Fraction just tipped me to this interview with Joss Whedon, so I thought I’d put it up here to forestall another two hundred people telling me about it:

I talked at great length and planned at great length the idea of a portal and putting shows together, having an Internet identity and starting my own little micro-studio. Nobody in town was interested, and then by the time they were, “Avengers” came around. I was and will continue to work on a very, very different Internet mini-thing that I was writing with Warren Ellis, and I have a lot of ideas for things I want to put up there. I still believe it’s a viable financial model, and a creative playground and I miss it. But in the year that I was supposed to do that, I instead decided to make this little Sundance movie that I’m making.

What he’s talking about is WASTELANDERS.  The deal is that, basically, whenever he’s ready, I’m ready.  We have a shitload of notes, and chunks of script.  Although I need to rewrite all of my bits because they’re terrible and I never showed them to him (not least because the poor bastard was busy enough at that point).

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Simon Spurrier is a comics writer and novelist, and a very nice man even though he said some things on twitter the other day about Essex that I suspect were intended to insult and infuriate me.  So I asked him to write to you about whatever was in his head today, and while he was doing that I shat on his bed.  But he got his revenge in first:

You can find Si at his website, or on his twitter.  Yes, twitter viewers, his hair really does look like that.  His excellent new novel, A SERPENT UNCOILED, can be preordered at Amazon UK or at Book Depository for free worldwide shipping.

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Posted via email from warrenellis’s posterous

Fascinating post at John Robb’s about the stirrings of a supposed “Jasmine Revolution” in China.  The full post is worth your attention, but I’m pulling these bits from his correspondent:

…several Chinese language, but overseas based, websites have been blogging on the creation of a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China. This… appears to have no real-world substance whatsoever, to have begun as a hoax at best, and to exist only in cyberspace, and cyberspace outside China at that. But the interesting bit is the real world effect it is having inside China, and the momentum it is generating.

The blogs and websites themselves are largely invisible to ordinary Chinese as the Great Firewall keeps them out, but they can be seen by the security agencies, who have been swift to react. The organizers, whoever and wherever they are, have repeatedly called on people to gather in a range of popular and public areas in the centre of major cities across China – shopping malls and university campuses – and go for a stroll every Sunday afternoon to call for minor political change. These public areas are, at that time of day, normally filled with young people and out-of-town domestic tourists, all now potential ‘protesters’… but there are no genuine protesters, just some bemused local tourists and a lot of foreign journalists. So some young tourists get beaten up and taken away, and some journalists get smacked around.

The security forces are taking it seriously, the top leaders have come out in public to criticise the organisers for threatening social stability, and yet there is still no evidence of real-world substance to the protests, just China’s vast security apparatus chasing shadows on the streets and on the internet, and closing down large sections of China’s internet and SMS traffic…

A revolutionary movement that doesn’t exist, but still causes the kind of crackdown we associate with revolutionary movements, generated by persons unknown either to illustrate what would happen to revolutionary protestors, or to foment genuine revolutionary protest.  The new fog of war.

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Sunrise, Scalby

Padraig

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Or, more correctly, the announcement of the book deal was the concluding moment of five or six weeks of relentless work, which itself followed a winter that wasn’t exactly easy-going.  On Monday, She Who Gestated My Spawn said to me that I was starting to look a lot like the way I did before I collapsed, going on ten years ago now.  So, since I don’t really have time to be bedridden and mostly unconscious for six weeks again, I’ve pretty much taken the last four days off.  I still haven’t been out of the office a whole hell of a lot – although Tuesday I did see the boys from the BERG briefly for Yuri’s Night and then had dinner with my new book editor, the excellent John Schoenfelder.  I have, however, mostly caught up with email, caught up with some reading, caught up with some new music, scarfed vitamins, eaten almost three meals a day, and reintroduced my body to things like Water and Air.  And, here on Friday, my eyesight is no longer juddering or blurring, I can form spoken sentences again and I generally feel less like falling over.

Which is all good, because Monday I recommence GUN MACHINE.

Right now, GUN MACHINE looks a bit like this.

Thanks to Cherie for pointing me in the direction of the progress meter she uses. 

In order to deliver GUN MACHINE in good time, I have to write 5000 words a week for twenty weeks.  I have decided that this horrible Death Bar will keep me honest.  Visit me each week to see how I come up with new lies to justify the fact that I didn’t hit my quota.  See me weep and curse about the evil Death Bar and how it rules my life.

This thing will drive me insane.  I can see it coming.  It’s going to be like the clock in STUDIO 60.

Also on Monday I intend to try and breathe some life back into this place.  Over the last six months of heavy work, it’s obviously taken a back seat to everything else.  I’m going to attempt to bring it back up to some kind of speed.  Not sure what shape that’ll take yet.

And now I’m going back to listening to new Grouper records and reading Ed Vulliamy’s AMEXICA.  See you Monday.

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Molly Crabapple is very busy right now, working on a graphic novel for First Second with John Leavitt, painting huge pictures for rich patrons and masses of other stuff I don’t have the strength to list because I’ve only been awake an hour. I asked her to do Three Panels for you, but I didn’t think she’d have the time. I was delighted and amazed when this arrived in email this morning. Even though she used it to explain why, well…

Thank you, Molly. I love it.

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(Brian Lopez)

Off to London for quick BERG drinks then dinner with my publisher.  Got to do a phone interview about GUN MACHINE on the way.

The first interview request to pop through the Mullholland PR process about GUN MACHINE is with Kat Curtis, over here.

Email interview requests can come to me at warrenellis@gmail.com, and will be forwarded on to Mulholland.

Daily Blam has Mulholland’s actual press release.

It was John Schoenfelder, the editor of Mulholland Books, who brought me in.  It was Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown (but perhaps still best known as David Foster Wallace’s editor on INFINITE JEST) who made it clear, in the middle of it all, that there was a seat for me there.  Which was hugely affirming for a hack like me and came at just the right time.  But it was John who was tireless, inventive, collaborative and determined.  And so I am now a Mulholland Books author, along with Charlie Huston, Greg Rucka, Michael Marshall Smith, Duane Swierczynski, and… christ, it’s an amazing list, go and look for yourself.

John Schoenfelder is scarily clever and erudite and I are not.  But he has an absolute passion for all the things we like.  Which is why there are crazy people like Charlie and rock stars like Greg on his list – people who like the weird stuff and the pop stuff as well as the literary barricades and the deep waters.

GUN MACHINE came out of a shedload of latenight email volleys between myself and John. We were just trying to establish the parameters of where we could go with a book.  An inciting event that encapsulated the tone as well as opening up a story of many levels.  A weapons cache became a room filled with guns.  A room full of guns became a room with guns arranged in waves and swirls.  Light falling into the room in narrow golden shafts.  A gunmetal church.

Somewhere along the way, it became a two-novel deal.  So I live at Mulholland Books now.  Which suits me.  The imprint, and the book itself, will give me the space to explore a bunch of ideas in any way I want, in any depth I want.  So long as someone gets shot every now and then.  But that’s my bias, not theirs.  I just like killing people.  The chances of finding an imprint editor who likes and can quote from FELL and DOKTOR SLEEPLESS at will were pretty fucking slim, but here I am.  And the space between those two books, undiluted, is pretty much where I am with GUN MACHINE.

A few of you had probably already noticed that I’m not producing as much comics work as I was.  I have two novels to write now, so I won’t be increasing the amount of comics I’m doing.  I have a couple of things still in the pipeline at Avatar and Image, one or two other possibilities float around, and I’m still producing one comic a month for Marvel for now, but I won’t be adding much to those, if anything at all.  It’s time to do something else for a while.

I may even set up one of those word count things Cherie Priest uses, just so I can go completely fucking mad within days.

So… yeah.  That’s all I can think of to say, right now.  Except to thank my long-suffering literary agent, Lydia Wills, who is a star and an angel.  (I must show you her business-card art soon.  You’ll love it.)

I’m a novelist again.  That’ll piss off the guy who ensured that only the bad review of CROOKED LITTLE VEIN made it to its Wikipedia page, I bet.

There’s the news from Reuters.

And here is the news, with a short essay written for Mulholland, at the imprint’s website.

More in a bit.

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By Rich Stevens of DIESEL SWEETIES. Thanks, squire.

It’s going to be a day.

Click through to buy a copy for very little money:

On its way.