Trying to finish the first story!

The first book that has always had the working title,

The Book That Needed to Be Written.

That story is now called

The Grateful Eight

Eight hippies, eight (nearly!) true stories, one extraordinary journey.

I will start by introducing you to them.

The Love Spreaders

Click their names to read their stories.

Leader and hero of the Eight, and their main drug dealer. Born to a wealthy south coast family, hated public school, discovered mushrooms and speed in London, and was arrested the day after his eighteenth birthday. He fled to Amsterdam on the eve of sentencing, shedding his old identity to become "the English." Present at Queens Day from the start. Rewrite and skills 01 to 04 complete.

DJ of the Eight. Dosed without consent at a 1966 Fillmore show, pulled into the Grateful Dead's crew, and secretly bootlegs tapes out of resentment at being excluded from the crew's pay. Caught, and flees to Amsterdam, where he fails as a musician before becoming the city's first beatmixing DJ. Present at Queens Day from the start. Rewrite and skills 01 to 04 complete.

Sources and stores the drugs Lish sells. A business student pushed into psychedelics via Mexico, he built a campus mescaline operation with his partner Manhattan, and became the first person arrested for selling LSD in America, fleeing to Amsterdam. Present at Queens Day from the start. Rewritten and complete through skills 01 to 04, plus a numbers and accuracy pass.

Spiritual and ceremonial lead of the Eight. English, drawn into LSD and ISKCON at the 1970 Phun City festival, renamed Sona Golden there after being brought back from a bad trip with chai. Leaves England shortly after, joins an existing Return to the Light party in Amsterdam, and runs the chai stall there, The Chai Conspiracy. Not present at Queens Day. Rewrite and skills 01 to 04 complete."

Music, fitting his own nickname, Lord of the Dance. Australian, then drawn into ISKCON and Krishna devotion in India. Has been to Harmonia and was not at Queens Day, arriving at the final party together with Nine Finger Nick, having travelled from there with him. Marked for a complete rewrite.

Party Organiser and Production Manager, securing venues and negotiating with the police. First appears running the bootleg tape operation in Sam Fran's chapter. Joins the group's ongoing Amsterdam parties mid-stream, after a still-unwritten chance meeting with Jersey John, not present at Queens Day itself. His own backstory is still just a title stub, not yet written.

Security for the Eight, and their on-the-ground dealer. Confirmed Dutch, and written as a wholly new character rather than a reuse of any cut fragment. Present at Queens Day from the start. Not yet written beyond the title stub; his backstory, and which real person he's based on, are both still to be decided.

Looks after everyone, the group's older and wiser public face. Based on a real Goa figure, arrives late to the Amsterdam party, already having been to the place the Eight later relocate to, and already has a home set up there. Arrives at the final party with Swami Nattaraj, not present at Queens Day. Barely started, needs to be completely written.

Meet another one of The Eight in

Nowhere Left to Be Tolerated

Publishing December 2026.

They found each other in Amsterdam and did the obvious thing: threw parties that spread love and LSD across a city that was rapidly running out of patience for either. Then came the night the police stopped pretending not to notice, and the Eight faced the choice this book actually turns on: stay and get arrested for being exactly who they were, or leave and go and build somewhere they might actually be wanted. This is where The Grateful Eight stops being eight separate stories and becomes one. Not a happy ending. A start, and a rather more dangerous one than the last.

If you would like a pdf, physical book or audio book to read or listen to, please just ask.

I am happy to provide any of these.

Contact Ted Grateful

This is what is already happening. The list of books I am very advanced in writing and scheduled for publication. I want The Kiteman to be the first.

The Kiteman sits inside a series already in production:

The Kiteman

Everyone Wants to Know

Publishing 2026.

Nobody ever learned anything useful about drugs from a government leaflet. The Kiteman does something far simpler: it puts the real questions to the people who actually know, the ones prohibition decided to silence rather than believe. What is it. Where does it come from. What does it actually do to you. Is it worth it. No lecture. No warning label. No stern voiceover.

Honest, first-hand accounts of drug use aren't new, they go back decades. But because of the illegality of these drugs, only a few have ever spoken out publicly. Many have alluded to it throughout their lives, in music, in art, in the space between what they were willing to say and what they actually meant. A very few brave people have spoken very clearly about their drug use and their belief in its benefits. Times have changed. The psychedelic revolution is here. It no longer has to stay encoded. People are talking about their past openly now, on podcasts, in public, without the fear that used to keep it half-hidden. Many more will come, and the rest of the world will be shocked at how many of us there are.

The Love Spreaders

None of Them Chose This

Publishing 2026.

Before they were the Eight, they were eight completely different people, and every single one of them was already a criminal according to the law of wherever they happened to be standing. A chemist who worked alongside the man who discovered LSD. A nurse who never once stopped caring, whatever the law said about what she was caring with. A dealer running from a piece of legislation that managed to outlaw him on the very day it was signed, which is either terrible timing or exactly the point. Each of them is based on someone real, someone Ted Grateful has actually sat down and talked to, not researched from a safe distance. This is where The Grateful Eight begins, not with the group photo moment in Amsterdam, but with eight separate people who never had the luxury of choosing to be outlaws. It was decided for them.

The Grateful Eight Converge

Nowhere Left to Be Tolerated

Publishing December 2026.

They found each other in Amsterdam and did the obvious thing: threw parties that spread love and LSD across a city that was rapidly running out of patience for either. Then came the night the police stopped pretending not to notice, and the Eight faced the choice this book actually turns on: stay and get arrested for being exactly who they were, or leave and go and build somewhere they might actually be wanted. This is where The Grateful Eight stops being eight separate stories and becomes one. Not a happy ending. A start, and a rather more dangerous one than the last.

The Grateful Eight in the Sanctuary of Sypher

The Land That Wanted Them

Publishing Early 2027.

Amsterdam couldn't hold them, so the Eight burned the map and built somewhere new: the Sanctuary of Sypher, a stretch of coast in a land that, for once, actually wanted them there. Three decades of freedom, chaos, and the kind of life nobody ever hands you, you have to go and take it yourself. This is where the running stops and the living starts.

The Grateful Truth

The Quiet Millions, Hidden in Plain Sight

Publishing Late 2027.

For fifty years, the story of psychedelics was told entirely by the people who'd banned them, which is a bit like letting the arsonist write the fire report. This is the other version, decade by decade, from the laboratory where it all started to the billion-dollar medicine it's quietly becoming now that the same institutions have decided it was a good idea all along. Not a defence. Not an apology. Just what actually happened, checked against the record rather than the official line, because apparently that still needs doing.

The Fateful Eight

The Next Generation

Publishing 2028.

The next generation of the Eight, who arrived in the nineties and took over from the original Grateful Eight.