Behold! Your weekly letter from me, Warren Ellis No Images? Click here ORBITAL OPERATIONS Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where I am wading through two episodes of the show, reading the CEMETERY BEACH paperback out, checking pencils and covers for the first issue of a "new" comics series (I wrote the first script almost a year ago!), picking at bits of the final issue of THE WILD STORM to make sure everything lines up before I do the connective write-through final draft, and enjoying seeing the white spaces appear on my whiteboard. All the small stuff has been dropped from my schedule, because there is no space or time left, and, with the absence of books I need to read for review or blurbing, I have been reading old Maigret books back-to-back at night to relax before sleep. I love Maigret books because they are almost never about evidence or procedure in the ordinary way. Maigret solves the crime by solving the people. Each novel is a little psychological study. I have been buying DVDs of things, and even buying CDs again (The Ligeti Project box set turned up for twenty quid the other day, an excellent soundtrack for The New Bleak). i was joking with Ed Brubaker that I'm preparing for the INFINITE DETAIL-style end of the internet where only physical media will work. But, honestly, I've just been going through a major change in working method and schedule, which has turned my periodic hibernation from the streams into permanent hermitage. I used to need a constant flow of information into the office - silence and low-signal did not help my thinking. But I was doing different work, that tends to require a high density of innovation. When each page needs to be its own thing, you (me) are burning a lot of cycles and a lot of data to try and achieve that. In television, a whole bunch of that becomes someone else's problem, and you're working in longer scenes and longer structures. I find it's more meditative work. More intensive, but I'm spending more time inside the mechanisms of it rather than pulling stuff from outside to constantly feed it. The other week, I used a web app to generate a page containing 120 numbered squares. Each square denotes 500 words. Crossing off all 120 squares constitutes a 60,000 word novel. I don't know why I did this. It is concerning. The way I think and work and exist in the world is changing. I figure this is a good thing, and indicates that my brain hasn't started fossilising yet. I've said this to you before, and I'll say it again: always be checking your practice. Times change and so do you. And let me tell you, I am (re)building a hell of a film and tv library over here, and so much of it isn't available on streaming. The days of "well, everything's going to be on the internet, right?" are long gone. THE NEW BLEAK Is my joke term for a space I've been thinking about for a few years. In the back of my head is a stack of references, starting from Nordic Noir, running through Eastern European cinema and other experimental forms, probably informed by at least three watch-throughs of TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN -- and, bad news for everybody, while I spend May trying to puzzle out a season of a new tv project I plan to watch the entire works of Ingmar Bergman -- and various other things that have struck me as occupying an adjacent space. It's my hobby. Every few days I scribble a few lines in a notebook, or tap a few lines into a rolling story document, and in three or four years it might even turn into something. Everybody needs a hobby, and mine is developing the most chilly and forbidding comics storytelling I can. WORKSPACES: John Rogers My old friend John Rogers is a television and film writer and producer: you'll likely know his name from LEVERAGE or THE LIBRARIANS. What follows are his words and pictures: I was a stand-up comic for 17 years, writing in shitty motel rooms, mall food courts and airport lounges, so I evolved a very specific bubble of portable ritual and stability. First photo is my "office", where I often have to entertain the Monied Humans. Second is my "workspace" -- that laptop, a year-round WORKFLOW notebook and then a specific notebook for each project, the black-infused ink Uniball Signos and whatever fountain pens are amusing me, the skeletool, the Jabra earbuds (better than Airpods) and the dopp kit of dongles, chargers and inks. That's it. Wherever I am, if I can find 2 square feet of tabletop and fire up the white noise generator, I can work. Me again. You can find John on Twitter as @jonrog1 . And also probably inside your television. Do you realise it was something like four and a half years ago when I first told you about Extinction Symbol? How does it feel to be that far ahead of the cultural curve, comrades? Comics won't just break your heart. Comics will just kill you. Hal Crane should know, he's been around since practically the beginning. Stuck at an out-of-town convention, waiting to receive a lifetime achievement award, Hal's weekend takes us on a dark ride through the secret history of a medium that's always been haunted by crooks, swindlers, and desperate dreamers. I bring good news from comics. Issues 2 and 3 of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' CRIMINAL are being collected into an expanded edition with ten new pages and some extra artwork, entitled BAD WEEKEND. And, yes, I did blurb it: The woozy, haunted, authentic intensity of BAD WEEKEND proves conclusively that Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips are one of the best creative teams in the world right now. It's out on July 16th. Ed and Sean would thank you if you ordered one from your local comics shop or bookstore, but if you don't have one of those, here are the Amazon links for (UK) and (US). It is a mighty piece of work, and I recommend it unreservedly. Twitter tip: create a list, and call it LOCAL, and if you look around you will likely find that your area has local traffic and weather Twitter accounts, local news provision, accounts for your local council and transport, your favourite places and local events. News, frankly, is Twitter's best use case. I don't have my own timeline or mentions on Tweetdeck any more, just lists. Don't engage with Twitter aside from your DMs, which you need to set so that only the people you follow can DM you. Just use it as a tool which makes your life a little better. Another tip: I was listening to BBC Radio 4 in the kitchen the other day and it took me a second to realise I could hear the voice of comrade Ingrid Burrington, author of NETWORKS OF NEW YORK. And then, naturally enough, it was replaced by the voice of writer and artist and human superposition James Bridle, author of THE NEW DARK AGE. NEW WAYS OF SEEING, a new series on Radio 4. Excellent. ++ SPEKTRMODULE Nine Dimensional Synod Of Oblique Pleasures - by The Wyrding Module. I personally treasure their long piece "The Word Made Flesh," which was an obscure mp3 release years ago, so I was glad to find new things by them. If you're just joining me and have forgotten why you subscribed: I'm Warren Ellis, author, comics writer, public speaker, screenwriter, producer, Doctor of the University of Essex, visiting Professor to York St John University, Patron to Humanists UK and writer/co-producer of CASTLEVANIA on Netflix. Please add warrenellis@orbitaloperations.com to your address book so I don't keep getting marked as sp7m just for sending you an email with four fucking links in it. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you'd like to infect your friends with it, by driving them to http://orbitaloperations.com and forcing them to give me their email address. Forward them your copy of this newsletter to see if they like it. I post during the week at LTD. And we are out. This one didn't turn out quite how I wanted, but that's nothing new, is it? These things are supposed to be ephemeral - they're just for you, not archived -- and sometimes perfect is the enemy of good, or even done. There's always next week to try again. And I can tell you, it's Sunday at 2pm as I write this bit, my eyes are barely opening and I am definitely done. I've got some new things to try next week. (If you're interested in how these things get built, keep an eye on this blogchain on LTD) In the meantime: take a breath, make everyone and everything go away for five minutes so you can feel your feet on the ground and feel yourself be alive and in the moment and because you bloody well deserve five minutes to yourself. Hold on tight. See you next week.