For people wanting to send me to their sites, wanting to email stuff or tell me about new music or send me tips or whatever, I’ve set up a Gmail account that I’ll check once or twice a day: degaussing [-at-] googlemail com. This isn’t, I stress, my main email account, and it’s not for asking me when some comic’s coming out. Always interested in new music, new art, new connections, new madness etc.

If you need to contact me about writing for print or web, please contact my agent Lydia Wills using the link in the righthand menu bar.

If you need to contact me about anything involving film, tv, games or other things that move, please contact my agent Angela Cheng Caplan using the link in the righthand menu bar.

If you (for god knows what reason) wanted to send me something physical, the best solution right now would probably be to send to my literary agency in New York City.

Warren Ellis
c/o Lydia Wills
Paradigm
360 Park Avenue South
16th floor
New York
New York 10010

I don’t have a solution for people living closer to me as yet.

Otherwise, it’s probably easiest to find me via my message board Whitechapel. I leave Twitter on most of the day. MySpace got really slow, so I usually only check it once a day, but I can be contacted through it. I’ve given up on Facebook. The next iteration of this site will strip out the social network links: I just don’t get anything out of them any more, and they become just another online chore for me.

Note: any of these signings may run anything up to 30 minutes short. Also note: this schedule does not include press sessions, meetings and other appointments. I’m booked solid for the duration of the show.

All these signings take place at the Avatar Press booth on the convention floor.

Thursday July 26

4:30 pm – Warren Ellis signing (4:30 to 6.30 approx)

Friday July 27

9:30 am – Warren Ellis signing (9:30 to 12:00)

3:00 pm – Warren Ellis signing (3:00 to 5.30 approx)

9:30 pm- 12:00 am – Warren Ellis panel

Saturday July 28

11:00 am – Warren Ellis signing (11:00 to 1:30)

4:00 pm - Warren Ellis signing (4:00 to 7:00)

Sunday July 29

10:30 am – Warren Ellis signing (10:30 to 12:30)

3:00 pm – Warren Ellis signing (3:30 to close)

YES I AM GOING TO DIE WHY DO YOU ASK LITTLE FUCKFACE BOY

I mean. Ahem. Looking forward to seeing some of you this coming weekend.

On Friday June 27, I’ll be doing an onstage appearance in conjunction with the Wizard World Chicago convention in Rosemont, Illinois, by arrangement of Avatar Press.

The thing is happening at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center — we don’t have a room number yet, because the Wizard World staff will be basically taking the walls off a series of rooms to create a 1500-seat hall. I imagine the event will be signposted in the lobby of the convention center. The hall will be furnished with two bars for your alcoholic poisoning. The doors will open at 9pm. I will be wheeled onstage around 9.30pm. I believe the plan is to have me gonged offstage around midnight.

The event is free. It is my understanding that you do not need a convention ticket to enter. So, whether you’re attending the convention or not, you can show up for this and get in with no problems.

Important point. I will be smoking onstage. You will not be smoking in the convention center. This event has been categorised, believe it or not, as performance art. As having access to nicotine is essential to my performance, I have been accorded the right to smoke. You will all have to suffer.

The format for this appearance is Q&A. This is where I take questions from the audience, and then ramble on at length about five other things without even getting within the same zipcode as your actual question. So, there’s no prepared talk this time, it’s just me cueing off questions from the floor, telling stories, and pretending to dispense The Starry Wisdom while actually telling you nothing of worth or relevance.

I dunno. I might read a bit from something.

I think that’s it. We’re handling further queries on Whitechapel right now.

At the end of the month, I’m off to Chicago to guest at the WizardWorld Chicago comics convention.  The name is a bit of a misnomer: it’s actually held in Rosemont, some way outside Chicago, basically just a convention-centre compound.  I will never actually get to see Chicago.  The experience will be not unlike a forty year old man visiting the city in LOGAN’S RUN.  Only without the sex and the mass suicides at the end.  That would be a fine way to end a comics convention — everyone into Carousel so Warren can watch you explode.  They ought to lay on that sort of show just for me, and I am therefore disappointed that they don’t show their guests of honour the correct volume of love.  There are never enough exploding people at these things.

As is usual when I do my annual American show, I’ll be doing a late-night talk on the Friday. The way these things work is that I am helped to a stage and then take questions from the audience until everyone gets sick of me. These gigs are sometimes curtailed by the fact that you can’t smoke in most of America anymore. Though I did light up during my San Diego talk anyway, and probably narrowly missed being arrested as, I don’t know, a lung terrorist or something.

This year at Chicago, Avatar Press (who arranged my appearance) have beaten expectations. They have somehow gotten my Friday night talk accredited as Performance Art. And it seems that under Illinois law performance artists can smoke on stage in pursuit of, well, the performance. And there’s a bar in the hall.

This means that, since I can remain drunk off my arse and wreathed in smoke for the entire gig, I will probably be talking well into Saturday. And probably to myself.

But if you’d put yourself in the situation of having to answer questions in front of several hundred people, wouldn’t you want to be shitfaced and chainsmoking too?

The only drawback to the plan is that my signing schedule is, to put it lightly, punishing, and the press time will go on top of that. So the chances of my actually seeing anyone outside convention time are minimal to forget-it. My schedule usually commences at 9am and finishes out around 1am.

Please don’t be offended if I don’t shake hands with you. I shook with every proffered hand at my signings at Heroes Con a couple of years ago, and by Saturday afternoon I was having to ice my hand down. And since I use that hand for typing and earning bill money, that’s not good. I sign for literally thousands of people at these things now, and it turns out a thousand handshakes a day just pulps my right hand.

You may kiss the hem of my garment instead.

Last year I had singing zombie girls, but this year I kind of fancy a call to prayer before my signings begin. What do you think? Too much?

I’m off on the road again this month.

On 23 May, I’ll be speaking at the Norwegian Film Institute. (Also appearing during this seminar are the major European comics figure Igort and the brilliant Killoffer.)

I will also be appearing at the Oslo Comics Expo (fuck-all details on website at present) on Saturday 24 May at 17:00, doing an onstage Q&A. No plans for a signing.

In real terms, this means that I arrive in Oslo airport tired and confused at 11 o’clock at night, attempt to get to central Oslo on my own without getting mugged or raped, locate my hotel, confirm that it’s not a crackhouse or a knocking-shop for backpackers, fail to sleep because I’ve timeshifted an hour, pass out around dawn, wake up five minutes later, jabber incoherently for two hours to a room full of filmmakers who don’t actually speak my language anyway, spend the next 24 hours staggering around town using the only two words of Norwegian I can remember ("thankyou" and "beer"), throw up over a small group of people at Comics Expo who were only standing there because they were looking for Killoffer, and then get myself conveyed back to the airport by ambulance on Sunday.

WIN.

See you there?

I’ve been getting a lot of requests lately, mostly through social networks, from people asking how they can send me stuff — either physical objects, or wanting to point me to their mp3s or comics or photographs or special projects etc.

If you (for god knows what reason) wanted to send me something physical, the best solution right now would probably be to send to my literary agency in New York City.

Warren Ellis
c/o Lydia Wills
360 Park Avenue South
16th floor
New York
New York 10010

I don’t have a solution for people living closer to me as yet. See, if you send it to Lydia, she’ll get Jason Yarn to check it for bombs or poison first. So get in touch and we’ll work something out.

For people wanting to send me to their sites, wanting to email stuff or send me tips or whatever, I’ve set up a Gmail account that I’ll check once or twice a day: degaussing [-at-] googlemail com. This isn’t, I stress, my main email account, and it’s not for asking me when some comic’s coming out. Always interested in new music, new art, new madness etc.

Otherwise, my social networks are studded along the right hand edge of this site: Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, Last.fm, LinkedIn.

And now I’m attempting to test the desktop blogging system.

I’ve been getting a lot of requests lately, mostly through social networks, from people asking how they can send me stuff — either physical objects, or wanting to point me to their mp3s or comics or photographs or special projects etc.

If you (for god knows what reason) wanted to send me something physical, the best solution right now would probably be to send to my literary agency in New York City.

Warren Ellis
c/o Lydia Wills
360 Park Avenue South
16th floor
New York
New York 10010

I don’t have a solution for people living closer to me as yet. See, if you send it to Lydia, she’ll get Jason Yarn to check it for bombs or poison first.

For people wanting to send me to their sites, wanting to email stuff or send me tips or whatever, I’ve set up a Gmail account that I’ll check once or twice a day: degaussing [-at-] googlemail com. This isn’t, I stress, my main email account, and it’s not for asking me when some comic’s coming out.

I’m a co-curator for the fifth international Artbots festival this year. More to follow on this, but in the meantime here’s the site, including the call for works.

(Grizzly! on Flickr)

Irene Kaoru:

…soon – soon! – I will have my bionic limbs and jewelry box full of different faces.

Wild, unexplained perceptual spatial distortions:

I stood up, reached down to pick up the TV remote control from the floor and felt my foot sink into the ground. Glancing down, I saw that my leg was plunging into the carpet… Floors either curved or dipped, and when I tried walking on them, it felt as though I was staggering on sponges. When I lay in bed and looked at my hands, my fingers stretched off half a mile into the distance…

This is my favourite bit, though:

…sometimes, especially shortly after waking up, I would experience a kind of binocular vision. Lying in bed, I would find myself staring out of the window, watching crows flying over trees 100m away, but able to see the details on each bird and treetop as if they were at arm’s length.

“Issuu is an online publishing service and a creative community dedicated to publishing. With Issuu (pronounced ‘issue’) anyone can convert their PDF documents into interactive online publications. It only takes a minute and it’s free. Forever.”

Interesting. I’ve commented a couple of times here that the PDF magazine seems to be getting a bit of a foothold again. Issuu claims to take that a bit further:

…you can view your document in a neat magazine-style viewer, that other people can bookmark, share and comment on. Finally, you can also post (embed) your Issuu documents on any external site, profile or blog.

Ukrainian junk-sculptor Andrei Severinko:

The entire article is behind a paygate, but the two available paragraphs (bold type is mine) are mindbending enough:

In August, radio astronomers announced that they had found an enormous hole in the universe. Nearly a billion light years across, the void lies in the constellation Eridanus and has far fewer stars, gas and galaxies than usual. It is bigger than anyone imagined possible and is beyond the present understanding of cosmology. What could cause such a gaping hole? One team of physicists has a breathtaking explanation: “It is the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own,” says Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It is a staggering claim. If Mersini-Houghton’s team is right, the giant void is the first experimental evidence for another universe. It would also vindicate string theory, our most promising understanding of how the universe works at its most fundamental level…

1964 French documentary on Bunuel, subtitled in English. Featured interviews with friends and collaborators, including Max Ernst:

Apple: You’ll Do As You’re Fucking Told

…surely some mistake?

“They Made Frogs Smoke ‘Til They Exploded” – Mum.

Finally, a new piece by an old favourite that doesn’t disappoint. Found a copy on Seeqpod, not the best quality, but it gives you a taste: