That's weird, as I just plucked 'Cambodian' out of thin air because it went well with Canadian and Catalan, without really thinking of whether it made sense, except for adding in another continent, to make the whole thing even more confused.

The name Van probably again came from looking for something that could sound European or Asian or anything. And is also a tribute to Ford Prefect and his vehicular name in the Hitchhiker's Guide, which partly inspired this piece.

Glad you enjoyed it. It just popped into my head, from that mystifying, incomprehensible thing you get taught as a kid that 'some of the stars we can see actually no longer exist, it's just the remaining light still travelling towards us'. There must have been a newspaper story about some supernova picked up by a radio telescope or something.

This actually gets me thinking about an idea I had for a pub which I shelved, but maybe should revive, as a way of pumping some motivation back into this platform for myself, and hopefully others.

It was going to be about writing process and ideas, a place to share concepts for stories, or discuss the ideas behind them, the techniques and references. Kind of like a writers' lit crit club, poring over the minutiae of what goes into our fiction or poetry, maybe doing some collaborative stuff, bouncing ideas, or sharing ones that maybe we've got stuck with but someone else may want to run with.

I'm not sure Medium is really the right place for that, but it's the only platform i have, and share with other more or less like-minded people.

It might make it all feel less like it's happening in a vacuum, that we may as well just shove our stories in our sock drawer as publish here.

Dunno.

What do you think? I mentioned it in passing to Mark Suroviec a while back and he seemed quite enthusiastic.