Death in Large Numbers was my first completed short story, and by a stroke of luck was also my first published story. Not long after I finished it, Another Sky Press began looking for submissions for their anthology, Falling From The Sky.
Another Sky were one of the earlier publishers to experiment with new publishing business models. They call their model “neo-patronage”, which is pretty similar to the Humble Bundle’s “pay-what-you-want” approach. All of their publications are downloadable for a optional contribution. If you want, you can download them for free. If you enjoyed what you read, you can always go back later to contribute or buy a bound copy. You, the reader, get to say what the book is worth1.
It was an irresistible opportunity, and I was very happy when they decided to accept Death In Large Numbers2 for publication. I think the anthology turned out well, it’s full of wonderfully odd pieces and fully worthy of your time.
The original idea for the story came from the cognitive bias we have towards scary-sounding but unlikely causes of death, but it went through years of false starts before I could make any headway. It was mostly completed on the long train-ride to and from my first software contracting job.
While I was researching it, I spent a long time thinking about death, and what’s really likely to kill you. The figures from the Office of National Statistics Causes of Death were good for context. There’s a lot of anecdotes about what it’s like to get struck by lightning on the Web; this piece on Asylum is pretty interesting. Lightning strikes have a surprisingly high survival rate.
For the version on this website, I’ve used a couple of open-source fonts: Chivo from Omnibus Type for the main body text and Pirata One by Rodrigo Fuenzalida and Nicolas Massi for the title.