The Thirteenth Dispatch

Lucky number thirteen!

First—

It’s my mom’s birthday! Happy birthday, Mom!

Upcoming News About THE CUT!

On June 27^th some friends and volunteers will be helping me with a fun social media cover reveal for The Cut! On that day I’ll also be announcing my publication date, and pre-orders should be live. If you’re on Twitter and would like to see the cover and get that information first, follow me and keep an eye out for the hashtag we’ll be using with the reveal, #TheCutBook

I love my book’s cover art so much, I just can’t wait to share it with everyone!

The Writing

Sometimes when I am in the process of writing a first draft, I forget how slow revising with an eye to cutting word count can feel for me. I’ve been working on trimming the excess tens of thousands of words from my campground horror book for a month now and I have cut it down by about 7,500 words.

Three things about this make it feel slow to me.

One is, I’m just over halfway through the draft and my target for words cut is 40k, so it’s looking like in this round of revisions I’m going to cut less than half of the word count that I need to cut. That means I’m going to have to do this at least one more time. Possibly two.

The second thing that makes it feel slow is simply that trimming word count is the part of the writing process that I find the least engaging. I still like it, but out of the whole endeavor it is the least fun to me.

The other thing is more illusory. I’ve cut about 7,500 words in a month. When I’m drafting, I tend to write around 20k words in a month, depending on how well everything goes, so it feels like I’m dropping the ball on cutting words. What I need to remind myself of is that cutting words is a lot less straightforward than writing them in the first place, and straight-up comparing the two processes isn’t accurate. (Writing friends will be familiar with all this already, the next bit of explanation will probably be more interesting to readers than to writers.)

Sometimes I can simply delete a word from a sentence, or a sentence from a paragraph, or more rarely a paragraph from a page. But most of the time, trimming a long manuscript down involves a lot of rearranging and restructuring, finding a new way to say something, making sure that I’ve caught instances of repetition, and fiddling with one sentence at a time or one paragraph until it’s right. This is what I’ve been doing on this first round of revisions because it is the easiest part of cutting words, for me, and it does tighten the prose, but it’s not the way to actually complete the task.

What’s of more value is finding scenes or sections that aren’t necessary to the story and cutting those entirely. That is also, for me, much harder. In the first part, it’s harder because even if a scene itself isn’t necessary for the story, there may be parts of it that are important for aspects of the story. Maybe the characters have an interaction here that sheds light on their relationship, or maybe a moment in the background is a hint at what’s coming later, or maybe there’s some subtle foreshadowing. The scene itself might be unnecessary, but there’s often nuggets in it that add depth to the book in various ways. So I then have to go about redistributing something essential from an otherwise unnecessary scene into other parts of the book (which is its own whole process of rewriting those parts to fit the newly rearranged bits without the rewrite adding to the word count, making sure it all comes at the right time narratively, making sure that it still works in terms of tone and style and mood and flow, and making sure that change doesn’t impact later scenes that I then have to account for and tweak to adjust).

Aside from those practical considerations, some of those scenes are ones I just love. It’s hard to trim them because they were fun to write, or because there’s an aspect of them that is unnecessary but is really well-written, or because it evokes a particular emotional response in me, personally. It’s hard to be ruthless with yourself and cut those bits. Lots of authors keep separate files during revisions where they tuck scenes like that away just in case they can put them back in or do tweak them to fit something else later or use them to inspire a whole new project. It’s a common enough problem that this kind of editing, cutting a whole scene that you love but is unnecessary in the long run, has had a common name amongst writers for a very long time: killing your darlings.

I hate killing my darlings. I’ve got one specific darling of a scene in the campground horror book involving a terrible watermelon that I know I need to kill, but on this first pass I have tried to just tweak it instead. I’m probably going to wind up taking an axe to it on my next round of revisions and I’m already heaving morose sighs about it.

On the plus side, I have been enjoying re-reading my own manuscript after several months away, and that’s a good sign. I think this book is going to be good when it’s done, and I can’t wait until I have it in a fit state to be seen by some of my critique partners. (Getting feedback is great, and revising with good, insightful, constructive feedback is my favorite part of the revisions process, and I have critique partners who are amazing at that.)

Very Premature Excitement

I will be attending StokerCon in 2025!  I’ve already got tickets and accommodation for my husband and I, and even though the con is in a year I am already buzzing with excitement. I can’t wait to spend a whole weekend meeting writing friends, making new friends, talking about horror and writing, and listening to panels and guest speakers, and just everything. It’ll be my first big literary convention and I’m pumped! (Yes I have absolutely started making a list of things to pack and thinking about what I’m going to wear and stuff like that even though this will be happening in a year, haha.)

Pet Pictures!

Noodles wanted belly rubs and I’m delighted to report that it was not a trap and I escaped unscathed.

Archer gets this weary, slightly judgmental look about her when the cats bicker.

Jupiter looks cozy while getting some little scratches.

The mourning dove who lives on our porch had two babies! The image quality isn’t great because I stood way back and used zoom to take this picture.

I’ve dubbed him Micah.

The End

That’s that on this month’s issue of C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch! If you liked it, please subscribe!

If you had any questions, comments, or vaguely-worded but ominous warnings, feel free to leave a comment!