Interview with Matt Cost – S. 10, Ep. 16

Join crime writer Matt Cost and me, as we discuss how Matt manages to write and publish three books a year, in various series.

You can download a copy of the transcript here.

Debbi (00:00:52): Hi, everyone. Happy New Year. Today is the third of the month, so it’s still a pretty new year. Anyhow, my guest for this episode is the former owner of a video store, a mystery bookstore, and a gym. I assume that he formerly owned these. He’s also taught history and coached just about every sport imaginable, in his words. So I’m trying to imagine some sports he might not have coached. Coming to us from Brunswick, Maine, it is my pleasure to introduce my guest, Matt Cost.

(00:01:31): Hi, Matt. How are you doing today?

Matt (00:01:33): I’m fantastic, Debbi. Thank you much for having me on.

Debbi (00:01:37): Oh, it’s my pleasure. Believe me. I always enjoy talking to people about their books and stuff.

(00:01:43): So I read your guest post. My goodness, your life sounds exhausting. It sounds like you’re constantly on the go. And you write three books a year and publish them?

Matt (00:01:55): Yes. You know, I got my first book published in 2020 after a short 29 years of waiting to get it published because I wrote it in 1991, originally the first draft. So when I got that door open, I decided to just go straight for it. And so that’s kind of what I do. I write seven days a week, 365 days a year and do all the other pieces that I put with that guest post on your blog.

Debbi (00:02:24): Wow. Well, I’m impressed. I got to say, three books a year is really good, in my opinion. That’s a fantastic output.

Matt (00:02:35): The variety of things you do is pretty cool, though. You’ve got mysteries and thrillers and young adults and screenplays. So that’s all very cool.

Debbi (00:02:44): It’s very cool. It may not be remunerative, but it’s cool. I’m enjoying it, though.I do enjoy writing screenplays very much.

(00:02:54): How do you organize your workflow? Do you keep a calendar of, say, short-term deadlines, things like that?

Matt (00:03:03): Not so much. Like I said, I write every day because without writing, nothing else matters. And so I fall into a rhythm where it takes me three or four months to write a book, but then it takes me three or four months to edit a book and three or four months to market a book and then three or four months promoting a book. And I’m generally doing all four of those things at the same time for four different books.

(00:03:31): So that’s kind of how my time is managed, you know, I break it out and what I need to get done. But I always start the day with writing because none of the rest of it matters if you don’t write.

Debbi (00:03:43): Exactly. Exactly right. Yeah. And how do you manage the paperwork in terms of like, or the filing system, as it were, if it’s an online filing system of your research and stuff, because you do a lot of historical research, don’t you?

Matt (00:04:02): Yeah, I’ve done three standalone historical fiction pieces. And then I also have started a series that’s a historical PI mystery series set in 1920s Brooklyn, New York. Bushwick, not too far from Queens. And, so to answer the question, I start with a document where I’m taking notes on the research that I’m doing. Much more heavy for historical, but some of the mysteries, you know, like when I get into genome editing and my book Mouse Trap, that took a lot of research on my part to understand the science behind that, because that’s not my forte, so to speak. And so I take all of those notes and then I develop character sketches.

(00:04:52): And I usually pick a picture that corresponds with what I think, maybe some famous actor, maybe just some schmo off of the internet that fits the image of who I’m looking for. And then I create an outline, which has over time become a pretty exact science for me. It is, you know, 40 chapters long and there’s three things in each chapter and a date and a word count. And I generally don’t fill that outline in until I’ve written the chapters that it’s going into because that helps me keep the place for what has happened. So, when you ask about the filing system, that allows me to come back and say, okay what was that guy’s eye color in chapter one or much more convoluted, you know.

(00:05:49): And when I’m on Book Six, which I’m currently on Book Six of my Clay Wolfe Trap series is, you know, what was the name of that park over in this fictional town of Port Essex that I put into Book One? And so I can go back and look into those outlines and find the appropriate place and names and things. And that’s very helpful.

Debbi (00:06:11): That’s a great system for a series. And your mathematical approach to story writing reminds me a great deal of screenwriting, which is highly mathematical. You need certain things to happen by page 10, by page 15, by page 20, that sort of thing. Have you ever considered screenwriting as an option?

Matt (00:06:33): I have, you know, dabbled with turning some of my works into screenplays. But then I realized that, you know, out in Hollywood, they have 10 or 12 screenwriters that they like to use for most of the work that they do. So you perhaps had some luck with it, but I was thinking it was going to be a tougher nut to crack than even getting published. So until somebody comes along and asks me to do it, I think I’ll hold off.

Debbi (00:07:03): I was going to say that I have not had Hollywood producers pounding on my door. It doesn’t happen like that. It really does not. Yeah, you kind of have to want to do that sort of thing or have an agent that wants to explore that, something like that, or produce it yourself. You could always do that, which is every bit as hard as it sounds. Let’s put it that way. Producing.

(00:07:34): Let me see, so your different series, where did you get the inspiration for them and tell us about them. How are they different? They deal with different protagonists, correct?

Matt (00:07:52): Yeah my first mystery series was based in the town that I live in Maine, so I went with the adage of write about what you know. And so I based it in Brunswick, Maine. And interestingly enough, my private investigator, Goff Langdon, is a private eye and a mystery bookstore owner in the town of Brunswick, Maine, because neither one of them is a job worthy of paying the bills in Brunswick. Small town, Maine. But if he puts the two of them together, he’s able to make a living. And that bookstore that he owns is based on a mystery bookstore that I actually owned in the 1990s, the Copy Dog Mystery Bookshop. And it sort of had a short run in the 90s. But now it gets to live on in the pages of the book. So that’s kind of fun for me. So it’s much more successful in the book than it was in real life.

Debbi (00:08:54): Yeah. I love the idea of a mystery-solving mystery bookstore owner. I think that’s great.

Matt (00:09:01): Yeah, so that was a fun one to put together. And so then, you know, as I was thinking about coming up with another series, I decided to create a fictional town because there’s certain problems with writing about a small town that you live in, such as people coming up and saying, “Is that me?”

Debbi (00:09:21): Yeah.

Matt (00:09:23): Or similar such things. I had one terrible story with that is, an elderly lady got my phone number and called me. She must have been in her 90s. And she said she absolutely loves my books and explained where she lived in Brunswick and that some of my scenes take place in and around where she lives. And as she explained where it was, I realized that in the book I was currently writing, I had just killed somebody in her building.

Debbi (00:09:59): Oh, my gosh. Oh, dear. Oh, no.

Matt (00:10:03): And I didn’t really have the heart to say that, thinking that it was the same building.

Debbi (00:10:09): Oh, my gosh. How awkward would that be?

Matt (00:10:13): So I decided to write a series about a fictional town that I created in Maine called Port Essex, which is actually loosely based on a real town, but it gives me the liberty to change things and do things that I want. And I have that private investigator, Clay Wolfe, be a little more professional. He’s a former Boston homicide detective as opposed to a mystery bookstore owner slash PI. And so he’s a little more professional, well-dressed and worried about his looks and appearance than Goff Langdon, who’s a bit of a slacker. But I would say both those series, as well as my third series, develop a very colorful cast of characters.

(00:11:02): I’ve always liked Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen where they have just zany, fun characters. And so both Clay Wolfe and Goff Langdon have a group of friends who are a little zany, pretty colorful, a little crazy. And so I have fun with that.

Debbi (00:11:20): Oh, my God. You had me at Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, two of my favorite writers.

Matt (00:11:26): Yeah. I mean, once I got past the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and things like that, I would say that those were the two that made the biggest impact on me and maybe tempered a little bit with Robert Parker. So you put those together, that’s the vein in which I try and write because those are kind of what molded me back in the day.

Debbi (00:11:48): So cool. That is really cool. Have you ever thought of writing a nonfiction book about productivity for writers?

Matt (00:11:56): [Laughs]

Debbi (00:12:00): Time management?

Matt (00:12:03): I haven’t planned on writing that. But up till now, as writers, we do a lot of conferences. And I go on panels and things like that. And I’ve never really felt like I should teach a class on writing. But now I’m starting to come around to doing exactly what you said. Productivity for writers or as my blog is called the Evolution of a Book, because I feel like I have fine-tuned that pretty well to hit all the different aspects that you need to as an author in this day and age, which, as you well know, is not just writing a book and then going to the bank and depositing your check.

Debbi (00:12:43): Exactly. Exactly. It’s not. Standing out is harder than ever these days. What advice would you give to anyone who’s interested in writing as a career?

Matt (00:12:58): I think, you know, go with the fact that there is no magic bean. As we just mentioned, it’s not as easy as writing the book and collecting the paycheck and going out. You know, really what you have to do is you have to spend your entire day gathering a whole bunch of beans and then you grind them up. And at the end of the day, if you’re lucky, you have enough for a pot of coffee. And the next day, you can drink your coffee and do it all over again.

(00:13:37): And that’s pretty much what it is. And if you don’t love writing, researching, editing, promoting, and marketing books, you probably are in the wrong field. Because there’s a chance that you’ll make a lot of money. And there’s a chance that you’ll make a living. And there’s a good chance that neither one of those things will happen and you’ll have to be doing it for the love of the craft and just enough to scrape by.

(00:14:12): And so, you know, you have to love it. There’s no major magic bean. You just have to gather the beans and grind away at it and make a pot of coffee and then do it all over again the next day.

Debbi (00:14:25): Absolutely, yeah. It’s interesting because there is definitely routine in a writer’s life.And the idea of writing as a job is something I can fully appreciate in terms of putting in the hours, and making sure you apply your time in the best way. And I was reminded of, when you were talking just then, of Robert Crais, who spoke at Bouchercon one year and said he considered himself a blue collar writer. And I thought that’s such a great attitude. You have your little lunch bag or whatever, you sit at your computer, you do your thing for a few hours, you take a break,you do your thing some more for a few hours, and you just work at it and work at it. And it’s a job. He treated it as a job. And I thought, that’s fantastic. And it sounds like you do the same sort of thing.

Matt (00:15:21): Absolutely. You know, I think another one of my heroes, Robert Parker, treated it that way as well, as a blue-collar job. And I think that made an impact on me, for sure. And, you know, people are always talking to me about how are you so prolific? How do you write so much?

(00:15:41): And then I kind of hear how many thousands of words they write when they sit down to write, and it’s always higher output than I do. But I do it every day. I do it seven days a week. And it just dovetails into the next day. And I just keep going at it. And when I finish one book, I’m lucky to take a day off and I start writing the next one. So, you know, you’re grinding away doing the blue collar work. I like that. If that’s what you call it.

(00:16:15): And, you know, it’s not sitting at your fancy desk, you know, whipping off a book in a couple of weeks and then taking the rest of the year off to, you know, just go around signing it.

Debbi (00:16:27): Interesting. Yeah, it isn’t. What conferences do you usually attend?

Matt (00:16:34): You know, ones that I never miss are local to me, Crime Wave in Maine and Crime Bake in Massachusetts. I’ve done ThrillerFest down in New York. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to try and get down to Nashville next year for the Silver Falchion one.

Debbi (00:16:57): Cool.

Matt (00:16:59): Which is something I’d like to do. I have not yet done Bouchercon, which I would like to do sometime. And I’m not sure if I’ll get there next year or when exactly that will be.

Debbi (00:17:12): Well, one of these days, I hope to get to one of those conferences because it’s been a long time since I’ve been, since before the pandemic.

Matt (00:17:20): Do you go to Malice Domestic?

Debbi (00:17:24): I haven’t lately, but I would like to this year.

Matt (00:17:27): That’s right in your neck of the woods.

Debbi (00:17:29): It is, yeah. I always go to C3, if you’ve ever heard of that, Creatures, Crimes, and Creativity.

Matt (00:17:36): Yeah, I’ve heard of it.

Debbi (00:17:38): It’s in Columbia.

Matt: (00:17:39): Oh, it’s right in Columbia.

Debbi (00:17:40): Yeah, it’s right there. It’s like, hey, all I have to do is just drive right over there. Yeah, it’s great. So is there anything else you’d like to talk about before we finish up?

Matt (00:17:53): No, I think, oh, I think my third series, which was the impetus behind my Brooklyn 8 Ballo series was really the fact that my daughter lives in Brooklyn. She’s in Bed-Stuy. And so I said, you know, if I’m going to write, and the first step was I wanted to combine my love of histories and mysteries.

(00:18:19): So I said, well, let’s write a historical PI mystery. And then I decided to write about Brooklyn because my daughter lives there and I could go do research and visit at the same time. And so I set my PI detective in Bushwick, right next to Queens there. And I decided on the 1920s because it was such a fabulous time and place with the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age and prohibition and gangsters and everything. So all of those things get woven into my so far two book series. The first one was Velma Gone Awry and then this past summer City Gone Askew came out, and in the first pages of the first book Dorothy Parker makes an appearance. And she’s such a fabulous character that she refuses to leave the pages and she becomes a regular throughout the book, both of them, as do many other characters like Coleman Hawkins and Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky.

(00:19:27): And so and then, you know, other appearances by famous people is fun to weave into it as well. So that’s kind of my Brooklyn 8 Ballo series.

Debbi (00:19:39): Have you been to the Algonquin and the Round Table?

Matt (00:19:43): I have.

Debbi (00:19:44): It’s kind of cool. My husband and I went there once, and there was a cat that was roaming through the restaurant, and apparently it kind of came with the place. I don’t remember the name of the cat now, but I just remember there was a cat.

Matt (00:20:00): Yeah, I didn’t see the cat when I was there, but I did go in because – My first chapter, you know, 8 Ballo, my PI hops into the Algonquin Room to talk to Dorothy Parker, who’s at the Round Table with Benchley and some of those others. That starts the whole thing off.

Debbi (00:20:21): That’s fantastic. That sounds like great fun.

Matt (00:20:24): Yeah, the research is so much fun on a lot of those things. I also visited the back room of The Back Room, which is a speakeasy in lower Manhattan that has been kept exactly like it was in the 1920s, so they haven’t changed a thing. But on top of that, they’ve kept pristine a back room to this speakeasy called The Back Room, where Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky and Charlie “Lucky” Luciano planned Murder Incorporated and kind of laid the foundation for the modern day mafia.

(00:21:04): And they play parts in both of my books so far. So it was neat to get in to see that, you know, just so many different things to the historical aspects. The history of Roosevelt Island which used to be known as Damnation Island and the East River there. It’s just mind-blowing so.

Debbi (00:21:29): Fascinating. Oh, my goodness. Well, I want to thank you so much for being here and sharing all this with us because it really is fascinating. And so I appreciate your being here and waiting to get on, also.

Matt (00:21:44): Oh, it’s fantastic. And it was great talking to you. It’s always one of the best, you know, I didn’t quite get to this, but one of the best parts of the whole gig is interacting and talking with other authors. And it’s such a fantastic community, mystery writers specifically, that I’ve enmeshed myself in and have really enjoyed. So I’m very happy to be on and chatting with you.

Debbi (00:22:12): Oh, well, same here. And thank you. Because yeah, you’re right.I mean, mystery writers are just awesome people. Crime writers, mystery writers, all of us.

Matt 00:22:23): Yeah, I think we get our angst out on the pages. So we’re a little more chill.

Debbi (00:22:28): That’s what it is. Yeah, we get all that angst out on the page and don’t have to take it out on anybody else. So yeah. Again, thank you. And my thanks to everyone who is listening as well. You can get early access to the episodes ad-free if you become a supporter on Patreon or Substack, one or the other. One of these days, I’m going to decide between the two of those, maybe. Who knows what’s going to happen? I never know what’s going to happen.

(00:23:00): Anyway, you also get bonus episodes and excerpts from my work, et cetera, et cetera. In any case, our next guest on the podcast will be Melissa Yi. And in the meantime, take care, happy new year and happy reading. Be seeing you.

Matt (00:23:19): Happy New Year. Write on!

Debbi (00:23:21): Write on!

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