October 2013 – Hunting

Arguments can be made for October being the worst month of the entire year. These arguments tend to hinge of two factors. Firstly there is Halloween. Halloween on its own is perfectly fine and innocuous, at least from a conceptual perspective. What isn’t innocuous is juvenile humanoids cruising the streets, jonesing for a sugar fix and pelting your front door with eggs if you have the temerity to be out when they come a calling. And secondly there’s the clocks changing. While we all sleep, time creeps into our bedrooms and gives us all an extra hour in bed. Now you’re probably thinking “Mister Verbumancer, sir? How is an extra hour in bed a bad thing?” Well for me it’s the equivalent of taking a 3 kilogramme lump of hardened steel, fitting it to a stout wooden support pole and using the resulting contraption to smash the bejeezus out of my careful recalibrated diurnal rhythms. I clutch the shattered and broken corpse of my sleep patterns, cradling it within my arms; I weep and I realise that I have to start all over again. Time is insidious, it takes and takes and whatever gifts it gives are all poisoned. It is callous, unforgiving, relentless and never around when you really, really need it. It hounds us and hunts us our entirely lives and then, in the end, it devours us. Cheery thought isn’t it? And by that extremely tenuous segue we come at last to October’s Pictonaut Challenge Hunting.

This month’s image is the work of Russian artist and illustrator Dmitry Maximov. I’m going to be honest with you all, I picked it solely based of the fact that it was a picture of a submarine in space. That and it afforded me the opportunity to make a very dodgy joke. It’s an image that takes the well-worn sci-fi trope of space navies to its literal extreme. I like it. It’s cool and it evokes… something. No idea what that something is mind you. probably something a bit Cold War-esque.

For the uninitiated (or those who simply don’t pay attention) the challenge I set before you is simple. You must craft me a wordascope based on the image above. 1 month. 1,000 words. Dead easy right? You’ve basically got no excuse not to participate.

So shields up, all crew to battle stations, RED ALERT!

*Bwooop*Bwooop*Bwooop*

James Clayton – Masha & Pobeda’s Interstellar Ultra-Cosmic Submarine Adventures Beyond the Stars

The Rogue Verbumancer – And so we send the Hunters

Mick – It’s beginning to look a lot like Fish Men…