Latest / Books4Guys / Why It's Never Too Late to Chase Your Dream | Matt Hughes

Transcript

Why It's Never Too Late to Chase Your Dream | Matt Hughes · Books4Guys

• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean tiny, is maybe 300 people live here, and then you get twice as many in the tourist time, which is now.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: I was about to ask, when when are the tourist months there?
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: What summer, June, up until September.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Weather's good and the scenery is beautiful.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: You got lakes, mountains, bears, elk, all that stuff.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's crazy.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I'm I'm in Tennessee and uh we see deer, but not not where I'm at, I don't see bears or anything like that.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you're lucky, you don't see a bear.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, I don't know if I want to see one.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: The most successful bear hunt is when you go out and don't see any bears.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: I agree.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Matt, I'm very excited to have you on the Books for Guys podcast today because number one, you've written you've written a lot of books.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think I'm somewhere around 40 by now.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I want to get into that, but I have a question for you first, as I was just learning a little bit about you as Mickey had shared some info with me.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: And one thing that caught my eye was that you spent several years uh essentially what was called house sitting and traveling.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: And can you explain what that is?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because I didn't know what that is, but it seems like something I would love to do because it involves traveling and seeing new places.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, I'll give you the backstory.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: I used to make a really good living as a freelance speechwriter for corporate people and politicians, mostly corporate because they had the money.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then when my kids were grown, what I'd always wanted to do was to write fiction, science fiction, crime fiction, fantasy, even historical fiction.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Trouble is, I would have been fine if I'd started that back in the 60s, but the business has changed an awful lot since then.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's very corporatized.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: They're only looking for bestsellers.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Guys like me who are you would call a niche author, we're not really wanted anymore.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: We can sell to small presses, but they don't pay much and they don't pay often.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I said, okay, I want to do this.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: How do I find a way to do this?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the way was cut out my living expenses.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: I just go and live in other people's houses and look after their cats and dogs and chickens.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: One time twenty five alpacas in France, uh horses, sheep, all of that.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I get to live in a house for, you know, three months, six months a year.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Everything paid.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they provide a car.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: You don't get paid for doing it, but you get all of that free stuff.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I managed to live 18 years.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: I've I've pretty well given it up now.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to settle down with my eldest son by the end of the year.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to help him buy a house.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: I've been able to save up money because I haven't been paying rent and mortgage and so on.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that'll be the end of the house sitting.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm staying with a friend right now up in the boonies while my son arranges to get a house for us.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why I did it and how I did it.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: There are various uh services on the internet which connect house sitters with people uh who want them.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the first one we used to use is called HouseCarers.com.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: That comes out of Australia, and we got a couple of Australian and New Zealand sits out of that.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Another one is called Mindmyhouse.com.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's from England or Britain.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the one last one we used for some years was called Trusted House Sitters.com, all one word.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: And they once we'd got going at it and we had some really good references behind us, we became sort of a list.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: So when we applied for a sit, normally we were either top of the list or number two.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: So we never had to worry about being homeless for too long or, you know, in some foreign country.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: We'd we'd find a sit and we'd go there.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Pay our own travel expenses, but show up on time and ready to do the gig.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's so cool because two things I'm taking away from that.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, I I'm gonna do the math after this, but I'm gonna add up how much money I could save if I didn't have rent for 18 years and see what that guy uh it would be a lot.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think about that even just in micro, like a year.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: If I could have a year off from rent, that would be uh such an interesting ceiling.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other thing I really like that you said essentially is you had a goal and you figured out how to how to work that goal and and create a path for yourself to do what you wanted to do.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's the most important thing I took from that is a lot of people they want to eat things, but they don't necessarily want to do what it takes to do those things.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it I don't think it suits everybody because really I was for 18 years a homeless drifter, which doesn't appeal to a lot of people, uh, not knowing where you're gonna be a year from now or six months from now, you've got to work that out and find somewhere.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: That there's a certain degree of uncertainty to it that would worry a lot of people.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: And when we first started, we went actually I was working for a house sitting service in the UK, and they put us in an 18th-century manor house for three months, uh, and that was fine.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: But then uh that wound up, the place was sold, the new owners came in, and we said, Okay, what else have you got?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, Well, we got a weekend here and a week there, and and we ended up for about uh a month in uh an off-season holiday trailer camp place, which was still pretty expensive, and the the long-term gigs were hard to find.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: But then by a fluke, I found one.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I I used to belong to SF Canada, the organization of professional authors and editors and agents and so on for science fiction in Canada.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we had a list server, and I saw on one that somebody was looking for a catminder, a house sitter, in a little place called East End Saskatchewan, which is tiny.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: And we went for that and got it, and from then on it was just we got into the the internet services, and also we would sometimes just have friends wanted us to come and and look after the place and the dog and so on.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that we just rolled on from there.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we went from Saskatchewan to uh Northern Ireland and then from Northern Ireland to uh the Olympic Peninsula in Washington and then to Australia and New Zealand and then Rome and we just went.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: Where was where was the uh what was your favorite location to be in?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, depends on what you want to specify.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um for just absolute scenic beauty, the North Island of of New Zealand can't be beaten.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's just absolutely I mean they have a place there called Ninety Mile Beach.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Think about that.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's white, beautiful sand.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: But for living, I I like Italy.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: I learned to speak Italian, because I had to.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I would live, you know, when you're house sitting, you're not a tourist.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: You go and live among the people, not in a hotel, you're not eating in restaurants, you're buying your groceries from the supermercado and and getting to know the local people, the butcher, the you know, the grocery man.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: That was for me a really big part of it.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: I really like that, and and to it helps, really helps if you're traveling to be a Canadian.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody loves us.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Especially in Italy, because we fought our way all the way up that peninsula and and beat the Germans, and people remember that.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: I would say uh Italy for the the food and New Zealand for the scenery, and maybe Greece, Athens just for the the antiquity.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: I love old stuff.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: I I've just finished a historical novel set in the time of Alexander the Great.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, to be up on the Acropolis overlooking Athens and the great ruins of the temples and everything there, that was that was cool.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I can imagine.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: I saw that and I just I had to ask you that question just just to just to get a glimpse of what that experience was like and just kind of some of your adventures through that.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it sounds like there was many memories made and a lot of just great experiences as a whole throughout that process.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Let me add the little kicker.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: You don't know until you show up and meet the people whether they're crazy or not.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And a couple of our sits we had crazy people.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And in one of them in Cyprus, I broke uh two bones in my ankle, and it was not a great not a great experience.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess I guess they can't all be, you know, perfect.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: No, I can imagine.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Matt, switch it over to just your your writing and your books, you know, kind of start at the beginning a little bit.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: What really inspired you to become an author, and then where did the passion for writing come from?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, okay.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'll go right back to when I was a teenager.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Excuse me.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: The smoke coming through the window from the forest fires here, so I may cough a little.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to be a historical novelist, is what it was.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to write about because that's what I love to read in those days, and I wanted to write that kind of stuff.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: And which is weird because now it's 60 years later, and I've actually just finished the book that I wanted to write when I was 16.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: I even wrote the first chapter of, first scene, really.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of, you know, comes round.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I that's what I wanted to do, and then I got married and had kids, and then I had to feed them every day, you know, even twice.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I had found that I had a totally unlooked-for talent for speechwriting, which is a rare mo most writers are not good at speechwriting.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: They're good at writing for the eye, not for the voice and the ear.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I took that up for 30 years.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: I was I was the top rated speechwriter in Vancouver and British Columbia.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: My last corporate rate was$200 an hour.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a way to make a living.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Along the way, though, in in slow times, I would I would write some fiction.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: I started out to write crime fiction, because seriously, as a lot of minor criminals in my gene pool, I'm I like to say I'm the white sheep of my family.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I I started on that, but then a fluke happened, as happens in you know the the publishing business, and I got a a funny science fiction fantasy science fantasy book out, and publishers started saying, well, if you write one of those for us, we'll give you some money.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I I started writing that kind of stuff, and I ended up what I am now, which is really I'm a crime writer trapped in a science fiction and fantasy writer's career.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I write crime stories set in science fiction and fantasy settings.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Very unique.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And by the time I got to in, you know, into my well into my 50s, I was segueing out of the speech writing because NAFTA was wiping out my market.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: My market was the CEO of a freestanding big corporation headquartered in Vancouver, and NAFTA meant that those were getting bored up.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the biggest forest company in Canada in those days was Macmillan Blowdell, went back to 1912, and it was bought by Weyerhauser.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the CEO that I used to write for, he retired, and an executive vice president was sent up from somewhere in the States, and he had no interest in the kind of egotism that CEOs had.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, gradually my market just shrank and shrank and shrank.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I finally said, okay, let's let's jump and do the books.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: So, and that's what I'm doing now.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: I self-publish because uh the corporates decided I was not a big enough return on investment.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: I can sell to small presses, but you know, they give you a an advance of a thousand dollars if you're lucky, and then you'll wait 18 months to see any royalties.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas I can uh write two books a year, put them up on Amazon, and I get paid every uh sixty days.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it's better than I would get from a small press.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the uh the business model now.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: What's been what's been your most successful book, and did you expect it to be your most successful book?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually a series.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the thing.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: I I I had a book deal with Tor, which is a big science fiction publisher, and from previous experience, I knew I had to have more readers when that book came out.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought, okay, when I was a kid, I used to read the uh science fiction digest magazines, Asimovs, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Analog.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: There were a bunch back when I was young, Galaxy If.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought, okay, I'll I'll write some short stories and sell them to the magazines.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: I did not realize that that was really hard to do, so I just sat down and thought one up and wrote it and sent it in to Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is the biggest and best.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I got a check within a week.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, oh, this is good.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the the publisher editor really liked what I was doing, so I kept doing more of it.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I ended up writing six or seven stories about a sort of far future Sherlock Holmes character detective in a space opera universe.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that uh that clicked with the readers in fantasy and science fiction.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then a small press said, We like the character.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Can you do a novel?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: I said, sure.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, okay, we'll take three.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: So then I wrote three novels about the same character, and his name is Hengus Hapthorne, totally made up name.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Although it turns out there are some people in the world actually called Hapthorne.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I'd made it up.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: And over the years, I got the rights, I kept the rights to the e-book, so I've been self-publishing that myself, and the publisher sold quite a few copies for for a small press.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: So Hapthorne has been my most successful character.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: He's I mean, I I put the stories together in a book called Nine Tales of Hangus Hapthorne, and then I've got the three novels, so it's a four book series, and I I sell a few every day.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Or well, every week.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe one or two a day.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:10
  unknown: Yeah.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: Has that been your personal favorite series that you've written?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: Or no.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: What's been your personal favorite work?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: In the same milieu, the space opera setting for our future, old Earth, you know, everything has been done a hundred times, forgotten, reinvented, done some more, forgotten.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's an old, old civilization and quite uh decadent and loosh and corrupt and all of that.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I've got Hengus, who is a detective, he calls himself a discriminator, but I also have a character called Lough Imbri.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he is a art thief, forger, con man, general master criminal.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I based him upon I don't know if your listeners will be familiar with this, but there was a movie called The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart in it.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a villain in that that they called the Fat Man.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Caspar, his name was, Casper Gutman.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he was big and fat and blonde and very smart and very vicious.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that is Lough Imbry.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: I modeled him on that character.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I've done God a slew of short stories for the magazines.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: I did four novellas for PS publishing in Britain.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I've done two novels, and I'm thinking of doing a third one about him.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been a character arc that has evolved as the uh as the stories went on.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: One thing that I've had right from the very beginning, it was just a throwaway line in my first book.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: See, I'm very much influenced by Jack Vance, who is one of the finest science fiction grandmaster authors of the twentieth century.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: And he wrote space opera, and he also wrote fantasies of something called the dying earth, when Earth is waiting for the sun to go out and magic has come back, there are wizards and all kinds of weird creatures and so on.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: And at one point I sort of wondered how'd he get from the space opera to the magic?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I came up with an idea that every few thousand years, for nobody knows why, the universe changes its basic operating system.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: It goes from rational science to will-powered magic.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then after a few thousand years it'll switch back again.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: And every time that happens is like a complete collapse of civilization because nobody knows how to deal with the new circumstances.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: They have to relearn everything.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: So Lough Imbri starts out as a criminal in the space opera setting, but he's living in the time when the change is about to happen.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: And magic is starting to come back, and he turns out to have kind of a talent for it.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: So he's in the last book I've done, he's working his way to being what I call a thaumaturge, a wizard.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I think if I do another one, it'll be him in his early stages of the dying earth becoming a wizard and dealing with whatever comes up.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: So he's my favorite.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Lef Imbri is definitely my favorite character.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Do you, Matt, do you think?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just, you know, again, you've written so many books, short stories.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that you, at this day in time, do you think you write more for yourself or for the people that read and follow your work?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's it's kind of both.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm what you call an intuitive writer.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: I don't plot, I don't outline.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: The characters come out of me.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: I put them in situations, I see how they react.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: Each one is a kind of pale shadow of some fragment of my psyche, because I I do I know I have from childhood I have uh not multiple personalities, but definitely different parts of me that do different things.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I'm kind of a slave to the guy in the back of my head, my unconscious or subconscious, whatever you want to call it.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: He's the guy who does the actual creating, and I do the typing and editing.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Which, you know, so there's people out there who really like what I do.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: There's not millions of them, but the ones who like it really like it.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I'm pleasing them, but I'm also just I'm doing what comes out of my head.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love that.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I always ask that with just with people who have written a lot.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm always curious to know, do you, you know, once you've put enough work out there, do you write because you have more of a sense of responsibility to keep writing?
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because now you have people who are following you and look for you to write, or is it still a passion that you don't care if anyone reads or reads it?
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: You just love doing it, so you want to keep doing it.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of times it seems to be a little bit of both pieces.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: I can't really say I have a passion for it, because you know, I've been doing this a long time.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm pretty old.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: I've written millions and millions of words with all those, you know, maybe two thousand speeches back in the old days.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I had no passion for that, but I used to enjoy it sometimes, and I certainly like the money.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not really a passion, it's a very faint compulsion.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I do.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm as I said, I I know I have a fragmented psyche, but I am most myself cohered together when I'm making characters and writing, then I'm me.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so I like it that people like it.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't bother me terribly that not everybody likes it, and that some people say, you know, he uses too many big words, that kind of thing.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: And and I make them up too, so yeah.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: So no, I uh I do this because it's what I do and have always done.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I can envision, you know, getting to the point where I just stop and I say, well, I've done my last one, because, you know, forty odd books is enough.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm not there yet.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: I've I just started a new one, and it's a third in a a series of crime stories that I first started back in the uh the nineties with a character like me.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: He was he was a freelance feature writer who lived on Vancouver Island and got mixed up with the mob and so on, which I came close to a couple of times.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: I used to write for anybody who would pay me, and that included people who ran scams on the Vancouver Stock Exchange, which was so corrupt they finally shut it down.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I I would write about new ways to mine tailings from old platinum mines and make a fortune.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was all bullshit.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm you know, I put that kind of stuff in in my book.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well I I I think that's what makes you so fascinating is just all the the things you've gotten to experience and be involved in and then translating it to your work in you know in the fiction world.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's some underlying tones to it of personal experience, which is fascinating.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: Which I I work into my my stories.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: The my speechwriter guy, he has a real problem as the book opens because the movie deal that he got has collapsed.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that happened to me.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: I had a movie deal with PayTV, and the producer I got to uh do the project could never get all the money together at the same time, and it died.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a real disappointment.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I segued that into what really did happen to me.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: I invented the next big game after Pictionary, Honest to God.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was a game called Genderbender.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was like scruples but nicer.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was about male and female stereotypes.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it was going to make me rich.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just going to stop writing speeches and write uh movie scripts and see how I did.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it was great.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: We were uh we came out in 1989.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: I had partners.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: We were a group of people from Mensa who decided we'd do a game company.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we came out in '89 and they sold 115,000 games that year, which made us a big success.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: And in 1990, along came Nintendo, and that was it.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: No more money.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: No and I found myself massively in debt waiting for a check at the end of the year that wasn't gonna come.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that was that was a problem.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I put that into my character about seven years later when I'd recovered from the damage.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's been an interesting life.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: Unusual.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: No, I again I think that just makes we all have stories and we all have I just like that you you you incorporate some of the personal experiences into your writing.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: And and I just again and people who read and don't know you, they may not know exactly what what that means or where that comes from.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: But I just think, especially now that I like I've been speaking with you, like if I read your books, I'm gonna be wondering like, was this something that Matt experienced or did he make this up?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's just a curiosity thing that I think is very cool that you've incorporated it there.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let me recommend one to you.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: I have just put it out as an ebook and paperback on Amazon.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: In North America only, it's in the States and Canada only, because the the rights to the rest of it, uh the rest of the world are held by a publisher in Britain.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: But I uh I kept the ebook rights and never got around, I'm not sure why to this day, I never got around to doing it, but I've just done it now in the past month.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a story called One More Kill.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's based on actually a short story that won the Crime Writers of Canada Award as Best Short Story of the Year, crime story, many years ago.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then I finally turned it into a novel.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's about an ex-U.S.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Army Ranger major who had a career and was quite happy in it, and then he got a low-grade form of leukemia, and they just eased him out.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: They just checked a box and said, that's it, medical discharge, and left him stranded without the life that he had built around himself, and he was running a little travel agency in Manhattan, and then something happened, and I won't tell what it is, but it it triggered a change in direction, and he took up the hobby of killing people, because he was very good at killing people, and he was very, very good at planning operations.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: That was his métier as a as a ranger, a major in rangers, killing people who'd done really awful things and got away with it.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then the plot evolves from that.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now that one has absolutely nothing to do with me, but I'm really proud of it.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: I I think it uh I I wish I'd put the ebook out years ago, but I was busy writing science fiction, and I guess I just let it slide.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: So one more kill.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh I think ten bucks on Amazon.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the paperback is is a little more, but I recommend it strongly.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: I uh it's some of the best writing I've done, and it has nothing to do with my life.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: Make that clear.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, that sounds like a great book.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I I'll I'll say one more thing because I should.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: George R.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: R.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: Martin, the uh Game of Thrones guy, is a fan of my work, and he gave me a blurb for that book.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: He read it, and said I kept him up late turning pages, which was nice.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I can imagine that was a great feeling.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Matt, that leads into my last question for you perfectly.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I ask everyone the same question that comes on this podcast, and I'm always curious to know what is a book or two that has meant a lot to you personally, and what's a book that you love to recommend to others?
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: You mean ones that I've written or somebody else's?
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: It can be ones you've written or ones that you've read that that just has had an impact, or maybe you've wanted to read it over and over because you enjoyed it so much.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: Or it inspired you in some way.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, what's what's some of your favorite books?
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, the year is 1962.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: I am 13 years of age.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: My eldest brother is a science fiction reader, and he uh has a subscription to Galaxy Magazine, which came out every month.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was a great magazine, and he would leave it lying around and I would pick it up and read it.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: And one day I picked it up and I read a short novel in the entire novella, really, in the magazine, and it was called The Dragon Masters, and it was by Jack Vance, and it had an absolute riveting effect on me.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: I had never read anything like this, and for some reason it just rang deep chords in my psyche.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been reading Jack Vance ever since, and until he died.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I was flabbergasted is more of the word, but I will say I was honored when his son authorized me to write a companion novel to one of his works.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that came out about five, six years ago.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it would that was so my recommendation to people if you like science fiction, if you like fantasy, and if you like it done in a unique voice and style, then read Jack Vance.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you can start with the Dragon Masters as I did, uh, which is a perfect, you know, you can read that in about three hours, and it's uh it's a killer.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, great, great recommendation.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: And Matt, thank you again for taking the time to do this today.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we're honored to spotlight your work, excited to to read through it and share it with others, as well as see uh what you continue to work on and what you continue to publish.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so excited, like I said, to share that.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: And again, thank you so much for coming on here today.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: It means a lot.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: It means a lot to me too.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Matt.