The Origin of Nasty, Brutish & Short Short
I wrote my first horror story in 2006 as part of a project I called "A Short Story a Day". Surprised me rather. Didn't know I had it in me.
By the end of the year, I had written just over 200 short stories (just over 150 if you take out the stories that later became chapters in
The Summoning Fire and a yet-to-be-released novella). I only labelled 11 of those as "horror" when I wrote them. Many of the rest (just like
The Summoning Fire, BTW), I didn't consider horror at all. I thought of them as "urban fantasy". Maybe "dark urban fantasy". But not horror.
I have since been corrected.
All of the stories collected in
Nasty, Brutish & Short Short were written during the A Short Story a Day project. Which is why they're flash fiction. These are the best of the darkest stories I wrote that year--whether or not I thought they were horror at the time I wrote them.
Happy reading!
-David
PS If you're curious about the A Short Story a Day project, you can learn more about that here:
A Short Story a Day: A Post Mortem