The Wheel in the Sky

So here we are at the end of July and as the heat wave that’s been assailing Britain comes towards its end so does July’s Pictonaut Challenge. You’d think that 10 months in I’d have gotten the hang of this short story lark. You’d think I’d be cracking this out in the space of an afternoon the day after the month’s challenge starts. You’d think I’d then spend the rest of the month in casual relaxation while spending odd hours here and there honing the text to a razor-sharp point. You would however, be quite fantastically wrong. I’m writing this blog post on the evening of the 30th of July, it’s 8:43 pm and July’s wordascope remains incomplete. I didn’t even start writing it until Saturday evening. I am a terrible sham of a man, a fraud and a man of lies and deceit. But at the end of the day nothing focuses the mind more than blind panic.

At the start of the month I mentioned that the picture was the work of the late Robert McCall but neglected the mention its actual source. Now I suspect that anyone who has even the vaguest inclination of writing anything with a sci-fi bent to it probably realised that it was in fact part of the iconic artwork from the late Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Based of course of the book by the late Arthur C. Clarke. That’s quite a lot of dead people when you think about it.

Once again I seemed to have reprised my themes of “Oh fuck it’s all gone horribly wrong” and “Yeah, we’re proper fucked” and “THE END TIMES ARE HERE PUNY MORTAL” that so often find their way into things I write. It’s really grim, not really gritty though. Just some uninspired, late night musings that could possibly be tangentially linked to the nature of existence. But when I started this whole short story gig way back in September last year I never made any guarantee that what I would produce would actually be any good. The rest of the wordascopes are far, far better.

The Rogue Verbumancer – All that’s left as the world burns

James Clayton – The Tale of a lovesick man… In Space!

Sir Marc of the Most Noble Order of Jolt – A working man and his son

Remember to check back tomorrow for the start of August’s Pictonaut Challenge