Ranking My Work
I’ve always been a sucker for a good list, and just recently I was talking to someone about the stories I’m most proud of - so naturally it’s a thought that’s been floating around in my head. Given those two things, I figure I might try a fun little experiment and see if I can come up with a top ten ranking of my stories and poems.
Of course, it’s rarely so cut and dry when it comes to art. What might be my favourite now might not be tomorrow and the higher up the list I get, the harder it will be to really distinguish between rankings. So don’t take this as objective gospel, but rather how I’m feeling at this moment.
10. City of Cycles
City of Cycles is a story I wrote back during Season Two of Stories Across Borders. It follows a scientist named Nader, who is part of a project that is constantly rewinding time in order to find a way to prevent the destruction of their city because of an erupting volcano.
I’m always a sucker for a time loop story because of the themes inherent to them and the ways they can make characters struggle. I was really pleased with the way this story explored Nader’s growing apathy and exhaustion given the short format it’s written in.
9. Beach Sand
Beach Sand comes from one of those ideas that just wouldn’t leave me alone until I wrote it down. It’s a short poem that explores the impermanence of people and history and the cyclical nature of societal growth and collapse.
In this poem, footprints and litter left on the beach serve as a metaphor for people, cultures, societies and even species. It’s a metaphor I am quite proud of and explores themes I’ve thought about a lot.
8. Raising the Stakes
This is another story I originally wrote for Stories Across Borders, this time for our cycle on friendships in fiction. It follows a group of highly skilled thieves in the aftermath of a job gone wrong, where overzealous police officers killed the man who was the moral centre and voice of reason in the group - the one who made them better.
I really enjoyed all of these characters, and it was interesting to explore what losing a character can mean for a tight knit group, especially when that character was the “heart” of their collective. This was also one of those stories that ended up feeling like part of a wider world, a snippet of a much longer story. And it has ended up like that in a way, I wrote a prequel called Risk and Reward for a different cycle in a later season. I like these characters a lot so I’ll likely jump into other parts of their timeline in the future again.
7. Turing
Turing is another SAB story, written as part of our cycle on science fiction. It’s the story of a lonely, eccentric millionaire who uses his extensive resources on the strange hobby of sending signals into space in order to try and contact aliens. More specifically, it follows him after he has seemingly succeeded and explores his friendship with the alien intelligence he has been talking to. Not everything is as it seems though, and some government agents showing up at his doorstep leads to a major revelation.
Turing was a lot of fun to write. I really enjoyed everything about it, from Dominic’s social woes and introspection to the way his friend communicates with him and relates to him and even the intentionally stereotypical “men in black” that come to Dominic’s door. I particularly enjoyed building up to the twist reveal though. I don’t typically write overly twisty writing, so it was a lot of fun to do something stylistically different. These are characters I may well come back to again as well. Turing very much feels like the start of something bigger, almost like a pilot episode.
6. Procession
Procession is a very introspective story, less about plot and more about exploring the thoughts and feelings of a character and giving the audience something to think about. In it, a young woman (thanks to Sarah Kamal’s narration), attends her grandmother's funeral. She finds herself wondering who the spectacle is really for and ruminates on her own inevitable demise.
Death is a theme that shows up a lot in my stories, it’s one of very few truly universal experiences and one that I - like most people - have a lot of thoughts about in one way or another. But this is probably the first time one of my stories really explored the notion of death and grief at the philosophical level instead of the dramatic. I like a story that gives you something to think about, and I hope I achieved that with this one. I feel like I did.
5. Of Ruination
From here on, we’re getting into the part of the list where everything was becoming very difficult to put into an actual order. I could easily see this ranking at fourth or even third on a different day. Of Ruination is the only other one of my poems on this list. On the literal level, it portrays a man wandering through a desert and noting the ruins of a once great civilisation. Really though, it’s an exploration of the idea of mental decline, the fragility of memory and the onset of dementia.
Far more than death, the idea of losing who I am terrifies me. So I think it was inevitable that I would explore this concept one way or another. While this story doesn’t really explore the horror of losing one’s self and one’s memory, I think it does a very good job of conveying the tragedy and sadness of such a thing through its morose and sombre tone. Plus, this is another poetic metaphor that I’m particularly proud of.
4. Epilogue
I wasn’t sure whether or not to count this as one story since it’s a collection of interconnected short stories I release in serialised format here on my site, but it felt weird to separate it out. Season One is now freely available here. Season Two is currently premium content.
Epilogue is about the end of the world. Or, more specifically, it’s about people at the end of the world. It’s an exploration of humanity - all of who we are and who we were. The good, the bad and the in-between. The focus isn’t on the spectacle of the apocalypse, it’s on the thoughts and feelings of individual people as everything comes to an end. Each season is focused on a different location and each episode follows a different character present at that location. The first season is set on a plane travelling from Brisbane to Hobart while the second has a broader scope, being set across a part of Hong Kong.
I’m very proud of my work on Epilogue. I really like all the characters I created for it, I love the concept of it and I feel like I’ve done a good job of showing all these different sides to who we are as a species. Fourth is still a really good placement, but it was still hard to put it here instead of at third.
3. Our Importance
Our Importance is the oldest piece of writing on this list. When I first wrote it, I didn’t have this website and I don’t think I’d only just recently written my first book, The Lonely Wizard. Despite that though, I think it is still one of the best things I’ve written.
Our Importance is an eco-horror story that follows one of the last humans - if not the last - as he wanders across the barren and desolate remains of the Earth. He reflects on what humanity did to the planet and how we’re paying for it. The horror really comes in though when nature starts to make its return, uninterested in the guilt of a lone human (or any humans). Our Importance isn’t just about the way we destroy the only planet we have. It’s about how the planet itself doesn’t care. It’s about the likelihood that some form of life will survive here even after we render the world inhospitable to ourselves. Our Importance is about reminding us that we aren’t important. We’re just another species in a long line of animals… just the only one smart (and stupid) enough to see to its own extinction.
2. Marble
Marble is the second book in my Pieces series. It follows Emina, on the verge of adulthood but coming from a spoiled place of privilege in the aftermath of a nuclear terror attack on the city of Kudin. In the aftermath of the attack, she finds herself reluctantly forced to care for the much younger Saba and Arben and has to confront the ugly parts of herself she’s never acknowledged. Learning empathy and responsibility isn’t just about growing up for Emina anymore, it’s become a matter of survival for all three of them.
Similarly to Epilogue, the Pieces series isn’t about the destruction itself. It’s about the effect that it has on ordinary people - the ways that kind of trauma fundamentally changes people and lingers with them for the rest of their lives. In Marble, we don’t just watch Emina being forced to grow up. We see her struggle to reckon with the destruction of her home, the loss of so many lives and the profound ways that affects not only herself but also the younger kids she’s caring for. We get to watch how even as Emina becomes a much more empathetic person, she is also becoming much more angry and extreme. This isn’t a story about thriving in dire circumstances, it’s about how those circumstances force change upon you and destroy who you used to be.
1. Domino
Really, number one had to be this one. While it’s definitely debatable which of Domino and Marble is the stronger story, Domino is where so much of this started. It wasn’t the first book I wrote, but it was the first novel. It was the beginning of building all of this - the business, the website, the articles and blogs, the podcasts and animations etc etc.
Domino is the first book in the Pieces series. As with Epilogue, it follows young people in the aftermath of that same nuclear attack on Kudin. In this case, it follows fourteen-year-old Hector and twelve-year-old Eli as they struggle to survive and make it to safety. Naturally, Domino and Marble share a lot of the same themes. However, they follow very different people in different circumstances. The biggest difference thematically between the two is that while Domino does still deal with how this kind of trauma changes people, there is a much stronger focus on the themes of guilt and grief. This is very much a story about not just becoming stronger out of necessity, but about everything that is taken from you in the process of surviving.
Of course, it’s tricky to separate Domino and Marble for similar reasons as to Epilogue. I chose to do so only because these are both full books and not a collection of short stories. I’m still slowly chipping away at the third and final (very different) Pieces book as well. It will be interesting to revisit this list one day after it (and the other things I’m writing) are done and see how the list has been shaken up.
