A scattered week, this week.

Been talking a lot with Tim Miller, the director of the developing GRAVEL film at Legendary Pictures. I can't talk about my long-term role too much, but I'm an executive producer on this film, and Tim's been brilliant about bringing me into the active development process right from the start of this phase of operations. We've been talking a lot about tone and style, and stuff we like, and the approach into the thing. And swearing a lot and talking about comics. Being involved in the development of an adaptation of your own work is a lot like arguing with yourself, and having several other people in the room who are mostly arguing with the other you. The trick is to understand -- as in the old Chandler anecdote I drag out with dull regularity -- that you're not erasing your own work. You're getting to look at it from a bunch of different angles, in pursuit of new goals. It's not the same mental apparatus that you use to actually create new original work -- it's not like you're second-guessing yourself, per se, so much as thinking about that old work with someone else's brain. It can be frustrating, but it can be a useful sharpener for your tools, too. Or at least an interesting one. It's a peculiar and rare situation to be in, and I find it quite fascinating. Particularly with someone like Tim -- our tastes and interests overlap to some extent, but a whole chunk of them don't, and neither of us are shy about calling the other one names. Note: I wouldn't recommend that last when talking to a director you haven't known for ten years.

In classic Bad Signal style, I would also like to report that I am writing this outside, and it is bloody freezing out here today.

Curse all those people on Twitter who told me to get out of bed.

SPOILER for the post-credits sequence of the AVENGERS film: it's live footage of Joss Whedon going to someone's house, finding the thing they love the best, and killing it right in front of them.

And now I'm back indoors, and the bloody computer just went through three restarts, erasing most of the hour I had to write this in. So it's going to be a short one this week, as I have some phone conferences looming at me.

ENGLAND/WALES: I'm appearing at the How The Light Gets In festival in Hay-On-Wye on June 3 and 4. All details are at http://www.howthelightgetsin.org/, but here are the two bits I'm doing so far:

Sunday 3 June 2012 - 2:00pm Philosophy Session

Our Hopeless Future & Other Comedy

Warren Ellis in conversation with Vassili Christodoulou Novelist, fantasist and icon of British comics

Warren Ellis talks to Vassili Christodoulou about dystopian America, the space age and breaking other people's websites with the power of Twitter.

Monday 4 June 2012 - 12:00pm - Philosophy Session

Thinking Differently

Ben Hammersley, Warren Ellis, Edie Lush. Paul Moss chairs.

The internet is changing our lives and how culture and society function. But is it also changing how we think? Is the immediacy and sound bite character of the online world the beginnings of a bright new intellectual culture or the dawning of a dark age? Internet icon and comic book writer Warren Ellis, technologist and diplomat Ben Hammersley, and political analyst and broadcaster Edie Lush learn to think differently.

I didn't write EITHER of those descriptions.

I've just been lengthily interviewed via email by L_A_N Magazine. No idea when that's due out, but I'll shout when it happens. I was rambling about black rubber burqas at one point.

REMINDERS:

LONDON, Kapow Comics Convention, Sat May 19th, speaking only.

GUN MACHINE: January 2013 in the US, spring 2013 in the UK.

 

Okay.  Sorry for the short week, but the phone's about to ring, and then I have to dig into an outline for A Thing I Can't Talk About For Months.  Next week will be more interesting, promise.

-- W