I think it is time for me to write yet another getting to know you post. To save a lot of time, I am going to sometimes point you to some posts I have already written for other blogs.
I am a man who loves to write. Even when I was a child I knew that what I wanted to do more than anything else is write. Stories, poems, essays – whatever it was I loved to write it. The fact that I was dyslexic and could not spell for toffee never even factored into my dreams.
Recently, I have started to get serious about my dreams. I have invested long hours into developing my understanding of writing and story telling. The fact that this sometimes looks like binge watching my favourite shows on Netflix is just a happy coincidence. When not justifying my love of long-running stories, I have been writing more than ever, reading when I can, and figuring out things like how to use a comma. (It turns out I actually did not know).
A few years ago I wrote a database driven app in PHP which runs on my personal computer. This app tracks stories, publications, and submissions. The idea being that selling short stories must be treated like a business.
My hope ist hat one day I will have the app in a state where I can share it with other people. Maybe as part of Author Buzz where I am a Dev?
What does Matthew write?
The first question writers often ask each other is “what do you write“. I have yet to come up with a concise answer to this question. Flippantly, I might answer “I write words” but seriously, I have no short answer.
This is the long answer.
I love fantasy and sometimes write it. I love sci-fi that is hard as nails but I also love my sci-fi soft and space opera like. There are two things that always get my attention – time travel and parallel or alternative realities. Mention both of these and no matter how badly made or niche, I am probably going to read, watch, or listen. Say no more, I am already there.
My love of stories that bend time, space, and reality is probably why I had so much fun with “that story with the cat in it“.
When I am not writing stories chock full of adventure, sometimes I just like to write stories that are about the characters. I have a story I am working on, which I might share here, which is just about a child who lives on an island with his family and reaches that point in his life when he realises that adults do not always tell the whole truth. My rule of giving myself no more than a year on a story means that I ran out of time, but I still think about that story which suggests it might be time to go back and revise it.
Be warned, I also have a fondness for tragic stories. Stories where things do not all end happily ever after. That said, I also love happy endings.
What I am trying to say is that my tastes as a writer are varied and I do not stick to one genre. Comedy, adventure, fantasy, space, time travel, childhood, tragedy, happy endings… I probably write them all.
