Category Archives: Writing

October 31, 2012

Hail Traveller!

By The Rogue Verbumancer

Be careful traveller for tonight’s the night,

Mischief, fun and the time for fright.

When strange things raise their head,

When the gross and rotten seem less than dead.

The night when ghouls and ghosts roam the moor,

And bring their friends knocking at your front-door.

The skein of the world’s gone all thin,

Full of enough holes to let things in.

So come inside and lock the door,

There’s horror and so much more in store.

Just be aware that you cannot leave,

For out there tonight, it’s All Hallows Eve. Continue reading

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October 1, 2012

October’s Pictonaut Challenge

By The Rogue Verbumancer

So here we are in October. 2012 is shrugging out of those ridiculous baggy cargo shorts and the voluminous tie-dye t-shirt she’s be wearing all summer. She’s putting on proper clothes now because it’s starting to get a bit nippy and inclement out there. It’s started to rain a lot, the sun is getting tired and sluggish; it’s getting up later and going to bed earlier. From here on out it’s all boots, sensible trousers and one of those coats with more pockets than are strictly necessary or in fact sane. There is however the distinct possibility of a decidedly silly and not entirely practical hat. Last year October’s Pictonaut Challenge was all about Halloween-esque spookiness and Lovecraftian terrors. Not wanting to repeat the same theme this year I decided to go with something a little outlandish and a bit mad. Just like that hat I mentioned. Behold, October’s Pictonaut Challenge “Hail Traveller!”

“I’m not going to lie, last night got really weird…”

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September 30, 2012

The Journey

By The Rogue Verbumancer

September now draws to a close. I nights are beginning to get fat and heavy; longer; darker. We’re well and truly rolling into the twilight of the year. At the start of this month I gave you a picture which I entitled The Journey. An image which is quite clearly of a seriously massive [technical term] desert. There’s something perverse about this. Not in of itself, but simply because large chunks of my home country and the surrounding regions were very recently, mostly underwater. I’m sure a better, more philosophical man than I could make some point about dissonance and duality, but my general reaction was largely composed of a simple and succinct “woah.” A ten foot rise in water levels generally has that effect when you’re not being directly effected by it. At the end of the day sand basically just like water right? Except less wet, more solid and chemically different. That si to say, not like water at all. But it does however share a propensity for eating things just at a considerably slower rate. Flood water thrashes and bashes and necks its food like a mad gannet with a gizzard full of PCP. Sand takes it slow, it nibbles and savours. It’s a connoisseur of the devouring of human endeavour.

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September 1, 2012

September’s Pictonaut Challenge

By The Rogue Verbumancer

The start of September heralds the end of summer in the traditional sense and the advent of autumn, in the words of House Stark “Winter is Coming.” I fucking love winter. Winter means that I can wear my coats. I love my coats, they are my armour against the world as much as it is against the cold. But in the interim I’m in Banbury. I’m once again off to see my parents while they’re a bit nearer to my neck of the woods. This of course means getting a train and we all know my feelings about trains. And now comes the segue, dropping like a thunderbolt out of a crystal blue sky, a meteorological phat bassline WUB. Since while you’re reading this I’ll be on a journey of sorts I’ve decided that September’s Pictonaut Challenge will be called The Journey.

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August 31, 2012

A Man Drinks Tea

By The Rogue Verbumancer

The Pictonaut Challenge has now been going for three hundred and sixty-seven days. It all began back on August 3oth 2011 with This Blog Needs You my plaintive cry to the faceless multitudes of the internet to join me in writing some fiction, once a month, every month; till the earth’s seas do boil away and the realm of man turn unto dust; until every star in the night sky winks out and the void finally grows cold and still; until the mere memory of words is all that remains; until I get bored and finally give up. But as of yet I haven’t given up, nor have I been alone in my endeavours. Every month at least one poor sap has joined me in my writing, sometimes more than that, but I have never soldiered on alone. I’d like to take the time to thank all of those who joined in and cranking out a wordascope wretched or otherwise, but most importantly of all I would like the thank my own stubbornness for forcing me to keep going. I’m a year down the line and I now have some twelve thousand odd words. Twelve thousand odd words which I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t started this whole mad idea. Sure it’s no 12 books in 12 months, but it’s a damn side better than having written nothing at all. Add to this NaNoWriMo and all of the blog posts I’ve pumped out and I’d estimate that in the year since I started this project I’ve written 111,000 words. Now that’s almost respectable.

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August 1, 2012

August’s Pictonaut Challenge

By The Rogue Verbumancer

So we’ve finally found our way into the month of August. August is a funny month, but then again all months are funny in one way of t’other. In this instance it’s not that August can be used as an adjective, placing it into a very small category of English words who’s meaning changes when capitalised or not. For me the funniness of August derives, like so many things in my own twisted world view, from the weather. August in England sits awkwardly between summer and autumn and never seems to be quite content on remaining in one category or the other. It swings from vast, mind blisteringly hot Indian summers one year to icy gales and torrential, autumnal rain the next. It’s over the middle hump of the year and August is so often the month that shows us just how shallow or steep the slope down towards winter is. Now it’s probably best that I dispense with the painful highlighting of my Englishness through to endless discussion of the weather and get to the mater at hand. August’s Pictonaut Challenge.

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July 31, 2012

The Wheel in the Sky

By The Rogue Verbumancer

So here we are at the end of July and as the heat wave that’s been assailing Britain comes towards its end so does July’s Pictonaut Challenge. You’d think that 10 months in I’d have gotten the hang of this short story lark. You’d think I’d be cracking this out in the space of an afternoon the day after the month’s challenge starts. You’d think I’d then spend the rest of the month in casual relaxation while spending odd hours here and there honing the text to a razor-sharp point. You would however, be quite fantastically wrong. I’m writing this blog post on the evening of the 30th of July, it’s 8:43 pm and July’s wordascope remains incomplete. I didn’t even start writing it until Saturday evening. I am a terrible sham of a man, a fraud and a man of lies and deceit. But at the end of the day nothing focuses the mind more than blind panic.

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July 23, 2012

The Hunted

By The Rogue Verbumancer

I have not done a lot of writing over the last few weeks. Recently the looming spectre of computer games has sunk its claws into my being and has stubbornly refused to let go. I’ve whiled away hour after hour amidst stealthy cyber-punk infiltration and corporate espionage; I’ve lost whole afternoons to pixelated mining; I’ve lost days to simulated space violence. I don’t regret any of this, I don’t feel too guilty about it. It was jolly good fun. But a man has obligations, a man has his patterns. This post is being hastily knocked together in the scant few moments I have before bed, with a hastily prepared dinner cooking in the oven. So in lieu of anything else to say I have delved into a back catalogue of wordascopes which are yet to see the light of day.

The Hunter watches you

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July 1, 2012

July’s Pictonaut Challenge

By The Rogue Verbumancer

Today is July 1st 2012 and I am a bit of a mess. I had envisaged a day of wild productivity, of getting things done, of cleaning pans and hoovering floors, of writing reams upon reams of really good words. Such a grand plan was obviously doomed to fail, but today it failed before it even began. My alarm went off at just after 8am this morning, my response to this was to turn it off and roll over for what I initially planned to be for a short and brief five minutes but what rapidly spiralled upwards to a frankly decadent three hours. Those three hours were gloriously restful, but also fantastically surreal. I lived through a terrifyingly vivid science fiction odyssey first fleeing from an oppressive father by disguising myself as a leper. Then I found myself bounding across roads and fields with a faithful dog and massive spring-loaded jumping boots. I broke into a the VIP Hilton terminal of a futuristic interstellar train station, and paid a couple of million credits for a ticket out beyond the Oort cloud to deep, deep space to my destiny as a military trained space assassin. That whole bizarre experience was probably worth the three hours of my life it consumed, even if it is now fading into the realm of forgotten ideas, whole chunks of the experience rendered grey and fuzzy. Up until last night I still hadn’t decided what picture to pick from the mystical Pictonaut stockpile, but after this morning’s whirlwind adventure I decided. It had to be sci-fi.

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June 30, 2012

A Place in the Country

By The Rogue Verbumancer

Yet another month draws to a close and with it June’s Pictonaut Challenge. June has been a turbulent month, swinging seemingly without warning from blistering heat to torrential rain. Leaving myself and many others to suffer the eternal “coat dilemma.” The agonising decision as to whether you should take a coat when you leave the house, sure it looks fine now but what if it rains later? Or if the sky looks gloomy, but isn’t actually raining do you take the coat just in case and risk having to lug its dead weight about if it starts to brighten up. To add a particularly rotten cherry to the top of this middle-class dilemma I remain in an uncertain limbo as to my housing situation for next year. My lease technically expires in a mere seventeen days, the leasing agent has been dragging their feet for months over signing the new contract. Sure my landlady may have stated that she’s fine with me staying but she herself is under the looming shadow of uncertainty with potential unemployment and the none to implausible risk of mortgage foreclosure. So it’s all fun a games for me at the moment. All rainbows and fucking unicorns, prancing about shitting gumdrop bastard mountains.

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