Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.

Bit of a different one this week. I need to buy myself some time to progress the development of this letter and get some other things done. So, for this one week, I’m suspending the usual sections and doing something I’ve wanted to do for a while. In preparation for the approaching commencement of Part 02, I am presenting the entire collected Part 01 of COLLIDE.

And if I do the other sections too, I will probably break Gmail’s email-length filters or set off alarms on other email providers!

Graphic novella GHOST DRIVE STATION by myself and Lordess Foudre is out on November 18.

The order code/UPC is: 70985304934000111. If you want a copy, drop a note to your local comics shop or bookstore, or stop in there, and give them that code. Nobody orders for the shelf any more, so if you want to be sure of getting a copy, tell your store this week.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics, and there’s at least one other major reprint project in the works from them that I’m writing a large essay for right now.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics on November 24.

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

Part Two starts soon.

ORBITAL

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. The current format is between one and three posts a day. Like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv.

It’s Wednesday here. I’m out to see DIGGER on Friday. I will probably talk about that next week. I will talk about all the things next week. Probably. Unless I don’t. Go take some time off soon and do something good for yourself. I won’t tell anyone.

W

Just a brief one this week, as I’m across half a dozen projects at least - probably forgetting each one - and, try as I might, there aren’t currently enough hours in the day for everything.

We are busy putting together new material for this newsletter, and it should actually be arriving soon.

Anyway, I’m on the run here, sooooo:

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Graphic novella GHOST DRIVE STATION by myself and Lordess Foudre is out on November 18.

The order code/UPC is: 70985304934000111. If you want a copy, drop a note to your local comics shop or bookstore, or stop in there, and give them that code. Nobody orders for the shelf any more, so if you want to be sure of getting a copy, tell your store.

Here’s another page from the book, one of my favourite atmosphere shots from the whole thing. Lordess has KILLED it.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics, and there’s at least one other major reprint project in the works from them that I’m writing a large essay for right now.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics on November 24. It just went to print.

COLLIDE part two coming soon.

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

ORBITAL

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.

I learned this week that the audio drama series I did a couple of years back, THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, has been downloaded more than 270,000 times. I kind of boggled at that. The whole thing is still available at this link for free.

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

TENTACLES

TENTACLES LONGER THAN NIGHT by Eugene Thacker. Apparently I picked this up years ago, started it and then put it down for some reason. I finished it this week.

As you can see, it’s the third (and final) book in Thacker’s exploration of horror. It’s a bit more philosophically difficult than the other two at the start, and kind of dissolves into fragments at the end, like Thacker is emptying out the backs of his notebooks.

As you can tell, it’s a lot of fun. Jolly. Summery.

But the joy of him emptying his notebook is the detailed references he makes to other works of philosophical horror, many of which I’d never heard of and have given me a list of things to look up. (It also reminded me that I bought Ligotti’s THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE and yet never read it.)

Sit with this:

For writers of a certain kind, that shit is red meat.

Didn’t love it as much as the first two in the series, but there are some serious gems in this one.

TENTACLES LONGER THAN NIGHT, Eugene Thacker (UK) (US)

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. The current format is between one and three posts a day. Like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

STATUS: the daily noon-ish roundup post

• further shifts back to analogue work

• new beard oil!

• picked up China Mieville’s THE ROUSE

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AND FINALLY

SOEUR L’ENFER

This is my favourite of the shorts: full David Lynch vibe.

I’m wrapping this letter up on Saturday, having just missed one gig because I had to do too much at home, and hoping I get to tonight’s gig because sitting down and just listening to live music is good for me. Do something good for you this week. You deserve it.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’ve been in full goblin mode work immersion this week, have barely looked at anything on the internet or, frankly, outside.

I’ve got like 250 emails in my inbox. I have previously talked about Inbox Fuckit as opposed to Inbox Zero but now it’s more like Inbox AWOL. Terrible, really. 

Did you ever open Deadline and read about the cancellations of tv shows you’ve never even heard of? I looked at Deadline on Friday and there were a slew of stories about tv shows ending or being cancelled and I’d never heard of bloody any of them. 

The last thing I watched on streaming was twenty minutes of the Guy Ritchie film INTO THE GREY, a supposed action movie, which played like a heist movie co-produced by Wes Anderson. Twenty minutes of nothing but arch exposition and surtitles, heavily intercut, one sequence narrated while the character makes an extremely elaborate Negroni with all the steps shown and annotated on screen. Absolutely bizarre thing. Like an inaction movie. And yet - a high level of invention. I must confess, I really want to rewatch those twenty utterly physically inert yet completely fascinating minutes and then find out if the rest of the film is like that. I had to pause it just after the sequence where a guy names twenty weapons by their nicknames while the real names of those weapons are written on the left of the screen as a list. As formal graphic invention goes, it’s not quite what you expect from a straight-to-Amazon film. Really worth you sitting and taking a look, ideally with a notebook to hand.

Somewhere between autumn and Indian Summer here. I will miss the passing of summer, but this week I made the mental shift into preparing the kitchen for autumn food and stacking the print books and magazines to curl up with in the evenings. I have mead. 

Horns Of Odin call their standard 70cl mead bottles Feast Bottles. I love that. 

OPERATIONS

THE ROTERFADEN

Longtime readers may recall that I have coveted the Roterfaden notebooks for a few years. They are very expensive, very well made, a discreet logo debossed into the leather on the back cover. They don’t show off.

So last month I finally cracked and ordered one. It took a few weeks to arrive from Germany.

Packaging is largely a lost art. A small effort has been made here that I appreciate.

They send you a pencil for free, which was kind of terrible for me because I’ve been trying not to go down a pencil rabbit hole. Gel pens are bad enough. But the craving for the tactile - it suddenly occurred to me the other day that it’s another version of “Reality Hunger” - is why I keep looking at Blackwings. 

There are a lot of different versions to choose from. I went for the Taschenbegleiter BS_20 in the M format, which is A5.

Leather cover, and a merino wool felt interior, for God’s sake. Mad. The whole thing FEELS amazing. Pockets sewn in.

Most notebook covers use elastic bands to keep the notebooks in. Roterfaden are German engineering. They use steel clips to hold the notebooks, a solution somewhere between Bauhaus and Krupps. 

I bought some of their own notebooks to try, although any A5 notebook will obviously do. Roterfaden means “red thread,” and you can see that signature red thread on the spines of the notebooks. I have two of the standard A5 notebooks and this weird list-making thing. The notebooks come in either blank or dot-grid, the latter being another Bauhaus touch. And they appear perfect-bound but fall perfectly flat, the red thread revealed again in the middle of the book. Dot-grid is not my favourite, but these are excellent notebooks.

The “Listen” is a pack of six sheets each folded into four, with perforations. Clip one of the sheets in and you have four long list sheets that you can tear out when done. Probably not essential, but I was curious. 

Oh, and this is an extra I picked up - a leather pen case they call a Pen Whale. I have a new Drehgriffel Gel Pen to go in there. 

Roterfaden.de.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Graphic novella GHOST DRIVE STATION by myself and Lordess Foudre is out on November 18.

The order code/UPC is: 70985304934000111. If you want a copy, drop a note to your local comics shop or bookstore, or stop in there, and give them that code. Nobody orders for the shelf any more, so if you want to be sure of getting a copy, tell your store.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics, and there’s at least two other major reprint projects in the works from them, one that I’m writing a large essay for right now.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics on November 24.

ORBITAL

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. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. The current format is between one and three posts a day. Like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

STATUS: the daily-ish noon-ish roundup post

• A care package from Zoharum Records

• new pens

• Northern Earth and fancy treats

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AND FINALLY

SOEUR L’ENFER

Right. I need to finish writing up an outline then script up the opening of a project for this newsletter. Once again, I live in hope that changes are coming here. But I also know from decades of experiences that some plans just don’t work out. Not the end of the world. Adapt, move on, think of something else. Tomorrow will always have something new. Let’s you and me stick around for tomorrow.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Last week, I managed to bust the Gmail container limit and got the dreaded “VIEW ENTIRE MESSAGE” cutoff. Sorry about that. I am adjusting accordingly.

Autumn be here. Big rain, finally. Pulling out the chukka boots, and the leather trainers I bought cheap a few weeks back, and cleaning cat puke off the Drover boots, because you can guarantee that if any of these hairy bastards throw up, it’ll be on something of mine.

In this letter:

• A few notes on writing

• Pens and paper

• The News, with Lordess Foudre

• Deliberate Disconnection with Rain DeGrey

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

• Roberto Bolano’s ANTWERP

• LTD

• Soeur L’Enfer

THE WORLD SERVICE

A FEW NOTES ON WRITING

Every story idea should contain something you don’t know, so you have something to write about.

Remove useless friction from your workplace. That thing you always have to move or fiddle with in order to start work? Bin it or permanently put it somewhere else. Useful friction is, say, putting your to-do list or your daybook on top of the laptop, so you have to look at it before you start work.

Have a little ritual that starts the writing session. Doesn’t need to be elaborate. Just the thing that trains your brain into “it’s writing time,” same as looking at sunlight first thing in the day tells your brain it’s time to go. For me, it’s just sitting down with coffee and water, putting on a record and checking the workbook before I open the laptop.

We don’t write to say what we think about something: we write to find out what we think about something.

If you don’t do some form of commonplace - anything, paper or digital, that lets you capture thoughts and quotes and pictures and references and links and interesting things - start one this week. That’s the reservoir which future-you can tap when you need it most.

Pick one thing to finish before the end of the year. Just one. So that in four months you can look back on the last third of 2026 and say, “I did that.” Your brain will thank you.

I read somewhere that the first episode of THE BANANA SPLITS aired fifty eight years ago this week and I may need to lay down in a field and wait for the dirt and weeds to cover me.

OPERATIONS

PENS AND PAPER

I was going to do a whole thing here on the new pens I ordered over a week ago. But they never showed up. Which is annoying, as I am very much cycling back to pen on paper as the primary method. Example:

I picked up a generic business card stand, a mini-clipboard and a fresh pack of Silvine record cards.  Stood them up portrait-style in the holder on the desk (where the old iPad used to live), along with the mini-clipboard - which, like the index cards, is 3 inches by 5 inches.  

I’m returning to the way I did things long ago: always on paper. Live long enough and you go full circle, I suppose.

What exactly is the point of all this?

Handwriting fixes ideas in the memory better. Thinking on paper is more fluid: you get to think around the notion more flexibly. Making things by hand is better for your brain than talking to a robot, and developing ideas works better on a page than on a keyboard. 

(And protecting your brain is likely to be a real creative and commercial asset in a few years.)

As seen here: HP Lovecraft’s notemaking:

Georges Simenon famously jotted down rough details of a story on the back of a large envelope before he sat down to write a MAIGRET book.

New project codenames: we’re waiting on the contract for PROJECT EARLING, a 48pp graphic novella. PROJECT HY-BRASIL is a serialised graphic novella I broke ground on earlier this week, that’s now in scripting. PROJECT WYTHMAIL is a serialised graphic novella I figured out last week, that’s now in scripting. The latter two are intended for this newsletter.

And I’ve pulled this old thing off the shelf again, for reasons that, hopefully, will become apparent next year:

I’m breaking out an A5 hardback notebook for this one.

I am starting to become concerned that I will have to put some kind of “AI is not used in the writing of this letter” line in the template at some point.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Graphic novella GHOST DRIVE STATION by myself and Lordess Foudre is out on November 18.

The order code/UPC is: 70985304934000111. If you want a copy, drop a note to your local comics shop or bookstore, or stop in there, and give them that code. Nobody orders for the shelf any more, so if you want to be sure of getting a copy, tell your store.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics, and there’s at least one other major reprint project in the works from them that I’m writing a large essay for right now.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics on November 24.

Last week, I asked you:

Which film are you going to go and see?

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ DIGGER (85)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 DUNE PART THREE (164)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ AVENGERS DOOMSDAY (80)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ WERWULF (86)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ CLAYFACE (9)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ WICKER (74)
498 Votes

The next poll should be - Given That The Correct Choice Was Clearly WERWULF, This Is What’s Wrong With Me:

• fear of fur

• a dog ate the good part of my brain

• WWWWOOORRRMMMMMSSSS

• Willem Dafoe is my sleep paralysis demon

Giphy

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

ANTWERP, AGAIN

I can’t be a science fiction writer because my innocence is mostly gone and I’m not crazy yet …

Re-read Roberto Bolano’s short book ANTWERP this week. It’s one of those books I seem to find something new in, every time. This time, it’s clearer that he was test-driving the obsessions that led him to THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES and 2666. Technically, it’s a crime story, but it’s splintered, it’s broken memory and the sense of an audience witnessing a fractured monologue. Fundamentally odd. Perhaps even wyrd.

There are also germs of books he’d never write, little seeds scattered around that never quite got the rain they needed:

He used to make the rounds of the old city of Barcelona. He wore a long shabby trench coat, smelled of black tobacco, and almost always happened upon the most unusual scenes a few minutes in advance. In other words, the screen flashed the word unusual to make him appear. “I’d like to have a word with you in private,” he’d say.

It’s a difficult, fragmented, wonderful little book.

Loneliness is an aspect of natural human egotism. One day the person you love will say she doesn’t love you and you won’t understand. It happened to me. I would’ve liked her to tell me how to endure her absence. She didn’t say anything. Only the inventors survive.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. The current format is between one and three posts a day. Like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

STATUS: the daily noon-ish roundup post

• new James Ellroy book

• my missing Rainer Werner Fassbinder film, IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS

• blood and meat

• “killed two of her ghosts”

• writing problems

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AND FINALLY

SOEUR L’ENFER

“Dear Embryo.” I’m going to warn you now, this one is emotionally hard going. Fucked me up the first time I heard it, a few months back.

Right! Let’s see how that worked!

I’m off to dinner and the never-ending challenge of Not Getting Shitfaced From The Wine Pairings. Let’s see how tomorrow works out. Chances are good that it’ll be better than today.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I have had A Bit Of A Week, so today we’re going to pretend that this is one of those hot link-aggregation newsletters that people pay real money for on Substack.

Linking! We’re only linking!

• You all know I have an interest in dark matter, because I did THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT. So when I saw that dark matter hunters may have finally spotted a hint of the particles, I was all in. It was just one signal, which doesn’t meet the bar for a discovery. But it’s the first time any detection experiment has thrown a signal of that size.

• The sketchbooks of Varya Yakovleva. Some of the other pages at that link remind me a bit of Aline Kominsky.

• Can’t remember if I linked this before, but here’s a bunch of web-based zine resources.

• I just dropped a couple hundred quid on new stationery and tossed a couple of devices out of the office. Being in the UK, Cult Pens is my usual stop. I mentioned the other week that I’m dropping out and going mostly analogue, and, I tell you, this week I’m feeling it. Also, this woman has a point.

• Holy shit. Look at this:

Instagram post

And this is just kind of eerie:

Instagram post

• Please enjoy the incredibly fucked up pencil drawings of Nathan Reidt:

Graphic novella GHOST DRIVE STATION by myself and Lordess Foudre is out on November 18.

The order code/UPC is: 70985304934000111. If you want a copy, drop a note to your local comics shop or bookstore, or stop in there, and give them that code. Nobody orders for the shelf any more, so if you want to be sure of getting a copy, tell your store.

Graphic novella PROJECT EXPLOITS RIVER has now moved to lettering phase, with an old colleague of mine taking care of that.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics, and there’s at least one other major reprint project in the works from them that I’m writing a large essay for right now.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics on November 24.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

• I nicked the above GIF from Strategy Breakdowns just to see how it works! Sorry, Strategy Breakdowns! One-time thing, I promise! This is an interesting short newsletter about how companies and people make stuff work for them, from Apple to influencers.

• Dust of Stars: Soundscapes from Hollow is the new record by Angela Winter, of the AAASMR music podcast I’ve mentioned here countless times. I adore her work. Stream whole thing at link.

• 7EXAS by NOISBIN: “A 30-minute meditation on murder, remorse, our demons, and the death penalty.” Dark ambient, slow and mean. Composed on a Yamaha TX7, which is some old school kit. Stream whole thing at link.

• New Kali Malone record. One track available to stream at that link. She does these immense organ-music records that are a whole-body drone experience.

A message from our supporters this week:

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Be the smartest person in the room. 1440 navigates 100+ sources to deliver a comprehensive, unbiased news roundup — politics, business, culture, and more — in a quick, 5-minute read. Completely free, completely factual.

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I came across this odd thing from 2025 this week:

I wonder if you can see the immediate curiosity of posting a list of constraints to media consumption on a social network. The idea that watching more than twelve films a year is cognitive overkill but an hour of Twitter and TikTok a day is just fine. The making-notes thing is good and healthy, and the whole thing is worth a close read, but…

Further down, I found this:

The author, Ruby Justice Thelot, is evidently an adjunct professor in New York, and clearly not stupid. He’s clearly thought a lot about this, he’s thought a lot about the action of images, and I don’t want to clip and decontextualise anything. But, on reading it, I just thought: this is the other side of the world, the side I never hear about, where people honestly think films and tv are more dangerous than brainrot apps, that films are MK ULTRA projects made by a single person who wants to fry your cortex, and we need to “figure out” television like it’s some ancient germ that’s emerged from a crack in the earth. Absolutely fascinating to me.

But I think we can all agree on unlimited books.

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.

We’re into the last third of 2026. Which of these films do you plan to go and see?

Here at home, I want to see DIGGER, we both want to see WERWULF, and herself, for reasons I cannot possibly fathom, really wants to see WICKER. Can’t imagine why.

MAIGRET IN VICHY (UK) (US) - the Maigrets that aren’t set in Paris aren’t my favourites, and this one is slow and not quite the best-written, but the emotional crime in it is a lovely little conceit, and there’s no such thing as a bad Maigret book.

I saw THE MAHABHARATA as a tv series here in Britain in the late Eighties, and it was insane. Completely surreal. Directed by Peter Brook, winner of two Tonys and pretty much every other award short of an Oscar. Co-written by Jean-Claude Carrière (two Oscars and the Padma Shri), novelist and Luis Bunuel’s screenwriter. Haven’t seen it since. Popped up on the BFI shop and I had to drop the money - I remembered the stage design and prop designs being absolutely mad, and it was a masterclass in making small minimal sets and a multi-racial cast of maybe thirty people look like an entire world.

And, honestly, I love that people are still working to preserve the most innovative tv from the Eighties and Nineties. People talk about American cable and American streaming as “the golden age of television” but British tv from EDGE OF DARKNESS through to A TV DANTE and GBH makes most of it eat shit.

This appears to be UK only - you can get it on Amazon, but I bought it direct from the BFI.

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

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AND FINALLY

SOEUR L’ENFER

I’m out. I have cat poop to scrape off a floor. See you next week!

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where autumn feels like it’s arriving a week early. Hanging up the linen clothes and thinking about batching meals. It’s raining outside. Soon the world will turn gold.

Look at this idiot soaking up the last of the summer warmth:

THE WORLD SERVICE

THE BITTER STUFF

Lynch was a complicated person, but sometimes he spoke very simply.  And I think this is one of the clearest and truest things he ever said.

I briefly knew a writer who was famous for their constant anger.  I once suggested to them that that anger got in the way of their creation and that there were a boatload of things they never got out into the world because of it.  And they said to me, "yeah, sure, but you can't let the bastards get away with it."  That writer should have been the American Borges but is instead largely remembered for the fights they had.  It's a fucking tragedy.

It's my feeling that you have to learn to let go of the bitter stuff.  We're not here for long, and using up that time on anger and bitterness not only isn't all that productive, but it wastes days that could be spent on better things.

But also:

Mia Woolf just sent me this and I love it:

Full Moon; Doodle Beach Island / Oil on panel / 4 feet by 8 feet

OPERATIONS

HEIDI WIGMORE

Stopped in at an exhibition of the work of Heidi Wigmore at the weekend:

Graphic novella GHOST DRIVE STATION by myself and Lordess Foudre is out on November 18.

The order code/UPC is: 70985304934000111. If you want a copy, drop a note to your local comics shop or bookstore, or stop in there, and give them that code. Nobody orders for the shelf any more, so if you want to be sure of getting a copy, tell your store.

Graphic novella PROJECT EXPLOITS RIVER has now moved to lettering phase, with an old colleague of mine taking care of that.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics, and there’s at least one other major reprint project in the works from them that I’m writing a large essay for right now.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics on November 24.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

ORBITAL

• Emmy and Ringo award-winning comics creator Dean Haspiel is now offering Dino's Down & Dirty cardboard art: for a hundred bucks each. Pick your favorite character and you’ll get an ink-sketch on cardboard mailed to your home (USA only). Or make it a gift. Because Christmas is coming! DM him via Instagram, Substack or Facebook for details. https://www.instagram.com/deanhaspiel_art/
  https://deanhaspiel.substack.com/
  https://www.facebook.com/dean.haspiel

• my old friend Sarah Froelich programmes movie nights at We Luv Video in Austin TX. The next instance of Blood Shed Theater is on September 24, and if you’re in the area, these nights look like a lot of fun, especially if you’re into straight-to-video horror films.

• my old friend Ramona Robinson is running a community group “for people curious about consciousness, expanded states of awareness, perception, human potential, and the nature of our experience” using Monroe Institute practises, both in-person in Wilmington DE in the US and in online virtual gatherings. Here’s the website.

• Robert Monroe briefly shows up in Annie Jacobsen’s PHENOMENA, which I wrote about here a few months ago

• Comrade of the newsletter and media inventor Jay Springett continues to make new things:

This is clever. Also, I know a lot of you are up for “occult internet culture.”

• Longtime reader Nathan Cabaniss made me aware of his new podcast, The Alan Moore Cast, in which he and a guest talk about a different piece of Alan Moore’s work in every episode. Those guests include Joe Casey, Kevin Mellon, Dan Watters, Paul Jenkins and Peter Hogan so far.

The second one and the fourth one were insanely good.

Note: organic wine. Something like 25 years ago, we went to this wonderful hotel in Cheshire called Frogg Manor. I’m not sure it’s still there. It was an incredibly eccentric place. Our usual room there had a secret door that opened into the bar. Our first time there, we ordered wine with dinner, and wonderful John Sykes, the Chief Frog, said to us, “I warn you, these wines are organic, and so they are quite strong.” She and I laughed this off, for we were Professionals. With a knowing smile, John poured, and an hour later we were utterly shitfaced and the bottle wasn’t even finished.

BEWARE ORGANIC WINES, O MY COMRADES

That annoying thing when you realise you’ve found a use for the half-idea you had four years ago, you go through your painstakingly indexed notebooks you store in the large box, and you can’t find the fucking thing. The benefit of writing things down by hand is that it helps fix things in memory, so I recall enough of it to do a partial reconstruction. After I’ve written it, it is almost guaranteed that I will find the lost notebook and whatever’s in it will be so much better than what I reconstructed that I will be kicking things for days.

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

New Laura Cannell album. This one came with a gold-leafed hagstone.

THE WILL OF TONGUES, Sarah Davachi:

It’s an immense thing, worth streaming from that link FOR FREE and living in for an afternoon.

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AND FINALLY

SOEUR L’ENFER

Soeur L’Enfer is dropping material on her IG. 

I remember standing in Chinatown in Melbourne a year after I’d been to the Arctic Circle and thinking, Christ, I’ve been around the world. How the hell did that happen? Aside from everything else, I have had an absurd amount of luck. I remember going and sitting by the Yarra (they called it “the upside-down river” at the time because they tried a cleaning process on it but it only cleared the bottom layer of the river) and just sitting with the amazement of it. 

I bet you’ve done two things that amaze you when you think about them. Think about them today.  See you next week.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’m not ready for summer to be over. (And neither is mancub!) I haven’t done enough yet. Summer can’t be over! I still have half a case of summer ale left! Here’s the cocktail I bought herself last week.

Gin, blackcurrant, honey, lemon verbena and cava, apparently

I haven’t made it outside enough this summer. But I have to say, generally, while the year hasn’t been without its challenges, it’s been a really lovely time so far. 

THE WORLD SERVICE

Catching up on watchlists this week. I’ve been making brief notes on LTD. Been watching a film every night.  Tuesday I had to pull a eleven hour writing day, so it was pleasant to switch the phone back to Approved Entities Only and just settle in with a glass of mead and let the world happen to itself on its own. 

I hit Instagram with hammers until I basically turned it into a messaging app, and that’s where I’m leaving it for a few months. I’ve knocked 25% off my daily phone screen time over the last couple of weeks. And I found an ad-supported classical music channel on cable, so that’s what the television does now. 

Can we ban “needle drops” from all films for like five years? Because at this rate everyone’s favourite song will be ruined by being yoked to some bullshit movie’s mediocre scene that couldn’t be arsed to survive on its own merits. Hire a fucking composer. 

Off to a gig at the Jazz Centre on Saturday. I was intrigued by vibraphone jazz, in a quartet with NO SAXOPHONE. I like metallophones and percussion instruments generally. 

And I just realised I have lunch that day too AND I need to stop in at a couple of places to buy food so I am moving quickly along.

Wiley Wallace.

Karina Kristoffersen McKenzie.

Florentina Holzinger.

Graphic novella GHOST DRIVE STATION by myself and Lordess Foudre is out on November 18.

Graphic novella PROJECT EXPLOITS RIVER has now moved to lettering phase, with an old colleague of mine taking care of that.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics, and there’s at least one other major reprint project in the works from them that I’m writing a large essay for right now.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics on November 24.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

ORBITAL

NEO

Hugh Howey has created a novel-writing application for Mac and Windows, and it’s free on GitHub.

That’s pretty amazing, right?

Sadly, on my Windows install, it sets off Smart App Control, and if you turn off Smart App Control, apparently you can never turn it on again without doing blood magic. Maybe you’ll have more luck!

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Been talking to director, artist and writer Kevin Mellon for a while now - he can be found at his website and Substack - I was looking through his shop this morning, and look at this gorgeous cover art:

There’s all kinds of stuff at his shop, so go and take a look when you have a few minutes.

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 KILLER’S MARK, MW CRAVEN (UK) (US)

This is the most recent of the Washington Poe novels. In the previous books, Poe was a detective for the National Crime Agency, working with autistic computer genius Tilly Bradshaw. The books were funny, cracked along at a fine pace, and had a venal dark streak in them. At this point, Poe has married hot goth pathologist Estelle Doyle and lives in a country house, Tilly is a national asset for the Security Service, and she and Poe have left the NCA to start a private detective agency. In this book, a constellation of characters from previous books show up, which threatens what I call the MASH problem.

The first two MASH novels by Richard Hooker and William Butterworth are good. The second moves the characters from Korea to Maine. The next couple of books add more characters. A couple of books later, the books are in an absolute rigid template of all the characters coming back in every book and doing the same thing. And there are like fifteen of those books. The writers fell in love with all their characters - or, worse, decided their audience did.

MW Craven is a smart writer. He got bored of the NCA set-up, the serial killer of the year thing, and decided to go another way. And the crime story in this one is twisty and inventive and things get really fucking violent and horrible. But he’s starting to accrue more recurring characters, and he’s clearly fallen in love with them. And that can freeze a series. I still kind of feel like the previous book should have been the last one, which I know is uncharitable. And Craven continues to surprise as a creator of crimes. However, the point is reached, as it has been with Ed James’ ROB MARSHALL sequence, where you can’t enter the series anywhere other than the earliest books, and that the gain of pleasing familiarity in returning to beloved characters becomes a welter of them all showing up, with not enough space for any of them to be more than sketches, and the MASH problem takes hold. (Ed James deals with this by occasionally killing a bunch of them.) If you’ve read the others, read this one, it’s fucked up and the caveats are minor (he still can’t do an American voice, for example). But I think this is where I get off and wait for him to start a new series with everything he’s learned from this and the Ben Koenig sequence. 

Last weekend I was gifted two new books.

IN HER MIND A DARKNESS by LS Johnson is a surprisingly uncomfortable evocation of awkward mid-teen years, in all their threat, fear and sense of impending doom. It brought me right back to those days in my life. And then it gets really disturbing. It’s a squirming read.

It’s a 100-page story - Johnson shared with me that she self-publishes because she writes at “weird lengths” which publishers don’t like, and we’ve talked her about how the novella doesn’t fit anywhere these days - and, to my knowledge, only available from her website.

MUD DUCK, Travis Malone (UK) (US). Notes on this one next week, just wanted to thank Travis for it, and to thank LS Johnson for her sending her book to me too.

A new AAASMR music show from Angela Winter. All stored away on Mixcloud for you to listen whenever. Thank god.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. The current format is between one and three posts a day. Like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

STATUS: the daily noon-ish roundup post

• pretty sure I gave a story idea away

• brief notes on the film LET THE CORPSES TAN, which was a fun watch

• brief notes on the film FLUX GOURMET, which I enjoyed but I can see why others weren’t as captivated

• brief notes on the film IS GOD IS, which I thought was great

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AND FINALLY

SOEUR L’ENFER

In her human disguise as Nina Courson, she is appearing in the film ELECTRIC MEAT, directed by Dan Schaffer, who is making the Soeur videos but better known to many of you as the graphic novelist who did DOGWITCH among other things. Here’s the ELECTRIC MEAT page with the trailer.

You made it this far, all the way into the year of our hell 2026, and you should be proud of yourself. I’m proud of you. Do something nice for yourself today. Hell, do it twice. See you next week.

W

So a few years back Lordess Foudre asked me to write a book for her. A few decades in age divide us, but before I knew it we were, by her initiation, talking about Fassbinder’s WORLD ON A WIRE and McGoohan’s THE PRISONER, Steve McQueen and a certain kind of male protagonist. As well as, of course, her art and collage work, which you have all enjoyed here as The News for many years now. A couple of months later, I came up with GHOST DRIVE STATION. And she’s spent the last two years drawing it. 

Here's the full press release from Image Comics:

The New York Times bestselling writer Warren Ellis (Trees, Transmetropolitan, Netflix's Castlevania) teams up with Grammy-nominated artist/designer Lordess Foudre (Soccer Mommy's Color Theory, Trashumanism, Kasablanca) for the upcoming Ghost Drive Station. This all-new graphic novella explores death and the digital age and will hit shelves this November from Image Comics.

On the anniversary of the worst thing that ever happened to him, Ghost Drive Station follows a haunted investigator with no time for the modern world is sent to a research station in the desert to discover why it’s gone offline. What he finds is an experiment in immortality gone horribly wrong, with stakes both global and very, very personal.

A complicated main character that feels plucked from season one of True Detective, but set on a path of cosmic terror not unlike Event Horizon or Backrooms.

Ghost Drive Station (UPC: 70985304934000111) will be available at comic book shops on Wednesday, November 18.

Ghost Drive Station will also be available across many digital platforms, including Amazon Kindle, Google Play, Apple’s iBooks, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd’s Everand, Kobo, Overdrive, Hoopla, Sweet app, Comic Plus, and more.

It’s been an immense privilege and pleasure to see the pages coming in, and I can only thank her for asking me to write for her. It’s been amazing, and we can’t wait to show you our book.

It’s at 6x9 size, black and white and 56 pages. A graphic novella.

It gets solicited at the end of the month and is released in November. Lordess and I look forward to showing you a little more of it between now and then.

GHOST DRIVE STATION was previously codename PROJECT LOST SIERRA, for those of you keeping score.

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.

A few people have asked me about past events in my life. It’s not my place to pick at it in public or speak for others. I will say that I got to apologise directly to a group of people and offer amends, which I remain very grateful for, and I keep that door open. I learned a lot and still am. I fucked up in a number of ways over the years, it doesn’t matter that I never acted with malice in mind, I hurt people, I’m sorry, and I’m trying to do better every day. That’s all I have to say for now.

AND NOW: BEHOLD THE MANCUB IN ALL HIS HEAVENLY GLORY:

It’s crazy hot. And I am bald as a coot. Therefore, the wide-brimmed straw hat has been broken out for my walks into town. A few times a week, I walk up to my favourite deli for lunch and a glass of wine. Thursday, that turned into several glasses of wine while talking with the owner and other customers. Something about the heat remaining constant has changed the way people are living and engaging. On the way back, I stopped at the preferred coffee shop for a bottle of water and a fortifying double espresso. A neighbour walked past, shook my hand, and decided to stop for a coffee with me, and we chatted for another twenty minutes or so before walking home together. It’s like high summer is where we remember we’re European.

Dan is teaching me about sheep cheese. Pretty sure my daughter will ask me if it tasted like licking a sheep. For those who have been reading for a while: want to feel old? My daughter will be 31 this year.

Also picked this up from the deli - a Cornish vermouth, would you believe. (I would: I was at Food Leigh On Sea the other week and they gave me a Cornish whisky called Pocketful Of Stones that played like an Irish single dancing with a Lowlands single.) I get through vermouth, because I make cocktails. Herself’s favourite of mine is the cherry Negroni. Though the rhubarb gin I’ve been infusing for the last couple of years has gone down well, too (I grow my own rhubarb).

Feeling good, doing what you like and taking pleasure in things isn’t a luxury. I’m always working in my head because that’s what being a writer is, and I’m always carrying a notebook because I need my essential tools to hand at all times. So a lot of the time I forget to live.

I know that all the above just lost a lot of you, but here’s the takeaway: live your life like it’s worth living. You’ll feel better. Wear your favourite clothes. Cate Winter, a wiser woman than I will ever be a man, once said to me; don’t save things for that perfect time, because that time will never come and what you’re saving will either go bad or never be used at all, so enjoy them now.

We stood outside and watched the eclipse on Thursday and that was free and it was the best part of the week.

Instagram post

Some rain expected next week, but that’s fine. It’s not going to be cold, just temperate, and we’re a country that dresses for spring, autumn and long winters anyway.

On Friday, everyone in the UK got an emergency text message from the Government telling us not to light fires or the entire country will go up in flames. Nothing quite like everyone’s phones going off like klaxons in a restaurant at 730 on a Friday evening.

Graphic novella GHOST DRIVE STATION by myself and Lordess Foudre is out on November 18.

Graphic novella PROJECT EXPLOITS RIVER has now moved to lettering phase, with an old colleague of mine taking care of that.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics, and there’s at least one other major reprint project in the works from them that I’m writing a large essay for right now.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics on November 24.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Bought a bottle of Fernet Branca. Now googling “how to make Fernet Branca drinkable.”

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.

Just arrived: INTO THE GREAT by Elliot Blake, another production banger from Lil Factory:

That, I suggest to you, is some proper space fiction. All the details at this link here. These books are so beautiful.

In a still timid ray of March sunshine, Maigret was playing.

I needed a soft week, so I put down all the long and serious books and finally read the 75th and last Maigret book, MAIGRET AND MONSIEUR CHARLES (UK) (US). Which was, of course, lovely.

Currently reading the latest Washington Poe novel by MW Craven, THE KILLER’S MARK, continuing the whole “comfort reading” thing, and I think I probably should have stopped reading this series with the previous novel, which was a fine conclusion.

New Soeur L’Enfer, as provided directly to me from her for you: SUGAR CRASH.

New Laura Cannell: BATTALIA.

This album was recorded four miles away from me and I saw the evening performance but I had to order it from Japan! The shot on the cover is from Leigh-on-Sea, down the road from me.

Bought myself a membership to the BFI. I thought to myself, “I’m gonna go to London and watch lovely obscure films onna big screen"!” Three hours later, the main rail line from here to London buckled in the heat and threw a train off the tracks at Wickford. So I think I’ll wait a while to use it.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. The current format is between one and three posts a day. Like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

MORNING COMPUTER: things to start the day

• morning computer dropping into monday

STATUS: the daily-ish noon-ish roundup post

• “Going Hard”

• brain fixing

• eclipse drunk

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Horns Of Odin was having an overstock sale.

And that’s all I have this week. It’s been an extremely stressful and anxious one. I intend to spend Saturday outside with the mp3 player and a notebook to see what arrives. May your Sunday be peaceful. Thank you for sitting with me.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. There are six weeks of summer left, I’m building a new routine, herself is off at a music festival because in this house we don’t let the old person in (she’s done Australia, Vietnam, Thailand and Spain this year, so a bit of headbanging won’t kill her), and I’m at the coffee shop, earbuds in and kicking around some new ideas.

Yeah: pale blue summer-weight denim and a pale blue linen jacket. Who even am I?

I like to find little bits of happiness all day. Getting dressed is one of them.

Also I made a chilled non-dairy alcoholic chocolate hazelnut mousse that you would all kill for.

Housekeeping: I am aware that the YouTube embeds are breaking in Gmail on the web. They appear to be clickable, but they don’t display properly. I’ll try to use them less until Beehiiv notices and fixes the problem.

Ganzeer and Emmy-winning director Yasmin Elayat are turning THE SOLAR GRID into a videogame.

An image from Aron Wiesenfeld’s upcoming graphic novel RUNOFF:

I read about an interview with Andy Burnham the other day. When he was an MP in his thirties, he did a tv interview that he felt he’d done well in. Walking off the set, he checked his phone and found a text from his wife, which read, in its entirety, “ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION.”

Is it too late to have her as prime minister instead?

In my creative consulting role, I work with lovely, insane people who won’t even let me do them a favour or two. If I try, then something like this arrives in the mail:

It’s a Panerai Table Clock. Manual wind, eight-day power reserve. Gloriously analogue and mechanical. It now lives on my desk. As you may be able to tell, it’s spherical, and when you turn it around you can see the movement working.

I like G-Shock watches. I have one of the standard big ruggedised digital ones for garden work. A ways back, I discovered there was a stainless steel analogue version, which I picked up cheap on eBay. And then this arrived in the mail by complete surprise:

It’s titanium.

Here’s something I really do NOT want from Casio, though:

It’s a ring watch. I mean, that’s just strange, right? Right?

I just approved the solicits for graphic novella PROJECT LOST SIERRA, which will, it seems, be solicited at the end of the month. Little bit nerve wracking. Probably a lot more so for the artist, as she’s been working on this book for a couple of years. It looks amazing, and I can’t wait to show you some of it.

Graphic novella PROJECT EXPLOITS RIVER has now moved to lettering phase, with an old colleague of mine taking care of that. Which reminds me that he, I and the artist have to have an argument about the logo soon. Heh.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics, and there’s at least one other major reprint project in the works from them that I’m writing a large essay for right now.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics in November.

In military nomenclature, a wicked problem is a problem without a solution. The term is borrowed from systems theory and refers to a problem so complex and so dynamic that by the time it reveals itself, the conditions of the problem will have already changed.

Scientists make first viruses designed by AI. Which I’m sure I’d feel better about if I wasn’t reading BIOLOGICAL WAR by Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US) which describes a scenario of a genetically modified plague virus escaping.

It was during the Black Death that the word “quarantine” emerged. In the fourteenth century, after authorities figured out that foreign ships were bringing infected people into European cities, harbor officials required vessels to anchor off the coast of a port city for forty days, a period of time after which the infected become the dead. In Italian, quaranta giorni translates as “forty days.”

DISCIPLINE: a gorgeously strange short directed by Mona Fastvold on MUBI. Fastvold was the co-writer of THE BRUTALIST and director of THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE, and the music is by Daniel Blumberg, also of THE BRUTALIST.

You can join MUBI here.

One of these women is an actor you may recognise.

What if life on earth actually arose twice?

A message from our supporters this week:

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Join for free today!

And now I’m testing one single YouTube embed to see if it’s working properly this week:

If it doesn’t, no need to tell me, I view these letters in five different email apps after sending.

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.

PRINT MORE SHIT OUT.

Taking photos is fine, making videos is cool, but, but, but, there’s nothing quite like printing a photo zine of 10 or so process photos, and then just having it.

I’ve made a promise to myself to make more zines, 10 photos and a cover is easy, each “project” no matter how small should end up with either a zine, and “photo book” (in the very loosest of terms), or some postcards.

Because - and I say this with love - it doesn’t need to be complicated.

— Dan Catt

A reminder to myself that I have gotten very bad at printing things out for myself, and a nudge for some of you that home printers AND online print-on-demand services exist. Make stuff. It doesn’t need to be complicated.

Click through. I thought some of you might find that useful.

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

Every headline satisfies an opinion. Except ours.

Remember when the news was about what happened, not how to feel about it? 1440's Daily Digest is bringing that back. Every morning, they sift through 100+ sources to deliver a concise, unbiased briefing — no pundits, no paywalls, no politics. Just the facts, all in five minutes. For free.

Read the newsletter trusted by 4.5 million fact-seekers.

And that’s me this week. It’s been one of those scattered weeks where I haven’t gotten enough done on anything because too much stuff has been happening around the edges. But this will pass. And there are still little bits of happiness to be found every day. You won’t have to look for them as hard as you think you will. Go be happy. See you next week.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. It is very hot and we have an incoming hosepipe ban for the first time since 1997.

THE WORLD SERVICE

UNPHONING

The phone is in the bag.

I keep using the phone as a fidget wheel or going down pointless reading holes or infinite scrolls. At some point, I forgot that the ideas come when you’re staring into space or listening to music or doing nothing at all. Occasionally I have to do these hard resets. This time is going harder than usual.

I’m stuffing the phone in a bag when I go out, and setting it so I mostly only get message notifications. The smartphone is a useful tool that I manage many things from. I can even write material on it. But I don’t get that many messages, or much email, and my office handles a lot of stuff for me, and frankly I need to get the fucking thing out of my hand again. Because I don’t need it in my hand. There is no reason but habit to be carrying the thing with me everywhere. And you can’t write on a laptop or in a notebook with a phone in your hand.

I’ll tell you why I’m going harder this time. I have half a dozen artists waiting for me to come up with something for them, at their request. I have a novella that I’m still not happy with, and I need to come up with a few more. I have a few tv/film projects in early days. Several other things floating around. I still have to finish a massive essay for a reprint project. I have a stack of overdue jobs.

The day after I stuck my phone in my bag, my morning desktop review of RSS feeds threw up half a dozen versions of the story that Christopher Nolan doesn’t have a smartphone. Because he knows he would get addicted to it, and he wants that time where he can stare out of the window and think about stories and just let his mind wander. Now, as I said to Robin Sloan the other day, Nolan has a whole team of people to handle email and messages for him. And probably drive him places and order stuff for him. But I think the principle holds.

Especially since that, by Friday night, I had the germs of three new ideas.

Not hermit, you understand. I can still be found, I still handle my own messaging apps. When a message pings, I’ll pick it up. It is always nice to hear from people. But the hyperconnected days are over. David Lynch had a point about room to dream. It is time to go. 

Graphic novella codenamed PROJECT LOST SIERRA is now in the publishing company’s system and I believe it is solicited next month for a November release.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics in November.

OPERATIONS

OUTSIDE

On Monday, I went out to London. Stuck my phone in my bag, watched everyone else around me stare at their phones, looked out the window.

I saw the above: a tribute to the recently deceased Eliane Radigue, whose work I love.

It was incredible.

In the queue at the Cafe Oto, the guy next to me first took out a laptop to look at, then his phone, then a Fire tablet. I mean, that’s some fucking commitment to not looking around. And then the guy on the other side of me took out a portable radio and put Jazz FM on.

Also, my first Aperol spritz of the season, somehow:

We have a first-generation Thai community in town, which means that I can get a fuck-off Tamarind Duck whenever I want.

Thank god for immigrants. We’d still be boiling vegetables otherwise.

(Mind you, as an island, we’ve always been a territory of immigrants. The part of the country I live in has variously been Danish and German. The very word England is derived from “land of the Angles,” the Angles being a tribe from Jutland. No immigration? No Britain. Come and live with us. We like you. Bring your culture. And your food.)

Dan at the deli made me eat sheep cheese.

When my daughter was very little, she tasted some goat cheese at a farmers’ market. They all loved her because she was interested in everything and she’d try anything. The woman said, how does it taste? And my appalling daughter said, “Like I licked a goat.”

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

ORBITAL

useful things from outside

• Jean-Michel Jarre to Explore Electronic Music History via Machines in New Book. Sorry, but I am very much up for this.

• door mixtape 211 - I love these, they are always a complete surprise

• people noticing that Substack is a social media app is becoming a whole genre of its own

• Warner Bros. and Paramount Are Making Separate, Competing ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ Remakes

• And Google has now pretty much stopped sending people to websites.

Instagram post

Instagram post

I have no idea if Instagram embeds work properly here or not.

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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.

SOEUR L’ENFER

They are making poor Soeur L’Enfer make Content.

In case you missed it: PETITE MORT.

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

BIOLOGICAL WAR

Biological warfare is illegal. Biological weapons are illegal. And yet biological weapons exist. The biological weapons that exist include genetically modified weapons designed for hypervirulence and human-to-human transmission. Weapons with a high lethality rate, and no known cure.

A spiritual sequel to her NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO of a couple of years ago. Annie Jacobsen turns her ruthless eye to biowar.

The scenario that follows—chronicling the hours, days, and weeks after the release into society of a genetically modified biological weapon—is based on facts and projections sourced from exclusive interviews with presidential advisors, Defense Department officials, medical doctors, microbiologists, epidemiologists, diplomats, congresspeople, CIA officers who work to counter weapons of mass destruction, Federal Emergency Management officials, and first responders who train for mass-casualty biological incidents and attacks.

It ends in dystopia.

And it echoes biological war scenarios run by the Pentagon.

This is not bedtime reading. I am reading it at bedtime anyway, because, as we all know, I’m an idiot who makes poor choices. Like NUCLEAR WAR, it is a deeply-sourced and exhaustively researched dive into one of the worst things in the world. And, like NUCLEAR WAR, it is becoming clear that there are no good outcomes.

BIOLOGICAL WAR, Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US)

I finished LOST LAMBS. It’s not a systems novel. It’s a constellation novel. Or perhaps a systems novel if Don DeLillo were twenty-five and sentimental, a bottle of white wine inside him and a box of pot brownies in front of him. But no, it is a constellation novel, a warm and fuzzy one, rushed at the end but eventually about love, devotion and, frankly, happy endings. Not what I expected at all.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. The current format is between one and three posts a day. Like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

• morning computer dem bones again

• my brain is empty and useless

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I’m off. See you next week!

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.

OCEAN, by myself and Chris Sprouse, with Karl Story, is being reprinted by Image Comics in a new edition this November. Check out this new cover, which Chris drew and coloured himself.

He actually sent it as a mock-up, intending it as a suggestion for a colourist. I just pointed at it and said, that’s the cover, just as it is. I mean, look at it. Is that not fantastic?

I’m delighted to see this out in the world again. It was such a privilege to write for Chris Sprouse.

This was previously designated PROJECT WALLOPS - Wallops Island was an early spacelaunch range, and in fact still exists today as Wallops Flight Facility. All the project codenames are always related to the project itself. They’re not random, just encrypted by my own insanity.

That’s pretty much all the news this week. We’ve uploaded the solicitation text, cover and preview pages for graphic novella PROJECT LOST SIERRA to the publisher now, I’m woefully behind on everything else because my brain has just been empty this week

So.

• Humans can learn to echolocate in just ten weeks. And that includes sighted people.

• Neill Blomkamp is making a film with AI. He’s started with a 13-minute short, NIGHTBORNE, evidently made with human concept artists and thirty-two real actors, and based on material from sf author Peter Watts. You are not going to see less of this sort of thing. You are going to see directors and producers testing the ethical judgement space around AI in pursuit of making things they couldn’t otherwise get produced. Blomkamp started out in CGI animation.

• and Darren Aronofsky is looking for funding for an AI studio, because you’re not going to keep AI out of production workflows forever.

• Apparently Chat GPT is the human suicide switch, and, lucky you, you can rent it from seven quid a month.

• Good news: now there are invisible drones.

• SUPERGIRL has gone straight to VOD after four weeks. Marvel claims to have constructed a film slate that will take them to the year 2042.

• Catfish in North America have a contagious cancer. Because “cancer is contagious now” is what we were all looking forward to hearing.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

First look at Werner Herzog’s new film, BUCKING FASTARD:

And, finally, since we’re doing space - Chinese rocket struck by lightning during launch:

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

Putin therefore believes that a dictatorship can wage war for longer than a democratic society, and it would appear he is not entirely wrong in this assumption.

• Read IF RUSSIA WINS: A SCENARIO by political scientist Carlo Masala, a short speculation on how Russia might challenge European security. It pivots on the new understanding that NATO’s Article Five - that if one NATO member is attacked, all NATO members respond - is no longer as ironclad as it used to be.

“Raj, I can give you most of the things you’re asking for, but I can’t lend you an air force Gulfstream for your travel to D.C.,” Eric said. “Negotiating 101,” responded Raj. “Always include one giveaway provision so your opponent has the illusion you are compromising.”

• Currently reading UNIT X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff, a slightly self congratulatory book about the Defense Innovation Unit eXperimental, an attempt to harness Silicon Valley for fast innovation in military tech. Detail rich but a little smug, so I put it down to start:

I sent a video of Nordic pornography to everyone in my dad’s work email—it’s a really specific genre, lots of pelts involved.

• There have been a lot of Opinions expended about LOST LAMBS by Madeline Cash. That she gamed the publishing system, or it was gamed on her behalf, that she got all the support and publicity and marketing that most other writers don’t get, that she had privilege and the table was rigged in her favour, that she didn’t deserve to be uplifted. I saw one person claiming to be an “editor” actually publish his own “clean-up” of the first few pages of LOST LAMBS, in order to demonstrate that she was a bad writer and that he knew better. He showed quite clearly that he had the same feeling for cadence and charm and voice that Jack the Ripper had for dating. LOST LAMBS is a clever and funny and accessible systems novel. LOST LAMBS, Madeline Cash (UK) (US)

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. The current format is between one and three posts a day. Like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

MORNING COMPUTER: things to start the day

• commonplace books and insect drones

• the art of Remedios Varo

STATUS: the daily noon-ish roundup post

• I grew lilies and did not go to see The Odyssey

• Flight From Time One

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That’s me. I’ve had no time for anything this week, and I’m hoping next week will be better for me and for you. See you next Sunday.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’ve been waist deep all week in a job that’s proven to be extraordinarily difficult and awkward, which has meant wasting pretty much three days just staring at the wall while I assemble and test solutions in my head. Never underestimate how much “writing” just gazing into the distance like someone with a life-altering brain injury.

It’s Thursday morning, I have several things stuck in limbo that I can’t talk about yet, the OO-to-office line is quiet, I have 170 unread emails and 1255 unread RSS articles, so this week I’m going to pretend this is one of those popular newsletters that serves you miscellaneous news and links.

But first!

This concludes part one of COLLIDE. COLLIDE will return in the near future.

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

• A sample survey suggested that 55% of Americans have pulled back from social media use. I think I read somewhere recently that the numbers are higher in some other countries. I forget I have Instagram most of the time, and I opened X earlier this year (I wanted to check a local news account because of a local incident) and everyone on the main feed just sounded unhinged.

• Came across a piece called PERFORMING DISTRESS with a most peculiar opening: “Strange online behaviors often mirror patterns long present offline, amplified by digital platforms. Phenomena like Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) faking, while a bizarre and excessive symptom of internet life, enacts familiar social logics long observed in historic expressions of the hysterical, including the performance of culturally intelligible distress, the formation of intense social bonds, and the contestation of institutional authority.” Is that even a real thing? Seems both complicated and pointless. But here’s what seems to be the core:

• This is really interesting: the ten greatest failures of Orson Welles. The things he never got made or got out into the world. Macbeth with an all African-American cast in 1936 that succeeded on the stage but with only four minutes surviving of the filmed performance? Making a film with Nabokov?

• Russian men are smashing and gouging their iPhones to make them look manlier. One assumes this is the “shirtless Putin riding a bear” for 2026.

• Woman prescribed Diet Coke to dissolve stomach bezoar. I fucking TOLD you not to drink that stuff, didn’t I?

• “We live with “lost futures” – a sense that the future we were promised in the 90s and 2000s never really arrived... Using hardware today is a way to inhabit an alternative timeline where tech stays weird, tactile and limited instead of collapsing into one smooth super‐app.” Ooh, fuck me, that sounds a bit like me of old, doesn’t it? But it’s not, it’s a report on JOLO, the joy of logging off, and the shift towards non-networked hardware. Worth a read, it’s a really nicely done deck, and you may find some useful tips in there too.

• That is actually a really good point: learning to develop the instinct for which idea fits which medium.

• Elliot McGucken:

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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.

Trailer for DIGGER, strong Strangelove vibes:

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.

Arrived this week, the late Alexander Kluge’s final book, a collaboration with the artist Anselm Kiefer.

As I think I mentioned, I finally had to surrender and get some low-strength reading glasses, and the one real benefit to that is that I can read print without strong light again. Hence, obtaining physical books again.

I was maybe six pages in when I was absolutely shot dead by this bit:

As humans, our basic currency is our lifespan. Damn. That’s worth putting on a wall.

River had once described Lamb as a coiled sponge. That was his current mode. At any moment, without warning, he might not do anything.

I just read CLOWN TOWN, the most recent Slough House/Slow Horses novel by Mick Herron. I’ve been reading them since long before the tv show - I remember when Jackson Lamb was described as looking like Timothy Spall! (I cannot tell you how much Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb reminded me of my grandad.) If you’ve read a Slow Horses novel before, you think you know what you’re getting. If you haven’t read one before, start with the first one, this one will make no sense. The thing is… this is just another Slow Horses book. A little low energy. A little bit Herron just cranking the handle.

The royal family, apparently, never travel en masse in the same vehicle – this is to avoid the possibility of lineage-shattering accidents. That’s what they tell Andrew, anyway.

Right up until it’s not.

There’s an old term in American TV writing: “the idiot ball.” When a plot only works when one of the characters suddenly has to become stupid, then they’re carrying the idiot ball. The idiot ball gets tossed about quite a bit in this one at the start. Now, Herron knows he can get away with that, because all his characters are fuckups on some level, but it gets a bit obvious this time. Partly because a lot of this book is replay and reshuffle of established tropes. It’s low energy and missing some bite. And then…

Turns out he’s taking a minute, enjoying the tropes one more time, having fun with the machine he built before letting it go. Because there’s a sharp intake of breath towards the end. Real shit happens. It’s not cute or funny. A cascade of serious changes that strongly suggest Herron is coming in for a landing. What comes next may be savage and marvellous.

He’s fortunate he picked a gentle soul like me to play with. Else he’d be waking up in Rwanda, with a barcode where his head used to be.

CLOWN TOWN, Mick Herron (UK) (US)

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And that’s me for this week, because I need to get back to beating my head against a wall and hopefully maybe get to enjoy some direct sunlight. You go and do something better. You don’t need permission to go and enjoy yourself. See you next week, I hope.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. It has been rather warm here, and it’s softening my brain. I almost lead out with the announcement of a reprint project, assuming it had been solicited because I saw a single link to it on the internet and then realised some store had just gotten the information early. I have no idea how these things work any more. Looks like PROJECT WALLOPS will actually be announced around the same time as graphic novella PROJECT LOST SIERRA, whose solicitation is now in the system. That book will be out in November, unless it’s not. Who the hell knows any more?

Screw it. It’s summer. I had a glass of Norman Soul Pear Liquor at the end of my dinner at a Michelin Guide restaurant last night. I’d never had it before. Apparently there are only a hundred bottles of it in the UK this year. DC Comics paid me some money to hold on to the rights for something for another year, so I took us out to dinner and tried some things I’ve never tried before, because trying new things is how you stay alive and happy.

In the mornings, the mancub emerges from the garden, says “hiiii” or occasionally “heeee-llooo” and pats my leg until I reach down and stroke him. And then we just sit together and bake in the daze of summer.

In this letter:

• generation x, mate

• Pink Beam Press

• Soeur L’Enfer

• COLLIDE

• Deliberate Disconnection

• Graveyard Gallery

• Phenomena

THE WORLD SERVICE

So, listen, one of the internet memes is true. If you were born in the late sixties, survived the seventies and can’t remember much of the eighties... my generation, we really do think we’re still thirty. Which, coincidentally, is the age of the kid we had in the nineties. See, here’s the problem - I’m fifty eight and I feel fucking great. So long as I don’t, you know, pick up an empty cup at the wrong angle or breathe at an incorrect volume. Because random injuries caused by being alive are absolutely real. 

The thing is that my generation should absolutely be extinct. For most of our childhoods we were only allowed in the house when it was time to eat food that was almost exclusively created in labs and came in colours that did not occur in nature. Nobody knew where we were during daylight hours until the age of 12 or 13 and then nobody knew where we were after sundown until we moved out. Which we did as soon as we could. Our generation were treated like feral monkeys, fed machine-washable bread and understood love to mean that someone expressed less disappointment in us than usual. We never asked for help, never trusted anyone, and started fires just for something to do. And yet. Freeze-dried elflord Bryan Johnson was recently diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis after years of eating nightmarish-looking plant slurry (no correlation I’m sure) but what if a Lean Cuisine from the Eighties might have preserved his tissues with its chemical stomach grouting? What if E Numbers sealed our organs in a manner similar to lamination? What if the fact that my generation are all dangerous sociopaths is an evolutionary advantage? Winston Churchill lived to 95 on a diet of whisky, cognac, ten cigars and literally two PINTS of Pol Roger champagne a day. That is 1.14 litres. This was our role model. Even vegetarian food was unhealthy. Even soft drinks rotted their own factories from the inside out. Alcohol was safer, as in the Dark Ages, when beer was less dangerous than water. 

What if I’m still shouting at you for the next FORTY YEARS?

I mean now that I’ve written that I’ll be dead by Xmas but STILL

OPERATIONS

PINK BEAM PRESS

PINK BEAM PRESS is a new publisher coming out of the organisation around the Philip K Dick Festival, leading out with a slate of seven sf novellas.

The plan is to release all seven novellas simultaneously in August in collaboration with the upcoming Philip K. Dick Festival at Cal State Fullerton, August 20-23. There is no dedicated website yet, so go to https://www.philipkdickfest.com/ and add yourself to their mailing list for updates.

I’ve been gifted all seven as advance copies and am hoping to get into them next week. Looking at the blurbs, they all seem PKD-inflected, but very much updated and wandering off into their own territories.

PINK BEAM is an ongoing project - I happen to know that they’re going to be publishing a collection of microfictions by the excellent Richard Kadrey later in the year.

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

ORBITAL

SOEUR L’ENFER

I’ve been talking with musician Nina Courson over the last couple of months, as she readies her solo project Soeur L’Enfer. The first piece of the album just appeared this week, and you can click on the above to watch it. The video was actually shot by Dan Schaffer, whom some readers may remember from the comics series DOGWITCH.

If you’re into Chelsea Wolfe or turn-of-the-century PJ Harvey, you’ll like this. This particular track also puts me in mind of Kate Bush for some reason.

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• new mixtape from door.link

• “‘The Mandela Catalogue’ Movie Lands at Amazon/MGM in Competitive 11-Studio Deal for YouTube Horror Series” - the next gold rush is on

• Diving suits for cyborg cockroaches. Yes, you read that right.

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

BRAIN WARFARE

During the Iran hostage crisis, President Carter was seen carrying a file with a tab marked “Grill Flame.” GRILL FLAME was the US Army’s remote viewing unit.

PHENOMENA by Annie Jacobsen starts during World War Two and propels along on rockets through to 2016. It’s a big book, but it feels like a fast read and I found I hated putting it down. I picked it up on a whim, having liked her NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO, even though I knew a fair bit about the subject of PHENOMENA. Or at least I thought I did. I was wrong.

For one thing, it seems that remote viewing worked.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA and various other governmental entities used psychics long before anyone thought they did, and long after everyone assumed they stopped. This is the story of a shadow programme to try and turn psychic phenomena into military assets. And it’s not the whole “Men Who Stare At Goats” thing, that was the decadent end of the programme when the whole thing was being largely run by the soft-brained. At its peak, there were intelligent, flinty people attempting to understand and weaponise psi, in America, Russia and China.

(And the guy running the Chinese programme was HS Tsien, who co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, worked on the Manhattan Project, interrogated von Braun for the US Army and was made the first director of the Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Center at Caltech before McCarthyism denied his application for US citizenship, had him under house arrest for five years and eventually returned him to China as part of a POW exchange. He dedicated the rest of his life to revenge on the US:)

The great powers were convinced: perhaps not that these things actually existed, but that if they did exist and somebody else had access to them, then we were all in trouble.

And so Jacobsen follows the thread of military and intelligence exploration of weird mental phenomena from World War Two onwards, and it’s a hell of a ride. Jacobsen takes a value-neutral approach, and simply tells you what was said, what was written down and what people told her.

The book is extensively reported. She talks to hardened skeptics, true believers and everyone in between, and sources the rest in deep research, including material recently declassified at the time of writing (2016). And at the end of the book, she makes it clear the mission is ongoing:

And here’s one more thing I didn’t know:

Excellent book. You would like it.

PHENOMENA, Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US)

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. Hopefully I’ll post more than twice next week! I blame the heat.

6jul26

morning computer self

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I’m out. You should be too. Go out and enjoy your life. Because, trust me, no matter how shitty it might seem right now, there are still things you love and still things you can enjoy. So go and do one of them. You’re allowed. See you next week.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’m writing this on a new computer. My last ThinkPad lasted eight years, which is unprecedented - before it, I beat a laptop to death every eighteen months. I wonder how long I’ll get out of this one. It only took me two days to get the wifi working properly on it ffs

But I finally have a laptop at full processing power, after some months of having to limit the number of applications and tabs I had open at the same time, which is a relief.

Today I am writing the solicitation text for graphic novella PROJECT LOST SIERRA. Looks like it will be out in November.

THE WORLD SERVICE

Did anyone else look at the final trailer for Christopher Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY and think to themselves… “No, I’m good”? Or was that really just me?

I understand the SUPERGIRL film cratered on release. I haven’t seen it. I saw one of the trailers, and it looked like a Guardians Of The Galaxy film. I haven’t read the graphic novel it’s based on, although one article I saw this week suggested it’s a riff on TRUE GRIT, with Supergirl in the Rooster Cogburn role, and I guess the TRUE GRIT structure didn’t provide enough stakes so the film added in the poisoning of the CGI dog. The thing about TRUE GRIT is that it doesn’t really hang if Rooster Cogburn is 21, so I presume there’s more to it than that. I dunno, maybe Jason Momoa as Lobo was supposed to be Rooster Cogburn, but I hear his appearance is basically an extended cameo. All of this means that I don’t have an informed opinion, which means I don’t have an opinion worth listening to.

In the film press I read, there seems to have been a lot of talk about whether this should really have been the second film from the new DC regime, whether there was any appetite for the character, many comments about the massive rounds of audience testing, observations that it plays a hell of a lot more like a James Gunn film than a Craig Gillespie films, lots of backseat driving.

Listen, Supergirl’s tv show lasted literally twice as long as Wonder Woman’s and she was a lot more recent in the culture than the gap between Lynda Carter and Gal Godot. It was a fair call and not the worst idea for a follow-up to the Superman film on the face of it.

It’s possible, however, that they just didn’t know where their audience was.

The other week, I mentioned DOCTOR WHO and their not seeming to know where their audience was landing - if eight year olds are really watching alt-universe Regency fops fucking on BRIDGERTON, then space babies and cuddly toys aren’t landing where your audience is. On the other hand, maybe a cosmic comedic murdery take on Supergirl just wasn’t where people were. Maybe everyone went to see BACKROOMS and OBSESSION instead, because those films knew what they were and weren’t tested to death first.

OPERATIONS

PLAYBOX

I finally cracked and bought the Snowsky Echo Mini mp3 player (UK) (US), and a pair of KS ZS10 PRO earbuds (UK) (US) to go with it. I already have a dozen 256GB SD cards. The Echo Mini doesn’t handle playlists, which will be a killer for a lot of people, but I tend to listen to one album at a time, so it doesn’t bother me too much.

However, I am building One Giant Folder on one card. Trawling through my library and just picking songs I like. No theme, rhyme or reason, just stuff I can happily listen to again and again.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

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

Coming up on the end of season 1 of COLLIDE.

ORBITAL

Today I discovered that the entire American tv series version of MAX HEADROOM is on the Internet Archive.

That’s all you need to know, right?

Go. Have fun. I once had a conversation or two with some people about MAX HEADROOM, after Matt Frewer told me he was aware of a “treasure map” to the rights situation on it. Didn’t come to anything in the end, and I suspect it all would have been enough trouble to take years off my life, but it still haunts me sometimes. There’s a handful of maybes and not-quites in my career like that - another is getting within a hair’s breadth of being able to take a crack at adapting ROADSIDE PICNIC for tv, after sitting down with AMC about another project entirely (which also did not take off).

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The Fitbit is on the shelf, the Apple Watch sits on a charger, the Bee is in a drawer, and I’m seriously thinking about having a newspaper delivered. 

There was a spate of about three weeks where it seemed like every book and film I took in featured people reading newspapers. And it started to feel so... peaceful. Savoir-vivre. I have eight newspapers and magazines sent to my phone. But the idea of sitting with just one good newspaper at the coffee shop does have a certain appeal, doesn’t it?

I’ve actually just bought myself a new mp3 player, the Snowsky Echo Mini, in the hopes that it’s just a little less cranky than the cheap no-name Chinese one I picked up the other month. I often take the Kindle to the deli for lunch because it is, in Amber Case’s framing, calm technology, and a lighter carry than the 1000-page books I seem to be reading this year. 

But a newspaper would be lighter still. 

And then, of course, I remembered that newsagents don’t exist any more and newspaper deliveries went the way of the dodo some years ago. Mostly because of people like me.

So instead I went out to have some links removed from a new watch, went to a gallery, stopped off at the deli for a charcuterie board and a glass of wine. I’d love to tell you that I didn’t look at my phone once, but I read a couple of longish articles on Le Monde over the afternoon.

You can’t cosplay as being a cafe thinker with a newspaper. But there is something to be said for slowing down. This section has been brought to you by a vodka martini I made myself at 10pm on Friday night. (Rinse the glass with white vermouth and throw the excess away. Pour in one large measure of vodka that you keep in the freezer. Take one long strip of lemon peel, twist it over the glass and then drop it in.)

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

HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT

Olga Tokarczuk writes what she calls “constellation novels.” Pick a setting and a person, and then roam the world around them, drifting from point to point, person to person, in fragments, until an entire sky of story is pieced together. Connected by imagined lines until a shape is formed. People have written about the “networked narrative” and the “systems novel,” but Tokarczuk independently invented her own version, something earthier and stranger.

It’s a drifting time-traveller of a book, wandering between decades and even centuries. Mentions of things become the circling of them and then deep dives through time into them. The stories of a village that was Polish, German and then Polish again, a liminal zone where the past leaks out of the ground.

The astonishing thing is that it does find a shape, connections are made, and it forms into a folk tale of sorts. It wants you to know that, in the grimmest of times and places… there’s still magic.

HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT, Olga Tokarczuk (UK) (US)

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I had a whole plan for the newsletter this year. The year did not go to plan. Many reasons. A good deal of them were out of my control. Shit happens. Projects die at the oven door, as a friend of mine likes to say. Everything is set up and suddenly it’s all circling the bowl.

It happens all the time, to everybody. That’s the thing to remember. There can be years of one step forwards and two steps back. For every project you see from any creator, there are probably ten dead ones laying in a ditch behind it.

The only thing under your control is making new things. Every new project is a new roll of the dice, a new thing you want to make, a new set of opportunities and lessons. You don’t stop learning and you don’t stop losing. You have to bear in mind that winning is a happy surprise, but it’s not what you do it all for. You do it for the joy of making new things and putting them out into the world.

Take care of yourself. You’re doing fine, all things considered. See you next week.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Record-breaking temperatures everywhere, this old failing laptop is really struggling and croaking now, and Lenovo STILL haven’t shipped the new one. So I still haven’t finished the goddamn novella or done much of anything else beyond sweat, stare into space and mostly lose at trying to get medication into one of the girl cats. Meanwhile, the mancub is exulting in summer and lives outside twenty-four-seven now. They gave me a dish of chilled cherries with my espresso at the coffee shop today.

So I’m breaking the usual structure a bit and just getting some things down for you and then going back to being boiled.

Mia Woolf sent me a new work:

It starts like a collection of her paintings, and then slowly morphs into a shoreline dream narrative. Amazing.

(Excuse dirt under thumbnail, I’d just been earthing up potatoes when this arrived)

This made me smile because it reminded me of the mark on the cover of the seminal STRANGE DAYS:

I have no idea how to get one of these, so maybe just ask her.

I was stopped dead this week by this section of a recent rant by Ed Zitron:

That made me sit and think. Has consumer tech hit a wall? Is this just pretty much as good as it gets for a generation? Consumer-level AI is pretty much just useless toys unless you're a coder. Phone evolution has been incremental for many years now. And is screenless really the next logical step for everything?

I mean, never bet against the future, but…. really?

That said: haven’t things felt incremental and iterative for a while now?

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

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

SERIOUS MATTERS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

Last week, I was sent this very fun short film written and directed by Josh Copeland.

In a near-future Southern American city, a rideshare driver traffics electronic empathy drugs to her passengers. When a new variety of the drug comes her way, she finds herself falling into a subculture of digitized-Faith abusers.

It's on YouTube, but if you want to watch it via Vimeo and learn more about this award-winning sixteen-minute wonder, go here: https://www.fuckgiantkiller.com/serious-matters

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.

Picked up IF WE COULD HEAR by Natalie Beridze the other day, and it opens like Ligeti or Penderecki with an alien choir in an abandoned steelyard, and then ascends into dreamspace. Wonderful thing.

I wanted to write a LOT more stuff but circumstances have prevented, so next week may be a bumper edition. Until then, stay safe, stay sane and stay yourself. Take care.

W

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.

Last weekend was the final Konsztrukting Soundz event of the season - a local monthly experimental music night over in Old Leigh. They’re back for season three at the end of September, and I realised that evening how those monthly events quickly became the spine of my year. Whatever else was going on, I know that in any given month, there was going to be an evening of at least three hours of listening to things I’d never heard before, phone off and just open to new sounds.

(If you happen to be a local to the Thames Delta area, they’re running a crowdfund for season 3 right now)

I’ve spent the last few days convinced that there was something really important that I wanted to write down for you but I’m forgotten it. First sign of senility? LAST sign of senility? Am I already senile and I just forgot?

Signed an agreement with a major producer to try and turn one of my old books into a film. Did I mention that?

In this letter:

• do not explain

• Vincent Price wants to cook (you)

• The News, with Lordess Foudre

• COLLIDE

• strange noises from Finland

• Deliberate Disconnection with Rain DeGrey

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

• a book and a record

• LTD

THE WORLD SERVICE

DO NOT EXPLAIN

Every week, I get a message from someone asking me a version of “did you mean X when you wrote that thing in that book?” And I try not to answer any of them. I try never to explain what I meant by anything I wrote in any book. Took me a long time to get to that point. Here’s my current position:

Once I’ve written something and it’s been published and released out into the world, I lose all control over how it is read and understood. It’s not mine any more, in a way - its interpretation is down to the individual reader, and I have no say over how you read and interpret any of it. I cannot and should not sit on your shoulder and tell you that you’re reading it wrong.

Resist the urge to explain when asked. Don’t police the work. People are going to read all kinds of stuff into your work, because that’s just where we are now. Just remember that nobody wrote long online screeds about how Thomas Harris loves killing and eating people. If people have forgotten that creators aren’t their characters, fictional characters can have different beliefs to their authors, and that events can have multiple interpretations… that’s on them, not you. Let it go.

David Lynch always said that magicians don’t tell how they did a thing. Be a magician. I feel like we could use more magicians and fewer creators doing customer service. Not least because very few people are happier after dealing with customer service.

OPERATIONS

VINCENT PRICE WANTS TO COOK YOU

So the British Film Institute shop was having a sale, and I picked up four blu-rays for thirty quid. And I’m afraid I included this:

Yes. Vincent Price did a cooking show on British television.

I was alive in the 1970s and it was NOT a “delicious decade.” From this review, a screenshot of one of the horrors herein, The Cheese Chess Set:

My thirty year old daughter frequently claims to not understand how we survived the Eighties. I look forward to sitting her down in front of this, the next time she’s home, to show her that surviving the Eighties was nothing compared to surviving the Seventies.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

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

ORBITAL

HARJU

Harju is a new band spun off from the glorious Finnish group Paavoharju, which longtime readers will have seen me mention multiple times over the years. I've been acquainted with them for a long time, and they sent me this video late last week. The video is the first piece off a forthcoming record that is the soundtrack for a graphic novel:

I fucking love this idea. Also that music and that video.

(And then they sent me the entire album!)

A message from our supporters this week:

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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.

I am particularly looking to add more serialised comics work to the newsletter. I already have some in train, but more would be good.

OPS

BOOKS AND MUSIC

"But she drowned, Rob. That’s all I can tell you. Some cases, I can divine that a victim was stabbed a hundred times with a toothpick so you can infer the dreaded toothpick killer has struck again. This time… She just drowned."

The ninth ROB MARSHALL novel by Ed James, CUTS BOTH WAYS, is not the place to start with the series. The books have been heavily serialized for a little while now, and its high-energy opening will make no sense unless you read the previous three or four. Also, this book is a backdoor pilot for a new series based around DI Sam Winter, and on top of that characters from other Ed James book series make appearances. Shockingly for me, one of them has ended up just down the road from me in Leigh-on-Sea. Ed has great fun connecting all his books into an Intercity Crime Universe, a term I just now thought of and which amuses me because it abbreviates to ICU.

I love the ROB MARSHALL series because they hit that sweet spot for me - an intelligent detective dealing with weird murders, horrible disgusting moments and some wit. This one is no different. I wonder if the next one, due in August, will be more of a jumping-on point.

CUTS BOTH WAYS, Ed James (UK) (US)

Anyone up for some haunted drone-driven avant-folk? I love Alison Cotton’s work, and her new record is out.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. The current format is between one and three posts a day. Like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

MORNING COMPUTER: things to start the day

• sunup

• ocean days

• hot world

• world computer

STATUS: the daily noon-ish roundup post

• konsztrukting sounds, media labs

• ana-digi temp

• commodore flip phone

• lunch

OTHER:

• Fritz Lang’s DIE NIBELUNGEN on blu-ray

• notes on the book THE BIG THREE by Neel Burton

• HAXAN on blu-ray!

• JUDEX on blu-ray

• Camel Trophy watch

• notes on the book THE REVOLUTIONISTS

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I’m off. I just had a notification that a friend has mailed me something and customs want £500 to let it through, so I presume I’ve been sent a firearm or a dead body. Every day is an adventure. Relax and see what the day brings you. See you next week.

W

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:

Markets move. Headlines catastrophize. Inside the noise is the story that matters — the opportunity, not the fear. The Daily Upside: global business and finance, reported without the alarm.

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