With Bret Easton Ellis seeming at long last to have gotten the message that no, he will have absolutely nothing to do with the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey, no matter how often he creepily insists that James Deen would be perfect to star whilst staring, unblinking, into your own eyes (again, please do not Google James Deen if you’re unfamiliar with the name and at work or around children), another long-time chronicler of the beautiful and vacant has proven a source of unexpected ardour for the project: Film-maker Gus Van Sant, director of American arthouse classics like Gerry, My Own Private Idaho and Drugstore Cowboy, is seemingly so eager to steer the book to the screen that he’s already filmed one of the sex scenes, entirely unsolicited and off his own back, if that phrasing isn’t too misleading given the circumstances.

It’s been a hot, awkwardly phrased minute since we last had anything worth reporting on the ol’ Fifty Shades of Grey front. Thankfully however, after three months, our long, hard, throbbing national nightmare is over with the news that Vintage is set to publish the excessively punctuated Fifty Shades of Grey: Inner Goddess (A Journal), which is either a canny piece of Fifty Shades merchandising or a spin-off of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.

Big week this week for EL James (when is it not?): after being named ‘publishing person of the year‘ by Publishers Weekly last Friday – insert your own Simpsons reference – the author and anagram of Jams Eel, which could conceivably be a sex act featured in her next novel, saw Fifty Shades of Grey beat off all comers (snigger) to take the title of popular fiction book of the year at the National Book Awards. Since civilisation had already ended by that point, presumably the canapés at the ceremony weren’t up to much.

As the leaves fall from the trees, autumn descends and the turn of the seasons rolls relentlessly onward, it’s nice to be reminded that some things are, indeed, constant and unchanging, such as the neverending news cycle about the forthcoming film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey, which still hasn’t been made even though it feels like we’ve been writing about it since some time before the Boer War.

It continues to dominate (ohoho) seemingly every news story to come out of the publishing world, so let’s get all of this week’s Fifty Shades of Grey news out of the way in one quick go, shall we? It’ll be just like ripping off an Elastoplast. Unless that’s the kind of thing you’re into, in which case, ew.

Yes, yes, it’s another post about another sales record broken by Fifty Shades of Grey, but look: we’ll stop reporting on it just as soon as you convince people to stop buying it. Vintage has unleashed the Kraken here, and the second it can stuff it back into the depths (oo-er missus, etc.) from whence it came, we can all shut up about it, finally, and get on with our decidedly non-sexy day to day lives. Until that glorious day, however, we’re stuck with letting you know that the trilogy has now collectively outsold all seven Harry Potter books on Amazon UK, making EL James the biggest selling author in the site’s nearly-fourteen year history.

In news that, for the sake of hilarity, we’ll attribute to The Daily Mail, EL James’ piece of Twilight slash fiction Fifty Shades of Grey has well and truly transcended its origins as a word of mouth e-book success story (most likely whispered about behind a theatrically raised hand) to become the fastest selling UK paperback since sales records began. Having topped the UK bestseller list for four straight weeks, sold more than 550,000 copies (over 100,000 of which were shifted in a single week) and overtaken the likes of J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown and, funnily enough, Stephenie Meyer, the book is now on track to sell over a million copies in the UK alone by year’s end.