Tag Archives: 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
Today is a good day for writing. 
The sun is streaming in through the back windows, across the open expanse of the kitchen and into the front-room. It makes my little cosy world feel spacious and clean. Fresh. A state that belies its true nature. The discarded plates can go unnoticed, the strewn flotsam of rubbish can wait till tomorrow, the strata of filth and grime is something which can be avoided. I’m drinking a big cup of organic white tea (middle-class represent!) out of a big, fat, pint mug. Times like these are one of only two times I can really write, the other being the grey place where afternoon and evening blur together. There is always however a problem with writing, the ever struggling battle for originality, the quest to produce something new and exciting. Naturally this isn’t as easy as it sounds.
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Leave a comment | tags: Georges Polti, Gilgamesh, Originality, Shakespeare, Stories, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
All things have a beginning 
and all things have an end. This is one of those inalienable facts of life, existence and creation. Ultimately everything in transitory, forever on a journey between these two markers. It’s a bit grim when you think about it. Depressing. I’ve been having a bit of a mope these last few days, one of those ennuis courting with malaise in a downward spiral of misery. I’m sure if it could be visualised it would look awfully pretty were it not for the fact that it makes me feel so downright awful. So forgive the somewhat maudlin tone on which I’ve began. Of all the bastards and traitors I have ever known my own brain is the greatest amongst them. But that is a matter for another time. This latest plumbing of the depths of my own self-absorbed mopery got me thinking about the aforementioned end of all things, specifically stories, tales, yarns and suchlike. Endings are fantastically important things, if they’re handled badly or poorly executed, then pretty much everything that has come before them is rendered ultimately pointless and irrevocably tainted.
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2 Comments | tags: Endings, Fin, Ramblings, The End, Writing | posted in Ramblings
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
This week sees me pass something of a 
milestone. Ali over at 12 Book has decided to go off gallivanting and galumphing across Europe; she’ll be gone for about a month. To fill her blog in her absence she asked for guest posts. I wrote one. It goes up on Wednesday 25th of April. In years to come when the world is a blasted ruin and we all live in caves or cardboard houses, when the sky bleeds acid and the very air is a noxious and cloying poison, Ali will look back on this day and say “That. That right there, is where it all began. Where it all started to go horribly wrong. That was the first, big, mistake.” Probably. I suspect that it won’t come to that though. Probably…
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Leave a comment | tags: 12 books in 12 months, Blogging, Guest Posts, Ramblings, Writing | posted in Ramblings
Well that about wraps it up for March and with it the end of 2012 quarter 1. How time flies eh? I’m still trying to acclimatise to the “weather” that’s been assailing the country of late. Temperatures are rocketing their way into the low twenties, my face is starting to melt and I’m still suffering from the institutionalised jet-lag of the clocks going forward. Apparently the UK’s heading towards drought and hose-pipe bans again, there’s panic buying in a farcical petrolocalypse, pasties are becoming subject to VAT, a former contestant from Celebrity Big Brother has just been elected to parliament. The very fabric of the country is beginning to tear and rupture as we spiral out control towards oblivion. And all the while the puppet masters of our minority government dance about in their pants quaffing caviare and singing about how great it is to be fabulously wealthy and that the poor should stop complain and do the decent thing and just roll over and die. By and large, things progress onwards much like every other month in recent memory. I suppose I should be thankful for the familiarity, even if it’s less than comforting. On the subject of familiarity it’s the end of the month, another pictonaut wraps up. There’s things to be read. Hop to it.
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Leave a comment | tags: Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Sci-fi, Space, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Last weekend was weird. Seriously weird. Not through any particular event but just from how it felt upstairs in the brain department. Even walking home from work on Friday night I could feel myself slipping into what I refer to as “one of those moods…” It’s hard to explain what one of these moods is like. It’s a bizarre and surreal no-man’s-land between anger and depression. It wells up from deep inside and just takes over. It feels like flying and falling at the same time. It swings pendulum like from one extreme to the other. On Saturday afternoon I was on the back-swing from misery when I started to get angry, really angry. When anger rears its vitriolic head I tend to get very vocal; I tend to get very… political. My friends love it when I’m like this, they derive immense amusement from my directionless, shouty rants against the injustices of the world.
This is exactly what happened this Saturday. With all the feckless stumbling and hypocritical posturing in the modern political world there is no shortage of things to be angry about. So I opened up a big fat can of righteous indignation and went to war on my keyboard.
RAWR!
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4 Comments | tags: Anger, Politics, Rants, Second Person, Writing | posted in Ramblings, 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
The Rogue Verbumancer 
