Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where I am on a work sprint to try and get all the way caught up from my three weeks of sickness (plus Xmas/New Year, plus losing Nov/Dec to the book tour). I have to get another two jobs off my desk today, and another two tomorrow, and then finish two scripts Tues-Thurs before going into London on Friday to record a podcast interview with The Economist. These are The Full Speed Days, comrades, which only fit these accelerated times. I am having to Eat Healthily, and I finally got to start walking every day again, and I'm even getting out of bed before noon.

Horrible.

WE WORK WITH: Afua Richardson

AFUA RICHARDSON is an old friend of mine, and when I decided to expand the Three Questions format to cover more than just writers, I knew I had to talk to Foo. She's a brilliant artist, a singer and musician with an amazing voice, and one of the best humans I've ever met. So I wanted to ask her a bit about how she works.

Because Afua is lovely, she includes YouTube links to her work soundtrack at the end for you to explore and enjoy.

1) How do you capture visual thinking? I'm a writer - I always have a notebook to hand. Do you carry sketchbooks (what kind?), doodle on the phone - what are your tools for thinking on the go?

I can't leave my home with out carrying something to jot an idea down in. It depends on what kind of bag I'll carry. Small bags have Moleskine or some hardcover knock-off from Barnes and Noble. Medium bags have the perforated Master's Touch dry media 80 lb 130 g/m2 paper. It's smooth and I don't have to fight the medium to get my ideas out. I'll carry a few blue or red Prisma color "Col-erase" pencils so if I sketch something I like I can clean it up and keep my sketch underneath. Sometimes I like to see where my thoughts have traveled. Red lines and blue lines are less intrusive than grey. For works that are more serious, I'll use the Fabriano Hot Press water color paper. It feels more like Bristol 350 gsm. heavy stock. I had someone remark on its durability when they accidentally spilled coffee on it and not a single line was out of place.

I keep so many sketchbooks and notebooks that they've become visual diaries of my life. I can see who I was several years ago by opening a page. But , when there's something non-visual but it's describing a piece I want to deliberate on conceptually, I note it down in my Google Drive. I have folders and sheets for all kinds of thoughts. Character names I like, story arcs and notes about characters that I don't want to forget. I don't have a fancy smancy Android Note or iPad yet. But I have one in my sights. For now there is something warm and inviting about the texture of paper that I don't want to let go of. Digital sketches I have less affinity for and I tend not to keep.

2) What does a regular day look like for you? What time do you get up, how do you break up the day, do you have a set amount of work (like writers have daily word counts) to get done in any given day?

I am an early afternoon person. I wake up around 10 or so, but it's dangerous to reason with me before I've had tea or coffee. I'll wash the crusts of the night off and jot down all the things I want to accomplish. Not just in the day, but in my life. I have a WANT, NEED, WISH FOR list I try to update everyday. I'll feed my 3 talkative cats so they won't bring me bits of squirrels and yard snakes out of starvation and if I don't plop down in front of the computer for 12 hours it's a better day than if I do. I am very bad about not working. Some part of me feels guilt for needing human things like food and sleep. I have to give up the fact that I am not a cyborg and eat eventually. I'll get out and walk a few miles and remember the world outside and I'm much more productive. These days, I've been playing the flute more. Writing by the local lake and walking through the abandoned golf courses that line my neighborhood. It makes me forget I live near other people. A small 5 mile loop of trees and hills and running into the occasional Owl or deer. It's revitalizing. I was a city girl most of my life. I didn't grow up seeing what kind of tapestries the earth can produce. Just man-made structures and organized bits of nature. I'll go and walk right after I write this, probably. And if I find a quiet corner, I'll play my flute a lil. It's rather bohemian, but it's something I did long ago to remind me of who I want to be. Less in my head and a little more in the moment. Otherwise I work until I pass out then get up and do it again.

3) What part does music play in your work day? (And what have you been listening to lately?)

If I don't listen to music, some part of me goes south. I make a playlist per project. Sometimes I’ll just have a list of my favorite things. Lately I’ve been making YouTube playlists of artist I find in a particular genre and name them all kinds of silly things. I'll sing along as If I'm a part of the music. A background singer. Like a hats off to my former life. You can find some of my list on YouTube: Docta Foo’s Funk Face Activated or Docta Foo’s Aquatic Soul and keep updating them on YouTube.

(NOTE FROM WARREN HERE: you can make public playlists on YouTube? I should do that one day!)

Top 15 songs on my work sound track list: (I swear it was much shorter and I just couldn't help myself.) Without music I wilt. No one song or even five can encompass my love for it. I just wish I were a better musician and I'd make it more. But same goes for art. I guess I'll just keep making things and enjoying the things others make until I'm happier or make other people happy too.

Moses Boyd ' Rye Lane Shuffle' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbF3StGHMUk&index=5&list=PLOQbKkmmS8Sfgc8Kqn87BP78k_AkkvsLb

Katranada ' lite spots ' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZnou4zthz4

Flying Lotus ft Thundercat and Kendrick Lamar ' Never catch me' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXD0vv-ds8

Heartbreaks + Setbacks Thundercat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngyk7CJbJyw&index=7&list=PLOQbKkmmS8Sfgc8Kqn87BP78k_AkkvsLb

Run The Jewels ' Run the Jewels' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfuCLp8VEng

D'angelo ' the Charade' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3CunfPYkME

Sufjan Stevens ' I want to be well' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO17WyaU2mE

Zoo Brazil ' Heart's a legend' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8WYNr9rpDg

Kavinsky ' Nightcall ' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV_3Dpw-BRY

River Tiber ' Phrophets ' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmpObyYgF6I&list=PLOQbKkmmS8Sfi_xCw7tzpWxrWfwB03BTm&index=16

James Blake ft Bon Iver ' Forest Fire' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAJgs1P-uUE

Fink ' yesterday was hard on all of us' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vlcDyokH-k

Radiohead ' Daydreamer ' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTAU7lLDZYU&list=PLOQbKkmmS8SewOu9jU4Cc6Ef0YVEfxx6d&index=1

Jeux D'eau - Maurice Ravel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_36x1_LKgg

Ravel - Daphnis et Chloé, Suite n°2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amGl9Qmgu7E

(Work in progress from Afua's tumblr.)

++

Writing season 2 (2018) of CASTLEVANIA while going through animation passes on episode 3 of season 1 (2017) is kind of like those stories where time travel involves sending a consciousness from the future into a body in the past. We've been on this job a long time.

I saw Adi tweet this the other day, so I guess we can consider it in the wild now:

So I'm going to be bad and give you a better look at that logo.

Reviewing environment renders for season 2. We are very deep into this thing.

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PERSONAL APPEARANCES:

LONDON: 16 March - North London Literary Festival

LONDON: 24 March - Convergence Festival

Another London appearance will be announced shortly.

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THE ENDS OF THE WORLD, by Déborah Danowski & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, translated by Rodrigo Guimaraes Nunes.

...trying to bring out the various aspects of the feeling of “disconnection” that paralyzes us in the face of present events: “Nothing [is] at the right scale.” We are therefore not only dealing with a “crisis” in time and space, but a ferocious corrosion of time and space...

That is the condition in which to read a book about the ends of the world, yes?

The Anthropocene, or whatever else one might want to call it, is an “epoch” in the geological sense of the word; but it points toward the end of epochality as such, insofar as our species is concerned. For it is certain that, although it began with us, it will end without us: the Anthropocene will only give way to a new geological epoch long after we have disappeared from the face of the Earth. Our present is the Anthropocene; this is our time. But this present time progressively reveals itself a present “without a view.”

It is, as you may imagine, not a cheerful book. Academic in tone, but blissfully free from much technical language, and footnoted well - the joy of the good footnote is that it adds to the text at your leisure without disrupting the flow of or thinning the information in the main text. It's cold work, written with a flinty eye, but shot through with marvellous little observations and references:

Jorge Luis Borges’ well-known quip on metaphysics being a branch of fantastic literature... requires that the converse be true – fantastic literature and science fiction are the pop metaphysics (or the “mythophysics”) of our time.

Mythophysics!

Maybe, as Lévi-Strauss often remarked, science, which started out by separating itself from myth around three thousand years ago, will eventually encounter it once again at the end...

I'd been looking around for something to delight the part of my brain that demands to be warped and electrified by the strange, and there it is. Mythophysics!

This chilly book is actually full of new ways of looking at the world and new ways of perceiving and considering what comes next. It's remarkable and I'm enjoying it much more than I probably should.

THE ENDS OF THE WORLD, Déborah Danowski & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, translated by Rodrigo Guimaraes Nunes. (UK) (US)

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Didn't have time to write in MORNING COMPUTER this week after all, which was annoying, as I have a lot of stuff bouncing around my head that I want to get down on a screen in front of me so I can see it properly. I have a talk to write for an education-related thing I'm doing at the end of March, and I want to work some stuff out for that too.

I'm on a work marathon right now, and I suspect by Tuesday I will be Full Loopy and writing random shit into it. Be gentle with a brain-damaged old man.

++ This Week In Ambience

holy shit AS TRUTH Mixtape by Amnesia Scanner holy shit it's monstrous and huge and EVERYTHING and distorted and in pain and destroying and I'm slightly obsessed with it this week.
single track - V by Iona Fortune - neo-classical with a drone sound right at the start that reminded me of Spacemen 3's DREAM WEAPON. Beautiful strings-driven piece.
a new Motion Sickness Of Time Travel record is always a good thing

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I just read an article in which the excellence of newsletters is judged by the way in which the newsletters have no actual content and just link out to articles on webpages. Articles like that always make me feel like I'm doing it wrong.

Sad to note the cancellation of Emma Rios' and Brandon Graham's comics anthology ISLAND at Image. I firmly believe that anthologies are the lifeblood of the comics medium - think of METAL HURLANT, 2000AD, RAW and the like, and try to imagine the medium without them. And it takes editors deeply embedded in the comics community, like Graham and Rios, to make them - think of Jean-Pierre Dionnet, Francois Mouly, Pat Mills, Paul Gravett.

(Statement of bias: I did a blurb for Simon Roy's HABITAT, originally serialised in ISLAND)

ISLAND came close to cracking its format - the original, oversized, 72-page version with the spine, though incompletely designed and observed, was the perfect vehicle for a monthly anthology. While I don't think their experiments with the nature of serialisation quite worked, they brought some remarkable pieces to market, were continuing to evolve and were showing unusual and original creators to a wider audience. It will be missed, both for what it was and what it could have become.

In another life, I think I would have loved to have been an editor, at least part-time. I still dream of editing a literary journal of some kind - there's a long history of working writers editing journals and magazines, from Dickens to Steve Erickson. I'm not deeply embedded enough in the comics community to do a comics anthology - in fact, I'm more distantly separated from the comics community than ever before. But there need to be more. I hope someone else tries something like ISLAND soon. Several someones, in fact. Comics withers and darkens without anthologies.

Anyone used a Skyroam? My little Mingle wifi hotspot device for the US died last year, and I've been thinking about a replacement that'd work worldwide. But the Skyroam is apparently only 3G - does it do the job? Is there something better? Hit reply if you know these things.

And that's our show, as I need to try and bring this afternoon's script in for a landing. Remember to take care of yourself, and that no matter how weird it gets, your own oxygen mask goes on before you try to take care of anyone else. You being too fucked up to move doesn't help anybody. Take a deep long breath. Here we go. Hold fast.

-- W