Cartoon Gravity 35

Evening all. It's a ramble this week, I'm afraid.

As Cartoon Gravity Pro members will know from yesterday's piece on rewriting, I have become a little obsessed with Formula One, thanks to Netflix's "Drive to Survive". I am late to this party, but F1 has never grabbed me before (despite getting to watch from the pit lane once, as Damon Hill won Silverstone). Now it has me firmly in its grip, not because I love loud fast cars, I'm largely indifferent, but because the machinations of the sport turn out to be fascinating and, per yesterday's Pro piece, because I am a sucker for people performing at the top of their game in any field.

That obviously goes for the drivers, but one of the surprise stars of the show is Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff. I'm not converting anyone to the cause with this newsletter, but if you're already into Toto, this long-form interview by Dax Shepherd will certainly be of interest.

I've lost a lot of today to tinkering with my photos on the Format site. There aren't many recent ones up there yet, but I'm attempting a redesign, and then I'll link to the whole thing here.

Work has been a bit on-again, off-again, as is the nature of the summer holidays. But the novel is now past 70,000 words and steaming into its final act, the new screenplay just saw its halfway mark slip into the rearview mirror, and a few new ideas are bubbling under. I have also finally broken ground on the first episode of Crowley — I've decided just to write the first episode while we're still assembling our research, because I need to get the feel for it and figure out how we're going to do it, and writing the thing is the best way I know to do that. It will change, inevitably, but there's only so long I can talk about an idea before I have to start writing something.

There have been a few seismic tremors in the film finance world over the past few weeks, and it looks like there's a chance we might be able to put one or both of the films together that I'm trying to make. Too early to tell which way this will go, but some activity is better than stagnation. I also have a new TV pilot script doing the rounds in the US. Time was, that industry was fast and hungry, but I am having to adjust to the new, slower, pace of doing business in the US. The Writers' Strike arguably seemed like a good idea at the time, and there were certainly things within it worth fighting for, but the fallout from it seems to have been utterly disastrous for most US film and TV writers.

After a brief and semi-hopeful flurry of activity last week, it seems my time with BBC Audio has also come to an end. There were a couple of things that we thought might work out there, but they didn't happen, and the whole process of form-filling and pitching and then the endless waiting for no result has just become too wearing for me. It looks like launching the Crowley Kickstarter happened at just the right time — if there is a future for me and audio fiction (and there is), it's unlikely to be with the BBC.

In Paris last week, I finally got to go into Messy Nessy's Cabinet. Regular readers will know how often I link to pieces on the Messy Nessy site, which is my first port of call most mornings. I am pleased to report that this small shop on the Rue De Bievre (above an underground river, of course it is) is everything I hoped for — knick-knacks, oddities and some serious rarities. It's a stone's throw from Notre Dame, and it doesn't have the queues of Shakespeare and Company, so drop in if you're nearby.

As previously reported, I have drastically thinned out my app stack, and I have also thinned out the time I spend at my desk recently; it turns out that working on an iPad (wherever possible) is a much better way to maintain focus than having an all-singing, all-dancing distraction machine at your fingertips. The iPad is great for writing prose, and dealing with emails etc. Thanks to Arc Studio, it also makes a pretty good stab at functional screenwriting now, too.

Ulysses has become my go to for everything from blog posts to newsletters to the novel. Much of my organisation is done with pen and paper now, but Akiflow does a great job of making sure nothing falls through the cracks, and of allowing me to time-block on more hectic days (I recently did another big dive into productivity apps, and that served to cement Akiflow even more — it's certainly the best thing out there). I still haven't decided what to do with all my notes, because I find every available option wanting. With that in mind, I am defaulting to Bear more and more because it's easy just to throw something into it and surface it later. Obsidian is still doing the heavy lifting for the Pleasant Green "Attic", and so that is still a place I am spending a decent amount of time.

The most significant change is that I have ditched Day One for Diarly. I can't actually remember why I did this, but I like to record bits and piece of my days so that I can look back and maintain some kind of record. Diarly is a little more functional than Day One and just seems a bit fresher.

Ready for some links? I've been diving back into Raindrop, which houses thousands of things I've saved over the past few years. The first thing that popped up is this piece from Nautilus about an author using AI to help write his novel. It's not what you think it's going to be.

Of course, we need something from MessyNessyChic. This is from 2022: You’ve probably Never Heard of the Most Fascinating Woman of the Belle Epoque.

Six Days Afloat In The Everglades was one of those all-time-great NYT online pieces, also from 2022.

Do you know what? All the other ones I was going to post turn out to be from MessyNessyChic, so I'm just going to send you off there instead. It's SUCH a great site, with so many wonderful rabbit holes to disappear down. Every time I land there, I lament that I don't have more time to create and explore like Nessy does. One day...

Fuck it. Send.

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