Ten years ago, I wrote One Love, the first horror story I ever posted to this site. It wasn’t the first story I’d ever written, but it was the first one I felt needed to exist somewhere other than in my head. This whole journey has never really been about becoming a writer, but more about proving to myself that I could actually take the ideas in my head and turn them into words on paper, to become something more than someone who just talked about writing. So I wrote, and wrote, and wrote.
And as the stories escaped the inner workings of my mind, I learned how to be a writer, while also learning how little I actually understood about writing at the time. My understanding of grammar and punctuation was almost nonexistent, which honestly, even now, I still feel dramatically underwhelmed by my grasp of both, twisting and manipulating certain things into what I call my style, which is probably more an excuse for my follies than my achievements.
But the more I learn, and the older I get, the more I feel I’ve become better at this. And if I’m better now, then maybe these older stories could be too if I picked them up again and looked at them through new eyes. That’s really where the idea for The Complete Cut came from.
So as I edit the final line of the “complete” version of One Love, I can still see the exact same story beating underneath both versions.
They really aren’t that different.
There are countless small changes, tightened moments, and additional layers that help many of the original ideas breathe properly now, but at its heart, One Love was always about grief, obsession, and the terrifying things love can become when someone refuses to let go. Death itself was never really the true horror. Sometimes the concept of losing someone, the moment of it, or even just the feeling that it’s coming can torment someone far more than death ever could.
I think if there’s one thing that’s truly changed over the years, it’s my understanding of what the story was actually trying to achieve. It was never meant to be some fast “wham bam thank you ma’am” zombie story. It was always a short tragedy about Samuel trying desperately to hold together the final piece of his life before everything collapsed around him.
That theme has found its way into so many of my stories over the years. Some handled it better than others, but all of them carry traces of that same emotional wound underneath them.
Most of my stories are still written almost entirely on instinct. They come out raw first, then slowly get carved back during editing, peeling away layers of fat and sinew until only the bones remain. The original version of One Love moved fast, angry, emotional, and desperate. It hurled blood, rain, violence, and heartbreak at the reader all at once. When revisiting it, I never wanted to replace that rawness or sand it down into something safer. I wanted to preserve the brutality and emotion while giving the story more room to breathe, allowing the silence and emotional damage to properly settle into the reader.
Moments like:
“well after the screaming had stopped and the chewing began”
became important to me for entirely different reasons ten years later. They allowed Samuel’s grief and denial to linger in the air instead of simply rushing toward the next violent moment.
I think that’s probably the biggest difference between my writing then and now. Over the last decade, I’ve become far more interested in aftermath than shock. The horror in One Love no longer comes purely from what’s happening physically, but from what Samuel is emotionally willing to survive just to keep holding onto the person he loves.
Somewhere along the line, the story stopped feeling like a zombie story to me and started feeling more like a tragedy about devotion rotting into delusion. And honestly, that idea could exist across a hundred different stories because it comes from something deeply human inside all of us. We are damaged creatures by nature, and that damage spreads into the people and worlds around us.
That’s why I think One Love has always remained important to me. It feels like the first story where I accidentally stumbled into the kind of horror I actually wanted to write, even if I didn’t fully understand it yet.
Even now, I can still see pieces of the writer I was becoming hidden inside those early stories I forced myself to write over those first few years. I was challenging myself constantly, not for performance or success, but simply because the ideas in my head refused to stay quiet.
Was the journey worth it?
Yeah, I think it was.
And I think this newer version finally feels closer to the story I was truly trying to tell all those years ago. Not because the beginning or ending changed dramatically, but because the emotional journey between those points finally feels fuller, heavier, and far more honest about the pain living underneath it all.
Matt
Leave a Reply