# Please introduce yourself and your book(s)!
I am Matt Simons from the deserts of Arizona. I have written two books in my series “The End Of Earth.” With the third scheduled to be released next year.
# What inspires/inspired your creativity?
The classics that came before. I like revisiting old stories that I loved as a kid and figuring out how they worked or how they didn’t. Then trying tell the stories my way.
# How do you deal with creative block?
I walk around and ask talk to myself. But the real danger is social media the doom scroll will steal hours of my writing time.
# What are the biggest mistakes you can make in a book?
The biggest mistake I have seen is ignoring feedback. At my level everyone who reads my stories I know personally, and hearing back from them helps me close plot holes I either missed or didn’t give enough detail for.
# Do you have tips on choosing titles and covers?
Personally I like to have covers that show an important part of the story. So when the reader closes the book they get an additional emotional connection to the story.
# How do bad reviews and negative feedback affect you and how do you deal with them?
I’m fairly unknown currently not too many reviews. I got one on amazon from a family member that gave me a positive review but low stars. So that kind of confused me.
# How has your creation process improved over time?
Living in solitude allows me to have the conversations with myself to create.
# What were the best, worst and most surprising things you encountered during the entire process of completing your book(s)?
How expensive it all is. Currently working 2 jobs to be able to publish the next book.
# Do you tend towards personal satisfaction or aim to serve your readers? Do you balance the two and how?
I know the story I want to tell but I also have to give the readers what they want. For example the original plan for the series was very different but because the readers wanted to know about a certain character plans had to be altered. As a result I restarted book 2 six times.
# Do you have any creativity tricks?
I have a bad tendency to start sentences with the word “with” so I have to fix that in editing.
# What are your plans for future books?
This current series will have at least five books with a prequal novella. But I have plans for at least thirty more stories tell, if not more.
# Tell us some quirky facts about yourself
I’m a musician. I play bass in a metal band called The Ruin and as a one man band without a laptop, where I go by Nightstand Matt because I carried a nightstand really far and found out it was full of weights the next day. My music is on Spotify and everywhere else music can be found.
My books can be found on amazon under “A Battle for Tomorrow, End of Earth Book 1 and Family Obligations, End of Earth Book2.” Both have audio books on audible. As well as any other online store that sells books.