Category Archives: Writing
So June has finally arrived. Despite the fact that I’ve been operating on British Summer Time since late March, June is, in my distorted world view at least, the first proper month of summer. I was all ready to launch it a vicious and scathing attack on summer. On how it’s hot, sticky and generally uncomfortable. A tirade about how as nice as a bit of sunshine is, excessive amounts cause me to wilt into and exhausted and non-functional jelly. The sort of hellish weather I had to live through over the last few days. But then, at the dawning of June, the hot weather disappeared. It was replaced with a chill and pervading overcast drizzle. This was much more to my liking, but somewhat put-paid to any plans for my original rant. It longer seemed quite so topical. Although I’ve never particularly enjoyed experiencing the heat of the oppressive British summers of recent years I have always enjoyed the aesthetics of the summer. Perhaps it’s one of those lingering relics of a childhood growing up in the rural north. Summer was a time when the grass always looked greener than it ever did at other times of the year, the sky was always bluer, every colour just seemed so much more vibrant, every hue a riot of almost neon proportions. The world always seemed so vivid. It was a world that through its existence prohibited melancholy and sadness. With these memories in mind I picked this picture for June’s Pictonaut Challenge: A Place in the Country.
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Leave a comment | tags: A Place in the Country, June, Pictonaut Challenge, Short stories, Summer, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
There may have been some of you who turned up here on Monday just after the striking of noon expecting a blog post. Some of you may even have been disappointed to see that there wasn’t one. Since we’re all friends here I’m going to be honest, I just couldn’t be bothered to stitch some words together and send a shoddy collection of thoughts shambling into the bright and burning light like a poorly constructed corpse-beast. Necromancy has after all, never really been my forte. Besides, you were going to be getting two blog posts at the end of the week. Three posts in one week seemed a little overkill. I spent much of last weekend and indeed Monday itself, elsewhere. I left the safe confines of the Fortress of Ineptitude (my house) and sallied forth (got a train) to a dark and foreboding place filled with evil and despair (Hampshire) to see my mentors in the ways of the arcane arts (my parents.) What followed was three days of traipsing around a variety of gardens and stately homes which, due to the weather, may as well have been on the surface of the sun. In those three short days my carefully cultivated nerd-pallor of pure alabaster white has been utterly destroyed. Now my exposed flesh has become the colour of orange leather. This is one of many reasons I tend to avoid the outdoors and the sinister privations of the malevolent day-star. On the subject of stars I suppose I should get down to the business of wrapping up May’s Pictonaut Challenge: Starwatcher.
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Leave a comment | tags: Gayane, May, Moebius, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Starwatcher, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Today is a good day for writing. 
The sun is streaming in through the back windows, across the open expanse of the kitchen and into the front-room. It makes my little cosy world feel spacious and clean. Fresh. A state that belies its true nature. The discarded plates can go unnoticed, the strewn flotsam of rubbish can wait till tomorrow, the strata of filth and grime is something which can be avoided. I’m drinking a big cup of organic white tea (middle-class represent!) out of a big, fat, pint mug. Times like these are one of only two times I can really write, the other being the grey place where afternoon and evening blur together. There is always however a problem with writing, the ever struggling battle for originality, the quest to produce something new and exciting. Naturally this isn’t as easy as it sounds.
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Leave a comment | tags: Georges Polti, Gilgamesh, Originality, Shakespeare, Stories, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
So it’s May. The last month of spring. The last month before summer finally arrives and my world begins an inexorable slide into an unpleasant, Stygian heat. The rains of the last month have been a delightful salve to my soul. I like rain. It keeps me cool, it makes me feel clean, it reminds me of a better time. A time when it meant I wouldn’t be dragged outside to play football. May is one of those month’s which fills me with a slight and intangible dread, I’ve always felt that there’s something distinctly suspicious and untrustworthy about it. I’ve chosen not to take a cue for this month’s theme from the month itself, all that would lead to would be thinly veiled phallic symbolism. I’m not sure anyone would enjoy that. So once again I’ve delved into the depths of the Pictonaut image folder in search of something suitably inspiring.
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4 Comments | tags: May, Moebius, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Starwatcher | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Business as usual? Ha! How ridiculous that sounds today. The last month has been anything but usual. The writing? It has not gone so well this month. Ordinarily I’ll bash out a couple of hundred words inside the first week, then it’ll sit untouched for a couple of weeks before finally being polished off about a week before the deadline. All of my writing is essentially an elaborately constructed illusion of organisation, determination and skill. It’s all really just a slap-dashed mess, like looking inside the casing of a gleaming, technological marvel only to discover it’s filled with elastic bands and gaffa-tape. At the time of writing my punt at Business as Usual remains unfinished. The usual plan fell to pieces. I was out this weekend, I didn’t get back home until noon on Sunday. I went on a strange and wonderful odyssey that has left me drained and dead and utterly bereft of the usual time I would write in. It’s all gone a bit pear-shaped, but as they say “no plan survives contact with the enemy.”
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Leave a comment | tags: Business as Usual, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
So it’s April now. April the first no less. A day many associate with frivolity, humour, japes, shenanigans and tomfoolery but at heart is basically a day about lies. Now I’m a big fan of lies, they’re useful when used properly, they protect, they comfort and they enrich. After all as Elim Garak once said “The truth is usually just an excuse for a lack of imagination.” I gave some thought as to putting together some form of ruse for April Fool’s Day. Something perhaps witty, tongue in cheek, perhaps even something believable. There were issues with such a plan. In order for it to truly be an April Fool it would have to occur suitably before midday, but midday is the time when the blog is usually posted, any such deviance from this routine would draw suspicion the lie would be obvious, flawed, pointless. I would also like to credit what scant readership that I have with some semblance of a discerning mind, an ability to see through such an obvious ruse as an April Fool’s Day prank. So in the end I decided against it. But there is something to be taken from the associated sanguinity. A lot of what I’ve written recently has been frightfully grim and dreadfully dark. Not pieces which exactly inspire a raucous case of the giggles. So this month’s picture will be something quite ridiculous.
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6 Comments | tags: April, Business as Usual, Fools, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Well that about wraps it up for March and with it the end of 2012 quarter 1. How time flies eh? I’m still trying to acclimatise to the “weather” that’s been assailing the country of late. Temperatures are rocketing their way into the low twenties, my face is starting to melt and I’m still suffering from the institutionalised jet-lag of the clocks going forward. Apparently the UK’s heading towards drought and hose-pipe bans again, there’s panic buying in a farcical petrolocalypse, pasties are becoming subject to VAT, a former contestant from Celebrity Big Brother has just been elected to parliament. The very fabric of the country is beginning to tear and rupture as we spiral out control towards oblivion. And all the while the puppet masters of our minority government dance about in their pants quaffing caviare and singing about how great it is to be fabulously wealthy and that the poor should stop complain and do the decent thing and just roll over and die. By and large, things progress onwards much like every other month in recent memory. I suppose I should be thankful for the familiarity, even if it’s less than comforting. On the subject of familiarity it’s the end of the month, another pictonaut wraps up. There’s things to be read. Hop to it.
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Leave a comment | tags: Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Sci-fi, Space, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Last weekend was weird. Seriously weird. Not through any particular event but just from how it felt upstairs in the brain department. Even walking home from work on Friday night I could feel myself slipping into what I refer to as “one of those moods…” It’s hard to explain what one of these moods is like. It’s a bizarre and surreal no-man’s-land between anger and depression. It wells up from deep inside and just takes over. It feels like flying and falling at the same time. It swings pendulum like from one extreme to the other. On Saturday afternoon I was on the back-swing from misery when I started to get angry, really angry. When anger rears its vitriolic head I tend to get very vocal; I tend to get very… political. My friends love it when I’m like this, they derive immense amusement from my directionless, shouty rants against the injustices of the world.
This is exactly what happened this Saturday. With all the feckless stumbling and hypocritical posturing in the modern political world there is no shortage of things to be angry about. So I opened up a big fat can of righteous indignation and went to war on my keyboard.
RAWR!
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4 Comments | tags: Anger, Politics, Rants, Second Person, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
There’s a problem with Callis. The problem is that, on a fundamental level, he is a truly awful person. He after all kills people for money, and he rather enjoys his work. This in of itself would not inherently be a problem if he was a supporting character or a bit part, but I had to go and make him the eponymous star of a series of short stories which I’ve been writing for the last two years. This means that I have to undertake the arduous task of some how making the reader connect with him. How you get a complete stranger to related to a cold-blooded murderer is not something easily done. I don’t even know if I’ve been successful in achieving this. I’d like to think that I have. I like Callis as a character, but that might just be speaking to the state of my diseased brain-meats.
One idea which occurred to me was that he have his own set of “rules,” not an entirely original idea I’ll admit. The way I see it, even bad people need to have rules they abide by. If they don’t then they’re hardly going to be able to function even on the fringes of society.
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Leave a comment | tags: Callis, Maxims, Rules, Short stories, Writing | posted in Writing
So here we are again. The start of another month and time for more wordascope based shenanigans. We find ourselves in March today, a month I generally feel signals the start of Spring. Spring’s all right I suppose. There will however be no pictures based on, nor tangentially related to: bunnies, eggs, flowers or a seemingly all right chap getting nailed to a big tree because some Romans got drunk and thought it’d be “a right laugh”. As most gamers know there are more important things happening this month.
It was quite clear that last month’s picture had quite a heavy fantasy feel to it. I thought it only fair that this month I should swing to the other end of the spectrum and throw out something distinctly more sci-fi in nature. There is also another reason for this. March 6th finally sees the release of Mass Effect 3 a sci-fi computer game which I am rather looking forward to playing. It’s an action-RPG affair with a storyline that has enthralled millions, some folk on the internet have even gone so far as to call it “The most important science-fiction universe of our generation.” Like Skyrim it also involves everything going horribly pear-shaped because of the appearance of a vast, all-powerful, malevolent entity. While Skyrim had dragons, Mass Effect has evil, robotic, space-cuttlefish (and no, I am not joking in the slightest); adventure and heroism of a sort then follow. Needless to say writing will suffer to some extent.
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1 Comment | tags: Any Direction, March, Pictonauts, Sci-fi, Short stories, Space, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
The Rogue Verbumancer 
