1. Second Person POV

You’re a good person, although your ex doesn’t believe it—and here you are, writing in the second person, which your ex says is a limiting, even off-putting POV, simply to get his attention, to tell him your side of the story.

Your boyfriend broke up with you last week after confessing he had doubts about your character. What really hurts is that since the breakup, he’s left your emails and texts unread. Even your letter was returned to sender.

Maybe this is pointless, slipping this printout under his door, this “article” you’ve written for a readership of one. Just your ex. But it was past midnight when you came up with this idea, when you were exhausted from your actual job of dealing with eldritch disasters.

Your ex says he wants to be a writer (you’ve told him a million times he is a writer, although he just frowns and mentions something about rejections). You can’t help but notice he’s always reading articles filled with writing advice. So . . . you figure making a series of writing mistakes might be the only way to get your apology through to him.

2. Starting with your main character waking up

Your ex complains about novels and movies that open with a character waking up (“It’s boring and unoriginal!” he says), but it’s where the tension began in your relationship.

All those mornings he awoke and found your half of the bed cold and empty. You had vanished without even a note of explanation.

Last Sunday, he texted you at three a.m., while you were in the middle of a job, to ask where you were. If you were okay.

You: \ I’ve got an emergency work situation! \

Him: \ An accounting emergency? REALLY? \

You: \ Accountants have emergencies too \

Him: \ But at three a.m.? I just . . . I mean, do I have to ask again? Are you being honest with me? \

You, sharply but (maybe?) understandably given you were dealing with an absolute monstrosity in front of you, but also cursing yourself for picking “accountant” as your cover job when you met him instead of something more believable like “cop” or “crime reporter”: \ Can’t deal with this rn \

And then, when you finally returned to the apartment, he stared at the goo in your hair, and you realized with dismay (and maybe a little unhinged hilarity?) where he assumed the glop had come from, but before you could explain, he said he’d had enough of your lies and broke up with you.

3. Listicles

Your ex says listicles are cheap tricks, but you’ve caught him reading them when he thinks no one is looking.

In order of importance, here are your ex’s top four points in his breakup. To your shame, he is right about them all.

1. You are lying about your work
2. Your phone has an encrypted messaging service that pings you incessantly before you disappear
3. On the nights you slip away for “accounting emergencies,” there are gruesome attacks on the city’s civilians
4. He deserves better

4. Purple prose

Purple prose can kill the narrative flow, your ex says. But there are other types of monstrosities that are far more deadly than overly ornate descriptions.

Each evening, you dread the inevitable summons that will be conveyed by ciphered message on your phone, and your guts churn at the thought that your metropolis will undoubtedly suffer from yet another monstrous incursion.

When the message comes, you pause before answering, casting your gaze across the crepuscular beauty of the city, its skyscrapers like tiered wedding cakes against a darkening sky, a moment of perfection that makes you weep for the doom that will soon be inflicted upon it.

For even as your adored conurbation rises from the turbulent sea like an ancient galleon, its skyline proud and stately above the water, below its waterline hides a portal, a doorway to an underworld of hunger and horror from which rapacious monstrosities swim upwards in an unending flow. You abhor these creatures and their determination to haul their twisted souls onto the metropolis’ fair streets, seeking to fill their gullets with the flesh of innocent citizens—bakers, clerks, writers like your ex, and, yes, even actual accountants.

These abominations from below aren’t the city’s only killers. You and your friends hide in the shadows, waiting, ready to strike against these horrors.

5. Flashback!

No one likes getting suddenly transported into backstory when the tale is chuffing along, your ex says. But without a flashback, you can’t explain why you’re disappearing several nights each week and returning in the mornings with chitinous fragments stuck to your clothing and goo in your hair.

You were twelve, just a kid on a school field trip to the Metropolitan High-Energy Collider. Your class was standing around the collider when the facility was rocked by an earthquake. (Later, you learned it was a disturbance in the eldritch portal beneath the city.) The protective barriers failed, and dark matter poured over you and your classmates. All you remember is a flash of blinding light, unimaginable pain, and waking up in the hospital.

You never went back to that school. Nor did your twelve classmates. The city hired academic and martial arts tutors for you, setting up a classroom in the mayor’s mansion, because you weren’t human anymore, not like you had been, and you couldn’t pretend to be like the other kids when every synapse of your body was brimming with dark power. The mayor said the city needed you, and your parents were told you had gained acceptance to an elite private school.

The creatures invading the city were more numerous every year, and they were getting smarter and stronger.

You called yourselves “The Lucky Thirteen”—not yet teenagers but somehow in charge of protecting the city. At first, it seemed like a stroke of fortune, to become so important and powerful and necessary.

But you quickly learned that you had to keep your identities secret, even from your parents, because the fiendish horrors soon grasped that the Lucky Thirteen were their only real threat. They have been hunting you down ever since. It’s better to protect your parents and everyone you love from such knowledge.

Now it’s two decades later, and there are only five of you left.

6. Spare your darlings

Be merciless, your ex says when he explains why he’s deleting multiple scenes from his novel. Get rid of useless characters, unnecessary plotlines, elements that you love but don’t further your story.

If you could, you would have spared all your darlings.

You would have spared the knowledge of your night-time battles from your ex, who embodies a gentleness and sweetly innocent belief that everything happens for a reason.

You would have spared the Lucky Thirteen who died. Ajay, Jaxon, Haoran, Florence, Ruby, Eun-Sook, Juana and Frank—each deserves their own damn character arc. Their own fucking novels. All of them were your friends. Some were your lovers. For years, you thought no one else but the Lucky Thirteen could understand, but you are hoping your ex may start to grasp what you’ve been through.

All you ask is the chance to redeem yourself.

You can’t stand to lose anyone else.

7. Telling instead of showing

Show the action, don’t tell it, your ex always says.

Yet here you are, revealing all on the page. You could have invited your ex to watch one of your fights with an eldritch horror, but you don’t want to put him at risk. And maybe your ex won’t want anything to do with you after he learns your real identity. After all, your work is dangerous, and the odds aren’t good that what’s left of the Lucky Thirteen will survive.

But you are asking, deeply, for your ex to forgive you.

You made your mistakes with the best intentions.

Think of all the glorious stories written in second person, novels meandering with beloved darlings and purple prose, stories told via listicles and stuffed with flashbacks and exposition that might not be needed but are still desperately wanted.

Sometimes rules need to be broken to make something better.

Night has fallen, and you must go out and battle the horrors that creep through the streets. If you survive this night, you hope your ex may give you another chance.

You’ll tell him all about your battle. And then you’ll show him, not just tell him, that your character and love run deep.