Dreadful Dispatch Birthday Edition

Welcome to the sixteenth issue of C.J. Dotson's Dreadful Dispatch! (Also it's my birthday!)

Hello!

The last month has been a hectic one for my personal life (back-to-school for my son means back-to-work for me, too, and my youngest started kindergarten, so it’s been a busy time). I’m very much looking forward to the cool progression of fall, now.

The Writing

Fun news! My short story “A Place Where the Sun Has Never Shone” will be appearing next month in the anthology Found 2: More Stories of Found Footage Horror, edited by Andrew Cull and Gabino Iglesias! The anthology comes out in exactly one month, on October 18th, 2024!

Recently I have had the great pleasure of listening to narrator auditions for the audiobook of THE CUT and I am so excited to hear how that will turn out.

I’ve also finished the first few rounds of revisions on another novel, including cutting over 35,000 words out of the overwritten first draft, and have sent that on to a couple of trusted beta readers. As soon as I sent it along I was immediately hit with the blend of nerves and excitement that always comes with showing other people a creative endeavor for the first time.

In the meantime I’ve moved from research for another book onto actively planning. The planning phase for me is fairly extensive; I’m a detail-oriented plotter and will go through several phases of brainstorming, fact-checking, character creation, and finally a detailed chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene bullet-pointed outline, and then I’ll start drafting. This is the first time I’ve done such extensive research for a book, so this time my first step is putting my notes on that research together and organizing them for my own reference, and while I’m enjoying the process and I know it will help me tremendously when plotting and drafting begin, I’m just so excited to get to the part where I’m actively creating.

THE CUT

Less than seven months until THE CUT is out in the world! Preorders are available, and you can find links to preorder from many major retailers here!

I’m no visual artist, but I am a dabbler, and I’ve been working on some simple, fun little sketches (in charcoal and white pencil on gray paper) of some of the characters from THE CUT. Over the next few months leading up to THE CUT’s release, I’ll be sharing a few of those.

This month we have Henry Drye, the somewhat stuffy hotel manager at L’Arpin Hotel.

Mr. Drye smiled at the mention of the lake, an expression so genuine that by contrast alone Sadie realized how forced he’d been before. The smile widened a fraction at the word summer. “Very nice,” he said. “Summer is fine on the lake.”

So now you’ve met Henry Drye!

Also, look at this THE CUT page-corner bookmark I made!

If you like the look of this, watch out for future giveaways which may include more of these!

THE CUT is available for pre-order, you can find the links here. If you’re a bookseller or educator or other industry professional, digital advanced reader copies of THE CUT are also available for request on Edelweiss. And you can add THE CUT on GoodReads.

Everyday Horror Inspiration

I’m not sure why, but there were slightly more things that gave me horror vibes over the past month than usual, and some of them I can’t really explain (for example, this very large and fluffy cloud which gave me terrible, creeping dread for no reason at all).

Some of them I can explain as being simply unsettling-looking, like the way the cheesy shells stuck to this wooden spoon. Look at that. I can’t help but imagine it as fleshy.

This one comes courtesy of my son, who called me to his room because there was a “creature peeking through the trees” into his window. It was a branch completely encased in spiderwebs, but the way it nodded in the wind did look like some thing.

But this is just an absolutely perfect spiderweb, though.

There’s also this one spot (which I don’t have a picture of) on my drive home, a very innocent patch of the road in front of a totally normal house, that strikes me every time I drive over it with this dread at the idea of gravity reversing, just for me and my car, only in that spot. Then I spend a moment imagining what I would do if the car started to float away with me, or worse, with me and my kids, inside it. (Please, I know that this will never actually happen, but the thought comes back every time I drive home from anywhere.)

When I was a kid I hated that overactive and paranoid part of my imagination. I was afraid of the dark (I still kind of am), I was afraid of the quiet, I was afraid of mirrors (again, I still kind of am). To be honest, with very little provocation I could be afraid of just about anything. And I have always been very easily startled. Jump scares in movies have been known to make me scream, even if the movie otherwise wouldn’t elicit that kind of reaction from me. When I was a kid and hated all those scary things, I thought I’d be a fantasy author, but looking back as an adult, as well as seeing the things that now give me horror vibes and paying attention to the kinds of things that still trigger the fearful part of my imagination, I think I was always going to wind up primarily writing horror. When my brain wants to turn everything around me into a potential horror scenario anyway, it just makes sense to run with it (and to have fun with it).

Happy Birthday To Me!

Today I am 38 years old!

Vintage C.J. for the birthday issue

All I want for my birthday is for everyone to pre-order THE CUT and add it on GoodReads, and for everyone to preorder the anthology my short story will be in next month, Found 2: More Stories of Found Footage Horror!

Pet Pics

A moment of sad news first. Over the last month our family dog, Archer, passed away at the age of 11. I could dedicate an entire issue of this newsletter just to her but for my own sake I would rather keep some of my feelings less public and say only that Archer was the best girl.

I have better pictures of her, but this is the last one, of Archer chilling on a rug we rolled up to try to keep her off it and giving me a look because she knew she was not supposed to be on that rug.

In happy news, though, by a lucky coincidence we were contacted by a friend of a friend who was moving and could not keep their recently-adopted puppy. My husband and I talked about how soon it was after Archer’s passing, and we talked to the kids, and we met the puppy and fell in love. So I’m happy to introduce to you our new little girl, Cooper!

Yes, she is named after Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks.

Jupiter takes her basking-in-the-sunlight duties very seriously.

Noodles is not amused by the presence of the puppy. (They’re reaching an understanding already, though)

And I’m happy to introduce Pebble, the stray baby I rescued from the woods outside my house! Once she’s got a fully clean bill of health she’ll be meeting the rest of the pets, for now she is a garage-quarantine-baby.

The End

Well, that’s that for the fairly eventful September 2024 issue of C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch! If you dig it and haven’t subscribed, do that now!