Tag Archives: Short stories
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
So June has finally arrived. Despite the fact that I’ve been operating on British Summer Time since late March, June is, in my distorted world view at least, the first proper month of summer. I was all ready to launch it a vicious and scathing attack on summer. On how it’s hot, sticky and generally uncomfortable. A tirade about how as nice as a bit of sunshine is, excessive amounts cause me to wilt into and exhausted and non-functional jelly. The sort of hellish weather I had to live through over the last few days. But then, at the dawning of June, the hot weather disappeared. It was replaced with a chill and pervading overcast drizzle. This was much more to my liking, but somewhat put-paid to any plans for my original rant. It longer seemed quite so topical. Although I’ve never particularly enjoyed experiencing the heat of the oppressive British summers of recent years I have always enjoyed the aesthetics of the summer. Perhaps it’s one of those lingering relics of a childhood growing up in the rural north. Summer was a time when the grass always looked greener than it ever did at other times of the year, the sky was always bluer, every colour just seemed so much more vibrant, every hue a riot of almost neon proportions. The world always seemed so vivid. It was a world that through its existence prohibited melancholy and sadness. With these memories in mind I picked this picture for June’s Pictonaut Challenge: A Place in the Country.
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Leave a comment | tags: A Place in the Country, June, Pictonaut Challenge, Short stories, Summer, Writing | 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
So it’s April now. April the first no less. A day many associate with frivolity, humour, japes, shenanigans and tomfoolery but at heart is basically a day about lies. Now I’m a big fan of lies, they’re useful when used properly, they protect, they comfort and they enrich. After all as Elim Garak once said “The truth is usually just an excuse for a lack of imagination.” I gave some thought as to putting together some form of ruse for April Fool’s Day. Something perhaps witty, tongue in cheek, perhaps even something believable. There were issues with such a plan. In order for it to truly be an April Fool it would have to occur suitably before midday, but midday is the time when the blog is usually posted, any such deviance from this routine would draw suspicion the lie would be obvious, flawed, pointless. I would also like to credit what scant readership that I have with some semblance of a discerning mind, an ability to see through such an obvious ruse as an April Fool’s Day prank. So in the end I decided against it. But there is something to be taken from the associated sanguinity. A lot of what I’ve written recently has been frightfully grim and dreadfully dark. Not pieces which exactly inspire a raucous case of the giggles. So this month’s picture will be something quite ridiculous.
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6 Comments | tags: April, Business as Usual, Fools, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
There’s a problem with Callis. The problem is that, on a fundamental level, he is a truly awful person. He after all kills people for money, and he rather enjoys his work. This in of itself would not inherently be a problem if he was a supporting character or a bit part, but I had to go and make him the eponymous star of a series of short stories which I’ve been writing for the last two years. This means that I have to undertake the arduous task of some how making the reader connect with him. How you get a complete stranger to related to a cold-blooded murderer is not something easily done. I don’t even know if I’ve been successful in achieving this. I’d like to think that I have. I like Callis as a character, but that might just be speaking to the state of my diseased brain-meats.
One idea which occurred to me was that he have his own set of “rules,” not an entirely original idea I’ll admit. The way I see it, even bad people need to have rules they abide by. If they don’t then they’re hardly going to be able to function even on the fringes of society.
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Leave a comment | tags: Callis, Maxims, Rules, Short stories, Writing | posted in Writing
So here we are again. The start of another month and time for more wordascope based shenanigans. We find ourselves in March today, a month I generally feel signals the start of Spring. Spring’s all right I suppose. There will however be no pictures based on, nor tangentially related to: bunnies, eggs, flowers or a seemingly all right chap getting nailed to a big tree because some Romans got drunk and thought it’d be “a right laugh”. As most gamers know there are more important things happening this month.
It was quite clear that last month’s picture had quite a heavy fantasy feel to it. I thought it only fair that this month I should swing to the other end of the spectrum and throw out something distinctly more sci-fi in nature. There is also another reason for this. March 6th finally sees the release of Mass Effect 3 a sci-fi computer game which I am rather looking forward to playing. It’s an action-RPG affair with a storyline that has enthralled millions, some folk on the internet have even gone so far as to call it “The most important science-fiction universe of our generation.” Like Skyrim it also involves everything going horribly pear-shaped because of the appearance of a vast, all-powerful, malevolent entity. While Skyrim had dragons, Mass Effect has evil, robotic, space-cuttlefish (and no, I am not joking in the slightest); adventure and heroism of a sort then follow. Needless to say writing will suffer to some extent.
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1 Comment | tags: Any Direction, March, Pictonauts, Sci-fi, Short stories, Space, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
So that’s February done and dusted then. Today’s post is coming to you from that strange a magical leap day that tacks itself to the end of February every four years. A place of wonder, mystery and Gregorian convenience. For me, at least, February has not been a month conducive to much writing. I do most of my writing on lazy weekends, sitting in my jim-jams, in front of a computer, drinking tea and slowly tapping out the odd word here and there. There were scant few such weekends this month. I’ve been off on a series of mini-adventures, gallivanting off into London to sample the musical styling of a German metal band and then a jaunt back to my quaint former home of Nottingham for a good old dinner and booze-up. The latter left me a little drained. I took Monday off from work planning to finish off this month’s wordascope in a blizzard of frenzied activity. Instead I spent the whole day sprawled on the sofa trying to work out if I was feeling sick or just really hungry. I eventually concluded it was a bit of both, although it was not so much “gut-rot” as it was, perhaps “gut-mould.” Any time in the evenings over the last few weeks was rapidly devoured by odd bits and bobs like cooking, and more recently work. Specifically defining my goals for the coming year in the strange and alien language of Managerial Moonspeak.
Although I feel as if I’ve made very little progress writing-wise this month my computer seems to disagree. There’s a file sitting snugly on my hard-drive that seems to contain about 2000 words, I’m not entirely sure how that happened. Can’t really complain about something like that can I?
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Leave a comment | tags: Callis, Faces in the Woods, Fantasy, Pictonauts, Short stories, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
