21/06/20026

I thought it’d be fun to write a bit about my process and intentions for my stories. I’m starting with my most recent because it’s still pretty fresh in my head, but I might well go back and revisit my older stories as well.

Fabric started life around six years ago. It’s been through nine drafts and spent a lot time untended to at the back of my mind. Evidently this was not a story that came into the world enthusiastically, rather one that was dragged kicking and screaming from the cold embrace of oblivion. In that time the overall premise (factory worker gets curious about the weird garment factory across the road) has stayed pretty stable, though just about everything else is quite different.

Early on, I was going to include a monster in the loom room. Some sort of pseudo-Lovecraftian many-limbed thing, an eldritch being manifesting in our reality through a body made of woven fabric and the blood and sweat of the agency workers. Ultimately I decided that a less bombastic sort of horror fit what I was trying to achieve a little better. Mundane corporate concerns taken to absurd depths with a little hint of larger weirdness. This turned out quite well for me. It gave me the opportunity to put the HR haruspex in, for a start (HaRuspex? HRuspex? I’ll leave it up to the reader). I’m inexplicably quite fond of her.

It also allowed for a lot more ambiguity as well as that sort of quietly desperate ending. That really made the story for me. The self-doubt of the protagonist, the questioning of memory, considering going back. I’m a factory worker myself. I joined my current employer when I was in a fairly tenuous spot, came on as a temp and got exposed to a sort of work that I hadn’t known in my previous life as a bar and restaurant manager. This story is the product of the feelings and thoughts I had in that tumultuous time in my life.

Voice for this one is more or less just my natural manner of writing, I wasn’t trying to inhabit a certain character. I’ve done a few of these first person stories with anonymous protagonists now and that’s usually because I’m bending and twisting my own experiences in order to make them into horror stories rather than coming up with something truly new.

There’s a little Kafka and a hint of Ligotti leaking through, I feel. Certainly that’s who I was reading when I wrote the early drafts. The absurdity inherent to my sort of factory work is a product of alienation. I never actually see the products I’m making; I inject wax patterns, another low-paid worker in another factory coats my pattern in ceramic and then melts the wax out, replacing my work with cast iron or some other metal. The customer never touches something I’ve touched, nothing of my labour remains other than a slightly distorted shape, a three-dimensional shadow on the cave wall of capitalism. This is investment casting, and it’d give Plato a stroke.

I chose to highlight the absurdity in this story but strip away the specificity of my role, going instead with a more generic injection moulding job. Every manufacturing firm in a modern supply chain has this alienation in its own way and I don’t want to give the impression that my job is especially bad or that I don’t like it. I’m actually fond of what I do. It’s just strange to think about from certain angles. The labour itself is repetitive and feels arbitrary, but my autistic brain handles that quite well. Not sure how allistics do it. I suppose a ‘this guy is crazy’ reading of Fabric might be my imagining how that would go. The ‘this actually happened’ reading is perhaps more intentional, commentary on corporate nonsense and a general statement of ‘these business people are fucking weird.’ I’ve dodged all the corporate stuff as much as I can in my life because it all feels very culty and intimidates me. I hope that comes through for the reader.

I think that’s all I have to say on Fabric right now, so I’ll leave it here.

Thanks for reading.

–Antony F.