Valentine's Day Newsletter

The Ninth Dispatch

The Writing

Hey hey hey, friends! Welcome to the special Valentine’s Day edition of C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch!

First of all, exciting news—THE CUT is scheduled to come out in early 2025! As soon as I have an exact date I will be over the moon to announce that. But for now, there’s only aboooout a year and I’m so pumped.

My follow-up book, THESE FAMILIAR WALLS, is with my agent right now and I’m trying not to stare holes in my inbox, fretting myself to pieces about whether he’ll like it or not.

The book I finished first-drafting on New Year’s Eve is still chilling out in my drafts folder, waiting for me to feel like I’ve got enough distance from it to tackle my first round of revisions. I remain excited to get back into it!

Currently I’m having a lot of fun writing a horror novel that’s a bit lighter than my usual fare, and I’m about a quarter of the way finished writing that first draft.

Also! I had my first Publishing Stress Dreams recently! When I’ve got a big event to look forward to (my wedding, the births of my children, and now my book’s debut) my subconscious comes up with pretty wacky dreams, and I legitimately happily anticipate the weird nightmares I will have when looking forward to something momentous. So far I have dreamed that my literary agent was teaching me to use magic to fight off assassins, and that I tried to visit my publisher’s office but it became a labyrinthine, ever-changing space with a train inside it and I got lost forever.

A Strange and True Story, Part 3 (End)

Welcome to the third and final installment of A Strange and True Story. For part one, check out issue five, and for part two, look at issue eight.

(Same quick caveat as parts one and two; this is a true story and also something that I am recalling from nearly twenty years ago; I’m not going to be writing this with the prose I would use in a short story or in my novels, this is just me sharing an unsettling memory with you all.)

In the weeks after I brought my friend to the hilltop behind the church next to my mom’s old house, my sister had nightmares about two indistinct figures and that hill. Eventually, my sister, her friend’s boyfriend, and I decided to take one last trip to the hill.

Maybe we’d seen too many movies or browsed too many ghost hunting websites, but for some reason we thought we could put whatever walked that hilltop to rest.

Remember, now, that my sister’s friend’s boyfriend considered himself something of an amateur ghost hunter. We were going to try to communicate with the presence atop the hill. To that end, we’d be taking pictures and checking them later for anomalies and we’d be recording ourselves asking questions. So one night my sister’s friend’s boyfriend came to my mom’s house with a tape recorder, a digital camera, and a list of rules.

photo credit, DS stories

The Rules:

1.) Check all batteries.

2.) No whispering. We were going to be recording, looking for EVP (electronic voice phenomenon, I’m pretty sure everyone who reads my newsletter knows this but just in case) and if you whisper while you’re recording and later pick up the sound of your own whisper but it is too indistinct to tell it’s you, you can trick yourself into thinking you’ve got an EVP.

3.) Be polite. (I like this rule just in general)

4.) After asking a question, pause for a moment so that if something answers and the tape recorder picks it up, it’s not buried under you rushing to your next question.

His fifth rule was more about things he claimed to have personally experienced than about EVP or making sure your devices had good batteries: after the “ghost hunt,” avoid mirrors until morning.

That rule sounds silly now but at the time it gave me a bit of a shiver.

So we left my mom’s home, the friend’s boyfriend carrying the recorder and me in charge of the digital camera, and headed for the church’s back parking lot. It was dark and cool but not cold, a mild night, no clouds or wind, just generally a good fall evening.

We climbed the hill, the unease descended, and the digital camera died.

I didn’t get one single picture on that hilltop. The camera stopped working the moment I set foot there.

The friend’s boyfriend turned on the tape recorder and said his name, he said my name and my sister’s name, and he said he was going to ask a few questions. The first thing he asked was “If you are here, can you give us a sign?”

It has to be a coincidence, but at that moment a wind sprang up from the shadowed corner that had always felt so threatening and swept around the top of the hill, then died. We were spooked. So the friend’s boyfriend starts asking a few questions, loud and clear and slow, with pauses in between each one. Then I asked if I could chime in, again in a loud and clear voice, and I asked a few questions. Nothing we said was very imaginative, a lot of “Who are you” and “Why are you here” and “Do you need help” type stuff. After each question either I or the friend’s boyfriend asked, we paused.

Pretty soon the absolute need to leave hit us. This time none of us said “We need to leave, now,” we just left. The second I stepped off the flattened hilltop and onto the slope, the camera chimed and came back to life in my hands. This time none of us said “don’t look back” or “all the lights are going to turn off,” but they did.

We went back to my mother’s house, and up to my bedroom, and played the tape recorder.

And it was all wrong. It must have malfunctioned. But the tape started with my voice instead of the friend’s boyfriend’s voice, and in the tape I spoke quickly, and in the tape I did not pause between questions. I wondered if the recording had sped up somehow, but there was none of the chipmunky, high-pitched distortion that comes with sped-up audio. My own, normal voice, just speaking so much faster than I actually had been, and without pausing at all. Then, abruptly, the tape cut to the friend’s boyfriend’s voice, coming after mine even though he’d spoken first on the hill. And again, the recording played his voice much faster and without pauses, but not in any kind of distorted-sounding way.

It got to the part where he’d asked for a sign, the part where that wind blew so suddenly. I know what it sounds like when wind blows across a phone or a recorder, that hollow and dull rushing roar. The roar that came out of the tape at the moment when he asked for a sign was not a wind-over-the-phone roar, it was an animal roar.

The part that scared us the most at the time, though, was that throughout the entire recording, the whole time our voices played, the whole time that roar came through, there was another voice. A low and gravelly voice, speaking without once stopping, in a language none of the three of us recognized.

And…that’s kind of where the story stops. There’s no resolution (if you would like some stories with endings, may I recommend my fiction?). That night we were so freaked out that we decided to head out from my mom’s house. When we’d gone out to the church we’d left through the back door in the kitchen, but on our way out to the friend’s boyfriend’s car we took the front door, passing the huge mirror my mom had hung in her entryway at the time, and my friend’s boyfriend pulled his jacket up over his head so he wouldn’t accidentally look into that mirror, but I didn’t notice anything untoward. We got in his car and we went to the nearby Steak-n-Shake where I spent much too much of my late teens and early twenties.

Not long after that came the big falling out. I haven’t spoken to my sister’s friend or the friend’s boyfriend in years.

But I was telling this story to my eighteen-year-old stepson recently, and he looked up the location of the church. And if he decides to go there, and if he feels or hears or sees anything strange there, I’ll let you all know.

Horror date ideas

Happy Valentine’s Day! About ten or twelve years ago a friend told me that she’d read that Valentine’s Day was originally a “werewolf holiday” and it was a disappointment to learn that this was a misunderstanding of Lupercalia, but it would be more fun to wish someone a “Happy Werewolf Day,” wouldn’t it?

photo credit: Francesco Ungaro

If you like Valentine’s Day and you like horror, here’s a list of horror date night ideas*!

Rent a scary movie, snuggle

Have a bonfire and share ghost stories

Play a horror board game

Graveyard picnic

Visit a haunted house attraction

Visit a real haunted house

Provoke the ghosts within the real haunted house

Abandoned building exploration (bonus bonding activity: not getting caught)

Wander together into the woods, off the trails, without a map or a plan

Go boating in the Bermuda Triangle

Create your own evil doppelgangers

Couples demon summoning

Romantic candlelit cannibalism

Necromancy and Chill

*…I don’t really need to say “most of these are jokes, don’t actually do them,” do I?

Pet Pics

And finally, the main attraction in the Dispatch, pictures of my animal friends.

Jupiter is the absolute undefeated champion of Being Cozy

Archer is an innocent baby who would never dream of trying to knock the cat’s food down so she can eat it herself.

This only-mildly-blurry picture of Noodles is probably the most still she’s ever sat when I try to get a picture of her unless she is sound asleep (and even then sometimes her “oh no a picture” senses wake her just in time to ruin a pic)