WARREN ELLIS LTD Posts

I grew lilies. I have a whole new, and hopefully long-term, plan for the garden, and am looking at an autumn/winter of being outside with implements of destruction. The raspberries have been great, I have some blueberries coming, and it looks like I may get figs this year.

I decided I couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to go and see THE ODYSSEY. That last trailer removed any wish I had to go and spend three hours of my life in front of it without access to cigarettes and alcohol. I’m sure it’s the sort of film that can only be appreciated properly on a decent big screen, and whatever enjoyment I might get out of it eventually will be diluted by a small-screen viewing. But, frankly, not every Nolan film hits for me. Which is fine. Nobody’s oeuvre should be for everyone. And I’m in the odd position of being, evidently, one of the few people who enjoyed TENET.

A stuck-together newsletter went out today.

It’s turned a little colder, after the blazing weeks – wearing a old John Varvatos cotton snap-front henley over a grey Carhartt chambray shirt. Timex Expedition Scout watch for a no-nonsense day.

I spent a chunk of yesterday looking at the new functions offered by my newsletter host, beehiiv. I really don’t need the majority of them – I’d rather die eaten by dogs than run an online community again. Their hosting podcasts is interesting, but the idea of doing one more thing as a one-man band is just exhausting.

STATUS: Putting myself back together after a goblin week. Apparently it is now impossible for me to remember to eat breakfast.
READING: IF RUSSIA WINS, Carlo Masala (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: SOUND HOARD, Laura Cannell

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

TELEMETRY:

• Are people really using AI to text friends and family? Is that something people would actually do? I said to a friend last night that when I go to the mainstream internet these days it makes me feel sane, ordinary and normal.
• Sitting down is the new smoking, again. (Except of course that no causation was established)
• I noted some influencer last night declaring this to be “pivot season,” which brough to mind Julian Simpson, a few weeks ago, reorganising his entire creative endeavour and presence following his insanely successful audio drama Kickstarter.

Accessions:

My previous digital copy of this was bootleg: a proper copy showed up in an Amazon sale, and I decided a legit and decently formatted version was worth the 99p.

ANTWERP, Roberto Bolano (UK) (US+)

OPERATIONS: finalising solicits text for a graphic novella, getting into a large client project, clearing space for a four day crash on the unfinished prose novella. Updating the boards today.
STATUS: 45 minutes at the coffee shop with a notebook and a digital audio player that isn’t my phone, with a watch on so I don’t have to look at the phone to check the time.

READING: PHENOMENA: US GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATIONS INTO ESP AND PSYCHOKINESIS, Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: THE GODS LAUGH, Alison Cotton

DRINK: a Manhattan with two dashes of cold brew coffee liqueur instead of bitters. Excellent.

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

Well, I wasn’t in the mood to post anything during the heatwave, and my poor eight-year-old ThinkPad was in such dire straits that opening more than four tabs while I had any other applications open was becoming a serious challenge for that faithful machine. To the point where I couldn’t finish the novella I was supposed to be landing last week.

It took Lenovo a month to ship me a new ThinkPad. I’ve been using ThinkPads for decades, as they have the best keyboards, but next time I need a new computer I’ll think again. It arrived yesterday, and I spent much of the day setting it up. It shipped without a power brick, which was fun. And it’s taken several hours yesterday and two hours this morning to get the wifi card to behave. I think I have it now. But, Christ, why isn’t anything easy?

It’s raining outside. The heaviest storms seem to be passing us by, sadly. I have to spend the day catching up on everything I haven’t been able to do since last Thursday and then try and get some client work out of the way. Might be a few days before I get back to logging anything here.

It is absolutely blazing out there today. Heat warnings are in effect. Friday looks like it’s going to be the hottest day.

OPERATIONS: 700 words yesterday, looking for at least 1000 today
STATUS: DHL have lost a mystery parcel that was on its way to me last week. They claimed to be “tracing” it yesterday, but had it in three different locations at the same time, so I figure that’s gone for good. And my two Royal Mail parcels have just been marked as “Unable to attempt delivery.” Is everything melting just because it got warm?
READING: PHENOMENA: US GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATIONS INTO ESP AND PSYCHOKINESIS, Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US+)

Puharich asked McCulloch to find him a patient at Bellevue who’d been committed for the first time to the psychiatric ward for hearing voices. McCulloch located a machinist whose psychiatric medical profile was completely normal other than a sudden audio aberration. Before the voices appeared, the machinist had displayed no symptoms of insanity. Whereas many a 1950s doctor would have written the man off as crazy, Puharich and his foundation had another theory to pursue. They believed the man might be hearing voices that were traveling on a radio wave, that the machinist was somehow “tuned in” to a specific radio frequency that other individuals could not hear. “We found out that his job was the key to the diagnosis,” Puharich wrote. In the machine shop where the man worked, the machinist’s daily routine was “grind[ing] metal casings against carborundum wheels” for hours at a time. At the foundation facility, Puharich’s research team gave the man a dental examination, “which showed that his metal fillings were coated with carborundum dust,” or silicon carbide, a semiconductor. The carborundum “behaved like the crystal rectifier in the old crystal radio sets of the 1920s,” wrote Puharich. When the subject was placed inside the Faraday Cage, all electrical and radio signals were eliminated. “We found that his voices ceased,” Puharich confirmed. “His teeth were cleaned and he was cured of the ‘psychiatric’ problem.” The man was never crazy to begin with. “Rather, we found that he was precisely tuned to radio station WOR in New York City.”

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

This week will probably just be a writing log. 500 words down yesterday. I always console myself that Graham Greene only ever wrote 500 words a day. The start of a prose piece is always slow for me, because I’m finding the voice and the pace of the thing as I go. Those first 500 will get revised to death once I have my full first draft. It speeds up as I go – I wrote the last three thousand words of DEAD PIG COLLECTOR in a single day.

Evidently we are now on track for our seventh prime minister in (checks watch) fifteen minutes.

The Met Office has issued a rare red warning for 09:00 on Wednesday to 21:00 Thursday for parts of England and Wales.

This means the heat is likely to bring impacts to health and could be a danger to life, but also a risk to infrastructure such as power supplies and transport.

Temperatures will increase significantly in the next few days with the potential for 38 or 39C by Wednesday and Thursday.

This week I am descending into finishing writing this novella I contracted for late last year. Of course, I picked the week of a Death Heatwave to do it. And also doing development on a new thing on the side, hence the above image: coffee shop, custom-made leather notebook cover that fits six Field Notes notebooks, and the digital audio player. Which has a weird sticky ring around the power/play button. I think I’m in the market for an upgrade. I picked this one up super-cheap because I wanted to test-drive a modern mp3 player driven by SD cards. I like it. The sound is very very good. But the user interface is fiddly, and the SD card slot is so cranky and spring-loaded that it fired an SD card across the office today and now said SD card is lost. Luckily, I had a spare, and the missing card is the one I just load new music purchases on to.

We went out to Food in Leigh-on-Sea on Friday night, which was excellent, and on Sunday we stopped at Wine Meats Cheese for lunch, where I had a toastie made with nduja and chili jam and my god.

OPERATIONS: as above: this week is novella and development
STATUS: farted around with Instagram a bit, this weekend, during some downtime, and frankly I regret it.
READING: finished HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT, Olga Tokarczuk (UK) (US+) last night
LAST WATCHED: COOKING PRICE-WISE, Vincent Price’s long-lost cooking show, which I have notes on at this link here

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