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27sep26

Published September 27, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Terrible day yesterday: ill and brain-fogged and too much to do. Missed the gig at the Jazz Centre I had tickets for. But I did make it to Konsztrukting Soundz in the evening.

I didn’t actually have high hopes for the night – free jazz and skronk saxophones are NOT my thing – but it was actually incredibly good. Drone saxophone! A trio of a guitarist doing Sunn O)))-ish doom drones, a saxophonist staying in the deep registers and an experimentalist drummer smashing his way around the edges – amazing. Site notes.

STATUS: starting today, a complete reset.
READING: RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+). First Ellroy I’ve read since the incoherent BLOOD’S A ROVER and damn this is a return to form.
LISTENING: just about to go through the catalogue of The Owl Service, a band whose existence I only learned of last night.

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

Tags: events

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Published September 26, 2026 by Warren Ellis

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23sep26

Published September 23, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Running late today.

ACCESSIONS:

Apparently this thing is 1200 pages long.

THE ROUSE, China Mieville (UK) (US+)

I’ve seen reviews for DIGGER start to appear, and, as with MEGALOPOLIS, it makes me want to see it more. Which is not something I thought I’d ever say about a Tom Cruise film.

READING: finished TENTACLES LONGER THAN NIGHT, Eugene Thacker (UK) (US+). Wondering if it’s time to descend into some of the Very Long books I have in the pile.
LISTENING: Posterior Vitreous Detachment (Video Soundtracks Vol 1) by Seymour Glass

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

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22sep26

Published September 22, 2026 by Warren Ellis

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.

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21sep26

Published September 21, 2026 by Warren Ellis

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.

Sunday’s newsletter: notes on the arrival of the Roterfaden notebook.

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+)

DRINK: Charmat (white)

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

Tags: analogue notebooks roterfaden

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17sep26

Published September 17, 2026 by Warren Ellis

A care package from Zoharum has arrived.

I have shipped out four different pieces of work this week, pulled a couple of very long days, and I’m not done yet.

Tags: library music zoharum

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15sep26

Published September 15, 2026 by Warren Ellis

New pens have arrived. Pigma Microns, Pentel Energels, a Uni-ball Signo 207, WRITECH Space-Up, and a new Drehgriffel gel pen.

OPERATIONS: sprint week continues

READING: finished MAIGRET AND THE OLD PEOPLE, Simenon (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: pens

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14sep26

Published September 14, 2026 by Warren Ellis

From Friday night – dinner at our favourite restaurant, which comes with treats from the chef when the bill arrives.

Arrived today, new issue of NORTHERN EARTH. https://northernearth.co.uk

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.

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11sep26

Published September 11, 2026 by Warren Ellis

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.

Tags: library music

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10sep26

Published September 10, 2026 by Warren Ellis

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.

LISTENING: ASYMPTOTE VERSATILE, Eliane Radigue, which I bought off Rhodri Davies at a gig a few months ago.

DRINK: Flint Vineyard Charmat Rose

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

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