Meet Your New Favorite Author & A New Year's Resolution

12/29/2024 10:57 AM CST

Dear Reader,

I’m finally going to do what I should have done in the first place.

I never introduced myself. Here I am blabbing in your ear about all sorts of stuff, and I haven’t even taken the time to tell you about myself and what I do.

I know you’re smart, and you probably have everything pieced together via context already, but I feel I would do you a disservice if I did not confirm the conclusions you have reached through your vigorous detective work.

So, allow me to explain.

My name is Matthew Jon Smith, and as we approach New Year’s Eve of ’24, I am currently 41, but I tell everyone 42 because my birthday is in January. I’m attempting to get your attention with this here blog because I write horror fiction. I might even presume to call myself an author. I have one published story in a horror anthology, so gall dang it, I am an author. A horror author, to be specific.

I know having one published story, a measly 2,500 words, equates to the white belt in the dojo of authorship and does not a legendary writer make. But here is the thing. I have been training on my own. I have done the equivalent of 100 literary push-ups a day for more than two years now.

True, I do not have much work published, but I have been writing. I want to tell you about the projects I have in the works.

 

Note: All page counts are in reference to a Word doc with 12 pt font, double spaced.

  

Tales from Greymoor: SPECIAL DELIVERY (This will be the longest explanation. I swear the rest are just blurbs.)

180K words (approx. 716 pages) – First Draft Completed

I don’t know how to explain what happened here, but I sat down to write a story about a little girl, Becky Baker, who is scared of the homeless man living behind the abandoned restaurant in her town.

My very first attempt at writing horror for real.

Before I could finish Becky’s story, I had two of the most visceral nightmares ever. Those then had to be processed as short stories too. When I finally finished the first draft of “Little Becky Baker,” it stood at a whopping 21k words. The original story would change perspectives in different sections and featured 4 different main characters, all centering around Becky or their interactions with her.

By the time I finished, “Little Becky Baker,” I knew two things.

1. I was writing a short story collection, but not a normal short story collection; I was writing a Pulp Fiction-style novel through these stories. A much bigger narrative started to emerge. These stories were interconnected.
2. I had devised the first two narrative devices that were going to thread these stories together. First, it was the delivery man and his packages. Second, it was the cursed town of Greymoor.

Then I went to work turning those awful dreams I mentioned into a story, which became “Killer Mike and the Blood Slugs” at 23K words. The story came in four parts, each cataloging a different murder in the career of Killer Mike.

I had set out to write two short stories but had unwittingly written two novellas instead. I knew nothing about word counts at the time. I didn’t know the average commercial novel sits between 60k and 90k words. All I knew was my favorite authors had short story collections. If Stephen King and Chuck Palahniuk could do it, then why couldn’t I?

When “Killer Mike and the Blood Slugs” was finished, the characters in the two stories just would not shut up, and they kept telling me more about their lives and the way they were all connected to horrible things. New characters kept slipping themselves in, and I wouldn’t know why at first, but as the characters BEGGED me to talk to them, the reasons became clear, and those reasons were always horrifying.

I fell in love with Greymoor, the characters, the mystery, and the absolute bleakness of it all. People who knew about my writing kept asking me, “How will you know when it's done?” and I could only reply, “When all the puzzle pieces fall in place and all the characters are satisfied.”

By the time I finished writing the first draft of SPECIAL DELIVERY, the whole Tales from Greymoor thing had emerged, and I knew now, already a tome, SPECIAL DELIVERY came to me as the first part of a trilogy. The Tales from Greymoor trilogy.

So, now you have it. Eventually you are going to get a trilogy of what I suspect will be BIG novels, all of which will be collections of interconnected short stories exploring the history (spanning generations) and origins of the cursed rot possessing the doomed town of Greymoor. Oh, and they are fairy tales. Trust me.

 

The Hunt at [REDACTED]

15K words (approx. 70 pages) – First Draft still in progress.

I had the idea for this story nearly 20 years ago, and I never forgot it. I started writing this with the first draft of SPECIAL DELIVERY still warm. Originally, just called The Hunt at that time, then briefly called Predatory: The Hunt, I finally realized the correct name. This one reads less horror and more thriller, but I will make sure to get your heart racing before it’s over.

A simple premise: Four characters converge in the same woods: a hunter, a mountain lion, a little girl, and a kidnapper. That is all I am going to give you for now.

The first 15k words shot from me like lightning. I think I wrote what I have in a week. But then I hit my first bout of writer’s block. I’ve put this project down for a while, but now I am pretty sure I know exactly what to do with the story, and I will get to it as soon as I can. But while dealing with writer’s block, I started writing my memoir instead.

 

My memoir about Homelessness, Drugs, and Psychosis

118K words (approx. 413 pages) – First Draft still in progress.

Exactly what it sounds like. I started writing my life story. The working title is Maximum Black, and I am married to that for now. I got into this project with the intention of writing something that fell into the 60k–90k word limit agents want when it comes to new writers. I saw that many more agents were accepting queries for memoirs than there were for horror stories, so I dove in and had a really weird and cathartic experience writing a bunch of my crazy shit down.

Another one that got away from me. I stopped writing it for now for two reasons. The book wants to be as big as it wants to be, and it wants to be big. Two, I learned memoirs are a hard sell. I was still in the stage where I thought a polished first draft would be worthy of querying agents, and I am glad I stopped myself before I sent it out unfinished.

The stories in here are fucking crazy, and so am I. You’ll see. I am going to come back to this when the time is right.

 

The Haunting of [REDACTED]

93K words (approx. 369 pages) – First Draft Complete

Again, I set out with that 60K-90K sweet spot I have heard about in mind. I said, “What is the most generic thing I can do?” So, I put Silent Hill 2, The Shining, and Evil Dead in a blender. Then I poured the resulting batter into a cake tin shaped like every supernatural murder mystery that takes place at a cabin on a lake that you have ever read.

I was just trying to see if I could write a normal-ish novel in the traditional form, but during the process, I fell in love with the story, and I ended up with a manuscript about becoming obsessed with stories. By the time I was a quarter of the way into it, the story really opened up to me and took me places I was not expecting. I am surprised how much I like it.

 

The Shadows of [REDACTED]

39K words (approx. 123 pages) – First Draft still in progress.

Imagine a coming-of-age murder mystery where we know the identity of the killer from the first page, the mystery being who they are going to kill, but the real horror emerges as we learn why they killed and how they did it.

This one came to me while walking in my neighborhood. I was joking with myself about how good of a writer I was and how I could write a good story about literally anything. I passed a flattened beer can on the side of the road, and I said, “Take that beer can for example,” and within seconds the rough premise and plot of this story came to me. Like a flash of lightning. Even as I’ve been writing it, I have not deviated from the ideas that came to me in those first few minutes of seeing that beer can.

I only stopped writing this one because I wanted to change gears and focus on short stories and getting a few of those published. A writer needs credits, you know?

 

SHORT STORIES

I started writing short stories sometime in late October of this year. I have 10 short stories in a folder now; most have a completed first draft, some have a second, and one of them is published.

  

That does it, folks. That is a look at all the irons I currently have in the fire. I only counted projects that I have actual prose written for; if I had included the projects that I have plotted, planned, or outlined, we would have been here all day.

So here is my New Year’s Resolution to you, Dear Reader: In the year 2025, I am going to take some massive steps toward getting more work published. First, I must do some second drafts. I am leaning toward SPECIAL DELIVERY or The Haunting of [REDACTED]. I’m thinking of self-publishing SPECIAL DELIVERY in a really cool, non-traditional way. In the meantime, I will get more shorts out there in the world so that you all can enjoy them.

This blog is too long. I’m going to take a nap now.