Category: work

This was the first line.

I’d written a short document. I printed it off and pasted the pages into a large Field Notes Dime Novel Edition notebook. And I went to a hotel room in London and didn’t come out until I’d broken down the whole season.

I remember clearly standing on the hotel balcony around 1 in the morning, looking down on East London, and suddenly realising the sound of Saint Germain. A few months later, Bill Nighy agreed to take the part of Saint Germain, which was good, because I would have been fucked if he’d said no, because he was that sound.

Also, seriously, how good is my life that I got to write for Bill Nighy?

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Richard Armitage, Alejandra Reynoso, James Callis, Ade M’Cormack, Theo James and Jaime Murray are back.

They are joined by Yasmine Al-Massri, Ivana Milicevic, Jessica Brown Findlay, Bill Nighy, Navid Negahban, Toru Uchikado, Rila Fukushima, Jason Isaacs, Lance Reddick and Barbara Steele.

Now that is a cast. Them are some serious fucking actors right there. I was amazed that any of my actors even took the goddamn job, and remain amazed by them as people and artists.

I got to write for and work directly with all these people, and, let me tell you, it was a learning experience and a fucking joy. Absolutely wonderful humans.

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March 5, only on Netflix.

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Our brilliant squad at Netflix produces a roll-out calendar that schedules exactly when news on CASTLEVANIA Season 3 is released and which “assets” (art, video, GIFs and stories) go out at each step. It’s a fascinating system. I stuck a copy to my wall next to the big whiteboard to help me track the countdown to series launch on March 5 and beyond. It’s a different way of doing things, for me, and I love learning new things.

Also, yes, trailer is coming.

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Official note for the blogge that season 3, at 10 episodes, goes live on March 5, only on Netflix.

It’s a weird one – with increased episode count and budget, I went a bit mad and kind of tested the boundaries of the thing. Over the next 30 days we’ll be talking on Twitter about the new cast members, characters, our amazing crew at Powerhouse, our terrific composer Trevor Morris, my long-suffering co-producer Kevin Kolde without whom all this would never happen, and all that stuff.

But, yes. It’s done and it’s on the way. Phew.

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These are all turned around because I don’t want anyone to see the titles written on the fronts.

I started trying something new over the winter break, inspired by Jeff Lemire’s notebooking practise.

The brown one on the far right is a development notebook for a suite of ideas I want to locate and isolate. If it turns out that one of the ideas in that notebook looks like it has enough juice and heft to go somewhere, it gets broken out into its own notebook for further development.

For many many years, all my heavy development work has gone straight into txt files on the computer. Composing directly into the machine. Last autumn, I figured it was time to start challenging that practise. I’ve obviously been comfortable with my process for over a decade, if not longer. At some point I wondered if that comfort was an obstruction to getting to new places. So I decided to introduce some new friction into the method to see what happens. It’s always worth running tests on the way you work.

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One of my smaller whiteboards is headed “PENDING” and it’s filling up fast.  Part of my job now is to ask people questions, track materials, keep tabs on deals and processes, and other organisational shit that I am historically Very Bad At.  Hence the PENDING board.  Write everything down on something that’s going to be in front of you all the damn time.  I dearly wish there was something like the old iOS Panic Status Board (which I still run on my ancient iPad 2 in the office) that was Windows-based or web browser accessible so I could throw it up on the external monitor. 

I remember being fascinated by the hacks on old Kindles that turned them into glanceable ambient information radiators.  (example)  They were mostly way too hard to implement but wonderful ideas nonetheless. It’s impossible to get the Echo Spot to display anything useful. Everything went backwards. So now I scrawl on whiteboards and scribble in notebooks and mark up a paper calendar.

(Kanban boards wotk for people I know, but they send me blind.)

My whole setup is extremely primitive.

That’s right.  Binder clips, a calendar printed off from the web, adhesive hooks. Nothing in here is fancy.  Just find what gets the job done.  You can fiddle about and make it pretty later if you want to.  Function first, detail later.  I can look up over the top of the monitor and see everything that’s on deck, and the time-sensitive stuff is in Google Calendar. (By “time sensitive” I mean things like “definitely start X today” or “you need to call X at 5pm on Monday.”)

I know someone who was working in a small space and did this with post-it notes on the wall next to their laptop.  It doesn’t take much.  Just having the idea and implementing it in minimum viable form.

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I am writing HEAVEN’S FOREST for Netflix and producing season 3 of CASTLEVANIA for Netflix.  My offsite job on my friend’s show finished in the third week of December, just as my body was about to crumble from spending four to six hours in a car every day, and news on that will probably pop towards the middle of the year.

I have six issues of BATMAN’S GRAVE left to write – I learned mid-December that there’s gonna be a skip month after issue 6. THE BATMAN’S GRAVE 4 is out on Jan 15. I don’t think DC are completely aware they’re even publishing this book. So please do join us for more horrible extended beatings and more of Alfred being shitty.

Jason Howard has moved on from TREES to his own work, which I’ve been lucky enough to read and it’s really rather marvellous.  It’s big.  It was a joy to read the script and the art I’ve seen is just bursting with invention and energy.

TREES: THREE FATES 5 is out on Jan 8.  The final issue of TREES: THREE FATES. A small, miserable lie is about to get Klara killed. A huge, terrible lie is about to get everyone else killed. Sometimes we must forgive the dead. Sometimes the dead have to forgive us.

And here is a link to Jason explaining how this final cover came about.

I personally do not understand how Jason hasn’t won all the awards for his TREES covers.  At this link here, you can see them all.

INJECTION: Declan Shalvey, whose monograph from Marvel Comics is released soon – either Jan 8 or Jan 21, the internet cannot agree — is engaging with important new projects that will keep him away from INJECTION for a while longer, for he is a Large Important Boy in the comics game now and has no time for my whimsical yarns about haunted AI, but those projects so personally and professionally beneficient to him that all I could do is applaud and send best wishes. Jordie Bellaire now lives on a private island that is basically one giant shelf for all her awards while she writes new comics that are, frankly, better written than mine.

(also Declan’s new graphic novel as writer, BOG BODIES, is really strong, and they really have both left me in the dust)

You may divine from this that I have no further new comics work in the pipeline, and you would be right. I’m afraid that, after 25 years, all the good artists saw through my half-bright bullshit and don’t want to work with me, but luckily television has no idea and it’ll be 25 years before they realise hahahahahHAHAHAHAHAHcough

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I still can’t talk about what I’ve been doing or where I’ve been, really, so here’s a shot from the location the show was rehearsing at today. I’ve been a Consulting Producer to a tv show you’ll see in 2021 for the last seven weeks. This has been a very different kind of writing job for me, and later I will attempt to unpack and process the many things I’ve learned. For now, I am simply grateful to the friends old and new who asked me to come in and worked with me and put up with my bullshit for seven weeks. It was a really good time. Even though I complained constantly about having to get up in the mornings.

I will miss my friends, and, if any of you see this: thank you, again, for everything.

G’night.

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TREES: THREE FATES 3 is out today, but the above is a clip from the final part, issue 5, which we locked this week. All done. Jason is moving on to other things, but I’m sure we’ll revisit the world in the future. We both want to thank our fantastic letterer/designer, Steven Finch, for his tireless aid and excellence. And I want to thank Jason for bringing this thing of ours to life in such a marvellous, magical way. I was only ever writing it for you to read. Thank you for letting me do this.

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