5 Stars for Ghost Station

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, 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.

This review has been an excerpt from the March 2024 issue of my newsletter, C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch. If you enjoyed it, check out the full issue here.

5 out of 5 Stars for THE HOLLOW PLACES by T. Kingfisher

Any mild spoilers within this review that I can’t really avoid will be italicized so that readers may skip those sections if they want to.

Following her divorce, Kara (called “Carrot” by the two most sympathetic side charactersl) moves into a spare room her Uncle Earl has fixed up for her in his home—which happens to also be a tourist attraction called the Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy, mostly called the Wonder Museum, where Kara repays his hospitality by helping him run the museum and catalogue the wacky and sometimes tacky “exhibits” in his eclectic collection, a never-ending task in a place with no formal organization and a constant in-flow of donated “oddities” from Uncle Earl’s friends from afar.

When Uncle Earl needs to stay with his own sister, Kara’s mother, to take it easy following a knee surgery, Kara stays at the Wonder Museum to cover for his absence and continue her inventory of the objects within. She’s not long on her own before someone knocks a hole in a wall and Kara finds, on the other side, an impossible concrete hallway. Enlisting the help of Simon, the barista who works at the coffee shop next door (in the same building, also owned by Uncle Earl, who lets his tenants pay their rent in free coffee), Kara investigates the strange hallway.

What they find is another world, one which does not look horrifying at first but turns out to be deeply uncanny and terribly dangerous. Kara and Simon explore a little, but a terrible discovery sends them running, lost, into the strange world. They must learn what the perils are in that place, figure out how to avoid them, and find their way home before they fall prey to what hunts in that other place—and they must make sure if they do get home that they don’t lead anything back to our world.

First of all, this premise is like catnip for me. I love holes in things that are not supposed to have holes in them. I love the idea of going through one of those holes and finding someplace I’ve never been and never would have been (in the really real world that would be, what, some ductwork above the drop-ceiling in a school or if I ever get really lucky maybe a secret room, though I’ve never gotten that lucky yet). And getting to go to another world where the rules are different than they are here has been a favorite daydream of mine ever since I first read any of the Narnia books. From very early in this book I knew that this is the kind of horror scenario I would 100% fall for, which made it very fun.

One of horror’s eternal questions is “why doesn’t the main character just leave,” and I think that the character of Uncle Earl answers this question so nicely for Kara in The Hollow Places; he is sweet and kind but not without flaws, in a way that feels genuine and lets the reader really feel Kara’s motivation in making sure that whatever is happening to her can’t also happen to him. 

I also love the way that Kara’s divorce is presented in the book—her ex-husband is obnoxious but not some monster, the divorce was an upheaval but not riddled with drama. It struck me as a very realistic depiction of what many divorces must feel like. Painful, yes, but not horrifying in and of itself, and awkward in the often-overlooked way that painful things are often also awkward. It was a great setup and it was carried through the book really well, of diminishing importance to Kara as the events of the novel unfolded.

The sense of adventure in this book was really enjoyable (for the reader, I mean—it was clearly not an enjoyable adventure for Kara and Simon). There were parts, near the beginning, when I knew that I would have been reading with a touch of envy if I had somehow missed that this is a horror novel.

The characters were engaging and realistic. The ones who were meant to be likable were very likable and the ones who were meant to be unlikable were very unlikable, but never in a way that felt over-the-top or cringeworthy. Simon was so fun, and although Uncle Earl didn’t get a ton of page-time I love him. Kara was a relatable main character who I sympathized with throughout the book without feeling like she was an author insert or reader insert character. I also liked that the tension and adventure in this book were balanced with a thread of humor that felt very grounded in the kind of jokes and comedy I encounter on the daily on social media; it was a specific and realistic kind of humor that added so much to Kara’s voice on the page.

There were only a couple of places where I felt the narrative fell a little flat for me.

The first is that though the tension and the pacing were perfect and there’s no question why the characters were terrified, most of the book didn’t make me feel frightened. Tense, yes! Engaged, interested, eager to see what happens next, yes! But mostly not afraid.

The second is that the revelation of the catalyst that led to the events of the book felt obvious to me. This is something I feel is worth noting in case others find this aspect of the book unsurprising as well, when I think it was meant to be something more mysterious. It’s not, however, something I would really hold against the book or the author—I often see things coming like this. 

For me, the strongest part of the entire book was the climactic scene (a little spoilery content coming) when Kara has figured out what caused the opening to another world in the Wonder Museum because it brings some aspects of that other world to ours, and the exhibits in the museum are all that allow her to survive, and the reason she works out for that during the final scenes in the book, was so well done. The tension of that climactic scene was the best in the whole book, the descriptions and visuals were so eerie and unsettling, and the main character’s best guess at an explanation at the end was so touching it actually choked me up a little bit.

Finally, I really enjoyed how the story was resolved—aside from being touching it also had just the right balance between explaining things and leaving some mystery, and it ended with the same thread of humor that ran through the whole story, without making that humor the focal point of the falling action of the book.
The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher was a really enjoyable read and I definitely recommend it. If you had any different interpretations of the book, or want to discuss any points, please feel free to leave a comment!

This review has been an excerpt from my monthly newsletter, C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch. You can find the rest of this issue of the newsletter here, complete with a writing update and some horror chat as well as my review of Evil Dead Rise, and some pictures of my pets. If you like what you read, subscribe!

Two-Book Deal Announcement

It’s been over three weeks since I’ve been allowed to publicly announce my two-book publishing deal with St. Martin’s Press and a week since I started trying to write this blog post, because sometimes I’m not sure how to talk about success (and also because I’m busy and doing any kind of writing that’s not my books or my short stories feels like it’s not good enough).

In 2020 I wrote my haunted house novel, These Familiar Walls. I had only dipped a toe into writing horror shorts for a few months before that. I’d always written sci-fi and fantasy (though I did lean toward the dark in those stories). I’ve always loved to read and watch horror, and when I was a kid on the bus I used to make up scary stories to tell other kids, but I had never written a horror book before that one. When I entered it into Pitch Wars in the late summer/early autumn of 2020, I didn’t tell anyone other than my family that I was giving that a try.

A few days after the mentee picks were announced, I posted this tweet:

In early 2021 my entry did alright in the showcase, and then These Familiar Walls did not get an agent. When the 2021 Pitch Wars hype started up (and we didn’t know, then, that this would be the last time), I had already drafted my next book and was seeking beta readers for it, and I had no qualms about writing a blog post aimed at future Pitch Wars hopefuls to talk about what it’s like to not be one of the big, instant successes from Pitch Wars.

I never posted on Twitter when I got full requests for any of the three books I queried between early 2021 and late 2022—I rarely gave it a second thought when I saw someone else post their full requests, but thinking about posting my own felt like bragging, it’s one of those double-standards I inflict on myself. I did post on Twitter when I signed with my agent, but I had no idea what to post in my blog. Which I straight-up admitted in the post I did eventually write.

I didn’t post, either, when I went on sub. I did make a twitter post (and even pinned it) when I was allowed to announce my book deal, but here I am more than three weeks later still trying to figure out how to talk about that in my blog.

Failing and trying and persevering feels simple. You get a rejection and you process your feelings and then you knuckle down and keep going and going. It’s not pleasant but it’s not complicated.

Succeeding feels complicated.

Is that fucked up? It feels like it might be, but I think probably it’s pretty normal.

One of the reasons succeeding feels complicated is that the publishing industry gives you a lot more “no” than “yes.” So when you finally get all the “yeses” lined up just right for something like an actual book deal to happen, it’s almost hard to believe in it. And there’s almost a feeling of guilt—there are incredible books out there by incredible authors who don’t have an agent, that aren’t published, and it’s not because they’re not as good as the books that are published because they are (and a lot of them are better).

The importance of luck in publishing can also complicate feelings about success. I want to say “I worked hard to get here” which is true but so have a lot of people who are not here yet. I want to say “It was lucky my book landed in the right editor’s inbox at the right time” which is true but doesn’t mention my agent and his know-how and downplays the, well, the hard work I did to get here.

I worked hard to get here. My agent knows his stuff and is great. And I was lucky. All of it.

As I’m sitting here now, drafting this blog, I’m realizing that maybe a “luck” blog deserves its own whole post.

But for now this is supposed to be my big blog of celebration about my book deal and instead I’m meandering through the post talking about how weird it feels.

My books are more focused than my blog posts, promise.

Anyway, here, because this was supposed to be the point of the whole blog post originally: I have a two-book deal from St. Martin’s Press!

In my debut horror novel, The Cut, there's something in the water at L'Arpin Hotel, but pregnant domestic abuse survivor Sadie can't prove it. Guests disappear, her boss gaslights her, and monsters slither in the gloom. Until she and her toddler daughter get back on their feet after escaping her ex-fiancé, they're stuck here...unless they vanish, too.

In the second horror novel, These Familiar Walls, Amber inherits her childhood home after an old friend resurfaces and murders her parents decades after their falling out. When she moves her family into the house, lockdown stress and bitter memories haunt her—along with a hateful, smoldering presence that lurks in the mirrors and whispers from the shadows. Now Amber must resolve her part in a lifetime of tragedy, or lose the life she's contrived for herself.

Check back on the blog for updates about things like my forthcoming newsletter, novel release dates, cover reveals, preorder information, ARCs, and maybe some giveaways and other fun stuff!

Phew, there we go, that shouldn’t have felt so hard.

Anyway, I started this post talking in part about how writing stuff that’s not my fiction feels like I’m dropping the ball somehow, and I’ll end it by saying that in spite of that feeling I’m going to be putting together a newsletter pretty soon. I’ll post again when I’ve got that going.

Have a good weekend, friends!

I'm Now Represented by Chris Bucci!

I’m sitting here trying to think of how to write this blog post and I’m totally blanking. I’ve started it probably four times. Five if you count this time.

Do I talk about how many novels I wrote before I wrote the one I finally started querying? Do I talk about the novels I queried first, the ones that didn’t help me get a literary agent? Do I talk about how proud I was of the first one, and how I felt like the second was the best I could manage at that time but didn’t live up to the first one? How that made me feel like I might lose my touch? Do I talk about my query stats? Across all the books I’ve queried or just the one that ended with an offer of representation? Do I copy what I did on Twitter and name all the people I want to thank for being my friends and my support network and my first readers and occasionally my scolders and, again, always, forever, my friends?

Chances are if you’re reading my blog, you’re a writer. So you probably already know this, but for the people who might stumble in here who aren’t writers (hi, mom), once an agent makes an offer of representation it’s standard to ask for two weeks before you answer that offer so that you can nudge other agents to give them the chance to finish reading your book and decide whether to counter-offer or not. My offer came just before Thanksgiving, so my nudge period had an extra week tacked on in consideration of the holiday.

That means I’ve had three weeks to plan what I’d say here, and I didn’t even think of it until just now.

I’m so proud and so lucky to get to make any kind of announcement like this:
I’m now represented by Chris Bucci at Aevitas Creative Management! Talking with him on the phone about my Lake Erie hotel horror-suspense novel, The Cut, was amazing—everything he said about my work, both from an artistic standpoint and from a business standpoint, drove home that he is absolutely the best agent to work with to get my books out there. I’m thrilled to be working on revisions he suggested, and I’m so excited for everything that comes next.

(Also it feels very strange to not be obsessively checking my inbox anymore)

Take a Break!

My last blog post was in January of this year and it was about recognizing that sometimes I need to give myself time to rest. But apparently the lesson didn’t stick, so I need to be a little more clear and a little more firm with myself. Consider this blog post more of a reminder to myself than anything else.

Take a break sometimes.

When life stress is hitting you over and over, sometimes writing through it can help you cope. Sometimes it does not. Sometimes trying to make yourself write while the stress waves are washing over you adds to the stress instead of letting you escape from it.

Take a break.

If you are sick and you need rest, waking up at 5 am for your morning writing time is not going to work out. You’re going to sit on the couch with tissues up your nose, breathing through your mouth and wincing every time you swallow when you sip your coffee, and you’re going to be thinking about feeling all gunky, and you’re not going to write any good words. Or any words at all. And you’re prolonging how long you’ll be sick for by not resting, perpetuating the shitty writing cycle.

Take a break.

It’s the school year, the viruses are coming. All of them, one after the other. If the kids are sick and you’re running yourself into the ground taking care of a pukey seven-year-old and a feverish three-year-old, trying to figure out what food they can keep down and trying to balance that against what food they’ll actually eat, your focus is where it needs to be. Writing probably won’t work. And you’ll be up three times in the night to empty a puke bowl or change some messy bedding, so waking up early to squeeze the words out before sunrise is probably also not going to work.

Take a break.

By the time you feel the burnout coming, the bad news is that it’s actually probably already here. It’s too late. You’re not going to make that project work no matter how much you love the idea.

Take a break.

If you’re finally having a really good time and you don’t want to think about stopping to do some work, or going to bed at a reasonable hour so that you can get up early enough to write, for god’s sake let yourself finally have a really good time.

Take a break.

It’s not going to kill you to go easy on yourself sometimes. It’s not going to kill your words. You won’t come back to writing after a break and realize that you’ve forgotten how to put a story together.

Take a break.

I’ve been stressed out for a couple of months (thanks, interstate move and minor family disasters) and I’ve also been sick for over two weeks (thanks, back-to-school germs) and I finally just gave in for a few days and slept through my alarm and took naps during the day and didn’t try to do anything, and today I’m feeling better than I have in ages. I got more writing done today than I have in any single day in months, sent more queries, and am at this very moment wrapping up writing my first blog post since just after the new year. (I also got more cleaning and chores done yesterday than I have in a couple of weeks.) I’m not back to 100%, but I feel like myself again.

Because I took a break.

It's Time I Start Hitting the Snooze Button

When my son was two years old and my stepson was twelve, my husband and I decided to let my stepson move his bedroom to the finished basement. It gave him a lot more privacy, a much bigger room, and meant that my son’s occasional recurrence of midnight screaming didn’t wake him up on school nights anymore. A nice side effect was that my husband and I could move our son into my stepson’s old room, which was about twice as large as the nursery. That had a nice side effect of its own. We turned the nursery into what I referred to as “my writing office” and what my husband referred to as “the creativity room” because he intended to paint miniatures and plan D&D campaigns there (both of those wound up falling through pretty quickly and the room was effectively my writing office, but I let him call it whatever he wanted).

At that time, my son was sleeping until seven or eight every morning. This is the latest he’s ever habitually slept in his entire life and I foolishly thought it was going to be the new normal, so I decided to start waking up at six every morning to write.

Not three days after I made that decision, my son started waking up between five and six every morning. I’ve been trying to break him of that habit for four and a half years. I didn’t jump into #5amwritersclub right then, though, at first because I was hoping he’d revert back to the later wakeup time and later because I still managed to find time to write back then. At that time I didn’t draft in my laptop, that was a switch I made after the great big writer’s block incident (which was, unbeknownst to me, looming on the horizon, and which I have written about here), I wrote by pen in a notebook. It was easy, then, to buckle my son into his booster seat with a snack or a meal and sneak away (often outside to have a cigarette, another factor which directly contributed to the great big writer’s block incident) to write for a few stolen minutes at a time.

Then, when my son was a month shy of his third birthday, I found out I was pregnant with my daughter. My “writing office” was converted back into a nursery and I quit smoking and felt sick all the time and entered the great big writer’s block incident and, really, you can read about that and how I dug myself out of it after two years here.

When I finally found my writing groove again I’d changed everything about my habitual writing, including finally forcing myself to get up at five o’clock every morning to write. I did NaNoWriMo, but I also started using the NaNoWriMo website’s stat tracking tools in other months. And at the time, it was all there in charts and graphs and a little cartoon bird with a worm in its beak declaring me an “early bird,” making it clear that the five a.m. writing time was my best—almost my only—productive writing time. I’ve been getting up at five o’clock in the morning almost every single day since then, for a little more than the past two years.

I wrote a bunch of short stories that way, I wrote the novel that got me into Pitch Wars and I did all the Pitch Wars work that way, I drafted and revised the next novel that way, and I’m drafting my current novel that way, and I’m not sure, actually, when getting up at 5 am every day stopped being super helpful for me, personally.

The panini started, we moved and moved my husband’s grandmother in with us, I got into Pitch Wars, we did remote kindergarten with my son, my kids got bigger, my son started in-person school, we moved again but this time nearly 800 miles away, and at some point I fell out of the habit of using NaNoWriMo’s stat tracker and only started again recently.

And at first I was annoyed, honestly, to see that the early bird cartoon telling me I did most of my writing between 5 and 6 in the morning had changed first to a flamingo telling me I’m a midday writer and then to a night owl telling me I get most of my work done in the hour between putting my daughter to bed and putting my son to bed.

Writing at five o’clock every morning isn’t productive for me anymore. I haven’t lost my writing time—I’m still getting the work done at the same rate I have for the last few years. It’s just that making myself get up at five o’clock in the morning every day isn’t helping anymore. The nature of my and my family’s day to day life has changed.

And I’m tired. I’m so tired, all the time. We all are, right? There’s so much more going on than just the writing and the stuff we see on Twitter, there’s the state of the world and there’s everyone’s personal worlds and we’re tired and I’m so, so tired.

I resolved this year to rest more, take better care of myself.

So why is it so hard to give up waking up at five every morning? I mean, okay, the cats and the children waking up before six every day doesn’t help. But I still have the alarm set in my phone, I still get up and make my coffee at five every morning—sometimes earlier and sometimes later, but let me tell you, the “sometimes later” happens a lot less than anything else—even though I can see that it’s not necessary anymore.

I wonder a little bit if it’s a low-key martyr complex. “Look at how I suffer for my art” type shit. I don’t think I see that in myself but what if that’s what I’m doing on a subconscious level. I don’t think so. But maybe. But probably not.

It’s more likely that I’m just having a hard time letting go of the habits that saved my ability to write back when my daughter was a tiny baby. I built these behaviors up as Absolutely Necessary (for me, personally, not for everyone), and now I’m afraid of letting them go.

Even if it means I’m not sleeping enough any night ever in my entire life.

I sighed deeply writing that.

I think it would be easier to tell myself I should sleep in more if my kids would oblige by also sleeping in more. Still, letting go of life habits that were bad for me was so integral to getting my writing back on track, it’s hard to make myself feel in my guts that letting go of habits that were good at the time will help me get my well-being back on track without also messing my writing up at all.

But it’s true. So I guess I better work on it.

Hello, Pitch Wars 2021 Hopefuls!

Hi! Welcome to my blog for people submitting to Pitch Wars this year!

I know some of my friends and family read my blog, but if you’ve stumbled upon this article chances are pretty high that you found it by looking at the #PitchWars hashtag on Twitter, or through Google. Probably the Twitter thing. But anyway the point is, it’s pretty likely that you don’t know me. So a quick intro:

My name is C.J. Dotson. I write genre fiction, mostly horror and SFF. I have a handful of short stories published, and I participated in Pitch Wars 2020 with a horror novel called These Familiar Walls. My mentor was Rochelle Karina and she’s wonderful. I currently live in the Midwest, in a big, creepy old house, with my husband, my almost-93-year-old grandmother-in-law, my almost-16-year-old stepson, my 6-year-old son, and my 2-year-old daughter. Up until I was furloughed last year when everything shut down, I worked at a bookstore, and I really miss it. When I’m not writing or reading or spending time with my family (or cleaning up after them), I love painting and baking. I think that one of the absolute greatest pleasures in life is to eat food and read a book at the same time. From a purely aesthetic perspective I find images of the planet Jupiter super soothing and satisfying. I’m afraid of the dark and I have a hard time remembering to keep the volume of my voice below a shout and I have a poor memory. I’m six feet tall and often find myself overwhelmed and impatient in stores so I usually wind up wearing clothing that is not quite long enough for me. I like bowling and swimming and roller skating and skee-ball and miniature golf, though I’m not particularly good at any of them. I dream of someday owning a kayak. If I ever get really fit, it’ll be almost entirely in the service of trying to cosplay Sypha Belnades from the Castlevania anime. I’m bi, my pronouns are she/her. I’m on Twitter!

There, now you know me, right?

But if you’re here deciding whether you should submit to Pitch Wars or not, or to get a better idea about what that’s like, you’re probably looking for another piece of information about me. Do I have a literary agent? Has my novel been picked up by a publisher?

Not yet.

So, do I think you should do Pitch Wars anyway?

Absolutely.

Right around a year ago I was doing what you’re doing right now. I was reading blogs written by former Pitch Wars mentees and trying to figure out what to expect. I was also making a big mistake, which was cherry-picking the blogs I read. This person got a two-book deal? That person is in talks with Netflix? Another person got an agent within a day of the showcase? Those were the blogs and articles and posts I was focusing on, last year.

The blog posts all about how Pitch Wars didn’t mean instant success for everyone, the posts about how people don’t always get an agent but it’s still worth it, the voices on my screen assuring me that the best part of Pitch Wars is the community you get out of it, I didn’t want to see that. Part of that was wishful thinking, of course. I wanted to be one of the big flashy success stories. But also, the last lingering clouds of social anxiety that I’ve mostly-but-not-entirely overcome over the last sixteen years managed to cast just enough of a shadow over me to convince me that the friendships were for other people, people who were good at making friends and being personable, not for me. I think that attitude is evident in my team interview on the Pitch Wars blog, if you know to look for it. Meanwhile a few of the other mentees had made a discord server for us, and were building a community, and I hadn’t joined it at first, and I was missing out.

You, Pitch Wars hopeful browsing blogs and social media in the weeks leading up to submitting your material and awaiting the big announcement, you’ll see this a lot:
The community is everything.

I really lucked out, because in Rochelle I got a mentor who I vibe with really well, who I genuinely like a ton, and who didn’t just go above and beyond with my manuscript but also made it clear from the start that she was ready to be friends and to stay friends. (Seriously, if your book fits her wish list, submit to Rochelle).

My first few weeks of participating in Pitch Wars, I didn’t put a lot of effort into getting to know my fellow mentees. Most of this is because, like I said, I convinced myself I wouldn’t be good at getting to know them. But a smaller part of it is because the first few weeks of Pitch Wars coincided with some personal difficulties and some technical difficulties. A good friend passed away in November of 2020, and I have a hard time thinking about the early days of my Pitch Wars experience without also thinking about him. There were other things going on in my personal life that November, but that’s the one that matters. And it’s relevant to this post because there’s this fundamental thing that I think hopeful Pitch Wars applicants might not be paying enough attention to. If you get into Pitch Wars, the rest of your life doesn’t stop, and it can’t really be put on a back-burner.

It’s been pointed out elsewhere that Pitch Wars is a stressful experience. A great experience, but a stressful one. And others have said what I’ll say now, which is if you’re not mentally or emotionally capable of taking on stress and deadlines and expectations and intense work on your creative endeavor while maintaining your mental health right now, submitting to Pitch Wars is not a decision you should take lightly. All that being said, Pitch Wars vibes really well with the way I handle stress rather than causing more stress. Having a big project to sink into and a tight deadline to keep up with helped keep my head above water during that hard time.

Pitch Wars is starting for a lot of you, but it’s over now for me. I did the work and I waited with bated breath through the showcase and I queried agents afterwards. I’m still waiting to hear back from a few of the agents who requested my full manuscript in the showcase. I’m still writing, revising a new novel, but the hectic whirl of work is past, for now. But I did eventually get in touch with the other mentees and ask to join the mentee discord, and I’m so incredibly glad I did. There were over a hundred mentees in 2020, and not every single mentee joined the discord, and I am not close with every single one of those of us who did. But I haven’t seen any antagonistic relationships in there, any enmity. I haven’t seen any pettiness or unpleasantness. There are a bunch of my fellow mentees from 2020 who I’m glad to know, and there are a handful who I believe I will be friends with—great friends with—for the rest of my life. It’s support, sharing information, celebrating together, commiserating together, sharing pet pictures, reaching out in times of need, critique partners, zoom hangouts, chatting about our lives, it’s building a web of professional connections together. But the most important to me is that it’s genuine, solid, amazing friendship.

Pitch Wars leveled up my writing. Pitch Wars gave me the confidence to start my querying journey and the belief that I’ll make it eventually. Pitch Wars provided me with a goal and structure in a time when that was really good for my mental health. And Pitch Wars introduced me to some people who I believe will rank among the best friends I’ve ever had.

If you’re wondering whether you should submit to Pitch Wars, and you’re reading articles by people who didn’t get agents, and you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, is it still worth it, then?” Yes. I don’t yet have an agent, but I would do it all over again. And if you have any questions for me, please feel free to comment here, or hit me up on Twitter!

(That paragraph up there about how PW leveled up my writing, gave me confidence, and provided structure? I’ll write a whole separate blog post about that soon. I intended to get into that in this post, but the community aspect really has been so deeply important to me, it wound up needing its own whole post. So check back here in a week or two, when I’ll get more into the craft aspects of the experience. And in the meantime, here’s a great blog post on the subject by my fellow 2020 mentee, Erin Fulmer.)

Five Sentence* Specialties

*roughly

Pitch Wars announced their 2021 and early 2022 schedule. Seeing the deadlines for mentor applications and mentee submissions, and especially seeing the dates chosen for the 2022 showcase, feels so strange. It’s so close to coming up again. I’ll have another post later about my feelings about this, and either in that post or yet another even later maybe some advice for people about to dive into this. Today’s post is a little different.

Coincidentally, I think, around the same day the timeline was posted, a bunch of us in the 2020/21 mentee chat group needed a bit of a boost. (If you’re finding this blog because you’re a Pitch Wars hopeful, you either have already or will soon see a lot on this theme: getting into Pitch Wars doesn’t make all your worries as a writer go away, any more than getting an agent or a book deal will. Don’t expect it to magically make you feel perfect about your writing. It won’t. That’s okay! It’s not supposed to! And while it’s different for different people, for me it’s been overall a great experience. Now, where was I? Oh, yes…) A bunch of us needed a boost and we wound up making a thread listing our own writing strengths!

Listing our strengths evolved into giving a few words of advice about them. And I had the idea to collect those in one place and share them, for anyone who’s interested. Check them out below, included with the permission of a few of my friends and fellow members of the Pitch Wars Class of 2020! (And click on any contributor’s name to visit them on Twitter.)

VOICE
Gretchen Schreiber
https://mailchi.mp/f54c0e1f5761/disabledyanewsletter
1. Music — helps to build flow and pacing of words 
2. What does your MC love (like a thing or expertise) — build that into the way metaphors take shape. 
3. Line breaks, white space, and hard returns 
4. Slang / specific words / personal expertise

MULTI-P.O.V. NARRATIVES
E.G. Fulmer
https://erinfulmerwrites.wordpress.com/
1. Use as few POVs as possible to tell the story—more POVs or swift POV shifts can make a story harder to connect with and follow. 
2. Each POV should have a distinguishable “voice,” goal, and arc—they should bring something important/unique to the story and be fully realized characters in themselves. 
3. Your structure and plot will be easier to wrangle if you choose a single protagonist out of your POVs, though each POV should still follow your chosen structure/beats at least loosely. 
4. When switching POVs, use a scene or chapter break, and try to indicate whose head the reader is inhabiting as soon as possible—ideally in the first sentence, though you can also use a header with the character’s name to help ground the reader. 
5. Because of their complexity, multi-POV stories may require very tight writing to feel complete and well-developed, so be prepared to be ruthless about what scenes are necessary and who is the right person to narrate specific events.

CHARACTERS READERS LOVE
R.A. Black
wordsofrablack.wordpress.com
1. Make them fail - it's hard to be invested in someone who never makes mistakes 
2. Make them vulnerable - give them something that can be used against them, something that can be exploited, whether that's a relationship, something they need to protect etc. And even better if the reader can see that coming before the character 
3. Make them want - give them a goal, something they need to achieve, and something the reader can root for along with them 
4. Make them connect - the main character’s interactions with the side characters helps bring them to life more, even if those interactions are less than positive. Relationships changing as the book progresses show growth in the main character as well 
5. Make them laugh - it's often easier to relate to a character we've shared a joke or happy moment with, then one who purely experiences misery. And also it makes the moment when they do lose that happiness much more poignant.

DIALOGUE THAT FLOWS
E.G. Fulmer
https://erinfulmerwrites.wordpress.com/
1. Dialogue has a rhythm, like music—develop your ear by listening to real conversations, but also recognize that the way people really speak (often contentless, full of ums and uhs and small talk) doesn’t translate on the page exactly. Written dialogue is a stylized imitation and carries more emotional content than the average real-world conversation. 
2. Use beats (physical action/”business” if you speak theater, internal thoughts/reactions, emotional responses, etc.) as a counterpoint to the spoken dialogue—it says a lot more than tags like “she said” (tags are still fine, just use them sparingly). 
3. Know your characters’ different voices and use their voices as a vehicle for characterization, i.e. some characters will favor declarative statements over questions, some will qualify and prevaricate, some will be wordy, others terse, some will have verbal tics/catch phrases/habits. 
4. Dialogue partners’ spoken lines should respond to each other in some way, but how they choose to respond and what they respond to can be very telling—perhaps they turn something into a joke, change the subject, deflect, lash out to hide vulnerability, or pick out a specific part of the previous speaker’s line but ignore the rest. 
5. Dialogue should move the story forward, just like any other aspect of story, by revealing character motivations, catalyzing change, advancing goals, deepening relationships, or sparking conflict—banter is fun but it should carry some story purpose as well.

DIALOGUE
M (half of MK Hardy)
1. Say the words in your head if you can do that and out loud if you can't. 
2. Put your face in whatever expression their face is in as they're talking. 
3. Don't have them say the name of the person they're talking to unless there's a reason for it. 
4. Pick your vocal/verbal ticks and don't mix them up between characters. 
5. Finally: start actively noticing how real people talk.

CHARACTERS EXPERIENCING EMOTION
C.J. Dotson
cjdotsonauthor.com (hey that’s where you are right now!)
1. Take time to describe the sensation physically, sometimes, don’t only ever use the words for the emotions.
2. Once you know what emotion your character is feeling, think of the thing that provokes that emotion in yourself; recall specifically how your body felt when you were experiencing that emotion.
3. If you can’t remember that sensation, and if it’s safe for you to do so, make yourself feel the emotion again and write a list of everything you physically feel in response to that. (For example, my eyes water when I’m scared.)
4. Even the coldest, most logical character will probably make at least some decisions based on emotion rather than rational thought; let their emotions push them to act irrationally sometimes—that doesn’t mean acting out of character, and it can deepen the characterization.
5. Don’t forget the emotional aftermath: When the anger has burned itself out, when the crying is done, when the laughter fades, how does that leave your character feeling, and how does that impact their next actions?

ANGST+STEAM
Stella Wren
stella-wren.com
1. Angst: Boil angst down to a battle between the character and themself—define the inner demon they are fighting and build scenes that force them to face it. 
2. Angst: Externalize the angst to a symbol in the text and evolve the character’s relationship to that thing over the course of the narrative. 
3. Steam: Find at least one point of contrast in the scene and blow it out—ex: character vs. character (enemies to lovers), characters vs. society (forbidden love), or characters vs. setting (Beds? Who needs beds?). 
4. The Steam Is In The Details. That thing you love, but you don’t think anyone else likes that thing? That’s the thing. Put that dude’s ring on his middle finger. I DARE YOU.
5. Steam+Angst: Define the relationship of steam to angst over the course of the scene, the act, and the book (Is it a healing catharsis? A pleasurable but ultimately toxic tryst?) and use it to catalyze your character's development.

DESCRIPTIONS
Sari 
1. Always add details. It's not enough to say it's a rug, you want to say what the pattern is, and if it ties back into your worldbuilding even better, so it says something about the world you're in. 
2. The best way to embed description is in the character's interactions with it. Texture is so very grounding, so is smell. They add layers to things that sight alone does not. 
3. I really love describing heat in different ways. There's the sweat on people, the sun beating down, but my favorite thing in my PW novel was talking about the heat lines rising in squiggles from a car. it's such a mundane detail, but if it doesn't say summer in arizona, idk what does. Think about temperature. Cold should be biting, Sun and heat should impact everything. 
4. Think about what makes something unique. Does the mug have a chip in it? Are the couches worn and faded? Is there a grandfather clock ticking noisily in the background? Even better if it's something that annoys the character or makes the object endearing. 
5. Dabble it out in bits and pieces. No one wants ten pages about the lake, followed by songs about the lake.

NATURE DESCRIPTIONS
Sara Codair
saracodair.com
1. Use some metaphor or simile, but don’t go overboard 
2. Use as many of the five senses as possible 
3. Don’t worry about cramming ever little detail into the description—just pick the ones you feel the most strongly about 
4. Connect the description to the character’s emotional state. 
5. Make the description part of the scene or action—it doesn’t have to all be one long paragraph but can be sprinkled throughout an action.

IMMERSIVE SETTINGS
Lyz Mancini
lyzmancini.com
1. close your eyes and imagine yourself in that room or field or bar or whatever. 
2. Pretend you’re a Sims character. Walk around it, smell it, feel stuff, stare at people, explore it all as if there were no societal rules and you could freely walk around 
3. If the place exists, go there! I’ve revisited locations that appear in my stories to notice attention to details I’d never noticed before 
4. Meditate on the locations in different seasons and situations. Whats it like in winter? What’s it like at 4am? What’s it like on fire? 
5. Pretend you’re a vibe architect and get to writing. Go full in on too much detail at first. Instead of editing in the detail layer, edit out too much detail later.

ACTION SCENES
C.J. Dotson
cjdotsonauthor.com
1. This is not the time for introspection.
2. Cut your sentences in half. Maybe into thirds. Shorter sentences read faster. This increases the pacing and the tension.
3. Emotional responses to the action are good, but try to weave them throughout rather than explaining them in long, flowing sentences or all at once. Also, this is a good time to really keep the emotional descriptions grounded in the physical.
4. Cut your paragraphs in half, too. Maybe into thirds. It’s the same as with sentences.
5. Make sure the stakes of the action scene are clearly laid out from the start. Why is the action happening? Why is it happening now? What does failure look like for this scene? What happens if the character does fail? Make sure your reader knows this going in. Even if you raise the stakes (plot twist, the villain suddenly reveals that he has captured the hero’s best friend! oh no the rockslide shifted course and is about to hit a pet store! even if you make it to the dock before the lava reaches you, if you’re not fast enough the ship will still leave without you!) partway through the action sequence, there still needs to be a clear objective or consequence from the start, too.

PLOT
Gretchen Schreiber
https://mailchi.mp/f54c0e1f5761/disabledyanewsletter
1. Always know your: hook, midpoint turn, and climax 
2. Scene tests — does the scene push the plot forward? 
3. Brianstorm 50-100 scenes for the book, then hand pick the best ones and put them into order / force them into a story 
4. How is the character pushing it forward — happenstance/coincidence is only okay in act 1

PACING
Diba Bijari
1. This may sound simple, but in any scene, keep only what is necessary in terms of descriptions and dialogue, so the inciting incident is most striking, especially in the first 20 pages. As much as I love pretty prose, it fuzzes the reader’s focus in the beginning. Save it for later! 
2. If you’re tired of a certain scene as you write it, the reader will be too. 
3. Something I’m working on: try not to stay in your protagonist’s head (if in first person POV) for too long. Dialogue is key. Interaction with other characters moves things quickly naturally. 
4. Move scenes along with their most exciting key points and less  detail or long prose. Sounds like the scene will be naked without, but no, it works. 
5. Think of the scenes as movie scenes and how long you’d tolerate them in a movie.

NARRATIVE ARC
E (half of MK Hardy)
1. Figure out what your character(s) wants at the beginning of the story, and then do everything in your power not to give it to them.
2. Or, give it to them but when they get it, it's not what they want after all.
3. Make sure each chapter/scene/conversation moves them in some way - doesn't always have to be forward, but don't stay static
4. A good arc shows change - both in the characters and the narrative. Change usually evokes feelings - oftentimes more negative than positive. What emotions are you evoking in your reader?
5. Ideally your reader will realise where things are going just before you (or your character) gets there. You want things to move logically but not predictably

THEME
M (half of MK Hardy)
1. What is your theme: a hypothesis, a question, an exploration?
2. State your theme early, in passing; it'll make you look clever later.
3. Knit it through every aspect of the story - your hero, your villain, your setting and your metaplot should all service the theme.
4. Your theme should be explored in both a literal and metaphorical/metaphysical sense if at all possible.
5. State your theme again in the third act, and be as heavy-handed as you feel is tasteful: you earned it.

REVISING
Briana Una McGuckin
Moonmissives.com
1. Write the compelling parts of the first draft, for you. Embrace that the picture will be incomplete, let it be okay. You don’t even know what you’ll need and what you won’t until it’s over, so just do what you have to do to tell the story to yourself. 
2. Understanding that plot and character arc turn on each other, write down questions of plot/character as you have them (e.g., how can it be more believable that Todd would do this?, or is there a better way to burn the house down?) You don’t need the answers yet—and likely you won’t get them—so just keep writing. 
3. At the end of the first draft, revisit your list of questions. If you get an answer, go back to that place in the book and fix the plot/character issue. Repeat until the plot and character development work together for you in a believable way. This is your draft 2.
4. Reread again, looking for those elements outside of character or plot that you UNDER-wrote in your first draft, and note them down. For me, these things are setting, body-language, and people reasoning/reacting on the page. Whatever they turn out to be for you, this dictates your next 3 (or however many) revisions. Go through looking for where setting is needed and mark it/add it, start to finish. That’s draft 3. Then go again, with the next element on the list. That’s draft 4, and so on. 
5. On the other side of this, the manuscript should be MEATY. You added what you needed. Now you can look for what you DON’T need anymore, now that you have formerly-under-written elements doing more of the narrative work. What did you over-write? For me, it’s dialogue and reflection. Make a list and do it the same as with your under-writing—one draft per element focus, except this time you’re cutting what is now extraneous
6. When this is done, I reread again and see how things hang together, and the longer I wait to do that, the better, so I’m less inside the story, more dependent on what’s on the page. 
7. I rely on what I call “task lists.” Instead of marking pages, I keep a separate word doc that lists issues chapter to chapter. This way, as I go through (whatever phase I’m in), I can cross things off a list. It feels productive, and it keeps the revision from feeling overwhelming

There you have it! These aren’t be-all end-all guides to writing, of course, mostly this is what we’ve found works for us. As with any writing advice, if you try it and find that it doesn’t work for you, don’t try to force yourself into someone else’s way of doing things. But we hope that these five-sentence advices can help! Oh, and hey, if you’re reading this and you have a particular writing strength or specialty you’d like to share, especially if you want to throw out any words of advice of your own, I’d love to see what you have to say in the comments!

Also, if you’re checking this out in advance of submitting to Pitch Wars, keep an eye out for a future blog post or two where I’ll talk about that more specifically, and good luck!