Tag Archives: Writing
I am going to make a meandering and circuitous route towards a point, so please bear with me.
This, in many ways, is a week that a small part of me thought that I would never see. Way back in the mists of time when I was still in high school, before even my GCSEs I was a very different person to what I am today. That person is very much a stranger. Admittedly we share similar traits and predispositions, but the similarity is that of freshly hewn marble and a finished sculpture. In these less than halcyon days one of my now tragically estranged friends made a prediction, an eerie prophecy that has rung down through the years. I suspect it was made in jest, a throw away comment, but it’s niggled at the back of my mind for an awfully long time.
“By the time you’re 25, you’ll either be dead or sectioned”
For years I used this pronouncement of my inevitable doom as funny little anecdote when talking to people in the pub. Normally people who still lingered in that awkward purgatory of “not being complete strangers but not yet friends.” We all laughed, fun and merriment was had by all. Then I turned 25 and suddenly it wasn’t quite so funny.
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2 Comments | tags: Birthdays, new beginnings, New Tools, Prophecies, Scrivener, Writing | posted in Ramblings
As many of you know, I am a big fan of Twitter. 
Through its cyber-witchcraft I keep in contact with old friends and converse with strange people I never have, and probably never will, meet. People with beards, people with hats, people with kids, people with cats. It’s an interesting place filled with interesting people. Recently, one of the myriad of misfits, misanthropes, malcontents and musers I follow posted something on their blog. The person in question is a lady operating under the pseudonym of Porridgebrain. She’s one of those artsy types. She draws, she knits, she takes fancy artistic photographs, she also writes. Her blog hosted a wee writing workshop thing until it fell by the wayside last October. It has now, however, been raised from the grave. Once a fortnight a word is posted people write things based on that word, fun is had by all. Last Monday she threw up a post with the prompt of Second, and I thought I’d have a bash at it. Continue reading
5 Comments | tags: Clocks, Poetry, Seconds, Seconds Out, Tick-tock, Time, Writing | posted in Writing
Today is a time of new beginnings and fresh starts, a time for contemplation, reflection and meditation on what has been and gone and what is yet to come. It is 2012, what wonders await us all? With it being the first of the month it’s time for the Pictonaut Challenge begin once again. If you’ve recently made a resolution to do more writing this year then the Pictonaut Challenge should serve as a nice little start. Only a thousand words a month, hardly anything in the way of rules and no real pressure to perform, how can any right thinking writer resist?
A new year always carries with it a little bit of mystery. No one really knows what’s in store, it is unknown and unknowable. This month’s picture has an air of the unknown about it, something I think is most fitting to the dawn of a new year.
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1 Comment | tags: Mystery, new beginnings, New Year, Pictonauts, Resolutions, Short stories, The Reliquary, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
So we’re finally here at the tail end of 2011. A year which has seen us frail and feckless humans stagger from crisis to crisis, lurching drunkenly through the year. Annus horribilis would not, in my opinion, be an inappropriate description. Riots, civil unrest, violence and economics once again threatening to destroy modern civilisation, it’s been a bit of a shit one if I’m honest. But as ever there is always the faint and guttering light at the end of the tunnel that is hope. Hope that next year will be better, that next year we’ll do things right, that this will be the year we’ll all pull together and make the world a better place. Inevitably that won’t be the case, but it’s nice to hope. Hope keeps you going.
I expect that, as I write this, a lot of you will be donning your glad rags for a night of revelry, drinking, debauchery and the fabrication of embarrassing moments that, come the dawn of 2012, you’ll want to pretend never happened. As for me I’ll be spending the evening in a darkened room, treating tonight like I would any other night: whiling away the hours until bed through a form of procrastination that I have elevated to a high art. It will also be the first time I’ve spent new year’s eve sober in nearly a decade, I’m sure this will prove to be a spectacularly novel experience. In the intervening period between now at the tolling of those twelve strikes at midnight it’s time to draw a line beneath December’s Pictonaut challenge.
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Leave a comment | tags: Drugs, Pictonauts, Short stories, The Psychedelic Lady, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
So December’s finally rolled around; the downward slide towards the end of the year. What a year it has been, but not in a good way, not for most people anyway. 2011 has been pretty awful, a year where I’m sure many people have uttered “well, it can’t get any worse can it?” only to then find out that, actually, it can. And what do we have to look forward to? In the long-term, more of the same. A government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich; a world primed to explode, collapse or implode; the bad times of world unrest raising its head once again. Gone are the free and happy peace-loving days of the 90s where everything really looked like it was one the up. Now we’re all back in the trenches, with nothing but shit and shells raining down on our heads. In the short-term we’ve got Christmas. That’s all right I suppose, even if it does mean spending time with people you generally dislike or don’t get on with, all the while having to smile and remain civil. Call me a cynic but everything I can see on the horizon is pants; garishly coloured pants woven from misery, misfortune and despair. But there is a glimmer of hope, a shinning beacon, a lighthouse. It is the return of the Pictonaut Challenge and it is your only hope for salvation in this dark and benighted world. (Maybe, but probably not) Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: colours, neon, Pictonauts, Short stories, The Psychedelic Lady, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Thus ends the turbulent non-month that is November. A great many things have happened this month, most of them perpetrated by fools. Be it the mustachioed madness of Movember, where hordes of hapless men grow their itchy face hair because suddenly prostate cancer is cool. Or alternatively the insanely optimistic troops of NaNoWriMo and their slog to an arbitrarily defined target.
I was one of these fools. I chose NaNoWriMo because it provided a challenge, it was productive, artsy, enriching and also because I can’t really grow a moustache. (I “won” in the end. I was very happy.) But despite all the hectic dashing about and the hurly-burly of this, that and the other, Pictonauts was still rumbling away in the background. Not the rumble of a mighty volcano fit to shower the surrounding locales with hot, steamy lava. More the rumbling of an empty tummy, or slightly cross cat. Continue reading
1 Comment | tags: NaNoWriMo, Pictonauts, Short stories, The Sphere, wordascope, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
This will be my last post on the topic of NaNoWriMo for this year, as last night, when the sun had gone to bed and the fingers of frost were clawing at my window I did what I had long thought impossible. I finished.
Well I say finished. More accurately I passed the 50,000 word mark. The titanic wordascope that I have been plugging away at all November is by no means ‘finished’. Those fifty thousand words in their extant form consist of a prologue, chapters 1 to 10 and the finishing chapter, number 29. Nineteen chapters that were planned sit in an unwritten limbo. I have a beginning, I have an end, but the middle? That’s not even started yet. Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: High Noon in Outer Space, Misquotes, NaNo, NaNoWriMo, Plans, Ramblings, Writing | posted in 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
So November is upon us. I’ve never been entirely sure about the month of November. It’s a distinctly unremarkable month as months go. There’s no major festivals or celebrations. Sure there’s Bonfire night, which has fireworks and we all love fireworks I’m sure. But at the end of the day that, unlike July the 4th or Bastille day, isn’t about throwing off [perceived] shackles of oppression and embracing the glories of freedom. It’s essentially a celebration of one man’s complete and resounding failure to achieve just that. It is a testament and historical memorial to shoddy workmanship, poor planning and the inability of some people to just keep their mouths shut. My friend Mick goes as far to swear November to be a foul and cursed month, frequently espousing declarations of “nothing good happens in November.” But we get fireworks, large fires and jacket tetties wrapped in tin-foil and baked in the untempered fury of a ten foot high pile of blazing wood, so at the end of the day who gives a shit, we’re all happy. Except Guy Fawkes of course, damn he got a right going over.
So musings on the nature of the November beast aside, there are a few things happening this month which are worthy of note.
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1 Comment | tags: NaNoWriMo, November, Pictonauts, Short stories, The Sphere, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
The Rogue Verbumancer 