Pronto! It is time I departed for a bit, mi amici. I’m leaving the country to go do some travelling…
Over on my website there’s a placeholder post to cover my backside while I banish myself from this geographical realm and the cyber-realm. I need a break from computers and this country and I’m off to have a adventure for a month.
Enjoy yourselves while I’m away and I’ll be back soon with new methods and motivation to break the internet… :D
Here sits James Clayton’s creative kung fu and other stuff…
Aye! In case you missed it, all my blog bits and pieces and anti-bits and anti-pieces are happening over on my fresh Wordpress website. It has a yellow colour scheme. It’s not owned by Yahoo. It was found last week by someone typing “SNES gamers blinded by nostalgia” into a search engine.
It may have something of interest. Recent slightly-deep blog posts have been praising people who open up in public about health problems and doing daily life with compassion and conscious awareness. Plus I also delved into the esoteric mysteries of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.
Oh, and if you’re wandering idly around the internet and want to see some other stuff I’m contributing to, go forth and gaze upon The Working Barbarian.
Don’t hang around here while there’s nothing happening here! Head elsewhere to more exotic cyberspaces of high adventure!
FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!
Captain Haddock vs Captain Birdseye. Here’s a poster for my latest contribution to the Fight! Fight! Fight! site. Further promotional pre-amble on my new site here. Hit the high seas and enjoy the ultraviolence…
Oi vey! Here’s another memo to say “Didn’t you get the memo? All the exciting stuff is elsewhere and, oh, what a desolate waste this is!”
I encourage you to go over to my website to catch up on cool things. Some fresh new things of interest include a fresh Pictonaut challenge effort in the form of a screenplay and on the horizon I’ll be stepping up to write for The Working Barbarian. The latter needs your input and I urge you to vote for the outcome affects what I have to write for you.
Go forth! Leave this place and enjoy the treasures of elsewhere!
The Fear
Right now my anxiety is making a noise. it’s a high-pitched whining sound that could, if properly…
Magus John the Steele has looked The Fear in its eyeballs and jammed his bastard sword right into all three of ‘em! By the thunder grumbles of Xaxathoon the Grumpy! The Life and Times of a Working Barbarian has gone live!
meanwhileinanalternatereality:
MEANWHILE, IN AN ALTERNATE REALITY… HAS BEEN HAPPY TO PROVIDE A DAILY PARALLEL DIMENSION NEWS SERVICE FOR 222 BROADCASTS. NOW - FOR THIS PARADIGM OF EXISTENCE AT LEAST - IT IS TIME TO CEASE OPERATIONS. PLEASE CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR FURTHER INFORMATION AND ANALYSIS. THANK YOU, AND GOOD NIGHT.
*Waves fingers, casts Jedi Mind Trick…*
You should really be heading over there. That’s where there’s a lot of exciting action. This wretched hive of scum and villainy is a bit of a desert these days, you know…
Oh, yeah…
*Waves fingers, casts another Jedi Mind Trick…*
You want to submit something to Badnasty Horror Horse Opera. Now, let me pass and may the Force be with you…
Hail! I have a new website/blog! I hope you like it and find things of interest there.
It’s work-in-progress and some more friggin’ in the riggin’ needs to be done. Nevertheless, it’s good to have something up and running with all my links on that isn’t a Tumblr site. Tumblr is good for media content and memes but isn’t good for a lot of writing or consistent, coherent organisation. That’s where the new site comes in to hopefully do the job. Ideally, that blog will replace this one which may be repurposed later as a transient, inconsequential image dump or on-the-fly avant-garde poetry bin. Or I could sell out and boot up a blog with real mass rebloggable appeal. Yeah, how about a ‘Marvel Comics Characters Hidden in Classic Art Masterpieces’ tumblr ? Let’s go: go forth and find the Incredible Hulk in a Hieronymus Bosch painting…
Anyway, all the short stories and other things I write will be easier to access and the plan is to sprawl out some blogging and lengthier rambles - the sort of stuff I shouldn’t do on Twitter because 140 characters sometimes isn’t enough for extended, elaborate ruminations and rants. I openly invite you then to join me in my new, improved, more awesome realm…
(via meanwhileinanalternatereality)
And that’s the 200th ‘Meanwhile, in an alternate reality…’ news bulletin. I can’t believe I’m still reporting these things. I’ll be stopping soon (our reality surely can’t take so much parallel universe action) but for now, whoa! 200! Infinite high fives to all the universes!
I was invited to ramble about folk tales and myself by Homespun Theatre and duly did so. Here it is reblogged for those who may be interested in reading about Japanese mythology, alternate realities, writing and, erm, me…
We thought it was high time we got to know Homespun Threads contributor James Clayton a little better. Now you can too!
I’m James Clayton and I’m 25 - though I figure that I’m actually somewhere around 18 because dark forces outside my control have conspired to keep me in arrested…
Hark! I have a fresh Pictonaut short story to share with thee! As is customary, the venerable John Steele has thrown down the challenge to write a tale inspired by an evocative image. Behold: February’s source picture is a brilliant photo of the former House of the Bulgarian Communist Party.
I thought about tackling this by writing a rip-off of At the Mountains of Madness with tentacular Socialist deities rising out of the ice to consume the soul of a wayward academic on an ill-advised field trip. The Lovecraftian terrors withdrew however as I sat and pondered on the quiet pathos of the picture. It speaks of ideologies being abandoned, a Communist fantasy and ambitious power designs ebbing away and perishing as time moves on.
It’s poignant and ‘cause grand dreams are on my agenda at the moment, I’ve ended up coming up with the following fiction-bit. I am all apologies for pumping out a juvenile pep-talk affirmation powertrip from the perspective of an neo-utopian emo-kid which, writing-wise, is a throwback attempt to channel my angry teenage diary days (ick, ick and more ick). Make of it what you will and, in the meantime, I urge you to have a stab at the Pictonaut short challenge and play around with some words before the month is done. Here then is my February Pictonaut effort…
Hydrated! vine.co/v/bn6jIw1wbgL
— James Clayton (@james__clayton) February 6, 2013
Short films and six-second mini-adventure epic making…
Twitter launched a new app called Vine and I thought “well, this could be interesting and a really easy and efficient way to make miniature movies without a lot of hassle.”
There’s some fun to be had here and I’m going to crank out some creative filmed experiments. Enjoy this true chronicle of my quest to overcome extreme thirst and watch out for more 6-second James Clayton joints…
It is almost the end of January which means it’s high time I filed a Pictonaut short story. Here’s how it works: every month the Resplendent Most-Righteous Meister John Steele picks an image and challenges people to write a story inspired by it. It’s fun to do, I recommend it and every month I get carried away doing it. Lose yourself fabricating fantastic fictions, y’know?
Anyway, I was ultra-psyched to find that the first inspiral picture of the New Year was a Moebius illustration. What’s more it was Western-tinged and I’m thinking a lot about that genre at the moment. Ultimately I was inspired to write the following which ended up being splurged out as a sort of stream-of-consciousness mystic trip.
Mr. Steele gave this month’s title “Plodding On” but I’ve gone off-base again and titled my effort “The Path is Yours to Choose”. I saw something positive in the image, get transcendental vibes from Moebius (it’s The Incal and the Alejandro Jodorowsky link, methinks) and felt a need to do some soul-searching. I’m resisting the urge to spend ages going over it and doing a heavy-duty polishing job because that’d go against the authentic, original spirit of the thing, I feel.
Pretty raw then, here’s my January Pictonaut piece…
The Path is Yours to Choose
By James Clayton
“The path is yours to choose…”
The phrase rolled around. Echo chamber mind. Open vistas of expansive space awaiting. Sound of a soothing voice deep and sonorous urging the mantra refrain.
“The path is yours to choose…”
Eyes open or shut? No certain knowing in this state. Out of body experience? Out of mind experience? He couldn’t tell. Sunstroke suffused senses. The haze and daze of the desert dusk. Weary. Tired. Twilight fugue.
As far as he could see it was sand. Grains of grey, green and blue. Ghostly. Otherworldly. Unusual but understandable. Weirdness happens. Weird is the way the world is. Weird is where we all inevitably end up.
Aye, hombre. I’m a ‘fixin’ to pull together a brute western anthology and am raisin’ a call for submissions. Get thinkin’ and keep your eyes peeled for updates on this new blog…
