When I became a novelist, I had no intention of ever writing a short story. I had no interest and didn’t really understand the form. Then my friend Kim Paffenroth—who has the unique (I believe) distinction of being both a professor of divinity and a horror writer with an insatiable love of zombies—asked me to write a story for him. Specifically for an anthology called History is Dead. All of the stories would focus on zombies causing trouble in different historical eras. I spent two weeks starting my first short story. Starting and continually failing, because everything I started to write kept wanting to be a novel. The absurdity of me ever writing a short story became laughable … which resulted in me writing not only a story, but a comedy story. I figured Kim would get a chuckle, ultimately say no, and that would be that. Instead, I rather liked the story. So did he. And so did the readers. It remains one of my most popular short stories. I have since written 125 short stories, I’ve edited over a dozen anthologies of short stories, and edit a magazine—Weird Tales—filled with short fiction.