I’m deep-diving into my creative process and sharing 30 of my favourite stories as the shorteststory.com/engine campaign runs! You can follow along over on my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/shorteststory/ “The Fog” makes the list because it was the first time I managed to freak myself out with a story. Oof, I needed to take my dog for a walk to clear my head after this one. The idea started with a creepy photograph that got me thinking about how scary it would be watching a fog roll in and your town’s population dwindle as people go missing. But the more I thought about it, the more I saw a deeper level of horror there. Memory (and loss of memory) feature prominently in my horror stories. To me, losing memory means losing stories, losing the ability to link moments across time and recognize the patterns and narratives in them. It means losing control of your reality. It scares me on a deep, deep level. So I went at it again, this time trying to figure out how to tell the story such that the people who went missing became TOTALLY forgotten. The trick was making sure there was a mechanism to reveal the forgetting. The empty houses became the anchor for the end of the story, the sign that something had been taken, taken so completely that even the memory of it was gone. There are few things scarier than that. PS: The Shortest Story now has a video channel! shorteststory.com/youtube
