a writer's notebook
I am awake way too early, as I got woken by some delivery bastard at 7am and couldn’t get back to sleep, so today is going to be a challenge. Not what I needed on the day CASTLEVANIA Season 3 goes live! And we got the big hero image on the Netflix front page this time!
All congrats and love to crew and cast for getting this season out without dying.
Inbox 18, I am mainlining espresso, it’s gonna be a long day.
Comments closedI’d been saving the final book in Iain Banks’ CULTURE sequence, THE HYDROGEN SONATA, for a while. Iain Banks died almost seven years ago, now — god, I remember buying his first book, THE WASP FACTORY, off a spinner rack in Rayleigh High Street in 1984 and just being knocked flat by its mad audacity – and there aren’t going to be any more Culture books. So I’ve saved it for as long as I can.
It’s probably the best book in the sequence since EXCESSION.
In the far future, civilisations can do something called Subliming – abandoning the real universe and escaping up to a higher dimension beyond spacetime. A civ called the Gzilt is about to do this. They are contacted by the remnant of a civilisation who previously Sublimed, who had taken the Gzilt somewhat under their wing in the years before they left. The remnant has a message for them. The Gzilt ship that the remnant approached takes the message — and then does something dramatic, unexpected and extremely final. This is the mystery: what was the message, and why did the Gzilt ship react in this way?
As in all the Culture books, the mystery naturally comes to involve The Culture, a vast Fully Automated Luxury Communism spaceborne civilisatiion that was Banks’ explicit reaction again the American right wing of space opera that had dominated most of the subgenre’s history.
Ships in the Culture, being god-level artificial intelligences, are characters in their own right, and some of them are big — when GSV The Empiricist shows up, it’s a few hundred kilometres on a side and contains several million people — and big personalities.
You will know Culture readers by their love for Culture ship names. Elon Musk borrowed a couple for his SpaceX drone boats. In HYDROGEN SONATA, you’ll meet MSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In, MSV You Call This Clean?, and the VFP Outstanding Contribution To The Historical Process among others.
Banks had the soul of a literary writer despite all protestations, and it’s a literary writer’s ending, but I think it’s one of the strongest endings to a Culture novel. And now I want to reread EXCESSION. Don’t start with this one? But save it. It’s worth it. And if you’ve already read any of the others? Don’t wait as long as I did to read this one.
Belated birthday gift. Now racked next to the complete QUINCY. I have a weakness for American 70s crime shows, what can I say. The complete COLUMBO will go next to them one day. Who knew KOJAK had 118 episodes, though?! Good god.
Comments closed“Channel” is the important signifier, I suspect. “Personal publishing” can mean a multiplicity of things, and should. And it probably starts with owning or at least significantly renting your own transmitter and owning all the master tapes.
That’s from the last post. Let me unpack this for myself a bit.
MORNING COMPUTER was erratically-published aphoristic writing nominally produced in my mornings as a writing exercise. It was amusing to me for a long time, but needs shift over time, and it began to not fit emerging requirements. These requirements included being able to signal that I was still alive, to be able to log new music I was interested in, and, bluntly, to be able to do anything I felt like. MORNING COMPUTER had an interesting set of constraints, but I started to feel them.
I wanted to return to the idea of a channel. Something where, if I am so moved, I can broadcast to you, my single reader, from when I get up to when I bail out at night. Sometimes it will be very boring, of course, like posting a picture of replacing the pond liner. But a personal log is allowed to be boring. I do hope to get time to write longer essays for myself once work calms down. The requirement, however, is being able to log my days. Before livestreaming there was “lifestreaming.” I won’t ever go full chronofile again — I experimented with that on a Tumblr instance once, and it was both oddly fascinating but also mostly stultifyingly appallingly overkill-dull.
The redoubtable Andy Affleck from WordPress Special Circumstances is taking a look at some additional fast-moving posting strategies for me. It would be nice to recover some things from the rapacious swallow of social media.
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Oof. One day til the show launches. Yesterday turned into hails of emails and documents and I couldn’t get on top of them for long enough to do actual writing, so today is going to be a bastard. Inbox 5 and I am fried.
According to my roll-out calendar, we have new key art popping up on IG today, and I think crossposting that is my one show thing today. And then we go live tomorrow, I schedule the announcement assets, and then turn every damn thing off aside from Buffer to load in the post-launch assets as they drop. (By “assets” I mean pictures, gifs, videos, created and branded and set in motion by our excellent partners at the NX marketing operation, who have been brilliant all the way through this thing.)
Looking forward to getting back to normal service.
Comments closedINJECTION is delayed indefinitely while Declan Shalvey works on other projects. He is a Large Important Boy in the comics game now, and has no time for my whimsical yarns of haunted AI until year’s end. Please buy his new book BOG BODIES, it’s very good. Jordie Bellaire, who now writes comics better than I do, doesn’t even remember who I am.
TREES Book 3 is out on March 18. This is the last TREES book for the foreseeable future, as Jason Howard is working on other projects, the big one of which I expect to see announced over the summer. He wrote it himself and it’s also very good.
Another TREES point: There is no “rest of the story.” TREES was always intended to be an anthology-like series. There are lots of TREES and the intent was always to wander the world and drop in on places and stories. Although I have ideas for, say, Vince in New York, or Jo Creasy, or Zhen, Book 2 certainly stands as a conclusion to many people’s personal stories, and, if there’s ever a Book 4, it wouldn’t necessarily pick anyone back up again.
CASTLEVANIA Season 3 goes live March 5, only on Netflix. It will be several weeks before we even get a hint as to whether we’ll get to do a Season 4 — it’s not in our hands, it’s Netflix’ decision.
THE BATMAN’S GRAVE takes a skip month after issue 6 and then returns to complete the 12-issue run without further interruptions. As noted in that sentence, it is a twelve-episode story with no extension, continuation or sequel planned or discussed.
FINALITY: My friend and collaborator Colleen Doran got seriously ill and was out of commission for a long time. She tells me she thinks she can get back to it this year, so I’m going to resume writing soon. Right now she has a beautiful book out called THE CLOCK that you should look for.
WILDCATS: cancelled. The artist didn’t want to draw it after all and no replacement was found.
MORE COMICS: I have no more comics work scheduled at this time. All my potential collaborators are busy, writing for themselves or ignoring my increasingly desperate and tear-stained emails. I was out of comics so long that most people think I’m either dead or a mythical creature.
Let’s see if anyone reads this.
#FAQ
Image by Lordess Foudre. Who returns to the newsletter this weekend.
Today has been about managing cancelled flights – I guess the corvid bug is scaring the airlines – and cancelling hotels, managing CASTLEVANIA S3 pre-launch elements and getting ready to bunker down post-launch. Inbox 14, watching the news. Apparently videoconferencing application stocks are shooting up. 51 confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK. I suspect the next few months are going to be difficult.
Five people die in car accidents in the UK every day, a number that does not affect whether or not people buy Zoom subscriptions.
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Moving a little slowly today – there was a ton of overnight inbound to process. I have at least one phone conference today but frankly I’ve forgotten the list. Lots of little things getting done, while with my other hand I fart around with connecting possible ways to post more quickly/on the run to this site. (Which don’t work, I just discovered. Ah well.) Inbox 14, bit scattered today.
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