The Fourteenth Dispatch

Thanks for reading Issue 14 of C.J. Dotson's Dreadful Dispatch!

Jul 10, 2024

Cover Reveal and Release Date for THE CUT!

About two weeks ago we had the big social media cover reveal for THE CUT, and it was such a fun time!

Parts of THE CUT take place in and around a particular Lake Erie beach heavily inspired by a real place where I used to spend a lot of time when I was younger, so I asked friends all over the world to take pictures of my book cover in their own local creepy places, and they did such amazing jobs. They’re a fun bunch of pictures to peruse, and you can check them all out here!

The book will come out on April 8^th, 2025, and pre-orders are available now!

Speaking of Pre-Orders…25% Off!

Barnes & Noble is having one of their weeklong pre-order sales for B&N Members (and you can sign up for a free membership here)! From now through 7/17 with the code PREORDER25 you can get 25% off when pre-ordering THE CUT through Barnes & Noble! Click here to do that!

Q&A with The Horror Tree

As part of my cover reveal, I did a Q&A with HorrorTree.com, which was neat! I got to talk a little bit about THE CUT and what it was like to write this book, and you can read that here.

The Writing

Cutting word count from my campground horror book is finally starting to feel like it’s going well. The process is not exactly quick, but it’s going a lot less slowly now than it was before. In my first re-read I realized that the pacing was on point from about Chapter 23 all the way through the end (Chapter 46), but much too slow in Chapters 1 through 22. And why didn’t I just say “the pacing was on point in the second half of the book but too slow in the first half”? Good question! It’s because it turns out all of my overwriting issues were in those first 22 chapters, which meant that the first half of the chapters made up way more than the first half of the book’s total length.

This is actually good news, though. It means I know where my problems are. I copied those chapters out into a separate file and have been working through them one at a time, trying to cut them all down to a more reasonable (and somewhat more uniform) length. I’ve figured out the general target word count for each chapter and by the end of this round of cutting I should have the manuscript down to a manageable length.

Then, of course, as I start other revisions, the word count may creep up again and have to be trimmed again. Writing is a Sisyphean task, sometimes.

I have also finished another chunk of research for the next book I’m going to draft, and the more I get into this research the more excited I am to start that. I can’t currently give in to the temptation to start drafting that one, because I don’t want to lose my newly-discovered revision momentum for the campground horror book, but once I’m feeling pretty secure in how that progress is going I think I can start plotting, even if I do have some more smallish details to keep researching before drafting the new book begins in earnest.

And Finally, the Pet Pics:

Noodles loves summer because of all the open windows for her to sit in, but she does get very jealous when others go outside without her. (Yes, every time. No, she’s not an outdoor cat.)