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Matt Doyle: Professional Writer, Author Cosplayer and Jack of All Trades.


In a world with so many creative avenues to pursue why only settle on one? Some are only drawn to one medium why others passion embodies itself in many creative ventures. Creativity holds no discrimination; talent is irrelevant when passion is roaring full storm ahead. Creating is an outlet for many and what a wonderful world it is to be able to communicate your inner intensities in more than one way. Matt Doyle is today's creative chameleon; a passionate artist, writer, cosplayer, ex-wrestler and that's just the tip of the iceberg continue below to get a further in-depth look at Matts creative world. Before we get into the Q&A be sure to check out Matt on any of his social channels.


Ano Nora: I see you write about a large variety of interests! Out of the lot which is your favorite topic to write about? Matt Doyle: It’s a bit of a cop-out, but I’m not sure that I have a set favourite. I tend to write about a large variety of subjects because I really do enjoy them all, albeit for different reasons. Interviewing authors has been an absolute blast because I’ve not only been able to dig into different subjects that they’re covering in their work, but also help them promote their projects. That’s important, I think because I know well how hard it is to get your books noticed sometimes. Then there’s my annual anime review tournament Crunchyroll of the Dice. That allows me to experience a lot of shows that I wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to see. Or there are the pieces of cryptozoology and hauntings; they’re really good because I get to really think about the origin of different phenomena and try to offer an explanation for some of them. In a narcissistic sort of way, I really get a kick doing the posts about my own projects too. I’m really proud of the work that I put out, so writing about different successes with the novels or building cosplays is great fun.


Ano Nora: I like to ask the difficult questions; what is your favorite piece of writing you've created; be it a blog post, short story or book.

Matt Doyle: That is so hard to pick! If I had to choose right now though, then I’d say Addict. It’s a novel and the first in my lesbian crime noir/sci-fi series The Cassie Tam Files. It’s my favourite for a number of reasons. For one, my previous work had been self-published, while this was my first to be sold to a professional publishing house (The LGBTQIA publishing house NineStar Press in this case). That meant having a lot more access to things like professional cover artists, multiple editors and so on. That all led to it being a much tidier book. It’s been my biggest seller, and my most reviewed title so far too. If nothing else, it’s done well enough for the publisher to sign the next two books in the series too, with the second on The Fox, The Dog and The King currently slated for a July release.


Ano Nora: That's so incredibly exciting not only to self-published but to continue and grow to become professionally published. With so many books under your belt, an active blog and plethora of interests how do you stay motivated? What do you do to combat creative block?


Matt Doyle: I know that a lot of people say to write every day, but I don’t actually subscribe to that. I have enough projects on the go at once that I can usually find the motivation to work on something most days, but I don’t pressure myself with it. If I get a block, then I try a different project. If that fails, I try to push through it. If that isn’t working, I take a break for the day. A change or powering through works in most cases, but it’s really important to listen to your body and mind and know when to take a break. Rest is important after all and helps you avoid burning out. I actually post very little over January each year as a sort of enforced rest stop to keep on top of that.

The Cassie Tam Files

Ano Nora: How long have you been writing? What life occurrence brought you into the world of storytelling? Matt Doyle: I’ve been writing for a very long time now. The first time I remember really throwing myself at it was when I was ten. We had a run of creative writing assignments in school and the first story I wrote was called Malfunction. It was about a circus comprised entirely of robot clowns that malfunctioned and started running amok. I was a mini-horror fan at the time, and it really played out in what I was writing. The second story I wrote was a werewolf one, and the third was a sequel to Malfunction.Things continued along the same lines in high school too. One of our first pieces of homework in English Literature class was to write a short story that we could read in class. My one, Dreadlocks, was about a homeless guy being chased through a city by a killer with ginger dreadlocks. The funny thing was, everyone else in the class had pretty much written one of two stories: falling in love with the handsome prince/pop star or getting scouted to play for their favourite soccer team. Mine really stood out, but it shocked the class too. It was a long time before any of them stopped looking at me like a weirdo. When I left school, I started submitting stories to websites and magazines, but I didn’t have much luck. Looking back on them, the stories were all pastiches of HP Lovecraft; not terrible, but certainly unrefined. I took a break from writing for a few years then, and when I came back to it, I’d switched to hybrid genre stories with a grounding in sci-fi. My love of things like Star Trek: TNG, Farscape, and Blade Runner really helped there. Now, I have (at time of writing) five novels and a novella out, and my short stories have appeared in a couple of different sci-fi and furry anthologies. It’s been a long journey, but I’m finally getting there. Ano Nora: You're a writer, a cosplayer, artist and ex-pro wrestler; how did you stumble upon all of your interests? Matt Doyle: At a base level, this all comes down to my life philosophy: “If you want to try something and there’s no good reason not to, go for it.”The reasons for wanting to do each do vary though. With writing, books were always a solace for me, especially when I was ill. Like, when I was eleven, if I was off school sick, I’d give my Mum my pocket money and send her down to the local store to get me the next book in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. I loved how much of an escape stories gave me, and I wanted to be able to give the same to others. So, I just kept writing.Cosplay comes down to two things. First up, I love costume making. Be it clothing modification or building mascot style fursuits from scratch, I just really enjoy getting the things built and roleplaying as the character for a convention. Second, it allows me some freedom of expression. I identify as gender-fluid and never really feel fully male or female. Most of my costumes are for female characters because it allows me to express the side of me that’s different to my birth gender in a safe and fun environment.Now, wrestling I was a big fan growing up. We had WCW on TV and our next-door neighbors used to tape the WWE (then WWF) shows for us too. I knew from a young age that I wanted to be able to go out there and do it too. A lot of us used to play wrestle at break times in school, pretending to be our favourite stars and imitating their mannerisms. When I hit my late teens, I basically started asking around about schools at local shows and ended up going to NWA-UK Hammerlock’s school back in 2001. I’d started getting into Japanese and British wrestling on top of the American companies too by then and started incorporating bits of that into my ring style. I lasted into my tenth year before injuries caught up with me and left me needing to call it a day. It’s a shame, and I still miss it, but I had a good run.

OWLS Blog Logo

Ano Nora: Blogging and writing has a large online community about it. Who are your favorite fellow creatives and how did you discover them? Matt Doyle: Oh my, there are so many! I try to keep up with a lot of different creators.Terry Pratchett was one that I followed the news on, right up until his passing. His work was and still is, a constant in my life. I’ve met a lot of really good authors through NineStar press, such as JP Jackson, EM Hamill and Rebecca Langham. Outside my publisher, horror author Brad Harmer-Barnes is wonderfully consistent with his work and well worth checking out if you like monster stories. I’ve had him on my site a few times now and he’s always fun.

When it comes to blogging, that’s a very welcoming community too. The Well-Red Mage and AmbiGaming are my usual go-to sites for video game related stuff, as they both run a lot of really interesting posts, ranging from in-depth reviews to discussion pieces. When it comes to the anime blogging community, OWLS (Otaku Warriors for Liberty and Self-Respect) has led me to a lot of great creators. Then there are the multi-subject bloggers like The Otaku Judge and Rastlin0903 too. Honestly, there is so much good stuff out there!

Ano Nora: What inspired your current ongoing project "The Cassie Tam Files"? Matt Doyle: Well, I’d just come out of writing a few books in a series called The Spark Form Chronicles. It’s a weird mix of card gaming and science fiction with some nods to pro wrestling and a touch of furry. Basically, imagine a far future world where a combat-based card game is the number one sport on TV, and the players have to use dangerous spinal implants to play at high speed while holographic anthropomorphic animals enact the battles in real time. One of the characters has a hologram that claims to be sentient too. The series had had some interest from publishers, but nothing really panned out, so I went down the self-publishing route. The thing is, it was well received by readers, so I didn’t want to just churn out book after book out in the series unless I had a good idea as to the story. It’s a rich world, and I don’t want it to stagnate.

As such, I wanted to try something different for a while but was struggling to come up with an idea that I really liked. Then it all happened by accident. I was playing BlazBlue Chronophantasma Extend online – read as getting destroyed by other players – and I just thought, “I know, I’ll write a mystery series.”Once that thought was there, I knew what sort of route I wanted to go down, so I binge watched Blade Runner, The Maltese Falcon, and L.A. Confidential and let things happen naturally. I wanted it to be a homage to crime noir but with a science fiction setting. The big thing for me was to make it so that it felt like an authentic possible future. As such, the tech stuff is actually derivative of stuff we have now, and everything in the books could potentially be real within the next fifty years or less. Meanwhile, Cassie herself just sort of wandered into my head fully formed and told me outright that the book was about her now. I didn’t want to argue, so I went with it. I already knew that I wanted to write a Chinese-Canadian lead, and she’s a wonderfully complex character, so she’s been fun to work with. Ano Nora: As a published writer; what advice would you give someone who has dreams of writing and sharing their stories? Matt Doyle: There’s a lot of advice out there, and not all of it will work for you. Listen and learn, but don’t be afraid to cast ideas aside if they simply don’t fit with you. That’s particularly important with genre conventions I think. There are successful story types that you can work with, but don’t be afraid to experiment and tell yourstory. Don’t aim to write the next x, aim for the first y.

Ano Nora: Life is filled with mistakes and bad days, happiness isn't around every corner of the waking day. What has been the most difficult experience you've overcome in the pursuit of your passions? Matt Doyle: I’m lucky, in some respects. I tend to look at life with the filter of “Success is relative.” By that, I mean that I always aim for the stars, but I’m aware that not everyone will always get there. Take the wrestling for example; I wanted to be the next big thing, but I wasn’t. Does that mean I failed? No. I worked for ten years as a wrestler, manager, referee, and ring announcer. I ran shows, trained people, and worked with some of the best in the world. I may not have made a living out of it, but I did a lot more than those that simply never tried. That’s a success in my eyes. No, passion pursuits themselves don’t usually cause me too much grief. Real life outside the fun stuff can sometimes get in the way through. Like, I got made redundant from my day job of fourteen years. That was not only a shock to the system but also left me in a position where I needed to be sure we could fund not only my projects but more importantly, carrying on living. Things worked out in the end, but that was rough. The thing is, we all stumble and fall sometimes. I’ve seen rock bottom, and I’ve crawled back out of the hole. That’s the key. Don’t let the bad stuff keep you grounded, push through it when you feel like you can.


Ano Nora: Manga VS Anime; a hot topic indeed. Which anime do you feel did better than the manga material? Matt Doyle: It all comes down to what you want from your storytelling, of course, but I do find it rare for the anime to do it better. A lot of people don’t realize how many changes need to be made when converting the written word to something visual. Even with manga having the cross-over of having graphical content too, some things still work better one way or the other.

Let’s see though. I would say that Attack on Titan is the most mainstream case for me. I actually avoided the series for a long time because I found the hype overwhelming and was expecting it to be disappointing. If I’m being honest, the premise sounded a bit meh to me. When I did start watching though, I loved it. So, I checked out the manga too. I think that what happened was a combination of things. The anime mixed the running order of the story up a bit, and that resulted in it feeling better paced. The art was more consistent in the anime too, though that’s not to say that the manga was entirely bad; the artist was great at detailing on character like the Female Titan, but the anime did a better job with the humans, especially when it came to facial expressions. Plus, all that action just looks so impressive in motion.

I had a similar thing with Flying Witch in that I thought that the anime did a really good job with some of the more subtle artistic touches that elevated it above the source material. Unlike Attack on Titan though, I’m still collecting the Flying Witch manga as it really struck a chord with me as a story.

 

I admire Matts continuing perseverance and dedication to his crafts and appreciate his creativity as a fellow creative. I know there are moments of dry spots and self-doubt but as Matt see fight the norm be you "Don’t aim to be the next x, aim for the first y!". Thank you for sharing your story with me and all the readers!


-Ano Nora

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