WARREN ELLIS LTD
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WARREN ELLIS LTD

Author: Warren Ellis

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The Christmas Of The Baleful

Warren Ellisquotes

…time is always short despite the unvarying task of burying mortal remains or consigning them to the flames; the long-faced gravediggers chatted as they got drunk, they talked about the Banquet, which would take place soon, in three months, in the spring, as it had been every year since the creation of the world, where they would have a few laughs, drink dry and eat hard, and for three days there would be no corpses, because, as is well known, no-one ever dies during the Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, for this is the Grim Reaper’s gift to the Guild, these three days’ repose, these revelries far from death are the Christmas of the baleful, the feast of Saint Nicholas for the men with long faces.

THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE GRAVEDIGGGER’S GUILD, Mathias Enard

week of 13nov23

Warren Ellisstatus

In a holding pattern over here while I Wait For Things To Happen, which is starting to boil my brain again. I have three jobs on deck this week, and we’ll see if I can finally finish one of them. I’m very ready to switch everything off for the year, because the garden could use two weeks’ solid attention to get it upright and organised again, and I could use the down time to develop some new projects and plans I have in mind, but it’s not going to work out like that just yet. We are, however, about eight or nine days’ away from America checking out for Thanksgiving, so I may get a break anyway.

Warren Ellisjotter

Autumn lasted about a month, in the end. It’s very much early winter now. 2.22pm and it already feels dark. I’m doing research reading and writing reconfigurations for Orbital Operations and LTD, with several cups of Kenyan peaberry coffee shots. (I grind them to espresso fines and run them through the Tassimo with a reusable pod like this one.)

Thinking ahead to 2024, generally. I’m waiting on so many potential things that the new year is more uncertain than any other new year for a long time. It’s time for me to take some control over that. I get passive when I’m tired. The actual move is to redouble energies and take them in different directions.

Accessions 12nov23

Warren Ellisbooks

I started reading a sample of this last night and was immediately hooked. Oops.

Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift – an inherited ability to tune into the voices and sounds of the past. When she dies, Selda’s gift passes down to her grandson Wolf, who must make sense of her legacy, and learn to live with the newly unleashed voices in his head. Ambitious and exhilarating, The Variations is a novel of startling originality about music and the difficulty – or impossibility – of living with the past.

Warren Ellisjotter

I am drinking a mug of beef bone broth on a rainy early afternoon. I don’t like it as much as chicken bone broth I’ve had in the past. But I am reading a book set in rural France, and the shining quality of the prose (Matthias Enard) is not affecting me as much as the constant refrain of all these country people drinking aperitifs. I closed the book at one in the morning and just lay there for half an hour thinking about a life of drinking aperitifs every day.

I could right go a vodka gimlet and a few slices of saucisson sec right now, and just daydream about a life of aperitifs.

I’m going to grind myself a shot of Kenyan peaberry coffee instead. Sigh.

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