About Me

Format

Cable – News & Events;
Minutes – On Writing & Publishing;
Vetting – The Month's Reviews;
Intercept – Quote of the Month

Cable – News & Events

New Website

Yeah, I left Substack.

If you’re reading this, it means this edition of the Dispatch is in your inbox from my new newsletter platform provided by my email provider, Hey! There’s a few reasons for this, but one of them is that I’ve never felt comfortable using social media, and constantly reevaluating my online presence. Substack is no exception, and I’ve migrated all my previous posts and essays to the microblogging feature provided by Hey! because I want fewer features. You can still read all previous editions and essays via the central index on my new biography page.

New Literary Agency

Speaking of new, my literary agent, John Baker, has moved to a new agency (Peters Fraser + Dunlop), which by extension means I have, too.

New Projects

It’s been a busy year with writing projects (more below), but I’m penning this newsletter from Glasgow Airport after an exhausting but very rewarding FantasyCon 2026 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. As my friend and agent sibling Dan Walsh pointed out, ‘you might be the only person I’ve ever met whose flown from London to Glasgow via Hong Kong’.

Hong Kong International Airport: still one of the world's best.

Minutes – On Writing & Publishing

Illustration Jordan Acosta 

A full cast horror audio drama inspired by Robert W. Chambers’ cult weird fiction collection, The King in Yellow.

Desperate to get back on the bestseller list, Dr. Molly Bedrook sifts through histories of banned literature for a topic worthy of her next book. She finds references to The King in Yellow, a stage-play so widely condemned that even she can’t get her hands on a copy. With the help of her PhD students Zee and Carl, she uncovers the unsettling stories surrounding it: stories littered with asylums, conspiracies, and untimely ends.

As they dig deeper into the lives — and bizarre deaths — of the those affected by the play, they start down a dangerous, reality-bending road. But despite the many cautionary tales she’s uncovered, Molly knows her writing career can’t survive another commercial flop.

And there’s one surefire path to success: locate a surviving copy of The King in Yellow.

‘What happened there?’ I hear you ask?

To summarise, my now producer Chris Gregory of Alternative Stories read the story and suggested rewriting it as an audio drama, rather than a straight audio narration. I’ve spent the last year writing and rewriting not one, but three audio drama stories and a framing narrative; complete with a full voice cast and original music. More on this in the coming months, because we have big plans for The Pallid Mask.

In the meantime, head over to thepallidmask.online to listen to a trailer. Also, if you search ‘The Pallid Mask’ on your podcast platform of choice, you can also hear to a four-minute preview of the upcoming season which premieres this Halloween.

I also co-founded a small publishing press. I forgot to mention that, didn’t I?


Hawberk Press

Logo Richard De Pesando

When word amongst my writer friends got out I’d penned a King in Yellow inspired story, I received a couple more offers for them to write a story. Obviously I said yes and added something along the lines of ‘it should be published as an anthology’.

Enter Michael.

Michael and I have been friends for well over a decade and talking about books and the industry for nearly as long. He’s also a brilliant reviewer and editor and was looking to do something a little different; and with that, Hawberk Press has been evolving over the last year from a series of long conversations about what we could actually do.

Here we are at our fortieth birthdays catching Bruce Springsteen in Oslo!

Hawberk Press is an independent publisher of genre-defying speculative fiction. Our mission is to delight adventurous readers with bold, unconventional stories, not constrained by genres or trends.

Vetting – The Month's Reviews

The ghost cat turned his gaze on the blocked alley, swiveled to look at the advancing enforcers, then back at Mercy. Still in his demon form, he licked her bruised forehead with an ephemeral tongue, gentle as a kitten. Then he turned and fled through a crack in the barricade, oozing his spirit self away to safety.

Mercy was truly alone.

"You selfish feline bastard," she said, incredulous, and began to laugh.

From an unusual twist on the vampire trope in her debut, The Bookeaters, Dean returns with an equally mind-bending excursion into folklore; this time, the ghosts of Hong Kong inhabiting the infamous Kowloon Walled City (which was razed the year before I moved to that very neighbourhood in the mid-nineties).

Her novel is very much a historical narrative as well as an emotional one; seamlessly weaving two interconnected stories of the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong during World War II, and the post-war economic boom of the 1970s; the generation of my own grandparents’ life in Hong Kong. The Girl with a Thousand Faces is a slippery book; full of twists and turns and a bold literary choice, whilst unexpected, was not unwelcome.

The first month was a gauntlet, designed to break them. Three of the fifteen trainees were winnowed out, precisely as intended. Each time, when they came back cold and wet and hungry, one of the rooms was simply vacated, door wedged, sheets stripped, locker hanging open and empty. No explanation was offered or asked for.

David Goodman returns after picking up a string of literary awards for his debut, A Reluctant Spy (reviewed in Edition #1), with a very well-received follow-up. Solitary Agents takes us across the breadth of the United Kingdom as the reader follows several POV characters playing the Intelligence Services’ version of Channel 4’s Hunted. Except the stakes are much higher when it transpires that a friendly exercise is compromised by a real murder. Cue a Bourne-style action adventure culminating one of the best locations since 1987's The Living Daylights.

Goodman has always been a confident writer, but I dare say Solitary Agents is more accomplished than his debut; establishing what I hope to be a long-running series that will appeal to fans of the modern spy thriller genre.

Hard Boiled 辣手神探
Director: John Woo 吳宇森, 1992

Alan: When I'm a Triad, the cops want to kill me and when I'm a cop, everyone wants to kill me! I'm a scared man.

Intercept – Quote of the Month

While the below is true, the fastest tell is actually that no publisher is going to reach out to you to ask about your work. Ever. They just aren't. 

KJ Charles, on the proliferation of AI-written emails scamming aspiring authors in 2026.

Many thanks for reading. The Acosta Dispatch is an occasional roundup by me, Jordan Acosta; a British speculative fiction writer. News, short reviews and more, published erratically. 

You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here. You can unsubscribe at any time, and I won't share your email address with anyone.

This edition was originally published October 14, 2026.