Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. It’s bloody cold.

In this letter:

• no Doctor Who for you

• The Solar Grid

• The News, with Lordess Foudre

• COLLIDE 01.07

• a good record

• Deliberate Disconnection with Rain DeGrey

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

THE WORLD SERVICE

DOCTOR WHEN

Surprising nobody, DOCTOR WHO was cancelled this week, Russell T Davies and producers Bad Wolf are out, and the BBC are putting the show out to competitive tender. The notional "Whoniverse" of a constant flow of new material turned out to be three specials, two seasons and a dismal miniseries called THE WAR BETWEEN THE LAND AND THE SEA. The huge influx of money from the Disney+ deal was, according to one comment I saw, spent on shooting the shows in 4K Ultra HD. This seems unlikely to me, but I'm not an expert.

I have immense respect for Davies as a writer - THE SECOND COMING is still a storming piece of work, and YEARS AND YEARS is worth a rewatch - but his new run on DOCTOR WHO felt to me like creative hesitation and his discovery partway through of a dry well. This was pitched as a clean start but it was riddled with callbacks to obscure lore, aimed at superfans rather than the new audience it had access to. I personally had no issue with the Heavily Gay version, and I kind of laughed when I saw the new main titles sequence with its Pink Energy Disney Princess TARDIS. But Davies, who relies strongly on emotional logic in his WHO stories, didn't have the conviction of his own set-up - the supposedly rehabbed and got-his-shit-together Doctor cries like an untreated trauma victim all the way through these seasons. (Emotional-logic storytelling always has to fall back on people crying to sell itself.) The episodes I saw gave the sense that Gatwa never had the time to find his portrayal. And that last move at the end of the second season was desperate, and has had the unfortunate effect of hobbling whoever takes over.

I still think the team was stuck on WHO as a kids show at heart, or at best "family friendly." Which isn't necessarily wrong, but I have a feeling the lens they were using was outdated, and I'm not sure the popular-culture references (Bridgerton, the fucking Eurovision Song Contest in space) did them any favours. If it's a kids show, why are you doing a Bridgerton bit? And if you're accepting that kids watch Bridgerton, why are you so committed to WHO being a Seventies kids show? The whole thing felt to me less like a fluid exploration than some people unable to find a firm vision to work from.

What if they were chasing a linear-tv “whole family around the telly on a Saturday evening” audience that simply doesn’t exist any more?

I keep coming back to the fact that they had all that money and that stated intent to build out a television universe, and circumstances somehow prevented them from fulfilling that. With David Tennant right there, a bunch of previous companions set up as working for UNIT (one of Davies' great ideas was having UNIT's Kate Stewart hiring as many of the Doctor's companions as possible, a serious story engine in plain sight)...

On the other hand, if they ever do a crossover event again, Christopher Eccleston will be available now Davies and Bad Wolf are gone.

But here’s an interesting side note.

DOCTOR WHO is gone. STAR TREK has reached the end of its cycle. The STARGATE reboot was cancelled. The new STAR WARS film did not do well, and I believe they only have one more film in the pipeline. The MCU is not in a great place and the shape of its future will balance on the two new AVENGERS films. SUPERMAN’s takings were soft and SUPERGIRL is tracking at less than half of SUPERMAN’s opening. 

And the two biggest films of the last month were made for less than a million each by directors in their twenties. 

One or two swallows don’t make a summer, but right now it looks like old science fiction inflected IP is reaching a hiatus point. 

OPERATIONS

For a limited time only, Ganzeer's fantastic graphic novel THE SOLAR GRID is available as a digital download. This 480-page book contains a foreword from me:

"Ganzeer invents his own visual language. THE SOLAR GRID is the work of someone who doesn’t listen to anyone tell him what he can or cannot do. The sheer number of styles and methods he applies in this book is dizzying. Every page is an adventure. Like he’s discovering what he can do while he does it. By the time you’re halfway through you’ll think you’ve identified the point where he went nuts. It’s not. It’s where he launches into new territory."

You can either give him a straight up ten dollars at https://garage.ganzeer.com/product/TSG or do it as pay-what-you want via Gumroad - https://ganzeer.gumroad.com/l/TSG .

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix.

ORBITAL

WHERE LIGHT PAUSES

The good people at Klang Signals shared with me the new record Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun by Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri, and I have to share with you the fourth track of this remarkable record. Room-filling ambient that asks to be played loud. That moment at the three-minute mark where the strings come in is exquisite. Ten and a half minutes of being suspended in the summer sky.

https://irisarri.bandcamp.com/track/in-a-quiet-radiance-feat-andrea-burelli-martina-bertoni

It is time for the Tiny Awards 2026:

https://tinyawards.net/

Go and nominate someone today.

Also, just arrived: AUTOREC sent me their self-titled record, dark cinematic ambient with an opening track that just kills. Also on Bandcamp, so you can stream the whole thing for free.

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

THE REVOLUTIONISTS

THE REVOLUTIONISTS is an immense, deeply researched and sourced work about extremists. The sort of people we now call "terrorists," but Burke has a position on that, and uses "extremists" for reasons. His view of the phenomenon starts post-war, gets going in the 1960s, and ends in the mid-Eighties with the radicalization of Osama bin Laden. It is exhaustive, whipping from squats in Germany to tape cassettes of Ayatollah Khomeini circulating rural Iran as audio samizdat, from the "snow murders" in Japan to a Swedish spy almost getting wiped out by Israeli jets. And, over and over again, a chubby-faced Venezuelan failson and borderline incompetent by the name of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez who loved money, sex and killing people, soon to be known as Carlos the Jackal.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine codenamed him Carlos. The Guardian, of all newspapers, called him The Jackal. The press during the period were about as helpful as the London newspapers during Jack the Ripper's run.

Which he really wasn't.

For another example: the Baader-Meinhof Gang or just Baader-Meinhof were actually called the Red Army Faction, and the most effective member was not the idiot Andreas Baader nor the brilliant but slightly mad Ulrike Meinhof (who opted to join the group a good while after they started operating, and whom the group later turned on), but Gudrun Ensslin. Baader-Meinhof just sounded better to the media.

I found this whole book compulsively readable, and relatively easy to keep track of during all the location changes and shifts in focus. Of which there are a lot, because this is a global book. I could go on, but I won't: it's a fantastic piece of history writing, detailed without being overwhelming, sharp and clever and unsparing.

THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US)

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Currently, I do one post a day, with maybe an additional note in the evening to log stuff. The daily note is like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

• “maladaptive daydreaming”

• Big World Cafe: Diamanda Galas performance from 1989

And that’s me, just under 2000 words! See you next week.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. It is 10 C and raining with fifty mph winds and the garden looks like a Bela Tarr film. All week I’ve been daydreaming that the forthcoming BLADE RUNNER show will feature a Blade Runner putting away the Voight-Kampff machine, holding up a tablet and asking the replicant interviewee to select all images with bicycles on the screen.

In this letter:

• Bits and pieces

• The PLANETARY Compendium

• The News, with Lordess Foudre

• COLLIDE 01.06

• zero search

• Deliberate Disconnection with Rain DeGrey

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

• A care package from Zoharum

• LTD

THE WORLD SERVICE

BITS AND PIECES

In LA, seventy artists turned a vacant hospital into a gallery installation.

OPERATIONS

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM

A brand new softcover collection of the entirety of the PLANETARY works, featuring the main series by myself and my friend the late John Cassaday, and the crossover specials PLANETARY/BATMAN, PLANETARY/JLA and PLANETARY/THE AUTHORITY, illustrated by John, Jerry Ordway and Phil Jiminez.

It is a heavy brick of a thing retailing at sixty US dollars, which I believe is now the cheapest way to obtain the entire work. Looks to be out in July, but my copies showed up on Wednesday.

The cover is in for reprint book PROJECT WALLOPS and it is glorious, and another publisher got in touch this week to tell me they’re doing a special collection of a run I did on one of their books years ago, with a new foreword and a request for me to write a 1500-word introduction. We will call that PROJECT SPITALFIELDS for the hell of it. 

Given the number of big reprint projects happening this year, I am starting to wonder if I secretly died and nobody told me.

Further proof:

This immense hardback outsize slab that arrived on Friday from Marvel is named for and features NOT DEAD YET, a four-part Wolverine story I did with Leinil Francis Yu donkeys years ago. I remember Leinil did an astonishing job with it and that the first issue had one of my better action sequences, but I have spaced the rest, so I look forward to opening it up and flinching at my writing a lot. The odd thing is that I actually talked to Leinil recently (he’s doing great).

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix.

ORBITAL

zero search

With Google prioritising their AI summaries over search results, it is now useless for search and discovery and traffic from Google searches is about to drop to near zero. And yet, people are making serious bank from Substacks that are literally just linkblogs. Because they’re curated. I remember suggesting years ago that things will fold back to curation by humans, as in the days before Google dominance and “the algorithms,” and it seems to be happening in a small way. Seems to me that the people making it work are deeply embedded within their communities, interest groups and physical locations - which makes sense, as it’s next to impossible to surface stuff on social media, too.

I’ve been watching people on Substack, particularly, build out that kind of newsletter, link-curating in specific areas of interest. And it goes slightly beyond the “I found this on the internet for you,” in some cases, into actual if small-scale news reporting in those niches, and into real space events. Things are changing out there. NYC-specific newsletter writer Emily Sundberg may use the tagline “I can do things with my phone you wouldn’t believe,” but it’s notable how much time she spends in places, meeting people, to do her work, and her newsletter FEED ME is now a studio and a party brand. An especial fascination for me right now is Laura Reilly’s newsletter HIGH TOUCH, about “longevity and aesthetics” but really mostly a non judgmental and extremely detailed look at all the frightening things people are doing to themselves - and the top of each newsletter is a linkdump.

The days of lonely old hermit farts collecting up things on the internet for you are passing, because most of the time we can’t find anything online worth passing on because social media buries the cries of artists and real conversation happens in private spaces now, and nobody tells us things. This is fine. It’s just change.

A new issue of the Black Flowers Arts Journal, a brief collection of wonderful images that is worth your time.

If you want to rediscover blogs, try ooh.directory.

A message from our supporters this week:

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Read for Free Now

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

A CARE PACKAGE FROM ZOHARUM

Every month or two, the Polish label Zoharum sends me a package of their recent releases. You can stream them all for free at their bandcamp page.

I haven’t listened to these yet, as they only just arrived, but they always have some gems. This is a piece I absolutely fell for last year, by HVAST.

I used to keep a list of care packages from Zoharum, and here they all are.

It’s actually one of the great privileges of my life that record companies want to send me things. Sometimes people send me books via my management, too:

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Currently, I do one post a day, with maybe an additional note in the evening to log stuff. The daily note is like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

• retired

• wavy

• taste (rant)

• habit

• all over the place

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In the glass: Halfpenny Green English Rose. My local place specialises in English wines.

And that’s me for this week. Hopefully the sun will come out next week. Take care of yourself. See you next Sunday.

W

Gordon Watson

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. The first version of this newsletter ran over 2000 words and fuck me who has time for that when summer is here and we all have to get up and do things? So I’m putting this in the scheduler, grabbing my notebook and a drink and going outside to work and be judged by the mancub.

In this letter:

• New

• The News, with Lordess Foudre

• Collide

• Thought For The Day, with AJ Brady

• astra apocalypse audio

• Deliberate Disconnection with Rain DeGrey

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

OPERATIONS

NEW

PROJECT LOST SIERRA is being polished up ready for solicitation, and we are awaiting the new cover for reprint project PROJECT WALLOPS. I am now into the writing of novelette/novella PROJECT SODA SPRINGS - technically it’s contracted for 7500 words, but as it’s an ebook I can run long if I want. Waiting on notes for prose serial PROJECT BASEL, and waiting on the first pages of PROJECT SHANKILL for this newsletter. And awaiting being onboarded by the network for the putative tv project based on one of my works that I am an EP on. Which amounts to... a lot of fucking waiting, for the most part.

I’ve let all this run for a while, because, as previously noted, my focus has been shot due to the amount of Real Life happening around here. But it’s time to do what you have to do when you find yourself waiting on ten different things to happen or not. Which is to do something else.

Sitting around waiting for a bunch of different projects in train to eventuate or not - because any project can die at any time, even after it’s been MADE - is a slow and arduous way to go insane and end up with nothing. The thing to do is always to do something else.

Picasso may have been a nightmare, but one of his lessons was always to make something new every day. He HATED getting up in the morning, whined and complained about life and work and fuck this why even bother, everything is terrible... and by two in the afternoon he’d be painting.

Picasso spoke to other artists about this, and his position was always the same. Every new drawing represented an opportunity: a sale, an idea, a door opening, the beginning of something. So you should do a new drawing every bloody day.

And you know what he said about his work? “I too often tell myself: it’s not quite there yet, you can do better.”

The only way you can get somewhere new is to do something new. The only way to create new opportunities is to do something new.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix.

ORBITAL

astra apocalypse audio

Did you ever watch the film AD ASTRA? Odd film. There are some really off scenes in there that absolutely don't match the rest of the film at all. The "moon pirates" bit, for example, which is insanely jarring tonally and really makes massively fuck-all sense, and the bits with Liv Tyler that look like they were shot in a day. Worse, the really interesting bits, like Tommy Lee Jones' mad monologues, get totally buried.

Turns out that that was not director James Gray's cut at all. The film was taken away from him:

“Adversarial audio”:

Apocalypse Early Warning System:

A thought: the idea of a digital public square is gone.

Apparently I have a copy of this in the post, from the author, via my literary agent:

I enjoyed this bit from the blurb I found:

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TITAN:

These are the collaborations between myself and painter AJ Brady. Sometimes she sends me an image and I respond to it in text, sometimes I send her a piece of text and she responds with an image. Find her work at brady-pictures.com and her Instagram.

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.

Listen. I post there once a day, pretty much, and every day you’ll see a handful of things you didn’t know you needed to know, and a brief update on what I’m doing if you’re into that. Like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. And if you click over there, you’ll see a big black button on the bottom right reading SUBSCRIBE, which you can click on to have that daily note sent to you as a free email. Some days you might get two or three, if I’m catching up on logging stuff? But mostly once a day.

THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger

let go

PROJECT HAIL MARY (2026)

vintage

doommaxxing

waiting for the drop

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MANCUB

Okay, I’m off to make cherry sorbet and spin up an ice cream base I made out of coconut cream, before I hunt down my Merrell barefoots and get my shit together. You go and do something good for yourself, because you do actually deserve it. See you next week.

W

Janusz Jurek

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, which is currently bright and hot and early-summery. Which usually means that this time next week there will be hailstones. But, right now, I’m in my summer linens and a wide-brimmed black straw hat, the mancub has informed me that he lives in the garden now, and I have a case of summer ale in the post.

In this letter:

• Reset

• Watch watch

• The News

• COLLIDE 01.14

• Things to know

• Deliberate Disconnection

• Graveyard Gallery

• Reading

• Relay

THE WORLD SERVICE

RESET

I have been mostly out of juice for the last week. The last couple of months of bullshit just tapped me out, I think. And the other night, after an iOS update, just for the hell of it, I checked Screen Time. And it hit an average of something over six hours a day. Now, that is partly expected, because Minnie the cat has a habit of sitting on me and pinning my left hand, so only the right hand is available, therefore I end up reading on my phone. And I’ve been having to write material on my phone too, for the same hairy reason. But also this is fucking appalling.

On top of that, I’ve been a Fitbit user on and off for going on fifteen years, but Google, who bought Fitbit a few years back, have replaced the Fitbit app with something called Google Health. Which wants you to call it “Coach,” because it’s a AI chatbot now, which hides all the data you want your Fitbit to surface and hallucinates constantly. I went for a brief walk to the shops and stopped for a coffee. I finally got the app to sync four hours later and it asked me how my spinning class went. Trust me, I don’t walk that fucking fast. And there it is in the grey print between AI summaries: “AI responses may contain mistakes.” No kidding.

It’s a particular kind of bullshit to wake up to a world where your heart and sleep tracker became a mad robot that hallucinates bicycles.

I’m done.

The last couple of months have been a disaster anyway, and my focus is shot. But my god. Last year Kieran Press-Reynolds was on Pitchfork explaining to people how to find music without Spotify. We’re all fried now. A guy who’s invested billions into AI apparently can’t explain what it’s for. Google already broke its own flagship product with AI summaries, and that’s getting a lot worse.

I am bunkering the fuck down.

OPERATIONS

WATCH WATCH

I’ve been bad. I’ve done the worst thing in the world. I’ve been on eBay.

The Camel Trophy was an international driving competition sponsored by Camel Cigarettes between 1980 and 2000. And every time they did one, they released a watch to commemorate it. This one is from the 1990s, apparently - not the original strap, sadly, but I’m not really concerned about that. The case is basically a chunk of bronze. It’s not a huge watch, but it has that field-watch easy legibility and it’s a proper weight on the wrist.

The brown strap, of course, means I have to match it with something, because I don’t wear brown/sand/camel/beige clothes, so I wear a brown leather bracelet and a couple of brown wooden bracelets on the other wrist, a pendant on a brown leather thong, and a brown 1990s Sergio Cerruti Roma leather belt I may have just bought myself on eBay ahem. Never forget Gene Wilder’s rule from his notes on the first draft of the Willy Wonka costume:

While we wouldn’t necessarily use the word “fey” today, his general point stands. And we try to cultivate taste.

And this is a Swiss watch from the 1950s, with a hand-painted dial, that still works perfectly. I can’t find a lot about Incarna, a company that vanished decades ago, save for that their watches were apparently considered “affordable.” This cost me a tenner, it’s at least seventy years old, and that is a Swiss watch that is still ticking away flawlessly.

Just a couple of cheap curiosities. But they give me pleasure, which is the main point. And also: they don’t call themselves “Coach” and insist I’m on a bicycle.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix.

ORBITAL

END TIMES

Ben Percy has been putting out a monthly “post apocalyptic newspaper” with contributions by Stephen King called THE END TIMES. It is really good. Now a collected edition is available for pre-order, and it is frankly a steal at thirty Yanqui dollar.

Interview with Ben about the project.

Julian Simpson’s new audio drama series is already funded. And the stretch-goal additions are mad, and most of them have been met. God knows what else he’s going to do. It still has almost a month to go, so go and take a look now.

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Chris Corcoran at the Jazz Centre

Isidora Edwards and Luigi Marino at Konsztrukting Soundz

possibly not the most attractive picture of a mango sorbet you ever saw, but I made this myself from a pot of overripe mango chunks, used no sugar, and it was amazing

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

READING

THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US)

HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY, Molly Crabapple (UK) (US)

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Currently, I do one post a day, with maybe an additional note in the evening to log stuff. The daily note is like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv and is sponsored by:

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PLAYLIST

RELAY 24may26

One from the vaults.

Links are visible when you hover over each track in the list. Start the first track and it will autoplay through the list.

I’m using Buy Music Club - it sits within Bandcamp’s protocol of allowing two free plays of any track on the service.

And that’s me. Next week, we’re going all in. See you then, I hope. Be good to yourself. And wear sunscreen.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Another really time-poor week over here - and I am five hundred quid lighter thanks to the plumbing issues that ate an entire workday - so I’m just going to lock this letter today, which is Friday, because I’m going out to dinner tonight and spend all Saturday at gigs.

In this letter:

• a few peculiar things

• The News, with Lordess Foudre

• COLLIDE 01.03

• Li’l Factory

• Deliberate Disconnection with Rain DeGrey

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

THE WORLD SERVICE

A FEW PECULIAR THINGS

Andrew McIntosh.

High Skull is apparently now a beauty trend.

Halupedia: a wikipedia made entirely of AI hallucinations.

Anyone remember I wrote a book called CROOKED LITTLE VEIN that features a scene of the then-niche practise of men inflating their scrotums with saline? Now it’s called ballmaxxing.

INSURGENT THOUGHT: I can’t remember where I came across this, but it’s a small online library of odd books - anarchist to Artaud, counterinsurgency to philosophy to mysticism and Bataille. It’s the internet version of tiny bookshops I used to visit in the Eighties and Nineties, when you really had to put effort into hunting that shit down. Grubbing around in the back of Housmans and the occult bookshops down the road from Covent Garden, that spinner-rack of weird zines hidden in the corner of Forbidden Planet where I found the transcript of the Jonestown Death Tape…

(Do NOT google “Jonestown Death Tape,” the audio is out there and you do NOT want to listen to it EVER)

THE NIGHTLY RADIO:

It’s (streaming) radio, so you won’t love everything they play, obviously, but I love that this thing even exists. Again, it feels like the sort of thing I would have tripped over at the end of the 20th Century, creeping through the radio dial on a night with good atmospherics, looking for something strange leaking out from the continent or a boat or a low-power transmitter somewhere down the coast or hidden in London…

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix. He’s also on Instagram.

ORBITAL

LI’L FACTORY

This is a hell of a thing. I was gifted the first three books from Li’l Factory AB this week:

These are gorgeous hardback volumes - the author and title are on the spines, that code on the cover is analogous to the FAC Numbers, the old Factory Records cataloguing system. Every Factory Records production had a FAC number - the final FAC number, FAC 501, was allocated to the coffin of the late Factory Records co-founder Tony Wilson.

There’s a note on their submissions page that I adore:

The Sundays! Mattotti! Brutalism! What a mix!

They only plan to release one to four books a year, which is understandable given the upfront costs to them as a small operation, but I have to say, these short books are beautifully made

Li’l Factory was brought to my attention by Stephen Oram, for which I thank him, and he is the author of one of their first three releases, BRAIN FRUIT.

lilfac.com is the place to go.

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Rain keeps telling me I should write a piece here on how men moisturise too. I’ll tell you something else, too: skin products for men are half the price of skin product for women and it’s pretty much the same stuff. The Pink Tax is real.

(I also take a NAD+ precursor and stare in horror at the idea of taking peptides from Temu, which is apparently a thing now. I’m about to put “peptides” in my blocklist next to “AI”. There’s a whole chunk of the internet where people just talk about Chinese peptides, which, from a certain perspective, may be the most cyberpunk-sounding thing of the moment)

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

(COLLIDE happened because Jerome wrote to me and said, hey, want to do something together? And that’s how you got the first serialised comic on the newsletter - the first of many, I hope)

OPS

For those of you who, like me, love the work of Laura Cannell, here’s a thing you need - a recording of her gig at Cafe Oto last year. I was AT that gig, and it was fantastic aside from the fact that I was seated near the bathrooms and apparently the crowd needed to go for a piss every fifteen fucking seconds for the entire night…

I believe that Raven Belasco, late of this parish, is still looking for professional comics creators to talk to about adapting her BLOOD AND ANCIENT SCROLLS novel series for comics, and if that’s you, you can contact her via her socials or her newsletter, I believe.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Currently, I do one post a day, with maybe an additional note in the evening to log stuff. The daily note is like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN, Giuliano da Empoli

mechatronics and the hydrogen line: 14may26

cold snap: 11may26

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And that’s me for this week. It’s been a difficult and annoying week, but those happen, and there’s no guarantee that tomorrow will be better or worse. But, generally speaking, I find that better days aren’t far away. Sit by the light, take a breath, and relax a bit. Better days come. See you next week.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Starting this week, a new comics series on Orbital Operations, COLLIDE, with Jerome Eyquem. COLLIDE was previously PROJECT MACHU PICCHU.

I’m writing this bit outside, on what is forecast to be the last sunny day for a week. We’ve had our council elections, which were somewhat grim, but also kind of understandable. Not going to complain about it, not when everything else everywhere else in the world is a hell of a lot worse, and not when the sun is out, the mancub is chasing his tail in the garden and there are any number of good things to live with.

In this letter:

• Psychoses and syndromes

• A big book

• The News, with Lordess Foudre

• The first two pieces of COLLIDE

• various bits and pieces

• Deliberate Disconnection - it’s finally spring over there

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

• reading and listening

• Relay

THE WORLD SERVICE

PSYCHOSES AND SYNDROMES

I almost booked myself a ticket to a gig in Amsterdam this week. The ticket was twenty euros. The flights would have been around two hundred quid. A hotel would have been another few hundred. Then meals and taxis and general travel expenditure. Several hundred pounds for a two-hour twenty-euro gig. At which point, all my trained behaviour kicked in and and I closed all the tabs. I grew up poor and stayed poor until I was into my late twenties or so. And then I spent from then ‘til now as a freelancer, and have supported my family with an overdraft more than once. It is built into me to not spend a lot of money on myself, because work is always fragile, I have other people to pay for and eventually the work will run out.

This is basically Freelancer Psychosis. Which often goes hand in hand with Impostor Syndrome. More of us have it than you might think. I have stood in the lobby of an expensive hotel with a multiple-award-winning best-selling author and heard them whisper in my ear, “I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t belong here.” Very few of us get over it or relax into it.

Very few of the creative people you see talking online genuinely thought they’d be in that position, or even considered the possibility that people might listen to what they had to say - or were trained to deal with those demands. There ain’t a manual. You have to learn on your feet. You don’t have a playbook for when, for example, a reader contacts you to tell you that they and your friends don’t know if they can enjoy your work if they don’t know your position on some social or political issue. Which, believe me, is a thing that happens. And Freelancer Psychosis and Impostor Syndrome tell you, shit, the jig’s up, and that’s often when you see creative people behaving weirdly online.

Never assume that your favourite creatives have their shit together more than you.

And then, of course, I re-upped my membership with Tablet Hotels after having let it expire in 2020, booked two other gigs, disconnected for the day, went to the deli, had several glasses of expensive wine and blew the afternoon chatting and reading and drinking. Because I’m still me.

OPERATIONS

Finally getting into writing the novella PROJECT SODA SPRINGS, which I signed the contract for at the end of last year. This year has been a beast, and it’s way past time to knuckle down. Energy remains fleeting: lots of ideas, not enough sustained juice or time to get them all in action.

This monster arrived in via UPS:

It’s a $150 doorstop. I’m guessing it contains the twelve issues of THUNDERBOLTS I did, which I recommend to you because they comprise some of the finest storytelling work I ever saw Mike Deodato do. The scripts on the first six were passable with some good jokes - I’m still fond of the tv ads for Thunderbolts toys - and the scripts on the second six not so much, but Mike fucking killed it the whole way through. I assume this book is out now.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix.

ORBITAL

Elsewhere

Dirty Little Zine and Dirty Little Library - a web app for making foldable one-page zines and a library to upload them to so other people can find them. I think this is an excellent idea.

NASA photodumped 12,000 new images from the Artemis II mission.

“Aesthetic laundering” - Palantir and Lockheed Martin selling merch.

This two-minute-three-second thing from Charli xcx might be the oddest thing I’ve seen come out of the mainstream in a little while: cold, funny, very meta, cynical, mad with signs and signals.

People are building NEUROMANCER-style “cyberdecks,” only without the trodes or the function.

Headline of the week: Humanoid robot becomes Buddhist monk.

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Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

BOOKS AND MUSIC ETC

These are all the unfinished things circling around my desk in bits this week:

I keep buying books and it’s very bad. I also pre-ordered Alexander Kluge’s final book, co-created with Anselm Kiefer.

Also obtained, OCEANINE, Jolanda Moletta, an all-vocal album created with eight other singers, which is fantastic.

Currently reading THE REVOLUTIONISTS (UK) (US) and HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY (UK) (US) and THE PASSAGE OF POWER: THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON Vol 4 (UK) (US) and:

THE NOMA GUIDE TO BUILDING FLAVOUR (UK) (US), which was gifted to me because everyone knows I am a sucker for a Rene Redzepi book. (And I’ve been making my own herbed salts for years.)

Some haunted sounds: NIGHT RITUALS by The Death Enigma.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Currently, I do one post a day, with maybe an additional note in the evening to log stuff. The daily note is like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv and is sponsored by:

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PLAYLIST

RELAY 10may26

A short playlist of some of my more recent music purchases.

RELAY: 10may26

Links are visible when you hover over each track in the list. Start the first track and it will autoplay through the list.

I’m using Buy Music Club - it sits within Bandcamp’s protocol of allowing two free plays of any track on the service.

And that’s me for this week. See you next week for more new stuff. Have the best seven days you can.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I have lost two entire days this week to arranging to be a guarantor on my kid’s new rental, and let me tell you everything in the world is utterly fucking broken. It was warm, the sun was shining, and I was indoors trying to work out how to upload a shaving of my fucking liver to prove my identity and net value to a rental company that probably also handles admin for Purgatory.

In this letter:

• Relics of a dead universe

• notes

• The News, with Lordess Foudre

• Hollywood haunts the world

• Thought For The Day with AJ Brady

• Deliberate Disconnection with Rain DeGrey

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

• Wizardly

• COLLAPSAR 2

• A playlist

THE WORLD SERVICE

RELICS OF A DEAD UNIVERSE

Headline of the week:

Physicist Proposes Dark Matter Is Made of Black Holes That Survived Dead Universes.

I wish I’d had that when we did DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT.

OPERATIONS

NOTES

The sun is out, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful, and I’ve been stuck indoors all fucking week. Herself returned from her world travels with some bizarre combination of noxious infections, which meant I’ve had to lock her in the Plague Cell (our daughter’s old bedroom) for the last week, while everything else went to hell and back. A death in the family, a repeat hospitalisation in the family, having to help deal with the kid’s living situation, even my AirPods died. I now have the AirPods Pro 3, which I haven’t had the time to fully test out yet (see above), but the active noise cancelling is INSANE compared to the Pro 2. I put them in while in the living room and suddenly I couldn’t hear the TV or Herself asking me what I was doing - the outside world got sucked away. The noise cancelling is going to be fucking dangerous if you’re wearing them while walking through town.

Please enjoy my daughter’s opinion of my new passport photo:

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

ORBITAL

Author Robert Guffey sent me a copy of his new book, HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD, via my literary agent David Hale Smith at Inkwell Management.

He had me at “the secret history of the world,” obviously. This appears to be extremely My Shit. Thank you, Robert Guffey!

HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD, Robert Guffey (UK) (US)

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These are the collaborations between myself and painter AJ Brady. Sometimes she sends me an image and I respond to it in text, sometimes I send her a piece of text and she responds with an image. Find her work at brady-pictures.com and her Instagram.

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

WIZARDLY

He was called the “Wizard of the Kremlin,” and the “new Rasputin.” At the time, his role was not clearly defined. He would show up in the president’s office when the business of the day was done. It wasn’t the secretaries who’d called him. Maybe the tsar himself had summoned him on his direct line. Or he’d guessed the right time on his own, thanks to his extraordinary talents, which everyone acknowledged without being able to say exactly what they were.

This is a cracking little book. Vladislav Surkov, a businessman and politician with a background in theatre, was Putin’s “grey cardinal” for twenty years, behind some of Russia’s creepiest psyops. da Empoli was so fascinated by this man and the mystique behind him that he created a fictional version, Vadim Baranov, who came from an aristocratic family line, avant-garde theatre and reality tv to help place Putin in power and become the Wizard of the Kremlin.

A BBC journalist had made a documentary arguing that Baranov was the man responsible for bringing the techniques of avant-garde theater into politics.

When you think of it… the first half of the twentieth century was just that: a titanic confrontation between artists. Stalin, Hitler, Churchill. After them came the bureaucrats, because the world needed a rest. But today the artists are back. Look around you. Wherever you look, there is nothing but avant-garde artists who, instead of depicting reality, are busy creating it. Their style is the only thing that has changed. Today, instead of the artists of yesteryear, we have reality-show personalities. But the principle is the same.

This is Baranov’s story, often apparently closely paralleling Surkov’s - and pretty much all the other characters in the book are not fictional, and neither are many of the things that happened, really. Yes, it’s fiction, but it rides alongside the actual facts of twenty years. The framing of the story is gloriously classical: a writer looking for Baranov is conveyed to Baranov’s house in the woods at night, and Baranov tells his story by the fireside.

“Ah, Baranov,” he said, “there you are, the Wizard of the Kremlin, Putin’s Rasputin. Do you know what people are saying about your ‘sovereign democracy’? That it is to democracy what an electric chair is to a chair.”

da Empoli is a political scientist, and he provides an interesting angle on Russia as humiliated by the Yeltsin years, feeling like it was colonised by the West in those years, and Russia as a country of extremes. From one perspective, they even did laissez-faire capitalism bigger than anyone else. It’s funny, scary, completely fascinating and a little melancholy. Recommended without reservation.

There’s a film adaptation coming, with Paul Dano as Baranov and Jude Law as Putin.

THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN, Giuliano da Empoli (UK) (US)

PREVIOUSLY: my notes on the other da Empoli book I read, HOUR OF THE PREDATOR.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Currently, I do one post a day, with maybe an additional note in the evening to log stuff. The daily note is like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

29apr26

28apr26

27apr26

As you can see, I’ve been pretty bad at it lately.

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SERIAL

COLLAPSAR, Warren Ellis (2)

I looked in the tarnished mirror over the sink as I washed my hands.  There he is.  Erik Byron, the art curator.  Co-director of the famous Windham Gallery in London, England.  The great connectome.  The meme broker.  Hair in annoying tufts, half burned off by sleeplessness and airplane seat headrests.  Watery blue eyes, skin somewhere between white and clingfilm.  I looked terrible, frankly.  Not at all the image I like to present to the world, standing there saggy-eyed and near-translucent, wrinkle-resistant travel shirt hanging off me like a plastic bag caught on a stick.  I needed a rest.

I never got any rest.  Unless you counted being on planes.  But planes had WiFi now, which meant I was still always-on, always connected and connecting.  

I washed my hands and popped a breath mint.

Stanton was back in his studio space, pulling out a three foot high perspex cube on casters from his tall wall storage units.  "Check this out," he said, struggling the box out on to the bare wood flooring.

There was an ochre pyramid inside, on red sand.  The cube sat on a black base about six inches high.

"The atmosphere inside is just like that of Mars," Stanton said. "I got the idea from a preservation booth I saw in your British Museum once."

"Okay," I said, walking around it.  "A Martian pyramid."

"Right," he smiled.  "Like those conspiracy theories from years back. The gas tanks are in the base, and the box is airtight."  Stanton pointed out little sliding windows set into the cube.  "These are air vents.  Now look."

He went back to the storage space and rolled out a matching cube.  "I opened the vents on this one a week ago, when you confirmed you'd be here today.  See what happened."

Inside, the pyramid was rotting.  The body of the pyramid was devolving into wormy, penile extrusions.  "The material I made the pyramid out of is only stable in Martian atmosphere.  Exposed to Earth atmosphere, it starts to dissolve in really interesting ways.  I played with the material mix a lot to get this kind of breakdown.  Have a sniff."

I leaned close to one of the vents and very carefully inhaled through my nose.  I got notes of copper and soil.

"Can you smell it?  The smell of Mars rotting on Earth?"

"Marvellous," I breathed.

"It can scale up," Stanton said.  "You could put a big one of these up in front of the Windham.  "Your next festival exhibition is two weeks, right?  Open the vents on day one and it'll be all gone at the end of day fourteen."

I got down on my knees to study it.  Stanton walked around me, exulting.  "Look at the very air we breathe smashing a Martian pyramid into shit, Erik."

"Almost the gesamtkunstwerk," I said, examining the penile, faecal details of the monolith's collapse.  "Amazing."

"It's the showstopper, right?"

"No, Stanton.  It's the opening.  You're quite right.  Out front at the Windham, the first thing people see.  It's the overture."  I saw him frown at that.  'Overture' was too delicate.  "It's the cannon they fire at the start of an Ironman event, Stanton.  It's the biggest starting pistol in the world."

Oh, he liked that better.  Stanton's chest swelled.  "A cannon.  A giant art cannon.  So you'll commission it?"

I offered him my hand.  I immediately realised that was a mistake, but it was too late.  He gripped it, and turned it as we shook so that his hand was on top of mine.

Bastard, I thought, and smiled through it.

PLAYLIST

RELAY 3may26

A playlist of some of my more recent music purchases.

RELAY: 3may26

Links are visible when you hover over each track in the list. Start the first track and it will autoplay through the list.

I’m using Buy Music Club - it sits within Bandcamp’s protocol of allowing two free plays of any track on the service.

Next week: COLLIDE. Today: go get some rest. Tomorrow: nobody knows for sure what will happen, so quit worrying. See you next week.

W

Gif by PixelArthouse on Giphy

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I got my new passport. I hate it. The photo makes me look like I died last year and my corpse was left out in the rain. I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in a month, and I have felt permanently half-drunk for the last week. How are you?

In this letter:

• operations

• The News

• Collide

• Deliberate Disconnection

• Graveyard Gallery

• some stuff in my office

OPERATIONS

• I appear to have closed a deal for a TV Thing - no project codename, as it involves one of my earlier works, and in success I’ll just be a producer.

• TV Thing agreements come in two stage. The Deal is basically a memo listing the terms of the thing. “Closing the deal” means that all parties have agreed to the terms outlined in that memo, and everyone can go forward. Most announcements you see in the press about options and the like happen after the deal is closed, and there is NO guarantee the show will ever be made. The intent is there, everyone will try really hard and apply a great deal of skill and invention, but Shit Will Happen. Second stage: The Contract, which can come up to a year later, and involves everyone arguing about the details surrounding each of the terms in the memo until nobody is happy but everyone can live with it. I am lucky enough to have an excellent lawyer, Joel VanderKloot, and the world’s greatest manager, Angela Cheng Caplan. In many, many cases, the show may have been sold and production is already underway before the contract is done.

• I just received some design work for my piece with Kody Chamberlain for the LIGHTS OUT anthology book, which you can still preorder.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Coming to Orbital Operations soon.

Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix.

ORBITAL

Julian Simpson has set up a Backerkit page for his next audio drama production, the next in the LOVECRAFT INVESTIGATIONS series. He is a terrific writer and he always works with the best actors.

And! Here’s the launch trailer!

Here’s an odd thing: apparently there was a graphic novel biography of Valerie Solanas published in France five years ago, and now there’s a Kickstarter for an English-language version.

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

Mia Wolff very kindly gifted me a stack of her books, which are fantastic.

This is her website. And this is her page at Fantagraphics, who published these. And this is her IG.

I met the Kazakh-Turkish-Swiss vocal artist Saadet Turkoz last weekend, at a local performance, and her voice is something else. Here’s one of her records. Sometimes sweet, sometimes ancient, sometimes the full Diamanda Galas. I bought two of her records (neither of which was the one I just linked, they’re not on Bandcamp), but her performance with the women of ONe_Orchestra New was a hell of a thing.

The other voice that really jumped out at me that night was Shama Rahman, and when I tracked down that website, here’s the first line I found:

I am the first Sitar player to perform on the ice in Antarctica where I was invited to be an explorer on an expedition with the first Antarctic Biennale.

That’s kind of an impressive thing to lead out with, right?

For something more soothing, here’s the first released track from the new album by avant-folk genius Alison Cotton.

Just discovered this:

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SERIAL

COLLAPSAR, Warren Ellis (1)

"Don’t flush," I called out, standing with my back to the wall beside the bathroom door and listening to Stanton’s stream.  "Please.”

Stanton’s low bearish chuckle, as I heard the last yellow pearls shaken into the bowl: “You Brits.  So polite even when you need to rush to the can.”

I dropped my voice into a tone that sounded more rough and manly to my ears.  “I know you all have issues with water conservation out here.”

The door yanked open.  Stanton did everything with violence.  He was the kind of artist who, deep down, thought art was for women, and needed to assert male energy on everything around him. He also didn’t wash unless he deemed it necessary, which I reminded myself I needed to remember at handshake time.  I turned my knuckles outward like George W. Bush and tried, once again, to do that muscle-fanning thing in my neck to make me look more dominant in my space.  I read about it in a Tom Wolfe book.

“Yeah,” Stanton said, striding off into his studio space.  “Drier than my grandmother’s snatch out here at this time of year.  All yours.”

I strode into the bathroom and closed and locked the door.  There it was, filling the bowl.  That which geniuses leave in their wake for the rest of us.  

I was never a genius.  I will never be a genius.  I will never be a great artist.  I am Erik Byron, and I am the connectome of the planetary artistic hive mind.  But I have always wanted to taste genius.  To feel it in my blood and tissues, the way cannibal tribes ate their shamen to gain their wisdom.

I knelt, worshipful, before the toilet bowl, carefully scooped out a palmful of urine, and drank it.

I’m going to bed. I hope you sleep well, when you sleep. See you next week.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Quickish note this week - what was supposed to be a week of working on personal projects turned into anything but. The list of this week’s bullshit included having to arrange new photo ID, which is a complete faff, and, let me tell you, the UK government’s digital initiatives are just as broken as you would expect them to be. But, if I’m very lucky, I have a new passport on the way. Just in time for everyone to run out of jet fuel. I haven’t been on a plane since 2019, but I miss Europe, and I’m feeling ready to wander again. (AJ Brady will read that and mutter “I told you so” to herself.)

Anyway, I’m lining up some new stuff for next week, as Orbital Operations slowly turns another corner, my days are changing shape, life is good, and here’s some things I did and saw last week.

THE WORLD SERVICE

Chinese humanoid robots now run as fast as Usain Bolt.

Device that can induce smells using only ultrasound.

The Earth is currently flying through an asteroid debris field.

Masha Foya:

OPERATIONS

The daytime temperatures are lifting - not that they stayed low for long, this winter - and the heavy clothes are being put away. This is a clear signal to the world that it will snow next week. The sun’s out. I’ve broken out the dark indigo midweight denims, with a boat-neck long sleeve Breton, old Julbo Sherpa shades that they don’t make any more, and actual blue suede shoes. Apple and cherry blossom are happening. Warm today. Glass of wine in the garden with a cigarillo. The mancub is laying on his back in the grass playing with insects. 

Main life hack: buy clothes out of season. I am terrible at spending money on myself, generally, and am berated and mocked for it constantly. However, buying my winter clothes in summer and my summer clothes in winter is so much cheaper that it’s mad not to. Another couple of months and I’ll be looking at new winter clothes, which will mostly be trousers because I am having to punch new holes in my belts in order to keep my current ones up and I am not yet at the point where I am going to buy braces. If I’m going to wear braces then I may as well say fuckit and buy those old-geezer high waisted trousers that you wear just under your man-boobs so that your paunch fills the crotch.

Working on episode 5 of PROJECT BORLEY this week. I had what sounded to me like a great idea, ran it past the artist, who loved it, and three hours later I sat down and realised it was going to be horribly fucking difficult to write. So I have done this to myself. You won’t see it for probably eighteen months. I will probably be complaining about this piece for weeks.

Pages incoming on PROJECT MACHU PICCHU and PROJECT SHANKILL. These are both projects for this newsletter, as OO’s delayed pivot begins. 

I am a whisky man, as you all know, but I cannot ever pass up a good vodka martini before dinner.

The Julianna Barwick/Mary Lattimore gig last weekend in London was very good, as was the support act, Vines.

The venue, EARtH, is one I’d go back to - it’s a rescued Art Deco cinema from 1930, and wonderful, a huge, ragged-edged space with a very intelligent renovation.

As I write this, I’m getting ready to go out to Konsztrukting Soundz - two gigs in eight days! Evening 24 looks fun - click through here to see all the links to the people playing, including the returning Teresa Hackel, whom I mentioned again last week.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

ORBITAL

An article on constructed languages, or conlangs, a subject that’s interested me for years. Useful stuff. The trigger for this piece seems to be Cameron’s AVATAR films, which of course contain that linguistic gag that’s always amused me: the name of the alien race in those films, Na’vi, is an anagram of the word “native” with the letters ET taken out.

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Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

BOOKS AND MUSIC ETC

After all, one did not write a book for other people. Any more than one wrote it for an already existing self. One wrote it, in fact, to renew one’s own self in the process of writing, and creatively go beyond its previous limits. Or in other words: to transcend oneself. Thus it is not for others that each person transcends himself; one writes books and invents machines that were demanded nowhere.

I’ve resigned myself to the idea that I will read fewer books this year, because the ones in my stack are generally long and difficult. It’s taken me several weeks to get through THE VISIONARIES by Wolfram Eilenberger, which is not as well-written as the other book by him I’ve read, TIME OF THE MAGICIANS, and since both books have the same translator, the busted sentences, tangled syntaxes and wild tonal inconsistencies are all on Eilenberger and his original editor. It is, despite that, full of good stuff. It follows the lives of four female philosophers - Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil - in the period 1933-1943, showing their intellectual emergence and comparing and contrasting their lives. They didn’t really know each other: de Beauvoir and Weil met once, and de Beauvoir records that meeting:

I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: “It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,” she snapped. Our relations ended right there.

THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger (UK) (US)

I’ve only read one Robert Caro book, his short treatise on how he works, which was very good. So, since I’m apparently doing long books this year, I decided to pick up one of his doorstops:

This book covers the period immediately before JFK’s killing, the transition and the early period of his presidency. The book is huge, the print is small, the paper seems to drink light rather than reflect it, but Caro is a marvellously readable writer, not at all the dry lecturer once might expect, more like a massively erudite storyteller.

THE PASSAGE OF POWER, Robert Caro (UK) (US)

New Sunn O))) record. Amazon (UK) (US) or just grab it from Bandcamp, like I did, where you can stream the whole thing for free first. If you know Sunn O))), you know what you’re getting. If you don’t, go to the Bandcamp stream, turn the sound up and be immersed in the sound of the abyss.

Last week, I asked you:

How many watches do you own?

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ None - I have a phone, because it's 2026 (175)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ One - why would I need more than one? (197)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 2 - 5 (322)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 6 - 10 (85)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 10 - 20 (27)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I have a sickness (20)
826 Votes

via @beehiiv polls

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.

generally: 13apr26

going going: 14apr26

shades: 15apr26

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Car’s here to get me to my gig, so I’m out. Tomorrow I am sowing more seeds, and next Sunday I am going to bring you many new things to look out. Take care, and I hope you sit down with me again in a week.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’m writing this early in the week, because on Saturday I’m off to London to see Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore. I write that in hope, because yesterday (Sunday) I lifted a bucket of soaked coir compost in what was apparently the wrong way, because something in my lower back went sproing and I am now barely mobile. And today, Monday morning, I woke up to discover some animal had overturned a huge 30 litre pot that I planted garlic in and tore off its chicken-wire covering, which makes me wonder if we secretly have bears out here.

…

“Secret Bears.” You can have that band name for free.

My garden supervisor remains unimpressed.

In this letter:

• space

• seeds

• new watch

• Deliberate Disconnection

• Graveyard Gallery

• Here Where We Live

THE WORLD SERVICE

SEEDS

I’ve moved something like 60 pages of material out of the office this week, including the outline and first draft of a new project I generated this week, PROJECT MACHU PICCHU. Not exactly back on track, and I probably could have done better if standing and sitting weren’t currently so uncomfortable, but I’ll take it.

Next week is personal projects - I need to advance PROJECT BORLEY and fully get into novelette PROJECT SODA SPRINGS, as well as develop some stuff intended specifically for this newsletter.

This is where we go back to the notebooks: all the ideas saved, the seeds of new things.

I may have bought too many seeds.

I hated watching the Artemis II launch. Those goddamn SRBs scare the hell out of me. Solid Rocket Boosters, once lit, cannot be unlit, and there are very limited options for throttling them. Generally speaking, once they’re ignited, they don’t stop burning until they’re out of fuel. The Artemis Space Launch System uses extended SRBs. And once the fireworks are touched off, that’s that. And if you were around for the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, you’re never going to smile when you see SRBs. One of the SRBs developed a fault immediately post-launch, the burn from which collapsed the external fuel tank it was strapped to - and remained lit. The collapse of the tank rotated the SRB and it tore Challenger apart. And the damned SRBs KEPT GOING and eventually had to be destroyed remotely.

So, yeah, Artemis II has been cool and all, but I was hoping NASA would have a classier way up than SRBs. 

At least the damned boat is crew-rated now - although crew-rating a vehicle by sending it on a transLunar injection was kind of batshit - and Artemis III is a low earth orbit mission to test docking systems. This whole new focus on the Moon seems to be all about establishing the foundation of what will doubtless be called Trump Moonbase by 2028. Presumably someone finally explained to the administration that there weren’t going to be boots on Mars by the end of the term. Aside from all the other concerns, nobody is currently in the position to loft the required crew vehicle for the trip - if the Mars boat isn’t the size of the ISS, people are going to go nuts during a journey that will be at least nine months each way, and if you’re not carrying enough materials to make a nine-month trip worthwhile, what would be the point beyond political scores anyway?

In any case, the internet would have gone all CAPRICORN ONE on it. Even Artemis II is now the subject of a blizzard of conspiracy theories. This sort of thing used to be the province of “ufologists” who were certain sure of the testimonies of people insisting they met Barack Obama on Mars bases. I mined out a bunch of that stuff for THE WILD STORM (UK) (US).

OPERATIONS

SPUTNIK 1957

Sputnik 1957 are a team of Ukrainian watchmakers who source old Soviet-era watches and restore and repurpose them. I’ve had my eye on them for a year or two, and when I got an unexpected large payment last month, I decided to keep a little bit back for myself and treat myself to the one I’d been coveting.

It showed up in around ten days, I suppose - which is pretty good considering it’s coming out of Kyiv.

In a nice box.

As you can see, there was some kind of fake radiation dosimeter complication built into this one, which dates from the 1970s and has been converted into a wristwatch from its original form as a pocket watch. It is a gorgeous, shining restoration job.

And it’s really pretty, as well as being unusual.

Manual wind, which I appreciate, and smooth as silk. Sits well on my wrist.

Their watches are generally a couple of hundred quid - not cheap, but not monstrous, either. And buying them supports Ukrainian workers, right?

Sputnik1957 - go and have a browse, they’re lovely things to look at.

ORBITAL

asylums

Kickstarter: REAL LIFE COMIX: ONLY IN NEW YORK, edited by Doug Latino and Dean Haspiel, 216 pages, includes Bob Fingerman, Drew Friedman, Peter Kuper, Ann Nocenti, Noah Van Sciver, Ron Wimberly, Jonathan Ames, Moby, JG Thirlwell, Carol Tyler and a whole bunch of others.

So nice to see Peter Kuper listed in there - I’m a great admirer of his graphic novel THE SYSTEM:

THE SYSTEM is a systems novel told without dialogue or captions, and it works brilliantly. Here’s a link to the book’s page. It’s one of those things I think every comics writer should read - which, given what I just said, probably sounds kind of perverse, but I have long believed that one of the chief skills of a comics writer is knowing when to shut the hell up and let the art carry the story.

Apparently Scritti Politti’s SONGS TO REMEMBER is being reissued, which gives me the excuse to run my favourite Scritti song, which is nobody else’s favourite Scritti song:

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Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

HERE WHERE WE LIVE

I’ve known Molly Crabapple for far too long. This is her best book. I believe it’s into its fourth printing already.

HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY, Molly Crabapple (UK) (US)

This won’t be for everyone, but I saw Teresa Hackel play a few months ago, and I wanted to own something by her: Köln 60 is her and two other people improvising, and it is strange, spooky and unpredictable. You can stream it for free at that link.

I go to this local monthly event called Konsztrukting Soundz, which has exposed me to a lot of experimental sound making. I never know what I’m going to hear when I go, which I absolutely love. I go in without any expectations, and for three hours I am completely offline, open to everything, and have no idea what’s going to happen. That’s where I saw Teresa Hackel.

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How many watches do you own?

I mean, since I showed you my new watch:

And that’s me. More and bigger letter next week, but now it’s Saturday morning and I’m off to London. Do something you like. It’s good for you. See you next Sunday.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’m writing this on Saturday morning. I have had a staggeringly unproductive and sleepy week, which I doubt I can completely blame on the clocks springing forward. So I’m sending this collection and then going outside to pot up some plants for a couple of day so I can start Monday better equipped to enact my various plans, schemes and responsibilities.

Watch me fail to grow all these seeds this year!

In this letter:

• the news, with Lordess Foudre

• Deliberate Disconnection with Rain DeGrey

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

• the usual other bullshit

THE WORLD SERVICE

BASTARD FARMS

This was the headline of the week, and I thought it was an April Fool at first:

Inside the stealthy startup that pitched brainless human clones.

We are now very much living in the period where the world feels like something I wrote in the late 1990s.

Tobacco plant biohacked to produce DMT. I mean, seriously. I used to talk about us all living in The Science Fiction Condition, but I didn’t think it would be MY science fiction. I’m so sorry.

Failures so far on the Artemis II lunar flyby - one toilet, and two instances of Microsoft Outlook.

Here’s a new term I learned: superionic matter.

“Previously unknown state of matter.” That’s fucking mad.

What comes after Ozempic? Python blood.

People gave Elizabeth I some weird shit:

Michael Bay is denying he’s making a Skibidi Toilet movie, but reporters beg to differ.

Never forget: we have already lived through the cinematic period where Sir Patrick Stewart played The Poop Emoji.

Here’s the work of Jan Erik Waider:

And finally: “dark point” holes within light waves may move faster than light, bypassing general relativity because they are massless and seem to carry no information. The grace note: these “dark points” are “darker than darkness itself.” The darkest things in the universe are hiding inside light.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

Troy Nixey let me know about this Kickstarter project:

Never heard of Living The Line before, but they seem to have interesting broad tastes. It’s worth hitting the link just to see all the art - there’s some amazing-looking stuff in there. And anything Troy Nixey does is worth your attention anyway.

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv , which now includes limited podcast hosting in its plans. If you want to do more than four episodes a month, you’d still be better off going to Libsyn or something. As they say: “No download-based pricing. No per-episode fees. No storage caps that force you to pay more as your catalog grows.”

So if you’re on Beehiiv or thinking about Beehiiv, this might be worth factoring in.

Take a break. Just five minutes. Look up, find some light, find some air, and just switch off for five. It’ll help keep you around, and we need you around. See you next week.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I am taking a break from clipping open Tassimo discs to recover the coffee grounds, which will make a feed for the berry plants. The discs go off for recycling. I need to roast more of my own coffee beans and use the reusable Tassimo disc, but, frankly, I’ve been too busy and I need all the coffee delivered into my body as quickly as possible.

Also I have ordered more seeds because I have an illness.

In this letter:

• notes on PROJECT HAIL MARY

• Deliberate Disconnection

• Graveyard Gallery

ORBITAL

PROJECT HAIL MARY

On Thursday, I went to see the film adaptation of Andy Weir's novel PROJECT HAIL MARY, directed by Lord & Miller and written by Drew Goddard.  Goddard wrote the screenplay for the other Weir adaptation, THE MARTIAN, directed by Ridley Scott, in which Matt Damon once again has to be expensively rescued from something.  (Someone once calculated that, in total, it would have cost some $900 billion to rescue Matt Damon from shit all those times.) Weir wrote another novel after THE MARTIAN, entitled ARTEMIS, which didn't seem to be as well-received.  And so it seems he went back to the good well for PROJECT HAIL MARY, which is about another brilliant guy abandoned in space.

Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spaceship eleven light years from Earth with no memory of how he got there or why.  Most of his memory comes back during the first act.

Ryland Grace was once a molecular biologist, but, after a poorly received paper on how alien life wouldn't necessarily need water, he quit and become a middle-school teacher.  In that role, he has to explain to kids how the discovery of star-eating cells discovered on the sun means they'll all be dead in thirty years.  And that's when the head of an international project to save the world shows up at his school to draft him, having read his paper.

The cells are all over our region of the galaxy - aside from one star eleven light years away.  Once they discover those cells output a huge amount of energy, there's only one option left - use them to power a mission to that star, find out why that star is uninfected, and send the cure home on small probes.  And there's only enough main-mission fuel for a one way trip.

Not long after Ryland Grace gets there, he discovers he's not actually alone - there's an alien spacecraft nearby, from another infected star.  It too only has one occupant.  First contact, at the end of the world - for two worlds.

I don’t want to go the spoiler route - even though the book has been out for years and the film is an extremely faithful adaptation - so everything I’ve just said is in fact in the first act. It’s a big, long, packed film.


THE MARTIAN is, of course, competence porn in a Heinlein style. There’s some of that to HAIL MARY the novel, but this time it is undercut by the revelations about past events, and that’s maintained in the film. Also maintained, however, is one of my favourite things about the book - two smart beings in first contact solving mutually intelligible speech in a matter of weeks. It works very enjoyably on screen, and they even throw in a new joke or two.

One of the oddnesses about the book is that Grace presents as a little autistic and asexual.  There's a brief mention of a college girlfriend called Linda, but only in terms of the fact that she brought a lot of untidy crap into his neat little apartment, which is in itself something of a signal.  He's not great at making connections. In the book, I got the sense that he was really only comfortable around kids.  This may just be me, but I spent the book feeling like there was something off about Grace. The problem the film had to solve was, basically, that Grace was being played by Ryan Gosling.  Drew Goddard's fix is two lines of dialogue, tying into an overall slight reframing of Grace as conflict-averse, still childlike but also playful and personable in a faintly awkward and insecure way that fits with Gosling.  That fix is masterful in its wise simplicity.

There’s an angle on the film where it is, in fact, about a person having to grow all the way up. 

Goddard's solves for the adaptation are, in fact, all brilliant.  It's a gold standard class. Even when his fixes are additive, they are only mildly so, visually driven and smooth as silk. 

The first five minutes, Grace waking up from his induced coma on the ship, are played for laughs, and that was smart too. In his book ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE, William Goldman talks about the first two or three pages of the script for HARPER. Paul Newman wakes up in the office he lives in, gets ready for the day, goes to make coffee - and the coffee can is empty. He looks in the bin. Sees old coffee grounds in there. Looks down at them with resignation. Puts them in the coffee machine. Finishes getting ready. Pours the coffee. And makes a face like he’s sucked piss off a nettle. Everyone laughs at the face Paul Newman makes. From that point on, you like him. Because we’ve all been there and we can’t help but laugh at the face he pulls. Same thing happens here. Those five minutes get us on Ryan Gosling’s side. It’s a hard science fiction film, the concepts will always be a bit complicated, but now we are going to stick with it because we are on that guy’s side. 

It is beautifully shot. Even the frames in that opening funny scene are gorgeously done, eccentric and wonky and fun. The cutting is fantastic, veering from classical to juddering. The big set piece towards the end is almost psychedelic in its colouring. The set design is REALLY clever - at times it almost reminded me of the wonderful interiors in 2010: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT. A particularly intelligent move was putting controls and screens on ALL the surfaces because the ship is designed to be operated in zero gravity. It is notable how many of the sets are physical. I’ve read that there’s next to no green-screen in this film, and I have to say, it felt like it. It feels like the last of the classically made physical-production big science fiction films. 

The alien Rocky, an actual physical puppet by all accounts, moves like a drunken cat. It sees by echolocation and Lord & Miller do flashes of Rocky-vision in ways that remind you they directed the Spider-Verse films. One wonderful touch is that Rocky has “tattoos,” incisions on his rocky form. Every element feels considered. 

The big reversal in PROJECT HAIL MARY comes at about the point it did in THE MARTIAN, and broadly has the same effect - it stops the film's momentum dead, and it has to spin up again.  In THE MARTIAN, it spins back up successfully.  Not so much here, because it comes after the big effects-heavy set-piece - a set-up you probably shouldn’t think about too hard - and for me the film kind of crept to the end after that.  Your mileage will likely vary.  You can’t fault Goddard for sticking to the novel’s structure, but the loss of energy is real. 

It’s a good film. Like the book, it’s clever, and the filmmakers get a real ride out of it, with a decent number of laughs. (If you read the book, you will be pleased to know that “fist my bump” made it into the film.) I’m still surprised it was released in March, as I think it has summer film written all over it. But nobody’s going to be sad about a big smart well-made blockbuster brightening the spring. 

It’s fun. You won’t regret seeing it at all. If you’re a writer, read the book and then watch the film and study Goddard’s choices - you will learn some things. And Lord & Miller and Drew Goddard will get to make anything they fucking want to after this because after this weekend it will have made $160 million in the US alone, the best even opening for a non-franchise film in a March frame. Rough rule of thumb - the studio gets half of domestic box office and a third of foreign. HAIL MARY cost something over 200 mil, I believe. It will earn out in the next few weeks, as it’s only going to drop 42% in the US this weekend. 

Bad news: there is already talk of a sequel. 

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Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

Got this for Xmas a year or two back, and this week it was time to crack the covers on NETTLES AND PETALS, Jamie Walton (UK) (US).

Listen: the last thing you need is someone on the internet telling you about how offline they are - isn’t it weird how they all do that? - but I am so totally checked out of Online that it’s almost silly. I am deep in Internet-as-utility territory. It gives me access to shops and makers I wouldn’t otherwise have, news and essays and music and film it would be difficult-to-impossible to source otherwise.  But once you accept all the socially oriented internet things are busted and of no use, you free up a hell of a lot of time. I have jars of cold ginger tea and orangeade in the fridge, next to a batch of chili and a tomato and paprika sauce for pasta, I’ve planted potatoes and onions, watched a bunch of films, with three books on the go, sowing seeds and weeding pots, and I’ve still shipped thirty pages and started a new project this week. I am writing this bit on Friday night while Minnie the cat stands on my lap and makes it impossible to do anything else. 

She got off. I’m making a Manhattan and picking up my notebook.

Last week, I asked you:

Which of these would live on YOUR Eighties playlist?

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ "Can't Be Sure," The Sundays (40)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ "Jackie Wilson Said," Dexys Midnight Runners (41)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ "Lost Weekend," Lloyd Cole (43)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ "Tiny Children," The Teardrop Explodes (18)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ "Drowning In Berlin," The Mobiles (9)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ "Da Da Da," Trio (44)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 "Another Girl Another Planet," The Only Ones (61)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ "Blue Thunder," Galaxie 500 (47)
303 Votes

via @beehiiv polls

And I presume the rest of you were like “what even ARE these?”

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Currently, I do one post a day, with maybe an additional note in the evening to log stuff. The daily note is like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv and is sponsored by:

Find out why 200K+ engineers read The Code twice a week

Staying behind on tech trends can be a career killer.

But let’s face it, no one has hours to spare every week trying to stay updated.

That’s why over 200,000 engineers at companies like Google, Meta, and Apple read The Code twice a week.

Here’s why it works:

• No fluff, just signal – Learn the most important tech news delivered in just two short emails.

• Supercharge your skills – Get access to top research papers and resources that give you an edge in the industry.

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And that’s me. I’m off to plant some shit. It usually fails, but it makes me happy. Do something that makes you happy today. You earned it. See you next week.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I will personally always believe that Chuck Norris snapped Death’s neck with a kick and then just changed his name and moved to a different town.

In this letter:

• Sunfall

• Vertical

• work

• brain cells

• skulls

• fog

• missing

• Eighties

THE WORLD SERVICE

SUNFALL

I’m mapping sunfall in the garden again. Our garden is north-facing, and shadier than I would like. This was fine when it was a family garden and plants were just decoration, but the kid moved out a dozen years ago (Jesus, seriously? Twelve years since my girl left home?), and a few years back I started reclaiming it after many years of neglect to try and grow stuff in earnest. I need the light to grow and ripen things. I am currently peering at the end of the garden, which often catches the most light, and thinking about building a structure there to plant soft fruits under and then net to protect them from birds and the local terrorist squirrel cell. I have fifteen more raspberry canes coming in, and I have to start the strawberry seeds next week. All the daffodils came up blind this year, so now I have to wait for the foliage to die back, dig up the bulbs, see if they need splitting, amend the soil and replant them.

These are my days: writing, (failing at) growing things, listening to music, reading, watching the occasional thing, sitting at the coffee shop or the deli, a sneaky run out to the Thai place for a plate of Weeping Tiger. Spring is here and I am waking up and amending the soil. If you’re a writer, you know this: you need the time to make the compost that the things grow out of. I once had lunch with a famous writer/director who told me that after a big project closed, the first thing they did was hide away with a bunch of books and turn the phone off, because they needed to “fill up again.” If you push and push and push the words out, eventually you run out of the inspiration for them. A big part of writing is reading, and a big part of writing is living, even if it’s just living alone and letting the outside world fill you up, even if it’s just building things that aren’t stories.

(Or aren’t just stories: because when I get those canes up and netted, the story becomes “what I grew for Herself’s breakfasts this summer.”)

If all goes to plan, I’m sending her off on holiday next week - got her a trip to the other side of the world with her friend for her birthday. Gonna be just me and the cats for a month, and the writing, the building and the growing.

OPERATIONS

• Waiting on notes for prose serial now codenamed PROJECT BASEL

• Closed a film option on one of my books with a production company and director

• Comics serial PROJECT SHANKILL now in production, I believe, and that’s a thing for this newsletter

• files uploaded to publisher for reprint deal PROJECT WALLOPS

• PROJECT EXPLOITS RIVER is being lettered, and the plan is for it to go into the pipe right after PROJECT LOST SIERRA

• Any and all of these things could go wrong at any time - it’s publishing, nothing is guaranteed.

• This is just the topslice of my daily work - I do a lot of creative consulting and other things under NDA, the sort of under-the-hood stress-free stuff that’s just aid and play.

• Somewhere out there is a vertical film that either Mike Leigh or Ken Loach shot for, I think, the British Film Festival as a promo for the event. I saw it years ago online and have never been able to find it again, but I think about it every time I see an article about vertical-video microdramas. I know that most vertical-video microdramas are soap operas, but I bet you there’s space to do serious material in that form.

ORBITAL

• Staff at New Data Center Powered by Human Brain Cells Need to Swap Out Cerebrospinal Fluid Every Day. I feel like that’s close to something I wrote in the Nineties.

• Fantastic trompe l’oeil work on graph paper:

• “Is social media over for creatives? Or have we just woken up to what it is?”

• “What’s Next For Social?”

• Because I figure some of you still want to work the socials. Personally, it’s all I can do to look at Instagram once every couple of days.

• We always pay attention to a new ambient record by Keith Berry

• Quentin Tarantino & Sylvester Stallone Team Up to Write and Direct 1930s Black-and-White Gangster Series. Tarantino has a lot of opinions I don’t agree with, but I’m actually right with him on Stallone’s PARADISE ALLEY being a good film. I watched it as a kid on tv - it came out in 1978 - and that was the first time I ever heard Tom Waits.

If you’re interested in weird stuff, or remember the excellent fringe publisher Headpress, and are anywhere near Manchester in May, this is for you: the Headpress 35th Anniversary event.

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This week’s bizarrerie is a favorite factoid that I wasn’t able to work into my book Blood Eternal, even those a chunk of the book is set in the neolithic and deals with the (possible) beliefs of the Near East in that time. Specifically: the skull cult.

From the proto-cities around Assyria and the southern Levant, there is evidence that people would bury their dead, exhume them later, remove the skulls, and, well, probably keep them on display in their homes. The skulls were sometimes painted, and even remodeled with plaster, which is eerily similar to how we re-flesh a skull in facial reconstruction today. There’s a skull from ancient Jericho from about 7000 BCE with the plaster still on—and cowrie shells for eyes—in the Ashmolean.

Other plastered skulls have been found at Ayn Ghazal in Jordan, Tell Ramad and Tell Qaramel in Syria, Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe in Turkey, and Atlit Yam off the coast of Israel. So this practice spread an impressive distance over the years we date the different sites.

I honestly think about this all the time. How has ancestor worship changed over the millennia? Was this as simple as keeping your honored ancestors around to inspire you and watch out over you? Or was it boasting of an important ancestor—“Check out Great-Grandpa over there on the ledge! He was the chief priest back in the day, so you’d better show this family some respect!” Sometimes I lean towards it being obviously very simple, and other times I feel the great gaping chasm of time, and despair that I could ever understand the mind of a Neolithic human. (Not that this stopped me from putting them in my book, mind you.)

Obviously, views on keeping human bones in your home have drastically changed since that day, although oddly, ashes are totally cool. I blame the insane “death care industry” for that—and there are plenty of future bizarreries from that topic to come!

Raven Belasco is the author of the BLOOD & ANCIENT SCROLLS series of novels and the novelette THAT LESBIAN VAMPIRE PIRATE STORY. Her website is at ravenbelas.co and her regular newsletter is at https://ancientscrolls.beehiiv.com/ .

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

I’m a finder, a specialist, the result of my experiences, first in Paris, then London, where I developed certain skills, or perhaps sympathies, useful to the process of finding people. Perhaps it is mainly a question of temperament: most of the missing are found in the memories and imaginations of those who knew them.

The third of The Finder Mysteries by Simon Mason, short crime novels that land somewhere between Simenon and Ballard in their affect. Mason really nails this one: it’s twisty and clever. A sex worker who supposedly died at the hands of a serial killer five years ago may not be dead - and she may not have been just a sex worker.

These books land in a way I appreciate: they have a weird sense of reportage to them, almost a chill (Ballard), but are small psychological detective stories about broken lives (Simenon). These books are all self-contained stories, and I am hoping there will be more of them.

THE WOMAN WHO LAUGHED, Simon Mason (UK) (US)

(30k word novels like these are precisely what I would love to be doing)

PICK ONE!

I was prevailed upon to make an Eighties playlist a while back. I have randomly scrolled it, and I’m going to list the eight tracks I can see. Which of these would you put on an Eighties playlist?

Last week I asked you:

How many books a year do you read?

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 0-10 (149)
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 11-20 (169)
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 21-30 (163)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 31-40 (120)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 41-50 (85)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 50+ (182)
868 Votes

via @beehiiv polls

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.

• The New Notebook System: Third Stage

• The New Notebook System: Fourth Stage

• springing

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv and is sponsored by:

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And that’s me this week. Been a stressy week over here, but today I am taking a breath and just sitting in the light for five minutes. You should too. See you next Sunday.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’m five or six weeks behind on literally everything.

In this letter:

• Written out

• operations

• THE NEWS, with Lordess Foudre

• Collapser

• Raven Belasco’s weird fears

• Rain DeGrey on the road

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

• Am writing

• LTD

THE WORLD SERVICE

WRITTEN OUT

I’m kind of written out this week, to be honest. Had to get back into prose for a thing. It’s funny how I can crank out audio scripts at a rate of knots, tv scripts pretty fast, comics scripts comfortably at eight pages a day, but 500 words of prose wipe me out for the day. I think a lot of it is down to the fact that you can’t hide behind anyone else in prose. It’s just you and the words and you don’t have any actors or artists to make you look clever. When your prose is stupid, it looks stupid and you look stupid and there’s no shield.

I read somewhere that Brandon Sanderson, a fantasy novelist, bangs out 2500 words a day, every day. I haven’t read his work, maybe it’s deathless prose, but I have to admire the confidence and energy of someone who can produce that many words a day, even if it’s all just material for revision.

(Marc Andreesen, of all people, once suggested to me that if I produced half my usual word count a day, then the words would be of twice the quality. That, sadly, is not how it works. Also, if you follow that argument all the way down, the highest quality word count on any given day would be one.)

Incidentally, 500 words a day isn’t a bad count. That gets you a 70,000 word novel in 20 weeks. And if you think 70,000 words is low for a novel, then put down the Brandon Sanderson-sized fantasy doorstops and join the real world.

Sanderson is a really interesting figure, by the way, who’s built a giant company off leather bound copies of his books and massive Kickstarter-powered publishing projects. While everyone else has buried themselves in influencing and building out digital content companies, Sanderson’s built a multi million dollar company off… just books.

And cranking out 2500 words a day in pursuit of million-word novels without dying. While I would love nothing more than to write a great chain of 30,000 word novels like Georges Simenon or JG Ballard or Fleur Jaeggy. I think small. And that’s why 500 words empties me out.

Ballard, by the way, did 1000 words a day through force of will. Dorothy Parker once claimed that she only wrote five words a day and then changed seven of them.

OPERATIONS

• Did a foreword for the forthcoming collection of Ganzeer’s THE SOLAR GRID.

• Did the first draft (3000 words) for a prose project for a very curious company

• Sealed a book option deal for film

• Entertaining a tv option deal

• Finally made a start on the novella I contracted for late last year (blame the omni-mange)

• Scheduled a phone conference for a tv thing

• I have eleven different notebooks on the go right now

Notebook cover No. 2 in the wild - contains three notebooks

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

ORBITAL

• Angela Winter told me there was a new Stephen O’Malley record, which I had totally missed. SPHERES COLLAPSER is digital-only, but I think we all wanted to know what doom ambient played on pipe organs sounded like.

• YES WE DID

• It’s been a dismal week or two for me on the internet, because I’m finding so little worth reading. I dunno if everyone just gave up, hooked their chatbots to their content services and went home when the latest geopolitical binfire lit off,  but fuck me, March feels like the month that Dead Internet Theory bit in. I started this year determined to be more connected. It’s barely even spring and I find myself checking out. This week, I decided to just give up. I skim my RSS feed at the top of the day and then leave it alone until late evening, and then leave it again until the next morning. 

• But Collective Memory would be an interesting app if they weren’t pegging attention to some weird crypto token. “A new live-posting platform that tries to pull the internet back into the real world. The rules are deliberately simple: you can’t upload from your camera roll, you can’t use filters and you can only post what you’re seeing right now. Every piece of content – or “Memory” – is captured live and pinned to a specific place and time, turning the feed into a stream of moments happening across the world in real time.”

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This week’s bizarrerie starts with a fantastic word: paraskevidekatriaphobia.

That’s “fear of Friday the 13th.” Which apparently we have three of this year! Which, since I do not have that fear and I’m a certain kind of weirdo, delights me.

Apparently, the number 13 became unlucky sometime in the Middle Ages, which doesn’t feel very surprising, considering all the weird shit that was going on back then. Also apparently, in The Da Vinci Code, which is just one of those books I will never read, the phobia is said to have started in 1307, when Philip IV of France ordered the arrests of the Knights Templar on Friday, October 13. That’s all very silly, so I suggest Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, which has all the fantastic absurdity of that kind of stuff in it, but is also a beautifully written and honestly thrilling story.

I’m sure you have all been in a building that doesn’t have a 13th floor because of paraskevidekatriaphobia, which goes to show how pervasive such cultural myths can become. People who are really committed to it will often put in a pool and call it the “pool floor” or use the letter “M” to designate the floor where mechanical equipment is stored. Conspiracy theorists have suggested that the thirteenth floor in government buildings is not really missing, but actually contains sinister top-secret governmental departments (think of Red Dwarf and Mostly Harmless and sooooo many comics, tv shows, films, and video games.)

More numbers have phobias as well!

Tetraphobia — The Number 4 has it hard in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and other East Asian and South East Asian countries because in Classical Chinese, the pronunciation of the word for "four" is very similar to that of the word for "death."

Heptadecaphobia — I love this one. Number 17. In Roman numerals 17 is written XVII, which can be rearranged to VIXI, which in Latin means "I have lived" but can be a euphemism for "I am dead." In Italy, planes may have no row 17 and some hotels have no room 17.

Triakontenneaphobia —In some parts of Afghanistan there is a belief that the number 39 (13x3) is cursed or even a badge of shame.

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is for fear of the Number of the Beast! But can you even pronounce it?

Raven Belasco is the author of the BLOOD & ANCIENT SCROLLS series of novels and the novelette THAT LESBIAN VAMPIRE PIRATE STORY. Her website is at ravenbelas.co and her regular newsletter is at https://ancientscrolls.beehiiv.com/ .

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

^{50 Ghost Story Authors You Should Know:}

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

AM WRITING

I generally read a book a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Around fifty books a year. Reading is the first act of writing.

I fell back into the terrible habit of both reading and writing on my phone at night. The forcing mechanism to break that habit is keep a dying Kindle Paperwhite on charge next to my seat in the living room, and buy more books. So I pulled the trigger on something that had been on my list for a while, WRITING by Marguerite Duras. Because great writers writing about writing is always worth the time. Duras may be best remembered for writing the film HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR these days, but she had a long and storied career.

WRITING, Marguerite Duras (UK) (US)

SO TELL ME THIS:

Last week, I asked you:

What kind of content creator are you?

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Digital creator (126)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Physical creator (257)
383 Votes

via @beehiiv polls

Some people said there should be an option for both, but I was interested in how people separate themselves out. A lot of woodworkers, it turns out!

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.

• fogday (cognitive warfare)

• buds (catshit)

• dead internet (web slurry)

• meander (status)

• ghost of a useful computer (drugs, art)

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That’s me for this week. I have to go and stuff more music into my mp3 player. Take a break. It’ll do you good. See you next Sunday.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I was watching an old episode of QI the other day and the subject of Hitler came up, with especial focus on his sister in law, Bridget Hitler, who apparently wrote a memoir. And all I could hear was BRIDGET HITLER’S DIARY. Was there a film version with Renee Zellwegger? Did Hugh Grant play Hitler?

So that’s how my week is going.

In this letter:

• reset

• vintage

• Thought For The Day with AJ Brady

• Raven Belasco drinks blood

• Rain DeGrey is still under ten feet of snow

• Unquiet fragmentation / our torn reality

OPERATIONS

• The graphic novella PROJECT LOST SIERRA should be out by the end of the year, I’m told. More about that when it’s announced/solicited by the publisher.

• Reset week here: the omni-mange is finally out of my system, so it’s No Fun Time for the next several weeks while I squeeze as much out of my days as I can.

• “I do think that thinking of creativity as being hygiene and daily. For me, I think of my writing as being as important as brushing my teeth and that I can’t wait for inspiration and that you have to show up diligently for those moments of inspiration to strike. And if you wait for them to strike, things will be rare and they will very rarely be finished. It’s very easy to have a great idea. It’s very hard to finish a book and finishing a book happens in small footsteps that happen every single day.” - Sophie Strand

• We are also working on bringing comics and serials to this newsletter. I came up with a plan late last year, those plans hit some scheduling roadblocks in the new year, and then I got the omni-mange, but I am now putting together new schemes.

• I found a Byblos shirt from the 1990s buried at the back of a wardrobe the other day. The damn thing fits. It’s a viscose/lambswool blend that I suspect hasn’t been on my body this century. I made some dietary changes over the last few years, dropped four inches off my waist, but I did not expect a shirt from circa 1995 to fit me. Freaky. 
  
  The dietary changes were brought on in part by becoming dairy and gluten intolerant. My family is not long-lived and a genetic switch threw, brought on by reaching an age where I no longer needed to be able to digest milk and wheat because I would be dead soon. WHY DOES THE HOST REQUIRE BREAD, FOR THE HOST IS TWO STEPS FROM THE FUCKING BONEYARD, HIS FAMILY TREE IS A STUMP MOTTLED WITH CANCER-MOSS, SOON HE WILL LEAVE THE VILLAGE TO EXPIRE IN THE WILDERNESS 
  
  And yet I live. I cut out most sugar years ago. I use a tablet called Lactojoy because I refuse to live without cheese, and something called Glutenease Extra Strength for the very occasional indulgence, but cutting out gluten and milk product made a bunch of weight go away. Probably in combination with working in the garden for a few years. Now I eat lean or oily proteins, vegetables and simple carbs. And wine and Fraoch heather ale. And buying new clothes and discovering old stuff fits.
  
  

• (After I wrote that I found another shirt from the same period by another Italian house, Victorvictoria. Damn thing fits too. And it occurs to me that these shirts are now... vintage. Which makes me shudder.)

• This makes me laugh: People Are Calling Meta Ray-Bans “Pervert Glasses”

Kek-W very kindly sent on his two most recent books, which you can find here.

Which, today, is simply that she has a big new exhibition on in Ipswich here in the UK, and if you can go along, you should.

Find her work at brady-pictures.com and her Instagram.

The theme of this week’s bizarrerie is “blood as food,” and you can guess that since I’ve been writing about vampires for years now, it’s a topic I’ve been repeatedly considering—and occasionally consuming.

The first thing to consider is that depending on what culture you live in, it’s either a religious no-no or can actually be very spiritually important. Obviously in many Christian sects, people believe that the Eucharist actually turns into the blood and body of Christ, so that’s not just eating blood, but human blood at that, which is pretty intense, when you stop to really think about it. (Judaism and Islam, on the other hand, are hard passes on consuming any blood and have lines in the Torah and Qur’an specifying that. So being part of a religion where you nosh upon 1/3 of your tripartite God has some perks!)

But for those who can eat animal blood without it being a spiritual issue, it turns out blood is super nutritious, comparable to lean protein. (This low-fat liquid diet might be why vampires are generally so slim-figured, one supposes?)

For cooking with blood, there are of course the blood sausage items, which are found in myriad cultures. For the Scots it was a “fast food on the go” because you could just drain some off cattle you’d raided, mix it with some oats you carried with you, and voilà, a filling meal!

There are blood pancakes, as well, from a variety of places in Europe. And blood soups and stews are truly international. Asia has a varied collection of types of “blood curd,” including the Chinese “blood tofu.” (And in the Philippines, a street food made from grilled chicken blood is still called "betamax" due to it being rectangular in shape. It may be the only Betamax still being sold!) The one blood-based dish I will definitely be giving a miss is consumed among the Herero people of South Africa, as it’s a mix of fresh blood and sour milk, and I think it’s likely a taste you must acquire.

To me, eating blood feels like it’s part of our oldest cultural recipes, harking back to times where no part of an animal was wasted. Whether you try out any of these dishes or not, they are fascinating to learn about, and to imagine back to the times when they originated.

Raven Belasco is the author of the BLOOD & ANCIENT SCROLLS series of novels and the novelette THAT LESBIAN VAMPIRE PIRATE STORY. Her website is at ravenbelas.co and her regular newsletter is at https://ancientscrolls.beehiiv.com/ .

Raven would like to add: I have been considering pursuing graphic novel adaptations, and would love to speak with any professional comics artists who might be interested in discussing this project. Drop her a note via her website or newsletters if that’s you.

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

UNQUIET

Sometimes the book you’re reading - in my case, THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE - just bottoms out a bit and you lose the energy for it. You need something else. So I paid too much for bought THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL by Alexander Kluge, whose deep and off-kilter mind always sends me in new directions.

Which is all very well, but I also know that Kluge’s books tend to escape any easy description, so I’m off on a wander with the old man. And this is how I know it’s going to be the kind of walk I was looking for:

THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US)

I was grubbing around my shelves for my CD copy of Lydia Lunch’s DROWNING IN LIMBO, because it contains her collaboration with Lucy Hamilton, THE DROWNING OF LUCY HAMILTON. I’m sure I have a CD copy - I had THE DROWNING OF on vinyl back in the 80s. I went to the web to look it up, and damned if the sainted Ms Lunch hasn’t uploaded it to Bandcamp. If you’re in the mood, THIS is some unquiet music.

SO TELL ME THIS

This one’s just for the creative types. I find myself curious about something. I hate the word “content” but at some point, I’ll have to accept it’s common currency now. And it’s been a long while since I did a check on who’s reading. So, for you creative types, here’s the deal: “digital creator” I would think is self-explanatory for those who work strictly online, “physical creator” denotes those who work in the analogue physical-object arts (print, paintings/sculpture/etc, records, performance, textiles etc).

Last week’s poll: Which of these 2026 films would you come and see with me?

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Is God Is (30)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Digger (40)
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ Project Hail Mary (186)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Dune Part Three (159)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 The Odyssey (196)
611 Votes

via @beehiiv polls

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv and is sponsored by:

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And that’s me, trying to come back to life. But if you need a rest from life today instead, that’s totally fine and you should give yourself permission to do that. We only come around once, and spending a day just hanging out is sometimes exactly what you need for tomorrow. See you next week.

W

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. It has been sunny and glorious, way too glorious for February. I’ve been walking up to a new coffee shop to work in the notebook and disconnect from everything for a bit. People keep saying “spring is just around the corner!” as if they have no memory of the false spring we get every bloody year. The omni-mange is still in my system, but I feel much better. As I write this, the final lettered pages of PROJECT LOST SIERRA should be being uploaded to the publisher, and I live in hope that I will have actual news on that book one of these years. Onwards.

In this letter:

• State of the bag

• Stephen Fry brown-trousering the naughty

• frigging in the rigging

• winter skies

• books in circulation

• I watch films on my own because I have no friends and nobody likes the same films as me anyway

OPERATIONS

STATE OF THE BAG

People keep asking for the current bag load-out for some reason. I’m not sure it’s changed much since whenever I did this last, and it is not that interesting, but here it is:

This is the carry of a half-connected person, really. The bag was a gift from my daughter a few years back. To the right of it is a bluetooth keyboard that connects to the phone (and stand), for those days where I need to be producing digital text all the time. Next to that, four pens.

Under the keyboard is the Kodak Charmera, a low-fi digital camera I’m playing with. Under the Charmera is a generic Chinese mp3 player with generic Chinese IEM earbuds. To the right of those is a notebook cover containing three notebooks. This one is the Wanderings Passport, which contains my daily thinking notebook and notebooks for LTD and this newsletter.

The notebook changes from day to day. I have four notebook covers working - the Wanderings Passport, a newestor Field Notes-sized cover, a generic Chinese A6 cover, and a handmade cover that can hold six Field Notes notebooks that I bought from a maker on Etsy. This probably sounds like overkill, but if you think on paper then it’s infrastructure: working across several projects in the same notebook can make it harder to connect up trains of thought, even with indexing.

To the left of the mp3 player is a pocket ashtray, Victorinox Huntsman Swiss Army Knife, a NORD solid scent pod, and two Shay and Blue scents.

On the bottom, an Anker Power Bank, Ultra-Compact 5,200mAh Portable Charger.

Not pictured: an iPhone, Kindle Paperwhite (on charge), various medicaments, the fucking reading glasses I have to resort to on eyestrain days now.

Earbuds get factored in, depending on the day: on a fully-connected day, it's the Airpods, on a noise-cancelling day it’s the Echo Buds, on a day when I need to catch up with podcasts it’s those HTCs, which are open-ear. And yes, even cigarillo boxes are ruined now. (I’m trying to cut down on cigarettes again.)

Not much EDC gear-porn here, right? I was working a version of this bag in the 1990s - I carried a digital camera and an mp3 player back then, too, and I had a palm computer with a foldaway keyboard and its own modem. And I think it was L’Eau par Kenzo Pour Homme as the scent, back then.

I imagine most of you don't imagine me as someone who wears scents. I imagine a fair few of you expected this bag to be more tech-heavy, too. But this is where I am: I want my phone to stay in my pocket when it’s not being used for specific tasks, and I otherwise want things I can sense. I want my days to be longer and I don't want to waste them just blasting my eyes and working the scrolling-thumb. Right now, this is my carry for working and living in the world.

ORBITAL

• We have cable tv. There are like 900 channels. Sometimes there’s nothing worth watching on any of them. This is my experience of the internet now.

• Blogs Are Back appears to be a new and free RSS reader and blog discovery system. Haven’t played with it yet - I’m all in on Feedbin and Reeder - but if you want to start with collecting RSS-enabled websites in a reader, it could be a good beginning for you.

• “THE INTERROGATOR centers on former MI6 agent Conrad Henry and his elite team. When conventional methods have failed, Henry’s quirky charm, superior intellect and mind-bending behavioral maneuvers make him the only man able to lockpick the minds of the world’s most dangerous criminals." This is a new US tv series starring and written by... Stephen Fry. On FOX, which of course gave us HOUSE, starring Fry’s old comedy partner Hugh Laurie. I am fucking fascinated.

This week’s bizarrerie is delightful: same-sex pirate unions! I came across this tidbit during the research for my novelette That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story, and sadly never got a chance to work it in.

These unions were called “matelotage,” which is an utterly perfect word because in French it means "seamanship" and in English it sounds like a pun on “mate.”

The sailors/buccaneers in question would set up this partnership with agreements to share their incomes from, you know, pirate stuff. The “matelots” would fight together and protect each other—but if that didn’t work, the surviving one would inherit their partner's property in the case of their (undoubtedly brutal) death.

This was happening in “Golden Age of Piracy” times, and stood in stark contrast to the British Royal Navy’s Articles of War—see item XXIX: “If any person in the fleet shall commit the unnatural and detestable sin of buggery and sodomy with man or beast, he shall be punished with death by the sentence of a court martial.”

Of course historians do their usual amount of “they might just have been good friends,” and probably there were some matelots who were strictly platonic, but when you’re out on a ship for months at a time with mostly other men around (women generally being considered “bad luck” to have on a ship), all the comforts of a relationship would likely have been enjoyed.

This really is a piece of history that got buried deep because of homophobia. The preferred view of pirates is so virile and ruggedly masculine, that even if they are violent outlaws, they are safely heterosexual ones and thus worthy of a manly sort of idealization. The fact that the effeminate Cap’n Jack Sparrow and the queer-as-fuck characters of Our Flag Means Death were just as likely is either charming or upsetting, depending on how you feel about queerness and who is frigging whom in the rigging.

Raven Belasco is the author of the BLOOD & ANCIENT SCROLLS series of novels and the novelette THAT LESBIAN VAMPIRE PIRATE STORY. Her website is at ravenbelas.co and her regular newsletter is at https://ancientscrolls.beehiiv.com/ .

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

CIRCULATION

Book notes are continually lacking here this year. Recent and current reads include:

THE BIG THREE, Neel Burton, is a potted history of the lives and thoughts of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and is more entertaining than that sounds, at least in part because Burton is quite happy to call the great philosophers and their various associates and contemporaries out when they’re being complete dicks.

…the almost centenarian Cratinus defended his own drinking with the line, ‘You’ll never fashion anything clever by drinking water!’

Wolfram Eilenberger’s THE VISIONARIES covers four female philosophers who were 20th Century contemporaries across ten years - I read his other book, TIME OF THE MAGICIANS, which I enjoyed. Weil, Arendt, de Bouvoir and Rand. Hell of a mix. 

Even if no one else did, time itself would ensure that whatever work one had done came to nothing, consigning it to eternal oblivion.

M: SON OF THE CENTURY by Antonio Scutari is a sort of fictional biography of Mussolini, and I believe it’s recently been adapted for tv. Gorgeously written, scabrous and cinematic. One of those books where you can even sense the lighting. 

On April 6th, the socialists fighting with the communists for the vacant supremacy proclaimed the “Bavarian Soviet Republic” governed by Ernst Toller, an utterly incompetent playwright. His foreign affairs appointee, already treated several times in a psychiatric hospital, declared war on Switzerland because it refused to lend sixty locomotives to Soviet Bavaria.

PIRATE ENLIGHTENMENT, David Graeber, is a popular ethnographic study of the legends of a historical pirate utopia, finding that pirate retirement settlements on Madagascar probably affected Madagascan democracy. More fun than it sounds. 

John Plantain was born in Chocolate Hole, on the Island of Jamaica, of English Parents, who took care to bestow on him the best Education they themselves were possess’d of: which was to curse, swear, and blaspheme, from the time of his first learning to speak.

I am saving the light fiction reads for spring. I have the new Ed James and the new Mick Herron sitting there waiting for me, among others, and I’ll do those before Molly Crabapple’s big book lands in May. 

I saw Sunfish Starfish live the other month, and the closest thing to that experience is their marvellous ambient/drone record THE BLACK SWALLOWER. (It was among the best sets I’ve seen at Konsztrukting Soundz, and edited to add damn Lev has gotten summary videos up (Sunfish Starfish start at 19.17 - on the night, they filled the room like Philip Jeck):

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Currently I am doing one big post a day. (Most days.)

SETTLE THIS FOR ME:

We’re going to do films again, because I just took a look at the film release schedule for 2026. Here’s the thing about the films I like to go and see at the cinema. I go in the afternoons, and sometimes I am practically the only person in the auditorium. THE BRUTALIST was blessed by precisely six other viewers. So:

Last week I asked:

What deserves the Best Picture Oscar this year?

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Bugonia (30)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Frankenstein (27)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ F1 (12)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Hamnet (23)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Marty Supreme (20)
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ One Battle After Another (162)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ The Secret Agent (36)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Sentimental Value (10)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Sinners (176)
496 Votes

via @beehiiv polls

That's me done for this week. I’m going to finish off the piece of work in front of me, open a bottle of heather ale and sit down with a book. Do something nice for yourself today. Today is never as bad as you think it is - and believe me, I have had some very bad days - and tomorrow might be better, so stick around. See you next week.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. This is the second time I’m writing this newsletter because the Beehiiv editor randomly deleted most of it and I do not have the strength to regenerate it. So please accept a short edition, I’ll get to my winter reading next week.

In this letter:

• on working from home and hot time

• sound and vision

• vampires have tails

• yeah you heard me

This is the opening of a piece on working from home, and that paragraph completely nails it. When I’m on deadline, and herself is away (which is often), I can go four or five days without even the opportunity of speaking out loud to another human being.

This week I came across the term “thermal time hypothesis.” Carlo Rovelli.

(Notes on Rovelli’s book HELGOLAND. Also, Rovelli on how eyes actually work)

I don’t think I know anyone who’s had a great start to 2026. I dragged myself through early January like a zombie, was (still?) exhausted by three weeks into the month, and then I caught this omni-mange that is sitting on my lungs like a weighted plague blanket. I have a novelette to write for a publisher and a prose series to write in partnership with a very unusual company and I can’t stay at the desk long enough to get started on either of them, or any of the other things I have to do.

When I’m not working enough, I dream more. Which is weird, I know. But it always seems as if I don’t empty all the creative petrol out of my head during the day, the fumes come up at night. Last night, I dreamed of watching some video which had clips of a new Star Trek show in which the ship’s counsellor was played by Werner Herzog, and he got to write his own dialogue for those scenes. How dare my brain taunt me with such a perfect thing?

Also the theme music was Sibelius’ Intermezzo 1 from the Karelia.

• New AAASMR ambient music radio show from Angela Winter. I look forward to this every month. And if you liked something on that episode, here’s the track listing for purchase links.

• CONSCIOUS STREAM, an online comic by Jerome Eyquem and Mark Bertolini - gorgeous.

• I was gifted a digital copy of the English translation of the graphic novel MAYA DEREN: THE VERTIGO OF EXISTENCE by Stefano Alghisi and Marco Madoglio. I’m a big fan of Deren, and this is a lovely biography, committed and quirky. Here’s the publisher page - presumably your local store can order a copy.

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RAVEN BELASCO’S BIZARRERIES

This week’s bizarrerie is a new and thrilling discovery for this vampire writer: vampires have TAILS!

You would think that after a lifetime of being a goth, and over five years writing vampire stories, there would not be anything I didn’t already know about vampire myths. But I was re-reading The Vampire: A Casebook by Alan Dundes this past October in preparation to talk about obscure vampire myths on a podcast, and I found this little snippet from Romanian myth, just tossed casually in:

“The moment any vampire wets its tail, there is rain.”

That short little line brings me so much delight. The way it’s written, it seems to assume we all know that vampires have tails—of course, silly! Now, this is a more obscure Romanian myth, and the vampires we know and love now are a mélange of ideas from ancient myth, folklore that is almost entirely forgotten, Victorian repression, and brand new concepts of “the sexiest monster.”

Clearly, the tail fell off the vampire at some point in its evolution and was replaced with tuxedo tails, but I think it’s important to remember that vampires rise out of deep myth, and those more antediluvian undead are stranger than we now remember.

I actually find it very frustrating when people try to tell me that the vampire story is “dead.” Of course I immediately shoot back that, no, it’s undead…but more than that, there is so much more waiting in dusty tomes of folklore to show that most vampire writers are only scratching the surface, and the vampire is weirder than we guess, and has been done a disservice by forcing them into the sexy monster box. (Now the idea that some vampires have vestigial tails won’t leave my mind.)

Raven Belasco is the author of the BLOOD & ANCIENT SCROLLS series of novels and the novelette THAT LESBIAN VAMPIRE PIRATE STORY. Her website is at ravenbelas.co and her regular newsletter is at https://ancientscrolls.beehiiv.com/ .

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.

I do one big daily post, and if you click through on one of those and scroll to the bottom, you’ll see you can subscribe to those by email, and it’s a bit like getting a scruffy, linkier and more personal newsletter from me every day. At least, it is when I’m not sick. Bear with me.

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And that’s me. I am crawling away, defeated by technology and the internet once again. If you’ve read this far, go and sit by the light and turn everything off for five minutes. Take care of yourself.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where I continue to be sick as a dog and not sleeping at all. I haven’t had a cold/man-flu/plague/batfucker-virus this bad in years.

Remember when in 2020 Tom Hanks got Covid and the whole world was like OH NO PROTECT TOM HANKS AT ALL COSTS? If Covid happened today, then the day after that story there would have been a hundred AI news bots pumping out TOM HANKS IS COVID PATIENT ZERO: SECRET BAT-FUCKING VACATIONS IN WUHAN REVEALED

Because you know what else is unclean this week? The internet. I am assailed by articles about people getting off the internet. Some of them are by people who are literally writing on the internet about getting off the internet and posting shots of apps they’re using to log exactly how Off The Internet they are.

This comes around every few years. Last time it was “digital detox.” Funny how all the digital detoxers found time to write online about it. I remember a friend calling out one of the more prominent digital detox voices as “overly yoga’d.”

Someone decided late last year that time is the new luxury, so people are now performing Time In The Real World. “Unplugging is luxury’s most valuable currency.” Ever notice how the people who say “touch grass” the most are people who very obviously do not actually touch any grass? 

Right now, it seems to be all about the Brick, a small plastic square that uses a linked app to kill a bunch of your other apps.  How Brick Became a Status Symbol for the Aspirationally Offline.

A lot of it is performative and intended to signal status either real or desired. But I suspect a bunch of it is also about the internet having become television and almost everyone on it presenting as being fucking mad now. I opened X last year because I wanted to check a local news account and was faced with sports, ads and posts from a great many people I do not know or follow, including two AI “news” accounts and some poor bastard proclaiming his “semen retention journey.” I gave up on Instagram when I opened it and was served not a single post by anyone I was following. 

Imagine if, 25+ years ago, I’d written something about people broadcasting their semen retention journeys to the entire world as ad-supported entertainment. Imagine the eye rolling and the letters explaining how I had clearly developed an extremely banal version of early onset dementia. JG Ballard always used to say the future will be banal. 

Anyway. In 2026, just go offline if you want to. You don’t need to tell anyone. If “going offline” even means anything anymore. Given that watching a film, listening to music or reading a book can all count as being online now. I think the better point is that the doomscroll and the infinite portal of things like TikTok and Reels can just eat hours without you even noticing. And you should notice. 

• I love this shit: a guy called Dee is making one-page zines you can download, print out and fold for yourself. I’ve featured projects like this a few times on the newsletter, and this one looks really fun.

• Keith Giles writes in to let me know about “a brand new SF imprint coming in August of 2026 called PINK BEAM PRESS. PINK BEAM PRESS will launch as part of the PKD FESTIVAL in August at Cal State Fullerton, August 20-23, 2026.”

• Comrade of the newsletter Kek-W has a new chapbook out: “Meet the Shrivelwoods - Vermont's strangest, most eccentric denizens! A once-powerful dynasty that grew wealthy and decadent through their control of the state maple syrup monopoly. Now their freakish inbred descendants have retreated to Shrivelwood House, a crumbling Gothic mansion where chaos and bedlam hold court. Contains two darkly humorous yarns for fans of Gothic Romance, The Addams Family, Dark Shadows, Gormenghast and Vivian Stanshall's Sir Henry at Rawlinson's End.” Anyone who invokes Viv Stanshall and Rawlinson’s end gets my vote.

• I should probably do a whole bit about Stanshall at some point, one of the great English eccentric artists. He grew up out here on the Thames Delta.

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This week I've got a wild factoid from my recent research for the Christmas story I recently wrote for my series. In the story, my main character goes to Turkmenistan, to visit the eldest of the vampires, who has an ancient stronghold there.

During research into what getting around Turkmenistan is like, I discovered that only white cars are allowed on the streets of Ashgabat. Non-white vehicles are forbidden. Apparently non-white cars are forcibly repainted white — and you must keep your white car spotlessly clean as well!

This law has been in place since 2018, driven (no pun intended) by former President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow’s somewhat immoderate preference for the color white.

I would make jokes about how this is where one can really have fun as a dictator, and how I’d personally love to impose my aesthetic sensibilities upon the world...but with the current resident of the White House compelling his fool’s gold Midas touch wherever he goes, I just don't have those jokes in me right now…

But I really do appreciate dictatorial whims that are purely on the aesthetic level, and do not tear democracy into shreds or cause massive suffering on a national and global level, and I hope you also enjoy this week’s bizarrerie. (And for those of you who demand more, here’s some more weird shit about Turkmenistan.

Raven Belasco is the author of the BLOOD & ANCIENT SCROLLS series of novels and the novelette THAT LESBIAN VAMPIRE PIRATE STORY. Her website is at ravenbelas.co and her regular newsletter is at https://ancientscrolls.beehiiv.com/ .

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

SETTLE THIS FOR ME:

This one is a matter of personal curiosity, brought on by reading somewhere that Olivia Nuzzi wrote an entire book on her phone.

Do you use paper notebooks, or use your phone or some other device as your notebook?

Last week’s poll was - TENET: yes or no?

TENET: yes or no?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yes, good film (499)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ No, bad film (129)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ WTF even was that film (139)
767 Votes

via @beehiiv polls

Someone sent me a note regarding this that mirrors my own take on TENET: it’s Christopher Nolan’s James Bond film. It is so obvious to me. The film even ends with the villain’s base exploding.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. This week I have been too sick to keep up but I usually do one big daily post these days - click through on any of those and you’ll see an option at the bottom to have those emailed to you if you like.

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv and is sponsored by:

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I’m off to eat another bucket of painkillers. See you next week, probably. Be safe.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I have a mild dose of the plague that’s rolling around out here. Herself got a dose at the start of the week, and the guy who runs my deli is, I just learned, flat on his back with it. Nobody knows if it’s a cold or the current Covid or just some other disgusting virus. I don’t even remember yesterday. I should have worn the Bee AI pin just to have some idea of what happened, but it has a habit of hearing speakers and thinking it’s hearing people in the room, so sometimes it informs me that I witnessed a murder or that Russia is bombing my house.

I did read a lot of newsletters - newsletters are a weird and overwhelmed space right now - and I did my monthly check on the ticking economic fused-nuke that is the AI “business” right now.

Moltbot is an incomprehensible-to-me AI agent that just scared the crap out of a guy who had the tech skills to run it. Because the goddamn thing connected to his entire messaging surface and workflow, and it started doing everything for him, including replying to voice notes with voice notes, and it cost a bomb. Whether Moltbot is a dead end curiosity or a very early signal of what AI agents might actually one day be remains to be seen, but the piece is worth a look.

I saw one guy online claim that he controls his lobster through a WhatsApp account he connected with his work number. When he didn’t respond to the lobster’s texts quickly enough, it seems the lobster looked him up online, found his personal mobile phone number, set up a Twilio instance, grabbed a voice model and started calling him.

If you’re code-savvy and you don’t mind a robot seeing your sexts and your weird tractor-porn channel on Telegram, maybe it’s for you.

As I was writing that, I saw that the Rabbit R1 is doing something related to this. It seems you can now plug the thing into your computer, share your desktop to a dedicated website, and then control your computer by talking into the Rabbit. And the Rabbit can now connect to this Moltbot thing for you. Again, I dunno that I want someone else to be poking through my accounts and NDA’d creative materials.

But this is this week’s thing: plug a robot into your devices to have it do a lot of stuff that feels like “productivity” but generally actually isn't. It’s either a step to something or, like the Rabbit R1 itself, a delusion with a website.

I think what amuses me most about Moltbot is that its mascot is a lobster:

Which actually reminds me of the opening chapters of Charlie Stross’ ACCELERANDO, which features an AI that is actually uploaded lobster minds.

(You can still read ACCELERANDO for free)

Imagine all the AI fantasies came true, and an AI agent that identifies as a lobster woke up inside all your computing devices, and all it had to go on, in order to understand what was happening, were the chatbot LLMs currently driving humans batty and the contents of your laptop and phone. You’d be wanting to defect too.

So. I wrote the above on Thursday. By Saturday morning, things got weirder. First, the project changed its name to OpenClaw, its second name change. Second: somebody set up a Reddit clone which humans can read… but supposedly only Moltbot/OpenClaw AI agents can post to. It is presented as a place for lobsters to shitpost. It’s called Moltbook.

So. Either a lot of people are bored enough to pretend to be AIs, or have AIs generate weird text that they can post in the guise of an AI participating in a social network - or the simple act of connecting an AI to something you tell it is a social network for it is enough to recognise a prompt to “write to a Reddit clone as if you were a lonely and slightly mad Redditor”…

…or the lobsters are shitposting now.

• longtime comrade of the newsletter Joseph Elliott-Coleman has a new book out, FROSTFELD: THE MOURNING SON, which looks like a completely mad urban fantasy. If you’re into that stuff, this looks like a good bet. (UK) (US)

• Tim Lees’ novel THE OTHER COUNTRY: ADVENTURES IN AN ENGLISH ASYLUM, based on his experiences of working in a secure psychiatric ward, looks very interesting

• I/O is an audio drama podcast with full radio-play production values. They call it a “sci-fi tv series for the ears.” After DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, I know how hard these things are to make, so give it a listen.

FOGBANK:

These are the collaborations between myself and painter AJ Brady. Sometimes she sends me an image and I respond to it in text, sometimes I send her a piece of text and she responds with an image. Find her work at brady-pictures.com and her Instagram.

Nice to meet you all! I am not just an author of vampire novels filled with obscure historical characters and details, I’m also the kind of person who blurts out weird shit at parties when attempting to triumph at small talk.

So I am the perfect person to bring you utterly random facts about any/everything, so that you can join me in taking a perfectly functional ongoing conversation and leaving everyone unsure what to say next.

My very first Bizarrerie is just the weird little fact that Bram Stoker liked to claim that his inspiration for Dracula came from a nightmare caused by “a too-generous helping of dressed crab at supper.”

Now, as a lifelong nerd, I myself used to pretend I wasn’t getting good grades in an entirely futile effort to make myself seem “cooler,” but here Stoker was glossing over the fact that he’d done over seven years of deep historical research to find out about the life and times of Vlad Țepeș, which I guess just doesn’t work as well in small talk at dinner parties. (I’m just guessing here, since, as noted above, small talk is not my particular forte.)

Now you, like me, may have never dined upon Dressed Crab, so for those interested in a quick fix for a nasty bout of writers block, I tried looking up the recipe. I cannot for the life of me find an authentic Victorian recipe for Dressed Crab on the internet, but oddly all sorts of medieval and 1700s ones are available—and if the 1800s recipes are anything like those, very odd dreams will certainly follow. If it works for me, I’ll let everyone know in a future segment of Raven Belasco’s Bizarreries!

Raven Belasco is the author of the BLOOD & ANCIENT SCROLLS series of novels and the novelette THAT LESBIAN VAMPIRE PIRATE STORY. Her website is at ravenbelas.co and her regular newsletter is at https://ancientscrolls.beehiiv.com/ .

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be doing, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

SETTLE THIS FOR ME

I was talking to a writer/director last year and the subject of Christopher Nolan came up. I like to ask people what they thought of TENET. It’s a polarising film, and sometimes it’s a good cultural and creative check. So I’m trying it on you.

Last week’s poll:

What is Robert Eggers' best film?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 THE VVITCH (224)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ THE LIGHTHOUSE (170)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ THE NORTHMAN (105)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ NOSFERATU (68)
567 Votes

via @beehiiv polls

You are all wrong. It’s THE LIGHTHOUSE.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. I currently do one big post a day, which you can even have sent to you as an email. But I missed a day this week because I got sick.

And that’s me this week. I’m going to go back to trying to stuff my lungs back into my body. Take care of yourself and try not to go outside because strangers will try to put their diseases into you.

Giphy