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Tag: magazines

26oct26

Published October 26, 2026 by Warren Ellis

It’s a touch damp out there today.

It’s Monday.

everybody’s getting back on X The Everything App. And by “everybody” I mean:

Nope.

Hannah Hauxwell (1926-2018) lived alone and maintained a farm “in almost unendurable conditions of farmers in the High Pennines in winter,” notes a film producer. Upon the deaths of her immediate family, then 35-year old Hannah took over management of the farm and made it her life dwelling in solitude.Hannah came to media attention in 1972 when a random hiker told a researcher about Hannah. She was the subject of successive television documentaries chronicling her solitary life in the Northshire wilds: “Too Long A Winter” (1972), “A Winter Too Many,” (1989), “Innocent Abroad” (1992),

New issue of The Modernist magazine. First thing learned: those generic one-piece plastic chairs you see everywhere have a name. They are Monobloc.

OPERATIONS: This week is Beast Mode. Got a script out the door yesterday, need to get at least half of one out today. My to-do list takes up a whole index card, vertically. And I have to get next Sunday’s newsletter started, as I’m on the road this coming weekend.
STATUS: Frantically trying to get my focus back! Last night I made roasted cabbage with black truffle sea salt as a side, and it was surprisingly successful. I now have a freezer compartment filled with chopped fruit. Already blew a bunch of time talking to the bank and dealing with accounts and I still need to call the phone company. See, this is why Brandon Sanderson has a team of a hundred people. Being a one-man-band for thirty-odd years is fucking exhausting.
READING: THE ROUSE, China Mieville (UK) (US+) and aforementioned magazine.
LISTENING: SOAKED, Philip Jeck + Jacob Kirkegaard

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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13oct26

Published October 13, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Been off for a few days. Went to a birthday party at the weekend, at a pub I haven’t set foot in for almost forty years.

Partway down the Little Wakering Road. Go allll the way down that road and you’re into Barling Magna, where I lived with a girl for a year. We used to go to this pub for lunch at the weekends.

ACCESSIONS:

Ordered a bunch of magazines from the excellent MagCulture that arrived yesterday.

I do appreciate a thoughtful bit of packaging.

MONOCLE is there because I haven’t read an issue of it in about fifteen years and I was simply curious. I’ve read EYE and REAL REVIEW before. The others are new to me.

I need new inputs. And there are kinds of input you can only get from print. Going back to the source and back to analogue means going back to small magazines.

TODAY:

STATUS: after a crappy couple of days, I am trying to pull my focus together.
READING: RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+).
LISTENING: Ultimate Calm with Erland Cooper ft: Claire Rousay
PAPERWORK: (pens pencils paper etc with amz)

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9oct26

Published October 9, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Autumn is creeping in step by step. Colder starts to the day, now. The managed retreat begins. Played yesterday with Dirty Little Zine for making tiny photobooks to clip into notebooks. Dropped a frankly absurd amount of money on a shipment of magazines from Magculture.

TODAY:

ACCESSIONS:

Just received this in the post from Mia Wolff:

OPERATIONS: all the things. My to-do list is ridiculous.
STATUS: awaiting a delivery of stationery items and peering unhappily at my bank balance
READING: RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+).

I saw a straight razor and strop, plus a toothbrush stuck in a half pint of vodka. Stalin brushed his teeth with vodka.

LISTENING: right now, Night Tracks and also episode 22 of podcast Did Somebody Say…Ambient?
PAPERWORK: switched to the Pigma Micron 03 after having two brand new 0.7mm Energels crap out on me in a row with fat lines, skipped strokes, wet inks with bad flow. When did Energels get bad?

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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8sep26

Published September 8, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Didn’t get enough nailed down yesterday. I have the full shape of two stories, but I really wanted to get into scripting and to firm up the scripts on two other jobs. Possibly I was being ambitious, but there’s little point in not being ambitious. Anyway, one artist has a rough pitch for a piece, and I’m a few hours away from finalising the style for the other, and then I’m into scripting up from notes and bones on those two other things. I don’t get bored.

Which is a pity, really, because sometimes boredom is when the backbrain starts assembling pieces of things to amuse itself. However, that is also why I take a notebook and a music player to the coffee shop. Something I’ve done since the age of the Walkman, except in the early days it was pubs or all-night burger shops.

Ended up buying more Silvine record cards, a mini clipboard and a card holder for the desk. Committing to the bit. Not going full Zettelkasten, though. Zettelkasten articles make my head hurt.

ACCESSIONS:

The one film missing from The Fassbinder Collection that I wanted to see was IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS, and I finally spotted a copy on blu-ray for a tenner.

Seems to be only on DVD in the US.

New issue of NEURAL magazine just showed up.

OPERATIONS: already moved 8pp out of the office, am two pages into another thing, working across two other scripts today, broke ground on Sunday’s newsletter
STATUS: it’s raining!
READING: re-reading ANTWERP, Roberto Bolano (UK) (US+)

We were on the edge of the reservoir and the sky was very blue. A few fishermen were visible in the distance and smoke from a chimney rose over the trees. Green wood, for burning witches, said the old man, his lips hardly moving.


LISTENING: DUST OF STARS: LANDSCAPES OF HOLLOW, Angela Winter

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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status 15jun26

Published June 15, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Yesterday, as is tradition, I gave herself the first ripe raspberry of summer. Today, we were out in the garden in the rain with a bowl collecting raspberries and redcurrants.

I had a whole plan to Go Outside today, but the weather has not cooperated, so I’m indoors going through my Bandcamp queue and probably buying too many records again.

On Friday, we went to see The Cobras in Harlow, because we know the bassist, and on Saturday I went to the final Konsztrukting Soundz of the season. Konsztrukting Sounds is a monthly experimental music night, and it’s become the highlight of my month – I’m going to miss it over the summer. They’re running a crowdfunder to support the upcoming third season of the event right now.

Julian Simpson connecting his various audio fiction and prose fiction “universes” into a single space and brand made me sit into space and think for a while. At the same time, a musician acquaintance has been sharing with me the video album she’s making to support her new music project (shooting them with an old comics acquaintance of mine, it turns out), and that’s been making my brain churn too. Social media is a dead zone but the wider internet is still a possibility space.

TODAY:

Just arrived, the new issue of NORTHERN EARTH:

OPERATIONS: consulting job needs to be wrapped by Friday, but this week I also need to get a big chunk of the novella down, and I had an idea Saturday night for a short story that I absolutely want to get landed in first draft this week, so this week is going to get a bit crunchy.
STATUS: was intending to go out this morning, but it’s cold and wet again. I also need to clear this laptop off in prep for the new one that should be arriving some time in the next week – this one is still working, so long as I don’t try to do too much on it at once. Software repair processes helped it a little, but the chipset is clearly failing. Very sad.
READING: HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT, Olga Tokarczuk (UK) (US+)

I don’t know why I have stored this kind of detail while forgetting the rest of the story. It must have made some sort of sense – it was a story, after all, with a beginning and an end – but I remember nothing but the pips, which my memory, quite rightly, has had to spit out later on.


LISTENING: Harju sent me their new record and it’s amazing:


LAST WATCHED: MOCK THE WEEK summer specials
DRINK: Cafe de Parisienne liqueur, for an affogato with double chocolate ice cream I made

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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19jan26

Published January 19, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Stephen Willats

I fully intended to walk outside to get coffee and sit with the notebook this morning, but it’s pushing noon and I’m still in the office chair, probably getting piles and trying to deal with the day’s problems. Pretty much all of which are of my own making, because email and messages are silent. I’d even thought about getting a cab down to Leigh to visit the new Little Fin cafe, but no, here I am reading a PDF for a book I’m running out of time to write the foreword for, looking at the research materials for a prose thing I only have 12 days left to land, and figuring out ways to somehow bring my venerable and moribund newsletter back from the dead.

Everything feels weirdly silent today. Can the internet hold its breath?

New issue of NEURAL magazine arrived, so that’s tonight sorted.

TODAY:

OPERATIONS: script, foreword, outline
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: The Early Music Show
LAST WATCHED: three more episodes of MOONSHINERS: MASTER DISTILLER

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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telemetry 14dec25

Published December 14, 2025 by Warren Ellis

https://lastweekincollapse.substack.com/p/last-week-in-collapse-december-7

I still read The Economist most weeks, and this is my reminder to sit down with the new issue tonight.

Earlier this week, a woman made a startling discovery while hailing a Waymo autonomous cab for her daughter in Los Angeles: a quick glance into the back of the vehicle revealed a stranger, who’d been hiding from view in the trunk.

“This s*** won’t let me out,” the man shouted after being confronted, in a video shared by the woman. “They put me in here,” he added, accusing unspecified “people” of trapping him.

A chaotic followup video shows the man being detained by two police officers on the sidewalk, while the woman is talking to a Waymo representative over the vehicle’s sound system.

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