And so the sun does set on the month of September. Clouds gather and the nights begin to close in, but still summer ardently clings on with all the anthropomorphised might it can muster. Twenty degree days see-saw with fog so thick it hides every facet of the world. Summer cannot hold on forever and soon we will find ourselves in thunder, lightning or in rain. Already I have seen the drifts of curling brown leaves begin to form in the nooks and crannies of the village. Whole armies of conker shells lie shattered upon the ground, their shiny brown charges spilled and exposed. The year edges ever onwards into its twilight and into darker times. Times where mystery, magic and the possibility of things distinctly other does not seem quite as far-fetched as it did at the height of summer. It is the time of witches, it is the time of The Crone.
Tag Archives: Writing
September’s Pictonaut Challenge
Today is a bit of a special day. Today sees the commencement of September 2013 and with this the Pictonaut Challenge enters its 25th month. It is now 2 years old. The enormity of that fact still hasn’t quite sunk in. The original idea was something of a fleeting fancy, a passing idea, something I thought I’d give a bash and see where it went. My readership remains tiny and close-knit but I have accomplished considerably more than I originally intended. For two whole years I have kept this little exercise going and for a man who has a singular lack of motivation or perseverance this is a rare and truly beautiful achievement. It also shockingly means I have something that could be referred to as “a body of work.” That on its own is a terrifying thing to realise. A thousand words? Every month? For two years? I’m quite proud of myself.
Since I am a scientist by profession and trade I can’t help but be drawn to the statistics of this little endeavour. And even just a cursory glance at them boggles the mind. The 24 stories (or wordascopes as I have taken to calling them) which I have written come to a total of just over 28,800 words, an average of about 1200 every month.
But of course I haven’t been alone in grappling with this particular challenge, others have joined in too. Our combined efforts have spawned a total of 71 short stories. Based on my average output this places the total cumulative wordcount at around the 85,000 mark. Just let that sink in for a moment. Eighty. Five. Thousand. That is an achievement not to be sniffed at.
So what image have I chosen to usher us into our second year? Behold The Crone!
Sand Sea
British summer. In most situations those two words paired together form one of the most ridiculous oxymorons of the western world. The isles of Britannia don’t do summer. They do prolonged periods of seasonal disappointment interspersed at rare and fleeting intervals with what can only be described as a acts of meteorological cock-teasing. A summer in Britain is about rain, moaning about the rain and clomping through fields in big green wellies. By traditional standards it is not about temperatures that make the deserts of North Africa look positively chill by comparison. Last Monday, as the heat wave crested into its second week temperatures hit 33.5°C. Sun has come to Britain. The first heat wave since 2006. The hottest I remember it being in perhaps a decade. A summer that could even give the Summer of ’76 a run for its money.
I am melting…
Send help…
July’s Pictonaut Challenge
As you read this I should hopefully be in a state resembling some sort of regenerative coma, a slightly more mainstream and fundamentally less cool version of the Odin Sleep. For I will have only just returned from my holidays. Finally returning to my seat of power after wild adventures in Devon and Nottinghamshire. I will be a drained and empty husk, my vital life essences depleted after so long away from the dark and eldritch energies that coarse through my lair. I expect to be so utterly incapable of cognitive processing or even basic motor control, that this post is being written ahead of time. Thus I come to you, through the mist of time, from June 8th. In what I can only described as a very shoddy approximation to a real time machine.
But June is over, June is gone. Now is July. It is the month when the summer holidays started when you were back at school. Six weeks that seemed to stretch on into infinity. Six weeks of perfect sunshine, days unblemished by rain. Of days in the garden, or down at the beach. Or in my case, crunching your way through Final Fantasy 8 and then pretending you’d been out playing football all day when your dad came home. But let us not dwell on nostalgia, for nostalgia is a drug. A highly addictive drug that makes both heroin and crack cocaine seem just “moreish” or “scrummy” by comparison. This is just hyperbolic though. Don’t do drugs. Unless they’re the sort prescribed to you by a legitimate and registered member of the human medical profession.
Rambling aside, time for the Pictonaut Challenge. This month it’s Sand Sea.
The Tower on the Hill
This is a pre-recorded transmission. Held in trust by the central data authorities of the great internet super-highway. If you are reading this, then I am not here. I am elsewhere. I am other. Beyond. On holiday. Possibly even outside, beneath the unremitting solar assault of the dreaded day-star. Or the unremitting aqueous assault of the British skies. The weather has resolutely refused to make up its mind and pick a side in this eternal war of the heavens.
I can scare believe that another month has drawn to a close. But it has, with all of the grim inevitability I have come to expect from time. It does herald the coming of short stories though. Which is nice I suppose.
June’s Pictonaut Challenge
May has finished its set. Greeted by half felt applause and empty cheers it shuffles off the stage. The audience is restless, hungry and ever so slightly damp. No one was here to see the support act. May was just a sad prelude to what is yet to come. Everyone is here for the headline acts. The gathered multitudes begin to ripple and sway. Feet are stamped in a harsh and demanding staccato beat. It’s primal, they want something and they want it bad. They’ve been waiting for a long time, through disappointment, through the rain and the frost that just wouldn’t go away. They bay in a language with no words but which is understandable to all. The sad acoustic set of May is forgotten as June takes centre stage. The amps have been dialled up to 11 and the bass is strong enough to shatter bone. Things are about to get hot. Electrically hot.
Tortured metaphors aside, summer is here even if its entourage of appropriate weather hasn’t quite made it yet. It’s June and we have another Pictonaut Challenge to occupy ourselves with. This month we have The Tower on the Hill.
May’s Pictonaut Challenge
May. A month of dancing round poles and the subsequent phallic symbolism such an act invokes. A month of two sweet and solid bank holidays; the last before a drought that save for a brief respite in late August will last until the end of the year. Summer’s not quite here yet. I can sense it though, just around the corner, just waiting for a chance to start flaunting its heat. But with that heat there is the promise of cider, beer gardens and nights as clear and crisp as cut glass. And with the burgeoning swell of summer comes the desire to throw open all your windows and crank the stereo all the way to eleven and let music fill the air. And that leads us, by an unwieldy and overly circuitous route to May’s Pictonaut Challenge: Music Box.
The Fear is Dead
Last week saw me more or less soiling myself with abject artistic terror. I’d just started a new project and was somewhat concerned as to what its reception would be. This fear however seems to have been largely unfounded. The fear is dead. I killed it. My hands are slicked with its horror-blood, my shirt stained with its nightmare-fluids and my boots caked with lumps of its panic-offal. So yeah. That’s a weight off my mind.
Jala daughter of Quyren
The Fear
Right now my anxiety is making a noise. it’s a high-pitched whining sound that could, if properly channelled, slice through steel. I could, if I were so inclined, stretch out this metaphor beyond the limits of its tensile strength. I could draw comparisons between the aforementioned steel and reason. I could even go on to the attribute the alloying elements contained within to a myriad of different emotional qualities and or foibles. But the anxiety has robbed me of much of my desire to sit down and have a real and proper think about things and/or stuff. I think it’s safe to say that I am now deep within the grip of “The Fear.“
But what, you might be wondering, is the source of The Fear. That is a question I for once have an answer to, though I’m not sure if knowing the source makes this any better than the occasional nameless feeling of dread that cloaks my addled brain. The source is simple. At approximately the same time as this post hits the seething cauldron of words that is the internet, my latest writing project starts. Today is the day that The Life and Times of a Working Barbarian goes live.
I have made a grave tactical error…
April’s Pictonaut Challenge
This post is arriving after noon so as to avoid the plethora of April Fools related shenanigans and totally not because I popped out to buy milk. The start of April is always a bit silly, hell the entire month is a bit silly. It rolls up declaring “Look! It’s definitely spring now! The weather is going to be so much better now!” And then it promptly tips it down for nearly the entire month. April is a month of lies and absurdity. Last Year I picked a fairly bizarre image for April’s Pictonaut Challenge, so I decided to stay in a similar vein this year. Combine this with the fact that today is one of the UK’s scant few public holidays, that means tomorrow the vast majority of us are back to work. So in keeping with that, and a desire for general absurdity we have Office Warfare.
The Rogue Verbumancer 