SEPTEMBER 2025
Those nights are getting dark fast huh. What’s been going on I hear you ask… quietly. Has he kept up with writing 3000 words a day?
Yeah - more or less, I think I did. The one thing I forgot to introduce into the equation is that whatever your plans are, life will always find a way to stick a stone in your shoe. My beloved one, Hector, died on September 1st and I got torn apart like a man has never been torn apart before - and I only mention it here because for some reason, I can’t write about it. I guess I might at some point, but now is definitely not the time.
Anyway, Teeth of the Hydra (Volume 2 - September 2025) is out on the kindle racks and I’m pretty happy with how the first one filtered out. I wasn’t sure if it would have any traction out there but it turns out it’s got solid building blocks. Having said that, it wouldn’t have mattered if it sold none. A commitment is a commitment. If you’re gonna go for it - I hope you enjoy it. Meanwhile, this one was a lot of fun to put together. I think I’m finding a groove now…
What else have you got Smith?
A couple of years back (maybe more), I had an idea for a book that was the dumbest idea in the whole world and I couldn’t get my head around what I was actually trying to do. It ended up consisting of many notebooks and back of envelope fragments but with this new ‘approach’ in my sails, I collected it together, spread it out in front of me, got to work and well… eventually finished it. It’s called The Electric Dharma. It concerns four imaginary beatnik writers from the 1950s (who are loosely based on four actual beat writers if you know your stuff) and what happens to them when TV shows from the 60s, 70s and 00s start to leak backwards into their world. I dipped in and out of a lot of Beatnik classics to dig in and emulate the style (not sure if I pulled that off), and it contains nothing but unhinged letter after unhinged letter between each of them as they get deeper and deeper into what The Electric Dharma has to offer.
I wanted to mess with my own style just because I could but there ain’t gonna be no sequel that’s for sure - it sure as hell didn’t fly from the end of my pen. It’s in the Bad Hare store for ordering if you’re in the market and you can also find it in the amazon store right here, for your kindle or, for the first time, I’ve also let amazon do some of the heavy lifting and let them print paperbacks to order. I’ve checked them out and aside from a little colour difference in the cover reproduction, they’re not far of the original mark. I’m quietly impressed actually. The sole reason for this is to kill off the hefty mailing charges internationally as they print them in the country of origin. It almost sounds like I know what I’m doing.
I’m going to do more projects like this and I have a good one lurking in the background that’s even more of a dumb idea. It’s called The Mask of El Vidente and has been lying around for even longer than Electric Dharma (by quite some measure!) but it’s been much harder to say what I wanted to. I’m currently on proof four of this one because, damn, it’s hard reading your own work and picking holes in it, but it will come… sometime. Here’s a prototype cover:
•••
That’s all I got - which is a fair ruck.
The end of October will see Teeth of the Hydra Volume 3 released for the kindle along with the collected paperback version of Volumes 1-3 and then my big goal for the remainder of the year is to publish Motorway and the Moonlight in December. I guess I might finally get my head around El Vidente as well but not if it’s going to get in the way of Motorway.
Be cool to each other…
S
AUGUST 2025
It all begins with an idea.
Hello Friends,
The Summer is nearly over, and that’s fine with Hector and me. Folk who don’t belong in the park and over the hills are a royal grind. The holidays bring out all kinds of people with dogs that aren’t friendly. No idea what they do for the other 46 weeks of the year… sit on the sofa and watch Eastenders together most likely.
While you haven’t been pining for news from me about anything at all, it is my solemn duty to report that I have been busy, busy, busy.
The first thing out of the blocks is a decision I made sometime around mid-July. I was sitting around watching TV myself and I figured that life was too short to watch any more re-runs of Supernatural and I’d be better off committing to doing something constructive even if it was the wrong thing. So I leashed up the hound, headed for the woods and came back having decided the best thing to do would be to write 3000 words a day for the rest of my life. Yeah, it sounded like a lot to me too, but if you can watch three hours of TV a day, you can also write 3000 words - one has to be substituted with the other, obviously.
So there it was on the table right in front of me. I spent a week writing a whole bunch of nothing to see how long it would take and whether my brain could actually handle such a task. Turns out it could but it also needed a little direction. So:
Idea #1. Write 1000 words a day like a blog but instead of posting it online, make a project out of it. That project is called Teeth of the Hyrda and it will come out (more or less) on the last day of each month, The first one at the end of August funnily enough, and you can grab it right now. It’s a kindle only publication and it’s as cheap as Amazon will allow me to make it. You can find it right here.
But that’s not the end of the story. I like having books in my store, it makes me look busy, so every three months (that makes it quarterly if my maths is working), they’ll be collected together and made available as a paperback copy… along with some extras. That means each kindle book is about 30,000 words and each paperback will close in on around 100,000 words. I hope I can keep it up or I’ll look like a fool.
That left me with 2000 words (ish) to get on with some other projects. My first port of call was to get an old project completed and off the damn desk…
Idea #2. About ten years ago (maybe longer) I started writing a book called Raised on Radio. It was a simple book about music and how we interact with it but as I spread it out in front of me and hacked away at rewriting it (as I have occasionally over the years), it became about something else. The title didn’t fit the book any more.
I’m not the precious kind, so I threw the title away and retitled it When The Music’s Over. Happy to report, it’s also finished and available in the store right now. You can also find it for the kindle on amazon if that’s how you roll, but the paperback has a few bonus chapters in it. Just saying.
No idea how many words I used up getting it finished but it’s been haunting me for so long, I was beginning to wonder if it would ever reach the end. I think it clocks in at 334 pages which makes it the longest book I’ve ever written, which is hardly a surprise really when you’ve been thinking about something for about a decade.
There’s not a million copies here but I do have ‘enough’ - or what I think is enough, so if you’d like a copy and I happen to run out due to a rush I wasn’t expecting, I’ll let you know - new copies take about a week from ordering to get back to me because of the way I print them. Nobody wants 10,000 books sitting in the local Lock n Store gathering mould, so I keep stocks to a best estimate and hope everybody understands if they have to wait a few extra days, It’s a much better way to work. It’s not like I’m selling antibiotics or copies of the TV guide a few days before Christmas.
What next? Along with the September’s edition of Hydra, I happened upon another project I had put to one side. This one is called The Electric Dharma and it’s totally different for me. It’s more or less finished now but I need to step away and read it like a reader for the first time, so I’ll absolutely find something to tweak in it. I’m aiming for the end of September to release that and yeah, I’ll be feeling pretty pleased with myself that after not releasing anything for far too long, that will be two books in a year.
What brought all this about? I read a blog post by Dean Wesley Smith that I’ve read before many times but didn’t think I was capable of. Let me tell you about it.
He calls this style of writing ‘Pulp Speed’. When you commit to writing 3000 words a day, that’s 84,000 words a month - in other words, it’s a lot of work under your belt and amounts to one million and eight thousand words a year. This is known as Pulp Speed One and that’s a fair whack of books if you can keep your brain working on all four cylinders every single day… to which I said, it’s not like I’m doing a whole lot else, so let’s get it on.
His scale goes all the way up to Pulp Speed Six which amounts to 5,500 words a day (2 million words a year). Easy tiger! I need to ease myself into that part of the commitment but I think I’d like to aim for it one day. Not this year that’s for sure, but one day.
That’s all I’ve got! I have official labelled myself a pulp writer and I will wear th badge with pride. Hope you find something you like and feel free to ping this on to a friend if you think they might be into any of this. God knows, I’m staking the rest of my life on this and dog food ain’t free.
Be cool to each other!
Oh… before I go, part of the deal I made with myself was to never use social media for promotion. The less interaction I have with the internet and the more I have with the real world, the better. So I’m flooding the world with double sided flyers for my projects for the rest of the year:
