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Tag: writing

morning computer playing dead

Published December 4, 2025 by Warren Ellis

New research conducted on a NASA-discovered bacterium shows the microbe is capable of entering an extreme dormant state, essentially “playing dead” to survive in some of the cleanest environments on Earth.

The finding could potentially reshape how scientists think about microbial survival on spacecraft and the challenges of preventing contamination during missions to space. Preventing contamination matters because it helps keep space missions safe, while ensuring that any signs of life spotted elsewhere in the solar system can be trusted.

“It shows that some microbes can enter ultra-low metabolic states that let them survive extremely austere environments, including clean rooms that naturally select for the hardiest organisms,” said Nils Averesch, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the University of Florida’s Department of Microbiology and Cell Science and a member of the Astraeus Space Institute. “The fact that this bacterium can intentionally suspend its metabolism makes survival on spacecraft surfaces or during deep-space cruise more plausible than previously assumed.”

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.”  — Tom Stoppard.

A spectre is haunting the best contemporary literary writing, the spectre of necromodernism…

Writing à propos of Louis Armand’s recent opus magnum, A Tomb in H-Section (2025), critic Ramiro Sanchiz called it “a necromodernist tour de force which animates every remain of (un)dead XXth century literature,” thus invoking the spectre of necromodernism, a modernism long-buried but still somehow living on, its undead corpse back again for yet another zombie standoff.

Necromodernism!

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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morning computer crowblack

Published November 24, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Vanessa Gillings.

To begin at the beginning: It is a spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

UNDER MILK WOOD, Dylan Thomas

The Crow Canyon Petroglyphs, the American Southwest’s most extensive collection of Navajo rock art from the 16th through 18th centuries. Some represent corn, the most sacred plant in their creation story. According to myth, white corn emerged along with First Woman (Áłtsé asdzą́ą́ ) and yellow corn with First Man (Altsé hastiin)

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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NINE BELLS cobwebbed space

Published October 1, 2025 by Warren Ellis

I’m assembling a little idea space I want to do some work in. For other people, I suppose this is like moodboarding – and I always encourage artists to show me their moodboards for the areas they’re currently interested in. For me, it’s a bit more messy and cobwebby. It’s what I want to talk about and how I want to talk about it. There’s no method, protocol, routine or discipline beyond making myself sit with an open notebook and thinking into it. Which also involves searching my memory. Sorting through the calamitous disarray of drawers and cupboards in my head for bits of films and half-remembered lines and barely recalled posters and graphics. It is the opposite of a memory palace. Not at all a wunderkammer. Anyone who’s seen my actual physical office will get the idea. Weirdly, I discover things better when they’re all over the place. And I accumulate a hundred new things into the piles every day, and covet more.

Is it weird that I want a case of mp3 players like Karl Lagerfeld? It is, right?

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NINE BELLS lazy

Published June 10, 2025 by Warren Ellis

I have read a calculation that Picasso produced at least one piece of art a day from the age of twenty until his death.

Not sure how he found the time, given his intense and poisonous personal life, but there it is.

This sort of thing always makes me curious. Like the fact that Graham Greene wrote exactly and only 500 words a day, every day.

It also somehow makes me feel lazy. To be this age and still feeling like I’m not doing it right.

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Decide You Don’t Know It’s Impossible

Published May 27, 2025 by Warren Ellis

One way into a new piece of work is the CITIZEN KANE position. It’s Orson Welles giving the answers in this interview:

A: I thought you could do anything with a camera that the eye could do or the imagination could do. And if you come up from the bottom in the film business, you’re taught all the things that the cameraman doesn’t want to attempt for fear he will be criticized for having failed. And in this case I had a cameraman who didn’t care if he was criticized if he failed, and I didn’t know that there were things you couldn’t do, so anything I could think up in my dreams, I attempted to photograph.

Q: You got away with enormous technical advances, didn’t you?

A: Simply by not knowing that they were impossible.


“I didn’t know there were things you couldn’t do.” It’s an invitation to forget what you know and come to a space fresh. Imagine that whatever form or function in front of you is an impossible machine for presenting dreams. And instead of deciding the machine cannot possibly generate any given dream, figure out what you have to do to it to make it work right.


Decide you don’t know it’s impossible, and do it anyway.

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The Deliberately Bad First Draft

Published May 26, 2025 by Warren Ellis

THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT was a medium that I haven’t, strictly speaking, worked in before, so there was A Plan for it.  The plan was: Deliberately Carelessly Bad First Drafts.  In this method, the goal is to just get to the end while having everything make some kind of vague sense.  Once you see the script as a whole, you can fix it up, but you have to get to the end of the script first without constantly second-guessing yourself as to whether you’re nailing it or not.  

You have to let yourself be Bad At It. Empty out everything you’ve been thinking about the job on to the page and don’t worry about whether it’s any good or not. You need it all out in front of you so you can see it all properly in all its horror.

Ideally, you should never show those drafts to anyone.  But I have two trusted co-producers, so I sent them on for notes, which help clarify the rewrite goals.  Sometimes you want to be left alone to sort it out yourself, sometimes you know that it’s Wrong in so many particulars that you want extra eyes on it to catch all the Wrongs.

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On The Pure Novel

Published December 16, 2024 by Warren Ellis

(This is me organising a bunch of disparate notes and thoughts in one place so I can see them properly.)

I was talking with a novelist acquaintance the other day about novel length. He was having to aim for a 100k word count on a new book because it’s simply what publishers ask for, because 100k is considered a firm expectation by the audience. The audience apparently having grown up on fantasy doorstops, or, I dunno, those fat brick Tom Clancy books.

I remember once briefly talking online to a famous writer who’d wrestled his novella up to 55k so that it would be eligible for novel awards.

Pretty much everything Georges Simenon ever wrote was in the 30-40k range. For reasons. He was once interviewed by the Paris Review, and while that is currently behind their paywall, someone sneakily escaped a copy, ssshhh.

INTERVIEWER

Is length important? Is it part of your definition of the pure novel?

SIMENON

Yes. That sounds like a practical question, but I think it is important, for the same reason you can’t see a tragedy in more than one sitting. I think that the pure novel is too tense for the reader to stop in the middle and take it up the next day.

I once wrote a 30k story, serialised in four parts, that was finally published as NORMAL. Or, as it says on the cover, NORMAL: A Novel. I had a great time with that. At the time, I wasn’t sold on calling it A Novel, as it was 30k and I didn’t want the publisher to get shit for calling a 30k book a novel. I don’t know if they did, but I did. But then, I got shit for GUN MACHINE being “only” 80-90k (I forget the exact length, let alone CROOKED LITTLE VEIN being 60-70k.

The perceived expectation of the potential audience can distort the shape of a work.

INTERVIEWER

One time you spoke about your wish to write the “pure” novel. Is this what you were speaking of a while ago — about cutting out the “literary” words and sentences — or does it also include the poetry you have just spoken of?

SIMENON

The “pure” novel will do only what the novel can do. I mean that it doesn’t have to do any teaching or any work of journalism. In a pure novel you wouldn’t take sixty pages to describe the South or Arizona or some country in Europe. Just the drama with only what is absolutely part of this drama. What I think about novels today is almost a translation of the rules of tragedy into the novel. I think the novel is the tragedy for our day.

Obviously, those points about teaching and journalism come from their time – the interview was conducted in 1955. (And isn’t it just a little wonderfully odd to be able to source and quote an arts interview conducted seventy years ago?) A lot of creative movement has happened in the intervening time. Cut that, and you’re left with the contention that the pure novel is a distilled thing.

(Also worth noting: he considered the Maigret novels less important than his self-described “hard novels,” the work he thought of as serious, because of the structure of the Maigrets. Because they were all told from Maigret’s POV, and the reader could only know what Maigret knew, the other characters in the books could never be given what Simenon considered appropriate weight – he could not descend into them.)

I once wrote a story, ELEKTROGRAD: RUSTED BLOOD, that was informed by my interest in Archigram. (UK) (US) In my head, it was going to be the start of a whole series, with each story containing an Archigram or other experimental-architecture element…

And then I got hospitalised, and then life happened.

I’ve self published a lot over the decades, pretty much as soon as Print On Demand came in, because that was fascinating to me and because I unhelpfully have more ideas and write more words than I can realistically do anything with. And the form I like best – the NORMAL form – is not one publishers like. NORMAL was an experiment for that publisher, and it did fine (and was an Amazon Top 100 book for 2016), but it was and is outside their usual practice and wasn’t intended to be repeated.

I wrote this in 2022!

I need to start writing the newsletter today, and also to start figuring out some of the extra bells and whistles that the new hosting platform provides me. I’ve been talking recently in the newsletter about returning to digital publishing, which I’ve done a lot of in the past — NORMAL. CUNNING PLANS,  ELEKTROGRAD and FREAKANGELS are just a few examples —

This has been marinating a long time.

So I’ve been thinking about self-publishing again, just to work in the prose form I like best. Without having to convince anyone else I’m not ill and without anyone else having to risk real money that could more usefully go towards food and shelter for other people.

In my notes, I’ve been calling it “the quick novel,” “the fast novel,” “fast fiction” (ha!) and “the short novel.” JG Ballard also had “the condensed novel.” But maybe “the pure novel” is the term I needed. I tend towards concision as a writer. And that’s something I’d like to explore. I would never actually claim to be writing A Pure Novel, that sounds a little too lofty, but it’s an interesting frame for thinking.

So, in whatever spaces I get for thinking over the next month or two, this is where my spare brain cycles are going. I’d like 2025 to be the year I actually get something done and out within this frame, for my own edification, development and peace of mind if nothing else. Short novels. Probably technically novellas? But I have accidental form in calling 30,000 words a novel, so fuck it, right?

(And covers that are purely typographic solutions, like Fitzcarraldo, Strelka or Faber Poetry.)

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morning computer curtains

Published December 16, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Reuben Wu.

It was a dialogue as grim as the language of thunder. The jerkings of his arms cut the sky into pieces, and in the cracks there appeared the face of Jehovah swollen with anger and spitting out curses. Without looking, I saw him, the terrible Demiurge, as, resting on darkness as on Sinai, propping his powerful palms on the pelmet of the curtains, he pressed his enormous face against the upper panes of the window…

THE STREET OF CROCODILES, Bruno Schulz

It was my idea that I would walk through the mirror in my own room. The mirror would soften, and I would be in another land. The moment of the mirror’s softening would be perfection. It would be the coalescing of image and sensation into something more and other than either of these two. It would be analogous to learning to fly or practice telekinesis. Having passed through a buoyant vertical curtain, I would find everything to surprise me.

Of Unicorns: On My Little Pony, by Lucy Ives

CONNECTED:

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The Zone Of The Nameable

Published December 6, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Kafka sensed that by then only the minimum number of elements of the surrounding world ought to be named. He plunged the sharpest Ockham’s razor into the substance of the novel. To name the bare minimum, and in its pure literality. And why so? Because the world was turning back into a primeval forest, too fraught with strange noises and apparitions. Everything had too much power. Thus it became necessary to limit oneself to what lay closest at hand, to circumscribe the zone of the nameable. Then all that power, otherwise diffuse, would be channeled there, and whatever was named—an inn, a file, an office, a room—would fill with unprecedented energy.

K, Roberto Calasso (UK) (US+)

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Frost Marks

Published November 27, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Gary Wagner.

Last night, the robust flowers — yellow, orange, red, and violet — succumbed to an overnight frost. In the morning the shriveled flowers hung crestfallen and lifeless. Should we have anticipated this event and turned “modern” in our attitude? Have brought out the technologies: the plastic wrap, the warm covers? Who would encourage it?

Not the transcendentalists, who visited their flowers in visits to open nature, not by maintaining contrived and entrapped closures. Thoreau delighted in venturing to the woods, not in sitting stultified in a captured zoo-like presentation of nature. Emily Dickinson teaches us that the processes of the universe must necessarily take their course, just as nature intended. To militate against them, regret them and curse them, is to deny them and ourselves, of insight into what is true and wise and necessary. The cycle will go on with us or without us, and we are better to choose to be with it.

The Ice Age camp site of Gönnersdorf on the banks of the Rhine has revealed a groundbreaking discovery that sheds new light on early fishing practices. New imaging methods have allowed researchers to see intricate engravings of fish on ancient schist plaquettes, accompanied by grid-like patterns that are interpreted as depictions of fishing nets or traps.
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