About ReMakar

(This posting follows on from the short 500 character description which is all Blogger permits us to deploy to introduce what may in some cases be a hideously-complicated set of tactics masquerading as activities or, as in this case, simply the results of a confused experiment to graft an author's head onto a walrus's body.)

...Because this is not his forte, and because 'ReMakar', as he's decided to call this aspect of himself, is nearing fifty, and therefore cannot pass it off as a career move, these 'story-things' are unlikely to make it into actual print, and so must languish here like mangy zoo penguins, poked with a stick and made to flap their wings and bird-oink lugubriously whenever you click onto this page. Dear Reader. 

The other reason they must remain in the rubbery purdah of the webpage is that ReMakar is clearly far more interested in reliving the obscure joys of his reading of the genres than he is in achieving the tragic epiphanies of serious literature. 

Genre, by which he appears to mean an incoherent mishmash of Scifi, Western, Fantasy and something that isn't exactly Children's Lit (Man-Child's Lit?), is clearly more important to him than the basic decencies of inventing serious makie-up people who experience topical crises at the correct moment in the organically efficient plot. 

Fortunately - or, if you too occupy a solipsistic backwater of counter-intuitive unhipness, unfortunately - for ReMakar, some of his precious pulpy faves are being encroached upon by more normal-looking media types. People don't sneer or look bewildered by the likes of Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard no more - even Moorcock seems vaguely okay.   

So a novel about a dodgy Pictish shaman that's not very historically accurate and throws in some gratuitous 'Magick' sex scenes just doesn't cut it as 'unlikely' any more. While a mash-up of Mozart and Shane that's (sort-of) Morike's Journey to Prague (kind-of) meets Kafka's America sounds ludicrous, but in a 'yeah, yeah, yadda, yadda' sort of way. And the kid's story that's a bit Celtic steampunk... well, what can you say? 

And he wants to write more, much more of this stuff - there's the time-travel novel based on what he misremembers from a Man from UNCLE spin-off, and the labyrinthine Virtual Scotland stuff that never cohered into a book of linked short stories whichever way up he looked at it, but was supposed to pull the whole project together. And then there's the Book of MacGonagall - when is he ever going to finish/write that? Thank God he's kept too busy by the day-job to really get going.

If any of this sounds even vaguely diverting, you've certainly come to the right place, but perhaps you need some form of counselling or support. If not, then run! Run for the hills!

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