Tag Archives: Pictonauts
November is a shambling odd-ball of a month. Were November a person you wouldn’t really like them. You’d suffer their presence quietly, hoping against hope that they’d just go away and leave you alone; you’d treat them with a passive-aggressive meanest that wouldn’t quite have the necessary understanding of social nuances to “get.” The sort of person who, the moment their back was turned you’d bolt for the nearest exit with a speed and urgency you didn’t realise you were capable of. November would have a bad moustache and no one had quite had the heart to inform them that it really didn’t suit them. November is forever going on about “their book” and how it’ll be amazing, yet no one has the heart to tell them it’s just as awful as their moustache. Add to this a distinctly pyromaniacal bent and you have the makings of someone who really should not be allowed near children.
So basically fuck November.
Perhaps I’m just bitter. I can’t grow a decent moustache and my body betraying me with maladies, plagues, facial twitches, heart-burn and fatigue has left me rather incapable of joining in with the NaNoWriMo fun. I can however still enjoy exploding showers of highly excited metal ion compounds with the best of them.
Now I’m sure many of you are embroiled in the NaNo frenzy, losing yourself to the 30 days of literary abandon. But for those not quite up to the colossal NaNo commitment I’m here to offer you an alternative. A quick jog round the park instead of a full-on marathon. It’s the start of November, it’s time for a new Pictonaut Challenge. It’s time for The Grid.
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Leave a comment | tags: November, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, The Grid, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
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
Leave a comment | tags: Hail Traveller, October, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Weird | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
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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3 Comments | tags: Desert, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, September, Short stories, The Journey, wordascope | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
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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Leave a comment | tags: A Man Drinks Tea, August, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Symbolism | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
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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Leave a comment | tags: A Man Drinks Tea, August, NY Post, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
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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Leave a comment | tags: July, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Robert McCall, Sci-fi, Short stories, The Wheel in the Sky | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
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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Leave a comment | tags: A Place in the Country, June, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
There may have been some of you who turned up here on Monday just after the striking of noon expecting a blog post. Some of you may even have been disappointed to see that there wasn’t one. Since we’re all friends here I’m going to be honest, I just couldn’t be bothered to stitch some words together and send a shoddy collection of thoughts shambling into the bright and burning light like a poorly constructed corpse-beast. Necromancy has after all, never really been my forte. Besides, you were going to be getting two blog posts at the end of the week. Three posts in one week seemed a little overkill. I spent much of last weekend and indeed Monday itself, elsewhere. I left the safe confines of the Fortress of Ineptitude (my house) and sallied forth (got a train) to a dark and foreboding place filled with evil and despair (Hampshire) to see my mentors in the ways of the arcane arts (my parents.) What followed was three days of traipsing around a variety of gardens and stately homes which, due to the weather, may as well have been on the surface of the sun. In those three short days my carefully cultivated nerd-pallor of pure alabaster white has been utterly destroyed. Now my exposed flesh has become the colour of orange leather. This is one of many reasons I tend to avoid the outdoors and the sinister privations of the malevolent day-star. On the subject of stars I suppose I should get down to the business of wrapping up May’s Pictonaut Challenge: Starwatcher.
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Leave a comment | tags: Gayane, May, Moebius, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Starwatcher, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
So it’s May. The last month of spring. The last month before summer finally arrives and my world begins an inexorable slide into an unpleasant, Stygian heat. The rains of the last month have been a delightful salve to my soul. I like rain. It keeps me cool, it makes me feel clean, it reminds me of a better time. A time when it meant I wouldn’t be dragged outside to play football. May is one of those month’s which fills me with a slight and intangible dread, I’ve always felt that there’s something distinctly suspicious and untrustworthy about it. I’ve chosen not to take a cue for this month’s theme from the month itself, all that would lead to would be thinly veiled phallic symbolism. I’m not sure anyone would enjoy that. So once again I’ve delved into the depths of the Pictonaut image folder in search of something suitably inspiring.
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4 Comments | tags: May, Moebius, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Starwatcher | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Business as usual? Ha! How ridiculous that sounds today. The last month has been anything but usual. The writing? It has not gone so well this month. Ordinarily I’ll bash out a couple of hundred words inside the first week, then it’ll sit untouched for a couple of weeks before finally being polished off about a week before the deadline. All of my writing is essentially an elaborately constructed illusion of organisation, determination and skill. It’s all really just a slap-dashed mess, like looking inside the casing of a gleaming, technological marvel only to discover it’s filled with elastic bands and gaffa-tape. At the time of writing my punt at Business as Usual remains unfinished. The usual plan fell to pieces. I was out this weekend, I didn’t get back home until noon on Sunday. I went on a strange and wonderful odyssey that has left me drained and dead and utterly bereft of the usual time I would write in. It’s all gone a bit pear-shaped, but as they say “no plan survives contact with the enemy.”
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Leave a comment | tags: Business as Usual, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
The Rogue Verbumancer 