city girl drinking craft beer

This is a first for me, a blog interview. Matthew Cory, author of Like Glass and the upcoming sequel, Shattered agreed to be a ‘guinea pig’ for my first interview.

Bella: How long have you been writing and why did you decide to publish your work?

Matthew Cory: I’ve been writing off and on for as long as I can remember. It was in the summer of 2006 that I started seriously picking it up seriously though. I was speaking with my dad on the phone one day, and he’d found some of my old short stories and poems. He said something along the lines of “These are pretty good; you ought to try and get back into it.” So I wrote a few short stories, fell madly in love with writing, and wrote Like Glass later that year. As far as publishing goes, it just seemed to be the natural progression, the next step to try once I finished writing a story.

Bella: How did you come up with the idea for your book, “Like Glass“?

Matthew Cory: It actually started off as a kind of fantasy/super-natural thriller, believe it or not. I had an idea for a series of short stories, where an “angel of Death” was in training, and each of the different stories was going to be a lesson for her. One of the stories involved a guy dying, and no one really liked him. Eventually, all the super-natural stuff got dropped, the moral lesson forgotten, and it ended up only being the guy’s brother that didn’t like him.

Bella: I know you have written in your blog about your depression, in what ways does this affect your writing, character development, meeting deadlines etc.

Matthew Cory: Thankfully, I set my own deadlines, so it doesn’t affect them too much. That’s not to say it doesn’t affect them at all; I still try and set some kind of goals for myself, and when the depression hits hardcore, it’s difficult to focus enough to work on the project. As for the tone of the writing and the characters, it probably tends to make them a little darker than if I didn’t have to deal with it. I had one reviewer think that Like Glass was rather unbelievable because of how many things go wrong for Rob and the others; my depression probably caused Rob a lot more trouble than he’d go through if a “normal” writer had grabbed his story before I did.

Bella: If you knew when you started the writing and publishing of a book how much work is involved, do you think you would have still done it?

Matthew Cory: I’d like to say I would have, but I think I know myself a little too well for that. I probably wouldn’t have, or at least I wouldn’t have tried to get published. Now that I’ve kinda buried myself up to the neck in it because of that previous naivete though, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. Most of it’s pretty simple, just a matter of doing it — editing, cover design, etc. — and I’ve wised up on that and recruited a couple of people who were nice enough to help out on those fronts.

Bella: Do you have a favorite author? If you do, who is it and has this author influenced your writing style?

Matthew Cory: Oh, Stephen King, hands down. I love his conversational style, like you’re sitting there hanging out and just talking with someone over a beer or something. I’ve tried to emulate that to some degree in my works; I’m not brave enough to say I’ve succeeded though 😉

Bella: I have to tell you, Stephen King kind of scares me, I saw an interview with him, the interviewer asked if he ever had any kind of therapy, he said, “No, I write about what scares and bothers me and let other people have the nightmares, and I sleep at night.” or words to that effect, it made me wonder, since depression is sometimes treated with a combination of talk therapy and medication, does your writing have any kind of a therapeutic effect on your depression?

Matthew Cory: In some ways, it definitely helps. I mean, when I wrote Shattered, I’d just come out of a really bad spot (in fact, more of Shattered than I’d care to admit comes from personal research and experience). It helped to kinda draw that chapter of my own life to a close to some degree. It got me to really focus on what had been driving me crazy for a while and get it out of my system. Now that I’ve written about it, it’s almost like I need to focus my energy on something else in life in order to have a “book #3”. Book #3 can’t be about addiction, or alcoholism, or suicide. I’m actually wanting it to be a bit of a “happy” book, and it’s going to take a bit more concentration to pull that together. That should be therapeutic, whether the actual writing is or not.

Bella: What is your favorite type of book and/or what are your favorite books?

Matthew Cory: Mostly I read sci-fi, supernatural kinda stuff — like King, Orson Scott Card, Stephanie Meyer (not just Twilight either — The Host is a killer novel). Right now I’m re-reading Idlewild by Nick Sagan for about the third time. That’s one of my bad habits — I don’t read a lot of new stuff, but I’ll re-read books I love twenty times.

Thanks for the interview Bella; it was a lot of fun 🙂

Bella: Thanks for your time in answering my questions, I was pretty nervous about this.

For more information on Matthew Cory, and to read some excerpts from his books, click on this link to go to his website.