About The Rogue Verbumancer
A chemistry graduate consumed by the demons of apathy and disinterest. Likes tea and cheese. Sleeps less than he should.
This is a pre-recorded transmission. Held in trust by the central data authorities of the great internet super-highway. If you are reading this, then I am not here. I am elsewhere. I am other. Beyond. On holiday. Possibly even outside, beneath the unremitting solar assault of the dreaded day-star. Or the unremitting aqueous assault of the British skies. The weather has resolutely refused to make up its mind and pick a side in this eternal war of the heavens.
I can scare believe that another month has drawn to a close. But it has, with all of the grim inevitability I have come to expect from time. It does herald the coming of short stories though. Which is nice I suppose.
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1 Comment | tags: June, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Summer, The Toweron the Hill, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Way back in the mists of time, in the dark and gloomy days of March 2011, I foolishly went and had an idea. I then expanded upon this foolishness by not keeping quiet about aforementioned idea. People got excited, perhaps irrationally so and it fell to me to birth this idea into the world; to drag it kicking and screaming from the fevered recesses of my mind. Agreeing to this was the shit cherry on a cake made entirely of shit and iced with a thick, viscous layer of finest shit. I am utterly incapable of organising myself much less anyone else. I had no idea what I was doing and seemed a little unwilling to let anyone else really help. The cocktail of my ineptitude and a liberal showering of other events meant that the idea and the project died shortly after it began. But some things refuse to stay dead. Some things rise from their graves or smash their way out of their tombs and shuffle, scream or soar their way back into the world. This was one such thing.
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2 Comments | tags: Black Stump Films, Films, Prisoners' Dilemma, SFFAS, Short Films, The Box | posted in Ramblings
May has finished its set. Greeted by half felt applause and empty cheers it shuffles off the stage. The audience is restless, hungry and ever so slightly damp. No one was here to see the support act. May was just a sad prelude to what is yet to come. Everyone is here for the headline acts. The gathered multitudes begin to ripple and sway. Feet are stamped in a harsh and demanding staccato beat. It’s primal, they want something and they want it bad. They’ve been waiting for a long time, through disappointment, through the rain and the frost that just wouldn’t go away. They bay in a language with no words but which is understandable to all. The sad acoustic set of May is forgotten as June takes centre stage. The amps have been dialled up to 11 and the bass is strong enough to shatter bone. Things are about to get hot. Electrically hot.
Tortured metaphors aside, summer is here even if its entourage of appropriate weather hasn’t quite made it yet. It’s June and we have another Pictonaut Challenge to occupy ourselves with. This month we have The Tower on the Hill.
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1 Comment | tags: June, Photos, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Summer, The Tower on the Hill, Tower, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
I have spent the last few weeks stewing in a soup of my own stress. A relentless assault of bills, complications, inconveniences, irritations and down right vexation. It has not been a good month in that respect. But there is always tomorrow and there is always music. My days have been balmed by the electro tones of the Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. This was partnered with the mind-bending New Age soundscapes of Mike Oldfield’s Songs of Distant Earth. They have kept me within the tenuous boundaries of sanity. It is quite fitting considering the theme of this month. For how else do you listen to music if not through a Music Box.
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1 Comment | tags: May, Music Box, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Spring, Summer | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Every morning for the last seven months I have left my diminutive one bedroom flat at 7:30 sharp and made my way from the raggedy edged border between town and countryside towards the small parochial and bucolic local station. It’s the sort with a big white station house that, despite the crudely tacked on billboards adverts for taxi companies, clearly belongs in another century. Then I wait on the tarmaced platform waiting for a flat-nosed, lumbering blue and pink behemoth to take me to work. It is a titanic 5 minute journey, for the privilege of this I pay about £55 every month. It is a sorry state of affairs, for as I have mentioned many times in the past: I fucking hate trains. The idea of trains? Sure, fine, they’re brilliant. Actually using them? Fuck off, just fuck right off.
But soon this is all about to change. For this weekend I did something outlandish. Something so utterly out of character for me that both my mother and my brother are wondering whether I have been replaced by a government-cyborg/doppelgänger/alien-clone/sinister-otherworldly-similacrum (delete as appropriate.)
This weekend I bought another means of getting to work every morning.
I bought another mode of transportation.
A velocipede
A duel-wheeled man-powered conveyance
I bought a bicycle.
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7 Comments | tags: Bicycles, Bikes, Commuting, Izzy, MAMILs, Ramblings, Velocipede | posted in Ramblings
May. A month of dancing round poles and the subsequent phallic symbolism such an act invokes. A month of two sweet and solid bank holidays; the last before a drought that save for a brief respite in late August will last until the end of the year. Summer’s not quite here yet. I can sense it though, just around the corner, just waiting for a chance to start flaunting its heat. But with that heat there is the promise of cider, beer gardens and nights as clear and crisp as cut glass. And with the burgeoning swell of summer comes the desire to throw open all your windows and crank the stereo all the way to eleven and let music fill the air. And that leads us, by an unwieldy and overly circuitous route to May’s Pictonaut Challenge: Music Box.
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3 Comments | tags: May, Music Box, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Spring, Summer, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
And no sooner than it had begun, April was over. It scarce feels like 30 whole days have passed since this month’s challenge started. It’s all passed by in a haze of work, writing and lounging about in my jim-jams. Spring has finally deigned to grace us with its mercurial presence. It feels like I’ve done nothing but write this month. Or more accurately try to write for hours only to be rewarded with a brief and transient flicker of words for a few fleeting moments. I’ve been snowed under with things to do, but slowly and surely, in the harsh light of spring, they are melting away. Hopefully I can return to a clam and pastoral life for a while, though I doubt it will be long before I’m seized by writer’s fervour and end up committing myself to even more things. But they are problems for another day. Now, to Pictonaut based business…
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Leave a comment | tags: April, Office Warfare, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Rhys Owens, Short stories | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
There are two things which I am notoriously bad at. These things are time management and concentration. Also I’m pretty bad at spelling, social interaction, domestic cleanliness and human emotion. But for the sake of argument let’s ignore those and stick with the first two. Anyway… I find it incredibly difficult to pay attention to more than one thing at once. I seem to be more or less functionally incapable of listening at the same time I’m reading or writing at the same time I’m listening, or any varied composite mixture of similar things. Basically I can’t really do more than one thing at once, and with my simply dire ability to manage my time I generally don’t have a great amount of time to do a lot of things. For this reason I’ve generally shied away from podcasts. They always got put on the back burner, things to look at later, a thing for a tomorrow never to arrive. As time has gone by I’ve been more and more inclined to give them an even wider berth, for the world of podcasts is world that is to me a strange and unknowable place that operates by rules and laws i have not the nous to fathom nor the patience to decipher. That was until now.
Earlier this week a friend of mine was waxing lyrical about something he had been listening to. I was beguiled by a sliver thin glimpse into a world to which I had never ventured before. I was lost the very moment a smooth, rich baritone voice uttered the words “Welcome to Night Vale.”
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2 Comments | tags: Lovecraft, Podcasts, Ramblings, Recommendations, Surreal, Welcome to Night Vale | posted in Ramblings
Last week saw me more or less soiling myself with abject artistic terror. I’d just started a new project and was somewhat concerned as to what its reception would be. This fear however seems to have been largely unfounded. The fear is dead. I killed it. My hands are slicked with its horror-blood, my shirt stained with its nightmare-fluids and my boots caked with lumps of its panic-offal. So yeah. That’s a weight off my mind.
Jala daughter of Quyren
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Leave a comment | tags: Choose Your Own Adventure, Jala, Ramblings, The Fear, The Fear is Dead, The Working Barbarian, Writing | posted in Ramblings
Right now my anxiety is making a noise. it’s a high-pitched whining sound that could, if properly channelled, slice through steel. I could, if I were so inclined, stretch out this metaphor beyond the limits of its tensile strength. I could draw comparisons between the aforementioned steel and reason. I could even go on to the attribute the alloying elements contained within to a myriad of different emotional qualities and or foibles. But the anxiety has robbed me of much of my desire to sit down and have a real and proper think about things and/or stuff. I think it’s safe to say that I am now deep within the grip of “The Fear.“
But what, you might be wondering, is the source of The Fear. That is a question I for once have an answer to, though I’m not sure if knowing the source makes this any better than the occasional nameless feeling of dread that cloaks my addled brain. The source is simple. At approximately the same time as this post hits the seething cauldron of words that is the internet, my latest writing project starts. Today is the day that The Life and Times of a Working Barbarian goes live.
I have made a grave tactical error…
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1 Comment | tags: Anxiety, Barbarians, Fantasy, New Project, Pulp, Ramblings, The Fear, The Working Barbarian, Writing | posted in Ramblings
The Rogue Verbumancer 