Out of the Debauched Sloth
Chaz Brenchley's Fortnightly Newsletter
“To the English, the weather is always the first of the news,” - me, as it happens. I am very intelligent.
Okay, then. Conforming to stereotype: the good news hereabouts is that the weather has finally remembered itself, and is delivering a proper California climate at last: temps in the low 80s and rising, not a cloud in the sky. No rain now until October, probs, at the earliest. (That last of course not counting as “good news”, obvs; it’s just what comes hand in hand with the heat that I love.)
It’s been a tough couple of weeks, here at Brenchley Towers: hopes held out, then delayed, then abruptly dismissed. Alcohol may have been resorted to. Nothing I’m in a position to talk about, though, so vaguelettering it is, until something actually does qualify as news.
Speaking of which, what? I have once again done more proofing (of other writers’ work) than anything of my own, since last we spoke. That said, I did finish the latest chapter of the latest Crater School book, and posted that to the Patreon; and I have done significantly more work on my Stalky-and-Co analogue on Mars (they are Wilkie & Co, did I mention? And they could have done that in direct imitation, for they are the post-war generation and Kipling features quite heavily in the Red Raj, so our boys are likely—nay, almost guaranteed—to have read those stories, and chosen to model themselves upon what Elinor Brent-Dyer refers to as The Three). Including the obligatory verses to open this first story with. In another part of the internet I did promise to share those verses in this newsletter, and so I shall.
In other news, my agent and I continue to seek a publisher for my novel-of-last-February, not to mention its sequel, my novel-of-last-March. Extraordinarily, the industry seems to have become even slower yet; it was bad enough before the pandemic, but John says that turn-around times of eighteen months to consider a text are now commonplace. When I started in this business, I drone wearisomely, you could hope for a response in four to five weeks, and expect one in six to eight.
Project LessAlcoholInChaz is still ongoing; I take none through the working week, except in emergencies like last week, and preauthorised events like later this afternoon, when I go to record an episode of Writers Drinking Coffee and will certainly be drinking wine throughout. Two years of isolation has exacerbated my already pathological taciturnity; I know I got through at least one WDC without saying a single literal word. Wine helps, I find. Red coffee is the best coffee. (You can get that on a T-shirt, if you like. Or a mug. We have merch! Not as cute as Jorts merch, obvs, but not everything can be ginger kittens, alas.)
I’m not allowed to tell you what book I’m proofing right now for Subterranean, but I can say that I’m enjoying it so much it’s actually displaced my current reading-for-pleasure; I’d rather go on working, if this comes under the category of work. I’ll remember to plug it later, I hope, once it’s been announced and the preorder links are up and so forth. (Oops, more vaguelettering. Sorry ’bout that.)
Paid subscribers can look forward to the second installment of THE SAMARITAN’s origin story, coming soon; otherwise, I’ll be back in a couple of weeks, give or take the enthusiasm of a deity and the water-level in the drainage channel.
Here’s that poem, for your amusement (and I’m sorry, I can’t figure out a way to stop it treating each line as a separate paragraph):
The men who cut the stone were ill-rewarded,
As they laboured in their quarries far away:
Too coarse to be considered, far too sordid
To be spoken of where Beauty holds her sway.
But every line of loveliness revealed,
The strength of every buttress as it wears,
Calls back to those whose backs declined to yield
Beneath the weight of fame that is not theirs.
- “The Cathedral, I: The Quarrymen”
We shall meet again. In two weeks, give or take, he said, not quite so Fu-Manchuly.