a writer's notebook
The original four-track version from 1989. Used to have this on mp3, which somehow vanished or rotted out over the years. Was way past time for a hard copy. I believe there’s a 2 LP reissue with bonus tracks being released imminently, but getting a turntable and storing new vinyl would be Bad News for me, and I’m happy with the original of this classic.
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At the desk a little earlier, because I have to power through a complex rewrite for EOD delivery. Inbox at 25, and that’s only going to get worse. Blasting Phurpa over the office speakers for focus, washing a big ginkgo biloba tablet down with coffee for brain speed or placebo effect thereof. It’s a two-screen work day, with the screenplay on the laptop screen and the studio notes up on the big external monitor. Here we go.
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The calendar for CASTLEVANIA Season 3 roll-out is now printed off and taped to the office wall. I show this mostly to fuck with my co-producer Kevin Kolde, who sent it over and then said “in the name of god DON’T TWEET IT”
hahaha YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME KOLDE except when you are i suppose
(Thanks to our partners, the Netflix/NX crew, for putting together a great plan.)
Inbox 15, marking up the whiteboards, coming in for a landing on a script. Have reactivated Twitter in prep for the Season 3 release, which is weird, but Netflix likes it when I appear to be actually alive. Strange nostalgia this morning for Old Twitter, when the day would start with waving to William Gibson and saying good morning to John Perry Barlow. I bumped into Bill in New York last year — hadn’t seen him in years, but he said, back in the days of Old Twitter, it nonetheless felt like we were seeing each other every day.
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Big delivery today, which is just as well as my internet has slowed to a crawl for no good reason other than that Virgin Media likes to remind us all who is boss sometimes.
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Inbox holding at 16. Listening to the pre-release track off the COMMON EIDER KING EIDER COBER ORD collab, piecing together the back end of a script under the clock today because I need to go into the second draft of something tomorrow. A balmy 7 C outside, settling in to update the boards and track production elements. And thinking vaguely about blog structures. I may end up in the jotter later.
Comments closedI’m across several books right now. As most of you know, I read on Kindle, which allows me to easily highlight and save text, like this bit from THE ORIGIN OF EMPIRE by David Potter:
Roman coinage, minted in Rome, was simply not user friendly. It consisted of heavy bronze bars, weighing slightly less than five pounds, which seem to have been used for large-scale transactions; silver and bronze coins copied from coins circulating in southern Italy; and bronze discs, weighing nearly a pound.
I mean, god knows when I’d ever need that nugget of trivia. But I’m pleased by the notion of someone heaving five bronze discs up onto a countertop just to get a coffee. Also, on the root of the word proletariat:
proletarii – that is, people whose duty to the state was to ‘bear children’ as they did not have enough property to be classified as assidui, ‘the settled’ or ‘the landowning’, who made up the membership of the other centuries.
Which I think I once knew and then forgot? Therefore worth saving as a note.
The new William Gibson, AGENCY, landed on my Kindle automagically a few days ago, and it may be that I pause the several books I have on the go and just descend into that, because it’s Bill and because I always learn new things about writing from reading Bill. It was my great delight to bump into him again in the green room at NYCC, and I’ve been looking forward to this one for awhile.
…but probably I should save it and go straight into Lavie Tidhar’s new one, BY FORCE ALONE, which is not out yet but Lavie sent me the manuscript and shit this does actually look really good damnit
Comments closedBritannia, AD 535.
The Romans have gone. While their libraries smoulder, roads decay and cities crumble, men with swords pick over civilisation’s carcass, slaughtering and being slaughtered in turn.
This is the story of just such a man. Like the others, he had a sword. He slew until slain. Unlike the others, we remember him. We remember King Arthur.
This is the story of a land neither green nor pleasant. An eldritch isle of deep forest and dark fell haunted by swaithes, boggarts and tod-lowries, Robin-Goodfellows and Jenny Greenteeths, and predators of rarer appetite yet.
This is the story of a legend forged from a pack of self-serving, turd-gilding, weasel-worded lies told to justify foul deeds and ill-gotten gains.
The embed thing doesn’t seem to want to play nice, so here’s a link to a new edition of one of my favourite ambient podcasts.
Oh, here we go. Let’s try this.
Comments closedHrefHunt 27 Jan 2020: in which the Kicks Condor guy collects up a bunch of interestingly designed blogs.
Black ‘rock’ from AD 79 Italy eruption is part of exploded brain
NASA’s Kepler witnesses vampire star system undergoing super-outburst (science headlines are still the best headlines)
Emma Willard’s Maps of Time – The Public Domain Review – the ur-infographics.
New Weird Britain In Review For January By Noel Gardner (music)
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This just arrived. So did a Xmas card from Joe Hill. One presumes it got stuck in the post on its way from The Outer Worlds.
I just discovered currents fm and suspect it’s a terrible procrastination tool.
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Extremely offline, but a new Paleowolf record arrived and I needed to record it. It’s actually from 2017, but was important to own this on physical media.
The Paleowolf stuff is great thinking music for me.
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