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a letter from warren ellis

 

GREETINGS COMRADES.  First off, housekeeping.  I'm trying a different template, at the suggestion of my fine host, Campaign Monitor.  This may help out our benighted friends using Window Phone 8.  Or not.  We couldn't replicate their problem.  Freaks.  And, being a different template, this might look weird for everybody.  We are experimenting.  Bear with me.  Also, this letter is emanating from a different email address - warrenellis@orbitaloperations.com - so it may have landed in a different folder in your email client.  This is to forestall future difficulties.  I hope you find me!  I hope you can read this text!  God, things get complicated. ONWARDS.

How are you doing?  Okay?  

So I'd forgotten about this, but apparently I'm in Amsterdam giving a keynote for something at the end of October.  Here's the link, which just has my bio and the location, date, and time, which hahaha believe me was kind of handy hahaha oh god.  Did I mention I had a Neurological Event?

 
 

It's Some Books Time

So, I have this semi-regular guilty pleasure.  I read Jack Reacher books. No, no.  Don't leave.  Lee Child is one of the best carpenters there is.  A natural tree-splitter who can cleave language into regular functional blocks with single swings like a folkloric lumberjack.  Bang bang bang.  No splinters, no dust, nothing left over.  Everything fits into everything else.  From a writer's point of view, these books are often little masterclasses in the design, whittling and assemblage of a thriller.  PERSONAL is no different, except that Child reaches into the first person.  Because the book's called PERSONAL, right?  Jack Reacher, essentially a giant genetic freak who runs on coffee and murder, usually prowls the United States looking for people to explode and strangle, but this time he has to go to Paris and... well, Romford.  The trip is actually to London, but he ends up in Romford and Chigwell for the most part.  All of which is 45 minutes up the rail line from me.  Also, of course, I'm an occasional visitor to Paris.  So perhaps you won't derive the hilarity from this caper that I did, but it is still a remarkably well-built object worthy of study.

PERSONAL, Lee Child:  (UK)  (US)

Hugh Howey's BEACON 23 sequence concludes, with part five, in a remarkably compassionate and forward-looking story of war and mass murder.  It's been a fun little run.  Congrats to Mr. Howey on wrapping that up so nicely.

BEACON 23 5, Hugh Howey (UK) (US)

Next week, more serious works.  

 
 

IF DICKENS HAD BEEN A TV STAFF WRITER

 
 

Some years back, a group of sf writers started producing a thing called SHADOW UNIT, which intended to replicate the structure and systems of a tv series in prose.  Which, as a concept, I thought was awfully interesting.  

And today there is a thing called Serial Box, which intends to operate as a network for such projects...

Read the whole thing at MORNING.COMPUTER (link)

Or, you know, don't.

 
 

BORING ADMIN

BORING ADMIN, for those who care.  Since I moved to Campaign Monitor, the open rate on these emails has dropped to some 61%.  In a few weeks, I'm going to have to do a purge on the people who apparently don't open OO.  If you suddenly stop getting this email in, say, a month, just resubscribe.  In the meantime, keep clicking on Show Images and whitelist warrenellis@orbitaloperations.com.  I still haven't settled on a template, as noted - if you had issues with the Elektrograd special email or this one in your email client, please let me know.  What this is, at this point, is the story of me trying to build this newsletter into a Thing that has value, and I'm going to need your help.

For the moment, by the way, I'm dumping/logging a lot of my music listening at http://warrenellis.tumblr.com.  I'd rather be doing that elsewhere, but I don't have a better/simpler solution right now.  So.  If you need more disorienting crackle and subhuman howling in your life, that's where to go.

 
 

A long chain of barely-connected thoughts about comics and literary theory that I warned you about

Here's TS Eliot on James Joyce's ULYSSES: "...a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.... Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art."  Almost a century old, that quote.  And it speaks directly to modernist literature becoming postmodern literature and eventually to what James Wood called "hysterical realism," where, in his view, the welter of facts and events and *things* in a certain style of writing threw overboard the ability and intent to talk about real social conditions, real people and real beliefs.  "How the world works rather than how somebody felt about something."

And I'm sitting here thinking, yes, he had a point, when it's done badly (I'll leave you to decide those examples).   And, hell, maybe even when it's done well and according to an authors' intent of showing how the swirl of events makes even great humans into tiny flotsam (AGAINST THE DAY).  The systems of the world are, from one perspective, the only thing worth talking about, but maybe there are only so many times we can show that before it becomes "hysterical."

The comic has disadvantages and advantages in this space.  Comics struggles to condense into the per-page density of information that the prose page can hold.  On the basis of strict textual information containment, the comics page will always be lighter.  But that's a cold and incomplete way to look at the form.

There's a brilliant little bit on, of all places, Wikipedia, about literary maximalism -- the root of hysterical realism being the style of throwing everything even vaguely relevant into a book, kitchen sink and all: "These maximalists are called by such an epithet because they, situated in the age of epistemological uncertainty and therefore knowing that they can never know what is authentic and inauthentic, attempt to include in their fiction everything belonging to that age, to take these authentic and inauthentic things as they are with all their uncertainty and inauthenticity included; their work intends to contain the maximum of the age, in other words, to be the age itself, and because of this their novels are often encyclopedic."

(Bold text mine)

Suspension of disbelief is inherent in the comics form because we pick up a comic already understanding that we're seeing a heavily filtered and codified representation of the world.  Real and irreal use the same visual codes.  Unreal figures in comics are made of the same stuff as the real ones.  Talking about the systems of the world is just telling stories that try to explain how the world works.  Picking up a comic, you already know that at least one person is essentially lying to you.

(art spiegelman does a wonderful gesture to this in MAUS, where in book 1 all the Jewish characters are drawn as mice, in past and future, but when spiegelman shows up in book 2 to comment on book 1, he draws himself as a human wearing a mouse mask.)

++ writing most mornings at http://morning.computer

A piece in the Guardian on Friday flagged up the lack of lead romantic relationships in this year's crop of summer action movies, from MAD MAX to ROGUE NATION, theoretically because writers and filmmakers felt they could finally throw out inauthentic emotion for the sake of checking a box.  It reminded me, somehow, of a documentary on, I think, the GODFATHER trilogy box set.  Which is mostly Francis Ford Coppola saying the word "emotional" a lot.  And, in there, they filmed the first big meeting between Coppola and the cast for GODFATHER 3.  Where Diane Keaton, magnificent and razor sharp, stops Coppola's monologue and says, "My thing is -- how does it end?"  And Coppola bloivates and deflects, and Keaton, a hard edge in her voice, says "Yeah, but how does it END?"  Saying what the depressed-looking Pacino and the confused-looking cast wouldn't or couldn't.  Coppola goes on about having many things to resolve, pointing at the various relationships, the "emotional material."  It fell to Keaton, also a superb director, to point out that there wasn't a bloody story there.

 
 
 

ELEKTROGRAD: RUSTED BLOOD

Cover by the magnificent Roger Strunk.

A crime story set in a strange dream of a possible city.  A science fiction mystery about theoretical architecture, AI and vintage robotics. USD $1.99 or local equivalent. Around 11,000 words long.

Amazon: (UK)  (USA)

Smashwords

iBooks, Kobo, Nook

 
 

So, as of Thursday night, we'd moved around 1100 units of ELEKTROGRAD: RUSTED BLOOD, which put us at #1 on Kindle in a couple of categories.  Which was gratifying, and indicative of the units you have to move in order to reach #1 in subcategories on Amazon.  We peaked at something like #125 in Paid On Kindle Store in the US, which is also an interesting metric.  

If you're interested in this, though, consider: the ELEKTROGRAD posts on my Facebook Page got heavily filtered away from the 10K followers there by the algo.  Supposedly 16500 people follow my Tumblr but it's a very old account and that figure must include a vast number of abandoned accounts.  Same with the half-million followers on Twitter.  And the OO mailout reached about half of the 13000 subscribers.  Guesstimate the live accounts I can contact and that's still a pretty healthy organic reach.  And the conversion across Amazon US and UK, after 24 hours, was 1100 or so. From a position of significant privilege.

If you're wondering why I'm so interested in the first 24 hours, it's because the sales velocity drops to nothing after that, because sales are driven entirely by my network reach.

Ed and I have been looking at the numbers, and my organic (as in, not supplements by ads, paid surfacing, reviews, backlinks or any other addition) reach turns into a ceiling of around 1400 copies sold.  Summon Books is, by and large, a breakeven enterprise.

But it's nice to give those 1400 people something new to read for the price of a coffee and a biscuit.  And it gets things out of my head.

 
 

It is Sunday now

And I am fried, because I started work on a new thing Saturday morning and by 130am this morning I had about an issue and a half's worth of script. Which is slightly insane.  Not least because it still doesn't have a title and I only slotted in the character names at 1.15am.  But you have to go where the flow is, and by my third coffee on Saturday I could see the whole first act.  Which I thought would fit into a single issue, but I sort of massively overshot that.  So I'm going to leave this most unentertaining episode of OO here, and promise you that I will be more entertaining in the future, honest.

A long, strange ride it's been.  Some of you have been reading me in newsletters like this since the 1990s.  It's amazing to consider that any of you consider riding along with me.  But I'm glad you're all here.  Let's see if we can manage a few more laps around the sun together.

The Unsubscribe link is around here somewhere, but if you click it three other people will die.

-- W