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This episode of the Crime Cafe features my interview with crime writer and award-winning author

Join us as we discuss her thriller series, as well as her works in other genres.

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Make sure you check out !

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This week’s guest post and giveaway comes from . She’ll be our next guest on the Crime Cafe podcast.

As part the giveaway, I’m adding in a free digital copy of my first Erica Jensen mystery, . (It was nominated for a , you know. Oh, you ? 🙂 )

To enter the contest, just follow the directions below.

Melissa’s giving away a gift basket!

Sugar and Vice (Hope’s Seven Deadly Sins 2: Gluttony) ebookSugar and Vice (Hope’s Seven Deadly Sins 2: Gluttony) signed paperbackThe Red Rock Killer, an award-winning YA mystery ebookPlus a recipe ebook that includes seven fiery recipes related to the sin of wrath!

Giveaway rules

Email olobooks[at]gmail[dot]comYou have to remove the [dot] and turn [at] into @That’s the hardest partPlease mention if you’re willing to join Melissa’s mailing listOne lucky winner will receive a gift basket!

opening

I’ve always known that if someone wants to murder me, the easiest way is through my stomach.

I just hadn’t expected anyone to kill me today.

My grandfather jokes that Chinese people, especially Cantonese ones like him, will eat anything with legs except a table, and anything that flies except an airplane. I’m a bit more squeamish after the whole born-and-raised-in-Canada thing, but don’t step between me and my plate.

I may not be a jacked woman like some of these dragon boaters, but I am a doctor. I know how to use a knife.

Just kidding about the knife. Sort of.

Yesterday’s text convo with Tori had set me on edge:

Tori

You have to come to Dragon Eats

Me

Why?

Tori

Someone’s going to die

My mom told me I could do whatever I wanted the whole summer I turned fourteen, so I decided to find the Red Rock Killer.

Let me back up. I sure hadn’t expected to find death the morning that me and my two best friends hiked the Red Rock Canyon, a conservation area 15 miles west of Las Vegas.

That Saturday morning, Callie Yang woke up me and Barstow right after rolling up her sleeping bag. “Let’s do Red Rock! Please.��

“No thanks, Cal. I downloaded a new game on Steam, and Edan wants to play Terraria.�� Barstow Ness glanced at me for support while he hooked his glasses back behind his ears.

Now, I am NOT a hiker. I read, I game, I dance/flail with 1 Million Dance Studio’s online tutorials, and I research the Civil War for fun. In other words, I run away from fresh air and trees.

“‘We need the tonic of wildness,'�� said Callie, wrapping her silky black hair in a bun. She’s a swimmer and likes running 5K’s for fun and crap like that.

I gave her the side eye, even though it’s hard to get mad at her when she looks like a ballerina with more shoulder muscles. “Is that a Mr. Carver quote?�� Our history teacher writes a quote on the blackboard every day, using real chalk. He’s old school.

“No. I read it myself. It’s Henry David Thoreau.��

Barstow and I both raised our eyebrows at her.

“Okay, I read it on ŷ������. So what? It’s still true. I hate being cooped up in school all week and then gaming with you two all weekend. It’s my birthday in nine days. I need to get out with my Garden of Eden and my Barstonia.��

I groaned. My name is Edan Sze. Edan is Celtic for fire, which Mom says is perfect for a baby born in the desert.

It’s pronounced Eden, as in the Garden of. Since Sze sounds a bit like the letter Z, a few kids call me E-Z. Whatever works.

Callie had invoked the birthday rule. The birthday girl or boy gets to choose what we do on the big day. So we all got suited up for Red Rock, which meant sunscreen, socks, and running shoes.

And that was how we first got mixed up with the Red Rock Killer.

___

Melissa Yi is an emergency physician and author whose heroine, resident Dr. Hope Sze, leaps from fixing ingrown toenails to solving full-blown murders while facing the seven deadly sins, most recently gluttony (Sugar and Vice), with sloth next (Killing Me Sloth-LY). Hope’s cousin, Edan, fights crime in Las Vegas. Melissa won the 2023 Derringer Award for the best short mystery in the English language and the Prix Aurora Award for the best speculative poem in Canada. Melissa also loves dogs and snowflakes. Please join her mailing list at and for a free gift, or say hi on social media at .

PS: FWIW, I’m also on . All ��the . 🙂

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

You can download .

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 �徱���’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 �徱���’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 �徱���’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!

If you enjoy the podcast, I hope you’ll consider lending your support on .

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Hi, today I’m reviewing the book by . Yeah, I have read all of this series: Money Shot, Choke Hold, I think it was called, and The Get Off and really, really enjoyed all those books. I’m a huge fan of Christa Faust and I love Hard Case Crime books in general. They’re awesome, but I read it in my Kobo and I highly recommend it.

��

Angel Dare is not only in a situation in which she’s accused of killing a cop, but she’s pregnant and boy, the descriptions are just visceral of that. I’m trying to imagine going through all that this character goes through while being pregnant and it is just—ahhh!—but it’s very well written, as always.

She’s just a wonderful writer and her main character, Angel Dare, has always been one that I loved. So if you enjoy smart talking, action-oriented women protagonists, this is the book for you. I mean, great stuff all around, and again, I highly recommend it.

I love Christa Faust’s work, period. And with that, I will just conclude, except to say check it out, do check it out. Five Stars Plus. And I will talk to you later. Be seeing you!

You can pre-order or buy the ebook from either of

You can also find it in print in and support indie bookstores:

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Our next guest on the Crime Cafe is crime writer . Check out our discussion about his process for writing and publishing three books a year, in multiple series.

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For bonus episodes and more, support us on .

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Our guest on the next Crime Cafe episode will be . Go to his website (click on that link there), hit “blog��, and prepare to have your mind blown.

Matt’s provided this week’s guest post and giveaway. The first one of the new year! We’re off to a good start, for sure.

I’ll let Matt take it from here. Happy new year!

The Evolution of a Book By: Matt Cost

My PR firm, Books Forward, hooked me up for this blog with Debbi Mack back in March of 2023. Since then, I have published five books. Velma Gone Awry was the first in my Brooklyn 8 Ballo series, Mainely Wicked was the fifth in my Mainely Mystery series, Pirate Trap was the fifth in my Clay Wolfe Trap series, City Gone Askew was the second in my Brooklyn 8 Ballo series, and Mainely Mayhem was the sixth in my Mainely Mystery series.

In 2025, I will publish the first in my new Max Creed thriller series, the sixth in my Clay Wolfe Trap series, and the first in my Jazz Jones 1950s Raleigh series.

What follows is my secret for researching, writing, editing, marketing, and promoting three books a year for publication.

THE EVOLUTION OF A BOOK is a complicated journey through time that takes many a turn and twist but at the same time follows a basic model. Mainely Mayhem, my latest published book this past November, has followed all these stages in its evolution.

It starts with an idea. What is the book going to be about? Often, for me, this is something gleaned from the news or something that I have read. What if there were a problem at a nuclear power plant? What if heroin was being smuggled through lobster traps? These ideas can range from cults to ice storms to genome editing to powerful lobbyists to unexplained aerial phenomena to an epidemic. Or, in the case of Mainely Mayhem, the corruption and power associated with nominating and placing a man on the most powerful Bench in the world.

In Velma Gone Awry, my idea germinated with the thought that I desired to combine my love of history and mystery between the front and back cover of a novel. I decided that I wanted to write a historical PI mystery set in the past. Where? I decided that Brooklyn, New York, was a fabulous place to set this novel. It �徱���’t take me much longer to realize that the Roaring ��20s was absolutely great fodder that was rich in material.

Once the idea is generated, the next step is to begin the research. Straight up historical fiction requires a great deal of delving into the topic at hand, whether it be about Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, Joshua Chamberlain and the Civil War, or New Orleans during the period of Reconstruction. To me, this is fascinating material that is exhilarating to dive into and toss around and learn more about. I have taken this love of digging into topics with my contemporary mysteries on the above-mentioned topics. Nuclear power, Big Pharma, Scientology, and what is in the sky above us?

Sometimes this research takes you places that are engaging and intriguing. Cuba. Civil War battlefields. New York. Brooklyn. New Orleans. More often, this research finds you poring through books and scrolling through your computer screen.

For Velma Gone Awry, it was a mixture of these two ideas; getting the time period correct regarding people, events, slang, as well as the topics of the day. The most fascinating research method that I used to accomplish this was to read the Brooklyn Eagle for every day for the entire year of 1923. Just 100 years later. The articles, events, and listings for what was happening was all great information, but it was the advertisements for everything from automobiles to fashion that was perhaps the greatest contributor to this research.

And then you write. I write every day. Sometimes just a bit, often more, and occasionally the words will spill from my keyboard like the rain during monsoon season. I might miss nine or ten days of writing all year long. Without writing, the rest of the evolution is pointless.

I also keep an outline where I will fill out tidbits of thoughts that will happen at certain times in the book. My basic philosophy is that something substantial must happen every 12.5% of the book. I shoot for 80,000 words on the first draft, knowing I will add another eight thousand with edits, so every ten thousand words something must go down. Shit must happen.

As I write, I continue to constantly do research, especially in a historical such as Velma Gone Awry where I need to fit appropriate slang in, fact check that refrigerators existed, or some other factoid of the time. Often, my best writing times are taking a solitary hot tub, walking the dogs, or driving. This is when I put the pieces together for the next segment of writing, so that when I sit down at the computer, it is a race to see if it can keep up with my fingers. I haven’t won yet.

The editing phase can be a frustrating exercise in painting the exterior trim to make the novel shine. The stages of editing for me include at least two passes of my own, three by a professional editor I pay, and then at least two more by the publisher. In a recent book, Mainely Wicked, my wife, after those seven edits had been done, found a major mistake in the ARC. A character who had been abducted was present for the planning session on how to saver herself. Whoops. Glad it was caught.

The book is done. Now it must be marketed. ARCs sent out for review, queries for interview, guest blog appearances, podcasts, radio, and most recently for me, Tubi TV (whatever that is). This is followed by promotions. The appearance of the author at events such as bookstore signings, readings, library presentations, and the culmination of that groundwork preparing for interviews in all sorts of various mediums.

My mornings are devoted to writing. I am only writing one new book at a time. In the afternoon, I am doing a variety of things. I am usually editing at least one book, some times as many as three. I will be marketing the release of then next upcoming book release and out promoting doing COST TALKS, podcasts, interviews, and whatnot for the most recent publication. And always, thinking about new ideas and researching new books.

The evolution of a book passes through the stages of idea, research, writing, editing, marketing, and promoting. And then what do we do? Write on.

How to Enter My Giveaway. Simple.

Go to and peruse my books. There are currently sixteen titles.Pick one that looks interesting to you.Email me the title at [email protected]I will enter the names in a hat, draw a winner, and reach out to you for your address.Easy peasy.

Matt Cost has owned a video store, a mystery bookstore, and a gym. He has also taught history and coached just about every sport imaginable.

During those years, since age eight actually, the true passion has been writing. I Am Cuba: Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution (Encircle Publications, March 2020) was his first traditionally published novel.

Cost has now written six books in the Mainely Mystery series starting with Mainely Power, five books in the Clay Wolfe Trap series starting with Wolfe Trap, and two books in the Brooklyn 8 Ballo series starting with Velma Gone Awry. A few historical fiction pieces fill out the shelves.

Cost now lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. He now spends his days at the computer, writing.

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I don’t know about you, but I’m all in for something new and different this year. Like maybe making money as a writer. Hmm �� ? 🙂

I suppose that’s still possible. However, I’ve been working on a long-term project. And that project is me.

Let’s start with the stroke I had about 20 years ago, from which I thought i’d completely recovered, but hadn’t.

About five or six months after the stroke, I developed a rather irritating and constant clenching in my left hand and foot. This was diagnosed, in rather short order, as dystonia. As a result, I have been receiving what has become the standard recognized treatment for dystonia, which in my case (and every case is different and affects the body differently) consisted of Botox shots in my arm, leg, hand, and the bottom of my foot (which is so painful, the first time I got one, I thought I’d levitate off the table to get away from that needle—I did not succeed).

I was getting some benefit from this, but not complete benefit. Also, it was not “fixing�� the problem, which originates in the brain. What I needed was to retrain my brain in a way that would engage all my muscles correctly. This just wasn’t happening.

About a year ago, I started engaging in physical and occupational therapy that’s had more effect on me in the past year than I’ve seen in the last twenty.

This video ended up being is about that journey.

So long, 2024! Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.

And, let’s hear it for 2025! 🙂

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PS: Have I got for you! 🙂

And now for ! 🙂

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The Crime Cafe once again is pleased to bring another episode from the annals of radio! Yes, a radio program. With one of my favorite protagonists–Philip Marlowe!

Bogie as Sam Spade!

He was also great as Philip Marlowe!

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Also, check out from . 🙂 Get it? Ha!

And for your holiday viewing pleasure, one of my other favorite Philip Marlowes!

was awesome!

I even did .

So, I just had to include him in this, �徱���’t I? 🙂

��Happy Noir New Year! 🙂

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In this episode,����and����discuss the film noir�� from 1948.

Debbi a bit better, and F.R. Jameson explains what actually is!

It’s not like the . 🙂

Get ready for 2025!

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This episode of the Crime Cafe features another fun episode from The Adventures of Philip Marlowe provided by the fine folks at Old Time Radio.

This one’s called “The Long Rope.�� And, no, the rope in question doesn’t have a noose at the end! 🙂

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Enjoy and happy holidays!

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