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:
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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
