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This is the Orbital Operations for12 APRIL 2020A letter from Warren Ellis aboutOH GOD, I DON'T KNOW
Well, that was a meatgrinder of a week. I swear to you, I got up at 10am on Wednesday and by noon I was wrung out and overloaded for the day. By five pm I was like "ooh, Arrow Video are having a sale, I should use the last of my strength to browse dvds and blu-rays" and almost nodded out before I clicked "buy." On the other hand, I did get seven discs for fifty quid, which really isn't bad. I posted the following on the website Thursday night: ## So, nobody needs another plague post, but let me tell you. I’ve been running full speed since last August, with just a little lull in January. In March — you remember March, it was 100 days long — I was supposed to take a very long weekend off. I was downing tools, getting the hell away from screens, and disappearing off somewhere with a book in one hand and currency in the other with which to pay people to bring me cocktails and meats. If I don’t switch off and go dark for a week every six months, when I’m working at this speed, bad things happen. Well, it’s April. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a month. And my system for surviving 1000mphclub, it turns out, has failure points. Like, everywhere I usually go is closed and I’m not allowed outside. Hahahah. I started crashing on Monday. Thought it would pass, and that it was just down to a lot of sudden work pressure of the using-up-decision-cycle kind. Today I barely made it out of the grocery store under my own power. So I guess it’s time for me to figure out a new way of doing things, too. ### And now it's Saturday, and I am here to tell you I have somewhat overdone it. I have full exhaustion/hypertension symptoms. But this, too, will pass.
But, let me tell you, fuck the socials. I have several carefully curated Twitter lists that usually run on my big screen, all news and music and culture and what have you, and right now they are all the fucking same. Even Instagram's just guys baking fucking bread like they've rediscovered the fucking soil or something. So I have switched Tweetdeck off for good. Sometimes, I run Bloomberg TV on the big screen, because it has graphs and numbers and news tickers all moving very pleasingly. I know nothing about finance or business, so it's all just vaguely hypnotising infographics to me. The rest of the time, I'm just screening films in here all day. Usually on mute, because I have a lot of music, you know how I do this by now. I may switch to TV box sets and try playing Sunn 0))) over the original COSMOS. Some days I have to be careful with the choice, or, as I did Monday, I find myself filling notebooks with scribbles about colour in storytelling during a rewatch of HERO. Here's a true thing I saw someone say before I turned the world off: for genuine joy and good feeling, once a day you should watch the Interlude from HOLY MOTORS:
I've gone Full Druid again, by the way. I started reading THE DIG by Cynan Jones:
And it's very good but fuck me is it bleak. So I'm going to pick it up again next week and finish it for my own pleasure but I don't think I can honestly exhort you, in these times, to grab it just yet because... look, it's gorgeously written --
-- but it is a meditation on nature, violence, grief and death. In parts, even I, who have no truck with your hu-man "emotions," get an uncomfortable little frisson of "why are my eyes making water" sooooo
I finally started reading William Gibson's AGENCY instead. I'd been saving it. I mean, it took Bill six years to write it, it'll be a while before there's another, so I didn't want to use it up on its week of release. And god damn. It reads like the wind. The sheer pace of the thing is astonishing. If nothing else, it's a unique masterclass in writing highly accelerated fiction that is still rich in texture and character. There's even a fun little pulpy side to it that you used to get from techno-thriller series, but with prose that is several orders of magnitude better sculpted. You know, reading Nick Harkaway's GNOMON: if you'd been anywhere near my bedroom at night, you would have heard the occasional involuntary whispered mutter of "fuck you, Nick" when I got to a good bit that I wish I'd written. I am three Fuck you, Bills into AGENCY. You will need to read THE PERIPHERAL first. That's non-negotiable. Luckily for you, it's an excellent book, so if you haven't read it, treat yourself, and then get AGENCY. And now, the news. THE NEWS, with Lordess Foudrecreated for Orbital Operations by Lordess Foudre Lordess Foudre Instagram - Lordess Foudre print shop At this point, I believe I know one team of creators who are planning a big original digital comics offering for the immediate future. I am, as you know, so far out of the loop in these matters that I can't even see the loop from here, so I hope there's a lot more that I'm not aware of. i mean, I have to assume at this point that most creative people are like me. Even staggering around Friday with jumping blood pressure and a head full of weird loops, i was bursting with new ideas, and by midnight found myself jotting down a project idea on the way to bed. I also have to assume the Anglophone comics market is not going to come back in anything like the shape it was in two hundred years ago, back in February. There's going to be a lot of pain points, moving forward. The resistance to digital comics is a combination of elements, including an adherence to print object culture but also the small and fairly half-assed nature of current digital comics provision. Print culture will come back from all this. Books always survive, and anyone who thinks otherwise has probably never read one. Digital comics have a new opportunity here. I'm interested to find out what happens. There's a whole audience outside the comics shop network that looks for the new and the different, after all. So make the things that that market was never going to support anyway, and expand the field of what digital-first looks like. (He said, as the writer and EP of a show that was never going to be picked up by network television or cable television, but has reached a fourth-season order on streaming, which is by definition digital-first) I was talking about this with Templesmith the other day. We both love print books, and book shops and comics shops, OBVIOUSLY, but often the digital space is where our initial audience is. (I mean, I expect nothing will happen. But it should.) One of my boards, on the wall in front of me here in the office, is headed PENDING. It lists all the things that are currently out there in the world looking for a landing. Pitches awaiting decisions. Deals in the process of being done (or not). Calls waiting to be set, offers waiting to be received, reversions ticking towards their deadline dates. I'm hoping nothing else reverts to PENDING this coming week, because right now there are FIFTEEN things on that board and not a lot of white space left to add anything. A whole bunch of other things on the other boards have been removed or had their dates changed to some nebulous time in the future. I've had a lot of stuff crash and burn in the last few weeks. Thing is, I'm not even getting the worst of it. So, please, be tolerant of the number of Kickstarters, Indiegogos, GoFundMes, Ko-Fis and new Patreon launches you're going to see soon. Nobody expects you to give money to everybody, and everybody has themselves and their people to look out for first: it's understood. But, as they start emerging, take a look. These people are only going to be offering you ways to get out of the world through their art. If you're using Twitter on your phone, there's a thing in the app (on iOS at least, I presume it's the same on Android) you might not be aware of. And here's how I use it. I create a Twitter List called LOCAL. And I add as many local service and information Twitter accounts to it as I can. You don't need to follow those accounts. Just go to their profile pages, select Add/Remove From Lists, and add them to your LOCAL list. Now go into the app, select Lists, and you'll see an option to Pin a list. Pin it. Go back to your main Twitter timeline, and you'll now see two tabs on top. Tap LOCAL. Stay on the LOCAL tab. (Or whatever you decide to call it.) Never look at the hellscape of your Twitter timeline again. Get local information instead, like you're an adult in the world in the actual future, with a tool in your hand that tells you what's going on in your area. If you're just joining me and have forgotten why you subscribed: I'm Warren Ellis, author, comics writer, screenwriter, producer, Doctor of the University of Essex, Patron to Humanists UK and writer/creator/ Executive 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. 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. Forward them your copy of this newsletter to see if they like it. I post during the week at LTD. LTDI am, at the very least, posting a status update on the site every day (aside from Sat and Sun, probably). The Status category is linked in my email footer, so interested parties can click through to see my inbox condition if I'm not fast with a reply. It doesn't have much of a readership, so it's not like I really need to consider batching posts, so it may be a bit sparse next week. I may just post my Out Of Town sign and have done with it for a week. OUT OF TOWN, mate. Jack Hargreaves. The days when British tv programmes were unironically filmed in geezers' sheds. Jack Hargreaves, mate. Diamond geezer of the 1970s. I'm sending this early. You know why? I woke up to three emails asking where it was. And two follow-up emails saying, sorry, I just realised it isn't Sunday yet. Time is telescoping. Don't be like me. Get some rest, eat properly, sleep when you can, and turn your phone off once in a while. Nothing wrong with shutting the rest of the world off when you need to. I'll keep an eye on it for you while you're gone. Take a breath, go and look at the sky, hold on tight. You're doing fine. -- W |