Tag Archives: Ramblings
Oh how much 
of a difference a week makes. What had been a fairly mundane demand of 1667 words a day has now become an uphill struggle, a real slog through a treacley sea of shitty words.
I’m still on the NaNo wagon for now, but how much longer I can hang on I’m not entirely sure. I’d say I’m getting pretty close to burn out. Which would be slightly frustrating, especially with about 31,500 words under my belt. I thought at passing 25k I was over the hump and it’d be a nice downhill slope to the finish line. Nope, turns out it was just a slight flattening before another big hill. Arse.
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Leave a comment | tags: High Noon in Outer Space, Misquotes, NaNoWriMo, Ramblings, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
Tuesday saw the start of my first attempt at NaNoWriMo. I have now been slogging away at it for almost five days. I’m honestly not entirely sure who I am any more, nor what I have become. I have a strange nagging feeling that there is something akin to unholy witchcraft about the entire concept of NaNoWriMo. There’s no pressure to perform, no real demands, only a vague nebulous challenge of “oh go on, just see if you can hit 50,000 words by the end of this month. If you can’t do it that no one’s going to think less of you. We’re all friends here.” It’s insidious and sneaky. I just simply cannot stop writing. It’s an urge that’s gotten under my skin, it’s a contagious disease spreading across the blogosphere and the internet. There is no cure, there is only success or failure.
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Leave a comment | tags: High Noon in Outer Space, Misquotes, NaNoWriMo, Ramblings, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
…Cometh the blind irrational panic.
It’s just over a week until the start of the slogfest that is NaNoWriMo and I must confess I’m slightly nervous. From a logical standpoint it seems easy enough. 1667 words a day you say? I know I’m easily capable of knocking out that many words in about half and hour. So logically I should be able to complete the entire thing in one 17 hour stint. The problem is however, that logic, is bullshit. Like many a perfect mathematical system constructed for scientific purposes it ignore several factors which twist and warp the result into something far, far different. In this instance it’s piddly little things like the need to sleep, eat, and occasionally re-equilibrate fluid levels. That and the ever threatening claws of The Funk, waiting to pounce on my unsuspecting creativity. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the glories of 55 words/minute, is the situation I frequently find myself in, where I have no idea where I’m heading, no idea what I want to write, or what words to use. A time where it can take as long as three hours just to force out 50 poxy words. This is what fuels my dread at the prospect of this undertaking.
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Leave a comment | tags: Callis, NaNoWriMo, Ramblings, The Funk, Writing, Zine | posted in Ramblings
Water, water everywhere...
As you may be aware this month’s Pictonaut challenge has a distinctly spooky bent to it. What with October being all ghosts, witches and an assorted agglomeration of supernatural voodoo; something which skirts into the grey and slightly disconcerting borders of the horror genre. This, to me, is beginning to prove a greater challenge than I originally anticipated. The whole spooky horror business is something I’ve generally managed to avoid my entire writing life. The exact reason as to why is something of a mystery. There were a few instances at school where we were more or less instructed to write a horror story, I met it with my traditional feckless disrespect for the subject matter and wry, yet utterly surreal humour. At least I’d like to think that my humour is wry.
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1 Comment | tags: Horror, Lovecraft, Pictonauts, Ramblings, The Writing on the Wall, Writing | posted in Ramblings
Mr Tolkien has a lot to answer for when it comes to books and fantasy in general. He was very much a trope machine. Be it cementing already pre-existing notions fashioned by Fritz Leiber and Robot E Howard in the dark and grimy pulp novellas of the 30s, or birthing entirely new tropes, leaving them blinking in the cold light of an unforgiving world; forever sitting on the landscape of literature like either a fine statue or a festering turd (depending of course of your own personal outlook on the entire genre). Together these three men ultimately shaped and moulded the whole genre, it resisting with all the structural integrity of a particularly soggy sponge cake, such was the force of their words.
The Dons of the Fantasy Mafia
But words are not the really subject of my musings today; One of the primary tropes inflicted on us all for better or worse by Tolkien was that of the map. Whether it was something he alone started with the Hobbit in the crazy days of 1937 or not is somewhat moot, he certainly played a major part in its rise to its modern-day prevalence. These days it’s a rarity to open a fantasy book and not find a map on opening pages. I don’t have a problem with this for the most part, but maps are a serious business and there are some truly awful maps out there. Continue reading
2 Comments | tags: Callis, Fantasy, Maps, Ramblings, The Land of a Thousand Duchies, Tolkien | posted in Ramblings
This missive comes to you from the blasted wastelands of Berkshire. My last post came amidst the uncertainty of a move to strange new lands and the availability of the sweet, sweet balm of the internet super highway. Continue reading
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I started this blog on a dark and gloomy night in the closing days of February. Now it is five months later and I’m somehow still going. It does pain me somewhat to say that I’m going to have to stop, at least for a little while.
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2 Comments | tags: Blog, Moving House, Ramblings, Stress, Test Card | posted in Ramblings
My family has its fair share of tales and stories. On my mother’s side there’s the story of one of my ancestors getting the maid up the duff and subsequently being forced to marry her. And there’s the great-great-great-great-uncle who left his illegitimate daughter enough money to buy ten horses. Best of all there’s just the simple fact that I had a great-great-uncle called Septimus, who was a tramp. On my Dad’s side there’s the tale of my Granddad surviving the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1947 thanks to the need to go to the lavatory. And how my Great-Granddad fled to Canada, leaving his wife and son behind for reasons that, to this day, we’re still not entirely sure about. There’s also the delightful fact that my Great-great-granddad (a veteran of the Boer War) had regimental tattoos on his shins, for the delightful purpose of “making it easier to identify the body.” Somewhere we’ve even got the bullet he used when he was forced to kill his horse before his journey back to Britain. Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: History, Legends, Ramblings, Scotland, Stories, Swords, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
A man I know on the intertubes named Sir Marc of Jolt has a blog. Over the past few months he’s posted a few pieces describing memories from his childhood. Most recently a tale about butterflies that is at once both tragic, monstrous and terribly touching. It is in essence, childhood crystallised into words. All of these stories paint a picture of a joyful childhood, I like to think it’s done in watercolours; slightly washed out and made indistinct and fuzzy by the passage of years.
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1 Comment | tags: Childhood, Dungarees, Memories, Ramblings, Tartan, Vest, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
Recently something awful happened. I became ensnared by something I simply refer to as: “The Funk”. The Funk is a terrible, terrible thing. It’s not tied to anything so delightful and buoyant as the thrumming beat of funkadelic jazz. The Funk as I know it harkens back to the older meaning of the word. That great yawning abyss of empty futile hopelessness. I’m not depressed. Oh no, life’s just about as grand as it gets for me right now. This mood that’s gripped me is something pertaining more exclusively to the creative arts. It’s something quite different to writer’s block. Writer’s block is a situation where despite wanting to, you can’t think of anything to write. The Funk is something of the inverse; having plenty ideas to write about, but not the will to do so.
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1 Comment | tags: Ennui, Ramblings, The Funk, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
The Rogue Verbumancer 