Tonight is a night of perceived horrors and frivolity. It is the end of October, the night of Halloween. And with the coming of this night, when the fabric of reality goes all wibbly, when wraiths and spectres slip through the holes and into the realm of men, we see the end of Pictonauts October. Words were written across the skin of paper and the skein of electrowizardy of computer screens, ideas were spun out of whimsy and fear in equal measure. Some people finished, others didn’t. There are causalities in every endeavour and we must not think less of those who didn’t haul themselves across the broken bodies of discarded words and phrases, to the top of Mount Pictonaut and scream into the windy night “I am unbroken! I am victorious!” It wouldn’t be a challenge if it was easy. Even though it really is easy, some people are just fucking lazy (and I love you for you laziness, truly I do). I could make an awful pun about walls and how, with the deadline now reached, there’s writing on them. But I fear that would be almost crass in the ease at which it could be made, I’m better than that. Puns are not the master of me. I can stop any time I want.
Tag Archives: Writing
Cometh the Hour…
…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.
The Arte and Science of Terror
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.
Grenade in the Rain
Last month I threw down the gauntlet and it did ring upon the stony flags like a particularly shit bell, a bit flat, not all that sonorous, kind of metaphorical. Despite this some of you rose to the challenge, writing one thousand English words about a heart wrenching picture of a young lady in a yellow macintosh, standing in the rain, holding a grenade. Also she’s crying, it’s beautiful in that sad sombre way that the emotional turmoil of others is. In the intervening month I discovered it was the work of a man called Marek Okon.
Knockout
I’ve been working on my take of Grenade in the Rain for the past few weeks, slowly slugging away until I finally finished it late last night. I had been planning to work on it this weekend, get down and dirty with some proper writing, show the story who’s boss. That plan sort of fell to pieces when I unexpectedly managed to finish it. Not that I’m really complaining mind you. Since there’s still a whole week or so until I plan on posting everyone’s take on the picture I needed something for this week’s post. I was considering rambling on about something for a while but an alternative presented itself on the way to the supermarket this morning. It was one of those dusty grains of an idea that has been floating around in my brain soup for a few weeks, I initially didn’t give it much thought, I hadn’t even made it into my ongoing text files of “ideas to be used at some later date in the future.” As I was walking it began to rapidly crystallise into something I could write about. What had been only a vague concept and a rant became something I could potentially write about. So I got home, had lunch and spent the next four hours teasing it out of its shell and into the cold, harsh, unforgiving light of reality. One thousand, two hundred and forty or so words later and I was done. I’m somewhat shocked that it got finished so quickly, ordinarily I’d have expected something like this to have taken a lot long, but when you’re on a roll you’re on a roll. So without further ado, I give you a tale of all-out interstellar war and boxing. Continue reading
Paying the Ferryman
It’s been a hectic old weekend. It feels like I’ve more or less been constantly on the move. First a series of train journeys before arriving in Essex, then a particularly long car journey to the midlands and a brief tangle with some slightly dodgy service station eggs. Then six hours or so of restless pacing around a living room, simply because sitting in one place for too long irks me in a seriously irrational manner. You’d think my knees would hate me for this, but they moan about everything and anything so it hardly makes a difference really. Another car journey followed, during which I manfully tried not to vomit, whether due to an encroaching case of motion sickness or the revenge of the aforementioned dodgy eggs I’m not sure. Then began an odyssey of rail replacement bus services and closed tubes lines before I finally, against all odds, found myself back home in Berkshire. And naturally at that point Banks’ Use of Weapons sank its claws into my arm like a particularly angry cat and demanded that I finish it. (Which I did, it is the third best book I’ve ever read, only narrowly loosing out on second place to The Lies of Locke Lamora) Needless to say not a lot of new writing has been done.
The Rogue Verbumancer 