Behold! Your weekly letter from me, Warren Ellis
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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where I did not have a relaxing break and am pretty much running on empty, and shouldn't even be writing this because I have a draft on something else to finish. HI! Glad to be back talking to you again. Welcome to 2019, which, hopefully, will not have 10,191 days in in like 2018 did.
NEWS: I have none. I am entering a zone where I will be unable to talk about much of what I do for much of this year. Which means I will have to talk about All The Other Things! (That's going to cause another rash of unsubscribes.)
Screenplays are like fucking Jenga. Take out one bit and the whole thing leans to the side. That's what I'm doing today. Hopefully the thing will still be standing in ten hours' time. Commercial screenplays have structural dependencies unlike anything else.
A nice bit from the book MAD AS HELL by Dave Itzkoff, about the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky:
Chayefsky found an ally for Altered States at the highest level of Columbia Pictures, where the former MGM executive Daniel Melnick had risen to the studio’s presidency. (Reviewing the screenplay a few weeks prior to his official appointment, Melnick had cheekily written to Chayefsky in a telegram, DEAR PADDY: STUNNING, BRILLIANT, BREATHTAKING—BUT WE CAN FIX IT.)
So this is a short one. I'm going to be warming up over the next few weeks, after a month off. Please bear with me.
True story: I was asked to play the role of the mysterious author Jerome F Davies in BLACK MIRROR: BANDERSNATCH. They asked me in late March 2018, for an early April shoot. Three days, and one of the days had not yet been specified. Six hours' train travel a day to get to the location and back. And I was just too busy with my own show (named the best animated series of 2018 by IGN, and also nominated in their shortlist for best overall television series of the year, thank you IGN) to burn three days, with the possibility that the floating day (the actual filming day) would be one I couldn't do. Still very grateful to have been asked.
So, hey, I was almost "that thing you have to look up on a wikipedia page."
A couple of recent blog posts probably worth reading together:
Nabil Maynard thinking about the state of social media. Sean Bonner on reconfiguring for the new year.
From this Verge story:
Everyone has a story about how they’ve never searched for something, but saw an ad for it after talking about it with a friend.
Me too. Happened to an acquaintance of mine after a text conversation in an app the other day.
Nabil's looking back in order to see a future internet, which is entirely valid. But I tend to side with the cynic in him that says the social internet is just busted.
Which reminds me! Craig Mod is launching a new newsletter that starts Jan 7.
Part of the impulse to launch Ridgeline is that I want to step away from Instagram. Many reasons why. The biggest is the “fool me once … shame on me. Fool me, like, you know, fifteen times …” feeling I have with much of social media. ...
as lovely as Instagram has been, with the loss of its cofounders in 2018, I feel like we are entering the Death By Monetization/Optimization™ spiral that Facebook is so very good at. Instagram will only get more complex, less knowable, more algorithmic, more engagement-hungry in 2019.
I want to have a place very far apart from that, where I can post photos on my own terms. Not have an algorithm decide which of my posts is best (have you noticed Instagram making the second photo in series appear first in the carousel?). And I don’t want to be rewarded for being anodyne, which is what these general algorithms seem to optimize for: things that are easily digestible, firmly on the scale of “fine, just fine.” It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the more boring stuff we shove into our eyeballs, the more boring our taste becomes.
He's very correct about all of this. I maintain my public IG as a way to remind the world I'm still alive and working (which I decided to do because otherwise I would vanish from sight in 2019, which is fine for me but not great for my publishers and production partners), but I save all those photos offsite, as I do with the "status" images.
I looked at and connected to Everythingggg once I got back into the office on Jan 2, but am now very much back to "this is a system to show me interesting stuff and buy music." Turn off everything that doesn't work for you, look for alternate processes to do the things you want to do better, speak on your own terms, block and mute and re-route.
So the other day Kieron Gillen sent me over the first issue of a comic he's doing with Caspar Wijngaard called PETER CANNON: THUNDERBOLT.
Peter Cannon, created around 1966, was the basis for Ozymandias in WATCHMEN. This first issue of the revival is like a whistlestop tour of thinking in superhero fiction from WATCHMEN to the present day, stopping off to drop the most THE AUTHORITY Year One line since I wrote Year One of THE AUTHORITY:
It's a furiously smart and visually spectacular comic that uses the character's somewhat meta standing in the canon (Gillen-level-toxicity pun laying there like a landmine) to observe, comment and tour the genre. This is your new favourite superhero comic.
Here's an interview with Kieron Gillen (riddled with transcription errors due to accent and speed of speech) that sheds some more light on it. I believe it's out later this month, so call or email or drop in on your local comics shop to make sure they get copies. Take a look at it. I thought it was really good. Here's a preview.
Great little thread showing key animation steps in a scene from CASTLEVANIA season 1.
(Thanks to Robin Sloan for pointing it out.)
Slow Radio! Here's a wonderful BBC podcast featuring Elfdalian, a near-extinct Swedish forest language.
SWEDISH FOREST LANGUAGE, you guys.
Some MORNING COMPUTER from over the holiday period:
New finds on Bandcamp include:
If you're just joining me and have forgotten why you subscribed: I'm Warren Ellis, author, comics writer, public speaker, screenwriter, producer, Doctor of the University of Essex, visiting Professor to York St John University, Patron to Humanists UK and writer/co-producer of CASTLEVANIA on Netflix.
Please add warrenellis@orbitaloperations.com to your address book so I don't keep getting marked as sp7m just for sending you an email with four fucking links in it.
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My Instagram is at @warrenellis and my clickstream dumps to https://twitter.com/warrenellis .
Here we go again. New year, new challenges. Also, new experiences, new discoveries, new opportunities, new space just to be yourself. Take the space for yourself. You deserve it, and you earned it just for surviving last year. Here we go again, you and me. Hold on tight. Look after yourself. See you next week.
- W
