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this week: a bit more focus

1. ADMIN

Hi. Sorry. These letters have been getting stupid long, and taking ages to do, so for both our sakes I’m starting to fiddle with the format. Remember when I was good at this? Yeah, me neither.

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. My name is Warren Ellis, and I’m a writer from England. These newsletters are about the work I do, the things I see, the books I read, the music I listen to, and the creative life I try to lead. I send them every Sunday to subscribers. Feel free to send your friends to this page here, where they can read the most recent letters and subscribe for their own.

what’s in this week’s edition:

new things, old things

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this week: out of town, gardens, botany

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. It’s Sunday today, which, according to the forecast, means the heavy rains and storms have passed, and, since we’re now past the first week of June, there should be no more frosts this season. As I mentioned on LTD the other day, out here we live in a mild microclimate aside from one freak twist - we now get an outlier frost at the end of May or early June. This made me give up serious attempts at gardening some years ago. My daughter and I would dutifully raise seedlings and plant things up, take every precaution short of building a heated greenhouse bunker, watch the skies and plan our moment, and then CRUNCH. Sudden heavy frost, everything dead.

But now, I can finally rake and enrich some ground, hack back a couple of rogue trees, place the raised covered bed I was bought for Xmas, and start some herbs and autumn/winter veg. I also set up the other thing I got for Xmas, which it’s taken me months to clear an appropriate space for - a little hydroponic seed-growing device.

this week: I wasn't going to use so many pictures, but:

this week: a little different, maybe

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This week, I just want to show you some things.

this week: recipes and limitations

what's in this week's edition

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this week: food and virtual reality

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It's now unambiguously spring. I finally trimmed my beard back for the first time since last autumn and about a bear's worth of hair ended up on the floor. Winter clothes are being washed and put away, cleaning and clearing out has begun. I always miss the passing of winter, to be honest. Over the next several months, part of me is always going to be looking for signs of autumn. But the warmth will be kind to the muscles and bones, and it will be easier to get my daily walk in.

this week: lists, brutalism, bluebells

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this week: art, sound, nuts and mushrooms

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Last week's note turned into a bit of an epic, didn't it? Let's see if I can be shorter this week. I will forgo the rant building up in my head about the word "content," a word which I do not wish to hear again for quite some time. I will refer you instead to this excellent essay by Martin Scorcese on Fellini, which I re-read last night.

kind of a linky week

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this week: a random collation, a random drop

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This week: the pivot between comics and prose, hell's cartography

As I write this, the wind is booming outside and snow is playing the windows like finger drums. My head is mostly in other things this week, but here are a few things I've been thinking about.

this week: Lordess news, two books, the repair shop for some reason

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Welcome back to my personal therapy practice: writing out loud.

I hope you've been as well as can be. If you're one of the people just joining me, this is less a "newsletter" than it is just a letter from me to you where I talk about what I'm seeing, hearing, thinking and doing.

in this issue: making some changes, submarine starships, spring sproing

As I start to come up to speed with these things, it's time to think harder about how I do them and what a "newsletter" should look like for me. Of course, I come from the age of Ceefax but live in the time of the "metaverse"; and so this is going to be a lot of trial and error, as I lean into the new limitations and see what they inspire. Having specific limitations in any creative process can be useful.

Sometimes, it's the simplest things.

Take a small onion, peel it and top and tail it, cut it into sixths and fan the layers out. Top and tail a carrot and chop it into slim batons. Halve half a dozen cherry tomatoes. Crush up a clove or two of garlic. Toss the lot in a little oil, a little balsamic vinegar if you have it, some salt and whatever other seasoning and spices you enjoy. Lay out on a baking tray and stick it in the oven at 180 C for 30-35 minutes. When it pings, fry two eggs, plate the vegetables and put the eggs on top.

Very simple lunch, just using up some remaining veg and a couple of eggs, but, god, that was delicious and restorative. The buds of spring have started to emerge here, but nobody has told the actual weather that, and it's bloody freezing. Winter is hanging on. And, sometimes, it's the simplest things that let us enjoy it and carry on.

(I have the advantage here of four rescue chickens who are producing an insane number of eggs.)

Stephen King, 1982:

"But for novellas ... boy, as far as marketability goes, you in a heap o' trouble. You look at your 25,000-to-35,000-word manuscript dismally, twist the cap off a beer, and in your head you seem to hear a heavily accented and rather greasy voice saying: "Buenos dias, senor! How was your flight on Revolucion Airways? You like eet preety-good-fine I theenk, si? Welcome to Novella, senor! You going to like heet here preety-good-fine, I theenk! Have a cheap cigar! Have some feelthy peectures! Put your feet up, senor, I theenk your story is going to be here a long, long time ... que pasa? Ah-ha-hahhah-hah!""

That's from the foreword to DIFFERENT SEASONS, a book which, to my mind, contains two of his finest pieces, Shawshank Redemption and Apt Pupil.

I love the novella form. The long short story, if you like. You actually cross into the novella at around 17,500 words. Some contend that the far border of the novella is 40,000 words. Some awards systems start the novel at 40,000 words, and that seems to have become more standard, but I remember a writer telling me years ago that he wrestled his book up to 54,000 words to ensure it was in novel awards contention. (It won all of them, so he clearly wasn't wrong.)

What a week, eh?

It's early Thursday afternoon, and I'd planned to watch a couple of films today, but instead I have the news streaming. A terrible break in discipline, but, hey, I'm sure you saw at least one news headline this week. On the bright side, I no longer have the ability to doomscroll. I will shortly switch back to Radio Mothership from up the road in Woodbridge.

Go through your phone today and decide which notifications you really need to keep switched on. That includes going through your WhatsApp and deciding who you can live with muting for a week, and deciding which news providers get to blast you with newsflashes.

I'm on an old iPhone 8, because it still works wonderfully well, and the advent of iOS 14 gave me access to widgets. This turned up at precisely the right time for me -- I wanted a calm device that was, as much as possible, a passive information radiator. Email, web access and personal messaging services are all buried inside folders on the dock, so that I have to make a conscious effort to use them, putting them out of reach of that semi-conscious twitch action. The widgets give me basic useful things at a glance - I even have a weather radar picture on the home screen, which is one of those rare "that feels like the future" things.

++I REMEMBER THE DINOSAURS WELL

This week is about taking stock and inventory.

While I was on hiatus from this newsletter, I got commissioned to write a tv pilot, consulted on another show, witnessed with bafflement Netflix putting me up for Emmy consideration for writing CASTLEVANIA (in drama, not animation), and did various other bits and pieces - and did a lot of thinking and reconnecting with life. I'm also working on something that's personally very exciting, and I'll be able to talk about that more at the end of the year. But, seriously, whenever I think about it, I rock back and forth on my heels and smile - it's something I've wanted to do for forty years.

First off, happy new year. May it be some small improvement on last year.

The mediated conversation with SMOU progresses. It's been a learning experience working with the mediator, who I've been talking with since August, and I have to thank them for their dedicated and empathetic work. SMOU completed their internal work and made a substantive response on Jan 27 2022, for which I thank them. I remain committed to the process.

You can find a Jan 31 2022 statement that updates our progress here.

Housekeeping. OO has been on Campaign Monitor for years, and I love them. Their service is superb. However, it's a massive Swiss Army Knife of a thing, and does more than I need it to do. So I've chosen to simplify, and have moved the newsletter to the very well regarded Buttondown system - which, I have to note, provides excellent service and support right from the start. More on this shortly.