Hey everyone,

I’m happy to announce that my short story “Stag Loop” will be included in Leza Cantoral’s anthology TRAGEDY QUEENS: STORIES INSPIRED BY LANA DEL REY AND SYLVIA PLATH published by Clash Media. This collection looks incredible. I’m immensely humbled to share its pages with so many writers I admire. And it looks like I’m about to discover a bunch of new ones. So, needless to say, I’m very excited to give it a read.

“Stag Loop” is one of those rare stories where I actually remember what inspired it. Late one night I jumped down an Internet rabbit hole and saw my first vintage stag loop video. I remember thinking it was vaguely creepy, owing to the discordant background music and sepia coloured filter. But there was also something oddly “real” about it. By that I mean it didn’t have the overblown, staged quality of most modern pornography. It was just two average-looking people fucking in front of a stationary camera. This somehow set off a chain reaction in my brain, which eventually lead me to writing the story.

To prepare (and I don’t usually do this) I read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper twice. In some intuitive way, I felt it had something to offer the story I was working on. When I finally sat down to write it, I used the now-cancelled Silent Hills PT demo as inspiration for the tone and overall sense of dread.

So yeah, there were some very specific ingredients that lead to the creation of this story. It’s pretty dark and brutal, but I feel like it has something to say, and I hope you enjoy it when it comes out.

I’ll post a link to the anthology when it’s released, so stay tuned!