Is the financial cost of smoking holding you back from opportunities?

James grew up surrounded by smoke, so it was a very normalized part of his life. But after three unsuccessful attempts to quit, he found himself in a situation where he was short on funds by the exact amount he spent on smoking. That realization provided the motivation he needed to quit in a lasting way.

Hear the strategies that helped him through the adjustment on this week’s episode of You Can Quit Smoking.

Jessi:
Hey everyone, welcome back. I'm here today with James. James, tell us a little bit about yourself.

James:
My name is James L. Richardson. I'm a full-time author. I write a bunch of stories in something called the public domain superheroes universe. It's a project that started last year. I publish a book a month.

I come from a background doing a bunch of different things. I was a musician in the 90s. I was a telephone repair guy in the 2000s. I grew up in a big city in Canada and now I live in a small town in Canada. But I've traveled. I've lived in Dubai. I've lived in the States. I've been all over the place.

And when I ran across your podcast and you were asking about people who had quit smoking and how they've done it, I thought, "Wow, I love talking about this because I'm always happy to help people that want to quit smoking." It's a really tough habit to kick. I struggled with it myself and I have a couple of little tips and a little tricks that I used.

If you're out there and that's what's going on for you, I'm with you. I wish you all the best and I hope you can just stick with it because it's a great thing to do. Get rid of that habit.

Jessi:
Oh, yeah. Big time. It sounds like you have a lot to share, a lot of experience, and I'm looking forward to seeing what tips you have because we all find our own way with it. So, what's your story with smoking?

James:
I'm 56 years old. I was born in the late 60s, early 70s. Growing up, my parents both smoked. So, basically, I was a smoker from the day I came home from the hospital. My parents smoked through until I was into school.

During school in the mid-70s, there was a big push to get people to quit smoking. And I became a very rabid anti-smoker as a pre-teen and a tween, which was to my parents' chagrin. They didn't like that very much. But I was a very rabid anti-smoker.

But then in my teens, and thanks to peer pressure and teenage stupidity, I started smoking at 15. And I smoked for the next decade and a half to the point where I was smoking a pack and a half a day.
And I was a rabid smoker. I went the exact opposite way. And I was adamant that I had the right to do it. I was adamant that I would do it because I loved it. And that's who I became for a very long time.

Looking back on it, I'm not sure when that change happened. But it's one of those things that if I could go back in time, that's something I would definitely make the effort to make myself not do. Because it's one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done in my life was to start smoking.

When I smoked in my teens in high school, it was because we were cool that we smoked. We went out to the smoking area to smoke. The cool kids all smoked. It was just kind of part of the culture.

From there into my 20s when I was a musician, I traveled extensively, and every bar that we played in was full of smoke. I mean, it was just how things were in the late 80s and into the 90s. Everywhere you went, people smoked.

And to be fair, I couldn't have been the singer I was for 10 years in bars like that if I hadn't been smoking. Because I wouldn't have been able to manage. It would have just been too hard on my breathing to deal with if I wasn't so used to the smoke from my own use that it didn't bother me that the room was full of smoke.

I worked with a couple of non-smoking singers over the years. They would struggle. They would have difficulty in some of the bars we played in because they would be so full of smoke. And we're trying to use our lungs and our throats and our vocal cords to produce nice, clean, clear music, and you are expected not to cough through the smoke. It was a challenge for non-smokers in those days.

So, it's the one positive thing I can point to from my smoking. In that time of my life, it was actually something that worked for me. But in every other sense, it worked against me for my whole life.

When I tried to quit a couple of different times over the years, I quit because of a girl the first time. That was an early attempt and that lasted about six or seven months. Then I fell back into smoking when my father passed away, and I just picked up a cigarette without thinking about it. Next thing you know, I'm back to smoking.

The second time I quit was on a bet. Somebody bet me that I couldn't. Being the stubborn person I am, I said, "There's absolutely no way I'm not winning this 50 bucks." So the bet was, I forget if it was three or six months, but whatever it was, I won the bet. And the next day I was smoking again with the 50 bucks that I won when I went and bought a carton of cigarettes.

The third time, I had a cold so bad that for four days I could not smoke. I just couldn't even look at it. It was so bad. I was coughing and my throat was just miserable. So on the fourth day, when I started to feel better, I thought, "Well, hey, I've quit smoking and I've been four days now. I might as well just keep going. That's it. I quit smoking."

About a week later… thank goodness I live alone. It was the only time in my life this has ever happened. I had a moment of pure rage that came up out of nowhere.
I was alone in my apartment, just a normal Saturday afternoon. And suddenly I was just the most angry, monstrously violent person you can imagine. If there had been anybody in the room, it would have been a disaster. Because I almost completely lost control of myself.

From that, I realized that at that point, I'd been smoking for so long that there was no way I was going to be able to quit completely by myself. Because the physical addiction had gotten to a point where, when it was pulled away from me, the reaction was that bad.

So about two years later, I was trying to buy a house. I did my budget, and the budget came up about $250 short per month, and the only disposable income that I had that I could change was my smoking budget. And that's about what I was spending a month on smoking. So I decided that would be it and I would quit.

For me at that point, I was being paid bi-weekly on the 15th and the first of the month. So I didn't want to tie it to a holiday. I didn't want to do the New Year's resolution sort of thing because they always fail for me. It doesn't work.

What I did was I tied it to my paydays. I quit on the 15th, which was a payday. And so every 15th, I would know that I'd made another month, and it would tie directly to my finances.

I used the patch. At that time, you were supposed to use it for 10 weeks if you were a heavy smoker like me. Four weeks of the full strength. Four weeks of the medium strength. And two weeks of the light to get you through.

I did three weeks. I did two weeks of the full strength, a week of the medium strength, and that was it. And after that, I was fine. But that first two weeks were two of the most miserable weeks of my life. It was really difficult. But the patch gave me a little bit of sanity, a little bit of control.

I did things like change all of my habits. I would come home from work, sit down on my couch, and instantly be leaning forward to the coffee table for my cigarettes. It was just like a reflex. So I started sitting in a different place in the house. I started having coffee standing up in my kitchen instead of sitting down in my living room.

Anything that triggered my smoking was changed. If I caught myself instantly pulling for a cigarette, whatever that was, I would do something different with that for that two or three-week period.

The other thing that helped was it was the coldest winter we've had in the city I was living in at the time. And I quit on January 15th. Every time I would look outside to the smoking area in front of my work, people would be out there huddling and shivering and freezing themselves to death. And I thought, "I don't like the cold anyway, so I can let the craving pass and just sit here and do my work."

But even work is set up like that because we have breaks every eight hours. You're given a lunch break. But you're also given two 15-minute breaks, which I always exploited to go and have a couple of cigarettes. Well, if you have to do something with those breaks and you're in the middle of quitting smoking, what do you do with that time? All of those things had to be structured so that they wouldn't trigger an uncontrollable urge.

And it was two or three weeks of really bad cravings. But after that, because it was money, because I'd found my motivation, from that point on, I've been pretty good. I can count my cravings for cigarettes in the last 23 years on one hand. I've been fortunate that way.
But man, I do remember those first two weeks.Yeah. Not fun.

Jessi:
Did you have a lot of emotion coming up? Like you said that you had that fit of rage after four days. But was that different having the nicotine patch, really having a clear why, and doing it by choice?

James:
Yes, absolutely. The rage never happened again. I never had that same moment, thankfully. I'm really grateful for that because it was a frightening thing that really kind of scared me. But when I quit the fourth time, I didn't have any of the strong emotions the same way.

The biggest thing that was difficult with it was my mother was still alive and she still smoked. I would go visit her once a week, go to her house, and she would cook for me. She would light a cigarette and sit there and watch me eat with the cigarette smoke. And I'm trying to eat with cigarette smoke in the air, and it would just kill me. But I mean, the woman was in her 80s, I didn't want to get into a fight about it.

The other thing that I noticed in my time smoking… like I told you, I basically smoked from infancy. I quit when I was 33. I can distinctly recall the instant in my life when I discovered that cigarettes have an odor. Up until I was 33 years old, I did not know they had a smell. I had no clue about this whatsoever.

But six months after I quit, I walked out of a Walmart, and at the entrance of the Walmart was a bus stop. There wasn't anybody there, it was just an empty bus stop with a bus shelter. But I was standing waiting for a cab.

I remember this like it was yesterday because it was so shocking. All of a sudden, I noticed this horrific smell that I'd never smelled before in my life. I didn't know what the smell was. It was a totally foreign, new smell. Something I had never smelled in my life.

And I thought, "What the hell is that? What is that smell? It's awful." And then I realized it was the bus stop. It was all the butts on the ground, all the cigarettes. All the people that had been standing around smoking had left this miasma of horrific odor coming off of this bus stop that, looking back on my life, I had stood inside that more times than I can count and never noticed it. I’d never known it was there.

From that point, I started noticing the smell in my apartment. I got rid of a bunch of furniture because soft goods all smelled and they started to really bother me.

Like I told you in the beginning, I spent 10 years as a telecom repair guy from 2009 to 2019, which meant I went into people's houses every day, four to six houses a day. If I ever had a moment where I thought about smoking, all I had to do was remember what those houses smelled like. Shockingly, how much of a reaction I would have, and I still do now. It makes me sort of rear back in horror because of the smell. And that was what my house smelled like.

I look back and I think, “Man, I had the cable guy in my apartment and I'm sure I smoked when he was there. I didn't even think about it. I had the telephone guy over, same thing. I'm sure my mother did a hundred times.”

And I look back at all the times that I smoked around people who may or may not have been smokers and didn't think about whether it情 bothered them or anything like that. And I think, “Man, was that rude. I was horrible to these people. If they were non-smokers, that was horrible for them.”

I don't know who they were, but whoever you are out there, I apologize. With all my heart, I apologize for that. Because when it happens to me now, I want to run screaming the other way.

Jessi:
Yeah. Well, you can't know what you don't know. And that kind of reminds me too, like when you were looking back at that moment in high school where you go from being an avid anti-smoker to being very much smoking and enjoying and asserting your right to do it. And you're like, "I regret that moment. It was a stupid choice."

When you have those moments of regret about bothering people or hurting yourself, is there anything that can help you be more comfortable with that? Like something really redemptive, something that you learned or some wisdom that you gained from smoking?

James:
I can't say that I really gained any wisdom specifically from smoking. Although what I have learned is that when I run into it. Which now, thankfully, I'm a full-time writer so I don't have to go into people's houses anymore and it's not an issue, But unless it really was an issue. One or two times people actually blew smoke in my face and I would say something in response to that.

But looking back on how ignorant I was about how bad it was for those who didn't smoke around me, when it would happen to me, I tried not to react in the moment to be rude. Because, like you said, you can't know what you don't know until you know. And for the most part, people who live in a smoking household world probably, like me, don't really think about it. They have no reason to think about it in their own lives.

Especially what I've noticed is that in a lot of families, if one or two people smoke, they all tend to smoke in the house. It tends to be a sort of a familial thing. So there's very much a situation where they just probably don't even really realize how bad it is for the non-smoker coming into that. So I don't make a fuss about it. When it happens to me on the odd, rare occasion now, I just kind of try to ignore it and move on.

But I grew up in the 70s and 80s. Everybody, and I mean everybody my parents knew, smoked. They all smoked. Everybody smoked in their house and it was just normal. We've gotten to a point now in the 2020s where that's not normal. I don't know too many people now who smoke, and very few that actually smoke in their own homes anymore. One or two, but not many.

I have a neighbor who does, and he smokes in his house. He's a man in his 70s, and I've gone into his house. It's not super pleasant for me, but he's a nice guy. I like him. I go in, I put up with it, and leave. I don't say a word because it's his house and it's what he likes.

But if you're out there and you're wondering, yeah, it's not fun for us. We don't enjoy it. Trust me, it's not a pleasant feeling being in a smoking house if you're a non-smoker.

Jessi:
Yeah. But you have that compassion and that understanding and less judgment. I think that that can be helpful to us.

James:
I try not to make it a fuss because, again, I don't have to be in this guy's house for very long. I'm going in to visit, say hello, chat for a few minutes, and then I take off. It's not the end of the world.
I try to live by "live and let live." My life is my life, and I don't expect anybody to tell me how to live it. So he's welcome to his. I just won't visit that often, that’s all.

Jessi:
And so looking back, like you had mentioned that you had that moment of rage that was overwhelming, what kind of other feelings did you have towards smoking? Like you had mentioned that you wanted to quit for a girl or for a bet. But was there some personal motivation when you were doing that work? Did you have some kind of intuitive feeling that "this isn't something I want to be doing"? What did that look like?

Jessi at midroll:
We will get back to the conversation in just a moment.

If you are listening to today’s story and feeling a bit of that familiar tension in your own journey, I want to share a resource with you. We all know that a craving is just a temporary sensation, but when you are in the middle of it, that feeling can take up a lot of space.

I put together a free minicourse called How to Survive a Craving. It is a collection of the specific tools and mindset shifts I used to navigate those hard minutes and stay connected to my true desire to quit.

You can grab it for free at honoryourheart.net/craving so you have those tools ready for the next time you need them.

Now, let’s head back to today’s episode.

James:
It's funny, not really. And in fact, for me personally, those sorts of motivations didn't really do much for me. My motivation was as simple as it gets. It was all about money. I was looking at the number of dollars I was spending on cigarettes, and I couldn't buy my house if I kept doing that.

And that's in 2003. Now, in 2003, cigarettes were $7 a pack. I don't know what they're worth today, but I watched a guy give a $20 bill Canadian over the counter and get a handful of coins back when he bought a pack of cigarettes. So they haven't gotten cheaper, right? So I didn't have any other real strong motivation.

And when people ask me about, "Well, I'm trying to quit. What's your advice?" My advice is don't follow my model specifically. The only advice I can give you is find that motivation for you. Whatever it is, whether it's your health, the smell, your kids, the fact that you want to be around long enough to watch them graduate, the fact that you're worried about your health, the fact that the smoking lobby is actively always trying to get young people to start.

Whatever your issue is around smoking, I don't care. It doesn't matter. But if you find the motivation that's yours, zero in on that and remember that every day. Every time you're having a craving, every time you're fighting the urge, remember what that motivation is. Because that's the only way you're going to quit is to know what your motivation is and be committed to it.

Again, in my case, it was pretty simple. It was money. It wasn't any of the other stuff. Looking back now, I see all of that other stuff came along with it.

As I say, I smoked from the time I was born till I was 33 years old. It was very normal in my life to have a cold every couple of months and be laid up with coughing and a sore throat and chills and miserable and whatever.

In the 23 years since I quit smoking, other than a relatively short, thankfully mercifully short bout of COVID, I have had less than 20 colds since then. I run less than a cold a year on average every single year since I quit smoking.

Now, I can't say that that's going to be the same for anybody else, but that was an unexpected benefit that I am so glad I have run across because I did not realize how much my smoking was impacting not just my health in terms of cancer and heart disease and life and death stuff, but in terms of just day-to-day existence. It was hurting me.

And I didn't realize until the second year after I quit. I noticed I got through the full winter without a cold, and I thought, "That's really odd." Then I got through the full spring without a cold, and that's really odd. Then I got through the full summer. I used to get very bad sinus headaches in the summer and I put it down to allergies. I got through the whole summer and that never happened. I haven't had that sinus issue since.

In terms of colds and flu, I go some years, I go two years without one. In my childhood, in my teens, in my 20s, in my 30s, I had at least four colds a year, probably six every single year. That's one of those "Thank you for quitting smoking, James" moments.

Jessi:
Yeah, that is an amazing gain. I can't even imagine…

James:
The downside, you talk about gain, I went from 172 pounds to 272 pounds in about two years. That was the downside. I was heavy from the time I was about 35 until this year. I dropped 130 pounds this year. But up until basically October 2024, I was over 300 pounds.

And if you're going to quit smoking, find the celery, get the carrot sticks, whatever you got to do. Because I was working next door to a bakery. It was not good. It was very not good. I went way big, way quick.

Jessi:
Yeah. Did you notice a change in your taste?

James:
Oh, very much so. Food is so much better now. I don't recall that as an instant change; it was sort of a gradual gain. It didn't come instantly like the smell thing did, but I mean, I'm sure it's related. Because I'm sure my taste buds and my smell receptors were just baked with tar and nicotine. But yeah, food is much better now. Has been for years. No question.

Jessi:
Yeah, that can get us a little too excited about food. I'm definitely in that camp myself, but you know.

James:
It's substituting a snack or a bag of chips or whatever for the smoking, which is a natural impulse to do. I did it for far too long and got far too big doing it.

So yeah, if you're trying to quit, find a healthy substitute. But you may need a substitute. There's nothing wrong with that. I personally would rather be heavy than smoking. It's just a personal choice.

I honestly struggled with my weight through my 40s and into my 50s, and there were times where I briefly, very briefly, considered starting smoking again, hoping that it might help me lose weight.

Jessi:
Same.

James:
It wouldn't. And don't do that. But it did occur to me, I have to admit.

Jessi:
Yeah, I actually went back to smoking one time because of that. Because I had gained so much so quickly, it scared me. And so I went back to smoking trying to lose it. But it didn't work. So, you can't go backwards. [laughter]

James:
[laughter] Yeah, now you're heavy and you smoke. And that's like, now it's even worse. And now you’ve got to quit all over again.

Jessi:
[laughter] Oh yeah.

James:
Don't go back for the weight thing. Find another way. Definitely not worth it.

Jessi:
And ultimately what did help me in the final time I quit was..and I've talked about this with other guests too. Drinking water is nice for that oral fixation, for that just need to do something in those transitions. So there are plenty of other options. But yeah, a lot of us fall for food because it tastes good.

James:
Like you say, it's an oral fixation. But there's definitely a reflexive thing that took me far longer than the two or three weeks that it took me to get over the physical. There are a lot of reflexes that go along with smoking that we develop over the years of being a smoker that took a long time to clear.

When I bought my first car in my mid-30s, I'd been quit for probably not a year yet at that point. And I remember I got behind the wheel, and boy, that was one of the strongest cravings I had had since I quit. Getting behind the wheel of a car was like, “Phew.”

Jessi:
Roll down the window and go.

James:

I just wanted to roll down that window, light a cigarette, and go. And again, it's that reflexive thing. You have to find the things like that and find something else to do with that moment. Because that moment will kill your progress every time if you let it.

Jessi:

Just kind of wrapping up here. You had a lot of pieces in there about tips for people, words of advice, but just formally now for someone who is thinking about quitting. They're on the fence about it. Maybe they're nervous to take the next step because they don't know what it's going to look like. They can't even imagine life without it. It's a scary thing to do. They're having a lot of doubt. What words of advice would you have for someone that's in that situation?

James:
If you're a long-term smoker, somebody that smoked for more than four or five years, you're going to have a physical reaction almost for sure. Because the nicotine withdrawal is a physical effect and you can't get around it. It's going to happen and it's unpleasant.

I've heard it compared to withdrawing from heroin. Never done heroin, so I don't know. But I can tell you that it's not a fun reaction. And it lasts differently for every person. For me, it was that first two weeks that was the worst. Some people I've talked to, it's lasted longer, some people shorter.

But if you're in that position where you know that's going to happen, where you're going to have that physical reaction, find something that's going to help you with that. Whether it's the gum, a patch, the injections, the whatever, something that's going to give you a little bit of nicotine to help ease that withdrawal. It's not cheating. You're working with the science against the addiction. We're human beings.

Once you decide what that is, I've got a few things that worked for me that helped.

Number one, avoid all your smoking friends like the plague. Everybody you know who smokes, cut them out of your life for at least a month. Because they will gleefully, happily, without reservation, offer you a cigarette thinking they're being the good guy to do that for you. So get away from them. Get far away from them.

Stay away from them because they're not going to help you. They think they are. They'll put it in terms that they're being the good guy, like, "Oh yeah, it's okay." And you'll believe for that moment that, "Oh, it's just one, and it's just going to cut the craving and I'll be fine." And that's the worst thing you can do.

You have to stop this cutting down thing. Everybody on the planet that I know, and I know a lot of people who tried this cutting down are like, "Well, I'm down to one a day." it doesn't work. It never works. You have to stop smoking, period.

And like I say, cut your smoking friends out of your life, not necessarily permanently. But make sure that those people you know who smoke are not around you for the initial phase of your quit. Because they're going to make your life miserable without really meaning to. They're thinking they're helping, but they're not.

Number two, and number three is figure out your triggers, whatever they are. I don't know what your triggers are. Everybody's different.

For me, it was, like I said, it was the couch thing. Leaning forward for my smokes, getting a cup of coffee and sitting down on my couch to have a cup of coffee in the morning, going out for my break.
Whatever those triggers are that make you crave a cigarette, find something else for the first however long,a month, two months, whatever, to do with those moments. Don't do those moments. Find a way not to do them. Find a way to not sit on that couch. Sit somewhere else in the living room. Sit somewhere else. Sit on your balcony. Sit in your backyard. Whatever that is, find that way.

The final thing and the most important one for me, and I think for everybody, is find that motivation. Whatever it is. In my case, it was money. But if it's your health, if it's you trying to avoid passing it along to your kids because you will. I'm telling you, you don't mean to.

Parents, you don't want to see your kids start smoking. You know it's wrong. You know you don't want to see them smoking. Why do you want to see yourself smoking?

Even my parents, who smoked till they died, didn't want me to be a smoker. But if you grow up with two parents where what they do is smoke, it is very hard for that child to become an adult who doesn't smoke.

So whatever your motivation is, find it. Take it into your heart. Take it into your brain. Live it every single day. Every time you have a craving, every time you walk through the convenience store and think, "Oh, I'm buying a lottery ticket. Let's get a pack of smokes." Whatever it is that you do, when those moments crop up, remember that motivation because that's the only thing that's going to save you.

Eventually, it'll become a reflex. Getting that motivation to you just takes a while to train your brain. You just have to replace "I want a cigarette" with "I'd like to save the money," or "I'd like to not see my kids smoke," or "I'd like to not get lung cancer," or "I don't want to have a heart attack," or whatever it is that works for you.

Those are my four keys. Those are the things that are going to work for you. Find the substitute for the nicotine. Get away from your smoking friends. Fix your fixation triggers, and figure out what your motivation is.

And number five,it's not a tip. But number five: if you fail, you fail. It's okay. Do it again. There's always a next time. If you fail, you're not a lesser person for it. You've just not beaten a really difficult addiction yet. So, try again. Six months later, try again because the only way you're going to quit is to try.

Jessi:
Those are wise words. Thank you for sharing all those tips, really organized. Yeah, I think they really would have been helpful for me to know when I was going through it. I had to learn the hard way myself.

James:
Well, like I say, it took me four times to figure all this out. And I mean, to be honest, when I was actually quitting, I wasn't that organized. This is 20 years of retrospective looking back at what worked, how I managed, and how I struggled when I was going through it. I probably wasn't thinking all those thoughts. I didn't have it that well thought out. And, yeah, if that helps somebody, excellent. I'm glad because it's hard.

It took me four times. I always say right now is quit number four because it's ongoing. I'm fortunate not to have a lot of cravings on any kind of regular basis. It's very rare. Happens once in a blue moon. Probably once every two or three years I get a craving at this point.
But they still happen. And I've been through some stressful situations where there's a moment of thought where like, "Yeah, a cigarette would be really good right now." I don't let myself, but I'm still quitting.

23 years later, I'm still quitting. It's still an ongoing thing. It's a fight that I have to deal with. Thankfully, not every single day. Not every single hour like I did when I first quit 23 years ago, but there are still moments where I still have to fight it. So, you're not alone out there. Anybody who's quit has gone through it.

Jessi:
Yeah. Keeping that commitment.

James:
Absolutely.

Jessi:
So, talk to us more about your work. I know you're an author. Where can people find you?

James:
Oh, I'm easy to find. I've got a couple of different websites. I'll give you the simplest one to find, the one that people listening can easily write down as I'm saying it. It's pdsh.ca. That's pdsh.ca. It stands for public domain superheroes.ca. I actually own publicdomainsuperheroes.com, but that's a big mouthful. pdsh.ca you can remember and write down. You can type that in in 10 seconds. So, that's where my stuff is.

I write a series of books in what I call the public domain superheroes universe. It's basically taking every currently available adventurer, superhero, and villain that's in the public domain. And right now, that's people like Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger, Professor Moriarty, and Buck Rogers, alongside heroes like the Spy Smasher and Captain Midnight that a lot of people haven't heard of, and putting them in books. I publish a book a month.

The plan here is that over the next 10 to 15 years, the public domain is going to see a bunch of characters that you have heard of enter it. In 2034, Superman will be public domain. In 2035, Batman will be public domain. In 2036, Captain America will be public domain. In 2037, Wonder Woman will be public domain.

So, what I'm doing is I'm creating a universe where all of these characters, when they arrive 10 years from now into the public domain, find this entire universe built up and spread out. Comic books are in the works. I'm trying to work up some animated projects. I've got, like I say, a book a month every month. I put short stories up at my website for free to read so you can get a taste of what I'm doing.

And in 10 years, when Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, and all the rest of the DC comics and Marvel comics heroes that came out of the 1940s arrive, my universe will be there to welcome them. All I've got to do is just fold them into it. And there's one timeline. Everything connects.

So Superman will live in the same universe as Buck Rogers, Sherlock Holmes, Captain America, and anybody else you can think of who's in the public domain. And they will all.. not necessarily interact. There's no multiverse, so they all live in that same one timeline.

Conan the Barbarian lived 5,000 years ago. But in his future, Superman will arrive on planet Earth from Krypton. It's all the same plane. It's all the same planet. And there are items, plot lines, and immortal villains that tie the whole thing together as one project.

So, I hope everybody takes a look at it. It's a lot of fun. I'm on Substack. I'm on Facebook. I'm on Instagram. I'm going to give you all those links and you can put them up beside my name and people can click away to their heart's content.

But I really hope you go to Amazon, look up James L. Richardson, and buy my books because that would really help me out. I'd love to be able to do this till I'm in my 90s.

Jessi:
That's awesome. You have such a passion for it. And it did look fun. I poked around and saw that Pulp Fiction style. And it just seems like a really cool thing that you're putting your heart into and enjoying.

James: It's literally everything I grew up with that I love. This book that I'm putting out this month is called Never, Mind!. It's a sequel to a book I put out in January called Say the Magic Word.

Turns out that Captain Marvel, you might know him better as Shazam, was created by Fawcett Comics in the 1940s. And when Fawcett Comics went out of business, a lot of the copyrights were not properly renewed. So that character, even though DC Comics puts out movies and comic books and all the rest of it , with Shazam, the core character himself is actually public domain. DC Comics doesn't make a big fuss about it because, obviously, they don't want people like me stealing their thunder. But yeah, I'm writing books about Captain Marvel Shazam.

This month's book is Captain Marvel Jr., another character from Fawcett that I loved growing up and I get to play with. I've got him in the same universe with Buck Rogers, another character I grew up with. I wrote a book about Buck in December. I've written books about a bunch of characters that people haven't heard of that sort of go together with things, like Crash Corrigan, Spy Smasher, and Captain Midnight.

But as the public domain gets closer to the dates that I was mentioning earlier, the names start to get more familiar. Characters like Flash Gordon are in a couple of years. There are characters like Phantom and, as I said, Superman, Batman, all of those things, the Joker. All of those fun things happen in the next 10 years. I cannot wait. I am so excited. I am so excited.

Jessi:
Awesome.

James:
So, I hope everybody checks it out. It's a lot of fun. And like I say, I'm on Substack, so find me on Substack. I'm there every single day and I answer all my notes. So, feel free to find me there. It's under PDSH newsletter at Substack. But again, I'll make sure you have the link.

Jessi:
I'll put those in the show notes. I just want to thank you for coming on here and sharing your story with us. It's something people can be kind of ashamed about or quiet about. You know, they get past it or they don't want to think about it.

But I think it's really amazing what you've been through, and I appreciate you sharing your knowledge with the rest of the people out there struggling, wanting to do this thing themselves. Thank you so much for your time and your wisdom.

James:
Never feel shame about being stuck in addiction. It happens to the best of us. The only thing you can feel shame about is not trying to quit. You've got to get out of it and only you can do it. Nobody else can do it for you.

But if we can give you the tools.. if shows like yours can give people the tools and the motivation to find the way out of this addiction, fantastic. I applaud the effort.

Jessi:
Thank you so much again.

James:

It's been a blast.

Jessi:
Cool. Well, take care everyone. See you next week.

End of Interview

Looking for more tips on how to get through the initial struggle of quitting smoking?

On Episode 27 of You Can Quit Smoking, Jon shares how he used an unexpected opportunity to get a head start on his journey. But he soon realized that staying smoke-free meant completely changing how he rewarded himself.

Hear the exact mindset shift that allowed him to stick to his decision for good.