WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
So the constant rain has washed away so much soil that the chicken coop is in danger of flooding in the next storm. And the weather forecasts keep changing their minds about when that is. So I’m downing a couple more coffees and then going out to run the garden shredder, to try and generate enough material to stop the garden from turning into a landslip bog that gives the chickens trenchfoot. Nobody wants chickens to have trenchfoot, so the phone is going on mute until that’s done.
Tomato “Moneymaker,” first germinated seed of the year.
The weather forecast has become fiction. It is still pissing down outside, long after the rain was supposed to have passed, and the garden is starting to sink underwater. Supposedly I will have a two-day gap before more rain arrives, but I will clearly just have to look at the sky and pick a day to give up work and run the garden shredder to create enough woodchips to un-bog the ground.
ON DECK: I hate this script and I’m just about to take fire to it. Need to figure out a troublesome cover, and I suspect the trouble is all my fault.
INBOX: 77, haven’t processed it yet – only looking at work email
OPERATIONS: signed a contract first thing. One more thing off the Pending board, one more thing added to the big board.
One of those, “no, this is really a colour photo” days.
ON DECK: I think I’ve worked out how the last eighteen pages of this script fall, so I’m going to drive it to the end in rough form today and see how it lays. If I can figure that out today, tomorrow I can finish and polish it.
INBOX: 75.
OPERATIONS: Things are quiet, everything’s ticking along. I’m spending the next three weeks doing nothing but scripting and it’s a pleasure. Even the bad writing days teach me things. But I do want to make the space for the flash-fiction notion I devised over the weekend.
LISTENING: making a 00’s playlist for all the things I used to listen to in that decade and forgot about.
THINKING ABOUT: Spring coming in at a clip and the mountain of work to be done in the garden still.
Chucking it down out there. So much for cutting chicken-wire panels to fit over the raised bed. Newsletter went out this morning.
ON DECK: I’m a week behind on scripting. I have a few sixteen-hour days ahead of me to get it back.
INBOX: 68. Have given up on Inbox Zero.
OPERATIONS: Spent last night in notebooks. I’ve been wanting to return to writing flash fictions, something I did a lot of in the 00s, for ten years now, and I think I’ve identified a space to experiment in. This is me thinking about it last summer, and it’s been nagging me ever since. I may have it now. Also trying to make a point of noting down the things I need to write down here, if that makes sense.
LISTENING: New Music Show
READING: Finished a Beckett collection last night, reading a sample of the new Anne Carson
CONDITION: 8hrs 19nins sleep, hungry, restless
THINKING ABOUT: Last night I filled a box with CDs and discovered one teetering stack actually had about ten centimetres of unused Field Notes notebooks under it. Same day I got an email from Field Notes inviting me to revive my old subscription. Maybe not. Maybe I have a problem.
SHIPPING FORECAST: I have probably twenty posts stacked in the Drafts folder for the coming week.
Got a cat at the vet. Had a brainwave last night and jotted down a new template for the newsletter, which I need to copy down into the newsletter system – it will first be seen in the 17 March edition, and probably no-one will notice the difference but me. Then it’s scripting, then it’s note-making on consult 3/2024, and probably replying to emails at the end of the day. And I just took in a 20kg box of horiticultural grit. Here we go.
Some people I do some consulting work for occasionally like to throw a problem space at me to see if I can do anything with it. They showed me one last week. It lurked in the back of my mind for a few days, but I’m busy with scripts right now. Tuesday night, sitting there doing nothing, a solution occurred to me, and I jotted it down across four or five pages of the notebook. Yesterday, after writing Sunday’s newsletter and rearranging some things in the script I’m on, I grabbed the notebook and started typing up my notes. And adding to them. Four hours later, I’d done about three weeks’ worth of thinking. Sent it off and shambled away to cook dinner. A few hours later, they pronounced it a solution. So that’s a job now, and I got to help out some people I like. The good news is that I can still pull off that creative focus. The bad news is that today I am knackered.
ON DECK: I had a brainwave last night on a thing I was asked to think about, so job one today is to type up those ideas scrawled in the notebook and arrange them on a page to see if I really have anything. Then back to rewriting my script.
INBOX: 52
OPERATIONS: Already figured out the DMARC compliance on the newsletter. Finishing out Sunday’s newsletter today
LISTENING:
shit I forgot to finish this. send.