The Rise and Fall of the Human Empire

Sometimes when you start on a new project, the ideas come faster than the writing. At least when you have a day job and a family as busy as mine. But I’ve always found the joy to be in building and growing the story. That’s where I find myself with “The Rise and Fall of the Human Empire.” I created this story at the age of 17, then began it over 30 years later. I’ve always known it would be bigger than I expected. I just never expected it to be as big as it’s becoming in my mind.

The other difficult component is coming up with a short, memorable pitch. As the ideas grow, and your enthusiasm to share those ideas with it, it becomes increasingly difficult to boil it down to a sentence or two. That’s certainly a hard thing for most writers, but it becomes essential to share the essence of your story in as succinct a way as possible. My “elevator pitch” is slowly forming.

The themes are less hard for me in this. I find the themes of this book guiding every scene I’m writing — themes of family, loss, grief, how we know what happened in our past, from recent to distant. Every time I start the mental path of charting out a scene, it’s bounced against these and a few other themes. If it doesn’t fit, it’s cut. When it does, I find the scene growing and moving in directions I didn’t expect prior to sitting down and writing that scene.

I hope the story comes across in execution as well as it is my mind, but I invite you to judge for yourself. You can read the latest installments of the story here:

Matt has two completed novels. The first is a science fiction adventure titled The Calling. The second, HONOR, is a terrorist conspiracy thriller set at his alma mater, the Air Force Academy. 

Both books are available for purchase in Kindle ebook format on Amazon.com as well as the Barnes & Noble Nook and Apple's iBooks. 

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His other work includes nonfiction books such as a college textbook for engineering mechanics used at the Air Force Academy as well as a daily Christian devotional that explores history, theology, and practical life lessons.

Matt’s also published short stories and articles in Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine and The First Line as well as other magazines and journals.