The Eighteenth Dispatch

Comin' at you live from the coziest corner of my living room

Nov 13, 2024

The Cut

We’re less than five months away from The Cut’s release date! With the winter holidays standing between me and my book’s debut, it still feels awfully far away, but by the end of next month I’m sure it’ll really hit me.

And a new issue of the newsletter means more character art! (Monthly reminder, I’m a dabbler, not an artist, but I enjoy it. This is black charcoal pencil and white pencil on gray paper.) Meet Melanie “Mel” Ross!

Drawing of a young woman with dark hair in a ponytail, wearing a hotel housekeeper's uniform, leaning on a broom handle and smiling slightly — “Dude. People bleed so, so much. There's always blood. It's everywhere. No sweat.”

Also, in case you missed it before, right now through November 18^th, GoodReads is hosting a giveaway with 50 physical advance reader copies of The Cut up for grabs! You’ve got five days left to enter if you haven’t already! Enter here!

While you’re there, you can add The Cut to your “want to read” shelf, too!

The Writing

My writing has gone a touch more slowly over the last month. Between world affairs, Halloween, and some family stuff, I haven’t had as much time or bandwidth as I’d like. But I have been polishing up and submitting some short stories, and I wrote two more shorts for open calls that look fun.

More exciting than that, though, is that my editor and I have started working on my second novel! It’s a dual-timeline haunted house book, and it’s near and dear to my heart; it’s the manuscript that got me started writing horror and the manuscript that got me into Pitch Wars and led to me finding my incredible writing community. Working with good revision notes to help me make it a stronger book is a great feeling, and I’m excited to keep digging deeper into all that.

Book Recommendation: MARY by Nat Cassidy

I am a bit late to the party, but I recently read Mary: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy and totally loved it.

The book cover for MARY: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy. Cover is mostly black with a white freestanding bath tub in an almost top-down view. A woman lounges in the tub, her back to us, arms resting on the sides, a white cloth over her head and a third arm reaching out of the water to grasp one of her hands

The prologue part was written in a really fun way, a kind of stylistic homage to Stephen King without feeling like a copy-cat job. Thereafter the book is narrated in the first person by the main character, Mary, a quiet woman whose life in NYC undergoes some upheavals just before she gets a call from her estranged aunt Nadine, who raised her after the death of her parents. Nadine asks Mary to come and help take care of her as her health fails, because her own daughter is unavailable. Reluctantly, Mary agrees to return to the desert town of her childhood and help her ailing aunt, and there, amid unpleasant interactions with her frankly yucky aunt and suspicious goings-on in town, Mary discovers a terrible truth about her past and her very identity.

This book was unsettling and fun at the same time, from beginning to end, with the scares and a sort of exultation in those scares building together to the climax. I have a particular fondness for any horror book that gives me the impression that there’s a thread of glee with the horror, that the writer had fun making something dark and scary and unsettling and the reader is invited to have fun experiencing the dark and scary and unsettling thing, and Mary definitely delivered that vibe to me. I highly recommend it, and I’ll be checking out more of Nat Cassidy’s books once I’m a little less behind on other parts of my TBR pile!

Everyday Horror Inspiration

I was out with Cooper, our puppy, before dawn the other morning and heard the strangest noise. I tried to record it with my phone’s camera, but it was far away and faint and all that my phone picked up was the sound of Cooper shuffling around forever in the cold, trying to find the exact perfect place to do her business.

It sounded like if you mixed canid howling with a siren and also with singing. It was a strange sound, and it went on for a while, and it was difficult to hear but sort of beautiful.

I’ve been toying with the idea of incorporating haunting and/or haunted music into my horror in a coming project, but music as a creative endeavor is so far outside my wheelhouse that it makes me hesitate to try to make use of it in my writing. Still, I’ll probably give it a shot someday.

Pet Pics

The animal situation in the Dotson household continues to be chaotic. Cooper the puppy and Pebble the kitten are integrating well, but I’ve never had a puppy and kitten at the same time before so I’m not fully used to the way they play with each other. I have to resist the urge to follow them around the house saying, “Gentle, guys, gentle.” (It’s not an urge I’m super great at resisting, either.) Jupiter and Noodles aren’t terribly impressed with their new siblings, but there’s a growing peace, and Noodles is perfectly content to ignore them altogether if they will return the favor.

A black and brown and tan five-month-old puppy, looming above the picture-taker, staring longingly out the window over the back of a couch. — Cooper watches for the kids to come home from school.

A gray kitten with a subtly darker gray stripe pattern on parts of her coat lays on a muted blue couch, staring at the camera — Pebbles looks chill here but actually she’s the queen of murder time

A white cat sleeps curled up on a folded towel, with a small stack of folded hand towels and washcloths atop her — Noodles decided to be part of my laundry

top-down picture of a mostly mostly gray, long-haired cat with white at her chest and on her front paws, sleeping on a blanket almost the same shade of gray that she is — Jupiter is napping while camouflaged

And now it looks like the rest of Pebble’s family has shown up under our shed. At first I thought it was just one more kitten Pebble’s age, but then I saw a couple of them.

As of two days ago, the count is up to at least 8. Maybe 9, if I didn’t mistake myself when I saw another one the other night. I’m contacting shelters, looking for at the very least some trap-neuter-release programs to help out with this situation. For a couple days now I’ve also been trying to earn their trust so that I can see if maybe it’s not too late for them to be fully domesticated and adopted. (Plus, one of the kittens is so beautiful I’m having trouble resisting the idea of adopting just one more baby into my own family, too.) Although, only yesterday I went out to see them and they seem to be gone, so they might’ve moved on or (hopefully) someone else saw them and caught them faster than I was and they’re somewhere safe and warm right now. I’ll keep checking around for them though. And either way, in the meantime you can still see a couple of them! I’ve only managed to get pictures of three or four (the black kittens moved around so much I’m not sure who’s who in these pics) of these little guys, never all 8 or 9 of them, though.

Three black kittens about four or five months old, two eating cat food from a plastic bowl, one watching, all of them mostly under a shed — Here’s three of the at-least-four black kittens

I hope these kitties vanished yesterday because they found a good home, but I also kind of hope this beautiful one comes back so its good home can be my home

There were more kittens, but these were the only ones that allowed themselves to be photographed.

One Last Thing Before You Go…

Like many people, I’ve mostly left Twitter recently. The site has become worse and worse over time, and my last straw was the update that ruined the way blocking accounts works there (nerfing safety features is never a good idea). I’ll still be posting updates and I’ll still retweet if something feels important or worth sharing, but to actually connect with me I can now be found here on Blue Sky instead.

The End!

This wraps up another issue of C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch! I hope you have a great month.

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