I'm sort of exploring where pacifism and socialism come into conflict. How do you reconcile a passionate rejection of might and violence with an attitude of "nil paseran" - "none shall pass" - in the face of fascism?

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.

Words command us. Names define us. Definitions bind us. Words are where we keep our sacred secrets.

Destiny can sometimes be history coming back to bite you in the arse.

Where names of people or places would mean little to a contemporary reader, I figured "translation errors" could create interesting new meanings.

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.

I started thinking about the endless bullshit about quotas, and how certain types of character are fine "as long as it's important to the story," and so on, started thinking about the absence of the abject.