No Substance #164: Orange
The image above is Andy Warhol’s ‘Five Deaths Eleven Times in Orange’. It’s part of Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, a collection of 70 odd works about things such as car crashes, suicides, electric chairs, and tainted cans of tuna. The images were originally drawn from newspapers and police reports, and then put through a silk screen press where they’re repeated and coloured. Warhol is quoted from this time saying, ‘When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it really doesn’t have any effect.’
It’s December.
Hello.
A lot of people are doing their end of year lists, but I don’t have one for you. I’ll probably have one in January, after the year ends. It’s a shocking thought, but there you go.
Most of you are starting to wind down as the year comes to the end. No doubt you’ve got a number of Christmas parties you don’t care about that you must attend. I wish you the best. One of the nice things about self employment is no one does that sort of thing. Which is good, because I find myself in the odd position of feeling like I’ve just go back into work. It’s mostly due to the year I’ve had, I know. It has been busy, and there has been disruptions that couldn’t be avoided, or that weren’t anyone’s fault and you just had to live through them. It’s quiet now, though, and if I’m good I can get some work done.
If I’m good. What a concept. I sound like I’m ten.
Anyhow: I published one short story this year, ‘The Ministry of Saturn’, over at Lightspeed. You can read it there for free, if you haven’t already.
I’ll have another story in Lightspeed in January, and another sometime later in 2024. I’ll have a book out next year as well. The Red Labyrinth will be published by Snuggly Books sometime in 2024, I think. It’ll be my ninth book. My last book came out in 2017. It’s a long time between 2017 to 2024 and I hope I won’t have such a break again, but you can never tell. Writing and publishing is a very humbling industry at times. And I’m not even talking about what happens when your book comes out. Some days I don’t know how I’ve managed to keep writing. Some days I know there’s nothing else.
It’s a strange world and I can’t explain it to you. I turned forty seven this year and I am, somehow, against all odds, still writing and still publishing.
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