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.

So this month we had an old black and white photo of a Soviet era shopping centre taken by Simon Friedland. We had quite a range of themes this month, all tinged with a wee bit of mystery as we all resolutely refused to tell anyone exactly what the screaming hell was going on in our stories. This month once again showed my own manifest inability to stick anywhere near to my own guidelines. Though, at the start of month (and every month for that matter) I gave the guideline of 1,000 words, I once again utterly failed to abide by it. This month’s wordascope is officially the longest that I’ve produced for this challenge. It weighs in at a hefty 2,046. So that’s over double what I was supposed to write. I am truly a complete monster.

I’ll quite honestly admit that I had fun writing it though, even if it was less than cooperative about extruding itself from my brain and onto the page. There is a second honest admission I have to make. It is perhaps more than just a little bit Neverwhere-y (it’s totally a word) in places. Having only finished reading Neverwhere for the first time at the end of February and then having only finished listening to the new radio adaptation last week it was bound to happen. It obviously falls short of the rich tapestry woven by Mister Gaiman and his probably sentient hair, but I’d like to think it has an appealing richness and absurdity all of its own. Even if I thought I was losing my mind when I was writing chunks of it. It is, in keeping with the Neverwhereiness (also a word,) a bit surreal.

But enough of my ramblings, the wordascopes for this month are as follows:

The Rogue Verbumancer – Wet Geoff and her Newspaper Men

Ali George – Last of the Mondays

James Clayton – The walk that went on forever

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