My friends call me Andy, but you can call me Quinn, the now largely pointless pseudonym, or if you will, nom-de-blog, that I go by around here. I live in Cheadle, South Manchester – a village famous for not hosting a neo-gothic church designed by Pugin – along with my wife, son and daughter. In my day job I steadfastly fail to use any of my hard-earned academic qualifications as I work as a communications officer for one of our beloved public services.
I write as Quinn because when I started this I assumed every blogger would go under a mysterious pseudonym, so I picked the name of the suitably enigmatic main character from Paul Auster’s novel City Of Glass, the first part of The New York Trilogy; and also as it is the surname of Niall, one of my heroes when he played football for my team, City. Anyway, I’m sticking with it for now, for ease of thing.
The blog is called The Obscurer because I had to call it something, and I remembered it being the title of a newspaper in a piece of unseen prose fiction I had to read during English Lit while at school; I have since learned that is it from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a novel I haven’t read, and probably never will. It still seems an appropriate title though, as I can in no way guarantee any sense or clarity in my writing; I feel I am far more likely to go and muddy the waters.
When I began this blog, having never read another, I thought it would be a way for me to indulge my ambition of being a political columnist on a broadsheet newspaper writing about current affairs. I was certain that no one would read it, and that it would be like throwing scrawled diary pages into a landfill, but I could still dream of being spotted somehow and the blog becoming successful. Now, more people read this than I ever imagined, but I know it will never become popular, and so it is more a way for me to handle my creative writing pangs and to write about whatever the hell I like; for my own pleasure, and to test out my thoughts in my head, on the page, and on anyone unfortunate enough to end up here following a fruitless and ill-fated Google search. More recently I have stretched even my meagre competence way past breaking point by extending and spreading The Obscurer’s “empire” to its own pages on YouTube, del.icio.us, Twitter and Tumblr.
I like those cool yet sunny spring days, especially Sunday mornings, walking to collect a newspaper, the sun warming you while the wind still chills, making everything feel fresh and bright. I dislike writing my profile in the third person; it’s just wrong.