Story challenges can be fun, and scary too. As I remember, this one came from a call for submissions for a cowboy erotica anthology. A few of us got talking about this and somebody said ‘How about cowboy Cthulhu erotica?’ For some reason this stuck in my head, along with other thoughts, such as ‘I don’t know anything about cowboys,’ and ‘I’ve never written erotica’. It was that last which made me think hard about this, and decide to try my hand. The Deep One was the result. I looked forwards to the critique workshop for this story with something approaching dread. You can write about serial-killers and nobody thinks anything of it. Write a sex scene and people seem to assume this is your personal bag. I never submitted it to the cowboy erotica anthology, but it did find a home with fishnet.mag, whose acceptance letter was completely charming.