Welcome to my weekly Author Spotlight. I’ve asked a bunch of my author friends to answer a set of interview questions, and to share their latest work.
Today: Matthew Phillion is the author of the Indestructibles, a YA superhero novel series, its spinoff Echo and the Sea, and the Dungeon Crawlers novella series. He is a member of the Salem Athenaeum’s writers committee and was the lead writer for the opioid awareness education stage play Stories of Substance. A former filmmaker, Matthew wrote and directed the feature film Certainly Never, an indie romantic dramedy, and is a journalist and writer with a background in healthcare quality and cybersecurity.
Thanks so much, Matthew, for joining me!
J. Scott Coatsworth: Do you read your book reviews? How do you deal with bad or good ones?
Matthew Phillion: Not anymore. I’m an anxious person; if a review hits me the wrong way it can screw up my writing groove for days. The best advice I got was very early on from a veteran author with my first publisher: reviews are for the readers, not for the writers. You need feedback and you need people to call you on your flaws, but those don’t come from reviews. Reviews are opinions and great ways to get the word out about your book, but they also happen after everything is set in stone and done. I do sometimes ask someone to tell me if a review will upset me or not and if they tell me it’ll inspire me or make me joyful, I might check it out, but even then I worry about the mental impact.
JSC: How long on average does it take you to write a book?
MP: If I’m really focused, I can write a 75k – 100k word novel in 90 days. My partner says she becomes a writer’s widow during that time frame – I buckle down at night and will write from like 8 p.m. to 2 or 3 a.m., which is just when my brain works best, and hammer out a first draft pretty quickly. But I also pre-write a LOT. I’ll daydream for weeks or months, run dialogue in my head, create extensive outlines all so I can try to get it as right as I can on the first draft. I don’t pants at all but rather plot with the openness to things changing. I’m never set in stone, but I always have a plan.
JSC: Why did you choose to write in your particular field or genre? If you write more than one, how do you balance them?
MP: True story: before writing the INDESTRUCTIBLES, I wrote romantic comedies and ultra low budget indie films. I loved it, but I wasn’t making money off of the scripts. I decided I wanted my next project to be something that, if it failed, there wouldn’t be a cast and crew who were also disappointed. I wanted all the weight on me. And I also thought, after a decade of writing to low budget constraints: what is the opposite of low budget? Superheroes. I grew up a superhero kid. I wanted to be a comic book writer when I was a teenager. So this was really a return to my roots but also an experiment to try to do the opposite of what I’d been doing in film.
JSC: What is the most heartfelt thing a reader has said to you?
MP: God, I have had so many shockingly beautiful moments with readers. Folks showing up in cosplay always blows my mind. There’s one that is deeply personal and I don’t feel like I can share it here – I hold that story like a treasure – but the one that I can say because it brings me joy every time I think about it was when a pair of readers invited me to their wedding. We’d met at a comic con and ended up chatting about the books and geek culture a bit online. Then I got this beautiful invitation to their wedding, a magically geek-tastic affair with themes of books and superheroes and science fiction. I wasn’t sure if I should accept or not – was it a courtesy invite? I didn’t know – but my partner and I attended and the groom threw his arms around me when he saw I was there, said “how many people can say their favorite author was at their wedding?” It was one of those magical moments where I think my being there made him really happy but they, by inviting me, made me feel like I’d created something that really did bring someone joy in their lives.
JSC: What was the most valuable piece of advice you’ve had from an editor?
MP: Oh, this is my favorite question. This wasn’t from a book editor, but it has served me well in every type of writing ever since I heard it. My first editor, at a local newspaper where I was a reporter, told me my first week on the job: DONE IS GOOD. He was on deadline and he just needed something to print. He wasn’t looking for perfection. He was looking for efficiency. And to this day, any time I’m struggling with writing, I say to myself: Done is good. Next time you can be even better, but if you can FINISH something, you are lightyears ahead of your competition as a writer. Done is good. Finish the story. Get a draft out. You can fix it later. Don’t get bogged down in the minutiae.
JSC: Name the book you like most among all you’ve written, and tell us why.
MP: I mean, as writers we love all our books, but DOC SIILENCE: THE COST OF MAGIC is my favorite. It’s the story I most wanted to tell and touches on every genre I want to write about, not just superhero stories but dark modern fantasy, noir, romance, coming of age. I was a short story writer before I was a novelist and I love the cadence of a gentle, beautiful short piece, and THE COST OF MAGIC is really an anthology of vignettes masquerading as a novel. It’s a life story about someone who gives up his name, his identity, and has to forge something out of the pieces that remain. It’s the only book I’ve written I struggle to read out loud at events because I make myself cry. When it was published, I said: I got the one book out of my heart I needed to before I shuffle off this mortal coil. Everything else from here is for joy. If I hadn’t written this book, I would have felt incomplete.
JSC: What are some day jobs that you have held? If any of them impacted your writing, share an example.
MP: I’m lucky in that most of my day jobs have been about writing. They’ve all had an impact on my fiction. Being a journalist is probably the main one – learning how to tell stories, to dig into facts, to become an expert in something new every day. But writing about healthcare has provided me with a deep understanding of one of the most important parts of our society; writing about cybersecurity helped me understand technology and made me a better science fiction writer (knowing real science helps when you’re making things up!). I’ve worked for city government and truly, local government? Those people are doing the best work, looking out for their community every day so everything stays afloat. But you can take something away from every job, honestly. My first job was working in a pizza joint and I still tell stories about that place. Everywhere you go leaves a mark.
JSC: What qualities do you and your characters share? How much are you like them, or how different are they from you?
MP: This is going to sound morbid, but I write a lot of characters with no sense of self preservation. They care about the well-being of others to an absolutely self-destructive degree, and that’s me. Worrying about the world keeps me up at night all the time, and the reason I write superheroes is because they can actually DO something about it all. They’re my wish fulfillment. We differ in that they have more hope than I do – I pile all my hope in the world into these characters. I’m deeply cynical, and deeply angry at the world for not being better than it should be. So I write hopepunk superhero kids who refuse the cynical, selfish choice because they can.
JSC: What’s your favorite line from any movie?
MP: Oh this is a tough one. But y’know what? I think I know exactly the one. Remember THE STING? Redford and Newman? I mean it’s a perfect movie, but there’s this one line. Robert Redford is talking with this woman, Loretta, at her door, trying to get her to join him. She says “I don’t even know you,” and Redford’s character, lonely and scared, says: “You know me. I’m just like you. It’s two in the morning and I don’t know nobody.” I saw it as a teenager and it struck me as profoundly sad and I never forgot it. Probably showing my age, but when I learned that Bob Seger wrote “We’ve Got Tonite” based on that same scene it hit me even harder. We’ve all been somewhere at two a.m. and didn’t know nobody. Haven’t we?
(Of course if I were to be less melancholy, I’d use a different Redford and Newman movie for this answer. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. “Can’t swim? Why you crazy… The fall will probably kill you!”
JSC: What are you working on now, and what’s coming out next? Tell us about it!
MP: I’m working on the next two novellas in the Dungeon Crawlers series (I release the novellas in this series digitally first, then collected editions in paperback a little later.) We left off on a cliffhanger and I have promised we’ll get Books 6 and 7 out by early 2025. The books are Dungeons & Dragons meets Jumanji with a group of young adults trapped in a tabletop game, who quickly realize they like the fictional world they’re living in better than the mundane one they left. But they’ve recently discovered the game world is crumbling and only they can save it, and these next two novellas set up how they’re going to do that.
I’m also working on a side project, my first truly adult novel. I call it a Gen-X low fantasy novel – a group of middle-aged adventurers learn that all the heroic stuff they did a young people was actually harmful to the world and they decide to go on one last adventure to try to undo some of their past mistakes. I’ve spent ten years writing young characters; I’m having a grand time writing old grumps like me.
And now for Matthew’s superhero series: The Indestructibles:
The Indestructibles is an ongoing series of YA superhero novels following a team of young heroes as they stumble their way through leaving the world better than they found it. With five books in the main series, the Indestructibles also features a prequel, Doc Silence: The Cost of Magic, about the rise of the team’s mentor growing up around the horrors of dark magic, and most recently Tales from the Indestructiverse, an anthology of short stories set in the same world. The setting also includes a spinoff series, Echo and the Sea and its prequel Posiedon’s Scar, and the Dungeon Crawlers, following a group of ordinary people who find themselves trapped inside a living, breathing TTRPG.