I question myself over many, many topics, not the least of which is why I’m trying to make literature out of male masturbation fantasy when the sky is literally falling on my home nation. I haven’t reconciled with that, it’s like a simmering pot I come back to while brewing coffee and feeding the cats. Sometimes it boils over and sometimes I cut the heat a little too much, but it will always be there and it will never be finished.

But another big one that I wrestle with is my handle. People who dislike thought tell me I’m thinking too much about this, but I am politically conscious, and the word aborigen means the same thing in several languages. If you search for my handle on Google Books, you’ll find all the stories I have up for sale, and you’ll find a library of indigenous concerns. Any time I try to break into a new forum, it’s a crapshoot as to whether it’s free for me to grab or it’s been taken by a First Nation or indigenous Central American user (or this one Russian dude, strangely). If it’s taken, I append “GTS” to my handle, even though technically I focus on shrunken men, but originally my fetish started with gigantic women so it’s true to that source, but−

Yes, I do think too much, but thinking is worthwhile. It’s not stopping progress, because I already have the handle and I’m pretty well positioned in my online presence. But whenever this comes up, I get that twinge that I’m being another white cishet middle-aged imperialist engaging in cultural appropriation.

I come by the handle in naïveté. In 1993, internet-capable computers were installed in the community college library where I worked, and I studied the provided documentation until I figured out how to perform an online search, and my first search term was “giantess.” And I found grainy BMP images and two online forums waiting for me. I devoured writers like DX Machina, Grildrig, and Scott Chelgren, and a few years later I started writing my own giantess porn, private fever-dreams and rants, strictly for getting my, and others’, rocks off. A few years after that, I decided to start my own online presence: I bought a book to learn HTML, then learned more via a pirated copy of Dreamweaver. I built a homepage on FortuneCity, then Blogger, and at that point I had to think of a name for myself.

I’m terrible with names. I rely on random name generators for writing stories, and it takes me several tries to remember a real person’s name unless there’s an emotional hook. When I first moved to Minneapolis, I listened to a local radio station that was hosting a trivia contest. No one else seemed to be playing, so I annoyed the DJs by calling in repeatedly with correct answers, so they awarded me a record so I’d shut up, I guess. It was an orange translucent 45 by a punk band… and in looking up this band, just this minute, I realize I’ve been wrong about their name for years. The band is TodosTusMuertos and they’re from Argentina; the name of the single is En Vivo Aborigen, with two versions of “Dale Aborigen,” in studio and live. (Up to this moment I assumed the band was En Vivo Aborigen and they were from Mexico. Wow, I’m one ignorant, lazy fucker. That is very embarrassing, but let me lay my shame bare.)

Aborigen means similar things in several languages: Spanish, Catalan, Kazakh, Romanian. You can recognize it in Italian, aborigeni; Haitian Creole, aborijèn; Macedonian, aboridžini; Maltese, aboriġinali. Some countries use it to mean Native Americans specifically, others designate it for the “primitive inhabitants” of a country. What does this have to do with me? Absolutely nothing, as I’m the descendant of Polish, Irish, and Prussian immigrants to the United States. I have no First Nation in me at all: according to my mother’s and brother’s 23andMe tests, I am wholly ethnically UK/Scand/Northern European, white as mayonnaise, without deviation.

Which to my mind makes it a little tasteless for me to take up “Aborigen” as an online identity. I’ve reverse-engineered a reason for my usage: citing the Mandela Effect, and cribbing from the controversy stirred after Richard Sharpe Shaver’s novella “I Remember Lemuria” in Amazing Stories (1945)—the controversy being the number of people who wrote in claiming “I do too!”—my nom de plume alludes to a timeline in which there were giants, giantesses, and tiny people, just like nearly every world culture has recorded in its ancient lore, that crossed over into the mainstream timeline. This left us with people who existed in that world (hence my book’s title, We Come from Somewhere This Was Real), who remember that world, but who find themselves somewhere else entirely. Sure, there’s the Kandahar giant, Homo floresiensis, and a ton of conspiracy theories, fragments and artifacts that get explained away by our materialist scientific limitations or diluted by New Age woo-woo bullshit and inept Photoshop jobs.

How else do I explain my own fixation on and innate attraction to women exponentially larger than myself? It doesn’t exist in real life, it can only be hinted at in sculpture and in cinematic special effects. The 360° immersive visual technology we enjoy now to imitate it did not in any way exist when I was seven years old and first set foot on this path. No, that started with a UHF channel’s Creature Double Feature, Attack of the 50′ Woman and Village of the Giants, but those movies spoke to something already inside me. I really don’t believe that watching those movies created a sexual attraction to giantesses, or I should have been erotically stimulated by literally any movie I saw at the time, to include The Bad News Bears, Logan’s Run, Bugsy Malone, or The Pink Panther Strikes Again. And that is not the case.

So who does it hurt if I entertain the notion that I, and others, come from a parallel reality where size fantasy was a fact of life? I’m not imposing my beliefs upon others in legislation. I don’t even look down on (no pun intended) those who don’t share or even understand my attraction. Yet maybe I should have chosen a less politically weighty word to bear.

Now it’s too late, or else rebranding myself would be a very difficult row to hoe. I know how to do it, I’m fluent in building websites and social media, but for the past 20 years I’ve been Aborigen (or AborigenGTS when my first choice is taken). Even if I could come up with a different, better name—and I have no idea how I could achieve such a feat—I would still have to impress everyone who’s been reading my work for two decades to recognize and adjust to the new handle. But the thing is, all the size fantasy readers aren’t in one location: I could roll out the change on Twitter, then rename myself on DeviantArt, wait a couple weeks and update my Instagram and Tumblr accounts, wait longer and start new accounts on Giantess World and Giantess City, but people won’t necessarily be watching for that. I could spend a month broadcasting this in heavy rotation on all channels, and strangers and friends alike will still be all, “Who’s this bossy new guy, and whatever happened to Aborigen?”

That doesn’t even address the problem of me struggling to find and generate a new handle, one that reflects my writing identity and one that I even like at all. The size fantasy scene is rife and striated with puns both known and potential. I don’t want to be something like “Shrunken Scribbler” or “Nom de Puny.” My first action would be to play around with etymology, finding the roots for “tiny person” and “writer” and running them through Google Translate. After that blows up in my face, I’d probably try searching mythological and literature references, though most of those have already been taken and those that haven’t don’t exactly trip off the tongue, much less lodge in someone’s memory.

I guess I’ll continue to be Aborigen and remain ready to apologize for it.