The Eighth Dispatch

Welcome again to C.J. Dotson's Dreadful Dispatch

The Writing

At the moment I still don’t have any updates to share about THE CUT. Things are happening, work is getting done, I’m very excited, but nothing is shareable at this moment.

I am unbelievably pleased to be able to write this update: I have finally finished the first draft of OVER THE RIVER!

I got a few months behind my ideal schedule for drafting this book, but I very much wanted to finish it in 2023, so on the very last day of the year I did a marathon writing session and wrapped up the last few chapters and an epilogue. I’m setting the book aside for now, to give my brain a break from focusing on it before I begin revising it. I’m legitimately super excited to do revisions on it, but I also know that right now having only just finished drafting it, I’m too close to see clearly what it will need (beyond a lot of cutting, my overwriting tendencies got me and now I need to trim it back down).

In the meantime, I’m doing a final polishing-up of THESE FAMILIAR WALLS, the book that is going to be my follow up to my debut, THE CUT. This book is the one that set me on my current publishing path. Originally, I almost exclusively wrote sci fi and fantasy, though within the SFF genres I did lean toward the dark and toward horror elements. WALLS was a departure for me, my first attempt at contemporary fiction and my first attempt at horror, and I was surprised to find I really loved it. I got into Pitch Wars with that book, which helped me find my writing community and which pushed me to actually learn how to query a novel, and it’s been horror for me ever since, so returning to this book now makes me really happy.

Bookish Chat

Most of the time when I talk about writing, or when I talk about the publishing industry in general or my journey in publishing specifically, I’m either talking to my husband who has heard it all so much that he almost always knows what I’m talking about by now, or I’m talking to my writing friends. I happen to have the incredible luck of having a lot of writing friends who are serious about their craft and who are seriously talented.

Something I have realized recently, though, is that as I go through the process of getting my books published, I’ll be engaging more and more about Book Stuff with people who are not as familiar with the industry as I’m used to.

One thing that reminded me of that realization late last month was this tweet:

I didn’t really mention this one to my writer friends because from my perspective, the problem with this idea is very obvious.

But for my non-writer friends, for my reader friends in particular, I figured I’d share my thoughts on this particular type of reviewing, as an author.

I’ll be honest, this tweet hit me a little harder than you might expect, because as a horror author I know I’m working in a genre that is very much not for everyone.

Writing is art and art is subjective, and I think because of that people think that any opinion one could have about it is automatically a valid opinion, because art is subjective.

But think of it this way. Imagine I went to a restaurant that serves a type of cuisine I just don’t like. Pretend that I hate sushi (unfortunately I actually love sushi, but just as an example pretend I hate it). Pretend I particularly hate tobiko with quail egg yolk (this is actually my favorite sushi). Now pretend I deliberately went to a sushi restaurant and deliberately ordered tobiko with quail egg yolk and then went home and wrote a bad review of the restaurant because I didn’t like the dish I knew I wouldn’t like. Was that a good sushi restaurant or a bad one? I don’t know, this version of me doesn’t like sushi. Maybe this version of me can’t even tell the difference between a 5-star sushi experience and a gas station California roll.

Is that review valid?

No.

And book reviews, particularly pre-publication reviews, have a much more powerful impact on the book’s success than restaurant reviews do.

Goodreads Has No Incentive to be Good

Also negative reviews are disproportionately weighted because of the way the algorithms on the review websites work. This means a 3-star review or lower can drastically harm a book’s chances of success. In the case of actually-bad books that’s one thing, but it’s different when a book is getting poor reviews just because people who don’t like its genre decided to read it.

I have nothing against a reader trying to expand their horizons! I think that’s great. But if someone trying to broaden their reading habits goes out on a limb and tries a genre they know they don’t like and discover that it is still not for them, they should simply not review that book.

And I think it’s important to say that when my book comes out, it will get some bad reviews (hopefully not too many! fingers crossed very hard for very few bad reviews!). I’m not going to enjoy that, but if the people reviewing my book make negative comments about actual problems they find with the book, that will be valid. That’s totally different.

A Strange and True Story, Part 2

Hey guess what I remembered! Back in my October newsletter I told part one of a strange and true story and said that I would post part two in a later newsletter if there was any interest in it. I did actually have interest in part two…and completely forgot to post it. (For anyone reading my newsletter who may not be super familiar with my Terrible Memory, now you know! This is very on brand for me.)

SO! Here we are for part two of my strange and true story.  (Please keep the last part’s quick caveat in mind—this is a story I’m remembering from nearly twenty years ago and I am not writing it the way I write my fiction. I’m also not making any spiritual or metaphysical claims with this story. It’s just an unsettling, difficult to explain memory I’m sharing with you all.)

A few weeks after my sister, her friend, and her friend’s boyfriend took me to the hilltop behind the church near the house my mother lived in when I was in my late teens and early twenties, I took one of my own best friends there.

I decided to repeat the experiment the others had done when they brought me; I didn’t tell my friend what I’d experienced on that hilltop and I didn’t tell her what my sister and her friends had experienced. We were hanging out, I suggested a walk, and I led us there.

I watched my friend climb that hill and I watched her when we reached the top. It was a brighter night, I think it was a full moon because despite the late hour the shadows were very crisp. My friend stood at the top of the hill and she stared into that one corner, that one place where the trees were thicker and the darkness was deeper and nothing waited but it felt like it should.

She stared at that spot and she didn’t speak but she tensed up. Her breathing first quickened and then grew heavy. When we started to walk around the hill she kept looking over at that one corner. We moved closer to that spot, and the reason I remember the shadows specifically that night is because the moon was low so the shadows of the trees reached far, onto the hilltop, and it was just before we would have stepped over that line into the shadows that my friend put out an arm to stop me. She shook her head and she said, “I will not go over there.”

It was one thing, hearing my sister and her friend and her friend’s boyfriend claim that they had previously said the same things I said when they brought me to a hilltop.

It was another thing to stand there and listen to my own friend, who had no idea what I’d seen and felt and said there before, do it.

A few moments later she said, “We need to leave, now.” Halfway down the hill, she said, “Don’t look back.” As we crossed the church parking lot she said, “The lights are about to go off.”

And they did.

We went back to my mom’s house and my friend was clearly shaken. She told me that she felt like there were two people watching us the entire time we were on that hill, and she said she’d gotten the strong impression that whatever was wrong with that shadowy corner was like that because one was being restrained by the other. Then she didn’t want to talk about it any more, and we dropped the subject.

A couple days later, my sister told me that she had had a nightmare about that hill. She’d dreamed that she was walking down the hill at night and instead of saying “Don’t look back,” she did look back, and saw two figures at the top of the hill watching her. She said one was holding the other back.

Not long after that, my sister, her friend, her friend’s boyfriend, and I returned to the hill with a digital camera and a tape recorder. In the years since this story, I had a falling out with the friend and her boyfriend, and my sister lost touch with them, and I have no way of knowing if he still has that tape. But if you want a part three, the story of that last night we went onto the hill, let me know and I will try very hard not to forget to include it in next month’s newsletter!

Podcast Recommendation

There’s a horror show that came out in early 2022 on Netflix that I really wanted to watch, Archive 81, but I was a little behind on stuff I was watching and didn’t get around to it before Netflix canceled the show. I’m not interested in getting invested in a show that will leave me hanging, so I said “well that’s a bummer” and never watched it.

I only recently learned that the show was based on a podcast! It first aired in 2016 and I started listening to it on my 7 hour drive home from picking up my stepson for the winter break.

The story is presented in found-footage (found-audio I guess) format, within the framework of a reporter looking for his missing friend and making public a bunch of audio tapes the friend sent him before disappearing. The tapes follow Dan, a young man who has been hired by a Shady Government Agency to digitize all the tapes in the 81^st section of their massive archive where he will both work and live alone until the job is done, all while himself being required to run an audio recorder for 100% of his time in the archive. The organization in the archive is not great, and once or twice Dan plays tapes from other sections, giving the listener the information that every section within the archive are evidence of things that are scientifically impossible.

I’m fully hooked and I definitely recommend it.

Pet Pics

It is once again my pleasure to close the newsletter with the highlight of every issue, my pets.

Noodles is usually a very reserved cat. I’m her favorite person, and 99% of the time the most I get is her pretending not to follow me around, and sitting on the arm of my recliner. But the other day she fell asleep on my lap not once, but twice in the same day!

Archer was sound asleep until the moment my husband woke up this morning, and then she popped straight up as soon as she heard him leaving our room.

There has never been a cozier cat than Jupiter. She is the absolute queen of being cozy.

Starting the new year with a bonus pet picture! This is my mom’s dog, Coco, she is very small and very sweet.

That’s All, Folks!

Thanks for reading another issue of the Dispatch! If you enjoyed it and you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so!