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WARREN ELLIS LTD Posts

deep down: 19feb26

Published February 19, 2026 by Warren Ellis

“Amphisbaena,” The Vatican Museum, Vatican City, Peter Li

So I got given these lovely A6 notebooks the other day:

Atoms To Astronauts make some gorgeous notebooks. However, they’re A6. Which means they don’t fit the Wanderings Passport notebook cover or the newestor Field Notes-sized cover, or the Field Notes-sized cover I’ve ordered from a maker on Etsy. So I had to order one of those randomly-generated-Chinese-company-name leather notebook covers in A6 (UK), because I got bought nine of these notebooks and I really want to get working in them.

That’s the third stage of the new notebook system, and I’ll write a separate post about that at some point. And when the other cover comes in from Etsy, that will be the fourth stage. Because I’ve decided that this year is all about going deep on working on paper and thinking on to paper.

TODAY:

Today I learned that Status Quo have their own beer.

Anyone for bagpipe metal?

I wanted to pre-order thar CD for herself, but Napalm Records’ shopping system is broken.

OPERATIONS: contracts processed, setting up another reprint project (fingers crossed), scripting and planning and printing off research notes to paste into one of the above notebooks
STATUS: wearing the field watch today. Email at a dreadful 154. Still not back at full power, but getting there.
READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)

Pythagoras had always been a paragon of humility, declining to be called a ‘wise man’ [sophos] and preferring instead to be called ‘a lover of wisdom’ [philosophos]—thereby coining the term ‘philosopher’.


LISTENING:


MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: photography notebooks music
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doorway: 18feb26

Published February 18, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Shoplifter, “Chromo Sapiens” (2019).

Taking off the Fitbit and the Apple Watch, putting on the Maven watch, setting up the third stage of the new notebook system (with a fourth stage to come) – it’s rapid disconnection time. More on that tomorrow because I’ve just been told I’m apparently going out for lunch.

TODAY:

STATUS: first day in a few weeks that I’ve felt even half-human
READING: I’m faintly annoyed with what I’m reading right now – last night I started a book about maximalist novels and it was so whiny (and obsessed with the word “transversal” that I gave up, and the Walsingham book is mired in “we have absolutely no idea what he dd in these years but here’s some random speculation” – so I picked up THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)

It can be no coincidence that the hierarchical, anti-democratic Spartans, who privileged military might above all else, prided themselves on the pithiness of their speech. According to Plutarch, when an Attic orator accused the Spartans of being ignorant, Pleistoanax, the Spartan king (r. 458-409 BCE), replied: “What you say is true. Of all the Greeks, we alone have not learnt your evil ways.”


LISTENING: New Music Show

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: crime space madness darkmatter neuro DMT drugs
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The Good Mead: 16feb26

Published February 16, 2026 by Warren Ellis

He’s as shocked as I am that it stopped raining.

Newsletter went out yesterday.

I have the good mead again. Very fond of the Bloodmoon.

Today is a personal day, so I’m actually checking out until tomorrow, which will be a resumption of normal notemaking service.

OPERATIONS: Finished script and processed contract yesterday, started rebuilding the newsletter template
STATUS: going out for lunch
LAST WATCHED: Ibsen’s THE MASTER BUILDER

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: drinks
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fish weather: 15feb26

Published February 15, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Hieu Chau

It is pissing down outside and the garden, waterlogged by weeks of rain, is starting to flood. I still have to plant and re-plant dormant trees and am fast running out of time.

I decided to get the Substack app and poke around in it last night, and fuck me did I underestimate the number of newsletters out there right now. It seems to me to be roughly equivalent of those days when most people seemed to be on blogspot. I’m going to need to delete that app immediately, because I was reading on my phone for three or four hours.

And it was on one of those newsletters that I discovered that Maya Deren wrote a short book on filmmaking. And there’s a PDF linked at the bottom of that page.

OPERATIONS: finishing touches on a script, then rewrite the newsletter template
STATUS: rrrreally just want to curl up somewhere with a book for ten hours
READING: Picked up a sample of BLANK SPACE by W David Marx

Related:

If artists can only make art while standing in the middle of the town square, you’re going to get more boring art.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/book-review-blank-space

That feels flat-out brilliant.

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: film books
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vday: 14feb26

Published February 14, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Today I was gifted a new lapboard so I can work downstairs in the living room more effectively in the evenings. I gave in return a box of raspberry, rose and hibiscus tea from Fortnum’s and a fancy high-end citrus press.

TODAY:

Yeah, I’m reading a lot of politics news, but politics news is pretty much all the news there is right now.

John Coulthart’s { feuilleton } blog is now twenty years old.

Recent suggestions that we can improve the internet by a return to blogging strike me as unrealistic. This is an unusual form of activity, one best suited to writers (or to those who enjoy writing), to creative types rather than mere diarists, and to people who don’t suffer inordinately when they throw something into a public arena then receive little or no feedback as a result. Starting something like this today without being part of a connected community like Substack would require resilience to cope with the isolation. And yet… The blogging format still provides opportunities that can’t easily be satisfied elsewhere. 

I’m with him there. You can click through on this post’s title, scroll to the bottom and get the daily posts here as an email. But ultimately this space is for me to make notes and think in, in a space I control, thanks to WordPress.

Vaguely related, Emily Sundberg:

The problem I’m running into recently on Substack is that I’m seeing a lot of monotony in the types of writing and formatting of newsletters, and very little user innovation (I haven’t decided if this is on the users or the platform). Subscription creator monetization and parasocial relationships seem pretty intertwined to me — I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the worst case scenarios of some of the relationships that have been bred here. I hit a wall yesterday afternoon, and was overwhelmed by a feeling that was similar to how I felt when I hit publish on this essay in 2024.

OPERATIONS: I have a contract to peer at and a script to finish.
STATUS: day 186 of the plague
READING: THE QUEEN’S AGENT: FRANCIS WALSINGHAM AT THE COURT OF ELIZABETH I (UK) (US+)

A magistrate from Kent known as ‘Justice Nine-Holes’ bored through the restored wooden rood-loft so he could spy on the people of his parish.


LISTENING:


LAST WATCHED: I started HAMNET, rewatched half of THE FRENCH DISPATCH

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: blogging newsletters pol
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reaching into fog: 13feb26

Published February 13, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Emi Mizukami

Yesterday I wrote my newsletter and then the Beehiiv editor deleted half of it, never to be seen again, which will teach me to write directly into a web page. Everything is so fucking broken these days that even writing into a web-based word processor is like reaching into fog and fooling yourself that there’s something solid in there.

I’m not on Bluesky, I glance at X once in a blue moon, I never bothered with Threads and I can go days without even thinking about IG, but this piece by Sean Bonner made me wonder what the hell is going on out there in the fog:

…a lot of conversations on BlueSky are still about how they aren’t using X. This is a pretty common thing in the beginning of any social site, but I admit I was surprised that this far long that’s still such a common theme there. And it isn’t just X, but posting about not using a whole collection of other apps and services, and also guilting/shaming others for using any of those apps and services. People are even making block lists (more on that next) of people who use other services.

Yesterday evening I made blood orange mimosas.

TODAY:

We are living in a time of great change and great boredom and at the intersection of chaotic change and mind-numbing boredom lies insanity.

I really need to get around to buying a full subscription to 8ball one of these days.

I got given a digital copy of this and am looking forward immensely:

OPERATIONS: really need to crack a broken ten-page section of script today
STATUS: 💀💀💀
READING: THE QUEEN’S AGENT: FRANCIS WALSINGHAM AT THE COURT OF ELIZABETH I (UK) (US+)
LISTENING:


THINKING ABOUT: adding to the notebook system. Also the systems novel.

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: books library newsletters pol russian
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let there be light, for maybe seven minutes: 12feb26

Published February 12, 2026 by Warren Ellis

It has stopped raining for whole minutes.

As I write this, it’s darkening down again. I am still completely tapped out, which is getting really fucking frustrating now. So I’m going to leave this here and hope for a comeback tomorrow.

TODAY:

STATUS: 💀
READING: THE QUEEN’S AGENT: FRANCIS WALSINGHAM AT THE COURT OF ELIZABETH I (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Ambient Daily 48

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: ambient architecture podcast space
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same river: 11feb26

Published February 11, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Sorin Neamtu

Still sick. Still raining. Both conditions seem permanent.

TODAY:

Accessions:

Picked up a sample of this last year, it was on sale yesterday.

UNIT X: HOW THE PENTAGON AND SILICON VALLEY ARE TRANSFORMING THE FUTURE OF WAR, Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff (UK) (US+)

STATUS: deth
READING: A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY, Joanna Kavenna (UK) (US+)
LISTENING:


MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: ai art fashion newsletters
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i left my soul in bed: 10feb26

Published February 10, 2026 by Warren Ellis

From a new Leonora Carrington retrospective.

Getting out of bed apparently used up all the calories I had remaining in my body.

David Lynch’s estate is now eBaying some of his items.

Solar flare:

New AAASMR music radio show from Angela Winter:

TODAY:

OPERATIONS: still zero energy, so today is for scriptment – that version of scripting where you just slap down dialogue and vague directions and then go back when you feel human to convert it up into full script.
STATUS: two steps from the boneyard
READING: A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY, Joanna Kavenna (UK) (US+)

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: art music pol radio space surrealism tech
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THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR, Guiliano da Empoli

Published February 9, 2026 by Warren Ellis

The hour of the predator is essentially just a return to normality. The anomaly was the brief period during which we believed that we could curb the bloody quest for power with a system of rules.


Pair that shit with Mark Carney talking about the end of rules-based international order the other week.

I read this short, witty and fairly scary book over Xmas. It’s a series of pen-portraits of autocrats and global political entities – the opening section on how the United Nations doesn’t actually work at all is both funny and horrible, and feels particularly pointed this month.

da Empoli is a longtime political operator and writer who’s been around power a lot. He’s very good at pointing out how political theatre is reflected across history and across the world right now in ways we don’t always see.

A less common occurrence is for a head of state to appear dressed in an outfit of his own invention, made for him by Miss Universe’s stylist. Yet this is what happened when Nayib Bukele, the young president of El Salvador, appeared in an indigo tunic with golden floral motifs embroidered on the cuffs and collar, giving him a look midway between Simón Bolívar and a Star Wars character.


The details are great. In the round – especially paired with AUTOCRACY INC – it goes a good way towards contextualising our present moment. So impressed was I that I picked up another of his books right after.

THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR (UK) (US)

Tags: pol
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