Posted by Kip Manley on Apr 16, 2024
Let’s do this!
No. 43 is appearing pretty much a full year after no. 41, and all I have to say about that at the moment is no. 44 is actually on track and taking shape, though it’s not a shape I’d been expecting. I swerved into a moment inspired by a moment from Eddison—one of those where the whole crufty panoply of mannerisms and cod-Jacobean prose cracks just enough to let something shockingly modern peep through, and, I mean, that’s not, I don’t think, what I’m doing, or on about, or the effect that will be achieved, I don’t know, but still: inspired, I guess. So. —And then the next bits: I’d been following Tom Ewing’s series of critical essays on Dave Sim’s Cerebus, which had me remembering not only when the comic was good, but what it was like reading it when it was good, which (for me) was very much about the physicality of the floppies, the seriality of it, which, I mean, is an enormous piece of why it is I’m doing what I’m trying to do here, and it was good to sit with that memory in my fingertips for a bit. But: a chance mention of a structural technique Sim used gave me what I needed to solve a number of problems in the next bits, and as I moved things around in the outline I realized it had been foreshadowed by some of what had already been done before, so there’s that serendipity again.
Other than that: the next novelette in the re-run sequence is no. 42, which began appearing this week at Royal Road and Scribble Hub: that means no. 43 will be re-run only a couple of weeks after it appears. And paper copies of no. 43 have been delayed a bit, due to the unfortunate timing of vacations and conferences; look for them soon. As for recent reading: I just finished Vajra Chandrasekera’s Saint of Bright Doors on the train, which is just the sort of book to make me wonder what I’d be doing if I weren’t doing this. Anyway. See you in a couple of weeks, on the first of the month.