Tag Archives: Warren Ellis

Teaser: The Wild Storm sneak peek by Jon Davis-Hunt

Via Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations weekly newsletter last week. the-wild-storm-teaser

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Thinkbook 5 | Untitled

~ This is a #thinkbook entry on #ruckology in which Brandon L. Rucker returns with new brainjuice after a two-week break ~

The last couple of weeks have not been optimal for regular blogging, due in part to my being busy creatively on a couple of projects. That’s a good thing. In that span there’s been so much on my mind I’ve wanted to lay out here in the form of brainjuice leakage that there’s no way to condense (nor remember) it all here for a single entry. I usually don’t do this particular series with much pre-planning or forethought, instead going for a more spontaneous approach, digging back into the deep pockets of my mind to squeeze out the past week’s high or deep thoughts. What usually occurs is a scattershot cranial explosion. Or something.

This week I’ll start by pulling a thought or two that I shared during the week on my Facebook page. First, some bad news.

Local/National News Story of the Week

In reaction to this news story about a deadly new synthetic drug scourging the streets of America, claiming 50 lives nationwide, two from my native state, I wrote:

++ The inventiveness of this kind of stuff seems boundless. It highlights that one of the saddest aspects of the human condition is the inability to cope without chemical assistance. My heart goes out to those who face any kind of existential crisis that leads them down this path. Stay above ground and keep breathing, y’all.

♦ ♦

Legacy News of the Week

In response to the news that Francis Ford Coppola is officially “relaunching” Zoetrope.com with an added new focus on short films, I wrote that Zoetrope.com is the place:

++ Where so many of us writers, editors and small press publishers cut our teeth back in the late 90s and early 00s. Not only did we learn so much about writing, editing and publishing from and with our peers, but the workshop/virtual studio was essentially the forerunner of social media. It’s where we learned how to (and how not to) act online. Big thanks to FFC, of course and a huge shout out to sysop Tom Edgar. Commence the renaissance.

♦ ♦

Political Thought of the Week

++ None of these things that people try to sling at Hillary Clinton can effectively negate the positives about her, especially all her years of public service benefitting women and children. I’d stack up her service record against any of the candidates we had going this cycle NOT named Bernard Sanders.

♦ ♦

Now let the brainjuice tap drip for . . .

Three Random Thoughts

++ A disturbing thing I’ve had to grudgingly but consciously admit to myself is that some days, often many days, I just don’t have the desire to wordsmith. As stated in yesterday’s Notebook 7, I’m always in a creative state. However, productivity surges and wanes to an imperceptible rhythm that a mere mortal writer like myself (i.e. not currently paid to do so) has not yet mastered the ability to perceive and ward off. Nonfiction stuff like social media or blogging, is rarely ever effected, but the kind of creative writing that fiction requires has always arrived from a mysterious well of unknown depth and unknown quantities of resources. Usually, this can be assisted by simply reading a diverse array of things, which I do regularly. But even this past week I slacked on that. #Writer’sPlight

++ Still, due to the inspiration of one of my favorite writers Warren Ellis, whose weekly newsletter Orbital Operations and an online journaling have been one of my primary inspirations here, I want to try to write something here every day without fail, as he is attempting to do for two uninterrupted months on his semi-daily blog Morning.Computer. Ideally this would be the month of September, leading up to and through my birthday weekend holiday. We’ll see if that happens.

++ I am a notorious tinkerer. I tinker and tweak everything. I’m a fine-tuner who believes in continuous improvement. So it’s very possible I may tinker with things here yet again, such as the theme, colors (though I love the stark monochrome), menu layout, etc. So don’t be surprised if you see things looking different around here (if you, ya know, even pay that much attention to that sort of thing).

♦ ♦

I’m going to have to stop it there and continue things later in Lifebook 11 where I focus on something equally communal and personal that happened last night. Right now I have to get ready for a wedding.

Be mindful and good to each other, m’kay?

– BLR

Perspective: State of the Comics Industry in 1999 via Warren Ellis

– by Brandon L. Rucker –

IMG_20160201_155414[1]8551231835_3c4c9ec04a_oSo for the first time in well over a decade I am re-reading COME IN ALONE, the trade paperback collection of Warren Ellis‘ year-long column at Comic Book Resources that ran from December 1999 to December 2000. It’s a starkly honest observation and analysis of the seriously ailing comics industry of the time. Surely you all remember that bleak time period: post-early-90s boom, and post-mid-90s bust, yet prior to slight post-911 rebound? For me personally it was a time most significantly marked by the horrible decision of Image Comics standout partner Jim Lee to sell his widely popular and successful (and much beloved) WildStorm Productions publishing company along with all characters and intellectual property assets to DC Comics/AOL Time Warner (as the parent conglomerate was called at the time). That’s how bleak a time it was, that one of the industry’s richest, smartest and most powerful creator/businessman found it wise to sell his company as well as his Image Comics partnership stake (and some would argue his soul) to a competitor within the same market (and also join DC/Warner as an executive. An aside: he later became co-publisher of DC Comics but that’s a whole other chapter).

To wit, please observe this paragraph taken from Mr. Ellis’ introduction to his book (dated May 2001):

IMG_20160201_145015[1]

Doesn’t sound like we’ve come too far in a decade-and-a-half, does it? In fact, there have been many cries of industry demise of late in the comics media sphere, with some predicting an eventual collapse in say, another decade. Are these doomsday naysayers actual prophets, or are they merely Chicken Littles?

Only time will tell, right? One thing’s for sure, the days of comics titles averaging sales at the mid-100k level are likely (i.e. certainly) never to return. And that too is a whole other chapter in the epic saga of this niche industry, despite the fact it’s being pillaged for other big money media industries like television and film.

Comic books are nearly dead. Long live comic books.

 

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Quote: Warren Ellis on Description

So I stumbled across this Warren Ellis video interview, looks like it was conducted and subsequently posted midsummer of last year.  When I started blogging about five years or so ago it was totally inspired by Warren Ellis’ old website

 

In novels you have to just suggest the image for the reader to allow the image to live in their own minds.  The more specific  you make the image, sometimes the harder it is for it to really resonate with the reader. It’s the difference between painting in detail and painting in broad strokes. — Warren Ellis

 

 

Warren Ellis on Commercial Storytelling

I am a proud and eager subscriber of writer Warren Ellis’ weekly newsletter Oribital Operations.  On a weekly basis (or therabouts) I can expect him to touch upon various topics that run the gamut of intelligent, thought-provoking, humorous and enlightening. A couple of weeks ago he stated something that really stopped me in my tracks, something I feel I must share with other writers.

“. . .thoughts about how commercial storytelling is changing. Look at the ructions television has gone through in the last fifteen years. The “endless” run (and the end brought by economics as much as anything) looks like an aged form now, and novels for television are where the important stuff is done. TRUE DETECTIVE, and the even more innovative AMERICAN HORROR STORY (and now AMERICAN CRIME) where the cast are a stable putting on a new play every season.

I think Jeff VanderMeer’s interlocking SOUTHERN REACH novels, all three released in the same 12 months, might prove to be a very interesting model for prose.

But it’s also a set of thoughts — and I haven’t nailed this down, I’m going to come back to it — about how narrative forms need to keep moving at the pace of the world to some extent, need to keep looking for new sounds. Also, going back to earlier scenes and digging through their rubble for something that can be mutated and gene-edited in a lab and bolted on to something else in order to make something modern. It’s not looking backward when you’re constructing something new out of the parts. Frankenstein wasn’t an archaeologist.

Keep building. Keep shooting lightning into things to see what happens. That’s what the narrative enterprise needs. That’s been my constant aspiration.”

— Warren Ellis via Orbital Operations. Who also writes most mornings (on British Summer Time) at Morning, Computer.

Warren Ellis
Photograph shot and copyright by Ellen J. Rogers

Warren Ellis on Mad Max

“You forget that the MAD MAX films are a narrative continuum, from the brink of societal collapse all the way through to the petrol- and water-cults after the end of the world.  Max himself goes from tightly-wound cop to broken man to the Max of FURY ROAD, who, for the first half of the film, is pretty much a grunting animal on his hind legs and then reduced down to a bag of blood.  From husband and father to medical object.

Someone said to me the other day that MAD MAX is “his Star Wars.”  His modern myth.  A myth of the time of steel and petrol, that’s about collapsing back into dark history.  Viewed as a continuum, the film cycle almost plays as a warning sent ahead to us from 1980.  A time capsule that’s still telling itself stories from inside its box.  FURY ROAD doesn’t feel like a modern film.  It’s a throwback to classical filmmaking.  A scream from the nightmares of the last century.”

— Warren Ellis from his post “The Mad Max Continuum”