletter on Sept 24 or October 1. I'm travelling, without a laptop. I am currently looking at my shoulder bag and wondering if I can really do a week on the road with just that. It's a Maxpedition Jumbo Versipack for reference. (UK) (US) I will, however, continue to journal to morning.computer while I'm on the road, as is my practise. Recently: This is from the first issue of a comic called ALIEN TOILET MONSTERS by artist Eric Barnett and my old friend Carol Zara. What immediately hits you, after the hot opening of weird alien beasties and desert animals, is Barnett's facility with people and expressions and details. Every face you see is alive and complex. The characters ramble on at length and it's good, it's alive and true. Carol herself shows up partway through the book - as I've said to her, it still feels like a weird choice - but Carol and Eric have "Carol" pinch an inch of bellyfat as she ruminates on a relationship going south and it feels depressingly real. More real than you'd expect from something called, yes, ALIEN TOILET MONSTERS. It's a peculiar book, dense with weird science fiction and social media callouts and relationship sketches and how alien life forms fuck and a grim policing of the multiverse and a diner with its tv stuck on a life feed of scientists narrating said alien fucking while people are trying to eat. If you see it, grab it. It's got energy going in a thousand different directions, it's eccentric and crooked and a little awkward sometimes, they do too much too soon, it's not completely sure what it is yet, they're going to be learning in public, bit it's packed as hell and it made me smile. At their website, you can find a list of retail stores stocking it, or just ask yours to order it. (Yes, sometimes I "review" comics too, the same way I talk about books. Only I never make it to the comics store and I have no idea what's going on in comics, so it only happens when my friends send me things.) ++Another old friend, Melissa Gira, is doing a new podcast called TERRIFIC CITY, "on the city and screen life of 1970s America." And if you're in NYC on Sept 24, my friend Kyoto Kitamura is performing for free at the Downtown Music Gallery. Here's a preview of MICHAEL CRAY 1. And here's Khary Randolph's variant cover for issue 2. ++ FAQWhenever I talk about daily routines or work processes, I get several queries that are variants on this: what about your staff? Ain't got no staff. If you email me from this newsletter, the email is read and answered by me, not an assistant, not a PR. I don't have a PR. PRs cost you five thousand American dollars a month, and that's a starter rate. I don't have a speaking agency. I have nowhere to even put an assistant. And, frankly, I have the kind of job that would require an assistant to own my brain in order to do their job. So it's just me here, with my whiteboard and Google Calendar. I have a manager for my film and tv work in Los Angeles, and a lawyer in Los Angeles, and a book agent who probably thinks I'm dead because he hasn't heard from me since March. That's it. It's doable. Some days are rougher than others, obviously, and I don't think I've hit inbox zero yet this year - it's constantly hovering around inbox 20. (Kieron Gillen, by contrast, is at inbox 302,746.) The first and best trick is to have an email address for work and close friends and an email address that's public-facing. That's the one responses to this newsletter go to. I check it every couple of days. The other one is private, and it's hooked to my phone's email app (Airmail, iOS). If someone comes through the public-facing account that's important, migrate them to the private account. When I did this, my morning email load went from 200+ to 20, overnight. Here's the thing: you get to choose your cognitive load. I'm a high information processor, and even I have rules. The only inbound to the phone is work, friends and comrades and the newsletters and information sources I select. And even I'm processing less than I used to, because I have hypertensive stress now so I need to attempt to manage it, and the work is a lot more cognitively demanding than it used to be now that I'm involved in producing tv shows and working in film again and co-running the Wildstorm stuff with my editor Marie Javins and etc etc etc. Nobody else gets to tell you what's not too much for you. Only you get to make that call. Get off Facebook, delete Messenger, run blocks on your phone number, go locked on Twitter, take your Instagram private, whatever it takes to get comfortable. Via John Coulthart: post-punk stamp designs: ++And I'm out. Talk to you again on October 8. I'm expecting to write to you in a few weeks. Hold on tight while I'm gone. |