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.

Find the truth and spread the lie.

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.

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’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?

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

Prejudice validates itself as righteous abhorrence of the criminally deviant. So Christian homophobia is just a metonym of that abjection in general.

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.

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.

The conflict between pacifism and socialism ultimately reflects a greater quandary of how one engages with such a system.