About The Rogue Verbumancer
A chemistry graduate consumed by the demons of apathy and disinterest. Likes tea and cheese. Sleeps less than he should.
All good things must come to an end. In the time since that idiom was first coined, whole nations have risen and entire empires have fallen. And yet, despite all that has gone before, I like many others did not listen. I was seduced by the possibility that things could only ever go up, could only get bigger, that there was no downward slope. But I have paid for my hubris, now I know all too well that the possibility of infinite growth within the confines of a finite system is a quaint illusion. To believe otherwise is folly.
Since I started this blog I have been enthralled by its statistics, the bar-charts, the numbers, the global demographics. As months went by I saw those bars grow and grow. At the end of 2012 I hit an all time record of 1608 hits in a single month. Then it all started to go downhill…
Continue reading
4 comments | tags: Blog Stats, Hits, Peak Blog, Ramblings, Recession, SEO | posted in Ramblings
Time ticks ever onwards. The year fades out of February and into March. The cogs of causal reality whirr and click in the heart of the great and unfathomable machine that is the universe. Winter is petering out and the days are getting warmer. Spring is just around the corner. Spring is a time of change and of new beginnings. Admittedly, depending on how you look at it, the same could be said for all the seasons but that is beside the point. The last two Pictonaut Challenges have been a bit on the grim side. All dark and gloomy, a little bit lonely and depressing, more wintery moods. I think it’s time for a bit of a change of pace and a change of scenery. With the weather starting to get milder and the evenings getting shorter I think it’s high time we pulled on our boots, put on a nice, light and airy coat, because we’re Going For A Walk.
Continue reading
3 comments | tags: Going for a Walk, March, Moscow, Neverwhere, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
It’s a sad thing to come to the end of February. February is cool. Cool in the sense that fezes and bow-ties are cool. It’s cool in the temperate sense too, but that’s neither here nor there. I do enjoy February. But all good things must come to an end. I’m closing the month on something of a high-note. I remain physiological intact, if somewhat mentally disparate, and in the last week I have been spectacularly productive. So productive that I think I’ve been the victim of some cruel and insidious trick. An anthology piece is done, and against all odds I managed to finish off this month’s wordascope in record time. The blog is now a whole two years old and I’m still going. All-in-all I think a small “woohoo” is in order.
Woohoo.
Continue reading
2 comments | tags: Dead Places, Family, February, Great-grandfather, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Ruins, Short stories, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
There are few things quite so satisfying as getting something finished. When you finally limp and stagger over the ill-defined finish line and collapse onto your back, facing the sky screaming “I did it. I DID IT!” Before descending into a fit of manic and unintelligible laughter based gibbering. That, dear readers, is pretty much what happened yesterday at about half past nine in the evening. Back at the start of January I was harping on about an anthology piece that I was hammering away at. It has been a bugbear of mine for far too long. I’m not very good at multi-tasking my projects, if I’ve got something on the go it is that and that alone which consumes my attention and energy. This of course is extremely frustrating when the aforementioned project simply refuses to be written. But with the first deadline looming at the end of the month I gritted my teeth and performed the literally equivalent of dragging someone into an alley and brutally beating them to death with an old chair leg.
Continue reading
3 comments | tags: Anthologies, Finishing, Short stories, Victory at any cost, Writing | posted in Writing
I’m recharging my batteries at the moment. Now you’d think that would be what the weekend was for, and ordinarily you’d be right. But this weekend I took a small holiday and have subsequently taken today off. Primarily because any form of travel leaves me feeling drained, knackered, broken and decidedly inhuman. So today has become a compressed weekend in lieu of an actual weekend, a day where I do nothing except vigorously neck pint mugs filled with tea. As Elbert Hubbard said “No one needs a holiday more than the man who has just had one.”
The holiday in question was a flying visit to my old stomping grounds of Nottingham. It served a very important purpose. My body might be curled up in a small heap and groggily telling my brain to “fuck off” at the merest suggestion of movement, while recharging itself to a point where I can once again pass for human; but this holiday served to reboot my brain. Something I have been in sore need of doing.
Seriously, fuck trains.
Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: Awkward, Friends, Holiday, mental-health, No Ticket, Nottingham, Police, Recharging, Trains | posted in Ramblings
I have always generally been my own worst enemy. A great many of my endeavours have been ruined or hampered by my own laziness, chronic inaction, fear or doubt. But generally that has been something I’ve been willing to live with. Such things are after all generally just an accepted fact of being human. But this weekend I found new and exciting ways to bring grief upon myself. For thus weekend I discovered that I must roam this mortal realm forever trapped inside a traitor.
Continue reading
4 comments | tags: A night on the tiles, Heartburn, Illness, Ramblings, Traitors, Treachery | posted in Ramblings
January is dead. It’s corpse has been stripped of its clothes, jewellery, money and anything of even tenuous value. It now lies cooling in a shallow grave in the middle of the desert of time. That’s just how time roles. It takes you for everything you have and leaves you dead and forgotten. Time is the bastard’s bastard. Cheery today aren’t I? Things were looking up, things were looking good, but then last night dinner went a bit pear-shaped, though not literally, no pears were involved. The cheese sauce bubbled over, it was very messy, it delayed things, it was massively inconvenient. There were no words in any language living or dead that could adequately convey my profound and abiding sense of anger and sadness. It was, in essence, the human condition. These are the trials I face in my life and I am left the worse for it. I swear it was going to be all sunshine and lollipops, unicorns and gumdrop mountains, but now? Now it’s going to be all grim-dark misery and the palpable despair of life in a universe that is as cruel as it is cold. This month we’re going down the rabbit hole and treading where no man should ever set foot. This month we’re going to the Dead Places.
Continue reading
1 comment | tags: Dead Places, February, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Ruins, Short stories, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Down here in my neck of the woods the snow has finally decided to bugger off and leave us well alone. The British weather in its typical mercurial way has rebounded from the cold snap by swinging to heights of frankly terrifying mildness. Despite it being what I would term the depths of winter the temperature rose to an incredible 13 degrees Celsius, forcing me to forgo both jumper and hat. Even the gloves came off, my winter beard now feels entirely extraneous. This unexpected bloom of warmth fits rather nicely with my equally mercurial mood. At the start of the month I was not in the finest of fettles, but now the grim introspection has gone, although the existential dread remains. But I’m okay with that he’s a reasonably okay guy when you get to know him, bit misunderstood and maligned, but always does the washing up and takes his shoes off when he comes through the door. So January’s ending on something approaching a high. I remain gainfully employed, I’m not dead and I have a house with function heating. everything’s coming up rose. Though not literally, give it a few months though.
Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: January, Moebius, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Plodding On, Short stories, Westerns, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Although there is a fair dusting of it about. Believe me, it’s take every fibre of my being to restrain my natural English desire to talk about the weather. I mean look at it! There’s just so much of it. So much weather. Everywhere. Let us just accept that snow has occurred and as always, it has been a divisive issue. I come to you today to talk to you about another matter entirely. For this weekend I did something which could possibly be considered terminally inadvisable. I went onto the Book of Faces and I made a page for the blog. Because that’s what people apparently do these days.
Facebook cares not for the capitalisation of proper nouns.
Continue reading
4 comments | tags: Facebook, Internet, Likes, Ramblings, Snow, The Rogue Verbumancer | posted in Ramblings
Last week I was bemoaning my writing woes. How I felt like I was basically smashing my head against a brick wall. It was less than fun. It’s not a nice feeling, sitting down to do something and then eight hours later discovering that you’ve managed to achieve the sum total of naff and all. So I came up with the cunning and ingenious scheme of breaking the 5,000+ word novella I’ve promised down into ten tasty, bite-sized chunks of 500 words a piece. I’m now sitting pretty at just a few hundred shy of 2,000. So I’d say it’s been a moderate success, even if only 2 of the 10 slated sections have been done. I’d like to attribute this moderate success to my ingenious plan, but in truth I think it’s because of something else entirely. I think it’s due to the fact that my life is profoundly ass-backwards. That is to say, ludicrously disordered and showing an arrangement grotesquely counter to the conventional.
Continue reading
2 comments | tags: Ass-backwards, Breaking it down, Creative Block, Ramblings, Word Counts, Writer's Block, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
