And so we find ourselves on the home straight of 2013. The days evaporating away into the æther only to rapidly condense into the sticky and turbid liquid that will become 2014. November is a silly month. Scores of you will now be desperately trying to grow a manly moustache (and almost certainly end up looking like a prat.) Others of you will be hammering away at your keyboard like it has dishonoured you and your ancestors, as you vainly try and churn out 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo. These 50,000 words will almost certainly be purest, unadulterated dross. But for those of us who are follically challenged or don’t much fancy the idea of chaining ourselves to our desks for a whole month, I have an alternative. For as ever, the Pictonaut Challenge rumbles ever on with Regent; with gunpowder, treason and plot (Adjust proportions to taste.)
Author Archives: The Rogue Verbumancer
About The Rogue Verbumancer
Hunting
I come to you now from a world draped in cobwebs, festooned with skellingtons and dotted with lanterns both Jack-o and Snanny (it’s a Northern thing, we make them out of turnips.) The night covers the world, and with the setting of the sun comes the return of that which does not belong in our world. The dead stir in their graves and walk upon this earth once again. Ghosts, ghouls, poltergeists and malign spirits slip through the cracks in the fabric of existence and embark upon a mission of mischief, mayhem, madness and all-purpose merry-hell. Obviously the only sensible response to this is to dress up, devour high-calorie sugared snacks and inappropriately add the adjective “sexy” as a prefix to thing which it does not rightly belong. Or if you;re me: turn-off all the lights and pretend you’re not in just so people will go away and stop knocking on your door. But even with all this frivolity, frippery and social cowardice there’s a lingering feeling that there really might be something out there in the cold autumn night. Something hungry, prowling darkened streets and hiding in the bushes. Something on the hunt…
October’s Pictonaut Challenge
Arguments can be made for October being the worst month of the entire year. These arguments tend to hinge of two factors. Firstly there is Halloween. Halloween on its own is perfectly fine and innocuous, at least from a conceptual perspective. What isn’t innocuous is juvenile humanoids cruising the streets, jonesing for a sugar fix and pelting your front door with eggs if you have the temerity to be out when they come a calling. And secondly there’s the clocks changing. While we all sleep, time creeps into our bedrooms and gives us all an extra hour in bed. Now you’re probably thinking “Mister Verbumancer, sir? How is an extra hour in bed a bad thing?” Well for me it’s the equivalent of taking a 3 kilogramme lump of hardened steel, fitting it to a stout wooden support pole and using the resulting contraption to smash the bejeezus out of my careful recalibrated diurnal rhythms. I clutch the shattered and broken corpse of my sleep patterns, cradling it within my arms; I weep and I realise that I have to start all over again. Time is insidious, it takes and takes and whatever gifts it gives are all poisoned. It is callous, unforgiving, relentless and never around when you really, really need it. It hounds us and hunts us our entirely lives and then, in the end, it devours us. Cheery thought isn’t it? And by that extremely tenuous segue we come at last to October’s Pictonaut Challenge Hunting.
The Crone
And so the sun does set on the month of September. Clouds gather and the nights begin to close in, but still summer ardently clings on with all the anthropomorphised might it can muster. Twenty degree days see-saw with fog so thick it hides every facet of the world. Summer cannot hold on forever and soon we will find ourselves in thunder, lightning or in rain. Already I have seen the drifts of curling brown leaves begin to form in the nooks and crannies of the village. Whole armies of conker shells lie shattered upon the ground, their shiny brown charges spilled and exposed. The year edges ever onwards into its twilight and into darker times. Times where mystery, magic and the possibility of things distinctly other does not seem quite as far-fetched as it did at the height of summer. It is the time of witches, it is the time of The Crone.
September’s Pictonaut Challenge
Today is a bit of a special day. Today sees the commencement of September 2013 and with this the Pictonaut Challenge enters its 25th month. It is now 2 years old. The enormity of that fact still hasn’t quite sunk in. The original idea was something of a fleeting fancy, a passing idea, something I thought I’d give a bash and see where it went. My readership remains tiny and close-knit but I have accomplished considerably more than I originally intended. For two whole years I have kept this little exercise going and for a man who has a singular lack of motivation or perseverance this is a rare and truly beautiful achievement. It also shockingly means I have something that could be referred to as “a body of work.” That on its own is a terrifying thing to realise. A thousand words? Every month? For two years? I’m quite proud of myself.
Since I am a scientist by profession and trade I can’t help but be drawn to the statistics of this little endeavour. And even just a cursory glance at them boggles the mind. The 24 stories (or wordascopes as I have taken to calling them) which I have written come to a total of just over 28,800 words, an average of about 1200 every month.
But of course I haven’t been alone in grappling with this particular challenge, others have joined in too. Our combined efforts have spawned a total of 71 short stories. Based on my average output this places the total cumulative wordcount at around the 85,000 mark. Just let that sink in for a moment. Eighty. Five. Thousand. That is an achievement not to be sniffed at.
So what image have I chosen to usher us into our second year? Behold The Crone!
Voyage to the Planets
Months are oft wont to slip by without you noticing. August has basically evaporated. And considering the continued fair weather that’s hardly surprising. This spate of fair weather was interrupted by one event of note however. A rain storm which I had the misfortune to by cycling home in. A rain storm so fierce and mighty, of such raw unbridled power that it managed to more or less dissolve parts of my new trainers. It also made me very, very wet. Which, if you think about it, is pretty much rain’s raison d’etre. At least I think that happened this month. Time has a very annoying habit of just blurring together in my head, events become transposed across dates. Things which happened in 2006 still feel very much like “only last week.” Yet despite the alleged duality of time and space I have yet to find similar things happening with my own personal geography. There has been no finding myself in two places at once. Which is a shame, because that would be super handy.
August’s Pictonaut Challenge
It’s August now. This is a fact which I am having a great deal of trouble comprehending. How can it conceivably be August? Already? Come on, you’re having a laugh! Seriously? August? Already? Fucking hell…
That means that I’ve been snuggled away in my little one bedroom flat for nearly 10 months. It also means I’ve been down in the deepest, darkest and most hideously depraved outlands of southern England for 2 years. Time is relentless in its surging forwards. The future is always rushing straight at us waving a big sign, which in large black capitals reads “LOOK AT ME!” It’s also my little brother’s birthday. A person who in my mind’s eye will always remain about 11 years old, is now edging ever further into his 20s. That’s not even remotely terrifying. But such is life. It is relentless. It is without mercy. It is unfathomable. It is cruel and it is cold.
In those respects it’s just like space (Tenuous segue ahoy!) Space is cool. Space is out future and it is our salvation. Space is absolutely fucking everywhere. So take your protein pills, put your helmet on and prepare for a Voyage to the Planets.
Sand Sea
British summer. In most situations those two words paired together form one of the most ridiculous oxymorons of the western world. The isles of Britannia don’t do summer. They do prolonged periods of seasonal disappointment interspersed at rare and fleeting intervals with what can only be described as a acts of meteorological cock-teasing. A summer in Britain is about rain, moaning about the rain and clomping through fields in big green wellies. By traditional standards it is not about temperatures that make the deserts of North Africa look positively chill by comparison. Last Monday, as the heat wave crested into its second week temperatures hit 33.5°C. Sun has come to Britain. The first heat wave since 2006. The hottest I remember it being in perhaps a decade. A summer that could even give the Summer of ’76 a run for its money.
I am melting…
Send help…
Holiday
As you may have gathered, I have been on holiday recently. I am usually content to spend my holidays in my flat, windows shut and curtains closed and desperately pretending that the world outside my door doesn’t exist and revealing in solitude. It’s an introvert’s favourite holiday. No hassle, no travel, no fuss and most importantly of all: no people. But sometimes even a wannabe hermit like myself needs to get out and go on something approaching a proper holiday. To get away to somewhere else, a place that is new, different and entirely not here. So I squeezed myself into the back of a friend’s car like something resembling a flat-pack man-shapped thing and off we pootled to Devon. For the next week myself and some 24 others stayed in grand stately home. We’d rented out the entire thing. We then promptly used its vast amount of table and floor space to play games. Swallowed by the countryside and lost in the rural hinterlands of England, there was no phone signal, no mobile internet, there were only games and relaxation.
July’s Pictonaut Challenge
As you read this I should hopefully be in a state resembling some sort of regenerative coma, a slightly more mainstream and fundamentally less cool version of the Odin Sleep. For I will have only just returned from my holidays. Finally returning to my seat of power after wild adventures in Devon and Nottinghamshire. I will be a drained and empty husk, my vital life essences depleted after so long away from the dark and eldritch energies that coarse through my lair. I expect to be so utterly incapable of cognitive processing or even basic motor control, that this post is being written ahead of time. Thus I come to you, through the mist of time, from June 8th. In what I can only described as a very shoddy approximation to a real time machine.
But June is over, June is gone. Now is July. It is the month when the summer holidays started when you were back at school. Six weeks that seemed to stretch on into infinity. Six weeks of perfect sunshine, days unblemished by rain. Of days in the garden, or down at the beach. Or in my case, crunching your way through Final Fantasy 8 and then pretending you’d been out playing football all day when your dad came home. But let us not dwell on nostalgia, for nostalgia is a drug. A highly addictive drug that makes both heroin and crack cocaine seem just “moreish” or “scrummy” by comparison. This is just hyperbolic though. Don’t do drugs. Unless they’re the sort prescribed to you by a legitimate and registered member of the human medical profession.
Rambling aside, time for the Pictonaut Challenge. This month it’s Sand Sea.
The Rogue Verbumancer 