A New Beginning.

This day marks a new future for humanity, or at least the share of humanity that likes my books.

Chronic pain is a strange thing. It’s often more of what you lose than what you feel that makes a different in your life.

Who am I?

I’m Matthew P. Schmidt, also known as M. P. Smythe. I write The City and the Dungeon, The World of Wishes, and under M. P. Smythe, The Heart of the Witch-Queen.

I also have fibromyalgia, or possibly long COVID. In March 2020, days before the lockdown started, I was hit with a sudden case of pneumonia that nearly killed me. And four years later, I still have never gotten better.

Years earlier I had often been able to write three hours a day. Now, on days when the weather changes, I can barely get out of bed, and sometimes don’t. While I struggled with this for a long time, first without a diagnosis and then with one, I ultimately accepted it. With chronic pain, there’s no other option.

Which brings me to this, my newest, and God willing, final platform.

Email marketing and other sacred cows.

There are ideas that float around the author world, in the behind-the-scenes shop talk that commercial and would-be commercial writers discuss without cease. Like all such ideas, some have merit and some are only rumors deified into unquestionable facts.

Verging towards the second category is the sacredest pillar of online marketing: the mailing list.

You need a mailing list, we are told. In fact, you need more than one. You need one for every pen name, and while you’re at it you should segment it into announcement-only, inorganic, organic, win-backs, never-purges, superfans and any other category that might help you market. Which of course you’ll set up your automations to actually do. And of course, you need to send a campaign every week, lest your readers forget about you.

Does this advice work? Yes, it does, or at least sometimes. If it never worked then no one would be talking about it. But what newer authors often don’t realize is that the authors who go full blast on mailing lists are not going full blast on TikTok, too, or whatever else is the latest and greatest thing.

But here’s an even greater truth: not everyone can do these things. Some people have kids. Some people have a full time job. And some people, of course, are disabled.

Or have chronic pain.

I wanted to be an email marketer. I wanted to be able to maintain two mailing lists, with all the segmentations, automations, indications, interactions and ultimately conversions that human perspiration can buy. It’s just not possible for me, who can barely work at all, to do all these things and also run the businesses I run and write and and and and…

And…

I’ve also started, to my recollection, at least three or four different blogs. I do enjoy blogging, but it’s another thing to juggle, even when (on occasion) it pays.

If I were to choose one, I would definitely pick blogging over email marketing. But blogs are barely around any more and mailing lists are the way to go. Or allegedly, since every new technology drags out the gurus and salesmen ready to sell you on this new method of selling.

Now we have Substack. But there is something to be said for a new technology if it lets you do the things you need to do, in a way you can do it.

For once, I have a way to write a blog, and have a newsletter at the same time. Of course creating two lists would be too difficult, but honestly, who cares? If you enjoy Matthew P. Schmidt’s books you’ll probably enjoy M. P. Smythe, and vice versa.

This is not about doing things optimally, or the way the gurus and salesmen say is optimal. This is about doing things that I can do, rather than feel guilty and overworked trying to do something that’s beyond my physical health.

“Hey, Matthew, that’s great and all, but what about your books? You’ve been silent for months!”

I’m glad you asked.

I had intended to finish two more C&D books in 2022, and said so publicly. In reality, I got neither finished.

Part of this was spectacularly overestimating my available time when I was also working on another series, and managing an incredibly rough time emotionally. In 2022, I went through three intense romantic relationships, all of which ended in painful breakups. Having overestimated my time, I put off C&D:E for many months.

And what happened when I started work on C&D:E? Well, I tried, tried, and tried again to start it, never succeeding. Unfortunately, the culture war rift it stepped on made it either unfun or untrue, or sometimes both. In the end, I realized that it was stopping me from progressing at all, so for the moment, it’s shelved.

I may try again in the future, if I can make it fun and true. But what you all want is C&D3.

And I’m working on it! I sorted out the plot issues that bedeviled it for years, and now it’s coming along. I intend (cue LOLs) to get the draft finished this year. I don’t know if I can get the book out, because that depends on the publisher, but dang it, I know you’re all waiting!

So how about a taste? C&D3 is titled (not finalized) The Deepest Core of the Dungeon: And What They Found There. It will not be the last book in the universe (especially not if I get back to C&D:E), but it will be the conclusion of Alex’s and his party’s characters arcs, so consider it a conclusion to the series.

How about M. P. Symthe?

I will offer a bit of a confession, another reason why the C&D books were delayed.

Originally, The Heart of the Witch-Queen was a short story, started all the way back in 2017. I ended up shelving it (which I was doing quite frequently to new projects.) Eventually, I decided to try again, making it a novella, only to shelve it again.

On the offhand remark of my friend and fellow author S. R. Crickard, who had asked when our critique group would see something new from me, I decided to bring it out of the drawer in 2021 and start posting chapters.

And they loved it! I have never seen alpha readers so enthusiastic. Unfortunately, there was one problem: I didn’t actually know how to write a romance novel. And so, week after week, I would blunder through the book, then called My Wife, the Witch-Queen and watch as my friends ineffectually tried to bash romance into my head.

Halfway through the “novella”, I discovered I had barely reached the end of the first act when I was already tens of thousands of words in. Oh no! So much for getting it done as a short side project. I pushed onward in 2022, hoping to finish it that year.

I had finally gotten all the way to Chapter 15 when the poor, beleaguered first draft met its end. I realized that I had misstructured the story, and I actually needed to start slower. (For those who have read the final version of My Girlfriend, the Witch-Queen, its entire plot had originally fit in Chapters 1-3 of the doomed first draft!)

So I started over, but meanwhile, I was already working on other books in the series: The Prototype Diagram, a prequel, and The Witch-Queen’s War, the story of Lynn’s rise to power. Unfortunately, because no one book was nailed down, they all influenced each other and needed rewrites as others was written. (For the record, don’t do this.)

Off I went again! As it became clear I would not finish any major project in 2022, I ended up turning a short story into a full novella (where, thankfully, it stayed.) That was The Last Tribune.

At the end of 2022, though, I had finally finished My Girlfriend, the Witch-Queen AND The Prototype Diagram AND had almost finished The Witch-Queen’s War. Unfortunately, WQW (as I’ll now call it) had its own doomed drafts. Both the first and the second hadn’t lived up to the coolness factor promised by a book about world conquest.

Come early 2023 and I was burned out. If I had WQ1 lying on my desk any longer I’d go insane, so I pushed to get it out… during tax season, the busiest part of the year for my day job. I had unwisely given myself only two months to get the book done, then snagged a BookBub deal so I couldn’t move the launch date. Rebecca W. Martin, my editor and also fellow author, and I pushed at full blast to finish it, and I also had to finished Prototype. It was nuts, and I definitely did not have time to work on anything else.

But now WQ1 is out. While it was not a flop, it was also not quite a success, either, and this was so demoralizing that I fell into a slump for a good few months. I’m just starting to get out of it now.

I had attempted WQW in the meantime, but I concluded that people would want WQ2 more, and I didn’t want to slow down on releases. I believe the greatest mistake in my authorial career was not following up on C&D1 immediately, so I don’t want to make that mistake again with a new series.

So where does that leave us? Everything is paused, Witch-Queen-wise, except Witch-Queen 2, My Fiancee, the Witch-Queen.

Other Projects

This meme sums up basically all of what happened, in terms of other projects.

I started way too many WIPs, many of which I mentioned, and then stopped mentioning as I abandoned them. The unfortunate consequence of that is the time I spent writing them is “wasted”, because I never finished them.

What about other series? WoW2 is still some time off, because I want to get C&D3 and possibly C&D:E done first. I haven’t forgotten, it’s just that other projects took priority.

As for the Refugeverse, my website says that I decided to reboot it. Well, I tried. The problem is, while C&D:E accidentally steps on a culture war faultline, my reboot attempt, every time I wrote it, outright stomped on an even larger one. And no matter how I wrote it, or what I tried, ultimately it ended up the same way.

Meanwhile, I thought about the main Refugeverse series, the one that I had originally gotten seriously into writing to write, and concluded that rebooting the series would require significantly rewriting the very feel of the story.

So… why do that? Why not just accept Prince Anak, with the things I wince about, and just keep going forwards?

I’m still not sure about it. But it’s a moot point, since y’all want either C&D3 or WQ2, so why mess with it? It’s not forgotten, but it’s not now, either.

Miscellany

I’m going to shoot for a by-weekly newsletter, but who knows if I can manage that. In any case, this is going to be a bit eclectic, with reviews of books, anime, even video games mixed with essays about whatever. This will not be political, and I may or may not be writing about crypto. Other than that, who knows?

Why “the Smithy of Dreams”? In fact, why even “Smithgift?” My last name means “Smith” (in German) and my first means “Gift of God” in Hebrew, so one day in the past I decided to merge the two to become my new screen name. As for this Substack, vivid dreams inform much of my story-telling, but as I’ve come to realize, it’s one thing to have a raw dream and another to have the finished product. This will, I hope, be about the process.

See you in the future!