Cartoon Gravity 26

Julian Simpson -

What's this you say? An actual Cartoon Gravity newsletter, with a number and everything?

I know, I can't believe my own eyes either. It has been nearly a year since I decided to stop writing "regular" (they were never that) newsletters, but I woke up this morning and I just fancied writing one. Let's not get carried away.

There is an ulterior motive, of sorts. This week I got to sit down with Suw Charman-Anderson, who is, among other things, the founder of Ada Lovelace day and something of an authority on crowdfunding. I was picking her brains on how to put together some Pleasant Green funding initiatives, so we can get going on another season of the Lovecraft Investigations and maybe a few bits and pieces of other audio in that space, and Suw pointed out that I would need a place where I can talk to people about this stuff and put the mailing list together. Cartoon Gravity already exists, and you're all here, so I thought it would be a good idea to refresh the whole thing and really underline this space as the place that I talk to you all.

The Development Hell Substack is where I post non-fiction stuff, mainly about writing (a brand new piece on the state of Hollywood went up last night and you can read that HERE), and obviously the Pleasant Green Blog is for all things Pleasant Green (more on that in a moment), but Cartoon Gravity is me talking about whatever I fancy and this is therefore the best place to talk to people about all the things. So here I am.

The App Stack

Cartoon Gravity wouldn't be Cartoon Gravity unless I was wanging on about apps, so let's get to that first (non-nerds, please skip down):

I'm writing this in Ulysses, which I have recently come back to after a brief sojourn with IA Writer. I love both apps for different reasons, but Ulysses edges it for usability and because it can work with Aeon Timeline if needed. Ulysses also does a nicer job with little things like outlines, keywords/tags and links.

The current PKM or notes app is Capacities. Notes apps, as you know, are the things I go back and forth on the most, but I am REALLY trying to settle at the moment and Capacities is iterating fast, looks great, and now works on all mobile devices. It can be a little fiddly sometimes, but I have the entirety of the Pleasant Green Universe in there now and it all looks great, like I've built my own encyclopedia.

Task management is happening in NotePlan, an app that has come on in leaps and bounds and now works like a digital bullet journal. It's incredibly powerful and easy and has replaced Notion/Akiflow/Sunsama etc for me. I open a daily note and my tasks are right there. They can be time-blocked, they can be re-ordered or re-scheduled and, best of all, I can write notes around them and reminders etc and everything just goes where it needs to be.

And that's pretty much it; the app stack has thinned out considerably since last we spoke, and I like it this way.

OK, everyone else can come back now, it's time to talk about...

Pleasant Green

Hollywood being in the doldrums right now, I have decided to make Pleasant Green my life for at least the next few months. I'm very happy with that decision, because there is a LOT I want to do in this universe and I am finally carving out the time to get some of it done. In the past I have been a little coy about plans because, well, the nature of this business is that everyone is a little secretive about projects but NO MORE. I am showing my work now!

First up, there's going to be a movie of BAD MEMORIES. This has been in the works for a while (truth be told, it's still in the works because these things take AGES to come together) but I can tell you that the script is written (and re-written, and re-written) and the action has moved to the US. This is partly for commercial reasons and partly because it lets me set the story in Arkham-country, which is really exciting to me. The story is an adaptation of the original radio play, not a straight translation, but the whole thing is going to be creepy as hell. We have actors attached to play Rachel and Jim, but that's the one thing I do have to be coy about for contractual reasons. I can tell you that I LOVE these two actors and they are going to be incredible.

Then there are THREE (count 'em!) movies coming up behind that (quite a bit behind because I'm only writing them now). THE SHADOW WORLD is a supernatural espionage story that is going to be crazy-dark. It tells the story of Marcus Byron and Victoria Ness, who both featured in The Haunter of the Dark, and explores the weird liminal space that we call "The Breach". Behind that are two interlinking movies, one big, one smaller, that are going to be set in Paris and revolve around the activities of the Levesque Institute. I'm super-excited about all three of these, but it's going to be a long old journey from here to when we start selling tickets.

On the TV side, there is a show tentatively titled WENTWORTH, which I'm incubating right now. It's set on the Suffolk coast (of course it is) and it's going to be intersecting with the Pleasant Green Universe from a different angle, as a London cop (it's British TV, the main character has to be a cop, that's the law) heads back to her home village to investigate the death of a schoolteacher, which leads her down a trail into her own, very dark, family history. I want to do this show on a new model; 30 minute episodes, low-budget (like an indie movie) and financed independently so we get the freedom to make it right. I imagine that's going to take a while to come together, but it'll be worth it if we can make it work, and I want to sprinkle a few familiar characters into it too.

More immediately, the latest installment of the Saltmarsh storyline will be going up on the Pleasant Green site, for paid subscribers, in the next few days. This story is getting weirder and scarier from here on in.

We have to sit down and figure out the crowdfunding stuff over the next month or so, but the plan right now involves two audio series and I'm not sure what order we're going to fund them in. Obviously one is the fifth season of The Lovecraft Investigations. That's expensive, relatively speaking, because I want to do a full series of 30 minute episodes and really dive back into the world properly. You all have an idea of what story I'm adapting for this, but you have NO IDEA where we're going to take this one...

The other audio series is more modest, but I think it's going to be really good. Throughout the Lovecraft Investigations, we have continually made reference to the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley, and it occurred to me that there is more than enough material there to create a non-fiction audio series detailing Crowley's life and very weird exploits; birth to death, soup to nuts, the whole thing. We'd make it entirely factual BUT we would present that information within our own framework ie. Kennedy and Heawood would host the show, with the occasional guest interviewee (a certain professor of folklore, for instance) for added colour. I'm really excited about this idea, as a kind of Lovecraft Investigations 4.5, but the format lends itself to a whole strand of occult non-fiction ideas as well.

Knocking around on the periphery of all this is THE VERY RUINE OF THE WHOLE LAND, which is a feature-length audio piece telling the origin story of a character called Karen Whybrew, who no one but me has met yet (readers of the Saltmarsh storyline will be encountering her very soon). The idea here is to do something absolutely spectacular with sound, like a weird, spooky art movie on headphones - something that will really push the boundaries of the medium.

Meanwhile, I'm working to set up the premium "Department of Works" membership tier on the Pleasant Green site (Ghost does not make it easy to do this stuff in the background without publishing everything, but I'm getting there). I had wanted to offer high-quality audio downloads of the shows to that membership level, but we have a boring issue with distribution rights at the moment, so that may take a while. In the meantime, I am delving through behind-the-scenes photos and notebooks etc to put together a really good package for The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. When I've got that together, I'll launch the tier and then start assembling and posting material for the other seasons, one by one. I'm also going to include downloadable PDFs of all the series scripts. We're also talking about putting a few bits and pieces of merch together.

The future of the Pleasant Green site is looking pretty good at the moment. The Saltmarsh storyline is leading into some other fiction ideas, and a recent trip to Amsterdam yielded an interesting notion about an organisation known only as The Cabal, which Parker is investigating and which intersects with the aforementioned Karen Whybrew storyline.

AND ANOTHER THING, which I may have alluded to before; dust off your D20s because I'm going to be working with Pelgrane Press to create a Pleasant Green supplement for their stupendous Trail of Cthulhu game system. That's in the early stages (because I have been slow getting off my ass and providing material) but it is now happening just as fast as we can manage it.

Like I say; full immersion in the Pleasant Green Universe for the next few months. I can't wait.

As we move forward on all these fronts, there will be plenty of opportunity to help out and get involved. Cartoon Gravity will be the place to learn about it all first, so if you know people who like the world, make sure they know to sign up here (it's free). Our best chance of getting a head of steam is to bump up the subscription numbers on this site, so we can launch membership and crowd-funding initiatives in a big way. The more people you can hook in now, the more we can get done.

And breathe... Some links to see us out of the weekend:

Robert Rodriguez did an amazing interview with Tim Ferris a few years back, covering all aspects of creativity. It's really inspiring and you can listen to it HERE.

From that, I learned about Rodriguez's show "The Director's Chair", where he interviews film-makers about their process. That's really great too; he has people like Francis Coppola, Guillermo Del Toro, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann etc, and they're all talking process because they's with a fellow film-maker and they don't have to plug anything. I'm not going to post a link, because I suspect it's not meant to be up on YouTube, but it is and it's not hard to find.

This Hollywood Reporter piece on the current state of Hollywood is sobering.

In case you didn't already see it, my friend Joseph Brett made this for Halloween, I hear it took FOREVER:

Oh, I almost forgot - ALDRICH KEMP AND THE ROSE OF PAMIR starts on Radio 4/BBC Sounds on Friday 22nd November. This is our best series so far. I'll post the trailer just as soon as it's available.

I'm no longer on Twitter (good riddance), but you can find me on Substack and Bluesky. Please send as many people as you can over to this site to sign up for news - we're going places now!

Fuck it, send.