My best writing of 2024

Short horror, poems, and writing tip articles

We only have very traditional winter decorations in the Haggis-Burridge household.

It’s been a year full of writing, so I thought I’d pick a few of my favourites:

Top 5 micro-fiction horror stories

5. This House Is Haunted

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.

4. A Good Human Father

More comedy sci-fi than horror, but this tiny story tickled me to write and had a great reception from readers.

3. Leather Babydoll

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.

2. Do you remember when you skinned you knee as a child? (#001)

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.)

1. Our Winter Ritual

The horror legend and lifetime-award winning Ramsey Campbell called this tiny story ‘haunting’ on Bluesky, which made my week.

Top 3 horror poems

3. We Always Are - As a vampire queer person, looking around the world in 2024 makes me afraid for our rights. But vampires queer people have always been here, and we are never going away.

2. The Ghosts Have No Witnesses - What might happen to the lifeless after humans cease to be?

1. 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

4. 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.

3. Take a story and flip it - What is a widely accepted story, and what if the opposite were true?

2. 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.

1. The suspension of disbelief versus the budget of believability - My most-read article this year gives a different lens on how far you can push credulity—and in what ways—before your audience loses trust in your story.

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I’ve enjoyed being here for you every week, and I hope this has been fun and inspiring for you too. Please let me know if you have any comments or requests for 2025 in the comments.

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Best wishes for the New Year celebrations, and let’s hope we all get pleasantly surprised by 2025. Hope can be a powerfully sustaining thing when the skies turn dark.

Keep being kind and spooky, and I’ll see you in the future,

Mata

xxx