Cartoon Gravity 34

The week online...

Only a couple of posts went up this week on the site, Wick Is Pain which was about the new John Wick documentary and 2025-06-12 which was a journal piece, chiefly about my new office chair. "All killer, no filler" is clearly the motto around here.

On the Pleasant Green site, subscribers got the third instalment of the De Kliek storyline, which is working really well so far.

I also did a live phone interview with Jimmy Mac and Lindsay Lawler on Radio Nemo in the US:

The week in real life...

This week I finished reading Atomic Earths by Lisa Kaltenegger and I can't recommend it highly enough. Kaltenegger runs the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University and her book is an incredibly readable account of the search for extraterrestrial life and the science behind what it takes for a planet to support life. The science is very clear and easy to follow and the book is interspersed with anecdotes about Kaltenegger's life and career, which prevents it from ever feeling too dry.

For work, I have also been going through Lion of Light, which is a collection of Robert Anton Wilson's pieces on Aleister Crowley. Predictably for RAW it's a mess of madness and insight, but interesting nonetheless.

Kickstarter seems to have finished collecting funds from backers and is now in the process of transferring them to me. This next week, I will be getting to grips with Backerkit's pledge management system and starting to put the admin scaffolding in place for delivery, even as Richard Maclean Smith and I start putting the pieces of the Crowley show together.

The whole task, from creating the shows to manufacturing and delivering Kickstarter rewards feels enormous right now, but some methodical project management should break it down into bite-sized chunks.

At the same time, I'm halfway through a new feature script and attempting (still) to put the Bad Memories movie together. Oh, and then there's the novel, which has not seen much progress this week...

On Thursday, we went to see the revival of London Road at the National Theatre. This was easily one of the best things I have ever seen on stage. It's not running for very long, so you should get a ticket if you possibly can.

My daughter and I also got to see a preview of the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition yesterday. As is the nature of the thing, it's a very mixed bag but there is some great stuff there and it's definitely going to be worth a couple of hours of your time over the summer.

Anything else?

I'm having a deliberately lazy day today, plotting out the next couple of sequences of the feature script and trying to make sense of everything I'm supposed to be doing over the next few weeks. I also have a couple of longer form articles simmering on the backburner.

I'm also going to finally figure out the writing box I bought from Galen; what to put in it, what to leave out etc.

I'm going to leave you with this video of Ezra Klein discussing the writing process. It had got me thinking about brining more writers into the Cartoon Gravity space. I'm not sure what that would look like, but I'm interested to hear from writers who have something they want to talk about.

Fuck it. Send.