I think I first heard about Ursula Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas on an episode of Chapo Traphouse, which is probably an odd place for a sci-fi writer to discover a seminal short story in the genre, but here we are. If you’ve not read the story you should, it’s short and important, and available to read here.

CJW: Hello and welcome. Here we are with another edition of the nothing here newsletter, beaming a dense dose of cultural, social, environmental, and political happenings directly into your eye holes.

The work we do here is supported by paying subscribers, who also get access to bonus letters - essays, experiments, fiction, rants, and whatever else we’re feeling at that moment. The latest bonus was a piece of original fiction from Marlee Jane, The Husband in Your Head. To get access to it and all the other bonus letters in the archive, just go .

This, and the last short fiction piece I published as a bonus, Voyeur, have done the rounds of short fiction markets. ALL the rounds. I had no luck, not because the stories were bad, they all said, but because they were not a good fit for the publications at the time.

I think I write a lot of stuff that is not a good fit for anywhere at any time. These past two years have been a rejection-palooza for me (bar one, bar one really good one), and I flip-flop around between thinking perhaps they aren’t the right fit, or perhaps they are just bad.

But I don’t think they are bad, myself. I have confidence in my work. My plotlines are simple, yes, but I know my writing is good. It’s just… weird.

CJW: Welcome to another issue of the nothing here newsletter. Our latest bonus letter was Part 4 of m1k3y’s Field Notes from the proto-Invisibles Monastary. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to .

Greetings and salutations fellow netizens,

here’s the fourth instalment of those #invizmon writings from 2016. In this episode I talk about drifting off-line and why. A quick skim of the PDF shows there’s a few notes to myself in there, which hey maybe one day I will actually revisit.

Rn I’m busy preparing for a life of escalating climate chaos — and if I was still generating content in this style I’d tell you what a fucking pain in the ass it is shopping for Air Quality Monitors and HEPA-filtered Air Purifiers that aren’t designed to plug straight into your local smart home, internet-enabled, surveillance tech waking nightmare of silval-run control.

It’s okay though, I found what I was after eventually and the dust storm that might’ve once more coated Melbourne in a fresh layer of slime didn’t hit us the other night — yeah, the streets have been running red, but it’s not from the blood of our enemies, it’s tons of top soil dumped by heavy weather — so I haven’t even needed to unbox the neat little air purifier I had to order online ‘cause they’re as absent from the shelves of our big box retailers as P2 masks are. And that’s life in the 2020s.

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. Today is Invasion Day here in Australia. I talked about it a little this time last year, but also want to point to some Aboriginal voices writing around important issues all year round. Here’s a piece by Jack Latimore on the media circus around Australia Day and what it does to black writers - Latimore writes a lot about Indigenous and Australian political issues, and is if you want to see Australia from a different perspective than the one presented by white columnists. Luke Pearson does a lot of work around , an independent Indigenous media organisation. Here he is on .

I was meant to see MY DISCO again tonight. I thought I would have a chance to write another hyperbolic review like last time, but instead I saw someone die.

I didn't see him fall, I just saw the commotion on the stairs. People stepping over what they assumed was a drunk, until someone paused for long enough to realise something was wrong. I saw the two drunks I'd been getting irritated by swoop down and do their best to help before I even realised what had happened.

I looked down from my spot over the stairs, looked down right into the man’s face. I saw the blood spattered around his head and the sick, rolling tilt of his eyes, unmoored. That image struck me, and it strikes me still. I must have seen something the others didn't, because they continued to watch as staff called Emergency, and punters administered CPR. Because they leered over the ledge watching as the paramedics tried to asses the situation - a man dying on the stairs, with an audience, with phones and flashlight, and fucking photos.

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. I had plans for this issue that I didn't quite get to because I got struck down by some sort of illness. So, for instance, there's nothing here about Iran, though that entire situation is fucked up, watching the American warhawks try to fabricate a war for the sake of political capital/profits/military-industrial hegemony/apocalyptic evangelical beliefs, all with complete disregard for the innocent Iranians that will die needlessly just so the US can wave it's big imperialist dick around. Hopefully next issue we'll have some more to share with you on Iran, but for now you could listen to these two recent Chapo Episodes, or friend of the newsletter Brendan recommends the recent episode of (patreon pay wall link).

CJW: Welcome, friends.

Last weekend I wrote a bonus letter all about the music of Refused - Refused Are Fucking (Un)dead. I’ve been listening to them for 20 years, so I had some thoughts… To get access, see our future bonus letters, and dive into the full archive, you can .

Here’s a Christmas-themed piece of micro-fiction that was originally published at Apex Magazine.

Enjoy.

//

Of course Mum and Dad have to live on opposite sides of the galaxy. Neither will relent, so I gotta spend halfa Xmas day with Mums, then get my atoms bust apart and sent across the Milky to have reconstituted Turkey with Pops in his sad little hab in the Io mining zone. Ugh.

A few weeks ago Austin and I were chatting. I asked him if he had listened to the new Refused album yet, and he told me he was more interested in hearing my thoughts on the album than the album itself. So, here we go.

//

I discovered Refused in 1999 after coming across one of their tracks on a punk compilation CD. Those were the days of the early internet, meaning I had just enough time to daydream about possibly seeing my new favourite band tour Australia before going online and realising they had already broken up a year earlier.

Refused formed in Umeå, Sweden in 1991, and for their first few years they played . I’ve never been much of a fan of – to me it just sounds too samey. Relentlessly fast-paced, with unintelligible screaming vocals, heavily distorted guitar, a flat bass tone, and a repetitive four-four beat. At least with punkrock I could understand the lyrics, appreciate the humour, and sing along, but old-school hardcore didn’t offer me any of that.

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. Bushfires are raging across Australia while our government refuses to act and refuses to provide funding for the volunteer firefighters who have been battling said fires for weeks now. And in the UK… well, shit. You poor bastards.

Our latest bonus letter was , a piece of original fiction by Marlee Jane Ward, about performance, exhibition, and self-harm in an alien zoo. I think it’s fucking great. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to .

I think, when it comes to my writing, that there will be this dividing line between my ‘bleak’ phase and something else. I feel like I’m straddling that line right now: with no clear idea where to go from here, but with a distinct feeling that I need to make something less… sad.

CJW: Welcome to the latest edition of the nothing here newsletter. Here in Australia, summer has just begun (but you wouldn’t know it from Melbourne’s weather), whilst in America everyone is off celebrating Thanksgiving (in all its problematic glory) and Capitalism (ditto).

We’ve got a whole lot of articles linked below, so hopefully you’ll find something worthwhile amongst the selection.

Our latest bonus letter was Part Three of m1k3y’s series of . To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to .

Greetings endlings,

Time for the third instalment of my serialisation of those writings from 2016. Weren’t they just simpler times? Sigh. Again, exported straight from Scrivener, any formatting weirdness is due to that… but this is samizdat for the end times. So… enjoy?

peace,

CJW: This year is really getting away from us isn’t it? We’re officially in the second half of November, and I barely know where the year has gone. I guess I edited a novel, and planned the next one, wrote a couple of short stories, gave detailed feedback on 220,000+ words of novel, novella, and short story for some other folk, and attended an incredibly in-depth and helpful workshop in the States, and, y’know, I worked and paid rent and did all sorts of things that one has to do to be a useful human (because we can’t all be productive all the time).

Our latest bonus letter came from Austin - The Worst Excuse, about pessimism, music, magick, nicotine cravings, and synchronicity. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to .

Being a parent will make you feel crazy, at least some of the time. During a recent stressful period (exacerbated by sleeplessness, sickness and a toddler with a predilection for explosive tantrums that come across like demonic possession in a Peppa Pig shirt), I made the questionable decision to read “Conspiracy Against The Human Race” by Thomas Ligotti. Great idea, idiot!  

The book had a big impact on me. Once I settled into Ligotti’s somewhat hammy Grand Guignol style, I enjoyed his thoughts about the illusory nature of consciousness and the validity of a philosophy built on naked pessimism - just the sort of thing you want to read when you feel like a deranged marionette being pulled in multiple directions at once. Here’s an excerpt from Conspiracy, featuring the sort of thinking that resonated with me at the time:

How much nonsense can we take in our lives? And is there any way we can escape it? No, there is not. We are doomed to all kinds of nonsense: the pain nonsense, the nightmare nonsense, the sweat and slave nonsense, and many other shapes and sizes of insufferable nonsense. It is brought to us on a plate, and we must eat it up or face the death nonsense.

CJW: Step right up, step right up, and welcome to another issue of nothing here.

Our latest bonus letter was written by moi, titled FitBit vs Do Easy - part 2 of my series on Mundane Occultism. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, you can go here to .

Here's a follow-up to my last post, Telepathy. Consider this Part 2 of my series on Mundane Occultism aka Everyday Magick.

I’m a little obsessed with William S. Burroughs.

CJW: Welcome to a brand new issue of nothing here. If you haven’t heard from us for a while, you might need to check your traps. We’re trying to keep these emails shorter where we can, but sometimes we can’t help ourselves… To make sure your email provider doesn’t hide the longer ones, you might need to whitelist this email address or otherwise train your algorithms that this particular mass of links is one you want to receive.

We liked Marlee’s most recent bonus letter so much, that we thought we’d open it up to the full list: Don’t worry, it ends on an up note. Each bonus letter is something totally different, so if you want to sign up for future bonuses, and get access to the full archive of them, just go here to .