RED LIGHT BYTES: 4-9-2025
Introducing A Refreshed Format With A Couple of Items...
Greetings again, hellions! As promised, here we are on Wednesday with the first in our weekly newsletters going forward. After trying to “spread the wealth” last year with 3 posts/week, I’ve decided to settle on just doing one newsletter and one story each week. Part of it is because of changes to my schedule and workload elsewhere explained in a Monday email to our subscribers. The other is staving off the issue of burnout I’ve struggled with in building up this series.
I’m at a point where I’m comfortable “letting go” of 365 Infantry. Not in the sense I would just drop it on a whim to chase some shiny new toy, but that I’m not putting all my eggs into this project’s basket. I love it dearly, I love the purpose it gave me at a uniquely infuriating time in my life, but I’m comfortable letting it ride out on its own without me jamming it into everything I do. There will be cross-promotion, of course, but I will be keeping 365 separate from certain projects, and vice versa. I’m a creative of many talents and many interests, and I can’t think of a better time than my 20s to pursue all-and-sundry until one fully takes off. Maybe my revived YouTube channel, maybe my films, my other writings. Hell, maybe 365 finally explodes!
Point is, I’m both confident and at peace with this project’s place in my life and I am plenty comfortable letting it grow on its own alongside my other pursuits.
This new Red Light Byte format (complete with a smoking-new thumbnail) will mainly focus on news regarding series developments, my work on other writing projects, cross-promoting the work of peers in this wing of the indie world, and the occasional op-ed focusing on something related to the series. This week, we’re taking things easy and the blurbs will be brief.
As that button at the top of the page suggests, I managed to get the preview page up and running over the last 48 hours! Coming soon to Kickstarter is our revived Ride for 2025 campaign. This campaign includes brand-new second editions of older titles, special subscription packages for the Quarterly, and a host of great new bundles. We’re hoping to fund the remainder of our 2025 season through this campaign, and will need all hands on deck to make it happen. Follow the Kickstarter preview page so you can be first in line for some of these killer deals!
Yours truly has been quite the busy bee in selling stories, with multiple titles coming soon to digital store shelves and fundraisers the world over. The unique tale of rock album artistry “An Airbrushed Odyssey” and my first sword-and-sorcery story “Born of Crimson Bones” were both sold to recent upstart Mistcreek Publishing. The former is due out in their “pulp rock” anthology Rock and Roll Mercenaries and the latter in the debut issue of seasonal anthology Mistcreek Tales. It’s been a pleasure to work with head honcho N.R. LaPoint and a jaw-dropping experience to see my name alongside fellow pulp-slingers like Misha Burnett, JD Cowan, Declan Finn and scores more!
Also coming soon from is ironically NOT my second sword-and-sorcery story (yet), but rather a madcap little space opera romp for his Space Opera Stories series from Tule Fog Press. I’m in Volume 2 of 4 that will be running its own fundraiser on Kickstarter. Best of all, he’s dishing them up in classic pocketbook size! Be sure to follow the preview page so you’ll know when it goes live! I’ve got one more project with my name on it, but I haven’t been given the go-ahead to share details yet. In the meantime, I will be writing like hell and cooking up stories for both zines, collections, and more!
From Sascha Ciezata (here on Substack as ) comes the first in a brand-new series: The Hippie Hunter. From the man himself:
“The Hippie Hunter is a graphic novel about a fictionalized version of Colonel Paul Tate (Sharon Tate’s father and a former Army Intelligence officer) and his real life mission going undercover in the LA hippie subculture to hunt down his daughters killers. In doing so he discovers a dark conspiracy behind the 60’s counterculture movement and the murders themselves.”
Done up in slick mid-century style, this period piece set against the backdrop of Californian counterculture is shaping up to be something thoroughly refreshing and engrossing through sheer force-of-will. You can grab a pulp-styled paperback from Amazon, or do yourself a real favor and check out the Indiegogo campaign where you can grab posters, variant covers, and bundles of all of the above. Sascha’s cooking with real gas right now, so help top his tank off, will ya?
TWO DAYS LEFT! For those who want in on the final hammer-blows of Kit Sun Cheah’s apocalyptic cyberpunk series with Babylon White, you got 56 hours (and counting) to grab the latest in the series, bundles to help you get caught up, Cheah’s other killer titles, and of course, my humble add-on contributions. The music single “Nova Babylonia” (heard in the trailer) is one of my most favorite pieces in recent memory, and the digital 365 bundles are a great way to dive into the series. They include the first two Annual Collections with the complete novella “The Short-Circuit Revolution” included in the 2022 Annual, an Alan Firedale starter pack with four episodes and a special selection of music, and a combo pack of all three titles and a year-long subscription to our Substack! Help send off Cheah’s thrilling series in style on Kickstarter.
That’s it for now! As always: May God Bless You & This Force. Be seeing you!