At the beginning of the pandemic, I found myself writing a lot of stories that focused on the theme of sacrifice. In speculative media, particularly, there are a lot of stories that portray martyrdom or sacrifice as a noble or necessary cause.

The germ of this story was born in the 2021 stage of the pandemic, while watching a panel on lost Doctor Who episodes during a virtual version of our local Doctor Who convention, CONsole Room. I wanted to write about the way that seemingly frivolous things like fandom still persist.

I tried to give the narrator and his ancestors a kind of power that forces them to give back. They don’t get to control the elements freely like powerful mages. In the end, they are claimed by the forces that gave them those powers in the first place.

It feels scary to even be hopeful about the distant future, especially because I sometimes wonder if there will even be a “distant” future for humanity, with the devastating consequences of climate change already unfolding.

Resistance is much on my mind lately, with the world in its current state, and I wanted to talk about how communication might shape itself in a conversation about the act of resistance.

Part of what drives this story for me is the lack of control, the chaos—he doesn’t know how it works, he screws up, the machine pushes forward (showing him such strange sights) and it pushes him backwards.

Unlike many of my stories, this had a specific inspiration—I was hiking a new-to-me trail in Rocky Mountain National Park, which is near where I live. I found the most amazing, peaceful spot—a kind of still murky pond with lily pads, and a nearby grove of aspens—it was autumn, the leaves had fallen, so the trail was carpeted with gold, and the bare branches reached up to a bright blue sky. It felt like a refuge—a good place to hide.

I googled “how to structure a heist” and got a lot of “here are the one hundred and nineteen essential plot beats for a heist,” so that was a dead end, because I don’t believe in more than, I don’t know, two plot beats at a time. So then I watched a bunch of heist stuff in the hope that it would all just sort of passively pervade my mind. The Thomas Crown Affair, Leverage, and so on.

I love night markets, and I love magical market stories. So of course I wanted one day to write one myself! I was also thinking about parenthood, about the baggage that we bring to it, about learning to be open and present even when that’s really hard. About vulnerability and defensiveness in general. And about the inevitable calluses that we acquire through life, the armor that we don to survive.

I did a lot of digging into the idea of “closure” and how looking for closure can become detrimental. It doesn’t matter how smart or well-adjusted you are. Like a dog chasing a bird, you can chase closure right over the edge of a cliff. The narrator of “The Last Lucid Day” is someone who has done the homework: He’s likely been in years of therapy; he knows the language of complex trauma, parental neglect, attachment styles, and so on.