July 2012 – The Wheel in the Sky

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.

This month’s picture is the work of the late Robert McCall and was painted in the wild and heady days of the late 1960s. I’m sure some of you might recognise its origin, it is after all, fairly iconic. The title of the wordascopes for July is “The Wheel in the Sky.” Not the most imaginative of names considering the subject matter, but I think it’s delightfully evocative. So there we have it, the picture. You all have a month to try and write a short story of roughly 1,000 words about it.

Now that the story rocket is brimming with word fuel and shrouded in the cold mists of errant thought, let’s strap ourselves in and prep for launch into the imagination zone.

Engines on. Countdown, T-minus 31 days…

The Rogue Verbumancer – All that’s left as the world burns

James Clayton – The Tale of a lovesick man… In Space!

Sir Marc of the Most Noble Order of Jolt – A working man and his son

The original blog post responsible for spawning this rampant frivolity can be found here and the post where the entries were originally collated can be found here: