Hi there and welcome!
If you subscribe, I’ll send you new, tiny horror stories.
Alongside those, there will be ideas about the craft of writing, writing for video games, and more.
I love writing horror - particularly supernatural, weird, and uncanny horror - and I want to ignite and stoke that flame in you too!
Here are some highlights to get you started:
Top 5 micro-fiction horror stories
Sometimes a story surprises you while you write it. This started as an experiment in writing a purely descriptive piece about a subtly haunted location, but the writing insisted it become a second-person perspective story. The outcome was nicely chilling.
More comedy sci-fi than horror, but this tiny story tickled me to write and had a great reception from readers.
I think this was my first paid-published piece of prose fiction, so it holds a special place in my heart. I love writing in the epistolary (i.e. letter) format, and the voice of this character was an absolute joy.
The first in a series of second-person micro-fiction horror written based on your memories. How do I know this is based on your memories? 60% of respondents on the poll say they remember this happening to them. (Find the others in the series here.)
The horror legend and lifetime-award winning Ramsey Campbell called this tiny story ‘haunting’ on Bluesky, which made my week.
Top 3 horror poems
We Always Are - As a
vampirequeer person, looking around the world makes me afraid for our rights. Butvampiresqueer people have always been here, and we are never going away.
The Ghosts Have No Witnesses - What might happen to the lifeless after humans cease to be?
You Saw A Woman With Your Face - We’re back into second-person narration, and readers tell me they were very creeped out by this one!
Top 4 articles about writing horror
Writing a comedy-horror killer - A quick guide to applying the idea of inversion, a quick route to inspiring ghoulish glee for readers and writers.
Take a story and flip it - What is a widely accepted story, and what if the opposite were true?
Write a short story in five sentences - A quick tool to creating stories. It’s so fast, you can pound through ideas to reach something with real bite to delight and horrify your readers without getting too attached to each one.
The suspension of disbelief versus the budget of believability - One of my most-read articles gives a different lens on how far you can push credulity—and in what ways—before your audience loses trust in your story.
My goal is to give you both fun new stories and insight into the craft of storytelling.
But let’s roll back a bit… Who am I?
I’m a published writer, narrative designer/writer for games, and researcher.
Around the year 2000 I had a nightmare about zombies. When I awoke, I thought ‘that was scary, but it would have been funny if it was kittens’ and so my first comedy animation was born on ‘Matazone.co.uk - The Other Side’.
In the two decades since, I ran my own animation and indie game company, worked for the AAA (high-budget) video game industry as a game designer, shifted to teaching game design, and then became a professor of video game development at one of the world’s top-rated video game educations.
All along the way, I’ve been making and writing things: animations, webcomics, short stories, video games, and more.
For over two decades, I’ve been honing my craft and trying to pass the things I’ve learnt onto others. That’s some of what I’ll be receive here.
Matazone.co.uk was/is the home of Flash animations about Mittens & Snowdrop, Mr. Snaffleburger, Samurai Lapin, and more. If you’re a friend from those old days, I’ll occasionally be posting retrospectives about them - and I’m very slowly converting the old Flash animations to YouTube, so you’ll hear directly when those go online too.
You'll start receiving free posts from my newsletter: The Inciting Incident with Mata Haggis-Burridge, but you can always upgrade to a paid subscription. TBH, there’s not much extra for paid subscribers, but you’ll be giving me great encouragement and support for my writing.
I’m delighted to be here and in touch with you all. I look forward to sharing this adventure with you.
Whether you’re an old-school friend from the days of the Matazone.co.uk website or a lovely new stranger, it would be great to have you onboard.
A little legal notice: I will occasionally post links to books/other things that I’ve enjoyed or recommend. I’m an Amazon Associate, and so I earn from qualifying purchases (which will typically support my reading habits!). You’re also very welcome to go support other sites too :)
Stay up-to-date
You won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox, and could feature writing tips, original short horror stories (nice and snackable 10 minutes-or-less reads), author updates, and more.
I’ll be discussing the craft of storytelling across video games, movies, and books. Paid subscribers will get critiques of the short stories that I write, discussing the choices that shaped the language and narrative, and more.
Join the crew
Be part of a community of people who share your interests. We’re all on this ride together. It’s more fun in good company.
To find out more about the folks that provide the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
Cheers, love, and go be spooky,
Mata Haggis-Burridge
