About The Rogue Verbumancer
A chemistry graduate consumed by the demons of apathy and disinterest. Likes tea and cheese. Sleeps less than he should.
So we’re finally here at the tail end of 2011. A year which has seen us frail and feckless humans stagger from crisis to crisis, lurching drunkenly through the year. Annus horribilis would not, in my opinion, be an inappropriate description. Riots, civil unrest, violence and economics once again threatening to destroy modern civilisation, it’s been a bit of a shit one if I’m honest. But as ever there is always the faint and guttering light at the end of the tunnel that is hope. Hope that next year will be better, that next year we’ll do things right, that this will be the year we’ll all pull together and make the world a better place. Inevitably that won’t be the case, but it’s nice to hope. Hope keeps you going.
I expect that, as I write this, a lot of you will be donning your glad rags for a night of revelry, drinking, debauchery and the fabrication of embarrassing moments that, come the dawn of 2012, you’ll want to pretend never happened. As for me I’ll be spending the evening in a darkened room, treating tonight like I would any other night: whiling away the hours until bed through a form of procrastination that I have elevated to a high art. It will also be the first time I’ve spent new year’s eve sober in nearly a decade, I’m sure this will prove to be a spectacularly novel experience. In the intervening period between now at the tolling of those twelve strikes at midnight it’s time to draw a line beneath December’s Pictonaut challenge.
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Leave a comment | tags: Drugs, Pictonauts, Short stories, The Psychedelic Lady, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Tomorrow sees my annual migration northwards, home, to see the family for Christmas. It will involve a hike across the dangerous wastes of urban Berkshire, a cramped and nervous passage through the subterranean catacombs of the capital, before finally giving myself over to an arduous 4 hours of train based conveyance. I hate trains. I’ll admit I like the idea of trains, I just don’t like using them. I’ve loathed them ever since, at the start of 2005, I was forced to stand for 5 hours from Newcastle to Birmingham. That was pretty awful. The price is brain meltingly extortionate too. Even though I could in theory fly home, the very fact I’d need to spend about £80 to take anything larger than a small back-pack with me is something of a turn-off.
So I’m heading north. However, unlike many tales of high fantasy there won’t be any magical adventures or feats of daring do. There’ll just be a lot of boredom, interspersed with the frustration of being completely incapable of getting anything even resembling a signal, never mind about mobile internet, on the east-coast mainline. It will be a tough journey.
But the prospect of this mighty and arduous journey got me thinking; “Why, in fantasy, do all the terrifying horrors of war, banditry, barbarism, or appearance of gribblies from the beyond and general wholesale evil, always happen in the North?”
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1 Comment | tags: Fantasy, fantasy archetype, fantasy stereotype, Innkeepers, Ramblings, Rangers, The North, The South | posted in Ramblings
As you may or may not know, I am from the North. Specifically the windswept and rainy coasts of Northumberland, England; a place that, I am wont to remind people, is north of the wall. It’s a fuzzy and grey place that isn’t quite Scotland, but isn’t quite England either; it’s a county that the rest of England tends to forget. A lot of people don’t really think there’s anything north of Newcastle other than a vast expanse of nothingness, they’re not far wrong either. There isn’t anything that could be even remotely described as a city and the largest town has a population of just shy of forty thousand. The population density (as I have mentioned before) is only 160 people per square mile, making it the most sparsely populated place in England and forever meaning it plays second fiddle to its neighbouring sibling of Tyne and Wear. You may be wondering where exactly I’m going with this. Being from Northumberland very much defines who and what I am. The things is though, it never used to. Continue reading
5 Comments | tags: Accents, Geordie, Northern, Northumberland, Ramblings, Regional Identity, Regional Pride | posted in Ramblings
This morning was the first day of the year where the cold really started to bite, and it chose to bite hard. The walk home from work was one of those times where you cannot keep your hands uncovered or out of your pockets for more than a minute before they start to burn with the lancing white fire that is the teeth of cold and thousands of nerve endings screaming with horror at its coming. I had a pair of gloves so I was quite fine and content, for they are big warm gloves made from the skin of a mighty beast. By that of course mean, a cow; if anyone takes issue with a cow being described as mighty, just remember that mighty is defined as “possessing great and impressive power or strength”, something which becomes all too apparent if one is charging angrily towards you. We so often forget how big cows really are. Of course the leather could have been from a pig, then I’d have to agree; pigs are proper shit. My meanderings aside, the weather seemed somehow appropriate for the topic of this week’s blog. For today I talk about the cold and unforgiving realm that is Skyrim. Continue reading
1 Comment | tags: Adventure, Dragonborn, Dragons, Legends, Skyrim, Stories | posted in Ramblings
So December’s finally rolled around; the downward slide towards the end of the year. What a year it has been, but not in a good way, not for most people anyway. 2011 has been pretty awful, a year where I’m sure many people have uttered “well, it can’t get any worse can it?” only to then find out that, actually, it can. And what do we have to look forward to? In the long-term, more of the same. A government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich; a world primed to explode, collapse or implode; the bad times of world unrest raising its head once again. Gone are the free and happy peace-loving days of the 90s where everything really looked like it was one the up. Now we’re all back in the trenches, with nothing but shit and shells raining down on our heads. In the short-term we’ve got Christmas. That’s all right I suppose, even if it does mean spending time with people you generally dislike or don’t get on with, all the while having to smile and remain civil. Call me a cynic but everything I can see on the horizon is pants; garishly coloured pants woven from misery, misfortune and despair. But there is a glimmer of hope, a shinning beacon, a lighthouse. It is the return of the Pictonaut Challenge and it is your only hope for salvation in this dark and benighted world. (Maybe, but probably not) Continue reading
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Thus ends the turbulent non-month that is November. A great many things have happened this month, most of them perpetrated by fools. Be it the mustachioed madness of Movember, where hordes of hapless men grow their itchy face hair because suddenly prostate cancer is cool. Or alternatively the insanely optimistic troops of NaNoWriMo and their slog to an arbitrarily defined target.
I was one of these fools. I chose NaNoWriMo because it provided a challenge, it was productive, artsy, enriching and also because I can’t really grow a moustache. (I “won” in the end. I was very happy.) But despite all the hectic dashing about and the hurly-burly of this, that and the other, Pictonauts was still rumbling away in the background. Not the rumble of a mighty volcano fit to shower the surrounding locales with hot, steamy lava. More the rumbling of an empty tummy, or slightly cross cat. Continue reading
1 Comment | tags: NaNoWriMo, Pictonauts, Short stories, The Sphere, wordascope, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
This will be my last post on the topic of NaNoWriMo for this year, as last night, when the sun had gone to bed and the fingers of frost were clawing at my window I did what I had long thought impossible. I finished.
Well I say finished. More accurately I passed the 50,000 word mark. The titanic wordascope that I have been plugging away at all November is by no means ‘finished’. Those fifty thousand words in their extant form consist of a prologue, chapters 1 to 10 and the finishing chapter, number 29. Nineteen chapters that were planned sit in an unwritten limbo. I have a beginning, I have an end, but the middle? That’s not even started yet. Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: High Noon in Outer Space, Misquotes, NaNo, NaNoWriMo, Plans, Ramblings, Writing | posted in Ramblings
Oh how much 
of a difference a week makes. What had been a fairly mundane demand of 1667 words a day has now become an uphill struggle, a real slog through a treacley sea of shitty words.
I’m still on the NaNo wagon for now, but how much longer I can hang on I’m not entirely sure. I’d say I’m getting pretty close to burn out. Which would be slightly frustrating, especially with about 31,500 words under my belt. I thought at passing 25k I was over the hump and it’d be a nice downhill slope to the finish line. Nope, turns out it was just a slight flattening before another big hill. Arse.
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Leave a comment | tags: High Noon in Outer Space, Misquotes, NaNoWriMo, Ramblings, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
Tuesday saw the start of my first attempt at NaNoWriMo. I have now been slogging away at it for almost five days. I’m honestly not entirely sure who I am any more, nor what I have become. I have a strange nagging feeling that there is something akin to unholy witchcraft about the entire concept of NaNoWriMo. There’s no pressure to perform, no real demands, only a vague nebulous challenge of “oh go on, just see if you can hit 50,000 words by the end of this month. If you can’t do it that no one’s going to think less of you. We’re all friends here.” It’s insidious and sneaky. I just simply cannot stop writing. It’s an urge that’s gotten under my skin, it’s a contagious disease spreading across the blogosphere and the internet. There is no cure, there is only success or failure.
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Leave a comment | tags: High Noon in Outer Space, Misquotes, NaNoWriMo, Ramblings, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
So November is upon us. I’ve never been entirely sure about the month of November. It’s a distinctly unremarkable month as months go. There’s no major festivals or celebrations. Sure there’s Bonfire night, which has fireworks and we all love fireworks I’m sure. But at the end of the day that, unlike July the 4th or Bastille day, isn’t about throwing off [perceived] shackles of oppression and embracing the glories of freedom. It’s essentially a celebration of one man’s complete and resounding failure to achieve just that. It is a testament and historical memorial to shoddy workmanship, poor planning and the inability of some people to just keep their mouths shut. My friend Mick goes as far to swear November to be a foul and cursed month, frequently espousing declarations of “nothing good happens in November.” But we get fireworks, large fires and jacket tetties wrapped in tin-foil and baked in the untempered fury of a ten foot high pile of blazing wood, so at the end of the day who gives a shit, we’re all happy. Except Guy Fawkes of course, damn he got a right going over.
So musings on the nature of the November beast aside, there are a few things happening this month which are worthy of note.
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1 Comment | tags: NaNoWriMo, November, Pictonauts, Short stories, The Sphere, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
The Rogue Verbumancer 