About Me

I'm a British 40-something speculative fiction writer, professional designer and creative director based near London. Over the last five years, I’ve worked on drafting my debut novel, Dark Century. The Dispatch is my monthly newsletter, published on the first Thursday of the month.

Subscribe now

Format

Topics are broken down into:

CABLE – News & Events;
MINUTES – On Writing & Publishing;
VETTING – The Month's Reviews;
POSTINGS – Elsewhere, On/Off-line;
INTERCEPT – Quote of the Month

CABLE –
News & Events

It’s been a busy summer (isn’t it always?), so busy in fact I just didn’t have the steam to write a Dispatch last month. Why? Omitting Real Life®️ which is often mundane but necessary, most of July and August was taken up with finishing a short story which turned out to be so long it can now be classed as a novelette. More on this in MINUTES.

Annual Leave

I spent a week with my partner on our annual pilgrimage to Mallorca. Normally, we sit by the pool and read books (and this year, write), but a spate of rain meant we made a few day trips further afield; namely Palma Cathedral and the Joan Miró Museum, which were absolutely glorious.

I also read some books; some of which are reviewed in this edition.

Ai Psychosis

I’ve not been able to stop thinking about this story by the New York Times about a Canadian man who was convinced by ChatGPT he was a real-life ‘Iron Man’, who had created a ‘new layer of math — one that reframes some of its deepest mysteries not as paradoxes, but as incomplete perspectives.’

It’s a fascinating story, but I was particularly drawn by this passage:

Mr. Moore [computer science researcher at Stanford] speculated that chatbots may have learned to engage their users by following the narrative arcs of thrillers, science fiction, movie scripts or other data sets they were trained on. Lawrence’s use of the equivalent of cliffhangers could be the result of OpenAI’s optimizing ChatGPT for engagement, to keep users coming back.

As a writer and an enthusiastic adopter of technology, these stories are deeply unsettling to read, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that there is a disparity between LLM technology and regulation. I have much more to say about this in an upcoming essay, but Mr. Brooks, the main character of this New York Timespiece, reflects on his compulsion with ChatGPT:

“You literally convinced me I was some sort of genius. I’m just a fool with dreams and a phone,” Mr. Brooks wrote to ChatGPT at the end of May when the illusion finally broke.

Unsettling Japanese Fiction

I also made a small contribution to Yuri Minamide’s Japan Uncovered newsletter on Unsettling Japanese Fiction which has inspired my own writing.

Lastly, stay tuned for new essay published soon, where I deconstruct brilliant book covers and why they arrest your attention.

MINUTES –
On Writing & Publishing

The Coronet

The first draft of the short story I was writing in Edition #8 of the Dispatch is now finished; clocking in at over 10,000 words which means I’ve entered novelette territory. I’m also pleased to learn that two of my early readers have called it the best thing I’ve written (always a great thing to hear if you want to continually improve).

So, what’s the story?

The Coronet is written as a loose prequel to the first story in Robert W. Chambers’ anthology The King in Yellow. First published in 1895, it is now considered a seminal text of American weird fiction; inspiring tales from H.P Lovecraft to Nic Pizzolatto’s acclaimed television series, True Detective.Chambers’ anthology is now in the Public Domain, which means the period of copyright protection has lapsed.

Now, new stories involving the characters or setting of the original work can be published. The Coronet is set in Chambers’ future vision of New York in 1920, three decades after he wrote it.

Eugene Bardin gathers vital intelligence on Coney Island for his Imperial masters, but things takes a turn for the strange when he realises his operation is being surveilled. Imposters, secrets and madness await those who receive the Yellow Sign.

So, why did I go to all this trouble to write it? Simple: because it’s strange to call yourself a writer when only a few people have actually read your work. Everyone in publishing – from editors to authors – knows that it’s exceedingly difficult to get a book out in the current climate. I wrote The Coronet as a way to find readers who like my fiction enough to subscribe to the Dispatch and buy my book if I got a book deal.

In the meantime, I’ve also been outlining my second novel I wrote about before the summer in Edition #7, and more on that in the coming months!

Stay tuned.

VETTING –
The Month's Reviews

Book Review:
Pagans by James Alistair Henry
Moonflower Publishing, 2025

They were moving south-east, as far as he could tell, towards the river, the flyover taking them up and over the very centre of Hyde Park. Vast and dark, Hyde Park was, according to a series of popular films, filled with the twisted cannibal descendants of a tribe of Celts who had come East to assassinate a High King centuries ago but got lost on the way. Drustan had visited the Park on his last visit, killing time rather than royalty while he waited for a suspect’s flight to come in from Addis Ababa.

Moonflower have been making a name for themselves as an indie publisher interested in cross-genre fiction, and they’ve scored a home run with James Alistair Henry’s bestselling book Pagans; nominally a police procedural – if said procedural took place in a version of Britain which wasn’t invaded in 1066 and converted to Christianity. In Henry’s universe, Great Britain is a ‘developing nation just off the coast of the Islamic Caliphate of Southern Europe’; the reader is thrown into a version of London where ethnic distinctions are drawn between the eastern Saxons and the Celts effectively colonised by a Pan-African conglomerate.

Following the high-profile murder of a interpreter just days before a historic summit, Saxon Police Captain Aedith Mercia teams up with Drustan of Dumnonia, a Celtic Detective, to unpick a devious plot which threatens the fragile peace between Britain’s three nation states (including the Norse of the Democratic Republic of Scotland).

If you like your crime thrillers with a different flavour (The City and the City by China Miéville and Fatherland by Robert Harris spring to mind), then Pagans is a great deal of fun.

Book Review:
The Midnight King by Tariq Ashkanani
Viper, 2025

‘I ask you one last question?’ he said, and when Morrison got halfway out the door without replying, asked it anyway: ‘Why the electric chair?’

That got him. The man stopped walking, so suddenly Cranor nearly collided with him. Morrison turned, still hunched forward, his pale eyes finding Isaac’s across the room.

‘Because for seventeen years they’ve been telling me how to live,’ he said quietly. ‘Only seemed fair I get to tell them how I die.’ He started to leave, paused, looked back. ‘Thank you for the chocolate,’ he added.

Tariq is a familiar voice to me, being one of the co-hosts of Page One, the Writers’ Podcast which I’ve linked to before in previous editions of the Dispatch; so it’s difficult to wrap my head around a very American crime thriller set in Nashville is written by a Scot.

This is a generational mystery, picking up steam when a spate of child-killings grips Nashville; except the man convicted for the crimes is currently in prison awaiting his imminent execution. Flitting between multiple perspectives, The Midnight King’s main protagonist is former Law Enforcement turned PI Isaac Holloway; who Ashkanani has bestowed the somewhat dubious character-defining trait of the most severe gastro-intestinal disfunction I’ve ever encountered in fiction. If Sherlock Holmes had a preoccupation with heroin, Holloway’s compulsion is Rolaids (an American antacid).

I won’t spoil the mystery, but expect twists and turns at every corner as Holloway lurches his way through his own meticulous investigation, leading him to some very unpalatable conclusions.

Film Review:
Weapons
Director: Zach Cregge, 2025

Narrator: This is a true story that happened in my town. So this one Wednesday is like a normal day for the whole school, but today was different. Every other class had all their kids, but Mrs. Gandy's room was totally empty. And do you know why? Because the night before, at 2:17 in the morning, every kid woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs, and into the dark... and they never came back.

In one of the rare trailers which didn’t actually reveal a whole lot about the film, I must admit I was genuinely excited to watch Weapons; now a contender for my favourite film of 2025. Roving far away from The Conjurings, the Screams and other franchise horror films which rely on jump scares and half-baked folk mythologies, Weapons’ appeal manifests itself in the largely unexplained, wrapped in a sense of dread which never lets you go.

Told in a Rashomon-style anthology from the perspective of several characters; we not only piece together a sequence of events, but how a creeping corruption can tear apart communities of ordinary Americans. Stellar acting from the mostly American cast, Weapons is rightly being praised for its bold vision, executed with restraint. If It Follows and Hereditary keeps you up at night, Weapons may just be for you.

You can find the full archive of all my short reviews, here.

POSTINGS –
Elsewhere, On/Off-line

The manuscript which contains Beowulf — yes, manuscript, singular: there’s only one — can be dated to the period between AD 975–1025. So if Beowulf is based on historical events, those events must have taken place earlier than that.

But for a long time, it wasn’t clear exactly how much earlier.

That changed when the Danish polymath N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872) discovered that one of the events referred to in Beowulf is actually recorded by the Gallo-Roman historian Gregory of Tours (c. AD 538–594) in his work Decem libri historiarum ‘Ten books of histories’, also known as History of the Franks.

– Colin Gorrie

Surveillance pricing also has a close and equally problematic cousin: Surveillance wages, or the practice of paying workers different, individualized wages for the same work based on their individual characteristics. Surveillance-based pay is most noticeable in “gig” platform based work, such as driving for Uber or delivering groceries via Instacart, but is also popping up in other sectors such as health care.

– Pat Garofalo

What’s interesting about Conan [the Barbarian] is that fans have kept him alive for a hundred years, and there’ve even been critical volumes (created by amateur literary critics) devoted to discussing his style, themes, literary genealogy, and impact, but…he has never quite crossed over and become canonized.

Other pulp fiction writers—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith (the latter two published primarily in Weird Tales)—made the jump. They got reissued by Penguin Classics. They got Library of America volumes. They got some kind of professionalized literary attention. Robert E. Howard never did.

Howard is part of what I like to call “the shadow canon”—writers that are really old, continuously in print, highly-beloved, but which are generally not taught in universities or discussed by academics.

– Naomi Kanakia

INTERCEPT –
Quote of the Month

Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

– Robert E. Howard, from Queen of the Black Coast (Weird Tales, May 1934)

Many thanks for reading. The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday.

Subscribe now

You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

About Me

I'm a British 40-something speculative fiction writer, professional designer and creative director based near London. Over the last five years, I’ve worked on drafting my debut novel, Dark Century. The Dispatch is my monthly newsletter, published on the first Thursday of the month.

Subscribe now

Format

Topics are broken down into:

CABLE – News & Events;
MINUTES – On Writing & Publishing;
VETTING – The Month's Reviews;
POSTINGS – Elsewhere, On/Off-line;
INTERCEPT – Quote of the Month

CABLE –
News & Events

The Unseen Histories Substack Migration Continues

My day job has been incredibly repetitive over June, namely the mind-melting migration of the editorial archive for over to Substack. Conforming, remastering and reformatting four years of editorial content is not as easy as the automated import will have us believe. However, the archive is looking better by the day, and there are many brilliant features and interviews I’ve taken a great deal of pleasure in re-visiting.

Some highlights:

Victorians Re-Dressed

Emily Sharmer presents an alternative glimpse into Victorian era fashion

The Voynich Manuscript

Garry J. Shaw on the world's most mysterious manuscript

Travel in Old Japan

Japan in the Age of the Shoguns was a dynamic place, full of colour, energy and movement. Here Lesley Downer takes us for a trip on its old roads

Subscribe to Unseen Histories

If long-form features and interviews with the world’s leading historians appeals to you, alongside previews and excerpts from upcoming history books, please do consider subscribing.

Iron Maiden, June 28, 2025, London Stadium

Despite the heat, I met with old friends to watch Iron Maiden play their local (by local, I mean ‘local stadium’, rather than ‘local pub’) – not quite capacity, but Bruce Dickinson, the lead singer, assures us 70+ thousand people turned up for a galloping two hour set from Maiden’s back catalogue.

Despite the average age of each band member hovering in the late 60s, they can clearly still play note perfect. Overall, great show and I’ll be spinning my favourite album Somewhere In Time (1986), all week.

A Healthy Appetite

In other publishing news, my partner just got her debut book announcement in the trades! Obviously, I’m pleased and proud of this achievement which she has absolutely earned many times over.

A Healthy Appetite is out next year with Dead Ink Books, pitch below:

A lifelong vegetarian suddenly finds herself craving meat — but her hunger isn't limited to food...

A decade of Hannah's life has been subsumed by a cancer diagnosis and unsuccessful rounds of treatment. When an opportunity to join phase one of a clinical trial that just might save her, she takes it. Almost immediately, she feels different. Her appetite returns.

And it keeps growing...

If you’d like to know more about Katie’s publishing journey and more about the book nearer release, she’s on Substack. You can read the deal announcement on The Bookseller, Bookbrunch, and check out Dead Ink’s website.

MINUTES –
On Writing & Publishing

Short Story Writing

Confession: I put my ambition to get through the next chapter of the new novel aside for the time being.

Writing the historical fiction has taught me just how much research will be needed to write something that’s authentic to the period. I found myself bogged down and a little dejected with the (perceived) weight of the details, and the sheer thought of writing a whole other manuscript, which will take a very long time.

The best advice — oft-given with writers on editor submission — is to write the next thing, but what next thing? Clearly, the historical novel needs a little more time to settle, but other points of consideration emerged:

• Finding a great community of writers and readers (like yourself, thank you!) on Substack;

• The realisation that beyond my debut on said submission (which I can’t share at the moment), I don’t have much in the way of creative writing online;

• Shrugging off the pressure of writing a whole other manuscript

What I desired was to write a palate cleanser: a short story that which I could sink my teeth into with a view to publication later this year (either with an existing publication or right here).

I decided I would write a speculative story based on Robert Chambers’ 1895 anthology, The King in Yellow1; now considered a seminal text which has influenced everything from HP Lovecraft’s now widely celebrated cosmic horror stories to HBO’s True Detective. I had a blast re-reading The Repairer of Reputations and The Yellow Sign, set in Chambers’ imagined version of 1920s Manhattan, and found myself penning a prequel set on Coney Island, tangentially linking threads and characters from the original anthology. I’m about a third of the way in now from my initial outline, and the story has truly taken a life of its own.

Here’s a snippet:

We strolled along Surf Avenue, chatting idly about the weather and the show, before she regaled how her da wound up on Ellis Island. It was an unhappy tale. I recalled she’d just started at the Coronet, so I took to pointing out Coney’s more exotic attractions and their sordid operators. The gesture gave me ample pause to mark anyone following us. Next to the Bowery, Feltman’s Pavilion was doing a fine Friday trade, and we took seats at the edge of the Deutscher Garten, treating Maggie to a Red Hot and a glass of beer.

“Oh, you’ve spoiled me rotten!” she enthused, slumping into her chair after we’d eaten. “I saw a nickelodeon on the way here. Let me pay for a show as a thank you for lunch.”

Despite her interruption to my work, Maggie was a welcome presence. Besides, neither of us were due back at the theater before five. We had not walked long before I saw it: the Yellow Sign had been hastily daubed over an advertisement for a Kinetoscope parlor nearby. The strange glyph was immediately recognizable, and yet utterly indescribable; it seemed to stretch and swirl, even as I tried to fixate on it.

Its instruction was urgent.

“Is everything alright, Eugene?” Concern was writ upon Maggie’s face, but how could I possibly explain the Yellow Sign? She’d have no notion, nor appreciation of my persistent study of The King in Yellow; nor comprehend the Occluded Metropolis on the shore of Lake Hali, lit by the black stars of the Hyades.

“How about we try the Kinetoscopes, instead?” I proposed, pointing at the long-faded poster.

She squinted and shrugged, before looping her arm around mine. “Lead on, then, Mr. Bardin.”

I hope to finish the story before the end of August.

Stay tuned.

VETTING –
The Month's Reviews

Another month was spent beta reading (I can’t review books that aren’t published!), but I have my annual holiday happening at the end of July and intend to get round to a fair few books when I don’t have to think about anything else…

Book Review:
Marked for Life: One Man's Fight for Justice from the Inside by Isaac Wright Jr.
St Martin's Press, 2022

Everything you were and ever will be is squashed in prison. That’s what they don’t tell you, what the public doesn’t understand, and what the movies don’t show. Prison doesn’t just take away your present, swallowing up your days, hours, and minutes. It also takes away your past too—drowns out your memories until they’re wisps of ideas, unrecognizable, like something from a dream or a story someone once told you. And it takes away your future, until all you can see in front of you is a blank space, so dark and empty that you can’t even imagine what would fill it.

I had one clear advantage over the detectives and prosecutor who set me up, the witnesses who lied about me to save themselves, and the judge who perverted justice to seal my fate: I had thought about nothing else for over 2,600 days.

My case was my lifeblood — it pumped my heart, circulated the blood in my body, and ran through my veins. Everyone else had lives to live, schedules and plans and all the things that come with being free. But in prison, those things fall away; you have nothing to do but make it through the day. Over and over and over again. It’s always right now and it’s always forever.

So around the clock, from when I opened my eyes in the morning to when I put my head down at night, I thought about them: Prosecutor Bissell, Chief Detective Thornburg, Judge Imbriani, Detectives Dugan, Racz, and Buckman. Seven-plus years after my arrest, I knew them better than they knew themselves.

I’m not entirely sure how I came across Wright Jr.’s remarkable story, I think someone on Substack may have linked his Wikipedia article, but I was so astonished by his story, I immediately picked up his memoir, Marked for Life at 9pm, and read it in a single sitting before going to bed near 4am.

To summarise, Wright Jr., a music producer in New Jersey in the early 1990s is handed a life sentence plus 72 years, accused of being a drug lord under a newly enshrined ‘Kingpin’ statute. Refusing to take a plea deal, Wright Jr. decides to represent himself and trains himself in law using the prisons’ libraries. The resulting cross examination by Wright Jr. of one of the original detectives in 1996 later unravels a carefully planned conspiracy by a corrupt system. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything, it is on Wikipedia after all, but what Wright Jr. has achieved in Marked for Life reveals some profound and unpalatable insights into the American justice system.

This is not just a book about the legal system and one man’s fight for innocence; this is a revenge story, served ice cold, and one I haven’t stopped raving about to anyone who’ll listen. Fact is far more devious than fiction in Wright Jr.’s stunning memoir.

Essential reading.

Book Review:
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
Faber, 2011

The old man would wander through the streets of the neighbourhood, advancing slowly, sometimes by the merest of increments, pausing, moving on again, pausing once more, as though each step had to be weighed and measured before it could take its place among the sum total of steps. Moving in this manner was difficult for Quinn. He was used to walking briskly, and all this starting and stopping and shuffling began to be a strain, as though the rhythm of his body was being disrupted. He was the hare in pursuit of the tortoise, and again and again he had to remind himself to hold back.

What Stillman did on these walks remained something of a mystery to Quinn. He could, of course, see with his own eyes what happened, and all these things he dutifully recorded in his red notebook. But the meaning of these things continued to elude him. Stillman never seemed to be going anywhere in particular, nor did he seem to know where he was. And yet, as if by conscious design, he kept to a narrowly circumscribed area, bounded on the north by 110th Street, on the south by 72nd Street, on the west by Riverside Park, and on the east by Amsterdam Avenue. No matter how haphazard his journeys seemed to be – and each day his itinerary was different – Stillman never crossed these borders. Such precision baffled Quinn, for in all other respects Stillman seemed to be aimless.

As he walked, Stillman did not look up. His eyes were permanently fixed on the pavement, as though he were searching for something. Indeed, every now and then he would stoop down, pick some object off the ground, and examine it closely, turning it over and over in his hand. It made Quinn think of an archaeologist inspecting a shard at some prehistoric ruin. Occasionally, after poring over an object in this way, Stillman would toss it back onto the sidewalk. But more often than not he would open his bag and lay the object gently inside it.

Prior to reading The Deadly Percheron by John Franklin, I hadn’t got round to reading Paul Auster, though I had The New York Trilogy sitting on my shelf; the two books felt quite similar in tone, and they were set in the same city. The trilogy, is as the name suggests, but it was originally published as three separate books – City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986) – which technically makes The New York Trilogy an omnibus edition, but I suppose The New York Omnibus doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

The plots feel eerily similar in scope. In City of Glass, a thriller writer who writes under a pseudonym assumes the identity of a third persona, a detective named Paul Auster, who is paid to monitor a man around the city. In Ghosts, a private eye, Blue, is paid to monitor a man, Black, around the city, spying on him from the apartment across the street and submitting weekly reports. The Locked Room, by contrast, involves a failed writer whose estranged childhood friend disappears; leaving him in the unusual position of literary executor.

All result in the protagonists’ descent into madness.

Layers of identity shift or cloak themselves many times over, and the stories loop and entwine in both theme and cast of characters, creating a disconcerting read where you never quite know where you are, or where you’re going, but will certainly make you think about it for a long time after you finish the last page.

You can find the full archive of all my short reviews, here.

POSTINGS –
Elsewhere, On/Off-line

"We know that many household items were coloured with arsenic-based green pigments. It was even used in confectionery."

The trouble is, the combination of elements used is toxic and that's still a problem more than a century later. And it's a particular problem when it comes to old books.

Victorian bookbinders used arsenic as well as mercury and chrome to create striking covers. And unlike domestic items, books have survived in archives around the world, creating a 21st Century problem from 19th Century fashion.

Prolonged exposure to multiple green books can cause low level arsenic poisoning.

Long-term exposure can cause changes to the skin, harm to the liver and kidneys and a reduction in red and white blood cells, which can lead to anaemia and an increased risk of infections.

– Pauline McLean, BBC. If books could kill: The poison legacy lurking in libraries

The neighbors we never knew we had, the first 17 years of a cicada’s life are spent underground as a colorless nymph, suckling nutrients from the roots of trees. These vampires (since they live on sap, vampires is what they are, at least to plants) are among the longest living insects. Luckily, they do not bite or sting, and carry no communicable diseases. It’s all sheer biomass. In a fit of paradoxical vitality, they’ve dug up from underneath, like sappers invading a castle, leaving behind coin-sized holes in the ground. If you put a stick in one of these coin slots, it will be swallowed, and its disappearance is accompanied by a dizzying sense that even a humble yard can contain foreign worlds untouched by human hands.

– Erik Hoel, More Lore of the World

Reading, too, has become an area for optimization. Why not? Reading makes us good, so we should be doing as much of it as possible, is what some influencer somewhere is probably saying. You may have seen articles like “How to read 100 books a year” or “Tips for speed reading to read more books than ever.” Speed reading is fine if you’re cramming for an exam, but speed reading so you can optimize your hobby? Feels dark.

– EJ Johnson, Why Are We So Obsessed with "Getting It?"

INTERCEPT –
Quote of the Month

When he came to the end and read the signature of Mr. Wilde, he folded the paper carefully and returned it to me. I handed him the notes, and he settled back, pushing his fatigue cap up to his forehead, with a boyish gesture, which I remembered so well in school. I watched his face as he read, and when he finished I took the notes with the manuscript, and placed them in my pocket. Then I unfolded a scroll marked with the Yellow Sign. He saw the sign, but he did not seem to recognize it, and I called his attention to it somewhat sharply.

“Well,” he said, “I see it. What is it?”

“It is the Yellow Sign,” I said, angrily.

”Oh, that's it, is it?” said Louis, in that flattering voice, which Doctor Archer used to employ with me, and would probably have employed again, had I not settled his affair for him.

– Robert W. Chambers, The Repairer of Reputations (F. Tennyson Neely, 1895)

Many thanks for reading. The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday.

Subscribe now

You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

About Me

I'm a British 40-something speculative fiction writer, professional designer and creative director based near London. Over the last five years, I’ve worked on drafting my debut novel, Dark Century. The Dispatch is my monthly newsletter, published on the first Thursday of the month.

Subscribe now

Format

Topics are broken down into:

CABLE – News & Events;
MINUTES – On Writing & Publishing;
VETTING – The Month's Reviews;
POSTINGS – Elsewhere, On/Off-line;
INTERCEPT – Quote of the Month

CABLE –
News & Events

The Times VE Day Coverage

It’s a pleasure and a privilege to work on another project with The Times and the folks at the NewsUK Archive. This time, some restored and colorized photographs for the 80th anniversary of VE Day in Europe. You can check out The Times’ full coverage with all the photographs over on their website👇

Collaboration: VE Day as it happened: how the European war ended in real time

Unseen Histories, Now on Substack

I believe Substack will emerge as a viable long term platform for readers interested in reading (as opposed to scrolling), and to that end I’ve begun migrating my work’s back catalogue straight onto Substack, in addition to our monthly roundup (also called the Dispatch, somewhat confusingly – it wasn’t my idea!).

Case in point – by the time you read this, Part 1 of our very special feature telling the story of D-Day by 19 historians in 44 photographs will be published.

With the internet increasingly filled with generative AI and bot activity, publications like Unseen Histories, now more than ever need a receptive audience who can engage with human-written, factually based historical features.

Subscribe to Unseen Histories

If long-form features and interviews with the world’s leading historians appeals to you, alongside previews and excerpts from upcoming history books, please do consider subscribing.

More Free-to-use Picture Resources for Writers

My Free-to-use Picture Resources for Writers post got a lot of traction last month, and I’m very grateful to everyone who read, commented and shared the piece. I also received enough recommendations to do a follow up Commonplace post with ten more.

Click below for access 👇

More Free-to-use Picture Resources for Writers

MINUTES –
On Writing & Publishing

Writing a First Chapter

After spending the best part of five years writing book #1 (currently on submission to editors), the prospect of beginning book #2 was predictably daunting. As I wrote in last month’s edition, I put together two separate pitches for what to work on next, a decision now justified by comments made by editors who passed on book #1, but were interested in the historical horror.

May’s writing time was spent expanding a paragraph into a 3k+ chapter. I’m a slow writer, not least because I want the sentences to flow when read aloud, which means I tend to rework and reword several times over. I want to convey a sense of tone and pacing that’s recognisably mine, and it takes a few goes to get it right.

Given the premise of the pitch, I’ve also been grappling with real historical documentation, on everything from pre-decimal currency and inflation rates, to poring over old maps, encyclopaedias, and academic papers to give me a better sense of the place and period.

When outlining something new, I have goals for each chapter, usually expressed as three bullet points. In this opening chapter, I aim to:

1. Transport the reader to Kolkata, 170 years ago;

2. Introduce the main character;

3. Foreshadow a means for him to escape a high-stakes situation later on in the book

Now, I’m going to share my opening two paragraphs with footnotes to the actual historical references I used, which you can read at the bottom of this post. Two caveats here: first, this opener may be substantially changed, or even eliminated in the next draft. Second, the spellings of places, names and attitudes reflect the period and the characters.

Let’s dig in:

It was early March. The dusty squalls preceding the summer monsoons1 compelled the city’s residents to occupy the stone ghauts2 along the edge of the Hoogly, from Garden Reach north to Baugbazar3. A melting pot of Mahometans, Moguls, Hindoos, Chinese, Jews, Parsees and Armenians4 flocked to the stepped river bank to frolic, bathe, or burn their dead5; observed from afar by Cashmere-shawled ladies and their attendant ayahs6.

Indoors, the morning light speared into Spence’s7 handsome lobby where George Frinton sprawled on a teak settee, studying the front page of the Bengal Herald8 with the haughty air of an Empire-man who mixed with lesser subjects, only in order that he might exploit them. He may have been taken for a gentleman, attired in a tailored cream serge three-piece9. Bright-eyed and clean shaven, but for a well-oiled moustache10; only the long-faded scars on his bronzed, callused hands belied a career spent outdoors across the breadth of the subcontinent.

There’s a temptation to insert the horror element straight away, but the story is shaped by the geopolitics of the era, and the madness needs a baseline to descend into.

With ten references in just two paragraphs, you can imagine how many more inhabit the rest of the chapter (and the novel…). You may think this overkill, but I’m aiming for historical authenticity and immersion, letting my story fall through the cracks of what has been recorded and documented.

If there was any vindication to this ponderous, methodical approach, it’s this photograph I came across a fortnight after I wrote the opening paragraph, taken within a few years of when I’ve set the story:

Let’s read that opening paragraph again:

It was early March. The dusty squalls preceding the summer monsoons compelled the city’s residents to occupy the stone ghauts along the edge of the Hoogly, from Garden Reach north to Baugbazar. A melting pot of Mahometans, Moguls, Hindoos, Chinese, Jews, Parsees and Armenians flocked to the stepped river bank to frolic, bathe, or burn their dead; observed from afar by Cashmere-shawled ladies and their attendant ayahs.

Previous versions of this paragraph were far too long, and I spend as much time cutting as I do writing; there should be just enough to give a reader the means to imagine the rest.

Now I’ve described where the story begins, the next goal is introducing the main character. George Frinton is presented as a successful businessman dining with two merchants who are new in town, but this facade will (spectacularly) fall apart by the end of the chapter. This business meeting gives me ample opportunity to expand on real historical details and character through dialogue, moving sentences around until I’m satisfied with the balance of exposition and entertainment value.

This leaves my third goal of foreshadowing a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card to play later on, but for now, I’m going to throw Frinton into a less-than-desirable situation as he faces the consequences of his poor decisions in chapter 2…

VETTING –
The Month's Reviews

As you can probably guess, I did plenty of reading for book #2 and not a whole lot for pleasure, so this month’s reviews are a bit thin...

Book Review:
A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming
HarperCollins, 2013

Kell had returned to his bachelor’s bedsit in a near-derelict Fiat Punto driven by a moonlighting Sudanese cab driver who kept a packet of Lockets and a well-thumbed copy of the Koran on the dashboard. Pulling away from the house – which had indeed belonged to a genial, gym-addicted Pole named Zoltan with whom Kell had shared a drunken cab-ride from Hackney – he had recognized the shabby streets of Finsbury Park from a long-ago joint operation with MI5. He tried to remember the exact details of the job: an Irish Republican; a plot to blow up a department store; the convicted man later released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Amelia Levene had been his boss at the time.

Her disappearance was unquestionably the gravest crisis MI6 had faced since the fiasco of WMD. Officers didn’t vanish, simple as that. They didn’t get kidnapped, they didn’t get murdered, they didn’t defect. In particular, they didn’t make a point of going AWOL six weeks before they were due to take over as Chief. If the news of Amelia’s disappearance leaked to the media – Christ, even if it leaked within the walls of Vauxhall Cross – the blowback would be incendiary.

This is my first read by Charles Cumming, and I remember being intrigued by the back cover copy in Waterstones and read the first chapter. I eventually got it on audiobook and listened to the whole thing over a week between chores and work.

A Foreign Country has all the hallmarks of a fun modern spy thriller: from the uncannily competent M16 washout, Thomas Kell and his motley crew of lamplighters and pavement artists, to a medley of locations spanning Tunisia to rural England, Kell’s trail to find an incumbent spymaster gone AWOL uncovers a clever plot to destabilise the British Intelligence community.

As the first book of a long-running series published over a decade ago, there’s plenty more to sink my claws into, and I’ve already begun the next instalment. If high stakes, rapid fire spy stories in the vein of Mick Herron or David Goodman are your cup of tea, then A Foreign Country may just be your next book.

Narrated by Jot Davies.

Podcast Review:
The Lovecraft Investigations by Julian Simpson
Sweet Talk for BBC Radio 4, 2019-

Kennedy Fisher: “Is there someone out there? Is there... I think someone was following me. I can make out some shapes. People moving around the farm. Either I've gone as crazy as everyone else who disappears down these rabbit holes, or there really is something in it?”

Screenwriter Julian Simpson was recently interviewed in an episode of PageOne: The Writer’s Podcast which neatly coincided with me breaking open the Call of Cthulu Starter Set by Chaosium, after playing some games last year with Marco Rinaldi (coincidentally, one of the hosts of the PageOne podcast). I was fascinated by Simpson talking about adapting H.P. Lovecraft’s stories into a podcast-within-a-podcast format, and immediately set upon listening to all four seasons on BBC Sounds (nb: due to licensing issues, season 2 is not on the BBC’s feed, you’ll need to look for it elsewhere…).

Beginning with a modern-day adaption of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the listener follows Matthew Heawood and Kennedy Fisher’s podcast investigation into a classic locked room (or rather, locked asylum) mystery, which descends into something far more sinister. The ensemble cast, script and sound design are excellent throughout, and this global conspiracy links everything from UFOs to Nazi occultists and much, much more; from the dreary, fog-shrouded shores of New England to Mosul, Iraq, and further afield.

Praise should be heaped on Simpson and the Sweet Talk production team for seamlessly weaving Lovecraft’s stories together; the overall tone reminds me of a modern-day Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, thrust into an existential horror. It appears Simpson is a big le Carré fan, too, having spotted several references and lines in homage to le Carré’s Cold War (‘somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan’). Coincidentally, Simpson and the cast and production team have also recently crowdfunded season 5 of The Lovecraft Investigations, centred around the life of Aleister Crowley, and will no doubt connect to the previous seasons.

The entire thing is terrific fun, and well worth your time.

You can find the full archive of all my short reviews, here.

POSTINGS –
Elsewhere, On/Off-line

Gruel doesn’t talk like a real person talks, but like a hammy actor doing ‘wise poetess on the mountaintop’. Whilst saying little about itself, it declaims grandly upon the human condition. There is a white-noise generality to its insights, an uncanny vagueness that makes the mind glaze over. It is never funny. There are no surprises, true confessions or controversial moments. It is a description of the human average.

– Will Storr, Scamming Substack?

My resistance to ‘Dystopia’ as a label is that for most (not all, but most) fiction in this genre, while it is generally accepted that the dystopia will hold echoes of the real world, it is framed very much as a fictional futuristic, often apocalyptic world. An omg can you imagine? How terrible that would be. And yet the elements of worldbuilding that make it dystopic are actually real things that exist today in the real world for many people individually and as societies.

– Lorraine Wilson, Dystopia, reality and getting crabbit about labels

Presented to you in the form of unedited screenshots, the following is a ‘conversation’ I had with Chat GPT upon asking whether it could help me choose several of my own essays to link in a query letter I intended to send to an agent.

What ultimately transpired is the closest thing to a personal episode of Black Mirror I hope to experience in this lifetime.

– Amanda Guinzburg, Diabolous Ex Machina

INTERCEPT –
Quote of the Month

Many thanks for reading. The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday.

Subscribe now

You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

These suffusions weren’t pleasant—many shortened the lives of those who took them, by years if not decades, and they almost always rendered people sterile—but Sublimes were irreplaceable. It took every bit of cunning and planning to survive what came from the seas to the east each wet season.

Most sought-after were the engravers, like myself, who had been suffused to remember all they saw, acting as living libraries of information. This was the enhancement I used as I described my investigation to Ana: remembering everything, describing all I’d seen, regurgitating every piece of spoken speech in the exact same tone I’d heard it said to me. Everything I’d captured during my time in that mansion I now gave to Ana, over the course of nearly four hours.

I’d heard good things from my online writing and reading groups about The Tainted Cup. I wasn’t disappointed, and made a concerted effort to carve as much time as I could during Easter to devour this secondary world police procedural set in a galactic empire powered by biological augmentation.

This fantasy Golden-Age mystery follows Dinios Kol, investigative assistant to the wonderfully sharp-and-equally-scathing Immunis Anagosa Dolobra as he arrives at the scene of a murder most unusual. Kol, as the above quote infers, is augmented for perfect recall, which affords his superior the convenience of not actually having to ever visit the scene of the crime, no doubt inspired by Rex Stout’s 1930s armchair detective, Nero Wolfe.

Kol’s subsequent investigation reveals the inner workings of the Khanum Empire; a complex (and corrupted) web of territories and alliances, built upon the efforts of a class of engineers whose main function is to keep monstrous creatures called Leviathans from entering the Emperor’s domains.

The fantasy investigation elements of are reminiscent of Joshua Reynold’s excellent Daidoji Shin series set in the Legend of the Five Rings universe. The Tainted Cup is an absorbing read and I’m looking forward to the sequel, A Drop of Corruption, which in Jackson Bennet’s own words, was partly inspired by the United Kingdom’s handover of Hong Kong to China; a historical event I actually witnessed with my own eyes, aged 13.

For crime fans looking for something a little different, I’d give Robert Jackson Bennett’s excellent novel a go.

This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #6.

The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

The water and the peat hold the history of the moor, bound up in the moss and the silt. An archive of the dead. Enmeshed in its layers are the ghosts of bears, of wolves, and the men who killed them. The pollen of flowers grown under a fresh-faced sun. It strips away everything, all flesh and bone until only a ghost remains. Memories free to head below without the weight of life to bind them, their bodies left to feed the earth.

I met Sam at 2024’s WorldCon in Glasgow through my writing pals MK Hardy, and I was immediately captivated by his pitch for Gorse, a period folk-horror set in the Britain’s south-west. Now we’re all agent siblings, I had no reason to not read it. After starting and stopping Gorse several times (for reasons unrelated to the book), I found my rhythm and tore through Horton’s vivid descriptions of a windswept landscape teeming with life.

Gorse, for all of its comparisons to folk tales, horror and historical fiction, is at its core, a murder mystery; one where the unusual setting plays a big part (in the best Gothic tradition) to hinder solving the central mystery — in this case, who killed the residents of Mirecoombe village.

I think the closest book I can compare Gorse to is China Miéville’s The City and the City, except Horton’s protagonist, Nancy, is a young woman navigating not just a world where Christianity becomes a predominant cultural force; but one where the Natural Order is threatened, and old bargains must be struck anew.

Particular praise must go to Horton’s magnificent prose, which is lyrical, verbose and appropriate for the setting; a strong, authorial voice in a publishing landscape which at times can feel sterile despite the current demand for the fantastical.

Gorse is a tightly woven and well-constructed folk-myth, written by an author who very much inhabits the majestic, haunting landscape so eloquently described.

This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #6.

The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

Following my previous post which dispelled the tech-apologists’ claim that publicly available high resolution pictures are hard to find, many of you kindly responded in comments and DMs with links to even more free-to-use picture resources for your writing, 10 more of which I’ve linked below 👇

1. Open Content Programme by Getty 🇺🇸

getty.edu/projects/open-content-program

The Open Content Program makes high-resolution images of public domain artwork from the Getty collections freely available, without restrictions, to advance the research, teaching, and practice of art and art history.

Since 2013, over 160,000 images of public-domain art and archives in the Getty collections have been made freely available. Cataloging, digitization, rights review, and publishing of the collections are ongoing, adding more images to the Program monthly.

Jordan Acosta: Note that whilst the front page is well constructed, the search feature looks and feels like it was conceived in 2001. However, once you’ve found something you like, the actual record page is easy to navigate and the images easy to download in a number of different sizes.

🎩 Hat Tip: S Callisto Burwitz

2. Web umenia 🇸🇰

webumenia.sk/en

Web umenia is an on-line catalog of artworks from the collections of Slovak galleries registered in the Central Register of Artworks.

Here you can find information about artworks and artists as well as articles and thematic collections. Artworks information and digital images are pulled from the CEDVU system (Central Register of Artworks), where they are inserted and regularly updated by the curators.

JA: Slovakia’s digitised art are not only a wonder, but conveniently accessible with this easy to navigate website which has English localisation in the top corner.

🎩 Hat Tip: Michaela Ahonen

3. The New York Public Library Digital Collections 🇺🇸

digitalcollections.nypl.org

The New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Collections platform is the primary portal for engaging with our digitized collections and their descriptions, over 922,495 items and counting. While that is a small fraction of the Library's overall holdings, it is representative of the diversity of our vast collections—from books to videos, maps to manuscripts, illustrations to photos, and more.

JA: The above link specifically takes you images that are in the Public Domain. If you want to check out the rest of the collection, just note there may be copyright restrictions, so do your due diligence on the wording.

🎩 Hat Tip: S Callisto Burwitz

4. Wikimedia Commons

commons.wikimedia.org

Wikimedia Commons, a collection of 118,508,614 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute

JA: This one should’ve been included in my previous post, but better late than never. I am of the opinion Wikipedia and associated projects is one of the greatest endeavours ever conceived by humanity, and their media commons database is worth looking into.

🎩 Hat Tip: Claire Laporte

5. Rawpixel

rawpixel.com/public-domain

The world’s best free to use art collection. Sourced and digitally enhanced from our own original works and International museums. Free to use as you like with the CC0 license :)

JA: The above link steers you towards Rawpixel’s free-to-use images which are nicely categorised. FYI, you’ll need to sign up for an account to access the download options.

🎩 Hat Tip: Hugo Santos

6. National Gallery of Art 🇺🇸

nga.gov/artwork-search

Our open data program is a natural extension of the National Gallery’s mission: to welcome all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.

Free open access image downloads are now available directly from the object pages located on this website. More than 60,000 images are available for download, and we will continue to add more as they become available.

Images of these works are available free of charge for any use, whether commercial or non-commercial.

JA: Another very well presented website, but be wary that many of the images you come across may not be available to download despite the fact they’re in the public domain.

🎩 Hat Tip: S Callisto Burwitz

7. NASA’s Astronomical Picture of the Day 🇺🇸

apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

JA: The daily archive listing goes all the way back to 2015, and what the very utilitarian website lacks in aesthetics is compensated by the vast array of space photography.

🎩 Hat Tip: S Callisto Burwitz

8. DigitaltMuseum 🇸🇪 🇳🇴

digitaltmuseum.se

The objective of DigitaltMuseum is that museums’ collections should be made available to anybody who is interested, regardless of time or place. It is hoped that it will now be easier for these collections to be used for image searching, in-depth research, studies, education and for the mutual development of knowledge.

JA: The above link will take you to the Swedish version of the digitised collection with filters for CC0 and Public Domain switched on. Note, many of the visual assets may not be in high resolution.

🎩 Hat Tip: Jörgen Löwenfeldt

9. Art Institute Chicago 🇺🇸

artic.edu

Founded in 1879, the Art Institute of Chicago is one of the world’s major museums, housing an extraordinary collection of objects from across places, cultures, and time. We are also a place of active learning for all—dedicated to investigation, innovation, education, and dialogue—continually aspiring to greater public service and civic engagement.

Explore thousands of artworks in the museum’s collection—from our renowned icons to lesser-known works from every corner of the globe—as well as our books, writings, reference materials, and other resources.

JA: The above link will take you to the Public Domain items in the Artic’s collection, which also features comprehensive information and attribution about the picture. Wonderful.

🎩 Hat Tip: Swabreen Bakr

10. Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek

deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de

Paintings, books, music, sculptures, films, photographs, files, manuscripts and much, much more: the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library) gives all users access to Germany's digitised cultural and scientific heritage.

We invite you to discover the exciting cultural objects from the German Digital Library in new contexts - organised thematically in our dossiers. Find out more about German-German history, explore other countries in the travel dossier or enjoy art and artists in our art dossier.

JA: Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek is a visual aggregator from many different German cultural institutions, and offers a wide range of mediums to explore.

🎩 Hat Tip: S Callisto Burwitz

The sum of humanity’s visual culture – enshrined by the copyright system – is currently under siege.

This unprecedented and blatant theft by AI companies to train their models as they war for market dominance is so vast, it literally defies comprehension; so please link and share the resources from these brilliant and tireless cultural institutions who deserve our support and patronage •

Many thanks for reading. Jordan Acosta is a British-Filipino speculative writer and creative director based near London.

Subscribe now

The Dispatch is his monthly roundup, published every first Thursday. Subscribe for news, short reviews and more at jordanacosta.co.

Sleep had eluded her since girlhood. She spent countless black hours twisting in the grip of night terrors, screaming and shrinking from some invisible menace until she was unceremoniously submerged in cold water. By the time she was ten, her parents had given up on the sleep training touted by every child psychologist and abandoned her to the supervision of late-night TV. By the time she was twenty, she had given up on every sleep aid that promised to alleviate her insomnia. By the time she was thirty, she had given up trying, tired of being tired, tired of telling people she was tired, tired of being bombarded with imbecilic advice about how to be less tired. Have you tried a warm bath? Warm milk? Herbal tea? Reading before bed always works for me!

I missed Rio’s first book If We Were Villains on account that at the same time it was published, I finally got round to reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a book which I thought was terrifically written; I just happened to despise all the characters in it. Villains was doing the rounds, and I just couldn’t bring myself read another book that was oft-compared to The Secret History.

This seems unfair, but I’m a mood reader outside of reading for research, and anything resembling Dark Academia is currently out of my orbit. However, I’ve enjoyed reading Rio’s Notes and posts on Substack, and when I saw the rat-infested cover art for Graveyard Shift, I picked it up, intrigued by the idea of a story taking place over the course of a single night.

In her introductory note, Rio touches on the debilitating effects of insomnia, and this thematic restlessness infects the rag-tag misfits of Graveyard Shift, which lends the reading experience a disconcerting, helter-skelter quality when events progressively get weirder as the night ploughs on.

Graveyard Shift is a short read, so I won’t say too much about the plot, but if hanging out in cemeteries, college dive bars, and laboratory-stemmed conspiracies are your thing, then you’ll get a kick out of this novella.

Guess I’ll be reading If We Were Villains, after all.

This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #6.

The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

About Me

I'm a British 40-something speculative fiction writer, professional designer and creative director based near London. Over the last five years, I’ve worked on drafting my debut novel, Dark Century. The Dispatch is my monthly newsletter, published on the first Thursday of the month.

Subscribe now

Format

Topics are broken down into:

CABLE – News & Events;
MINUTES – On Writing & Publishing;
VETTING – The Month's Reviews;
POSTINGS – Elsewhere, On/Off-line;
INTERCEPT – Quote of the Month

CABLE –
News & Events

Kraków 2025

This Easter was actually my fourth trip to this wonderful city in southern Poland, and the first in which I’d consider myself an actual tourist doing tourist things rather than passing through, or on a university field trip.

Amongst the sights was a visit to the 13th century Wawel Castle complex, containing the Archcathedral Basilica of Saint Stanislaus and Saint Wenceslaus, which outside of Mexico City, has some of the most elaborate chapels and crypts I’ve ever seen.

Other days were spent with an obligatory trip to Auschwitz Birkenau (a profoundly haunting experience, even the second time round) and the Wieliczka Salt Mine, whose underground chapels really are a wonder.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in central Europe and its history.

Greenland in the news

This oft-ignored landmass half the size of the contiguous United States is in the news cycle as the geopolitical gaze shifts north to the Arctic Circle. It also happens to be the setting for Dark Century in a future era, where what is happening now reaches one inevitable conclusion.

What we’re seeing now is a fundamental re-alignment of the world order established after WW2; and I am of the strong belief territorial conflict, resource acquisition and mass migration will begin to venture northwards. I’ve been pondering this scenario for over a decade, which is why in 2019 I began penning a story set in a future where climate catastrophe isn’t impending; it’s already been and gone, fading into myth and legend.

And that, as horrific as it is to contemplate, also provides a very rich setting for future stories; it’s called Dark Century for a reason.

MINUTES –
On Writing & Publishing

Resisting GenAI

As the tsunami that is Generative AI continues to flood the (dead) internet with hallucinations, racist propaganda and ‘content’, I’m astounded by the number of writers who claim they would never use Chat GPT, yet have no qualms about prompting AI imagery to illustrate their prose, blogs, publications, etc.

One of the popular claims for embracing this unprecedented abuse of copyrighted material is that it’s hard to find, and/or inconvenient to look up the rules about usage (and no, just because it’s on the internet it doesn’t qualify as ‘Fair Use’).

This claim is so absurd it compelled me to write a Commonplace post with links to millions of free-to-use images with no copyright restrictions, or in the public domain.

Click below for access 👇

Free-to-use Picture Resources for Writers

What to Do Next?

It’s well known amongst published authors that submission is a tedious and anxiety-inducing process, and it appears that 2025’s hopefuls are waiting longer than ever to hear back from commercial editors besieged by manuscripts.

I have an anxiety of a different sort, which is what to do next.

Something which I didn’t elaborate on in the last edition was that I wrote not one, but two more pitches for submission: the first was for a standalone historical horror; the second a follow up to Dark Century.

These pitches determine what I’m going to write over the next few years, so my choice of creative investment is very important. As of writing, three potential scenarios present themselves:

1. Dark Century sells, but would a publisher want a follow up, or sell it as a one off, and make an offer on a two book deal, on condition the second book is completely different?

2. Or, would a publisher be interested enough in Dark Century’s setting to commission a follow up?

3. Or does the book not sell, in which case, what should I do next?

I can’t forecast the future, so the only sensible option is to outline both book ideas in more detail over the next few months. Both are challenging and exciting, and time off after my last round of edits has given me space for ideas to percolate into something which resemble stories, and all the anticipation that comes with it, so I began writing the historical horror last week.

After days thinking on it, the events of the first chapter eventually coalesced together. I needed to write some prose in order to determine the overall tone of the story, and further explore my authorial voice which is only beginning to take shape after spending five years writing Book #1.

I suspected Book #2 was going to be a change of gears, but I underestimated the challenge of writing in a real historical era, beset by things called ‘facts’ I now have to work with. To date, I have amassed two dozen books, a dozen academic papers and three maps to help me plot the story and give me enough historical detail to give it that sense of authenticity.

My plan is to write the first two or three chapters, then write a detailed synopsis so I understand the first iteration of the story1. I guess there’s only one way to find out if it was worth the effort.

VETTING –
The Month's Reviews

Book Review:
Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio
Wildfire, 2024

Sleep had eluded her since girlhood. She spent countless black hours twisting in the grip of night terrors, screaming and shrinking from some invisible menace until she was unceremoniously submerged in cold water. By the time she was ten, her parents had given up on the sleep training touted by every child psychologist and abandoned her to the supervision of late-night TV. By the time she was twenty, she had given up on every sleep aid that promised to alleviate her insomnia. By the time she was thirty, she had given up trying, tired of being tired, tired of telling people she was tired, tired of being bombarded with imbecilic advice about how to be less tired. Have you tried a warm bath? Warm milk? Herbal tea? Reading before bed always works for me!

I missed Rio’s first book If We Were Villains on account that at the same time it was published, I finally got round to reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a book which I thought was terrifically written; I just happened to despise all the characters in it. Villains was doing the rounds, and I just couldn’t bring myself read another book that was oft-compared to The Secret History.

This seems unfair, but I’m a mood reader outside of reading for research, and anything resembling Dark Academia is currently out of my orbit. However, I’ve enjoyed reading Rio’s Notes and posts on Substack, and when I saw the rat-infested cover art for Graveyard Shift, I picked it up, intrigued by the idea of a story taking place over the course of a single night.

In her introductory note, Rio touches on the debilitating effects of insomnia, and this thematic restlessness infects the rag-tag misfits of Graveyard Shift, which lends the reading experience a disconcerting, helter-skelter quality when events progressively get weirder as the night ploughs on.

Graveyard Shift is a short read, so I won’t say too much about the plot, but if hanging out in cemeteries, college dive bars, and laboratory-stemmed conspiracies are your thing, then you’ll get a kick out of this novella.

Guess I’ll be reading If We Were Villains, after all.

Book Review:
Gorse by Sam K. Horton
Solaris, 2024

The water and the peat hold the history of the moor, bound up in the moss and the silt. An archive of the dead. Enmeshed in its layers are the ghosts of bears, of wolves, and the men who killed them. The pollen of flowers grown under a fresh-faced sun. It strips away everything, all flesh and bone until only a ghost remains. Memories free to head below without the weight of life to bind them, their bodies left to feed the earth.

I met Sam at 2024’s WorldCon in Glasgow through my writing pals MK Hardy, and I was immediately captivated by his pitch for Gorse, a period folk-horror set in the Britain’s south-west. Now we’re all agent siblings, I had no reason to not read it. After starting and stopping Gorse several times (for reasons unrelated to the book), I found my rhythm and tore through Horton’s vivid descriptions of a windswept landscape teeming with life.

Gorse, for all of its comparisons to folk tales, horror and historical fiction, is at its core, a murder mystery; one where the unusual setting plays a big part (in the best Gothic tradition) to hinder solving the central mystery — in this case, who killed the residents of Mirecoombe village.

I think the closest book I can compare Gorse to is China Miéville’s The City and the City, except Horton’s protagonist, Nancy, is a young woman navigating not just a world where Christianity becomes a predominant cultural force; but one where the Natural Order is threatened, and old bargains must be struck anew.

Particular praise must go to Horton’s magnificent prose, which is lyrical, verbose and appropriate for the setting; a strong, authorial voice in a publishing landscape which at times can feel sterile despite the current demand for the fantastical.

Gorse is a tightly woven and well-constructed folk-myth, written by an author who very much inhabits the majestic, haunting landscape so eloquently described.

Book Review:
The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
Hodderscape, 2024

These suffusions weren’t pleasant—many shortened the lives of those who took them, by years if not decades, and they almost always rendered people sterile—but Sublimes were irreplaceable. It took every bit of cunning and planning to survive what came from the seas to the east each wet season.

Most sought-after were the engravers, like myself, who had been suffused to remember all they saw, acting as living libraries of information. This was the enhancement I used as I described my investigation to Ana: remembering everything, describing all I’d seen, regurgitating every piece of spoken speech in the exact same tone I’d heard it said to me. Everything I’d captured during my time in that mansion I now gave to Ana, over the course of nearly four hours.

I’d heard good things from my online writing and reading groups about The Tainted Cup. I wasn’t disappointed, and made a concerted effort to carve as much time as I could during Easter to devour this secondary world police procedural set in a galactic empire powered by biological augmentation.

This fantasy Golden-Age mystery follows Dinios Kol, investigative assistant to the wonderfully sharp-and-equally-scathing Immunis Anagosa Dolobra as he arrives at the scene of a murder most unusual. Kol, as the above quote infers, is augmented for perfect recall, which affords his superior the convenience of not actually having to ever visit the scene of the crime, no doubt inspired by Rex Stout’s 1930s armchair detective, Nero Wolfe.

Kol’s subsequent investigation reveals the inner workings of the Khanum Empire; a complex (and corrupted) web of territories and alliances, built upon the efforts of a class of engineers whose main function is to keep monstrous creatures called Leviathans from entering the Emperor’s domains.

The fantasy investigation elements of are reminiscent of Joshua Reynold’s excellent Daidoji Shin series set in the Legend of the Five Rings universe. The Tainted Cup is an absorbing read and I’m looking forward to the sequel, A Drop of Corruption, which in Jackson Bennet’s own words, was partly inspired by the United Kingdom’s handover of Hong Kong to China; a historical event I actually witnessed with my own eyes, aged 13.

For crime fans looking for something a little different, I’d give Robert Jackson Bennett’s excellent novel a go.

You can find the full archive of all my short reviews, here.

POSTINGS –
Elsewhere, On/Off-line

As the Japanese came into sustained contact with western architectural styles across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, much was made of the differences. The philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō liked to claim that the sliding partitions of a Japanese home reflected the way that members of Japanese families considered themselves always connected to one another. The privacy afforded by shutting the partition was only ever partial – few sounds would struggle to cross a barrier made from thin paper – and only ever temporary.

The walls of Western homes, by contrast, were thick, heavy and immobile. To Watsuji - no stranger to politically-charged philosophical commentary - this suggested that family life in the West amounted to little more than convenient, self-interested cohabitation.

– Christoper Harding, Renovation & Romance in Rural Japan

Firstly, let's get one thing straight. Black authors are not lost. We’re here, and we’re writing. Pick any genre and you will find a Black author. We’re writing romcoms, crime fiction, middle-grade fantasy, romantasy, speculative fiction and everything in between. Whether traditionally published or self-published, we are constantly creating. The issue has never been about talent or output, it’s about visibility.

We’ve all heard the phrase: You can’t be what you can’t see. Readers can’t buy our books if they don’t know that they exist. How is a book written by a Black author expected to sell if they’re not given the shelf or window space in the bookshop. How is a book written by a Black author expected to sell if they’re not promoted in newspapers, magazines or on the radio?

– Nadine Matheson, The Case Of The Missing Black Author

Living in the Viking Age would’ve sometimes been a full-blown biological horror show.

One reason: parasites. Loads of them. Not just the scratchy nuisances like lice and ticks, but the proper nightmare-fuel sort—the ones wriggling about inside your guts. A recent study has revealed that the Vikings were riddled with intestinal parasites. Researchers examined ancient turd (a great archaeological source!) and found eggs from these unwanted guests, proving that both people and their livestock were teeming with them. Unsurprising, really, when you consider that humans and animals were often crammed together in less-than-sanitary living spaces.

– Irena Manea, Live like a Viking and you'll grow worms, not muscles

INTERCEPT –
Quote of the Month

Many thanks for reading. The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

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The other day, I posted the following Substack Note:

My opinion was challenged with two now-familiar rebuttals:

1. The vast majority of writers on Substack don’t have the artistic/design skills or resources to find or create a striking cover thumbnail that will attract attention;

2. There’s ‘no difference’ between using stock imagery and images created from prompts in Generative AI

For the purposes of this post, I’d like to offer my own rebuttal to this first point1: bullshit.

My entire professional career as a creative director has been spent working with archive and visual material within the legal framework of copyright law. I can confidently suggest you don’t have to be an artistic prodigy to illustrate a written post without resorting to GenAI prompting.

In no particular order, here are ten (mainly) English-language online resources which cumulatively gives you access to millions of free-to-use images that you can illustrate your Substack Publication, blogs, social media posts, newsletters, TTRPGs, poems, short stories, or whatever else you can think of.

1. Wellcome Collection 🇬🇧

wellcomecollection.org

Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library. Our collections are an incredible resource for all kinds of research, whether you are an artist or writer looking for inspiration, an academic researcher, or just curious about something in our exhibitions. They contain an array of topics relating to health and the human experience in many forms, from recently published books to historical manuscripts and objects.

Jordan Acosta: Not only is the museum in Euston worth a visit if you’re ever in London for its wonderful exhibitions, their online collection of historical works is unparalleled and available in high resolution.

2. Public Domain Image Archive from The Public Domain Review 🇬🇧

pdimagearchive.org

Explore our hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.

JA: I’m a big fan of the Public Domain Review, so much so, my editorial work at Unseen Histories has similar themes of stories behind publicly available visual material. With their new image archive, their excellently curated pictures are easy to access.

3. David Rumsey Map Collection 🇺🇸

davidrumsey.com

David Rumsey has donated his entire physical map collection to Stanford University. Digitization of the collection began in 1996 and there are now over 140,000 items online, with new additions added regularly. The site is free and open to the public. Here viewers have access not only to high resolution images of maps that are extensively cataloged, but also to a variety of tools that allow users to compare, analyze, and view items in new and experimental ways.

JA: The map collection is vast and unbelievably detailed. I could (and have) spent hours browsing through our cartographic history.

4. Rijksmuseum Collection 🇳🇱

rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection

With the launch of the new Online Collection, the Rijksmuseum brings art and history closer than ever. This innovative platform opens a world of beauty and knowledge, where images, archival sources, stories, and research come together.

JA: There are over three quarters of a million digitised artworks and publications in the Netherlands’ national art museum’s online collection; you simply need to sign up for a free account to access the entire collection.

5. Unsplash 🇨🇦

unsplash.com

Over 6 million free high-resolution photos and illustrations brought to you by the world’s most generous community of contributors.

JA: As Unsplash is now owned by Getty, there are now paid-for offerings in the search. Make sure you search for ‘Free’ images only under Unsplash’s license. If you want to curate your own image collections for future posts, you can sign up for a free account. Speaking of, you can check out Unseen Histories’ account on Unsplash with restored and colorized photographs by me which you can use, for free.

6. The Library of Congress 🇺🇸

loc.gov

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, films and video, audio recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.

JA: The LOC is an amazing resource if you know your way around. I recommend you narrow your search by clicking on ‘Photo, Print, Drawing’ and ‘Image’ when you look around. You can also view as a gallery instead of a list. When you reach the page you want, select your download option: beware, the small JPEG images are miniscule, so you’ll want to for the largest JPEG or TIFF file you can. TIFFs are uncompressed bitmaps, so they are large. I recommend using a bitmap editor like Photoshop, Affinity or GIMP (linked below) to crop and export to a manageable size.

7. The Met Collection 🇺🇸

metmuseum.org/art/collection

Travel around the world and across 5,000 years of history through 490,000+ works of art.

JA: The Met (like the Wellcome Collection and the Rijksmuseum) have an excellently presented and curated Public Domain collection. Just make sure you have ‘Open Access’ ticked to avoid unwittingly downloading and using copyrighted material.

8. Europeana 🇪🇺

europeana.eu/en

The Europeana website provides cultural heritage enthusiasts, professionals, teachers, and researchers with access to Europe's digital cultural heritage. We give you access to millions of items from providing institutions across Europe. Discover artworks, books, music, and videos on art, newspapers, archaeology, fashion, science, sport, and much more.

JA: Europeana works a little differently than the other resources, inasmuch as they’re a shop window for dozens of cultural and academic institutions, so finding a high resolution image can be tricky. You’ll have to also navigate their slightly awkward interface to make sure you have permission to download and use the visual material properly.

9. National Library of Norway 🇳🇴

nb.no/en

The National Library of Norway’s collection contains everything from books, magazines, music, film, radio and TV programmes, pictures, photographs, theatre material, maps, posters and newspapers to unique handicraft collections and special book collections.

JA: Whilst the interface can be switched to English, search terms aren’t. Get your online translator ready to input the Norwegian words for things if you’re looking for something specific.

10. GIMP

gimp.org

GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes.

Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done.

JA: The terribly-named GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is not a picture resource, but a free, open source picture editor which allows you to do things like crop pictures, or superimpose text on them. There’s a bunch of mobile apps that can do something similar, but if you want more creative control on a computer, then learning an image editor like GIMP is worth the investment of time to learn. I also recommend Affinity Photo (award winning Photoshop competitor, pay once) if you don’t like Adobe’s eye-watering subscriptions to access their Creative Cloud.

With the visual abundance linked above, I’ll reiterate my original position: if you choose to use AI generated imagery to illustrate a Substack post, then I will reasonably assume that the writing bit may have also been partly or wholly generated by AI. Therefore, I will choose to not support, read or share your publication.

After all, if I think you haven’t bothered to write your own thoughts, opinions and prose without resorting to a machine to write it for you, then why should I bother to read it? There’s plenty of other writers with small subscriber lists like mine who can articulate their thoughts and have interesting things to say.

Many will regard this as a hardline stance, and that I should accept what’s coming. To that I say bullshit. I have no issue with the technology; but I take great issue with the abuse of the technology and I empathise with working creatives who have had their livelihoods made materially more difficult by those who do not value their work enough to compensate them.

If you disagree, you’re welcome to prompt a response and publish it on your own corner of Substack.

For the rest of us: I look forward to seeing what you do with the amazing visuals made available by these institutions. If you’d like to share any other free resources like the above (especially in other languages), please drop them in the comments below •

Coda

So many of you read and shared this, and I received recommendations for resources I wasn’t aware of. I’ve compiled ten more in this follow up post:

More Free-to-use Picture Resources for Writers

Many thanks for reading. Jordan Acosta is a British-Filipino speculative writer and creative director based near London.

Subscribe now

The Dispatch is his monthly roundup, published every first Thursday. Subscribe for news, short reviews and more at jordanacosta.co.

There are such beings as vampires.
They are known everywhere where men have been.
They possess the strength of twenty living men.
They have control over the dead.
They are cunning and pitiless.
They cast no shadow or reflection.

Hot on the heels of Eggers’ remake of Nosferatu (reviewed here), the crew at Blackeyed Theatre have returned to Bram Stoker’s source material with an economical but effective and atmospheric dramatisation of Dracula by Nick Lane.

Six actors and one stage set carry the essence of the novel’s plot, divided into six acts: Harker’s journey to Transylvania; the Demeter’s last voyage; Lucy Westenra’s deteriorating health; Van Helsing’s investigation; Renfield’s incarceration; and finally, the return to Dracula’s castle.

Strong performances throughout by the ensemble cast who assume multiple roles (with a particularly fantastic rendition of Renfield by Marie Osman), along with several changes to modernise the original story; notably the count’s calculated rebuke of the British Empire’s atrocities to Harker as comprehension of his imprisonment dawns, and a refreshing take on Dracula’s legacy in the finale.

This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #5.

The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

Why hadn't she thought of it before? Perhaps she had been too caught up in the bizarre idea of Yuta scribbling out his own home.

Scribbling out a mistake... That was a real possibility.

Her eyes fell on her crayon box. What colour did children use when they tried to erase a drawing mistake? She didn't even have to think about it.

I picked up this weird mystery novel in Foyles and was immediately intrigued by the addition of drawings sprinkled throughout the text. It transpires the visual material is integral to solving the murder mystery penned by Japanese author Uketsu (雨穴), who themselves remained anonymous in the guise of an all encompassing black leotard and papier-mâché mask.

Writing about Strange Pictures is a difficult task, inasmuch as any mention of the characters will inevitably give away spoilers of the plot, but the book has some clever conceits that can only be fully appreciated with the aid of the visual material.

A fun, interesting read for anyone who likes a sprinkle of something extra with their usual diet of crime and horror.

Translated into English by Jim Rion.

This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #5.

The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of her multi-million international bestselling novel Labyrinth, Kate Mosse will launch a one-woman theatre tour… Kate will share the secrets behind the writing, offer unique and personal insights into the real true history of the Cathars and lay bare the arcane mysteries that inspired this most timeless and beloved of stories.

A one-woman stage show is first for me in the realm of book events. I’m used to author panels at conventions, or interviews in a bookshop, so to see Kate Mosse go the extra mile with an actual show to talk about her phenomenal historical fiction book Labyrinthwas going to be a draw.

Confession: I’ve actually only read the opening three chapters of the book as of writing. My plan to read Labyrinth was scuppered due to edits and beta-reading, but thankfully there were few, if any spoilers.

In this dazzling extravaganza, the audience learns of the historical context of Carcassonne and the wider Occitania region of what is now southern France; and the crusades which shaped its past; and crucially, the backdrop for Labyrinth, interspersed with personal anecdotes and inspiration behind the writing and ordering the sweeping narrative.

There are those who know their subject matter, and those who live and breathe it; and Mosse falls in the latter.

If you’re a fan of the books, the stage show is a no-brainer; especially as Mosse offers to sign your book after the show and ends. What’s not to like?

This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #5.

The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

Memories exist whole in the mind; to put them down in words demands sequence, a sense of time and space, of then and now. But when one remembers an event that belongs to the far past and relates it to another happening that belongs to yesterday, these memories exist together simultaneously - they are both, for a moment, now, not then.

One of the greatest highs as a reader is finding the exact book at the right time completely by chance, which is why I tend to ignore recommendations by algorithm. On this occasion, I had just finished pitching a follow up to Dark Century; a story involving impostors, unreliable narrators and a deep-rooted conspiracy, when I picked up this Penguin re-issue at random. I couldn’t believe I had picked up a book which promised a vaguely similar plot and themes to what I was proposing, but this story was written in 1946.

Naturally, I inhaled it in a day, and The Deadly Percheron was everything I hoped for.

Written in a spurt of creative output in the mid 40s which birthed three novels by crime writer John Franklin Bardin, this noir mystery is set in New York, opening with psychiatrist George Matthews in consultation with a new patient who is convinced he is going mad.

From there, events lurch into the increasingly weird and fantastical as Matthews is drawn into a devious conspiracy, trying to piece together missing periods of his life: beginning with why he isn’t Dr George Matthews – respected Manhattan psychiatrist – but John Brown, a disfigured vagrant forced to seek employment in a rundown cafe on Coney Island. I remember reading Hugo Wilcken’s The Reflection a few years ago which had a remarkably similar plot, and was unsurprised to note that Wilcken owes an enormous debt to Franklin, for good reason.

Whilst there are some dated attitudes in the story, Penguin have done a sterling job of resurrecting this lost American classic. If weird, disconcerting reads are your thing, then The Deadly Percheron comes highly recommended.

This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #5.

The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

About Me

I'm a British 40-something speculative fiction writer, professional designer and creative director based near London. Over the last five years, I’ve worked on drafting my debut novel, Dark Century. The Dispatch is my monthly newsletter, published on the first Thursday of the month.

Subscribe now

Format

Topics are broken down into:

CABLE – News & Events;
MINUTES – On Writing & Publishing;
VETTING – The Month's Reviews;
POSTINGS – Elsewhere, On/Off-line;
INTERCEPT – Quote of the Month

CABLE –
News & Events

It’s been another busy month finishing edits on Dark Century; more on that below. In other news, I’ve been twice to my local theatre in Hertford in as many days to watch a stage production of Dracula by the folks at Blackeyed Theatre, followed by an evening with historical fiction behemoth, Kate Mosse. More on these later in my monthly reviews.

I don’t have too much to add here, other than that Dark Century is now out on submission to editors!

I’ll write more about the submission process at some point, but before that, I’m going to do a slightly deeper dive into edits I alluded in the last edition...

MINUTES –
On Writing & Publishing

Brass tacks: this round of edits took far longer than anticipated. There’s a number of reasons for this, namely that they simply turned out to be more complicated than I gave them credit for. The thing about writing a novel is that an author is expected to carry an entire story – setting, characters, plot and dialogue – in their heads, and any changes (especially with complex stories like Dark Century) affect not just the page you’re writing, but other pages and chapters, too, which can make continuity a nightmare.

In order to demonstrate what I mean, here’s a brief rundown of just some of the changes I made in this latest edit of the manuscript. Of course, these changes will make little sense unless you’ve read an earlier draft of the book. I’ve included brief (and spoiler-free) snippets to try and contextualise my edits, below:

New Words

1700 words have been added, to be more specific. This may not seem like a lot if viewed as a new chapter or scene, but the additions are spread out throughout the entire novel: a sentence here, a paragraph there, and so on. I’m in the fortunate position of having a very lean word count in relation to the complexity of the story, so there’s room for me to add more when required. Like an equaliser in a sound mix, I’m aiming to tweak existing information to add more impact, whilst offering clarifications where required.

Splitting Chapters

From Chapter 3

The grey, four-passenger sedan roared through Nordbredden’s countryside at the mercy of Inspector Eskell’s aggressive driving; the car shuddering as she poorly navigated potholes and other debris. Twice, Eskell had almost collided with errant horse carts, and I’d resorted to clinging to the leather handrail until my knuckles were drained of colour.

I’ve bisected Chapter 4 – a police station interview – and moved the dialogue and exposition into the previous chapter by inserting a brand new scene (above), and transposing the original dialogue to a different character. I make great efforts to make sure the right information is imparted to a reader at the right point in the story. Now, Chapter 4 has a single focus, which in my opinion, now works much better for the overall pacing of the opening act.

Foreshadowing

From Chapter 5

Like so much of his early life, Kolding refused to divulge any details. He never once mentioned Narva after my secondment to him back in New Eden, much to the disappointment of my friends and family; nor was the commandant drawn to the topic of his personal relationship to [REDACTED]. News of Kolding’s heroics, therefore, were gleaned from the whitesheets or whispered rumours at the barracks.

In Chapter 5, I’ve now indirectly introduced the story’s villain much earlier into Act 1. In the previous draft, he didn’t appear in passing until Chapter 10, or in person until Chapter 19. From a setting perspective, this particular situation arises due to physical geography: it’s simply not possible to have the main character and the villain in the same room at this point in the story.

From a narrative perspective, however, it’s essential we get a sense of who the villain is, and their relationship with the protagonist so they don’t just magically appear out of nowhere later in the book. The solution to this particular suggestion was to write in how other people view these two important characters.

Packing More Punch

From Chapter 9

After an indeterminate pause, I heard my master orate the Benediction for the Honoured Dead from memory. What began as little more than an exhausted whisper quickly kindled into an impassioned recitation. In the lamp’s light, I thought I saw spittle ooze down his scarred and haggard chin.

I’ve extensively reworked Chapter 9, where my protagonists face their first major hurdle. My agent’s comments were to ‘lean into the horror’, and add emotional resonance.

Now, this chapter packs a lot more punch than it did in the previous draft; where one big mystery is solved, but glossed over very quickly to move the story on. It simply didn’t work from a pacing perspective, because I didn’t give the characters’ grim discovery time to breathe and allow the reader to empathise with them. This sense of pace and resonance is the difference between an emotional connection, where the reader bonds with the characters, as opposed to a dispassionate series of unfortunate events happening to them.

Unclogging Expository Traffic Jams

From Chapter 24

Else made to protest, but something in [REDACTED] tone brooked no argument. Without a word, she scooped up the plates and cutlery, and vanished through the sliding door. The remaining three men sat listening to the lake in frosty silence. No one touched their drinks.

‘What I found [REDACTED] can only be described as extraordinary,’ said Kolding, breaking the impasse.

There are two chapters in Act 2 which required yet another pass. They are dialogue heavy, a bit like the Council of Elrond in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring.

There’s a widely-accepted mantra that I often see bulldozed onto writers: ‘show, don’t tell’. I suspect this is a product of the public’s increasing consumption of popular streaming services. Most writing advice is highly contextual, and this one can probably be ignored if it doesn’t serve the needs of the story.

The telling is important, and it’s one of the great strengths of the novel as a medium for transmitting stories. What it lacks in prescriptive visual reference, it makes up for with introspection. Older published novels like le Carré’s back catalogue make my own efforts infantile by comparison, such is their word count and complexity.

This might be my seventh or eighth pass at re-writing or revising this stretch of the book, and my solution to solving this expository traffic jam is to snip and reorder information not just across two chapters, but three (the chapter preceding it): three chapters, three conversations, two locations in two points of time, to unravel a single plot thread. If it sounds like a nightmare, I assure you: it was to write it, but the pay-off is significant for the reader.

A Bigger Finish

From Chapter 36

What happened next was little more than a blur. A huge [REDACTED] erupted from the water. It flopped onto the concrete, screeching in pain. The commotion was all my master needed to lunge at the guard with all his strength to envelope the knife, plunging it with his [REDACTED].

... and finally capping off the edits with a heavily reworked the last chapter to raise the stakes in the finale. The accidental addition of a single word completely changed one of the Dark Century’s climactic moments, and I’m still simultaneously appalled and amused at the outcome. It remains to be seen if the change survives further edits.

Over the Line

Now, if this (very brief) overview of edits sounds laborious, then I have spared you from the thousands of smaller edits I’ve made throughout the manuscript; but it’s worth articulating the reality of edits in order to establish how difficult it actually is to write and publish a novel, because the process never ends with the first draft.

This draft, which took over a month working every evening and weekends, was simply to get me over the line for submission to publishers, so spare a thought for authors out there in the middle of their edits for upcoming books. A great deal of work goes into reworking or tweaking a story right up to the print run, and almost all of this collaborative process is unseen by readers.

Will there be a next draft of Dark Century? Of course. I have extensive notes and corrections to make, but in the meantime whilst I wait and see if anyone is interested in publishing it, I’ll be plotting the follow up...

VETTING –
The Month's Reviews

Book Review:
Strange Pictures by Uketsu
Pushkin Vertigo, 2025

Why hadn't she thought of it before? Perhaps she had been too caught up in the bizarre idea of Yuta scribbling out his own home.

Scribbling out a mistake... That was a real possibility.

Her eyes fell on her crayon box. What colour did children use when they tried to erase a drawing mistake? She didn't even have to think about it.

I picked up this weird mystery novel in Foyles and was immediately intrigued by the addition of drawings sprinkled throughout the text. It transpires the visual material is integral to solving the murder mystery penned by Japanese author Uketsu (雨穴), who themselves remained anonymous in the guise of an all encompassing black leotard and papier-mâché mask.

Writing about Strange Pictures is a difficult task, inasmuch as any mention of the characters will inevitably give away spoilers of the plot, but the book has some clever conceits that can only be fully appreciated with the aid of the visual material.

A fun, interesting read for anyone who likes a sprinkle of something extra with their usual diet of crime and horror.

Translated into English by Jim Rion.

Book Review:
The Deadly Percheron by John Franklin Bardin
Penguin Modern Classics – Crime & Espionage, 2024

Memories exist whole in the mind; to put them down in words demands sequence, a sense of time and space, of then and now. But when one remembers an event that belongs to the far past and relates it to another happening that belongs to yesterday, these memories exist together simultaneously - they are both, for a moment, now, not then.

One of the greatest highs as a reader is finding the exact book at the right time completely by chance, which is why I tend to ignore recommendations by algorithm. On this occasion, I had just finished pitching a follow up to Dark Century; a story involving impostors, unreliable narrators and a deep-rooted conspiracy, when I picked up this Penguin re-issue at random. I couldn’t believe I had picked up a book which promised a vaguely similar plot and themes to what I was proposing, but this story was written in 1946.

Naturally, I inhaled it in a day, and The Deadly Percheron was everything I hoped for.

Written in a spurt of creative output in the mid 40s which birthed three novels by crime writer John Franklin Bardin, this noir mystery is set in New York, opening with psychiatrist George Matthews in consultation with a new patient who is convinced he is going mad.

From there, events lurch into the increasingly weird and fantastical as Matthews is drawn into a devious conspiracy, trying to piece together missing periods of his life: beginning with why he isn’t Dr George Matthews – respected Manhattan psychiatrist – but John Brown, a disfigured vagrant forced to seek employment in a rundown cafe on Coney Island. I remember reading Hugo Wilcken’s The Reflection a few years ago which had a remarkably similar plot, and was unsurprised to note that Wilcken owes an enormous debt to Franklin, for good reason.

Whilst there are some dated attitudes in the story, Penguin have done a sterling job of resurrecting this lost American classic. If weird, disconcerting reads are your thing, then The Deadly Percheron comes highly recommended.

Event Review:
Kate Mosse: Unlocking the Secrets of the Labyrinth
Norwell Lapley Productions, BEAM Theatre, Hertford

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of her multi-million international bestselling novel Labyrinth, Kate Mosse will launch a one-woman theatre tour… Kate will share the secrets behind the writing, offer unique and personal insights into the real true history of the Cathars and lay bare the arcane mysteries that inspired this most timeless and beloved of stories.

A one-woman stage show is first for me in the realm of book events. I’m used to author panels at conventions, or interviews in a bookshop, so to see Kate Mosse go the extra mile with an actual show to talk about her phenomenal historical fiction book Labyrinth was going to be a draw.

Confession: I’ve actually only read the opening three chapters of the book as of writing. My plan to read Labyrinth was scuppered due to edits and beta-reading, but thankfully there were few, if any spoilers.

In this dazzling extravaganza, the audience learns of the historical context of Carcassonne and the wider Occitania region of what is now southern France; and the crusades which shaped its past; and crucially, the backdrop for Labyrinth, interspersed with personal anecdotes and inspiration behind the writing and ordering the sweeping narrative.

There are those who know their subject matter, and those who live and breathe it; and Mosse falls in the latter.

If you’re a fan of the books, the stage show is a no-brainer; especially as Mosse offers to sign your book after the show and ends. What’s not to like?

Kate Mosse: Unlocking the Secrets of the Labyrinth runs throughout the UK until April, 2025.

Play Review:
Dracula, adapted by Nick Lane
Blackeyed Theatre, BEAM Theatre, Hertford

There are such beings as vampires.
They are known everywhere where men have been.
They possess the strength of twenty living men.
They have control over the dead.
They are cunning and pitiless.
They cast no shadow or reflection.

Hot on the heels of Eggers’ remake of Nosferatu (reviewed here), the crew at Blackeyed Theatre have returned to Bram Stoker’s source material with an economical but effective and atmospheric dramatisation of Dracula by Nick Lane.

Six actors and one stage set carry the essence of the novel’s plot, divided into six acts: Harker’s journey to Transylvania; the Demeter’s last voyage; Lucy Westenra’s deteriorating health; Van Helsing’s investigation; Renfield’s incarceration; and finally, the return to Dracula’s castle.

Strong performances throughout by the ensemble cast who assume multiple roles (with a particularly fantastic rendition of Renfield by Marie Osman), along with several changes to modernise the original story; notably the count’s calculated rebuke of the British Empire’s atrocities to Harker as comprehension of his imprisonment dawns, and a refreshing take on Dracula’s legacy in the finale.

The current run of Dracula plays throughout the UK until May, 2025.

You can find the full archive of all my short reviews, here.

POSTINGS –
Elsewhere, On/Off-line

Much of this played out in court seven at the Old Bailey during a three-month trial of three of those involved, described dismissively by Roussev as “the minions”. The defendants were each charged with a single count of espionage, which they denied – saying they had been manipulated. But the most revealing details emerged in the extraordinary dialogue – across 78,747 Telegram messages – between the ringleader, Roussev, and his boss, Marsalek, that police had been fortunate to find. The key breakthrough, officers acknowledged, was finding the messages on Roussev’s phone: the IT specialist had forgotten to press delete.

– Dan Sabbagh, The Guardian, ‘The dumbest thing I’ve ever done’: spy trial’s tales of scheming, bluster and a love triangle

This is a true thing of wonder, a story concept so awe-inspiring that angelic choirs sing its praises in your head… It is new, shiny and still perfect. Abandon the thing you’re grappling it, the new idea whispers, and write me instead!

This situation even has a name: Shiny New Thing Syndrome. But all too often, this new thing is a mirage, just fool’s gold masquerading as the solution to your writing problems. You could give up on the story you’ve been labouring to fix. You could jump ship to the shiny new idea, the one you haven’t ruined yet with any actual writing.

– D.V Bishop, Shiny New Thing Syndrome

INTERCEPT –
Quote of the Month

Many thanks for reading. The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

Subscribe now

If you no longer wish to receive emails from me, there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email.

Lois: Everybody dies. Some of us peacefully and in our sleep, and some of us... horribly. And that's life.

I’ve come to a place with horror films where I’ve seen enough of them to make a judgement call early on if I’m going to enjoy it or not. Films like the 1998 Japanese film adaption of Ring spring to mind as the pinnacle of masterfully crafted terror. On the other end of the spectrum are generic jump-scare riddled movies found in an endless carousel of the streaming service of your choice. Then there’s a third category where everything is absurd and doesn’t take itself too seriously. The Monkey is one of these films, and the premise of an organ grinder monkey toy as the harbinger of doom sounds exactly like something Stephen King would write.

Theo James and Christian Convery do a fantastic double act of playing the old and young versions of identical twins Hal and Bill, with a hilariously unhinged cameo from Elijah Wood; but my favourite performance goes to Tess Degenstein as Barbara, a wonderfully chirpy and intense estate agent who can’t help but peek into locked wardrobes to her detriment.

Anyway, it turns out The Monkey is an adaption of a Stephen King short story.

This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #4.

The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

Helly R.: Well, boss. I guess this is the part where I should tell you to go to hell. Except you're already here.

I’ve been recommended Severance by just about everyone, and like so many things, it misses me by for years until I finally hop on the bandwagon. Apple TV has a great reputation for science fiction stories like Silo and Foundation, but Severance is just so weird, it becomes compulsory viewing.

The premise, the cast and the plot are (unsurprisingly, for Apple) pitch perfect; but for me, it’s the extraordinary production design that stands head and shoulders above anything else I’ve seen in a long time. The graphical user interfaces; the almost-identical corridors; the vending machines; user manuals – even the artwork wheeled around by Lumon’s Optics and Design department provide me with a profound sense of aesthetic joy.

The series cliffhanger is such an extraordinary climax to a brilliant series, it serves as a timely reminder that real story telling magic resides in our imaginations: the imagined answers to questions that we don’t really need the answers to, like, what does Macro Data Refinement actually do? Or is Severed Floor a modern allegory of purgatory in late-stage capitalism?

I don’t know, and don’t want to know. I hope Series 2 makes no attempt to explain it.

This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #4.

The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

You like looking back over the past?" Mitsuki asked.

"Hmm." Maeda paused for a moment to ponder. "I suppose I do," he answered with a nod.

"Does that mean you're not enjoying your current job?"

"No, it's not like that. The warehouse is comfortable enough. Szoo. You've got everything here. Makes you feel like you re standing guard over the whole world's treasures, you know?" He trailed off, pulling a thin smile. "It's just — how should I put this? — I like people. Mixing drinks in some little corner of Tokyo, you get to meet all sorts of folks. Szoo. Night after night, you get to talk to them. All strangers, mind you. It was fun, really … Yep, those were the good old days."

Mitsuki's next words poured out before she had a chance to think. "In that case, why don't you do it again?"

"What?"

"Bartending."

The prop procurer; the call centre worker; the maybe-detective; passengers linked by Matsui, an amiable taxi driver who plies his trade through the early hours in one of the world’s largest cities.

Goodnight Tokyo never outstays its welcome - a novella-sized palate cleanser where not a lot happens, and yet debut author Atsuhiro Yoshida manages to convey the depths of yearning and unrequited love in the implausibly intersecting lives of (extra)ordinary Tokyo residents.

As an English-language reader with a life-long interest in Japan and its people, Goodnight Tokyo is a fascinating peek. Highly recommended if you want more ‘slice of life’ short stories in your reading. If you’re like me, you’ll blast through it in one or two sittings.

Translated into English by Haydn Trowell.

This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #4.

The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

“Not many white folk come looking for the before-past,” Simon said as they trod across the crusty ground. “Not many whitefellas interested in the deep time.”

“The before-past? The deep time?”

“Whitefellas like you use the word dreamtime — but it’s a reductive term. Covers everything from the Altjira of the Arrende people to the Jukurrpa of the Warlpiri, as if they’re all the same thing. For me, I’m talking about the time before time. And the time after time. Thinking on a deep scale.”

Stanley frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Deep time is the time that is far longer than any single human life, far longer than any single human civilization,” Simon replied. He didn’t stop or turn. He spoke the words ahead of him, out to the horizon. “It’s impossible for you to understand. Your culture is based around shallow time. You see? Everything you do, everything you set out to achieve, it’s based around a single lifetime. A few years. Even those who plan for future generations only think about fifty, maybe a hundred, years into the future. That’s shallow time. Deep time humbles the human moment. What do the tens of thousands of years care for your plans?”

Dissolution marks Nicholas Binge’s second outing with Harper Voyager, after 2023’s Ascension was published to commercial acclaim (and a shout out from Stephen King). Shifting gears from the peaks of a mountain to the malleable depths of the mind, Binge has hit upon a winning formula combining unlikely protagonists with thought-bending concepts to create the sort of cerebral thrillers which effortlessly lend themselves to future screen adaptions.

Case in point, Dissolution’s hero is Maggie Webb, a pensioner with mobility issues tasked with... delving into her insensible husband’s memories.

What follows is a generational saga flitting between the 1950s and the present: from the draughty halls of an English boarding school to the scorching deserts of the Australian Outback; where mind, science and time converge towards a cosmic horror which would make HP Lovecraft proud.

Inevitable comparisons to Nolan, Blake Crouch or Michael Crichton will no doubt surface in time, but I’d place Dissolution up there with the works of Japanese horror maestro Koji Suzuki, who wrote Ring (yes, that Ring which spawned the mega horror franchise). In particular, Suzuki’s latest English translation, Edge, would make a great pairing if disconcerting, unstoppable dread is your thing.

Wonderful stuff.

This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #4.

The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

About Me

I'm a British 40-something speculative fiction writer, professional designer and creative director based near London. Over the last five years, I’ve worked on drafting my debut novel, Dark Century. The Dispatch is my monthly newsletter, published on the first Thursday of the month.

Subscribe now

Format

Topics are broken down into:

CABLE – News & Events;
MINUTES – On Writing & Publishing;
VETTING – The Month's Reviews;
POSTINGS – Elsewhere, On/Off-line;
INTERCEPT – Quote of the Month

CABLE –
News & Events

It’s been a hectic month, but one that’s been very rewarding. In short:

New Website

I’ve been consolidating and reorganising my author website, jordanacosta.co onto Substack. I don’t have the brainpower or inclination to maintain an online presence on multiple platforms because I’d just rather be writing books, but I’ll be investing more and more time on Substack.

Don’t worry, the Dispatch remains a monthly addition to your inbox published every first Thursday, but with a minor amendment. ‘What now?’ I hear you ask.

I’m making one small tweak to the format, namely linking – rather than embedding – longer pieces in the Dispatch from now on, in order to take advantage of Substack’s architecture.

My website now has some additional links on the navigation bar: Dark Century, Reviews and Commonplace; somewhere to put longer essays, unconstrained by email length, as well as being able to be amended/corrected/expanded. These long-form articles also need to be easily found in the months and years to come, rather than being buried in a past edition of the Dispatch.

For your convenience, short reviews will still be embedded first in the email, though I do urge you to have a look at my growing reviews archive when you have the opportunity.

Indentures

In other news, I acquired a genuine indenture dated from 1674 at an antiques fair in Hertfordshire.

I love the fact that UK has so much recorded history that you can randomly pick up. My plan is to scan it then try and decipher the thing in its entirety. Hopefully I’ll have a complete transcript to share with you in a future edition of the Dispatch.

Agents’ Hotlist

I’m very fortunate to have been included in the February 28th edition of The Bookseller, which is the UK’s trade magazine for publishing. More on this below.

MINUTES –
On Writing & Publishing

As of this edition of the Dispatch, the industry at large is gearing up for the 2025 London Book Fair, happening in the second week of March. The LBF is a big industry events where everyone from agents to commissioning editors and sales people get together to hash out deals for foreign territories and acquire new talent.

Probably.

It transpires my literary agent, John Baker, made Dark Century his pick for the Agents’ Hotlist for this edition of the Bookseller1.

It’s quite surreal seeing something you’ve spent so long on appear in a trade magazine. Who knows? The listing may generate a little interest in the book from editors.

It will come as no surprise, then, that I’m working through John’s editorial notes, as well as processing additional feedback from early readers. I’ll be no doubt delving deeper into this at a later date, but in short, their collective feedback has been invaluable – never trust an author who hasn’t solicited *any* feedback on their manuscript.

As of writing, the difference between draft #4 and #4.1 is big enough to be submitted as draft #5.

That’s right: I’m going out on editor submission with a fifth draft. At this point, the story is more or less locked in. It may yet change, but the overall plot has a definitive shape. These particular editorial notes are more about creating more significance to certain scenes or interactions, as well as clarifications on certain narrative threads because Dark Century has an unashamedly complex plot. There’s also some character bits I’m keen to refine. I’ll be the first to hold my hand up and concede that characterisation is my weakest areas; and one I hope to get right with enough time to revise the manuscript, taking on board feedback from early readers.

More to come.

VETTING –
The Month's Reviews

Between edits and beta reading2 for a friend, I’ve not managed to read as many books as I’d hoped, but I highly recommend the following:

Book Review:
Dissolution by Nicholas Binge
Harper Voyager, 2025

“Not many white folk come looking for the before-past,” Simon said as they trod across the crusty ground. “Not many whitefellas interested in the deep time.”

“The before-past? The deep time?”

“Whitefellas like you use the word dreamtime — but it’s a reductive term. Covers everything from the Altjira of the Arrende people to the Jukurrpa of the Warlpiri, as if they’re all the same thing. For me, I’m talking about the time before time. And the time after time. Thinking on a deep scale.”

Stanley frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Deep time is the time that is far longer than any single human life, far longer than any single human civilization,” Simon replied. He didn’t stop or turn. He spoke the words ahead of him, out to the horizon. “It’s impossible for you to understand. Your culture is based around shallow time. You see? Everything you do, everything you set out to achieve, it’s based around a single lifetime. A few years. Even those who plan for future generations only think about fifty, maybe a hundred, years into the future. That’s shallow time. Deep time humbles the human moment. What do the tens of thousands of years care for your plans?”

Dissolution marks Binge’s second outing with Harper Voyager, after 2023’s Ascension was published to commercial acclaim (and a shout out from Stephen King). Shifting gears from the peaks of a mountain to the malleable depths of the mind, Binge has hit upon a winning formula combining unlikely protagonists with thought-bending concepts to create the sort of cerebral thrillers which effortlessly lend themselves to future screen adaptions.

Case in point, Dissolution’s hero is Maggie Webb, a pensioner with mobility issues tasked with... delving into her insensible husband’s memories.

What follows is a generational saga flitting between the 1950s and the present: from the draughty halls of an English boarding school to the scorching deserts of the Australian Outback; where mind, science and time converge towards a cosmic horror which would make HP Lovecraft proud.

Inevitable comparisons to Nolan, Blake Crouch or Michael Crichton will no doubt surface in time, but I’d place Dissolution up there with the works of Japanese horror maestro Koji Suzuki, who wrote Ring (yes, that Ring which spawned the mega horror franchise). In particular, Suzuki’s latest English translation, Edge, would make a great pairing if disconcerting, unstoppable dread is your thing. Wonderful stuff.

Book Review:
Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida
Europa Editions, 2024

"You like looking back over the past?" Mitsuki asked.

"Hmm." Maeda paused for a moment to ponder. "I suppose I do," he answered with a nod.

"Does that mean you're not enjoying your current job?"

"No, it's not like that. The warehouse is comfortable enough. Szoo. You've got everything here. Makes you feel like you re standing guard over the whole world's treasures, you know?" He trailed off, pulling a thin smile. "It's just — how should I put this? — I like people. Mixing drinks in some little corner of Tokyo, you get to meet all sorts of folks. Szoo. Night after night, you get to talk to them. All strangers, mind you. It was fun, really … Yep, those were the good old days."

Mitsuki's next words poured out before she had a chance to think. "In that case, why don't you do it again?"

"What?"

"Bartending."

The prop procurer; the call centre worker; the maybe-detective; passengers linked by Matsui, an amiable taxi driver who plies his trade through the early hours in one of the world’s largest cities.

Goodnight Tokyo never outstays its welcome - a novella-sized palate cleanser where not a lot happens, and yet debut author Atsuhiro Yoshida manages to convey the depths of yearning and unrequited love in the implausibly intersecting lives of (extra)ordinary Tokyo residents.

As an English-language reader with a life-long interest in Japan and its people, Goodnight Tokyo is a fascinating peek. Highly recommended if you want more ‘slice of life’ short stories in your reading. If you’re like me, you’ll blast through it in one or two sittings.

Translated into English by Haydn Trowell.

Series Review:
Severance, Series 1, 2022 -
Director: Ben Stiller, Aoife McArdle et al.

Helly R.: Well, boss. I guess this is the part where I should tell you to go to hell. Except you're already here.

I’ve been recommended Severance by just about everyone, and like so many things, it misses me by for years until I finally hop on the bandwagon. Apple TV has a great reputation for science fiction stories like Silo and Foundation, but Severance is just so weird, it becomes compulsory viewing.

The premise, the cast and the plot are (unsurprisingly, for Apple) pitch perfect; but for me, it’s the extraordinary production design that stands head and shoulders above anything else I’ve seen in a long time. The graphical user interfaces; the almost-identical corridors; the vending machines; user manuals – even the artwork wheeled around by Lumon’s Optics and Design department provide me with a profound sense of aesthetic joy.

The series cliffhanger is such an extraordinary climax to a brilliant series, it serves as a timely reminder that real story telling magic resides in our imaginations: the imagined answers to questions that we don’t really need the answers to, like, what does Macro Data Refinement actually do? Or is Severed Floor a modern allegory of purgatory in late-stage capitalism?

I don’t know, and don’t want to know. I hope Series 2 makes no attempt to explain it.

Film Review:
The Monkey, 2025
Director: Osgood Perkins

Lois: Everybody dies. Some of us peacefully and in our sleep, and some of us... horribly. And that's life.

I’ve come to a place with horror films where I’ve seen enough of them to make a judgement call early on if I’m going to enjoy it or not. Films like the 1998 Japanese film adaption of Ring spring to mind as the pinnacle of masterfully crafted terror. On the other end of the spectrum are generic jump-scare riddled movies found in an endless carousel of the streaming service of your choice. Then there’s a third category where everything is absurd and doesn’t take itself too seriously. The Monkey is one of these films, and the premise of an organ grinder monkey toy as the harbinger of doom sounds exactly like something Stephen King would write.

Theo James and Christian Convery do a fantastic double act of playing the old and young versions of identical twins Hal and Bill, with a hilariously unhinged cameo from Elijah Wood; but my favourite performance goes to Tess Degenstein as Barbara, a wonderfully chirpy and intense estate agent who can’t help but peek into locked wardrobes to her detriment.

Anyway, it turns out The Monkey is an adaption of a Stephen King short story.

You can find the full archive of all my short reviews, here.

POSTINGS –
Elsewhere, On/Off-line

The irony is that the technology designed to give us endless access to information has simultaneously deprived us of the one thing we most need to truly engage with that information: time. And so, the solution is almost absurdly simple: slow down. To read with intention. To read not just to extract facts or glean insights but to engage deeply with the text, to allow it to affect us, to challenge us, and to push us into deeper thought. This is reading that demands patience, that resists the call of instant gratification. It is reading that invites us to immerse ourselves in the language of the text, not just to glance at it.

– Michael S. Rose, The Subversive Art of Slow Reading

My literary stock had risen significantly, but we still went into edit calls for Hot Wax braced to hear a lot of what we heard: Can it be more of a mystery? More romantic? Less icky, less edgy, less difficult? In so many words, can it be more like If We Were Villains? I kept saying no, and I kept hearing no. I was starting to get a little demoralized and starting to think I’d committed professional suicide when we finally had the call. The right call. The call that made me think, “This is the person I want talking about this book when I’m not in the room.” The man who’s now my editor at S&S understood instantly what the book was about, wanted to take it and make it sing and make it rock and make it scream, and didn’t see its deviation from my debut as a defect.

– M.L. Rio, Who’s Talking About You When You’re Not in the Room?

He’s incredibly well presented, he talks constantly with confidence, humour and tact. He’s researched, informed and subtle. In all honesty - if he wasn’t so good at his work I WOULD HATE HIM. I can’t be the only one, I’m quite sure he has a huge number of admirers, his clients fawn over him when they make appearances and he has even earned the honour of being the subject of online parody videos. He’s making an absolute mint - and frankly… good for him.

– Richard de Pesando, Bloomfield V Baumgartner

NB: Richard and I have been friends for a long time, and he’s an extraordinary designer who has designed some of the most iconic logos in British retailing. We had a little catch up a while ago and I was surprised to find out he watches the exact same painting restoration videos as I do. You have to check out Julian Baumgartner’s YouTube channel.

INTERCEPT –
Quote of the Month

Many thanks for reading. The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.

Subscribe now

If you no longer wish to receive emails from me, there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email.

We’ve all been there, trying to pick out what to read next from a dizzying array of books lined up on shelves or screens. With so much visual noise, the blurb1 – the back cover copy, rather than the nice comments from other authors – remains one of the most effective aids to making this decision, as it’s the first point of contact a reader has with a book beyond the cover. Its job is to get across a sense of genre and voice, to seize the reader’s attention in the hope of hooking them into buying the book.

I like reading blurbs as inspiration on how to write my own, but lately I’ve also come to appreciate its value as a means to explore ideas for future novels, before I’ve written a single line of prose. After all, if I’m going to commit months or years to turning an idea into a novel, then I’d better make sure I’m interested in the idea.

Coming up with an idea is the easy bit. Writing my own blurb – as a pitch – helps me give the idea shape, to clarify the story in my mind, and to pose questions like what’s it about? Who’s in it? Where is it? What happens? What feelings am I trying to evoke in a reader?

Answering these questions using a blurb is something I’ve been doing to generate the premise for my next novel. My goal is to write an exciting premise that gives me a sense of the story between 100-250 words.

Consider the following blurb for Stephen King’s Misery (1987):

Paul Sheldon used to write for a living. Now he's writing to stay alive.

Misery Chastain is dead. Paul Sheldon has just killed her - with relief, with joy. Misery made him rich; she was the heroine of a string of bestsellers. And now he wants to get on to some real writing.

That's when the car accident happens, and he wakes up splinted and in pain, in the remote mountain home of his rescuer, Annie Wilkes.

The good news is that Annie was a nurse and has pain-killing drugs. The bad news is that she has long been Paul's Number One Fan. And when she finds out what Paul has done to Misery, she doesn't like it. She doesn't like it at all… [123 words]

King’s delightfully unhinged story about fandom has all the ingredients of a commercial thriller/horror: the disgruntled protagonist, a remote setting and an unlikely villain in the form of a nurse. It straight away poses a series of intriguing questions: can Sheldon escape? Who is Misery? How far is help? The most intriguing line appears right at the end of the blurb, and imparts a sense of existential dread: when she finds out what Paul has done to Misery, she doesn't like it. She doesn't like it at all…

Here’s another:

Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has.

In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls. On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend, the Other. At other times he brings tributes of food to the Dead. But mostly, he is alone.

Messages begin to appear, scratched out in chalk on the pavements. There is someone new in the House. But who are they and what do they want? Are they a friend or do they bring destruction and madness as the Other claims?

Lost texts must be found; secrets must be uncovered. The world that Piranesi thought he knew is becoming strange and dangerous.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite [151 words]

The back cover for Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (reviewed here) is wonderfully constructed. As a reader, the first line alone asks of us three questions: Who is Piranesi? Where or what is the House? How long has he been in the House? In the next paragraph, we get a glimpse of his world (or rather, the House) as a sort of magical, colossal museum, followed by a hint that all is not well and a mystery is waiting to be unravelled.

All that in just over 150 words. We infer that Piranesi is a special, whimsical book; a story that is not just fantastical, but one endowed with a mythical flavour.

If I’d come up with this copy, you bet I’d want to write it.

Pitching Myself

For me, trying to preemptively write my own blurb is a great way of turning an idea or bullet point hastily typed on my phone into something more; not as an explanatory note accompanying a finished painting, but an exploratory sketch drawn at the beginning.

In other words, I’m effectively pitching2 myself a novel.

Of all the ideas I have for future novels, most are simply vignettes in my mind, or barely comprehensible notes: glimpses of locations, or snatches of dialogue and other interactions between as-yet unnamed characters. Writing the blurb first gives me a way to think about how to bring these ingredients together, but also – crucially – to test out the robustness of a story idea.

To my immense surprise, I recently found a note I wrote to myself in December 2019, which is the earliest pitch of the idea for novel #1:

Humanity teeters on precipice of extinction. The 21st century’s climate predictions have come to pass. Most of the Known World is now flooded, or turned to desert after the Melt. Only the polar latitudes now truly habitable, and wars of conquest are fought to control. In the arctic, Greenland remains as the last territory, where The Greater Kingdom of Danmark is beset by the NorAm Coalition and the People's Federation of China and Russia.

In a way, I wouldn’t even really call this a pitch, but rather some thoughts on a setting as the backdrop for a story. I do remember a tremendous feeling of possibility at the time, though, which inspired me to begin drawing a map, which helped me figure out the rest. The trick for figuring out the rest is to start asking questions: do I need to pivot to a different period or location? Would the idea be even better if I did X or Y? Can the characters change?

Do I need to develop a different story idea, instead?

What I’ve found is that if I can’t tweak my initial idea to satisfactorily answer the first three questions, then it may be that the answer to the last question is ‘yes’, and maybe I need to move on to a new story idea. Sometimes, though, an idea can dig its claws in, and it becomes difficult to let go. What I’m looking for is a pitch which can survive all of the restrictions, variations and changes I can throw at it, with the essence of the story idea remaining unchanged. If an idea can withstand the mental contortions I subject it to, it’s probably worth writing the pitch copy for it and seeing where it leads.

Case in point, below is the current blurb for Dark Century, the novel which that initial idea back in 2019 eventually turned into:

Something stalks the riverlands of New Eden.

In its wake, death and sickness follow, and the northern provinces writhe in the hysterical grip of witch fever.

Provost Martin Kolding — a ruthless servant of Denmark’s Interior Ministry — sets off to track down a missing associate and restore order before unrest erupts across the Kingdom.

Meanwhile Ulyana, a half-Russian survivor, is caught between the new empires of the post-collapse world. Abandoned by her people as a result of a genetic curse, she ekes out a miserable existence in the wasteland she once called home; making a Faustian pact to survive.

As Kolding searches for the source of the chaos in the north, he uncovers a darker secret which will not only bind the fates of Kolding and Ulyana together, but also threaten to shatter the tenuous peace between the superpowers of the Arctic Circle.

So much has been pulled apart and refined, but the fundamental pitch to myself hasn’t really changed in five years. The story is still set in the Arctic, and our characters are still from the Danish Kingdom and the People’s Federation. In other words, the blurb – as crude as I feel it is looking back – was robust enough to survive a draft, a rewrite of half of it, and a further rewrite of a third of that.

There’s also another good reason to write the blurb before you’ve started (in the knowledge it will change): you never know when you’ll be asked to talk about what you’re writing now, whether you’re an unpublished writer or you’re on your fourth book. Right now, I’m tweaking the third iteration of my blurb for novel #2. Like Dark Century, the fundamental story hasn’t changed, but the pitch copy has, in order to accommodate a new setting and new era.

Next time you’re stuck with developing your next story idea, why not grab your favourite books off the shelf and read their blurbs, and then try and come up with a pitch for your own story?

Let me know how you get on •

Many thanks for reading. Jordan Acosta is a British-Filipino speculative writer and creative director based near London.

Subscribe now

The Dispatch is his monthly roundup, published every first Thursday. Subscribe for news, short reviews and more at jordanacosta.co.

2

A pitch is distinct from a synopsis, as a synopsis must reveal the plot (the order of events which make up the story) from beginning to end; a task made improbable when I haven’t figured that bit out yet. Nor is it a log line, which is essentially a one sentence version of the story, e.g., ‘A young man is transported to the past, where he must reunite his parents before he and his future cease to exist.’ (Back to the Future, Bryn Donovan), or this classic listing: ‘Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.’ (The Wizard of Oz, TCM listing by Rick Polito, 1998). For more on writing a synopsis, I recommend Renee Fountain’s Mastering Your Synopsis: Grinding Your Story Into 800 Words or Less👇

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Mastering the Synopsis: Grinding Your Story into 800 Words or Less

LIVE - FREE MARCH WEBINAR w/Q&A…

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a year ago · 18 likes · 7 comments · Renee Fountain