Can you talk a bit about how this story took shape and what inspirations fed into it?

I wrote “The Girlfriend Experience” while attending Clarion West last year. I masochistically put my hand up for Monday critiques, so it was one of the stories in our very first day of workshops. In retrospect, it might’ve been a subconscious litmus test to find out which of my classmates were prudes. (As it turns out, none of them; Clarion West Class of 2024 is wall-to-wall perverts, and I could not be happier.)

Inspiration, for me, usually means that I’m processing or reacting to something by writing stories about it. Inspirations for “The Girlfriend Experience” include but are not limited to: the book Abolition Labor; the video game Cyberpunk 2077; the novel A Memory Called Empire; the TV show Deadloch; the movie Dredd; the Nature article “Fast response of cold ice-rich permafrost in northeast Siberia to a warming climate”; Marx’s theory of alienation; the TV show Dollhouse; the song “Solidarity Forever”; and one really dark joke. (Apologies to everyone who’s recommended it to me, but I still haven’t watched Severance.)

The closet and costumes are straightforward metaphors for the face you put on at work. I think everyone is familiar with the concept of “customer service voice,” for example. I’m on the autism spectrum, so for me it goes a bit further. I can’t just dial up the friendliness; I need a whole façade of neurotypicality, built by observing and copying my coworkers. The idea of a cyberpunk version of autistic masking, with all the genre’s attendant themes of commodification and corporate intrusion, has been kicking around in the back of my head for a while. I suspect it’s something I’ll come back to in the future.

I really liked how the story turned the idea of “the disposable sex worker” on its head, particularly given the costume’s form and use as a weapon. What led you to set this up as a murder story from beginning to end?

Full disclosure: I used to be a sex worker, so I have some skin in this game. I hate that trope! I’ve only worked in places where sex work is legalised or decriminalised, but I am confident I’d still hate it if I’d worked exclusively in places where sex work is criminalised. No human is disposable. This is not the only time my seething irritation about the matter has resulted in a story. I was so irked by how a certain extremely popular piece of fantasy media treated sex workers that, when the 2022 floods left me stranded without internet for a couple of weeks, I wrote a 95,000-word manuscript about it. (If any agents are interested in a fantasy novel set in a brothel, I’m about to start querying—hit me up!)

Imagine a world where accountants are disproportionately victims of violence; where law enforcement simply fails to investigate attacks on accountants; where pop culture portrays murder as the natural consequence of getting paid to file tax returns. In that world, Evie would be an accountant. In this world, she’s a sex worker. I don’t know that inverting the murderer/murdered roles was particularly creative or unique, but it was a lot of fun! I would love to see more stories that end with a tech billionaire getting murdered.

From the initial hook to the simulated rapes and the costumes, a strong thread of casual, workaday cruelty bled through the narrative. Was this part of what you hoped a reader would take away from the story, and what led you to focus on this angle of sex work?

That’s an interesting question! To invert it for a moment, I desperately hope no reader comes away demonising consensual sex work. The workplaces where I have felt most dehumanised and exploited were not brothels; they were corporate offices. When sex work is decriminalised and sex workers have access to the same rights and protections as workers in any other industry, working at a brothel is no more coercive than working at a fast food joint. They have different risks—brothel workers are unlikely to burn themselves on a deep fryer, and fast food workers are unlikely to wind up with chafed nipples—but neither is inherently riskier.

Evie consents to take on a dangerous task because she needs the money. She isn’t coerced by her role or her workplace—Viktor explicitly tells her she does not have to do this!—but by her landlord raising her rent. There’s a secondary element of being reluctant to refuse the company man specifically, but that, too, is not about her job; it’s about class. If you were a minimum wage receptionist in a generic office job, and a sleazy billionaire walked in and hit on you, how free would you feel to tell them to fuck off?

I hope readers comes away from this story recognising that sex workers are people, that sex work is real work, that workers in every industry deserve rights and protections, and that the real villain is capitalism. Casual, workaday cruelty thrives whenever workers must choose between maybe getting hurt on the job or definitely getting evicted if they don’t earn enough this month.

I appreciated how, between sex workers offering a “girlfriend experience” for money and the reality of the Smoulder, the title works on multiple levels. How did you land on this title, and how does that process often go for you?

Remember how I said one of the inspirations was a really dark joke? A couple of months before I went to CW24, I caught up with a friend of mine. We met as sex workers, but we’ve both since left the industry. My friend now supports survivors of intimate partner violence. They were telling me about a report from the Australian Institute of Criminology showing a staggering increase in intimate partner homicides against women. I said that we’d clearly had it wrong in the brothel; the real girlfriend experience was getting strangled to death by your boyfriend.

Titles are normally a struggle for me, but for this story, “The Girlfriend Experience” was the only option.

Is there anything you’re working on that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

My day job got super intense and ate my life for a good six months, so I’m in a creative bottleneck. If there’s anyone out there who wants to give me a fellowship or residency or grant or mysterious benefactor or unexpected inheritance or wealthy and supportive spouse, that would be fantastic for my productivity!

I’ve been in talks with an Australian comic book publisher about adapting some of my short fiction as graphic novels. They’re actually really keen on “The Girlfriend Experience”—it’s very on-brand for them! It’s all theoretical right now, but I would love to write more in this setting, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed . . .

I’m contributing to the anthology Never Say Die for the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild, which should be coming out not long after this issue of Lightspeed. I’m contributing to another anthology which has not been announced at the time I write this but might be by the time people read it, which will be launching on Kickstarter later in 2025. And I am constantly, nigh-pathologically, working on stories—some short, some long, but always at least one.