Homophobia's just one form of abjection, and wherever you have a marker of deviance - skin colour, gender, gender identity, disability - you get the same mechanisms of prejudice.

Homophobia's just one form of abjection, and wherever you have a marker of deviance - skin colour, gender, gender identity, disability - you get the same mechanisms of prejudice.

Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.

I wanted to do justice to texts that are in verse in their original, so I tried to invest my version with a comparable poetic power; hence even more literary fireworks there.

A 3K word story might well be done in some caffeine-and-nicotine-fuelled 36 hour session, and at the end of it, there'll be a few passes of editing required, but I basically have a polished draft.

I've got a number of stories written so far in that mythos, more lined up to be written, and a narrative arc taking shape between them. I was experimenting with releasing the stories online for Paypal donations, so the existing ones are currently available via the blog for free download, but the ball didn't keep rolling in terms of meeting the targets I was setting.

Movies, novels, TV shows - these are the water fountains of today. We thirst for stories which speak to us by representing us, but we go to the water fountains in the centre of town looking for that, and we're turned away, sent to the ghetto.