A Darkroom of Ideas
Updates
Thank you to all who pledged money to the Headspace Kickstarter campaign. Fully funded!
(If you’re after another Kickstarter project to back then I heartily recommend you take a look at, and consider, The Edge Off by Fraser Campbell, Iain Laurie, David B. Cooper and Colin Bell)
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Speaking of Kickstarter…
The print editions of Metropo (including that beautiful slipcase) have left the printers. Current guesstimates are that those who ordered this version of the book should receive them some time in June.
Magnus put out an update about this earlier in the week.
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Disconnect continues to hurtle towards completion:
This book has been a long time coming. I can’t wait to get it out into the world.
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Developing story the tactile way
I’ve spent the last few weeks on a bit of a Benjamin Percy kick. I really enjoyed his post-Ellis run on the James Bond comics and I really enjoyed his first issue of Nightwing this week. I hope he gets to take a really good, long crack at the character.
On the trail of the new Nightwing issue I spent most of the week reading Thrill Me, a collection of essays that Percy wrote on fiction and writing. Needless to say I heartily recommend it (my Kindle notes report I made forty two highlights). I won’t bore you with them all, but I especially liked this quote about revision and editing:
“So much of revision, I’ve discovered, is about coming to terms with that word: gone. Letting things go. When revising, the beginning writer spends hours consulting the thesaurus, replacing a period with a semicolon, cutting adjectives, adding a few descriptive sentences—whereas the professional writer mercilessly lops off limbs, rips out innards like party streamers, drains away gallons of blood, and then calls down the lightning to bring the body back to life.”
The impression you get when reading the book is the idea of Percy treating writing like any other craft, say like carpentry. He has a very tactile approach in his creative process that I find refreshing.
Case in point is a small room in his house which was used by the former owner as a darkroom. It’s here that Percy hangs up scraps of notes, articles, character biographies, etc. making it a place where the story truly develops. He mentions this in Thrill Me but you can see more of it in the video below (relevant part starts around the 1:50 mark):
This is one of the things I miss about having an allocated space/office to write in, the notion of being surrounded by ideas, inspiration and miscellanea.
Links
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Indiewire has a list of the 25 Best American Screenplays of the 21st Century.
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Amazing stuff at NatGeo where it turns out the Bajau, a nomadic people living in the waters near Indonesia, have disproportionately bigger spleens than the rest of humanity which allow them to hold their breath underwater for as long as 13 minutes!
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On turning your phone dumb and using it less. (Bonus: De-Googling your Android phone.
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Another good, back to basics, article on productivity.
“Stay on paper as long as possible. Sketch and write things out long-hand, possibly even emails. We all know screens are distracting. It’s much more pragmatic to step away from them for a significant block of time than trying to learn an attentional jiu jitsu that may be impossible. If you think you can’t step away, do it anyway for one day to see how much trouble it causes. That’s useful information.”
- I remember writing a piece for the back of an issue of Headspace where I mentioned the ‘democratisation of technology’, specifically about terrorists using off the shelf technology to counter larger, better equipped, opponents. Well, it’s happening again.
“Last winter, on the outskirts of a large U.S. city, an FBI hostage rescue team set up an elevated observation post to assess an unfolding situation. Soon they heard the buzz of small drones — and then the tiny aircraft were all around them, swooping past in a series of “high-speed low passes at the agents in the observation post to flush them,” the head of the agency’s operational technology law unit told attendees of the AUVSI Xponential conference here. Result: “We were then blind,” said Joe Mazel, meaning the group lost situational awareness of the target. “It definitely presented some challenges.”
Finally, one of my all time favourite writers is the amazing Jean-Patrick Manchette. I came to his work via the comic West Coast Blues an adaptation of his novel 3 to Kill. Since then I’ve devoured all but one of his novels that have been published in English (sadly not all of them have been). Manchette has a style that is extremely minimalist and bare but still somehow manages to infuse his work with depth, emotion and a visceral punch.
“For Manchette, The Prone Gunman was the final step in his attempt to reach “a total behaviorist style,” a manner of writing stripped down to the bare essentials and devoid of any superfluous effects, in which the simple statement of fact replaced any psychological comment or explanation. A passionate admirer of Dashiell Hammett and the bare-bones approach of the American hard-boiled school, Manchette had by now become a master of that approach.”
Manchette also took on translation work, believing it made him a better writer. He translated most of the works of Donald Westlake into French and even oversaw the translation of a little known comic called Watchmen. He was an avowed Leftist and was fully engaged politically:
“In 1993 he founded an iconoclastic, informal movement called Banana, whose main activity was slipping banana peels under the feet of policemen trying to break up demonstrations. Manchette garnered several absurd photographs of bewildered or infuriated cops, while managing to create minor chaos among the forces of counterrevolution. “
Two years later he was dead. He died whilst in the middle of a new novel, Ivory Pearl without completing it, but it looks like this last novel of his is now going to be published posthumously. I cannot wait. I really recommend reading any of Manchette’s work you can get a hold of and the comic book adaptations of his work are also top notch.