The Horrible Space Between…

Warren Ellis is going through a run where he posts content from his late, lamented Morning.Computer site to his shiny new WarrenEllis.ltd home. Which means I got a chance to revisit one of those posts where every writer I know feels incredibly seen:

…never ask anyone who’s just finished a book if they’re happy with it, because the answer is always IT’S AWFUL MY CAREER IS OVER GET AWAY FROM ME I WILL TEAR YOUR FUCKING HEART OUT AND EAT IT IN FRONT OF YOU. There’s a terrible space between the conclusion of the copy-editing and the release of the thing where you’re convinced that it’s a rotten piece of work and you’re going to be Found Out and everything is over. You start telling the wall — because you don’t know anybody any more, because you’ve been indoors for months destroying a laptop with your crap — that if you only had another six months, if you could just alter a couple of things, if you could just maybe take out and replace a plotline, and maybe the main plot, and all the characters, and change the title, and write a whole different book, then everything would be fine…

On Finishing A Book, WarrenEllis.ltd

Apropos of nothing, you should probably be reading WarrenEllis.ltd. You should almost certainly be subscribed to his newsletter. And, honestly, the only way I’m getting through the political chaos of the modern world is re-reading Transmetropolitan, which has started feeling terrifyingly contemporary and yet contains astonishing amounts of hope amid its bleak, post-human cyberpunk vision.