WARREN ELLIS LTD

marks 5jul23

Warren EllistimestampJuly 5, 2023

We could see the glint off giant cities on alien worlds, suggests paper. That’s a fun idea.
Taylor Sheridan interview. Some interesting process and commercial-art thinking buried in here. As someone who wrote four seasons of a show on his own – and who comes from a British tv culture of one writer, one show – I can appreciate his stance on these things. Not convinced a writer’s room would have made EDGE OF DARKNESS better. Or FLEABAG.
Discovery of up to 25 Mesolithic pits in Bedfordshire astounds archaeologists

I tend to use the winter months to read all the things I really should have read years ago. Given how much I love THE RINGS OF SATURN, it’s really kind of baffling and unconscionable that I haven’t yet read VERTIGO by WG Sebald. So this is now in the queue for when the nights get long.

This also marks the point where I start logging the books I’m buying. My reading queue is insanely long, partly because I buy books (most often when they’re on sale, a habit from my teens and twenties that I never shook) and then forget I bought them a week later.

I’m stealing the use of the term “accessions” from Paul Graham Raven, as a useful search operator to prevent me losing things, and because we write things down to remember them. Cheers, Paul.

COMPOSER OF THE WEEK: György Ligeti (BBC Radio 3)

Warren EllispodcastsJuly 5, 2023

Listen now
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Composer of the Week
Kate Molleson explores the life of György Ligeti with guest, Danny Driver

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0fqp0ns

Not entirely sure this will work – BBC tends to resist any kind of embed – but I have to make a start on logging the podcasts I want to remember somewhere, so I’ll start here, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. This one showed up on my feed right after rewatching a chunk of 2001 the previous night, oddly enough. Somewhere, I have the 5CD box set of THE LIGETI PROJECT, which somehow never got logged here.

Warren EllistimestampJuly 5, 2023

Sea purslane is amazingly good. How did I not know this before?

HWN UN AMN, 43ODES

Warren EllisscoreJuly 5, 2023

Sadly no CD release for this: plays, in the opening, a little like a more chilled version of France (with a slowed-down stoned version of Chris Rea’s banjo figure from “Let’s Dance”), before easing into a Tuluum Shimmering-like pastoral psychedelia. Something for summer afternoons: that opening piece is something you’d playlist after “Deep Blue Day.”

The Chromebook Pixel 2013 Lives

Warren EllisjotterJuly 5, 2023

I had to hunt around online and drop forty fucking quid on a replacement charging brick, but the old Chromebook Pixel I was gifted by Google Open Source ten years ago does in fact live. However, Google identifies it as having passed End Of Life, decertified support, and refuses to update or sync. The latter seems like bullshit to me, really. And Google Docs insists that the un-updateable Chrome instance is unsupported. But! It turns out I can write in Google Docs just fine, and it auto-saves just fine. So I have what I wanted. It does one single thing very very well – auto-saved plaintext in a pleasant writing environment on an excellent keyboard. And, now I have a phone that won’t die when I ask it to do literally anything, I can use it as a hotspot for the Pixel, as I get 5G in the back garden, and write new short fiction at the patio table under the lilac tree. All good.

status 5jul23

Warren EllisstatusJuly 5, 2023

It’s July and the pollen count is still nightmarish. But it did finally rain! Looks like we got almost 8mm overnight. Kid’s partner is out of the hospital after their operation, and all is looking pretty good so far. The sun is out, I have coffee, and all is well.

ON DECK: Scripting, outlining, emailing, thinking. Picked up a very fun new short gig with an artist I love and need to start planning that out tonight.
INBOX: 88. Reducing that today. Am avail all day.
LISTENING: NIGHT TRACKS, which opened with a nice Sarah Davachi piece

SHIPPING FORECAST: As per previous post, just going to relax and make notes here as and when I feel.

A Small Alteration

Warren Ellisthe isles of bloggingJuly 5, 2023

I’ve changed the top strap on the website. 18 months ago, it just read “storytelling, culture and knowledge work.” Around the start of the year, I appended “a writer’s notebook” to that. On Sunday, I cut “storytelling, culture and knowledge work.”

The original top strap was a reminder to myself that this isn’t a private notebook, and people can read over my shoulder, and that there was a point to my collections here. Now, it feels like it’s getting in the way of what the place wants to be, and the shapes of my days are distorting around it a little bit. So I’m going to try just letting it be what it wants to be for a while.

Vaguely related: I often think about Marc Weidenbaum’s “scratchpad” practise:

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week.
https://disquiet.com/2023/07/01/scratch-pad-bandcamp-fireworks-x-rays/

I’m curious as to how to adapt that without using social media.

Here we go again.

Previously.

STATION IDENT: 2023, Part Two

Warren EllisSTATION IDENTJuly 4, 2023

This is warrenellis.ltd, a writer’s notebook by Warren Ellis, New York Times-bestselling author of GUN MACHINE and the Amazon Top 100 2016 author of NORMAL, co-creator of graphic novels including TRANSMETROPOLITAN, PLANETARY, TREES, FREAKANGELS and RED, and the creator, writer and co-producer of CASTLEVANIA on Netflix and the forthcoming audio drama serial THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT.

Being a personal notebook, it combines gathered knowledge with considerations of new culture and information, jottings and observations, and personal statuses and notes. This means it is essentially of no utility to anyone but me, but, if you’re reading this, you’re welcome to read over my shoulder.

In public, I write this journal and a free weekly newsletter, ORBITAL OPERATIONS, which can be sampled and subscribed to at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com. I’ve been writing newsletters since the 1990s and it seems to be ingrained in me now.

I am represented by the Cheng Caplan Company, Inkwell Management and VanderKloot Law.

30jun23

Warren EllisstatusJune 30, 2023

Sudden craving for marmalade. God knows why. I’m just not good at summer eating. I’m an autumnal human.

America is having its very long weekend, and that’s a good excuse for me to turn everything off for a while. I’ll reactivate this log on Wednesday.

WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.

György Ligeti (1923-2006)

Sliding Sidebar