Warren Ellis's Blog, page 40
November 12, 2012
This Is Simply An “I Am Not Dead” Blogpost
I like to think that @benhammersley releases his moustache into the streets of London at night to devour weaker moustaches during Movember.
— Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) November 12, 2012
Yeah, that’s about the level of my intellect this evening.
New column at VICE today, which surrounds the nutter trifecta of extreme weather events, climate change and the Mayans.
Also this happened.
Bookmarks for 2012-11-12
"If superparticles were to exist the decay would happen far more often. This test is one of the "golden" tests for supersymmetry and it is one that on the face of it this hugely popular theory among physicists has failed."
(tags:sci )
November 9, 2012
CLOSEDOWN: Carn
A new album by old mate of warren ellis dot com Kemper Norton? I’ll have some of that. And so will you. Click through to buy for a very reasonable price, or stream the whole thing here. G’night.
FAQ 9nov12
How does do you write dialogue so well? I’ve always heard other writers say that all it comes down to is listening to how people talk and mimicking that in your writing, but most of time I feel like what I have my characters say either falls flat or isn’t going to be interesting/witty/funny/what have you.
I’m ignoring the first bit, because my dialogue isn’t great.
Dialogue for comics is a hugely different animal to dialogue in books or film, but here’s a couple of general things to think about:
1) You can’t force being funny. Forced funny is never funny.
2) When you have a character talking, have two things you know about their lives in your head as you let them talk. Two things that make them what they are. What was their childhood like? What was their first job? Do they spend a lot of time alone? Are they guarded around people? Because dialogue is about moving information around and expressing character. What you know about them affects the way they talk. Take a book you like — or, hell, even one you don’t — and select a passage of dialogue, and see what you can learn about those characters from the way they speak. (And, on top of that, see if the way they speak changes during the course of the book.)
2a) Once you know what they think is funny, or what’s funny *about* them, their dialogue will get funny.
I hope that helps a little bit.
Hiya. What kind of reading vs. writing ratio do you normally have? (Sometimes it seems like you cruise the internet for the amazing and absurd while your beard writes the books. Also, if that’s actually the case, what’s the best way to make a beard?)
There is no ratio. People tend to look for structure in my working life, and there isn’t a lot. Reading is work. Writing is work. Communication is work. Research is work. I work from when I get up to when I go to bed. I’m fairly stupid, and writing passable pages doesn’t come easily, so this is a 24/7 gig for me, just to be competent. All this means that it’s really hard to separate the elements of the day out enough to be able to see a ratio. It’s all The Job.
November 8, 2012
The Complete DEEP MAP PILOTS by Eliza Gauger & Warren Ellis
All of these are available as prints and postcard sets from Eliza. You can find Eliza at @3liza and tumblr.
DEEP MAP PILOTS: A Series Of Five Pictures From Words
MARENKA flies the sailplane service that skims the Neptune atmosphere on a loop that brings it back to the thaw station on Triton. All the many photos taped to the walls of Marenka’s cockpit flutter like dead leaves in a cold breeze when she bounces out of the atmosphere, and when the harsh thermal exchange beats the boat about on its descent to Triton. Triton is a moon of frozen lakes and a hot core. The sailplane delivers scooped helium-3 to the fusion engines that are re-routing core heat to the surface. Soon, Triton will be a subtropical worldlet on the edge of the solar system. That’s when Marenka will leave. She has a cockpit full of photos of all the things she never wants to be near again, and soon Triton won’t be a cold enough place for her.
REHANI saw space before she saw the sea. When she finally stood at the edge of an ocean, at night, all she could really see was something black and chilly and sparkling, with the sketched suggestion of islands out in its deeps. Rehani was disappointed. She flies for Big Island, a great floating city that surfs the cloud-tops of Venus at two hundred miles an hour. It’s wider than the Central African Republic, and moves across a misty vastness you could lose every ocean on Earth in. And it spins in something that is blacker and colder and more sparkling than anything, anything she’s ever seen. It’s never disappointed her. It’s the only sea she needs.
JINJING makes the jump from Titan to Enceladus the same way, no matter what their relative positions might be on launch day. She’ll make her approach trajectory for Enceladus while she’s on the other side of Saturn from it. Enceladus is in the E Ring, the one furthest out from the planet. So Jinjing gets to spend a whole half-orbit skipping across the top of the E ring. It’s a glittering ghost road three hundred thousand kilometers wide. There’s not a children’s story, nursery rhyme or fairy tale that ever competed with riding a road of diamond dust to a moon where stations drift across a wide warm underground sea. Sometimes Jinjing laughs out loud, at the thought of having grown up into a life that no childhood dream was ever big enough to capture.
CAMEO is a rock dancer. Not everyone wants to make the run to Ceres. You have to like scientists, for one thing, because there’s nothing inside Ceres but hermit physicists and their weird globular microgravity labs. You also have to like dancing with rocks. On a good day, Ceres is riding between Mars and Jupiter with a family of a thousand other objects. On a bad day, it’s like being shot at by seven armies. Shot at with asteroids. It takes a lot of craft and more art, and no-one gets through even the first month without picking up some bulletholes and powder burn. They say that, to do the Ceres run, you either have something to prove or you want to die. Cameo says she just likes dancing.
ASCENCION is four billion miles away from home, and that’s the way she likes it. She’s seen the stained egg of Haumea, and the misty red lump of Makemake, and dozens of other things that no-one had ever laid eyes on before. Ascencion dives the deeps of the Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune and Pluto. It’s the graveyard at the end of the solar system. Failed planets, dead comets, lost moons and all the strange dark rubble left over from the formation of the worlds we know. She’s out among the spectres, flying through ultimate history to places where, quite literally, there have never been eyes before. The Kuiper Belt is vast. She wants to see it all. She wants it all to herself, in a way that no-one else has ever been able to understand. She never wants to go home again.
Art © Eliza Gauger 2012. Words © Warren Ellis 2012
November 7, 2012
Experiments In Food: Pulled Pork
This is how it begins. It doesn’t look so good, does it?
I’d been wanting to try this for ages, and was given an opportunity last week to experiment on the child.
I discovered pulled pork back in the 90s, in a NYC restaurant (that has since burned down, something I remain kind of unsurprised about). I was never going to even approximate that first dish, but I thought I’d give the general idea a go.
This is a boneless shoulder of pork, around 1.75KG. There are, I warn you, a million pulled-pork “purists” who will complain about the cut, and the bone out (or in!) and any number of other things. But we are The People Who Burn Water, and We Don’t Care.
This is a slight adaptation of a Baker Brothers recipe. All measurements from this point are approximate, and in English. Make Google do the regional adaptations.
The day before.
What you need is a large bowl, because you are going to throw the following things into it.
A fair glug of olive oil. Like, the equivalent of a tablespoon and a half. Sort of.
A larger whack of Worcester Sauce. And if you have balsamic vinegar, a little splash wouldn’t hurt.
An even larger whack of honey. Like two, two point five tablespoons.
Some smoked paprika. I went with two heaped teaspoons.
Fresh rosemary – strip the leaves off a couple of sprigs.
Fresh thyme – same, only use twice as many springs.
Break up a head of garlic. Get rid of the papery shit on half of the cloves and throw them in. Peel the other half, crush them under the flat of your knife, and throw them in.
Grind in some salt, equivalent to a large pinch.
And, of course, a bottle of beer. Because this is me. Now, I went with an excellent ruby red porter, but, in the end, I think maybe it was slightly too hoppy and bitter for the mix. You might like that. But next time I’m going to use a golden ale.
Mix all this up. Yes, it looks disgusting.
The meat goes into a big roasting tin. Get your knife and score the meat all over, in a large crosshatch pattern.
Grind up another pinch of salt and rub it into the meat.
Now take that muck you mixed up and rub that into the meat too. Get the garlic and honey pressed into the scoring as you go.
Now look at your hands. You look like a vet who’s been tending a cow with the runs. Wash.
Pour the mix into the roasting tin, throw another bunch of rosemary and thyme sprigs on top, and sling it in the fridge. Come back in four hours to turn the meat so the fat side is down. Come back four hours after that to turn the meat back. Go to bed.
The cooking day.
The first thing you do is set the oven to 240 degrees C and stick the meat in, flashing it for twenty minutes. Take it out, baste it in the mix again, cover the pan tightly in tin foil and put it back in the oven at 140 degrees C for seven hours.
Seven hours later, you get something like this.
This is, of course, utterly horrifying. But that awful charred crab-head lid? That’s the fat. You just pull that off. Underneath, you’ve got pork so moist and tender that you can quite literally shred it with two forks:
Serve in bread rolls with anything you like, including a spoonful of the cooked marinade.
November 6, 2012
Bookmarks for 2012-11-06
"Adrien suffers pixeliose, an unknown disease resulting in partial pixelation of his field of vision. To cure this disease, he goes to a woman, Dr. Rittenmatter, ophthalmologist."
(tags:video newaesthetic sf design+fiction )
Intelligence Spending Drops for a Second Year | Secrecy News
"But while intelligence budgets are shrinking, they remain very high by historical standards, having more than doubled over the past decade."
(tags:intel )
SVA Workshop: Books After Books | booktwo.org
"The workshop started with two briefs. The first examined the book cover: its purpose in the old world of bricks-and-mortar bookshops and bookshelves, and its new place online and embedded in devices, more avatar than wrapper for the book. The second looked at the problems of navigating a long-form electronic text, without the ability to thumb and spatially conceive of a solid block of paper."
(tags:books design ebooks )
BLDGBLOG: Lebbeus Woods, 1940-2012
"…we should all have, as he phrased it, a "difficult New Year." That is, we should all look forward to, even seek out or purposefully engineer, a new year filled with the kinds of challenges Lebbeus felt, rightly or not, that we deserved to face, fight, and, in all cases, overcome—the genuine and endless difficulty of pursuing our own ideas and commitments, absurd goals no one else might share or even be interested in."
(tags:architecture writing )
Ice Music « mary anne hobbs
(tags:music )
November 5, 2012
GUEST INFORMANT: Cherie Priest
On the occasion of the release of her new book, THE INEXPLICABLES , my admired friend (and one of my daughter’s favourite authors) Cherie Priest kindly accepted my invitation to mark this new piece in her groundbreaking steampunk sequence with some thoughts on what it is and how it came to me. — W
When a new book looms, you start to see a pattern early on. You figure out quickly which questions will be asked most often, and which will be hardest to answer; and with regards to The Inexplicables, which lands November 13, I could already see the big ones on the horizon.
In short, people want to know what this steampunk undead Sasquatch book is really about, and they want to know if it’s a young adult novel. So let me try to explain.
* * *
When I began The Inexplicables my husband and I were already planning to leave the Northwest; we were already watching the real estate market in Tennessee, saving up our money, and thinking about what we wanted from our first house. But Seattle was very kind to me, and before I went anywhere I wanted to do one more book … one more Boneshaker, another warped little love letter to the place. The Clockwork Century franchise had wandered far and wide – all the way across the country, East Coast to West, and up and down the continent.
But one more, for the road.
I wanted to tell a story that was uniquely northwestern, while still falling into the niche that’s become my personal tradition: low concept treated with the straight face of high concept. But I drew a blank until a conversation with a friend, wherein she jokingly recommended a Bigfoot story. I doubt she thought I’d take the idea any more seriously than she’d suggested it.
But it festered, and in the end, I wrote it. And although I do guarantee you one undead Sasquatch, mostly this is a story about people who aren’t worth saving.
Worthless, useless, downright destructive people – people who will stab you in the back as soon as give you a hand. Ruthless, selfish, incompetent people who began their miserable miscreant careers as miserable unwanted children, leftover from a disaster they didn’t cause and twisted by an environmental poison they didn’t ask for. They were given nothing, and told to survive – and no one cares if they do.
This book is about them, and the places they find. Places that are every bit as run-down, wrecked, wretched and unlikely to be hospitable as the people themselves.
To be more precise, this is the story of one homeless, drug-addicted teenager in particular – who wanders inside a dangerous walled city full of the living dead in pursuit of a ghost. The Inexplicables is about what he finds there – criminals and fellow villains. Peers and problems. He finds his way into legend.
I’m routinely asked if Boneshaker was intended to be a young adult novel, or if it just turned out that way. I always find that question strange, since most of the book is told from the point of view of Briar Wilkes, a 30-something woman whose teenage son has gone missing. But largely because her son’s perspective is likewise featured … I ended up with a whole new audience: a demographic lovingly euphemized as "reluctant young readers." By which teachers and librarians mean "teenage boys."
(Teenage girls tend to be less reluctant readers. That’s not so much a sweeping generalization as a market trend.)
So ever since that first in the series, people have wanted to know when I’d do another young adult book – when in fact, I never wrote one in the first place. And in keeping with that longstanding tradition, I’ve already heard a number of queries along these lines in the wake of The Inexplicables, for its protagonist is an eighteen year old boy. But these questions don’t bother me in the slightest. In case you’ve ever wondered why I don’t fight the YA label, this is why: Nobody reads a book and says, “That was great. I have read a book. I need never read another, and I shall never tell a soul about it.” And this is particularly true of teenagers.
Let it never be said that I tried to distance myself from them, for they have been some of my greatest advocates. But sometimes adults are squirrelly about reading things intended for young people, for whatever ridiculous reason, so the questions keep coming. And here, now, by way of getting everything (or nothing) straight upfront, I’ll lay it all on the line: This is a story written by an adult, for adults or anyone else, but yes, it’s a story about a kid. He’s kind of an asshole, but I’d like to think that by the end, you can find it in your heart to root for him.
That’s all, I guess. So call it what you want, and thanks for listening to me ramble. But most of all, thanks for reading.
You can find Cherie at her website , and also @cmpriest .
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