warren_ellis

DO ANYTHING was mostly written in a Moleskine reporter’s notepad with a propelling pencil. The page reproduced below — cranked up in GIMP to make it visible, if not legible — appears to date from late May 2009. It’s written in block caps because I needed to be able to copy-type from it, and as we know from earlier posts, my handwriting is shitty.

Pretty much every page of DO ANYTHING in this notebook looks like this:

If you’ve read DO ANYTHING, you know a lot of it is pretty densely layered with connections. The column was written in a very specific way to maximise the information. It always, always started out as longhand, early in the day. The longhand was always about the forward thrust of the column — the column meanders a lot, but it doesn’t wander, it’s constantly following a channel. As I go, I’m signposting things I need to check later, or need to remember to tie in.

Later, I sit down and copy-type the thing into Notepad, with a browser open, because I’m fact-checking as I go. The longhand draft is all mental, and that includes working in information from memory. Since I often can’t remember what I did yesterday, it needs to be checked.

I’d write the longhand version in intense two-hour stretches, and usually had way too much for a single column. After 003, in fact, I just kept writing without thinking about column breaks, and found those breaks later after the copy-typing.

Once I’d typed the column up, the real draft started. Because I’d then spend an hour plugging names from the column into Google, looking for more connections, as well as following my signposts, and layering that stuff into the piece. The Notepad draft after an hour or so on Google was the actual first draft, and that’s what’d get pasted into OpenOffice to get edited and cleaned up.

Really, an incredibly complicated and time-devouring process for a column no-one read. But it was fun, and it taught me things.

warren_ellis

The serial version of the first DO ANYTHING book concluded today. It’ll be out in print in April, and it’ll look something like this:

warren_ellis

• Charitable Front: Some Bay Area organizations appear to be part of a secretive group
  "Mysterious organizations in the Bay Area profess to be advocating for liberal causes. In truth, they appear to be part of a secretive group with a bizarre radical past."
  (tags:cult pol )
• Sikhs strive to keep language alive
  "The Sikh scriptures and the Punjabi language of many Sikhs were written in a script known as Gurmukhi. So to be fully initiated into the religion, you must know how to read it."
  (tags:cult culture language history social )
• U.S. Evangelicals? Role Seen in Uganda Anti-Gay Push
  "…the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how ?the gay movement is an evil institution? whose goal is ?to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.? Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior…"
  (tags:cult crime )
• Freescale promises bargain-price tablet this year
  "Freescale Semiconductor unveiled blueprints for a tablet computer to be priced at less than 200 dollars (US) when it debuts later this year."
  (tags:tech computing )

warren_ellis

Curzon from Coming Anarchy took some photos of the opening of the Burj Khalifa, the new top medieval folly in Dubai. The thing about criminal lunatics who live like God’s just keeping their chairs warm is that, well, they do know how to put on a show:

More at the link.

warren_ellis

Of a 300-word column on comics for SFX. 300 poxy words. This usually means I’m going to have to scrap it and start again. It’s not due to file until the 11th, but I want to get it out of the way today, because I need to be producing some comics pages by the end of the week. Of course, at the end of the week, I’m planning to be in London to consult with a few people on a few things, so…

Provided London hasn’t been cut off by snow, of course. Extreme weather warnings are popping up all over the country today, and both London and Southend are pegged for "heavy snow" tonight — about a foot of it, by all accounts. People in other parts of the world are laughing their arses off at the very idea of that being "heavy snow," I know. But you can confidently expect this shambles of a country to fall over and play dead after a foot of snow.

Today I had a very, very strange job offer.

This turned up in my inbox the other day, from artist Sam Haney.

(Larger version)

You too can send me dirty pictures at my "dump" email address, which I check every day or two, at warrenellis [at] gmail dot com.

janewilliams20

ColdFusion 9 system requirements
Windows
•Intel® Pentium® 4 or AMD Athlon processor
•Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 Web, Standard, or Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 1, R2 and Service Pack 2; Windows Server 2008; Windows® XP Professional or Home Edition; or Windows Vista® (Windows 7 not supported)

warren_ellis

At my internet cave today:

* The Katie West Residency

* The Brian Wood Residency

Both here until end of Friday. Go and meet them.

* REMAKE/REMODEL: Ace Of Space – return of the artists’ challenge thread.

* Free Paper Science newspaper from We Are Words + Pictures – oh yes. We do free stuff now.

* Comics on Sale This Week (Jan 6) – For people with a local comics store.

* SHUDDERTOWN; March 2010 from Image/Shadowline

* GHOST PROJEKT: Coming in March from Oni Press

Preview material for two new comics by creators who visit Whitechapel

* DJs lets post some mixes thread!

14theditch

  The first issue of the Polish F&SF will be coming out in early 2010.  It will have my story, "The Night Whiskey," and an interview I did with Konrad Walewski.  There will also be stories by China Mieville, David Moles, Terry Bisson and Ursula Le Guin. 

This morning I came across this article at the site howstuffworks.com about the real possibility of scientists ressurecting the Dodo bird from remains recently discovered. 
http://animals.howstuffworks.com/extinct-animals/dodo.htm
One of my top 5 favorite fantastic stories of all time is "Ugly Chickens" by the great Howard Waldrop.  It's a cryptid tale about the survival of the Dodo bird into the mid-20th century.  If you haven't read it, you can here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20061012064632/www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/waldrop/waldrop1.html   

  My story, "The Dreaming Wind," recently appeared in the Russian SF magazine ESLI. 

It looks like Tony Smith at StarShipSofa http://www.starshipsofa.com/ will be turning my story, "Creation," into an upcoming podcast.  I believe Rajan Khanna, who did the excellent readings of "The Dreaming Wind" and "The Annals of Eelin-Ok"
http://podcastle.org/2009/03/25/podcastle-45-the-annals-of-eelin-ok/
http://podcastle.org/2009/05/26/podcastle-episode-54-the-dreaming-wind/
will be reading the story. 

warren_ellis

Concluding the first volume.

warren_ellis

Clayton "Siege" Cubitt’s notebook is probably a lot nicer to wake up to than mine, you know.

Good morning. This is warrenellisdotcom. I write things here.

warren_ellis

Broadcast and network culture. (And Atemporality, which, like the term "post-industrial," you’re likely to hear a lot about this year.)

In my part of the world, in the 1960s, you’d come home from work — as my mother did, as Niki’s mother did — and the first thing you’d do is put the radio on. You’ve already selected the broadcast channel you want. You’ve found out the frequency from friends, from a magazine, or just twisted around the dial ’til you hunted it out and left it there. Radio Caroline, or Radio Essex, broadcasting off the Maunsell Sea Fort called Knock John. These are pirate radio stations, outside the control or mandate of the BBC. And you’ve left the dial locked to that frequency because it’s the only way you can hear the music you like. It’s music the BBC doesn’t play, and the BBC’s pretty much the only game in town, if your town is ashen, brick-faced Sixties Britain. Broadcast technology has gotten to the point where nutters like Paddy Roy Bates can lash together a kit on a concrete plug sticking out of the Thames Estuary and blanket the area in modern music. It’s on the verge of a consumer-society democratisation.

My RSS feed reader is tuned to several broadcasters. I’ve found out the web addresses from friends, from magazines, from twisting around a search engine until I found what I was looking for. These broadcasters send music directly to my main daily listening device, which is a X61 Thinkpad (as opposed to an ITT transistor radio). And, even though I live in 2010 Britain and have a few more options than three or four BBC stations, it’s still often the only way I can hear the music I like.

(My daughter comes home and puts on YouTube, clicking around playlists. YouTube is in fact the radio for her and her friends, right now to the shitty sound quality.)

We’re in the depths of the consumer-society democratisation of the relevant technologies. It is really not hard to be a broadcaster now.

There’s obviously going to be a rush of tablet technologies this year. These are largely going to be about the broadcast of magazines. This is going to be kind of a new thing: over-the-air simultaneous delivery of post-print journalistic/design digital objects to handheld devices. Without immediate democratisation. This is a thing that large publishing corporations would presumably be intent on controlling access to. This will, equally obviously, not happen.

This is something I’m going to be kicking around for a while.