it's always later than you think
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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where it has been a definite week, including getting bits of myself scanned in hospitals and ordering blood tests. Nothing to worry about, just the sort of thing it's smart to get done when you reach my advanced age and you've got pre-existing conditions and something's just slightly out of whack and your national healthcare system is still universal. I'm probably not dying. Which is just as well, because I don't have time to die (glares at half-written screenplay, series beat sheet, fuckton of unanswered email, bible rewrites, comics scripts in various states of broken).
People wonder why I just want a quiet life.
"You're young to have hypertensive stress," the doctor said. Hahahahahohgod
So! What's next?
I'm speaking at Impakt Festival: Haunted Machines & Wicked Problems, October 25 in Utrecht. More details to follow. Looking forward to seeing Anab Jain and Liam Young again, as well as organisers Natalie Kane and Tobias Revell.
I'm also passing through Amsterdam at the end of September to give a sermon at Shadow Channel. I presume it's being video'd.
If you're just joining me and have forgotten why you subscribed: I'm Warren Ellis, author, comics writer, public speaker, screenwriter, producer, visiting Professor to York St John University, Patron to Humanists UK and guest tutor to the Shadow Channel masters programme at the Sandberg Institute.
Please add warrenellis@orbitaloperations.com to your address book.
If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you'd like to infect your friends with it, by driving them to http://orbitaloperations.com and forcing them to give me their email address.
++ THREE QUESTIONS: Jeff Noon
For many of you, Jeff Noon will need no introduction. Author of the seminal SF novel VURT, the astonishing NEEDLE IN THE GROOVE, and of the brand new novel A MAN OF SHADOWS, Jeff Noon has been at the crest of speculative fiction for very nearly twenty five years. He's a legendary figure. I blurbed A MAN OF SHADOWS, which was a rare privilege, and I said:
This superb novel of light, glass and blood proves again that Jeff Noon is one of our few true visionaries.
By arrangement with Angry Robot Books, three questions about writing with Jeff Noon:
What kind of novelist are you? Are you one of those terrifying people who starts with an image or a notion and just plunges into the thing without a roadmap, or are you a serious outliner who knows where they're going before they write the opening line?
I’m much more the first than the second. I start with an idea, something that intrigues me, excites me: the spark. Something that has the potential to sustain the length of a novel. Actually, it’s more that two or three ideas come together and clash and merge in an interesting and unexpected way. Once this central concept is lodged in my brain, I think about it, add to it, start to make notes, pen on paper, not screen. Everything is fluid. With A Man of Shadows the starting point was the city of light and dark. The location emerged first in my mind, and then I populated it, with people, and with ideas and emotions. So, at a certain point I will start to write. I work one chapter at a time. I make notes on a single A4 sheet of paper about the events and emotions of the upcoming chapter, then I write it. I write quickly in this first draft, not changing much, trying to resist going back and fixing things. One chapter after another: makes notes, write, make notes, write. I’ve also got another A4 list on the go: things to include at some future point. And during this process, I’m starting to build up an idea in my head about the overall structure of the novel, the grand arc, beginning to end. And then, hopefully, I will get what I call the Key Moment: this is an event somewhere towards the end of the novel which I really, really want to write, I can see myself writing it in my mind’s eye, and I know it will be a very exciting thing to do: so that becomes my goal, my drive, the fuel that keeps me going through the one hundred thousand words, to get to that moment, that reward. So that’s my overall process for the first draft. It’s usually pretty chaotic, words tumbling over each other in a mad rush, and (because I write so quickly) loads of spelling mistakes! The second draft for me is taming that wildness, getting it into shape.
When you're in a book, do you aim for a daily word count and walk away when you hit it, or do you just see where the day takes you? Interested in what a writing work day looks like for you.
No daily word count, not at all. First thing I do every morning is write my microstories, or “spores” as I call them, for Twitter. I try to write a number of these a day: sometimes one, sometimes six, sometimes twenty, depending on how inspired I feel. This is my writing laboratory. Then I’ll start on the novel. I will bring up the current page on the screen, and leave it there for a bit. I might read a book, watch a bit of television, but I’ll keep glancing at the laptop screen every so often, at the three slanted lines I use as a marker, and then I’ll begin. Years and years ago I read a book about how to be a writer, and picked up the tip of leaving the day’s writing at a mid-point, an exciting event, or a suspenseful moment, rather than working towards the end of an episode, or chapter. Because of this, it’s usually fairly easy for me to start writing: after all, my character’s probably in danger, or falling in love and I need to save them from that fate, or push them towards it, whatever it might be. Again, it’s all about making the work an exciting process for me, as the writer: this keeps me going. I tend to write in a lot of short bursts throughout the day, rather than longer sustained periods. But sometimes I’ll fall into a trance, and then look up suddenly and a good number of pages have been written, and I can’t remember doing it. That’s always a nice feeling. I’m not overly aware of how it happens, but day by day, the novel is written. When I read through the whole narrative for the first time, I’m always surprised by things: did I really write that? I truly can’t remember doing so.
I have this theory that a lot of writers have a bucket list of media, genres or styles they want to try at some point. Can you name one, or do you think differently in this regard?
I’m committed to novel and story writing at the moment. That said, I’d like to write a comic or graphic novel one day. I love the medium, as a reader, so I’ve always harboured dreams of creating my own. But one of my bucket list items has now happened: the writing of a crime novel. I’ve always been a fan of murder mysteries, so writing one was always on the list of things to do. However, because of the way my mind works, I tend to think up weird ideas that have some extra dimension to them, something above or to the side of reality, so it didn’t seem likely that I’d ever come up with a straight crime idea. (A Man Of Shadows is a case in point: it’s a private eye thriller, but set in a science fiction city.) And then one day I met a friend for coffee and he told me this strange little story about the early days of a very famous rock band, a true story, and one I’d never heard before. As I was walking home my mind started to spin off from that story, and I came up with this really interesting serial killer concept. I told the idea to a few friends, and was encouraged enough by their responses to start writing the novel. Although it’s a crime book, it still circles around the obsessions of my SF work, just in a more down to earth fashion. It was a good experience, a change of intent, a new discipline to learn. Where that will lead in the future, I can’t yet say, but I sense new possibilities ahead.
- Jeff Noon's website
- Jeff Noon on Twitter, where he does the Spore experiments
- A MAN OF SHADOWS, Jeff Noon (UK) (US)
++
- BBC World Service to broadcast a radio programme into North Korea in the middle of the night.
Solarpunk Anthology Translation: The first English translation of a groundbreaking Brazilian anthology of science fiction stories set in sustainable future worlds.
from the excellent Planetary Folklore tumblr:
++ SPEKTRMODULE
The Colin Stetson record I linked last week? I was copypasting on the fly - if you scroll down that page, you see that it's actually by Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld. Apologies for the omission.
Gil-Estel by Thangorodrim is such a wonderfully immense piece of dungeon synth ambient that I only noticed later, in the notes, that it's Tolkien-inspired. As a life-long Tolkein-allergic, I can tell you that it affects the music not at all.
Also enjoyed this week:
Histós Lusis by Toàn
I swear, the minute Bandcamp starts an affiliates programme, I'll be a thousandaire.
Just arrived: new book from my friend Andrew Copson, Chief Exec of Humanists UK., of whIch I am a Patron. (We used to be called Distinguished Supporters.) Andrew is one of the nicest people on Earth and mixes a good cocktail. Hanging out with him in Martin Miller's old house during the How The Light Gets In festival was one of the highlights of that year for me, and I'm looking forward to this book immensely.
Out September 28th, it looks like. (UK) (US)
(That year, I also got to spend time with Martin himself, who was a magnificent human being, and his loss still seems immensely unfair. I remember being driven up to the house, with Caitlin Moran in the back seat, and her saying something like, Oh my god, look at that insane place, you're going to die here and never be seen again....)
Also, this amazing looking book by my children Declan Shalvey & Jordie Bellaire with the marvellous cartoonist Philip Barrett is out Sept 20. Here's an interview and a few pages.
In Limerick City, Jimmy “Hardy” Savage is a gangster on the rise, facing trouble from all sides. With the local cops, rival gangs, his best mate, and his mammy all out to stick a knife in him, will the bollocks live long enough to get to the top? More importantly, will he pay me back that fiver I gave him last week?
++
I have conducted my semi-annual clean of my Twitter account, and am considering doing the same to my IG account. I'm mostly dark for the next few weeks anyway, finishing some jobs, and it may crash into my usual winter hermitage. Speaking of - I note in advance that there will be no September 24 or October 1 editions of this newsletter, as I will be on the road without a laptop. Oh yeah. I'm going to attempt to do nine days' travel on just a shoulderbag. This will either be a masterpiece of advanced planning or an utter disaster. I have a Kindle Paperwhite, an Amazon Fire 8, and an iPhone 6S, and that and a couple of notebooks and my earbuds are all I'm planning to take in terms of gear. I'm at a private conference in a remote part of Norway for a week, and then crossing to AMS, so I need to be present and speaking and Not Writing most of the time anyway.
The October 8 newsletter may illustrate some amusing catastrophes.
++
I really need some kind of system to tell me how many newsletters I'm subscribed to. People keep asking me, and, at this point, I have no idea. I know how many websites I have in my RSS reader -- ah, websites! Doesn't that almost sound quaint now? I see people in my RSS reader, writing in their websites about how it seems archaic and almost private and nearly heretic to be doing such a thing now. "Pivoting to video" has been said so many times this year that it's officially boring. And video is so slow! Facebook Live, Facebook Watch -- people are still going to Periscope to stream! -- it's public access cable, the right to be on television. There was a time where VIDEODROME looked dated, but, hey, people really do have special television names now. "PewDiePie" still not being as cool as "Brian O'Blivion," but still.
The television screen has become the retina of the mind's eye. That's why I refuse to appear on television, except on television. Of course, O'Blivion was not the name I was born with. That's my television name. Soon all of us will have special names, names designed to cause the cathode ray tube to resonate.
And yet. Drudge Report hasn't materially changed in twenty years. Bannon's back to the Breitbart site and crowing about "having his hands back on his weapons." I feel like maybe there's some weird almost-hopeful blindness about basic websites no longer being important because We've All Moved On To New Things. But, while you were making 30-second news shows for Snapchat and treating the open web like it was the dark web, all kinds of weird shit was happening out here.
And now, hey, here we are again with newsletters - which I've been doing since the 90s - which go straight to your email object so you don't have to go hacking out in the wilds. (And, also - note how newsletters like GOOP have no actual content and each section is just a link out to one of their website pages, leading you down a private path to a walled garden lined with decorative wasp's nests and vagina steamers.)
The weirdest cultural thing you could do this year is probably start a blog. Even launching an indie print magazine doesn't sound as oddly off the map.
Take care of yourself. Everything's gone nuts but it doesn't have to take you with it. Remember the drill - put your own oxygen mask on first before you try to help others, please. Hold on tight. This is not the thing that's going to kill us. See you next week.
- W
