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.