Listening:
WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
Me too, Aya the cat. me too.
Listening:
Wiping down the whiteboards, clearing the decks, bowing to the inevitable horror of having to write a to-do list. Which needs to include collecting eggs and looking for a beater watch to wear in the garden, because I’m not wearing the old Apple Watch or a Dan Henry to dig shit up and cut shit down. And Mudmasters cost an insane amount of money. Though I probably only want one because my garden is mostly mud.
Managed to get an edition of the newsletter out yesterday. It’s over here.
Listening:
Probably time to start on my podcast listening backlog today, but it’s going to rain tonight, so I think I’m probably going to be cutting kindling in the back garden instead. Which reminds me that I need to trim the holly tree too. Oh well. The History Of Philosophy Without Any Gaps will have to wait a little longer.
The current dinosaur flock. All of our chickens are always rescues from farms, and these have been a particular struggle. Two of them arrived in oven-ready form, and one of them is full crazy.
Listening:
Currently: figuring out the new newslettering system. Need more coffee. Need to resist the urge to curl back up with a book.
Reading: NORTHWIND, JD Kirk (UK) (US)
“If you don’t give me every last fucking ounce of your attention, I won’t just break every bone in your body, I’ll find all new bones and I’ll break those, too. I’ll defy fucking medical science. Years from now, scientists will dig you up and think they’ve stumbled upon a new species. That’s how much I’ll mess you up, son. That understood?”
Building a raised vegetable bed.
Listening:
Wondering if this thing still works. And if I still remember how to use it.
So, as I was on my way to bed last night, I suddenly realised how to fix that eight-pager I was working on, what to cut and how to rearrange and land it. So I went back into the office and sat there until it was done and sent it off. To which my editor replied, “I saw your closedown note, I wasn’t expecting this until tomorrow.” Ha ha.
Today I have a one-page thing to figure out, and then I need to clear Inbox 17, and then I am boiling my body in the bathroom because I probably smell like a dead bear, and then I am very likely going the fuck to bed. Good morning, reader.
Good morning. I am technically “awake” but the rest of my body hasn’t got that memo yet.
Today I have an eight-page script to write (already laid out most of it) and a one-page script to write (no idea yet) and the fifth GENEVA module to wrestle with, as I was unable to quite land it over the weekend because hey my brain is fried here on the eighty-fourth week of lockdown.
(But I did finish BATMAN’S GRAVE 10 on Friday night.)
You ever have those days where you wake up and you just know that something is wrong and off? I’m presuming my hypertension is kicking off and my fluctuating blood pressure is creating a sense of impending doom, but it feels like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and everything’s going to catch fire today. Unmanageable stress! It’s fun!
Inbox 15. 21C out here on the Thames Delta. I need a lot of thinking time. And more coffee. Hi.
It is cold and it is pissing down. I had to keep working after Closedown in the end last night, as I was reminded that I’d forgotten to fix up and send the fourth GENEVA module. So today I am a chilly zombie facing down another full day of working inside the BATMAN’S GRAVE conclusion document, and I still have a lot to do there. It’s currently 1000 words of telegrammatic indications of beats and scenes and things I need to think about. Today it will grow by around 2000 words as I slot things together and expand lines into scenes to see how they run. Which is a lot of words for one day, but nobody will actually see this but me, because it will all be copied out of the document and rewritten and expanded again into full script. So it can be as ugly as it has to be — it’s not like it has to be 2000 words of polished prose ready for other humans to look at.
Inbox 11, coffee 4, listening to WINTERLIGHT by Gaetir The Mountainkeeper. And we’re off.
I’m up. Another full day inside the BATMAN’S GRAVE document. I always knew how it ended, but I need to take the time to make sure all the pieces are assembled and have second and third thoughts about the elements and what else is needed. So this is a full week’s work, before the actual scripting starts.
And it’s cold. Heaters are on in the house. And I just added a phone conference to the day. And I just found a PDF of GRAVE 8 in my overnight email, which is rather lovely. Inbox 20. Here we go. Good morning.