I love stories told in the epistolary form, though unlike my 2009 story “The World Breaks,” “The Letters They Left Behind” isn’t entirely epistolary.
To explain, here’s the beginning of what I scribbled in my journal the day the idea for this one came to me —
“A story told in the form of letters written by a parent to a child, to be read at important moments in the kid’s life after Mom or Dad is gone.”
I’ll share nothing else of what I wrote that day, because it would be a spoiler, and if you know me, you know I hate spoilers.
If you want to read what I did with that idea, you can check out “The Letters They Left Behind” in the August 2023 issue of Lightspeed.