Mission: Creep

I'm pivoting back to horror fiction. Here's why.

9 by Stephen King for his 75th birthday on September 21 (I don’t own 75 Stephen King books)

I had big plans for this space, but planning and actually doing are two different things. Ask anyone who’s tried to put together a piece of IKEA furniture. If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plannen.

Discontent Dispatch has been dormant for more than a year. Now I’m reviving it, but the mission has changed. Instead of the critical essays I originally imagined, I’m focusing on horror fiction. Here’s a little background on why (heads up: it’s about to get a little personal).

This summer, I was in a nostalgic mood. The extreme heat was getting to me—in North Texas, where I live, we had forty-seven 100-degree days—and I was finding a lot of comfort in throwback entertainment (thanks a lot, Stranger Things).

And you know something? It really took me back, man.

In high school, I was obsessed—obsessed—with Stephen King. I spent two years reading almost everything he’d written to that point. (Since then, he’s published about 25 books, maybe more.) He shaped my idea of what a writer was. I wanted to be him.

Under his influence, I wrote little horror stories of my own and sent them off to magazines. Though none were ever published, some were positively received (despite being shameless rip-offs). One story—a three-page chiller not-so-subtly inspired by The Dark Half—received a little praise from the then-editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I still remember the first line of that response, handwritten in pen on the forms they used to send out: “Fairly close, actually.”

Due to some combination of heat and nostalgia, I spent a lot of time this past summer dwelling on that period of my life. I kept thinking about that feedback: “Fairly close, actually.” If I was “fairly close” to writing a good horror story at 16, I thought, maybe I could bring something to the genre at 30. It was worth a try, at least.

So I gave it a shot. Thrillingly, the spark was still there—after years of stagnation where I wrote essentially nothing, I drafted two stories in a month and began work on a novel. My phone is full of ideas for future work. Best of all, I was working on fiction I was actually excited about for the first time in years.

I’m shopping those two stories around right now, and, in some cases, directing editors to this space. I’m not sure if it will lead anywhere. But, again, it’s worth a try.

Discontent Dispatch will remain my online writing home. Over the coming months, I’ll be figuring out what exactly that means.