I imported a new supply of beard oil from my current favourite source, Fires Of Freyja in North Carolina USA. HEKS, I didn’t order – they threw it in for free! Such lovely people.
OPERATIONS: notebooks, all day. Development and script layouts. STATUS: Eyestrain! Hence notebooks – I need a day of less screens. READING:TENTACLES LONGER THAN NIGHT, Eugene Thacker (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Printing off development material to paste it into notebooks. This is a piece of COLLIDE, the comic with Jerome Eyquem that is being serialised in chunks on my newsletter. He’s working on part two right now, so I need to sit and think about part three.
It’s a glorious day outside. I have to say, I love the Indian summers we get now. I mean, we’re all gonna die, but it’s pretty.
OPERATIONS: we do not do #1000mphclub any more, but it’s definitely going to be 100mphclub for a little while. Today is a bits and pieces day, including a quick partial update of warrenellis.com, which I haven’t amended in a few years. STATUS:
Going back in time a little bit. Shifting as many processes back to paper and pen and analogue as I can.
READING: TENTACLES LONGER THAN NIGHT, Eugene Thacker (UK) (US+)
OPERATIONS: heavy production week. STATUS: I gained back a little weight, so I am now living off what herself calls my “Sadness Bowls” – leaves and fish and nuts and oil. READING:MAIGRET AND THE OLD PEOPLE, Simenon (UK) (US+) LISTENING: music podcast LE JARDIN, E5S01 LAST WATCHED: Last Night Of The Proms – a particularly poor year, I thought. DRINK:Fraoch heather ale
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
That brain-tapping thing when you spend all night meditating on a story space, and get the penultimate solution to it about twenty minutes before bedtime. Also – and this isn’t the same for everyone, but – that rrrrreally annoying liminal point where you have everything the story wants except for the actual complete plot. Drives me bugfuck. I have a possible beginning and a possible end and nothing in between, so I’m going to be drafting story spines and checking logical progressions all bloody day. Except I’m not, because I have other scripts to write. So this will be haunting me all day.
OPERATIONS: ALL THE THINGS FFS STATUS: i have like five different deliveries scheduled for today, so no fun lunch at the deli for meeee READING:TENTACLES LONGER THAN NIGHT, Eugene Thacker (UK) (US+)
…a notion of the divine as shadowy, dark, and absent (apophatic or negative theologies). But as Dionysius takes care to note, the divine is “dark” or “shadowy” not because it is lacking anything, but because it is superlatively beyond human comprehension. The most one can take away from this enigmatic thought is a negative knowledge, the thought of the limit of thought – or to use Lovecraft’s phrase, the thought of the “inability of the mind to correlate all its contents.”
LISTENING:
THE WILL OF TONGUES, Sarah Davachi (UK) (US+) (bandcamp)
LAST WATCHED: two episodes of season 2 of BOOKISH, which hasn’t engaged me as much as season 1 did. I admire Mark Gatiss’ writing a great deal. DRINK: dropped two shots of O’Donnell’s cherry moonshine into two glasses of cherry soda and made something cheerful
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
I read somewhere this week that offline is (once again) the new flex. Fashion people have apparently discovered The Offline, which seems weird to me because they’re the last people who should have been living online.
OPERATIONS: all the scripts, today STATUS: Royal Mail claiming the house was “inaccessible” because they couldn’t be bothered to deliver my fucking pens READING:INTELLIGENCE IS THE ART OF REMAINING FAITHFUL UNDER SHIFTING CIRCUMSTANCES, Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer (UK) (US+)
It appears that I picked up and then put down TENTACLES LONGER THAN NIGHT, Eugene Thacker (UK) (US+) a few years ago, and so I picked it up again last night:
In so far as stories like these are part of the horror genre, they present horror less as a stimulus-response system, in which a threat elicits an emotional response of fear, and more as a kind of freezing of all affect, resulting in a combined state of dread and fascination – what theologian Rudolf Otto once called the mysterium tremendum. In stories like these, horror is a state of frozen thought, reason’s dark cyclopean winter.
The first early-autumn morning when you realise you won’t actually be warm again for nine months. Russian naval boat-neck longsleeve under a Nepalese cotton popover. Wearing two pendants that came with CDs from Black Mara Records.
Meat delivery from Fruit Pig:
Collar bacon is an old kind of bacon cut – also, as you can see, sometimes known as ribeye bacon. Fruit Pig are one of the few black pudding producers at scale who use fresh blood – most black pudding these days is made with dried blood imported from Europe.
I’m currently defrosting a couple of venison steaks, and herself is on a high-protein wild-meat diet, so dinner tonight will clearly just be meat.
The watch is the original Trifoglio Veloce, which they don’t have in this colourway any more, you have to opt for the Veloce II to get it in black and red.
OPERATIONS: peering at the new process for arranging comp copies of my books from Image. I fear this will be a spreadsheet. Since my Brain Thing – more than ten years ago, now! – spreadsheets fuck with my vision and give me vertigo. Ideally, I’d like to get a bunch of pages out today so I can go for a wander tomorrow, but now that I’ve written that down, I’ve cursed it. STATUS: inbox 203 READING: finished the re-read of ANTWERP, Roberto Bolano (UK) (US+) last night. I suspect I may disappear into reading some long books from this point on. LISTENING: ADNOS, Eliane Radigue DRINK: Tuaca
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Didn’t get enough nailed down yesterday. I have the full shape of two stories, but I really wanted to get into scripting and to firm up the scripts on two other jobs. Possibly I was being ambitious, but there’s little point in not being ambitious. Anyway, one artist has a rough pitch for a piece, and I’m a few hours away from finalising the style for the other, and then I’m into scripting up from notes and bones on those two other things. I don’t get bored.
Which is a pity, really, because sometimes boredom is when the backbrain starts assembling pieces of things to amuse itself. However, that is also why I take a notebook and a music player to the coffee shop. Something I’ve done since the age of the Walkman, except in the early days it was pubs or all-night burger shops.
Ended up buying more Silvine record cards, a mini clipboard and a card holder for the desk. Committing to the bit. Not going full Zettelkasten, though. Zettelkasten articles make my head hurt.
OPERATIONS: already moved 8pp out of the office, am two pages into another thing, working across two other scripts today, broke ground on Sunday’s newsletter STATUS: it’s raining! READING: re-reading ANTWERP, Roberto Bolano (UK) (US+)
We were on the edge of the reservoir and the sky was very blue. A few fishermen were visible in the distance and smoke from a chimney rose over the trees. Green wood, for burning witches, said the old man, his lips hardly moving.
