WARREN ELLIS LTD

Where To Find Me On The Internet, Late 2019 Edition

Published November 16, 2019 by Warren Ellis

My newsletter goes out every Sunday unless it’s on short hiatus for some reason, and you can subscribe to it at orbitaloperations.com . I’ve been newslettering in some form or other since the 1990s, and, on the current iteration, some 22.5K people suffer the consequences.

This site, where I live, sends out updates to @warrenellis at Twitter and, in some cases, @warrenellis at Instagram, both of which occasionally get other things thrown at them.

If you see who I follow on IG, you can find members of the cast and crew of the CASTLEVANIA show, which I write and exec-produce, and my network Netflix, as well as my current comics publishers, DC Comics and Image Comics.

This site syndicates out to Tumblr and an Official Facebook Page, neither of which I use. And, of course, if you’re a proper hermit, this site expresses an RSS feed.

I think the only other thing that increments is my Bandcamp collection page. And, yes, I have bought more than 1100 pieces of work through Bandcamp. I have a problem. (Yes, just the one. Shut up.)

I have pretty much retired from the internet. Bumped into William Gibson the other month – hadn’t seen him for fourteen years or so, and he commented that one of the great pleasures of Old Twitter was that it nevertheless felt like we were speaking every day. Things changed. I retired from the field.

I no longer give talks, keynotes, lectures, whatever you want to call them. I’ve bailed out of the whole futurism/tech/haunted circuit. I only go to conventions and festivals when compelled to by the power of Contractual Obligations — so occasionally I will be witnessed at a distance, like a flabby woodland ghost, when required to manifest for a tv show or a book.

And now I have a FAQ to link to. Thanks for indulging me, reader.

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Library 16nov19

Published November 16, 2019 by Warren Ellis

It’s another good day. See anything you like? Well you can’t have it it’s mine

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16nov19

Published November 16, 2019 by Warren Ellis

How you know it’s Xmas in my town: the German Sausage people come back for the season

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STATUS 15nov19

Published November 15, 2019 by Warren Ellis

Home alone, deep into working out the details of a story, screening TWIN PEAKS Season 3 on mute while I play SOLILOQUY FOR LILITH by Nurse With Wound over the top because this is how we get our cold lonely shit done

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SEPULCHRAL BLESSING, CLAVICVLA

Published November 15, 2019 by Warren Ellis

In which we have to check our inbox to find out what the fuck this is because we cannot read the text or logo.

It was SEPULCHRAL BLESSING by CLAVICVLA, proper cosmic void ambient from someone presumably living under a destroyed temple in Italy.

Lovely doomy packaging, and excellent work music if you’re writing about the burdens of living in a ruthless and uncaring universe. Which, you know, I might go and do now.

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NOTES ON THE CINEMATOGRAPH, Robert Bresson

Published November 14, 2019 by Warren Ellis

I’ve been reading NOTES ON THE CINEMATOGRAPH by Robert Bresson.

Bresson was an austere and eccentric French filmmaker with very specific developed views on what film should or should not be. As just one example, he exclusively referred to his actors as “models,” as he believed acting was a hold-over from theatre that had no place in film. His NOTES are essentially a long list of epigrams, aphorisms and fragments. Here are some:

The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows.

An image must be transformed by contact with other images as is a colour by contact with other colours.

The truth of cinematography cannot be the truth of theatre, not the truth of the novel, nor the truth of painting. (What the cinematographer captures with his or her own resources cannot be what the theatre, the novel, painting capture with theirs).

Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art’s form.

Expression through compression. To put into an image what a writer would spin out over ten pages.

Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence.

His “flattened” images and his interest in silence and immobility seem to me to have an unusual amount to say to the comics form.

NOTES ON THE CINEMATOGRAPH (UK) (US)

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14nov19

Published November 14, 2019 by Warren Ellis

It is now fully Screener Season. At least Amazon sent theirs all at once in (this year) a little box, presumably having learned the lesson that sending a single DVD of MRS MAISEL in a giant hatbox was 1) way over the top 2) cost some of us a bunch of money in customs charges 3) seriously a hatbox how baked were you when you came up with that one

Listening to ATMOSPHERE FOR DREAMING by Steve Roach, inbox resting at 14, doing some thinking before I hit the actual tasks of the day.

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Tom Spurgeon

Published November 14, 2019 by Warren Ellis

The above clip is from an essay by writer, journalist and editor Tom Spurgeon, who died on Monday. He was 51. (So am I.) Tom and I have been in comics for pretty much the same amount of time.

I remember back in April that he wrote the following words, which caused me to wonder:

I want sloppy, beautiful, devastating art. I want experiences through art that are troubling and terrifying and joyful. I want to be desperate to catch up.
The object of my affection may not be the same as yours, and in fact I hope it isn’t. I want to die with my head on its shoulder.

And then, I think, he did. I hope he did. I hope he left with calm and with love, because he deserved it.

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13nov19

Published November 13, 2019 by Warren Ellis

Back home and feeding the dinosaurs.

I slept something like ten hours last night. Two days of early starts for the run into the wastelands west of London to think out loud in a room for seven or eight hours straight is, it turns out, kind of hard on the brain.

Five more weeks of two-days-a-week doing that, which isn’t exactly breaking rocks for a living – but it turns out that damn I need that ten hour shutdown afterwards.

Inbox: 22, and today I have to write a quote for something, spend some time on show outline PROJECT SMOKEHILL, try to put some more bones and meat into idea-in-development PROJECT URUK, and getting my notes together for the second draft of a HEAVEN’S FOREST script. And, since it’s only 408am in Los Angeles, I imagine the list will start getting added to in a few hours.

Oh shit. I have to do a blurb for an old friend’s book, too. Time to make more coffee and get all this in order.

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