The location is loosely based on the Round Table Foundation, an occult and psychic research facility that existed on the Maine coast in the mid-20th century. It was led by one Henry Puharić, who is well known in paranormal conspiracy circles, and a guy named Harry Stump, whose biography has to be read to be believed. Aldous Huxley used to stop by.

The story came directly out of two incidents around the same time last summer: a con released a panel description complaining about the existence of too many lesbian stories, and a couple of gaming websites started mass-censoring/banning queer games and creators. The way these events overlapped made both even more frustrating; looking back at my early handwritten notes for this story, the first line is “too many lesbians” in scare quotes.

I have been a professional writer since I was sixteen—which is fifty years now. I have always wanted to write. I think it comes from being the youngest of four. One of my earliest memories is of five adults (my parents and siblings) sitting in the living room reading, while I went from person to person begging them to play. They were reading instead.

“Ten Unsent Letters to the Dark Lord” originated at Can*Con 2024. There was a masterclass workshop at the convention called “Write a Story in a Weekend,” hosted by Brandon Butler and David Schultz of the Toronto SFF Writers Group. I like writing challenges, and I like deadlines, and I decided that writing the first draft of a whole short story in forty-eight hours while also attending a convention sounded like exactly the kind of bad idea I would enjoy.

This story very much started from its opening paragraphs, which spilled easily onto the page. It followed pretty quickly that the narrator had been dreaming about his dog and mother, even though he knew that he never had a dog and couldn’t remember his mother. At that point, I thought, Oh my gosh! What’s going on here? What is this story about?

Like a lot of people, my head is buried in news and social media and talks with my neighbors. I’m always in the center of the most politically awkward conversation at the con bar, but I can’t point to too many specific references that inspired this story. It kind of came out of the subconscious soup that paying attention to the world cooks up.

There’s still a lot of stigma around mental illness. Even the profession that treats it isn’t immune. There would most definitely be the pressure for a psychiatrist with a psychotic disorder to hide their diagnosis from colleagues and patients. So, already, the ‘what if?’ was ripe in my head. I’ve always found the brain, consciousness, and human perception fascinating. It’s what’s drawn me both to being a speculative fiction author and a psychiatrist.

I’ve always wanted to return to the world of Six-Gun and it was only a matter of time before a new one found me. Before, I was always locked into back-to-back trad publishing contracts (80 books, not counting other commissioned projects!). Now that I’m full indie and have found a loyal, growing readership online, I can’t write new stories fast enough to satisfy the demand.

This story is an example of how sometimes we need to make art in order to make sense of what’s happening around us. For context, I’m currently living in Minneapolis during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge. A week after Renee Good’s murder, I was still stuck and paralyzed and I needed to put my energy into something. I needed to put what was going on into words. Because that’s my job.

I’m honored Lightspeed enjoyed “Saint Zero” and published it, it’s such a dream home for this story. The idea behind it was a twofold, very random thought sequence: “What if A Knight’s Tale were sapphic?” and then “No, wait, what if it were set in space?” This was followed by a lot of complicated emotions existing in this current political climate (“Saint Zero” was written in 2025, so these emotions have only intensified since), and then realizing this story wasn’t going to end well for either Zero or Silvi.