Can you talk a bit about how “Ten Unsent Letters to the Dark Lord” took shape and what inspirations fed into it?

“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. I went into the workshop without any clear idea what I was going to write; I figured it would be more fun to let the idea come to me on the weekend.

The first inspiration came to me when one of the two presenters was talking about story structure. Stories have a beginning, middle, and end, he said; but you don’t always have to start at the beginning. In fact, you could even start after the end! I liked that idea, and I decided I was going to write a little story about someone whose big epic story had already happened, and who was looking back and trying to process it all.

I don’t remember exactly how I decided that the narrator would be a Dark Lord’s ex-minion, but I think that part of the idea came at the same time. I am a bit of a villain enjoyer, and one of my all-time favorite, bulletproof tropes is when the villain’s minion has a crush on them. I did a lot of work deconstructing and problematizing this trope in my book The Fallen, but then I kept loving it anyway, which I think means it is genuinely bulletproof and engraved into my DNA. So it was an easy trope to draw on when I was looking for ideas. I was also pretty deep in my feelings at the time about an ex-girlfriend who’d ghosted me, so those feelings all leaked into the story and gave it its emotional shape. I was actually really embarrassed because it was so transparent to me what this narrative was really all about, and I worried that it would be transparent in an off-putting way to everyone else too; but with such a limited time there wasn’t much to do but plow ahead anyway.

To my surprise, the story had a pretty charmed and uncomplicated existence after that. Everyone at the workshop loved it and had a lot of helpful feedback which I used in revisions, and then it sold to the first place I sent it, which, obviously, was Lightspeed.

Because of health and work obligations, I wasn’t able to make it to the next workshop in 2025, but I sat down with Brandon over Saturday breakfast that year and he told me that he was telling all that year’s workshop participants about my sale to Lightspeed. I think it is the workshop’s biggest success story! It clearly was a process that worked for me.

What led you to write this as an epistolary story, and what are your thoughts about the format?

I love epistolary stories, found footage stories, and other ways of playing with format. In this case, the epistolary format was mostly a device to support the feeling that the narration is happening after the end of the story. Our narrator isn’t out in the world, doing things, having things happen to them; things have already happened, and they’re now wrestling with different ways of framing what happened.

To me, this story is about a victim of abuse leaving their partner and lacking the tools to come to terms with what they experienced. Was this sort of reading intentional on your part, and was the lack of specific characterization in the service of universalizing the letter-writer’s experience?

That’s a pretty accurate reading, although the abuse in the story mostly comes from the inherent traits of the fantasy tropes that are being employed. I think that the archetypal villain/minion relationship is always abusive in some way or, at the very least, not particularly healthy. This is a narrative I’m drawn to because of my preexisting issues; my actual ex-girlfriend wasn’t as evil as a Dark Lord.

The lack of specific characterization partly comes from the quick way the story was written, but you’re correct that it is also about universalizing the letter-writer’s experience. I wanted the story to feel archetypal, which means a lot of the weight rests on tropes and references that I trust my readers to already understand.

“I tell them that service to the greatest dark power of our generation is its own reward.” This hit me hard for its modern-day relevance. What do you think writers should do in the process of arguing against this kind of urge?

Oof. I mean. I can see that reading. I wasn’t thinking about the modern-day political reading when I wrote the story, but it’s a valid reading and I support readers being able to read things in various ways. To be super clear, I only enjoy villains when they’re fictional.

And, I mean, I’m not going to pretend that I know the magic way to write a story that deradicalizes people. (I’m also, frankly, suspicious of people who think that there’s one single best way for a story to meet the political moment. I think political moments are generally too multifaceted and too complicated for one approach.) But I do think that “Ten Unsent Letters” does two things that are helpful if you are reading the story politically.

First, it makes it clear, without getting too bogged down, that this character’s urges are coming from somewhere. You don’t need a detailed tragic backstory for a character like this, but there is some sense that they come from a place where they were deprived of power, and where “goodness” didn’t do a lot to help them or the people they loved. There are a lot of people in real life who do come from enormous privilege and who turn evil because they want even more privilege, but let’s be real, those aren’t the people we are trying to deradicalize. A lot of the foot soldiers in an evil political movement are people who come from some kind of struggle, and who’ve been sold a lie that says the evil political movement will be able to solve their problems. That doesn’t excuse their choice—it’s still an evil choice—but I think it’s important to note, with some modicum of compassion, that the choice is coming from somewhere. I don’t think it’s possible to reach people where they are without acknowledging that about them.

Second, and even more importantly, I think the story shows joining the bad side did not actually meet this character’s needs. It was a choice that came from somewhere, but it was not a helpful choice—even if it’s looked at, as it is here, through a purely self-interested lens. The narrator here is attached to the Dark Lord because they have been projecting a sort of relationship and care onto the Dark Lord which, in practice, is not there. And the moment when the narrator notices it’s not there—if only because the Dark Lord admits out loud that it isn’t—is when everything starts to unravel.

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?

Absolutely. An excerpt from my new SF novel, Ignore All Previous Instructions, which I’m so excited to finally get to share with everybody, appears in the April issue of Lightspeed! I didn’t write “Ten Unsent Letters” with real-world politics in mind, but if you want a story that is intentionally political, Ignore is very much an intentional commentary on issues in the real world—not only about generative AI, as the title implies, but also a lot about anti-queer and anti-trans book banning and censorship. It asks all sorts of questions about what happens when human expression is controlled by a big, corporate, profit-making machine instead of by individual humans. Also it’s a fun space adventure with a strong romantic arc! I hope everybody checks it out.

I don’t have anything else lined up after that for sure, but I have a couple of fantasy novels out on submission—one is a New Adult, queer coming-of-age story with dragons, and one is a grimdark epic that happens at the bottom of the sea. I have some pretty fully fleshed out concepts for sequels to Ignore, because I love Ignore’s characters so much that I didn’t want to leave them, but we have to wait for sales numbers before the publisher can decide if sequels are actually going to be a thing. I also have a couple of book-length WIPs I am still chewing on behind the scenes. One is a thing that I hope will end up being a new take on dark academia; the other is cosmic horrors showing up in Silicon Valley. I would like to write all sorts of books in all sorts of speculative genres, ideally.