The Tenth Dispatch

Welcome to another issue of C.J. Dotson's Dreadful Dispatch!

The Writing

Welcome back to the Dreadful Dispatch!

I’m having a ton of fun with the bakery horror novel I’m drafting right now. At this point I’m nearly halfway done with the first draft, and it definitely tickles my fancy. I’m really enjoying balancing my love of horror with a more lighthearted story and cast of characters, and it’s coming together in a way that is both an absolute pleasure to write and also something I think will be very fun and unsettling to read.

The campground horror novel is still resting for now. I plan to jump into revisions on that one as soon as I’m done drafting the bakery horror novel. I feel at this point that I could maybe go back to it with a clear, unclouded mind, but if I do that I’ll lose momentum on the bakery book. The good news about this feeling is that the excitement to work on this project hasn’t dimmed in the face of the excitement I feel working on the bakery book.

And I’ve got another couple of new ideas for future books, all of which are shiny and tempting and I’m exercising great willpower in making them wait their turns.

Things with THE CUT are moving along behind the scenes still. I’ve reviewed copyedits on the book, and I’ve gotten to see sample pages of what the interior will look like, including the title page. (I opened that email while grocery shopping and then had to hide out in the deodorant/body wash aisle and cry a little bit, it’s all so exciting!) I’ve been told the name of my jacket designer (and made myself very emotional looking at other covers she’s designed) as well as the names of the production team. It’s all been very interesting and the team at St. Martin’s Press is just a delight to work with, I can’t wait until we get to parts of this process that I can share more openly about.

I’ve set up an author Facebook page! There is not a ton there yet but along with this newsletter and my Twitter account (where I post marginally more often than anywhere else), that will be the best place to find information and news about my writing.

Also, I set up the beginning of my Amazon author profile. Right now you can go there to see a couple of the anthologies I’ve contributed to, but soon you’ll be able to find my novels there as well.

Five Stars for Ghost Station by S.A. Barnes

Five stars for Ghost Station by S.A. Barnes

In my perpetual hunt for haunted spaceships I was excited last year to find Dead Silence, S.A. Barnes’s space horror debut. If you haven’t read that one and you love horror and sci-fi, I definitely recommend it. After having read Dead Silence I went straight to twitter to look up the author and was delighted to see that she’s got another space horror book coming out, Ghost Station.

I received an ARC of Ghost Station from Tor Publishing through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review of the book.

The book follows Ophelia Bray, daughter of an extremely wealthy and powerful family who run a company called Pinnacle. Her relationship with every last one of her family members except her sister is not just strained but extremely antagonistic, and that antagonism paired with her family’s Lords of Capitalism Assholery are a large part of what drove Ophelia to seek out a profession as a psychiatrist and to find a job working for her family’s company’s competitor, Montrose. But it’s Ophelia’s struggle with her own feelings of guilt that truly drive most of her decisions, including prompting her to take a very remote assignment for her company; the book opens with Ophelia preparing to enter cold sleep for a long interstellar trip out to accompany a corporate Reclamation and Exploration (R&E) team staking a claim for Montrose, on a far-flung planet once inhabited by now-extinct sentient life, while her family makes one final attempt to convince her not to go.

Her official reason for accompanying the R&E team is to act as an on-site psychiatrist in an effort to help reduce the risk of psychological problems arising from the stress, isolation, and long periods of cold sleep that their jobs entail, especially as this team has recently suffered the loss of a team member—a loss Ophelia suspects is more complicated than the team lets on.

The team themselves clearly don’t want Ophelia there, with reactions to her presence ranging from cool and aloof to openly hostile, with the exception of one team member who is portrayed as more vulnerable but also younger, less mature, and more naïve. It is with this inauspicious start that Ophelia finds herself descending with a mostly-hostile, secretive team to a poorly-understood, inhospitable alien planet, where things take a turn from bad to worse.

From the jump, the threading together of Ophelia’s openly acknowledged motivations and the secrets she keeps about her past is deftly handled. It’s immediately clear that there are some things that Ophelia not only refuses to talk about with others but also does her best to refuse engaging with in her own mind. The hints laid throughout the text early in the book give shape to those secrets without explicitly defining them, in a way that keeps interest without becoming annoying. The character interactions are well-written, varied, and keep the tension high even in between the scares. Clues are trickled out in a mix of obvious moments and more subtle hints that makes it easy for the reader to second-guess the situation in a way that feels intriguing and natural rather than obfuscating, and because of that it is easy too for the reader to understand oversights on the characters’ parts. All the pieces are woven throughout the narrative so that when it’s time to wrap the story up it feels neither painfully obvious nor contrived, and very satisfying.

The whole book was a fun, enjoyable, unsettling read, but there are two aspects in which I feel Barnes really excels.

First, throughout the book there is a growing sense of unease, dread, and even disgust. The team’s natural inclination to pranks, and their expectation of being pranked in turn, make it so easy for Ophelia and for the reader to feel wrong-footed throughout the first half of the book. Is this something to be concerned about, or is it the R&E team playing a joke? Is this something uncanny, or was it the previous team indulging in some malicious mischief? The book puts your guard up or gets your guard down by turns, so that the thing you can really expect is that whatever you’re looking at isn’t quite what it seems. It’s hard to pull off an unreliable narrator who the reader wants to believe in even if they can’t believe them, but Ophelia is just that. The book didn’t have the literary equivalent of jump-scares, but it didn’t need them, relying instead on an ever-increasing dread and paranoia that was deftly handled.

Second, the underlying theme of guilt—both earned and unearned, both resolved and unresolved—was powerfully woven. From guilt that was wrongly put on Ophelia’s shoulders by others, to undeserved guilt she assigns to herself, to the guilt she actually owns, Ophelia has a lot to face. The themes of guilt and accountability would be powerful enough if Ophelia only had to resolve her unearned feelings of guilt over situations that were out of her control, or if she only had to reckon with her actual complicity in situations which she could have changed but chose not to. But Barnes crafted a story in which Ophelia had to both forgive herself and let go of guilt that was not hers and accept and resolve guilt that she did have a part in. Doing both at once could have wound up clunky, but Barnes wove them together deftly in a way that caused each aspect of the guilt theme to highlight and strengthen the other, and resolved it satisfyingly. I was very impressed.

The only thing about the book that I wish had been different is more of a me-problem than anything else—my memory is so poor, and Barnes introduced a whole handful of corporate acronyms pretty quickly, which left me flipping back through pages to figure out what people were talking about more than once.

I’ll wrap it up by saying that I loved the way the resolution of the story felt tidy and well-resolved but still left enough threads open that I can sit here and hope for a sequel without feeling frustrated by the end of the book. Whether S.A. Barnes does write a direct sequel to this book or not, I absolutely hope that she gives me more of the space horror I crave.

Writing Chat

There is a lot of advice out there for writers, and almost all of it is good advice for someone. It’s not all or even mostly good advice specifically for you, because about half of it contradicts the other half. The real writing advice, always, is to find what works for you and then do that.

What works for me is meticulous outlining, character planning, and (when the story calls for it) detailed worldbuilding all worked out well in advance and saved in anywhere from two to four separate documents in a file for whatever novel I’m planning to work on. If you’re a writer who doesn’t engage much with the social media writing communities, or if you’re a very new writer, or if you’re not a writer but you read my newsletters, you may not know that what I am is usually called a plotter or a planner. That’s the method that works for me.

Some writers do not do any planning or outlining or anything like that at all. They have an idea and they start writing and they see where the story takes them. These people are magical wizards. I’m constantly impressed by the skill it must take to craft a cohesive narrative like that, much less a good cohesive narrative. These writers are sometimes called discovery writers, but more often they’re called pantsers (because they’re flying by the seat of their pants when they write).

There are people who are somewhere in the middle, too.

None of them are wrong.

You know who is wrong? This guy answering the question here.

There is no one right way to be a writer. But there are lots of right ways to be an asshole.

I saw this on twitter and the main reason I didn’t make my disagreement known there is because this guy has a blue check account and I don’t want to contribute to his engagement and funding when he’s posting such absolutely garbage takes.

But I do want to talk about that line of thinking. Because it is dead wrong. Just absolute drivel. That tweet is a super worthless collection of words. If the guy who wrote that tweet ever stumbles upon my newsletter I want him to know that however wrong he thinks I’m saying he is, he’s way more wrong than that. And it’s important to say so because there are a lot of writers out there who haven’t yet found themselves in a healthy writing community, who might see some total garbage like that and think it’s correct. If anybody who subscribes to my newsletter is a beginning writer or knows a beginning writer and you see anyone saying anything like that, please don’t internalize it. Please don’t let absolute trash-tier takes like that stifle your words.

If you’re looking for advice on what it takes to be a writer, I’d lean much more in favor of what Chuck Tingle posted a couple days later on his own twitter account.

I mean, I do think you should probably write sometimes, if you want to be a writer (but then I think that writing is the best part of being a writer). But I also spent two entire years languishing in writer’s block hell and didn’t write a single word during those two years. I’m a writer now, I was a writer before those two years, and I was a writer having a rough time during those two wordless years.

There is no one way to write. There’s no one amount of writing that makes you “real.”

There’s lots of writing advice out there. Much of it contradicts itself. But the advice that’s always good is to write the way that works for you and to look for more advice from people who say the kinds of things Chuck Tingle was saying, not from people who say the kinds of things that Bad Take Guy was saying.

Pet Pics

And now for your perusal, the most important part of any issue of the Dreadful Dispatch, new pictures of my cats and my dog.

Here we see an uncommonly photogenic Noodles pretending she didn’t wake me up at 3 A.M. that day.

I offer you this picture of Jupiter’s fluffy lil paws.

Archer doesn’t want get up on the couch often, but we had a nice snuggle after the kids went to bed the other day.

The End

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