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WARREN ELLIS LTD

WARREN ELLIS LTD

WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.

30may23

Warren Ellisstatus

Another grey day with a chill in the air. My body thinks it’s still February and wants me to go back in the cave to finish hibernating.

ON DECK: Unless something else happens during the day, I’m bulling my way through to the end of a treatment and then going to a new project outline tonight.
INBOX: 75, but that’s mostly delivery notifications. Ran out of everything at once.
LISTENING: Night Tracks.
READING: PROCESS: THE WRITING LIVES OF GREAT AUTHORS
OUTSIDE: this article on THE PAPER:

Where are you?
OG: I’m home today but I usually work at the Cardiff University hospital library. It’s got a good, studious atmosphere, as I’m surrounded by lots of extremely stressed medical students drinking Monster energy and reading about bones.

 

What can you see from your desk/ through the window?
EM: I don’t have a fixed desk space at home—sometimes I sit by the front window, but it can be quite distracting. Like the other morning I ended up charging a scaffolder’s tools cos the guy he was working for on the street wouldn’t open the door to him, then I ended up chatting for ages with a different guy who used to live in this house, who made his presence known by shouting, ‘Is the pond still out the back?!’ at me repeatedly through the window.

In the garden, it has come to this: plant hats.

So many of the gardens on our street have been paved over that it seems all the slugs and snails in the postcode have come to live in ours. Therefore, I’m trying everything I can find to help my plants survive.

The City Is Ribbed For Your Pleasure

Warren Ellismorning computer

Above, the work of Ay-O, age 92.

I really need to find time to cull my RSS feed subscriptions, because they’re overrun with posts about AI, and the only AI story I cared about lately was the one where AI might have identified a new antibiotic. (Try replacing “AI” with “clever use of spreadsheets” in every story you see about AI.) This is the sort of thing filling my RSS reader:

“AI generated inflatable skyscrapers.” One suspects this comes from the same techbro k-hole as the time networked clothing was described as “wearable shirts.” Apparently the above is “fresh inspiration” and not “there are a lot of condoms in the image library learning model.” Look closely and you will see that the speculative city of the future is ribbed for your pleasure.

On Routines

Warren Ellisjotter

The thing about daily routines is that, in the end, they slip and slide. I was reading over my most recent Daily Routine notation from earlier this year (that I somehow managed to misname as Jan 2022) and, boy, it’s the end of May and I don’t do all of that any more. Winter went on forever, there was family health stress, a few deadline-intensive jobs, getting DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT up and running, various other things and, frankly, a large dose of fuckit.

This leads me back to the start of the loop, where you begin thinking about “productivity” and what you need to change or begin doing. And the thing about thinking about “productivity” is that you can easily find yourself in a space where thinking about “productivity” becomes the only activity you’re performing, and the things you’re trying to design to make work easier or better become the entirety of the work.

So I went outside and planted strawberries in the raised bed instead.

I have a magpie mind. Maintaining a concrete routine can work for months and even years, but in the end I’ll feel caged and look for a side door to slip out of, loosen the days up, turn a nine-part plan into a beginning and a finish and just wing it from A to B in whatever route suits me. I say to people: I always have a plan, but I always wing it in the middle and adjust to the air currents as I go.

Unfortunately, this can lead to me saying to myself, I can pick up that fucking notebook again or I could watch THE GROUNDSTAR CONSPIRACY with George Peppard and Michael Sarrazin, and what happened to Michael Sarrazin anyway, he was in fucking everything when I was a kid and often seemed to be either hallucinating or naked or both, and the music in this film feels really weird for the kind of film it is, and maybe I should isolate some of that music for sound design or maybe a basis for incidental music or an ident because Seventies electronic sound really is its own thing –

And then I pick up the notebook. Just not when I was supposed to.

Anyway, I need to change my routine back up, because I’ve gotten lazy.

PIRANESI, Susanna Clarke

Warren Ellisbooks

The beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

I never read JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL – didn’t look like my sort of thing. But, given the attention paid to it, I was interested in reading Susanna Clarke’s prose. So I picked up the shorter PIRANESI, which looked more like my sort of thing, and then it sat on the digital pile for god knows how long. I opened it one Friday night, and finished it on the Wednesday night. I did not get much sleep. It is really very good.

Also very hard to talk about without serious spoilers, but let me try: there is a man who lives in The House, an apparently infinite arrangement of vast halls filled with giant statues, all constructed upon an ocean with occasionally dangerous tides that provides him seafood to live on, and subject to its own internal weather systems. This is the entire world. He has always lived in The House – however, he possesses education, objects and modern locutions that suggest this is not the case. He is visited twice a week by The Other, the only human he knows, who gives him tasks of observation and measurement in pursuit of The Great And Secret Knowledge. The Other calls our man Piranesi.

Piranesi is not mad. But he has been lied to. A lot.

It is a supernatural/science-fictional mystery novel, but it’s chiefly a study of solitude and empathy, and of living fully in a world full of marvels. (And, perhaps, the old saw about “where we get our ideas from.”) The mystery, by the way, is wonderful. But there’s an argument to be made that the book is really an allegory for how we live and how we don’t live, how we see and how we don’t see, and how the things done to us and taken away from us can sometimes lead to a new life that has its own wonders and joys.

PIRANESI, Susanna Clarke (shop)

STUPOR MUNDI, Susan Drone

Warren Ellislibrary

Susan Drone is better known as Susana Lopez.

One of those marvellous, all-enveloping, dark-ambient drone pieces, reminiscent to me of Julian Cope’s magnificent ODIN in places. It shifts and rises through its four sections, riverine and contemplative.

29may23

Warren Ellisstatus

It’s actually a bank holiday here for some reason – I swear we’ve had four of them this month – and I guess it’s a holiday in the US too, but I’m back online anyway. I don’t feel like my head is completely together, but I need to get moving now. But probably not today, because I have plants to tend to and seeds to sow, and we took in three new rescue chickens at the weekend that I have to keep an eye on.

ON DECK: I’m halfway through a consult job, and across a script and two outlines, marking up the boards, setting calls, making plans and trying to wake up
INBOX: 71. I’ll be picking up most email after 5.
READING: TLS, currently. I have a longgggg reading queue to get to.
LAST WATCHED: SUCCESSION final episode
OUTSIDE: A Day Inside Putin’s Surreal Television Empire

10may23

Warren Ellisstatus

The sycamore tree is now in full leaf. I have a lot to do in the garden, but I have more to do indoors.

ON DECK: Trying to compress three days’ work into two, because I’m recording on Friday, apparently. I dunno which episode of DEPT. MIDNIGHT we’re recording, but I’ve been told to hold the day, so holding I am.
INBOX: 70. Catching up.
READING: Just finished PIRANESI, casting around for what’s next.
OUTSIDE: “Police arrest man in gimp suit who jumped in front of motorist in Somerset”

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