This Blog Needs You

Well perhaps need is too strong a word, perhaps “would actually rather like your assistance” is more apt. It is my understanding that to become internet famous you need to reach out to your readership, make them feel involved, engage with them. That or have tits. Without the required secondary X chromosome for the latter I’ve decided that it would be more prudent to attempt the former.

Not that internet fame is the motivation of this. It’s more boredom. That and it’s terribly lonely blogging on your own. What I’m proposing is an idea I originally wanted to insert into the Sci-fi e-zine from my old university. But now I’m far away in pastures new, that and the majority of my old compatriots were notoriously lax when it came to actually writing things. I, at least, think it’ll be a nice little exercise for those writing muscles, and perhaps a little fun. (FUN IS MANDATORY)

I’m sure over the years everyone’s heard the expression “a picture paints a thousand words.” That’s more or less the jist of it. I’m quite certain that this idea has never been attempted before ever in the history of the world (it has), and it is entirely my own idea free from outside influence (it’s not). Simply put, once a month I will post a picture. We all then have a good sit down and think about it before coming back a month later with a short story about a thousand words long using that picture as inspiration. Should anyone else actually join in with me I’ll put handy-dandy little links to wherever they’ve posted their work. Then we will all feel warm and fuzzy inside that we all wrote something. We can ooh and aah at what everyone else wrote and perhaps catch a glimpse into the workings of their fevered brains. And then we can all be happy. (HAPPINESS IS MANDATORY) In the (un)likely –delete as appropriate- event that no one else joins in with me, be it because of a busy schedule, a bout of chronic lazitude or having had your fingers gnawed off by hoards of rampaging mice (everyone’s a critic these days), it will at least give me some sort of small goal to aim for myself. As opposed to now, where my goals are largely “yeah, I should probably write something…maybe”. It will also give me something to post here, instead of pillaging my rapidly diminishing back catalogue of feckless word-a-scopes, or spouting a torrent of disingenuous bile about trivial concerns. I originally thought of doing this whole thing weekly, but I concluded that the time pressures involved might turn off potential participants. That and seriously, a week? Fuck that noise. There’s no way I’m going to pull that off on a weekly basis. It’s all about a balance of realism over optimism.

Anyway, I have selected a picture to start with. I found it while trawling the internet sometime in January. I don’t know who created it, or even what its actual name is (if anyone actually knows, please inform me). I refer to it as Grenade in the Rain. It is one of the most heart wrenching images I’ve ever seen. There’s something so unspeakably tragic about it.

So with the image at our disposal let’s crank the story-forge up to eleven, dial into the imagination exchange and set the word banks to maximal…

*pew*pew*