commentary

after some separation from having written something, i tend to have new thoughts on it, as writers often do. sometimes i think theyre worth appending to the end of something. i’ll try not to overdo it!

Explosive Charge

february 2025:

initially i was worried about this one not being didactic enough, actually. oh no what if i glorified the military as so and so. that type of shit. now i think the story is fine, considering it’s in the headspace of people who have been pushed so far into the war machine that they can’t conceive of anything else. if there was an ending for these two that involved deserting and being better people according to our own morals, and if they had actually wanted that, they would have found it.

the avert allusions to empty spaces-esque mech posting here are kind of cringe though. ill do better, im listening and im learning, etc etc etc. really i should have just been more subtle about it instead of framing it in this context with the subtlety of a sledgehammer

The Prison City

february 2025:

i wrote this in 7 days in a period of divine inspiration. it definitely shows. lol.

the only thing i really regret about this one, though, is that around this time i started wanting to set my writing in lands that id lived on. in this case it ended up being unceded Gadigal land. but unsure of how to tackle the nature of colonialism in this story, one where history is unreliable and overwritten, i decided to try and say “im not up to tackling this” and then wrote something where they didn’t exist on their own land. basically i played into terra nullius without realising, and i dont like that.

i did mention kamay as “the place where Europeans first decided to colonise the Australian continent” so i was aware of it. im aware of the state of australia’s history as a prison colony and the dehumanisation and genocide of the people who lived here before colonisation. im not stupid.

really i think i should have been more careful with this. i could have not made the continent completely abandoned, or just set this in a fictional land, or an actual geographic location without specifying which. the story would be better for it, instead of something that i imagine people could read as really ignorant coloniser stuff.

Passing Through Cervantes

march 2025:

yet another story set somewhere i’ve been. in this case it’s set on unceded Yued and Whadjuk lands. this story ended up exploring alienation ive felt from the world as someone who grew up in suburbs. it sounds like some “cis women thinks transphobia is bad but only because it could affect her” type shit, obviously im a beneficiary of colonialism, but i think writing and revising this helped me understand my relation to these things.

i dont actually know if id change anything about this one though. despite it being similar to The Prison City in this sense, i think that mermaid story (as i called it while writing) was the right place to tackle this, and the other story wasn’t. charlotte’s only engagement with the pinnacles is not as a place of spiritual significance, with all the weight it entails: she has only engaged with it as a tourist attraction. she sees beauty in the natural world yet this isn’t a connection with it. no community, holed up in her house. alexandra isnt a yawkyawk, but a mermaid from europe. etc etc. basically, here it was intentional, and it wasnt in the other story.

ultimately i do want to write stories set in “australia” though, because i live here, and i dont want people to read my stories and assume theyre set in america. i live here, and i want to do what i can to portray it as a beautiful place ruined by british colonialism and american imperialism, without being preachy, and without overstepping my bounds. tall ask! but hopefully my writing after this can tackle it ok.