I haven't posted on here for a good while, nearly two years in fact. While it's nice to be back, I think I've got a fairly serious amount of updating to do.
The principal development has been my ongoing two year collaboration with Jacob Bettany at Niche Clever. Jacob has developed a website for my writing, and formatted and begun the job of marketing the seven works of mine below, which are now available for sale:-
Of these works, the first four and the sixth may together be classed as volumes of an extended Juvenalian satire which I call the Bristolian Chronicles. The Chronicles at least so far are all full-length novels except for The Senseless Counterfeit, which is a full length Jacobean revenge tragedy in loose iambic pentameter. Each chronicle features Bristol as the background landscape, the Chronicles as a whole feature an overlapping cast of characters, and each work is a parody of or homage to a literary classic, with the exception again of The Senseless Counterfeit which to some extent satirises Jacobean revenge tragedy itself as a genre, and thus counts as Menippean as well as Juvenalian.
https://www.richardcraven.uk/amoeba-dick/ Based on Moby Dick. Herod, manager of Bristolian gym Pex 'n' Quads seeks vengeance against the colony of microbes in the gym hot tub blamed for his genital gangrene. As a signifier of his quest he straps to his frontage a huge white marital aid known as The White Willy.
https://www.richardcraven.uk/pretty-poli/ Based on The Mayor of Casterbridge. African Grey parrot Hawksmoor Perroquet sells his gormless budgerigar wife and their egg to a passing ornithologist during a ketamine frenzy at the Anarchist Book Fair in Hamilton House, swears off drugs, and embarks on a successful career as an architect of hipster bars. The machinations of depressive provincial merchant banker Sir Hearty Luncheon propel him upto the mayoralty. Then the return of his wife and their supposed child precipitate his usurpation by genial Scottish crow Ian Corby, and his headlong descent into drugs and destitution.
https://www.richardcraven.uk/the-senseless-counterfeit/ Jacobean revenge tragedy. Sudanese aesthete Suliman protects his two daughters from the advances of the local thugs in Withywood. His neighbour, tantric entrepreneur Sleaze stirs up rumours of paedophila resulting first in Suliman's arrest and then release by hapless Constable Wifebeating-Cokehead, whereupon he is promptly his crucified by the mob. His younger daughter goes mad with flower and is prostituted by Sleaze's lieutenant, ketamine dealer Mr Luvvertory, but his older daughter Scheherezade is made of sterner stuff. Revenge is administered orally by means of the eponymous marital aid in a dark room mercifully offstage.
https://www.richardcraven.uk/odour-issues/ Based on the Odyssey/Ulysses. Aristocratic junky Lord Snatch fails to return from an evening as the front end of a pantomime horse propping up the bar at the Startling Farter. Back home in their Cheltenham Road ... er ... squat, his charming wife the poshtitute Lady Snatch whiles away the hours treating the human flotsam of Stokes Croft to a gangbang.
https://www.richardcraven.uk/books/mr-nices-bottom-and-other-short-stories/ The short stories in this volume are assembled chronologically, i.e. relative juvenalia first. It bears remarking that of these stories Professor Guzman's PhD Student could very arguably be included in the Bristolian Chronicles, on account of its featuring several characters who appear in the Chronicles.
https://www.richardcraven.uk/books/helix-folt-the-conservative/ Based on George Eliot's novel Felix Holt the Radical. Somewhat neurodivergent ingenue socially conservative foundling Helix Folt toils honestly at provincial merchant bank. When a new council bi-election in Montpelier the Bristolian suburb where he lives is announced, Helix finds himself drawn into increasingly farcical confrontations with left wing antisemites, green fascists and postmodernists armed with fathomless cynicism, all while hypnotise by the wiles of Slavic maneater Gamina Drocerpyatova.
https://www.richardcraven.uk/books/collected-shorter-verse/ Fifty poems, with an introduction. Mainly sonnets but with some poems of other verse types. Each poem is accompanied by a commentary on the facing page.
Next in the pipeline:-
In my early 30's, i.e. 30 years ago, I wrote and published my first novel Bile under the pen name Mark Brand. Bile is a disgustingly scatological satire of the 1990's debate about Britain's role in Europe. In brief, the story concerns what happens in the aftermath of the EU physically invading Britain. Bile is quite challenging insofar as it's not actually written in English but in Estuarine, i.e. bastard son of Cockney. Suffice to say, Jacob is presently formatting Bile, and it is soon to be reissued under my own name.
Finally, I have two projects on the go at the moment. The first of these is Woking Pox, which may be regarded as the sixth volume of the Bristolian Chronicles - or the seventh if we include Professor Guzman's PhD Student. Woking Pox is a parody of or homage to Camus's La Peste, and narrates the story of the usurpation of political power in Bristol by a committee of bottomlessly cynical postmodernists under the pretext of undertaking measures to combat the deadly Pox, a plague caught from rats which causes blue hair, morbid obesity, self-righteous ragen, and an enthusiasm for child mutilation.
Woking Pox is at present about 40% complete, but I don't anticipate finishing it for a couple of years at least, because my attention has been diverted by the need to do some about publishing my heroic couplet satires. There are four of these, two complete and two incomplete. These are, respectively The Montpeliad, The Wokeiad, The Modern Lady's Dressing Room and The Modern Hudibras. The original plan was to publish the four together with an introduction. However, the introduction has metastasized into chapters on the theories of heroic couplet and satire, together with an extensive history of heroic couplet satire feuds between the 16th-20th centuries, focusing on Thomas Nashe, John Dryden, Alexander Pope and Roy Campbell. I'm very much enjoying writing history for the first time in my life, but the whole project is liable to take at least nine months.
