Tag Archives: Writing
It is March 31st and let me just say now, for the record, I am most assuredly not going for a walk. As fellow Brits are probably well aware we’ve just entered British Summer Time, BST, Bastard-Shitting-Timechange. Last night Time snuck into my room while I slept and stole from me an hour of rest. Now I’ve got a horrible fug in my head, a slight headache and a general desire to crawl under a particularly large rock and die. I have what can be best described as a case of temporal jet-lag. I can fly half way around the world and laugh at the mere notion of travel based jet-lag, but the minute the clocks change it comes and hits me, quite literally, where I live. But you didn’t come here to read about my dodgy circadian rhythms. You came here for stories. Or because you googled something seriously weird.
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1 Comment | tags: Going for a Walk, March, Moscow, Neverwhere, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Time ticks ever onwards. The year fades out of February and into March. The cogs of causal reality whirr and click in the heart of the great and unfathomable machine that is the universe. Winter is petering out and the days are getting warmer. Spring is just around the corner. Spring is a time of change and of new beginnings. Admittedly, depending on how you look at it, the same could be said for all the seasons but that is beside the point. The last two Pictonaut Challenges have been a bit on the grim side. All dark and gloomy, a little bit lonely and depressing, more wintery moods. I think it’s time for a bit of a change of pace and a change of scenery. With the weather starting to get milder and the evenings getting shorter I think it’s high time we pulled on our boots, put on a nice, light and airy coat, because we’re Going For A Walk.
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3 Comments | tags: Going for a Walk, March, Moscow, Neverwhere, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
It’s a sad thing to come to the end of February. February is cool. Cool in the sense that fezes and bow-ties are cool. It’s cool in the temperate sense too, but that’s neither here nor there. I do enjoy February. But all good things must come to an end. I’m closing the month on something of a high-note. I remain physiological intact, if somewhat mentally disparate, and in the last week I have been spectacularly productive. So productive that I think I’ve been the victim of some cruel and insidious trick. An anthology piece is done, and against all odds I managed to finish off this month’s wordascope in record time. The blog is now a whole two years old and I’m still going. All-in-all I think a small “woohoo” is in order.
Woohoo.
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2 Comments | tags: Dead Places, Family, February, Great-grandfather, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Ruins, Short stories, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
There are few things quite so satisfying as getting something finished. When you finally limp and stagger over the ill-defined finish line and collapse onto your back, facing the sky screaming “I did it. I DID IT!” Before descending into a fit of manic and unintelligible laughter based gibbering. That, dear readers, is pretty much what happened yesterday at about half past nine in the evening. Back at the start of January I was harping on about an anthology piece that I was hammering away at. It has been a bugbear of mine for far too long. I’m not very good at multi-tasking my projects, if I’ve got something on the go it is that and that alone which consumes my attention and energy. This of course is extremely frustrating when the aforementioned project simply refuses to be written. But with the first deadline looming at the end of the month I gritted my teeth and performed the literally equivalent of dragging someone into an alley and brutally beating them to death with an old chair leg.
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3 Comments | tags: Anthologies, Finishing, Short stories, Victory at any cost, Writing | posted in Writing
January is dead. It’s corpse has been stripped of its clothes, jewellery, money and anything of even tenuous value. It now lies cooling in a shallow grave in the middle of the desert of time. That’s just how time roles. It takes you for everything you have and leaves you dead and forgotten. Time is the bastard’s bastard. Cheery today aren’t I? Things were looking up, things were looking good, but then last night dinner went a bit pear-shaped, though not literally, no pears were involved. The cheese sauce bubbled over, it was very messy, it delayed things, it was massively inconvenient. There were no words in any language living or dead that could adequately convey my profound and abiding sense of anger and sadness. It was, in essence, the human condition. These are the trials I face in my life and I am left the worse for it. I swear it was going to be all sunshine and lollipops, unicorns and gumdrop mountains, but now? Now it’s going to be all grim-dark misery and the palpable despair of life in a universe that is as cruel as it is cold. This month we’re going down the rabbit hole and treading where no man should ever set foot. This month we’re going to the Dead Places.
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1 Comment | tags: Dead Places, February, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Ruins, Short stories, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Down here in my neck of the woods the snow has finally decided to bugger off and leave us well alone. The British weather in its typical mercurial way has rebounded from the cold snap by swinging to heights of frankly terrifying mildness. Despite it being what I would term the depths of winter the temperature rose to an incredible 13 degrees Celsius, forcing me to forgo both jumper and hat. Even the gloves came off, my winter beard now feels entirely extraneous. This unexpected bloom of warmth fits rather nicely with my equally mercurial mood. At the start of the month I was not in the finest of fettles, but now the grim introspection has gone, although the existential dread remains. But I’m okay with that he’s a reasonably okay guy when you get to know him, bit misunderstood and maligned, but always does the washing up and takes his shoes off when he comes through the door. So January’s ending on something approaching a high. I remain gainfully employed, I’m not dead and I have a house with function heating. everything’s coming up rose. Though not literally, give it a few months though.
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Leave a comment | tags: January, Moebius, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Plodding On, Short stories, Westerns, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Last week I was bemoaning my writing woes. How I felt like I was basically smashing my head against a brick wall. It was less than fun. It’s not a nice feeling, sitting down to do something and then eight hours later discovering that you’ve managed to achieve the sum total of naff and all. So I came up with the cunning and ingenious scheme of breaking the 5,000+ word novella I’ve promised down into ten tasty, bite-sized chunks of 500 words a piece. I’m now sitting pretty at just a few hundred shy of 2,000. So I’d say it’s been a moderate success, even if only 2 of the 10 slated sections have been done. I’d like to attribute this moderate success to my ingenious plan, but in truth I think it’s because of something else entirely. I think it’s due to the fact that my life is profoundly ass-backwards. That is to say, ludicrously disordered and showing an arrangement grotesquely counter to the conventional.
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2 Comments | tags: Ass-backwards, Breaking it down, Creative Block, Ramblings, Word Counts, Writer's Block, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
It hasn’t been a good couple of months for me creatively. Which is typical of life really, the one time of the year where I’m more or less getting snowed under with things to write and I more or less lose the ability to do so. I’ve spent literally days staring at my computer screen, trying to bring myself to do some proper writing. (Blogging isn’t really proper writing, it’s basically the writing equivalent of standing in the street shouting at passers-by.) And in that time I have achieved more or less nothing. This isn’t a case of writer’s block, writer’s block I can deal with, that’s just the problem of not knowing what to write. The situation I find myself in is not being able to bring myself to write. Just staring at the empty or half written pages fills me with a profound sense of ennui. That hopeless feeling of “honestly why do I even bother?” It’s hardly an ideal, and as much fun as cranking the stereo volume up to 11, curling up on the sofa with a cup of tea and hoping that the world spontaneously catches fire, it doesn’t really achieve anything.
Photo by Chris van Ryn
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6 Comments | tags: Breaking it down, Creative Block, Rambling, Word Counts, Writer's Block, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
Another month down and another 1,000 or so words churned out for the faceless masses of the internet to ignore. As ever the end of the year has been a hectic time for me. The jaunt back to the northern homeland always takes a massive chunk of time out of the schedule and as ever travel over any appreciable distance usually leaves me feeling like someone’s stuck a hosepipe into my soul and siphoned my life essence off into a jerry-can. Add to that all the other writing work I’ve gone and committed myself too: two pieces of anthology work, a short screen-play, a guest blog post, the pictonaut challenge, a new blog project, all my weekly blog posts and then a few odds and ends here and there. Needless to say I’ve been getting a little snowed under. For a little while it even looked like I might not get anything written at all as I sank further and further into a pit of my own ennui. But then I pulled my finger out and managed to crank out about 700 words in a night and all was well. So to business, Leviathan.
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1 Comment | tags: December, Epistolary stories, Fantasy, jamie jones, Leviathan, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
At the start of November I mentioned that I was writing a fairy tale to submit for inclusion in an eBook being put together by Homespun Theatre. All funds going into what I like to image is a big cast iron cauldron with the words “CASH” stencilled on the side in white spray-paint. When the cauldron is overflowing with cash-moneys they’ll cart it off to the local witch who will then take it as payment for casting a spell, a magical spell which will let them take their Edinburgh Fringe show on a national tour. It’s like a more capitalist version of Cinderella. This may however not been entirely accurate in its specifics. It’s near enough though, It’ll do.
The eBook went on sale late on Friday afternoon. My monstrously long fairy tale was accepted. I guess this makes me a real and proper writer now. Whoa…
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4 Comments | tags: eBooks, Fairy Tales, Fantasy, Homespun Theatre, Publishing, Writing | posted in Writing
The Rogue Verbumancer 