Who Is This Hornswoggler, Anyway?

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed -- and possibly even puzzled over, if they're particularly bored -- the fact that this blog has a person's name in its title, and that name is not mine. And yet (he said, giving up on an already-far-too-long sentence) my name is featured prominently on the blog, and it's even got a picture of my grinning mug up near the top there. So I'm clearly not trying to be anonymous, as Evil Editor or Miss Snark are.

I said, very early on (in my second-ever post, the Collector's-Item Mission Statement) that "G.B.H. Hornswoggler" was a name I made up some years ago for videogame high scores -- and that is true. However, both the name itself and the long-winded blog title call up certain connotations, and those are not unintended. (I won't claim I have any grand scheme in mind, but I do have some half-baked thoughts I'm trying to shop around.) Whatever images The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent. calls up in your heads are probably similar to the ones I intended to place there. Probably. Unless you're really weird or something.

All this is circling around one thought: this blog is written as by "G.B.H. Hornwoggler," who is not the same person as "Andrew Wheeler." Well, that's not quite true, either. The Hornswoggler isn't even as separate from my everyday self as Jeff VanderMeer's Evil Monkey; he lives in my head and types with my fingers and he says the things I want to say. Hornswoggler, though, is more flamboyant, quicker to pick a fight, and devastatingly witty. (At least, he thinks he is.) The Hornswoggler is a way of saying things, a verbose (and, I expect, occasionally tedious) old scalawag who puts into far too many words the ideas that Wheeler would normally just let drift off into the ether.

This probably all adds up to a warning: if you want me in always-coherent, on-message mode, you'd be better served at SFBC's blog (which might have a real spiffy name of its own sometime soon, if the domain name search goes well). What you'll find here is likely to be less coherent, and -- as I keep having to emphasize -- completely personal, and not endorsed or authorized in any way by my employer, family, friends or fraternal organizations. I hope you do stick around (and maybe even comment once in a while), but Antick Musings is about as far for an official anything as you can get -- and I like it that way.