Tag Archives: Pictonauts
Today is a bit of a special day. Today sees the commencement of September 2013 and with this the Pictonaut Challenge enters its 25th month. It is now 2 years old. The enormity of that fact still hasn’t quite sunk in. The original idea was something of a fleeting fancy, a passing idea, something I thought I’d give a bash and see where it went. My readership remains tiny and close-knit but I have accomplished considerably more than I originally intended. For two whole years I have kept this little exercise going and for a man who has a singular lack of motivation or perseverance this is a rare and truly beautiful achievement. It also shockingly means I have something that could be referred to as “a body of work.” That on its own is a terrifying thing to realise. A thousand words? Every month? For two years? I’m quite proud of myself.
Since I am a scientist by profession and trade I can’t help but be drawn to the statistics of this little endeavour. And even just a cursory glance at them boggles the mind. The 24 stories (or wordascopes as I have taken to calling them) which I have written come to a total of just over 28,800 words, an average of about 1200 every month.
But of course I haven’t been alone in grappling with this particular challenge, others have joined in too. Our combined efforts have spawned a total of 71 short stories. Based on my average output this places the total cumulative wordcount at around the 85,000 mark. Just let that sink in for a moment. Eighty. Five. Thousand. That is an achievement not to be sniffed at.
So what image have I chosen to usher us into our second year? Behold The Crone!
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1 Comment | tags: Muhammed Muheisen, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, September, Short stories, The Crone, Writing, Yemen | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Months are oft wont to slip by without you noticing. August has basically evaporated. And considering the continued fair weather that’s hardly surprising. This spate of fair weather was interrupted by one event of note however. A rain storm which I had the misfortune to by cycling home in. A rain storm so fierce and mighty, of such raw unbridled power that it managed to more or less dissolve parts of my new trainers. It also made me very, very wet. Which, if you think about it, is pretty much rain’s raison d’etre. At least I think that happened this month. Time has a very annoying habit of just blurring together in my head, events become transposed across dates. Things which happened in 2006 still feel very much like “only last week.” Yet despite the alleged duality of time and space I have yet to find similar things happening with my own personal geography. There has been no finding myself in two places at once. Which is a shame, because that would be super handy.
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Leave a comment | tags: August, Pegasus, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Sci-fi, Short stories, Voyage to the Planets | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
It’s August now. This is a fact which I am having a great deal of trouble comprehending. How can it conceivably be August? Already? Come on, you’re having a laugh! Seriously? August? Already? Fucking hell…
That means that I’ve been snuggled away in my little one bedroom flat for nearly 10 months. It also means I’ve been down in the deepest, darkest and most hideously depraved outlands of southern England for 2 years. Time is relentless in its surging forwards. The future is always rushing straight at us waving a big sign, which in large black capitals reads “LOOK AT ME!” It’s also my little brother’s birthday. A person who in my mind’s eye will always remain about 11 years old, is now edging ever further into his 20s. That’s not even remotely terrifying. But such is life. It is relentless. It is without mercy. It is unfathomable. It is cruel and it is cold.
In those respects it’s just like space (Tenuous segue ahoy!) Space is cool. Space is out future and it is our salvation. Space is absolutely fucking everywhere. So take your protein pills, put your helmet on and prepare for a Voyage to the Planets.
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3 Comments | tags: August, Daren Horley, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Sci-fi, Space Odyssey, Voyage to the Planets | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
British summer. In most situations those two words paired together form one of the most ridiculous oxymorons of the western world. The isles of Britannia don’t do summer. They do prolonged periods of seasonal disappointment interspersed at rare and fleeting intervals with what can only be described as a acts of meteorological cock-teasing. A summer in Britain is about rain, moaning about the rain and clomping through fields in big green wellies. By traditional standards it is not about temperatures that make the deserts of North Africa look positively chill by comparison. Last Monday, as the heat wave crested into its second week temperatures hit 33.5°C. Sun has come to Britain. The first heat wave since 2006. The hottest I remember it being in perhaps a decade. A summer that could even give the Summer of ’76 a run for its money.
I am melting…
Send help…
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Leave a comment | tags: Hot, July, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Sand Sea, Short stories, Summer, Weather, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
As you read this I should hopefully be in a state resembling some sort of regenerative coma, a slightly more mainstream and fundamentally less cool version of the Odin Sleep. For I will have only just returned from my holidays. Finally returning to my seat of power after wild adventures in Devon and Nottinghamshire. I will be a drained and empty husk, my vital life essences depleted after so long away from the dark and eldritch energies that coarse through my lair. I expect to be so utterly incapable of cognitive processing or even basic motor control, that this post is being written ahead of time. Thus I come to you, through the mist of time, from June 8th. In what I can only described as a very shoddy approximation to a real time machine.
But June is over, June is gone. Now is July. It is the month when the summer holidays started when you were back at school. Six weeks that seemed to stretch on into infinity. Six weeks of perfect sunshine, days unblemished by rain. Of days in the garden, or down at the beach. Or in my case, crunching your way through Final Fantasy 8 and then pretending you’d been out playing football all day when your dad came home. But let us not dwell on nostalgia, for nostalgia is a drug. A highly addictive drug that makes both heroin and crack cocaine seem just “moreish” or “scrummy” by comparison. This is just hyperbolic though. Don’t do drugs. Unless they’re the sort prescribed to you by a legitimate and registered member of the human medical profession.
Rambling aside, time for the Pictonaut Challenge. This month it’s Sand Sea.
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5 Comments | tags: July, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Sand Sea, Short stories, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
This is a pre-recorded transmission. Held in trust by the central data authorities of the great internet super-highway. If you are reading this, then I am not here. I am elsewhere. I am other. Beyond. On holiday. Possibly even outside, beneath the unremitting solar assault of the dreaded day-star. Or the unremitting aqueous assault of the British skies. The weather has resolutely refused to make up its mind and pick a side in this eternal war of the heavens.
I can scare believe that another month has drawn to a close. But it has, with all of the grim inevitability I have come to expect from time. It does herald the coming of short stories though. Which is nice I suppose.
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1 Comment | tags: June, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Summer, The Toweron the Hill, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
May has finished its set. Greeted by half felt applause and empty cheers it shuffles off the stage. The audience is restless, hungry and ever so slightly damp. No one was here to see the support act. May was just a sad prelude to what is yet to come. Everyone is here for the headline acts. The gathered multitudes begin to ripple and sway. Feet are stamped in a harsh and demanding staccato beat. It’s primal, they want something and they want it bad. They’ve been waiting for a long time, through disappointment, through the rain and the frost that just wouldn’t go away. They bay in a language with no words but which is understandable to all. The sad acoustic set of May is forgotten as June takes centre stage. The amps have been dialled up to 11 and the bass is strong enough to shatter bone. Things are about to get hot. Electrically hot.
Tortured metaphors aside, summer is here even if its entourage of appropriate weather hasn’t quite made it yet. It’s June and we have another Pictonaut Challenge to occupy ourselves with. This month we have The Tower on the Hill.
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1 Comment | tags: June, Photos, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Summer, The Tower on the Hill, Tower, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
I have spent the last few weeks stewing in a soup of my own stress. A relentless assault of bills, complications, inconveniences, irritations and down right vexation. It has not been a good month in that respect. But there is always tomorrow and there is always music. My days have been balmed by the electro tones of the Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. This was partnered with the mind-bending New Age soundscapes of Mike Oldfield’s Songs of Distant Earth. They have kept me within the tenuous boundaries of sanity. It is quite fitting considering the theme of this month. For how else do you listen to music if not through a Music Box.
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1 Comment | tags: May, Music Box, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Spring, Summer | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
May. A month of dancing round poles and the subsequent phallic symbolism such an act invokes. A month of two sweet and solid bank holidays; the last before a drought that save for a brief respite in late August will last until the end of the year. Summer’s not quite here yet. I can sense it though, just around the corner, just waiting for a chance to start flaunting its heat. But with that heat there is the promise of cider, beer gardens and nights as clear and crisp as cut glass. And with the burgeoning swell of summer comes the desire to throw open all your windows and crank the stereo all the way to eleven and let music fill the air. And that leads us, by an unwieldy and overly circuitous route to May’s Pictonaut Challenge: Music Box.
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3 Comments | tags: May, Music Box, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Spring, Summer, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
And no sooner than it had begun, April was over. It scarce feels like 30 whole days have passed since this month’s challenge started. It’s all passed by in a haze of work, writing and lounging about in my jim-jams. Spring has finally deigned to grace us with its mercurial presence. It feels like I’ve done nothing but write this month. Or more accurately try to write for hours only to be rewarded with a brief and transient flicker of words for a few fleeting moments. I’ve been snowed under with things to do, but slowly and surely, in the harsh light of spring, they are melting away. Hopefully I can return to a clam and pastoral life for a while, though I doubt it will be long before I’m seized by writer’s fervour and end up committing myself to even more things. But they are problems for another day. Now, to Pictonaut based business…
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Leave a comment | tags: April, Office Warfare, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Rhys Owens, Short stories | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
The Rogue Verbumancer 