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 write