May. A month of dancing round poles and the subsequent phallic symbolism such an act invokes. A month of two sweet and solid bank holidays; the last before a drought that save for a brief respite in late August will last until the end of the year. Summer’s not quite here yet. I can sense it though, just around the corner, just waiting for a chance to start flaunting its heat. But with that heat there is the promise of cider, beer gardens and nights as clear and crisp as cut glass. And with the burgeoning swell of summer comes the desire to throw open all your windows and crank the stereo all the way to eleven and let music fill the air. And that leads us, by an unwieldy and overly circuitous route to May’s Pictonaut Challenge: Music Box.
Category Archives: Writing
Office Warfare
And no sooner than it had begun, April was over. It scarce feels like 30 whole days have passed since this month’s challenge started. It’s all passed by in a haze of work, writing and lounging about in my jim-jams. Spring has finally deigned to grace us with its mercurial presence. It feels like I’ve done nothing but write this month. Or more accurately try to write for hours only to be rewarded with a brief and transient flicker of words for a few fleeting moments. I’ve been snowed under with things to do, but slowly and surely, in the harsh light of spring, they are melting away. Hopefully I can return to a clam and pastoral life for a while, though I doubt it will be long before I’m seized by writer’s fervour and end up committing myself to even more things. But they are problems for another day. Now, to Pictonaut based business…
April’s Pictonaut Challenge
This post is arriving after noon so as to avoid the plethora of April Fools related shenanigans and totally not because I popped out to buy milk. The start of April is always a bit silly, hell the entire month is a bit silly. It rolls up declaring “Look! It’s definitely spring now! The weather is going to be so much better now!” And then it promptly tips it down for nearly the entire month. April is a month of lies and absurdity. Last Year I picked a fairly bizarre image for April’s Pictonaut Challenge, so I decided to stay in a similar vein this year. Combine this with the fact that today is one of the UK’s scant few public holidays, that means tomorrow the vast majority of us are back to work. So in keeping with that, and a desire for general absurdity we have Office Warfare.
Going For a Walk
It is March 31st and let me just say now, for the record, I am most assuredly not going for a walk. As fellow Brits are probably well aware we’ve just entered British Summer Time, BST, Bastard-Shitting-Timechange. Last night Time snuck into my room while I slept and stole from me an hour of rest. Now I’ve got a horrible fug in my head, a slight headache and a general desire to crawl under a particularly large rock and die. I have what can be best described as a case of temporal jet-lag. I can fly half way around the world and laugh at the mere notion of travel based jet-lag, but the minute the clocks change it comes and hits me, quite literally, where I live. But you didn’t come here to read about my dodgy circadian rhythms. You came here for stories. Or because you googled something seriously weird.
March’s Pictonaut Challenge
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.
Dead Places
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.
Victory At Any Cost
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.
February’s Pictonaut Challenge
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.
Plodding On
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.
Ass-backwards
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.
