Category Archives: Pictonauts
So here we are at the end of January, another month pissed away into the onrushing winds of merciless time. Time is such a dick sometimes, strutting around like it owns the place. Abstract concepts, eh? They’re bastards the lot of them. My futile struggles against the crushing inevitability of existence aside, it also means that it’s time to draw another instalment of the Pictonaut Challenge challenge to a close. So there’s a lining to this cloud. Whether it’s a lining of silver or a lining of a slightly less shitty brown on a wallowy, brown cloud of shit depends entirely on your point of view. Either way, you cannot begrudge my claim that there is, at the very least, some sort of lining.
So then, The Reliquary? What did you make of it?
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1 Comment | tags: Cyber-punk, Pictonauts, river blyth, Sailors, Sea, Short stories, The Reliquary | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Today is a time of new beginnings and fresh starts, a time for contemplation, reflection and meditation on what has been and gone and what is yet to come. It is 2012, what wonders await us all? With it being the first of the month it’s time for the Pictonaut Challenge begin once again. If you’ve recently made a resolution to do more writing this year then the Pictonaut Challenge should serve as a nice little start. Only a thousand words a month, hardly anything in the way of rules and no real pressure to perform, how can any right thinking writer resist?
A new year always carries with it a little bit of mystery. No one really knows what’s in store, it is unknown and unknowable. This month’s picture has an air of the unknown about it, something I think is most fitting to the dawn of a new year.
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1 Comment | tags: Mystery, new beginnings, New Year, Pictonauts, Resolutions, Short stories, The Reliquary, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
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
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
Leave a comment | tags: colours, neon, Pictonauts, Short stories, The Psychedelic Lady, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
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
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
Tonight is a night of perceived horrors and frivolity. It is the end of October, the night of Halloween. And with the coming of this night, when the fabric of reality goes all wibbly, when wraiths and spectres slip through the holes and into the realm of men, we see the end of Pictonauts October. Words were written across the skin of paper and the skein of electrowizardy of computer screens, ideas were spun out of whimsy and fear in equal measure. Some people finished, others didn’t. There are causalities in every endeavour and we must not think less of those who didn’t haul themselves across the broken bodies of discarded words and phrases, to the top of Mount Pictonaut and scream into the windy night “I am unbroken! I am victorious!” It wouldn’t be a challenge if it was easy. Even though it really is easy, some people are just fucking lazy (and I love you for you laziness, truly I do). I could make an awful pun about walls and how, with the deadline now reached, there’s writing on them. But I fear that would be almost crass in the ease at which it could be made, I’m better than that. Puns are not the master of me. I can stop any time I want.
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Leave a comment | tags: Horror, Pictonauts, Short stories, The Writing on the Wall, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
And so begins another month, the auspicious days of autumnal October. A month when the nights begin to close in around us and Winter begins to flex its chill fingers. It’s a month when the cold starts to nip at our heels just before it really begins to bite. October to me is a time of transition, a slightly mystical month; with the world-changing around us it feels like almost anything could happen. When it finally draws to a close October goes out with a bang, culminating in All Hallows Eve. If there is a day that embodies the mystery of the unknown I have yet to discover it. It is a night where the world feels just a little flimsy and surreal, as if the fabric which holds everything together is not quite as stolid as we believe it to be. The night where even the bravest and most sceptical of us all are just a little bit afraid of what might really be out there, lurking in the dark and dim corners of the world…
It’s the first of October, it’s a new month, it’s time for Pictonauts old and new to start flexing their fiction muscles.
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3 Comments | tags: Halloween, October, Pictonauts, Short stories, The Writing on the Wall, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Last month I threw down the gauntlet and it did ring upon the stony flags like a particularly shit bell, a bit flat, not all that sonorous, kind of metaphorical. Despite this some of you rose to the challenge, writing one thousand English words about a heart wrenching picture of a young lady in a yellow macintosh, standing in the rain, holding a grenade. Also she’s crying, it’s beautiful in that sad sombre way that the emotional turmoil of others is. In the intervening month I discovered it was the work of a man called Marek Okon.
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9 Comments | tags: 12 books in 12 months, Challenge, Grenade in the Rain, Pictonauts, September, Short Story, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Well perhaps need is too strong a word, perhaps “would actually rather like your assistance” is more apt. It is my understanding that to become internet famous you need to reach out to your readership, make them feel involved, engage with them. That or have tits. Without the required secondary X chromosome for the latter I’ve decided that it would be more prudent to attempt the former. Continue reading
4 Comments | tags: A picture paints a thousand words, Blog, Ideas, Images, Networking, Short stories, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
The Rogue Verbumancer 