About

From Physics to Fiction

Most people that knew Matt would bet that he’d would become any one of three things—an artist, an architect, or a professional athlete.

After first grade, a learning disability kept him from moving on to second grade.

He was placed in a lot of remedial math and English classes.

Being in remedial classes felt like punishment. The smart or normal kids were in a classroom directly across the hall, taking pre-algebra, and he wished he could be with them.

Matt wanted to feel smart and wanted everyone to think he was smart.

Once he got to high school, he never told anyone how he felt, not even his parents. No one stopped him, so, he sighed up for classes like physics and chemistry.

It seemed in high school, though he was destined to be an artist. After all, he could draw like the best of them—Da Vinci, Michelangelo.

In high school, his grades in physics and chemistry soured. He almost flunked Algebra if it were not for at least turning in homework; the second time around in algebra was a different story. Everything suddenly clicked, giving Matt hope.

In art, though his grades soared.

But, his junior year of high school, his teacher confronted him with the assignment of making color charts, but color and charts did not rub off on him. His art stalled out at drawing, but that wasn’t the only reason. Matt was afraid of artist. They were weird, spooky, freaky, gay.

He graduated in the middle of his class at no. 32.

When Matt wasn’t in school, he was playing baseball and football with his friends in the backyard and basketball on the neighborhood driveways circuit.

In baseball, he played center field and batted clean up. He could hit home runs almost at will, over whatever row of trees or into any open field he wished, and hardly ever struck out and. He even caught a few fly balls behind his back.

In basketball, he played the shooting guard position with a deadly three-point shot of almost unlimited, unguardable range.

In football, he played the wide receiver position.

But baseball and football in the backyard, and basketball in the driveway didn’t translate too well to high school sports. Stage freight stole any chance of a sports scholarship of any kind.

In college, drafted by his father, he got off to a terrible start! Although his father suggested he study architectural engineering. He still fixated on becoming a physicist.

To put it mildly, he was not the model student but more like a lost student.

In 1987, YSU was one of the few colleges still on the quarter system. The third time wasn’t the charm. Matt flunked out after three quarters.

But, life without college did not last too long. Matt reluctantly returned to a junior college for his girlfriend but still fixated on physics. After graduating he wanted to design high-end speaker enclosures for homes, but numbers requiring scientific calculators still numbed his mind.

Because Matt had scored low on the college entrance exam, Matt was placed in in course called Preparatory English or Prep English, but Prep English, as hip as it sounded, did not sound any better. The worse part of it was it did not even count as credited courses or toward his English requirements. You either passed it, or failed it.

He had some success in College Math I.

Matt remembered being assigned to write one paragraph—apparently a five-paragraph essay was too much for students in Prep English.

For the assignment, he wrote a story called The Jocular Glasses—showing off with the spelling bee word Jocular. He wrote about a family vacation in Canada. During the trip, they passed a man on a bicycle. He had a rear-view mirror attached to his glasses. The contraption that it was looked hilarious!

Writing that assignment, Matt found himself. He found writing. He got an A on that assignment—and all other assignments in that class. As he famously says, he gladly traded his scientific calculator in for a manual typewriter and hasn’t stopped writing since.

He remembered the week before the final. His instructor approached him after class with good news: Not only had she informed that he didn’t have to come for the final—he would have still gotten an A—on behave of the college she told him that he didn’t have to be in that class. The news did not make him feel any better.

If that wasn’t bad enough.

One night, he had come home from work and found a Dear John letter left on his pillow.

Then months later on a very white wintry morning, snow falling heavily, his now ex-girlfriend called. he thought that maybe she called to say she wanted to get back together, but the call was for his sister. his ex had just bought a new car and wanted to ask his sister if she wanted to go for a ride in it.

As miserable as he was, he had writing.

He fled to the basement.

In the basement, on his father's Royal Safari manual typewriter, he began writing away the pain of a broken heart through a short story.

Although Matt never completed the short story ASATAL, which was an acronym for A Story About Telepathy and Love, that is when, he believe, he came of age as a writer.

Although in the beginning, he wrote a lot of stories that went nowhere—false starts as the late Paul Auster called them—he became a freight train of a writer!

To focus on writing The Great American Novel, he dropped out of junior college.

In 1993, he landed his first official writing job as a reporter for The Wolf Traxx Monthly. It was a paper published by WNCD 106 The Wolf, a rock station in Niles, Ohio. He worked there until 1994 when the paper went out of circulation.

On a wing and a prayer and armed without a college degree in the Summer of 1997, he moved down to Charleston, SC. There, he hoped to become a reporter for the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper The Post & Courier.

All hope was not lost.

Matt believes that you’ve got to find the humor in everything. He also learned that it took very little to get his imagination going.

Matt returned home late that summer and wrote what he called The Great American Novella—Condo Joe. The Morris Island Lighthouse, a landmark on Folly Beach, inspired the novella.

He began thinking that writing fiction was his true north. He returned to college with direction and focus. In 2000, he graduated with a smart bomb of a degree in general studies.

By 2004, he wrote two more novellas, thrillers—Jamaican Moon and Bad Blood. They along with Condo Joe were published as a collection called Three by the Sea by a Print-On-Demand publisher.

The first review was in by a dear friend of mine, Rita, from Trinidad, and it was a review that any first-time author could only hope for:

I couldn’t wait any longer, so I bought the book off the Internet—cost me a big $18, shipping, etc., but it was worth every penny. A good book, kept my interest to the end.

Rita thought he ought to be writing for TV, but for Matt, it was write the Great American Novel or nothing!

he wrote several more novellas—Girl in a Drenched Prom Dress, Dose of Her Own Medicine, The Hula Girl’s Son, Seaweed, and The Flip,

He applied to the Institute of Children's Literature. Writing an essay was part of the application process. he wrote an essay called The Unusual Gift about as a child having been given a unicycle as a Christmas gift.

He was accepted. I studied under the author Stephen Roos. He graduated in eighteen months and wrote two children's books—Finny the Friendly Shark and Timmy the Timid Dolphin—both published.

In 2008, he thought he'd try writing something completely different—a spec screenplay.

That screenplay became Forbidden. he wrote another feature spec This Ain’t No Vacation, Sweetheart.

Attending a local English Festival, he was formally introduced to Karl Kurlander (co-writer of St. Elmo's Fire). he told him that I had written a couple of screenplays. He suggested that he send a script in for script coverage. he sent in This Ain’t No Vacation, Sweetheart, and in a week was served up a PASS.

He bought the book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field and re-wrote the script. After several rewrites the script earned a CONSIDER.

During this time he had been been on a book tour with Books Are Fun where he sold and signed copies of Finny the Friendly Shark and Timmy the Timid Dolphin. Finny the Friendly Shark became the third feature spec script he'd write, which after a re-write or two also earned a CONSIDER.

Between 2008 and 2015, he wrote forty-some feature spec scripts and a for-hire an action-adventure feature script 2 Days to Die.

In 2016, he wrote a series of romantic sports novellas—A Better Idea, Everything! He also wrote a collection of short stories, Playing with Water.

In 2024, he was hired to adapt a memoir in a feature script, Against All Odds.

In 2025, he wrote two more romantic sports novellas for the series—The One Thing and The Lucky Gym.

He currently completed the first draft of his latest novella—The Perfect Love.

The genre seems to choose me, and the genre I believe he am permanently planted in—at least for now—is thrillers.

But, what had surprised him—that he had become a writer. He prides in believing it was the only thing he had discovered on his own—and stuck with the most.

Matt lives in his hometown, New Castle, PA, a small town 43 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, which just so happens to be the fireworks capital of the world. His home away from home is Charleston, SC.