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| | Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, and congratulations to Ian Holloway for marking ten years doing the fine Wyrd Britain. | | | | | INSPIRATIONS | SLIVERS | NEW ACTS | MURMURATIONS | THE EARTH RADIATES SONG |
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| Letters about the creative life by Warren Ellis, a writer from England. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe. |
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| | | | šļø Conrad Schnitzler, SOLO BASS HEAD appears to be the title, and the opening piece is wonderful. Remember that weird gurgling bass note in the first Star Trek film? Like that. | šļø THE CONTRAPTION, a marvellously strange short film with a marvellously strange pedigree: written and directed by the guy that wrote FATAL ATTRACTION, and starring Richard OāBrien, who wrote THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW. | šWhere did you propose?ā | āI didnāt,ā Poe said. āEstelle proposed to me.ā | āThatās . . . unconventional.ā | āYou donāt know the half of it. She lured me to a post-mortem and when I got there sheād spelled out āWill you marry me?ā with finger bones.ā | ā THE MERCY CHAIR, MW Craven |
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| | OPERATIONS | SLIVERS | I canāt show you the two amazing covers Iāve had burning a hole in my desktop for the last few months, and itās killing me. All I can do is show you two little slivers of them to prove theyāre real and scratch the itch. And hope this doesnāt piss anyone off! | | | Itās been a year of schedules getting dropped in pools of molasses: Iāve just looked at the calendar and moved two books off the 2024 board and on to the 2025 board. Nothing happens fast any more, and Iām mostly okay with that, but once in a blue moon I just want to scream. | I am into the development of PROJECT BORLEY now - which is already sold and contracted, my co-creator artist is busy in visual development, and I 1) still donāt have six plots I like enough 2) am assembling the weird toolbox the project requires. It is not going to look like other comics Iāve done. It contains a bunch of tools Iāve been itching to try out, and Iām spending a lot of time in notebooks and staring at the wall visualising. If we can pull this off, itās going to beā¦ well, probably alienating and a colossal failure. But it will look amazing. | I have a lot of reference in front of me right now. | | | This showed up in the post the other day, so I guess itās been reprinted (possibly in a larger size? It feels big): | | I got to be on the same bill as Neal Adams. | | (I still have a photo somewhere as proof I was once on the same bill as James Ellroy at an otherwise lonely literary festival, because I have always had terrible imposter syndrome) | And I got to write a story for Becky Cloonan to draw: still pretty sure sheās a better writer than me, but being able to write for that marvellous flowing line of hers and that liquid motion in it was a joy. | | ORBITAL | NEW ACTS | | I forgot to mention this last week: Julian Simpsonās new audio drama, TEMPORAL, is being released on Audible on August 1. His announcement: | I'm confident that this is the largest cast ever assembled for a show like this, and it includes Sanjeev Bhaskar, Jessie Mei Li, Nicola Walker, Jana Carpenter, Kyle Soller, Don Gilet, Phoebe Fox, Steven Mackintosh, Mark Bazeley, Barnaby Kay... Alongside pretty much everyone else you've ever heard in Lovecraft Investigations or Aldrich Kemp. It was written by me, Bec Boey, Nosa Igbinedion and Richard Maclean Smith (who writes and hosts the excellent Unexplained podcast). The story is mostly under wraps, but it concerns a Martian colony a thousand years from now, sending teams back in time to Earth to find out why the human race spontaneously vanished from the face of the planet. |
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| That is a huge bloody cast, heās right. | Seeing that, you may be wondering where my own audio drama projects are. Thatās a bloody good question, and one I hope to have an answer to in a few weeks. | My old friend Scott Dunbier, once of Wildstorm and IDW, has announced his new project, ACT 4 Publishing, and hereās a flex: he got Chip Kidd to design the logo. | | If youāre going to San Diego, heāll be releasing more details at a panel there. | | | | | A new Sarah Davachi album always gets my attention. Her work is somewhere between early music and modern electroacoustic music: often somewhere between the liturgical and lab-grown psychoacoustics. | | OTHER | THE EARTH RADIATES SONG | Marc Weidenbaum sent me this, with the email header āgeomicrobiologyā: | | We eventually reached another large spigot mired in what looked like wet clay, which varied in color from pale salmon to brick red. This, too, Casar explained, was the work of microbes ā in this case a genus known as Gallionella, which thrives in iron-rich waters and excretes twisted metal spires. |
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| The storyās on the NYT, and entitled The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet. | These intraterrestrial microbes tend to be quite different from their counterparts on the surface. They are ancient and slow, reĀproducing infrequently and possibly living for millions of years. They often acquire energy in unusual ways, breathing rock instead of oxyĀgen. |
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| Intraterrestrial! | This, though, might be my favourite: | Within some of the deepest samples, they found a single species: a baguette-shaped bacterium with a whiplike tail that endured temperatures up to 140 degrees and acquired energy from the chemical byĀproducts of radioactively decaying uranium embedded in its sunless home. |
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| The piece has a wonderful final line: | Earth is a stone that eats starlight and radiates song, whirling through the inscrutable emptiness of space ā pulsing, breathing, evolving ā and just as vulnerable to death as we are. |
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