New Year's Eve Dispatch

Welcome to the, uh, 30th? I think? issue of C. J. Dotson's Dreadful Dispatch!

2025 Wrap-Up

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—

Deep breath.

Okay.

Wow, this year has been a lot.

In achieving my literal lifelong dream, I’ve experienced one of the most incredible high points of my life, but there’ve been some real struggles as well (for the newsletter, I’ll just stick to talking about the publishing side of my 2025, though, haha). It’s been one of the busiest, most hectic, hardest years of my adult life, but it’s also been one of the most fun and fulfilling years of my whole entire life.

Publishing my debut novel was never quite like I had imagined it would be—I’d heard all the warnings about the post-publication crash, about finding oneself shifting goalposts, about the incredible pressure of social media and self-promo and hype, but experiencing it all myself still took me by surprise. And there’s the struggle of learning not only how to navigate the problems themselves, but also learning how to regulate my emotional responses to them. And that’s leaving aside the things I’d hoped would get easier but didn’t, like the gut-twisting discomfort of asking around for blurbs and the weeks of impostor syndrome before in-person author events (don’t even get me started on the impostor syndrome I suffered on the day that I realized I didn’t have an author signature yet and practiced in a notebook in my writing room until I managed one I can tolerate).

But publishing my debut novel was also way, way more fun than I had imagined it would be. There were the milestones I expected—seeing my cover for the first time, seeing the page layouts, getting my ARCs and then my author copies in the mail and crying over them because I love them so much. But there was so much more that I hadn’t thought to anticipate. In my day-to-day life I’m a homebody, but this year I got to travel to NYC for my first ever author event with the Twisted Spine and the Brooklyn Horror Society (it was so exciting and so fun), my book launch party was held at the Barnes & Noble where I used to work so I had a great excuse to visit my hometown area and catch up with family and friends, I reconnected with the elementary school teacher who got me into writing in the first place nearly 30 years ago, I got to take a gorgeous backroads drive through the Adirondacks to go have a Q&A and signing at Gibson’s Bookstore in NH, I went to Stoker Con in Connecticut and was overwhelmed at the number of people there who were cool as heck to spend time with and talk to, I got to stay in a cabin in the Catskills and hang out with horror authors and horror readers for Horror Reader Weekend. I did podcast interviews with some of the nicest, most engaging conversationalists. I met so many of my writing friends IRL for the first time, and I got to visit friends I haven’t seen in ages, and I have made new friends. And over and over I got to have the absolutely incredible experience of seeing my book—my book!—on shelves in stores.

It hasn’t been an easy year, but it has been a year marked by some of the coolest days I’ve ever lived, the kinds of days that almost feel like they couldn’t possibly belong to my real life.

Reading Round-Up

I didn’t track my reading in any formal way this year, and I probably won’t remember to do that very well in 2026 either, but I do have a nice list of highlights, books that I read and loved this year. Some of them are available to go buy or get at your library now, and some are not out yet but you should pre-order them. And there were a few I can’t list properly because they were manuscripts I beta-read for friends and critique partners, but you better believe I’ll be shouting about them as soon as I can.

image credit: Pixabay

Highlights from my 2025 Reading

At Dark, I Become Loathsome by Eric LaRocca
Cold Eternity by SA Barnes
When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman
The Needfire by MK Hardy
The Faceless Thing We Adore by Hester Steel
Play Nice by Rachel Harrison
Good Boy by Neil McRobert
Atlas of Unknowable Things by McCormick Templeman
The Bone Queen by Will Shindler
We Sent Them Down Singing by Libby Edwardson
Vanishing Daughters by Cynthia Pelayo
You Weren’t Meant to be Human by Andrew Joseph White
We Are Always Tender with Our Dead by Eric LaRocca
Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy A Snyder
Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer
Abyss by Nicholas Binge
Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes
A Cold Night for Alligators by Viggy Parr Hampton
The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

Plus several novels that aren’t yet published, which I beta-read for friends, and which I can’t wait to recommend to you as soon as I’m able to.

What I’m currently reading:

The Shining by Stephen King
I saw a post recently that I can’t remember verbatim, but which was recommending re-reading your old favorites periodically. It said something like, “The book never changes, but your perspective will.” And it hit just right, that sentiment, as I’ve been re-reading this one. I like The Shining more now than I ever have, and it was always a book that was important to me.

What I’m excited to read next:

The Secret Attic by Chelsea Conradt
Our Winter Monster by Dennis Mahoney
rekt by Alex Gonzalez
Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher
Dig by J. H. Markert
A Veritable Household Pet by Viggy Parr Hampton
Edenville by Sam Rebelein
Wretch by Eric LaRocca
Sick Houses by Leila Taylor

The Writing

It’s lucky that I got so far behind on my newsletter-writing in the month of December, with its convenient major holiday focused on introspection and goal-setting (perfect for a newsletter issue) at the end of the month, because progress on my newest novel manuscript is going so, so well and so, so quickly…but at the expense of my ability to make myself spend time working on almost anything else.

I’m having SO much fun writing my new WIP, though. I’m in that excellent locked-in place with it where once I get started the words just come as if on their own and when I’m not working on it I’m thinking about it almost all the time.

Over the last month or so I’ve been experimenting with a new-to-me drafting method—I’m drafting Monday through Saturday, with a daily target word goal that will let me finish this first draft in about three months since I started, and on Sundays I’m editing what I wrote over the rest of the week. Once the first draft is fully finished, it’ll also have gone through its first round of revisions already. Hopefully at that point I’ll then be able to go through and polish it up more quickly than I have done in the past, and get it ready for beta readers fast. And having a weekly change of focus is helping me maintain my energy and my pace with the writing. It’s been a really good method for me, so far, so I’ll be sticking with it for as long as it continues to work for me!

Heading Into 2026

I don’t even know how to articulate my hopes for the new year. So much of what I would like to get out of 2026 is completely outside of my control, and I’ll hope for and believe in those things with everything I’ve got, but I can’t set goals around them. And 2025 has knocked me for so many loops, good and bad, that I’m wary of thinking up many concrete goals at all.

I hope that the challenges 2026 will throw at me will be mostly stimulating and exciting challenges. I hope that the difficulties coming next year will be ones I can handle without feeling like I’m losing parts of myself. I hope the same for my loved ones, and for you.

But as for plans? I’ve got nothing concrete. I’m going to keep writing, I’m going to keep finding the best writing practices for me, and I’m going to try to be more consistent with this newsletter. I’m going to keep reading, but I’m not going to set any arbitrary goals around it—maybe in my January newsletter I’ll talk a little bit about the way becoming a published author impacts this all-time favorite hobby of mine, but for now suffice it to say that stressing myself out about the number of books I’m reading sounds to me like a great way to diminish the joy I get out of it. I’d like to work on my self-care, including taking my physical health more seriously (I’ll be 40 this year and in too many ways I still treat my body like I’m in my 20s). If I have anything like an actual New Year’s Resolution, it’s that I’d like to develop more self-confidence, so I guess I’d better start figuring out how to go about that.

And that’s it…

…for this issue of the newsletter, and for 2025. I hope that 2026 is good to all of us.

Celebrate safely tonight, see you next year!!!