S4 E1- Trapping Matt Dinniman: A Hippopotamus, Bass Strings, and Pizza-Blasted Goldfish

I'm sitting here like he's not even playing God people like this is so unfair. You're like you're playing Carl. I am and it's that's the fun part for me. If I knew the ending, I wouldn't write it. Hello, hello, I'm V.E. Shwab and welcome to the fourth season. How is that possible of no right way? A podcast in which I convinced other successful writers to talk to me about their own creative process. In an effort to prove that there is in fact no right way to write. Oh listeners, I have a treat for you today. I first discovered today's guests last year while signing 300,000 Tiffin Sheets while searching for audiobooks to pass the time enough people suggested "Jundred Carler Carle" that I gave in even though on paper it might not have been my usual fair. And oh am I so glad I was persuaded. Over the next eight weeks, I devoured each and every installment at the time. There were only six hours and pages falling away as I was consumed by the adventures of Carl and Princess Stonehead and the ever-expending cast of Miss Smiths and menaces locked in the battle for survival on this sweeping cosmic game show. The novels themselves are by turns jovial and poignant, camp and captivating and deeply painfully human. And the series has become one of my and many many readers' favorite things. And while we all wait for the next installment, he's got something new in store. Blending his signature wet and humor in the upcoming Operation Bounce House about a man fighting to protect his planet from a group of gamers on Earth trying to remotely annihilate it. Matt Deneman, welcome to No Right Way. Wow, that's way better than my bio than I was. I try. I try. No, truly. I spent three months in Denver signing the entire first printing of my latest book. And I feel like your narrator just became like the soundtrack of my life, like a kind of continuous companion. I signed, I think it was 15,000 tip-in sheets. And I want all the attack on Titan anime. And so now I associate that in my brain. I can't even begin to imagine what happens here in your brain while you were signing that many. I was. I was. Thank God to consume me. I genuinely between signing and then going for walks in between every like hour to two hours of signing. I just had this kind of continuous film playing in my mind thanks to you. And I I just it was such a delightful experience. And I'm sure readers of the series will know you're so good at what I would call like bearing the the broccoli and the mac and cheese where what seems to be this very kind of like light fun rom is at the same time so explorative of deeper humanistic concepts. And so it was just the combination of those things the immersive quality of the audio narration. All of it came together to just create one of the most enjoyable creative seasons of my life in terms of just being a consumer of content and not a creator of it. So so thank you for that. Oh, thank you. I appreciate all of that. We're going to get into a lot of processing things. But first of all, because I get to see your wonderful face and everyone else will be listening to this. Can you just give us a little where are you when are you how are you today? So I am right now sitting in my house in gig Harbor, Washington. I would normally be in my office, but my wife had ordered Christmas presents for a daughter. And the FedEx guy is going to be here any minute. So I might and I have to sign for it apparently. And I couldn't like do the thing. So so we may get some animal cameos throughout. There's construction going on and my my little silky terrier is arch enemies with the construction people. So hopefully she won't start screen barking at them. I'm doing I'm doing great. I am I am on deadline. I have January 31st. I have to finish turning the final dungeon crawler call book eight. I only have like a hundred thousand words to go. It's fine. That's totally fine. It's totally fine. Don't worry. So leave it. I'm not panicking at all. But no, I'm doing well. I just I just got back from Brandon Sanderson's dragon steel. Oh, yeah. And which was pretty fun. I got to hang out with a bunch of authors. And meet a bunch of you know readers and fans. And that was pretty cool. That was pretty fun. Yeah, I mean, we have to talk. I'm sure we will. A length of kind of like feel like you've been thrust into a spotlight. Not because you're you're new to this, but because it feels like the virality surrounding the series is is fairly recent. In terms of I mean, it now getting it's now getting its traditional publishing green packaging. There's a lot of things I have. The audio goes back to mine. I have the wild covers. And I love the wild chaotic maximalist covers. We'll get we'll get into that. Also, we'll decide. Are you a fast writer? Are you an immersive writer? You said January 30th and a hundred thousand words. When I don't know which one of those is an exaggeration. But is that a dual neither of those are exaggeration? That I so I I'm a dancer and my method of writing is if you're not sure if you're not familiar, or pants are means I kind of make it up as they go along. I don't have an outline. And I write a lot. I write but a lot of it hits the cutting room floor. I tend the right scenes over and over and over again and talk happy with them. And it's not a very effective or efficient way of writing. But it is how I do it and now I'm kind of stuck to it. Okay, wait, sensing a series though. Hold on a second because I got into this here's Brown as well. When you say you're a dancer and where you're working on book eight in this series, are you truly are you a dancer of the story within the story? Are you a dancer of the broad beats as well? Like do you have endings in like do you know how the series ends? It's funny. I was just I just had dinner with Pierce Brown two nights ago. And we talked about this. I have no idea where any of this is going. Oh god, not. This is sometimes sometimes I'll set something up like in book one. And I kind of put it away and I'm like, okay, this is what I'm going to do with this. Maybe 50% of the time that is what I end up doing with it. I keep very, very careful track of everything that's behind me. I have this like massive excel sheet that's so big that it crashed my last MacBook Pro that I had to get a new one. And I joke about this, but if that thing ever goes, if I lose that thing, I'm just going to kill everybody. But I kind of enjoy it this way. I don't know where everything is going. I do have great notes on like every single character you meet with a name. I have like what their skills are, what their inventory is and all that stuff. But I write that as I write. I don't have that ahead of time. I don't know how it's going to end. I don't know how book eight is going to end. I think I'm going to do something crazy. Making a face for people who can't see because I am the exact opposite of this vector from you. I am somebody who knows every beat before I write it. And I am like an architect executing a building. This is, I mean, but at the same time, these books are in so many ways a love letter to kind of a video game culture. And if you think about how you would play a video game, you're almost, I mean, tell me if I'm wrong. But it seems like you're kind of writing it the way you would play it, which is to say, as a player, you don't know how it's going to go. You're reacting in real time. I can never do improv because I don't consider myself like a comedian or anything. But some of those improv style methods work when I'm writing. Yes and yes and sort of thing. And that's how we get these crazy escalations, especially at the end of each story. So you must eventually like the thing about writing in such an organic way. Do you write yourself into dead ends? Do you write yourself down roads that you have to bust through the walls of it or turn around constantly? That's my favorite thing to do. And sometimes it's my own fault. Sometimes if you're not aware, I let my Patreon people vote on things that happen in the book. And they never picked the one I'm like 90% positive. They're going to pick X and they pick Y every single time. Because every choice that I give them is something I'm perfectly willing to go with. But sometimes I'm not expecting them to go with it. For a spoiler free example is like in book six, part of the book is set basically in Cuba. And they had the choice of any country in the entire world. We did like a smart madness sort of thing. Starting with continents and down to the countries. And I don't know why they picked Cuba. I have no idea how that happened. I know nothing or knew nothing about Cuba at the time. I had to go to library, get a bunch of books, watch hours of YouTube videos, travel videos about Cuba, and teach myself. What a creative exercise though, right? Because as a massive perfectionist and also somebody who is to be very frank, I had no idea about that aspect of the work in terms of the interactivity with your Patreon followers. I'm just experiencing it as kind of a traditional reader and listener. And I did have a moment where I was like, I wonder why Cuba. Like when that came out of the book, I was like, you know, but also given the series, why not Cuba? So it's so fun to like your challenge becomes make it good. Make it fun. Make it my ultimate goal is to have readers say, well, I'm surprised this happened, but I can't think of any other way could have possibly gone. And yeah, that's that's that's hard because like you said, breaking through the wall when you're stuck in a, you finish yourself in the corner, it's really, really easy to get into the trap of having, you know, do sec walk in a, you know, have a god come out of nowhere and talk to him up, especially now. now that we have, well, not literal, but people with God-like powers running around everywhere. How do you impose the limitations? I mean, I've skipped, I've gone completely out of order of what my usual. I'm going to work back to the origin story here in a minute, but I'm just too curious. Like, this is how we do it. When you have a situation like this where kind of anything is possible almost within the framework of the levels of the game that you've designed, how do you create constraint? How do you create boundaries? So I'm aware of this myself that I'm a psychopancer. I go off, I do crazy things if I let myself. So whenever I write a book, anytime I start a story, and I build the arena immediately. So right in the first book, you know it's an 18 level dungeon. You know that there are specific roles about levels and all that stuff. I established that pretty early on. It's one of the reasons why a lot of my books can be a little exposition heavy right in the beginning, and that's me building the racetrack. Because if I don't do this, then I would have them opening a coffee shop in Paris by now. And deciding not to play the game. So you kind of front load the parameters and you're like, here's the outer limits. And then now that I have a wall, a floor, a ceiling, now kind of the world is my oyster. And that's right. And I could decorate it anyway I want, but you know, I'm still have to stay inside this house that I built. Oh my God. Okay. Well, as a pancer, I have so many questions. I can't wait to dive in. We're going to rewind. I'm going to reimpose order on the chaos for a second here. I like to start out with an origin story because just as there is no one way to do this, there's no one way that we get here. So for listeners, can you just give us your villain origin story? Like how did you, how did you come to writing in the first place? Okay. So I have been writing my entire life. I, uh, 51 years old now. And I was writing Transformers, G I Joe fan fiction, Smurfs fan fiction when I was a kid. I was like, fourth, fifth, sixth grade. And this is something I've always wanted to do. Every job I've ever had and I've had a lot of jobs in my entire life. I've been everything from pizza delivery. I was a telephone psychic. I was working for family services. I worked in corporate advertising. Everything one of those jobs I've had over the years. I was also wanting to be a writer. And so I have been writing my whole life. My first book came out way back in 2003. It was a small press, um, sold, you know, maybe typical. I sold maybe like 50 copies of that. And I just kept doing it and right around 2016, 2017, I started writing a, uh, why read a book that was a letter PG. It was a Russian letter PG, uh, which if you're unfamiliar, a letter PG or books where it's kind of the rules of the world are based on video games, like characters level one and he's aware that he's level one and he fights monster. He levels up and now he's stronger. Uh, and that's what the color Carlos, but I wrote a book called Dominion of Blades, which is my first letter PG. And when I wrote it, I started looking like, well, how am I going to get this published? No one's going to want to publish this. And I discovered self publishing. And when I self published it, I made more money in that first week self publishing than my entire writing career combined up to that point. And I was like, this is great. I'm just going to self publish everything from now on. And so when I started writing Carl, I started writing Carl at the very, very tail end of 2019. I decided I'm just going to maybe self publish it and maybe not. I started putting it online for free on a website called War Road. And my, I wasn't anticipating even publishing it on Amazon anytime soon. And then March of 2020 happened and at the time I was, I was, I was an artist. For the previous 10 years, I started drawing pictures of the cats for a living. I travel to cat shows, set up artists, salad booths. It was a really fun job. You were training for Princess Donut. I was. I was basically just doing research for. I was. The most popular character. If you want to talk about cat shows, we can talk about cat shows first. But I'm. So when the pandemic started, all of my income went away. I have four children and multiple children college at the point. And I didn't have a choice. I started really pushing the Patreon. I had just started for Dungeon Qualcomm. I self published it sooner than I wanted to, which was October of 2020. And it was doing okay, typical for me, which is pretty good. I did well as a self publisher. And then in January of 2021, the audiobook came out. And Jeff Hayes and I were friends before this. And when he did the audiobook, it started to kind of take off quite a bit because he does a very, very good job at the audiobook. I mean, it's like 20, it's like 25 voices. Yeah, right. It's a wild number of voices. He's so talented and I get accused all the time. But this day, I still get accused of not properly crediting the female narrator in Carl. That's just Jeff. He really, it's still Jeff. So right around the end of 2023, I started getting approached by trade publishers because Carl was doing so well. But most of them wanted the whole thing. They wanted the ebooks, the physical books and the audiobooks. And I said, I am not, I'm not going to sell my ebook rates. I'm just not because I am earning more than enough money to make a decent living off of just the ebook rates. And there's finally one publisher, Ace over at Pagno Random House who said, okay, okay, we don't want any of the rights except for the physical copies. They're the first ones to offer it and we took it and we've been off to the racist sense. There's seven books out with book eight coming out and May assuming I finished this. Oh, I know because I asked if I could get an advanced copy of it. And this was like genuinely like, I'll do anything it takes. And they're like, we'll see if that's possible. Now I'm like, well, this is why I can't have an advanced copy because it hasn't been written yet. I have not turned it in yet. So to this day, Don't You Call a Count is still self published. The ebook comes out. That's amazing though. Only I touch it. They're editorial earned. Doesn't touch it. They do a bunch of commas and we fight over them and the word Goddamn it is spelled and correct. I'm aware of that. But I'm still spilling it that way. You know, that sort of stuff. There's a proper hybrid book. I mean, it is. It's publishing life. It is. And then Soundbook Theater does the audiobook, which is now audible has the license to it. But it's still Soundbook Theater is the one who has the audio. Pagno Random House has the physical copies and I am just me just Matt has ebooks. That's incredible. That's a great way to do it. What a amount like the amount of creative control, but it's also a creative control that like you understand and have earned and have said like this is what works for me. I don't need to like change the thing that's working for me. And at the same time, it's still it's reaching so many new readers. It's not reaching so many new readers because Pagno Random House has the hardcover rights. It's reaching so many new readers because it's a fucking incredible series. And it is so I have never read it in material form. I have only ever listened to it. And I think it is such a you and Hayes have such a brilliant melding. You're formatting and like the number it was kind of a cacophonous experience. Right. There's a lot of elements for those who haven't read or listened to it yet. You've got kind of the intrusions of the game and the leveling up information and a lot of like those things as well as the voices and so it really feels like an audio film playing in your head. It's it's very high pace and it's chaos. And then all those elements like you said, the little sound effects that Jeff throws in there along with the fact that he can voice hundreds of characters. Sure. I mean, at this point, we have over 100 named characters and they're all distinct. We just an interview together and he says, well, sometimes they use the same voice, but since those characters have such very personalities, you have you can't tell. You can't tell. But from a creating perspective, like I guess what I kind of want to ask is like how chaotic is it inside your head? Because it's a lot of moving pieces and and to add pancing on top of it. I don't know if that is like in my mind, the feature or the bug because like there's it is chaos. And so I just want to know like, are you, are you seeing it? Is it visual for you? Is it full experiential? Like when you're sitting down to create it, what's happening in your head? Yeah. Well, first of it is chaos in my brain 24/7. I always have 100 threads going on. I am unmedicated and it's just the best way for me to do it to write this stuff. And I do, I'm highly visual when I read, I see it like it's a movie and when I write, it's the same sort of way. And I taught myself kind of the best I can suffer in this where I can pause and then kind of see it from above and see where all the characters are. I have to be able to picture their environment and it's hard. It's lots of moving parts. There's this scene in book two of Daniel Griller Carl, "Thought Spoilers." [BLANK_AUDIO] It's a fight with Carl and Dona meet these elves that are a little crazy and then there's this little dwarf kid and They're pet dinosaur and they're all fighting each other at the same time and I had deliberately Pushed that scenario just to test myself to see if I could Create a scene where there was at least seven different threads going on at the same time and you could and when I did that And I feel as if I did an okay job It kind of broke something in my brain and we're off to the races now Trying to one up myself every time it's like building this crazy janguit hour of action Without confusing the readers and I'm not and sometimes I'm not as successful as other times But I that's that's always What I'm trying to do because that's real life in some ways even though this is the book about talking cat We want the action Realistic in terms of you know the confines of the story. Yeah, now while it's obviously like Part of the joy for it of you has there ever been a time where like several books and now you look back and you're like God damn it. Why did I do That thing in that moment there like it's caused such a headache for me now Or if I wish I could go back and just just just just change that one detail it would save me constantly hundreds of times over Over and over I kind of wish I hadn't said 18 floors to be perfectly honest. I would have Been happy specific number. I know it's just a random I thought like well, let's make them base three and then lots of little minor quests like the whole Crown of the sepsis horror which is an item that donut puts on immediately I thought I was funny at the time and I had no idea what I was gonna do with it and then yeah It causes me to build all the scaffolding Which is it's a whole story line that doesn't even get dealt with until book seven and We have other things that have done that floor that I have to deal with There's a character named Lucian Mar when I first introduced her. I had no idea what I was gonna do with her Yeah, because she's a child in the dungeon when she's you're not supposed to be children in dungeon So how is that possible? that sort of thing and It forces me to make these books longer and longer and longer and longer and got to the point where PRH penguin is like Let's make this next one shorter. Please. We're begging that There's for those who don't know there are paper costs and if you go I'm sure you've talked about this with Brandon with Sanders And but if you go past a certain length they start getting a little annoyed because the books literally cost a lot more in terms of the paper and you run out of space Yeah, see it's funny because when I never thought about physical copies when I start writing and as an indie author Especially if you're posting on Kindle unlimited you get paid based on the page reads so the longer the book the better and with audible As long as your narrator's okay with it the longer books tend to sell better people who with the credit system They'll look am I gonna use my credit on a story that seven hours longer when that's 30 hours long and a lot of people tend to go for the 30 hour A lot of ones so There's an incentive to make your books longer and then it's opposite and traditional publishing where they're always looking to save money because these are Actual physical items that need to be manufactured now. Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely someone like when I have audible credits I'm always like well, I mean, I don't want to spend that on the six hour book right? I could probably get the six hour book from the library and then I'll use the audible credit on the 30 hour But you know like it is it's a it's a map if you want the bang for your buck There's so many really Ridiculous specific details and now I'm like, oh were they what was what was a patreon choice and what was a Matt Dinovon choice but like like Carl's toast The car like the foot fetish of the AI system running the game for Carl's feet Where's it come from? So that specific Very early in the book and this isn't really a spoiler because this happened to like in chapter two or three Carl has his first encounter. He's fighting goblins and he's on top of like this tractor thing That's about to blow up a goblin is falling off his on the ground and Carl's like a big dude. He's like six foot three or four five here Remember and he does what the match I think it was a natural thing or is he jumps off and just basically Annihilized this poor little goblin with his feet And he goes in a dungeon without shoes on so he's barefoot because he had to run up there and chase up the cat And this is like the and and and thing and what would be funny? Well, I made it so the dungeon would like that It was a spur the moment thing. It was the worst decision of my entire life So that's the best decision ever the best decision ever. It's like oh, yeah I'm so sorry for your inbox, but as a listener and reader Delightful joy. So I said you know it would be funny if the AI that's running this whole dungeon who's excited by that I had no idea where I was going with it and it turned into this whole life of its own thing. Yeah, so now everyone Talks about you're the guy that writes the foot fetish book It's great though because he gets like bonus points he gets boons and it's like in the form of well now you have purple sparkly nails But it's gonna give you this incredible advantage and it's just because the AI wants to see your pretty toes You know, it's like it's delightful as the books do get progressively. I don't want to say darker It is an existentially heavy premise you have like kind of the way I think of In really great comedy you have a straight man and the right that like okay This is the only way to think to do it. We're filming this right around Christmas time. It is like I watch Muppet Christmas Carol Every right and the thing that Muppet Christmas Carol does so well is that Michael Cain plays it like it's Shakespeare Right, right Michael Cain is not in on the joke Michael Cain is In it for his life, right? He is playing it like classic and I feel like Carl is So serious because he's like I will make you pay for what you've done I will you will not break me that's as famous kind of like but that level of like sincerity and sobriety on Carl's part when contrasted with all of the absurdity is Is is what makes it so powerfully and so funny? That the your example of Muppet Christmas Carol is my I've used that example before It's Carl takes everything very very seriously and I see this and authors who are attempting to imitate this quite a bit they they kind of miss that they You need like a grounding force and it doesn't necessarily have to be the main character But in my case it is Carl is taking everything damn seriously But donut is also who's the cat is also taking everything seriously But she's also playing for the camera at the same time. Yeah, and that's and she's a cat and she's a cat and She's a cat with very cat attitudes and opinions Yes, and she's still a child in many ways too. So I like to play against those two meanwhile The people that are writing this game show that he's stuck on are trying to be as ridiculous as possible kind of these insane scenarios that they have to deal with in a sane way I mean that's the thing is I think and it's one of the reasons why I said in the introduction that it's not my usual affair And the reason they said it's not my usual affair. It's not because it's lidar pg. It's not because itself up is because going in knowing nothing You kind of expect possibly for me for it to lean into camp for it to be all Oh, Carl's in with the laughs as well. It's like it's unserious and I I love this contrast between Carl's sincerity And the rest of the absurdity because he isn't the absolutely ridiculous scenario There's been a cataclysmic destruction of his planet. He has lost essentially everybody that he knows except for his ex's pec cat And he is like somehow Becoming the most famous person in the universe and they are making it Observed and he is like the sole arbiter of reason in terms of like they are They're treating him like a character and he's a real person And I think like it's just a really beautiful reminder of comedy and tragedy and how well they can play together If you know who to give what part to yeah I think so I'm a big fan of horror and I consider dungeon crawler crawl horror novel But it's humorous horror novel and that's and it is clamped in so many ways But I think a lot of the camp stuff was also trying to be serious, but they're constrained yeah Like the medium that they're being forced upon and the people that are paying their money for it But that's a whole other conversation as well, but I I'm a big fan of those juxtapositions And a big fan of contradictions because that's how humans are exactly we're always contradicting ourselves in so many interesting ways It's also humor and horror whenever I interview horror novelist I mean humor and horror go hand in hand I always say it's about breathwork like it's about I can always tell something terrible is gonna happen in one of my books when I make a reader laugh Because I want you to exhale so that you're not ready for the terrible thing right you have to bring it down And so I think humor and horror both play with that sense of breath and expectation on the reader's part and how safe they feel Um, and so I think that humor and horror are natural bedfellows Uh, and I would say yeah, it's so a lot of horrifying shit happening in the series It's just it's like done in it's so much fun Like it's done it and what's it kind of puts A little bit of like a weird onus on the reader Because the reader is also in many ways than a participant like I just saw the new running man reboot And I only could think the whole time was like oh shit. This would be a real show now And we would watch it and the worst part is I would probably watch Like there is this kind of fascination wherein I put myself in a situation now where like would I watch this dungeon? If I wasn't human, if it was just if I was on another planet, I probably would. Because it's this like train wreck can't look away. And so it's a really fun, I feel like this whole podcast is not meant to just be me being like hard eyes at you. But it is really so novel and so clever. And it's novel while playing in really fun tested proving grounds like with RPG and in these archetypes and in these tropes in ways that I just think are. You've just done it to the near perfect degree. And so to hear that you are a dancer, I'm sitting here like he's not even playing God people. Like this is so unfair. Yeah, I am. It's first person. Lots of things happen that he doesn't see and then I got to figure out. Well, how how how can Carl even know this sort of thing? And it's that's the fun part for me. It's just I can't. Is there any part that you dread? Is there any part that you're like, oh shit. This is the hard part or I am dreading the climax of this book because I think I know what I'm going to do. I am dreading the next book. The next book book nine is going to be really difficult for me to write. It is without spoilers. It talks about what's going to happen on the 12th floor, which is kind of like more of the game of Thrones and the ascendancy battles between God's. I'm nervous. I'm nervous, Matt. I'm nervous. I need you to I just need I need people to stay intact or I need them to be resurrected. I just I need people to be there. What's your fave for it? I mean, it's almost like I feel like it sounds like you have a lot of fun with all of it. But like we all have creative crutches. We all have like craft security blankets. Like what is the part where you're just like, oh, I'm home now. This is my, this is my jam. My favorite part is when they're all together and there is nothing super terrible happening at that moment. And I have to choose like how I'm going to pull the rug out from home. And it's my favorite part of like, like you said, the breaths because anything can happen. And I usually don't know what it's going to be until I write it. And it's so, so it's so fun. Like for example, and without exploiters again, book seven. Yeah, I have a character named Samantha and who is a talking sex doll. He's inflatable. It's a it's a it's the head of a blow up sex doll, right? Yes. And well, she's she's silicone. But she rolls around like those critters in the 80s movies and she just talks random thing. And I was coming to the climax of book seven. And I'm like, well, let's, how can we just do something crazy? And I have her say something that just causes just pure chaos to break out. And I wasn't even planning on having that happen. I just did. And it's like the escalations. And then it's I create this huge problem for myself. And how do I get out of it and be entertaining at the same time? And that's my favorite part is like the calm before the storm. It's like the surf or waiting for the wave. You don't know how big the wave is going to be. But you're really excited to write it at the same time. Why do I have this vision of you creating like a little physical game board and then just moving little piece like do you ever as a visual as an artist? Do you move pieces around in physical space? Like I remember one time when I was trying to figure out the finale for one of my books. And I had everybody in the same space, right? And I needed to like arrange three kind of three sets of fights. I essentially got little nail polish bottles. And I drew an outline of the place. And then I was like, okay, and then this person's going to go over here and this person's like, do you do you work it out in material? I do. I have a white board that I usually use with like little magnets on it that sometimes I'll do. Um, for book three, I actually built this whole train system in VR in a map. And then I'm not going to do that again because people got mad. But because they said I was too complicated. But I have I still have it. I still have the whole tubes and everything. I mean, you must be kind of like amassing over the course of these books, also a little like stash of artifacts, right? Things which I mean, I saw behind you, you have the Desperado Club. You have like a poster for one of the places in the book. Somebody made that for me. I have all sorts of random stuff. We have merch now to you like this is um, this is a air freshener that's coming out. You can be able to buy this in stores, but I will be buying that. No, there's there's so much. We just my wife and I we just bought it. It has and it has the whole room that's just for me and a building like the world's largest bookcase because I have this giant collection over a thousand indie books that are all signed and I have to display somehow. But I'm also going to keep all the stuff that people have given me and all the stuff that I've created throughout the years in this journey for this book. So it's going to be really cool. But because there's so many characters, there's so much fan art out there. There's all this neat stuff that I've been collecting. Fan art such a special thing right because it's a really good indicator of how you've done as a description. Like you can like I have like some characters who really look the same no matter who's rendering them. And then I have some characters where I'm like wow, did I do a shit job of describing this person or did I just leave it a little too much up to the imagination? Do you have a character where you're like that's not how I saw that. There's a there's a few like that. There's some characters even though I've described them people still see them in other ways. And that's sometimes that tells me that maybe my description of them doesn't match what how I write them, especially later in a series. But we have like the web comic is out now where people are falling along. This is only in book one. And it's always interesting seeing how they draw characters like Chris and Brandon who are characters we meet early on. And Amani who's a very important character, the story how people perceive her. Then there's a character named Afechi which I'm really interested in seeing how people draw. Carl tends to be pretty similar. People are year-old about his age and how old he should look because he's 27 in the books. And 27 is kind of a weird time where all of your friends are starting to either look 40 or they still look like they're 15. It's an amorphous. It's an amorphous age. It is. In my mind he's like 35 because I'm 38 and I'm like Carl can't be a full ass decade younger than me. We're fine. I'm not a fan of the fans. Is there anything that ends up there that you just, 'cause again, coming back to this idea of we get very attached to things once we make them? Where you're just like, oh man, I really want you to work and you don't, and it makes me sad because I think you're fabulous. Is there anything like that, or do you just put it aside for the future? - I constantly, I constantly do that. And sometimes I do bring it back. One example is in the very first book, I had Donut pick Mongo and then Mongo immediately has to get killed. And then they get a second chance and they get the tummy ache, or which is a little mohawk meatball thing. And all that is gone. Obviously, I can't even touch Mongo now or else I'll get beaten to death in the streets. But-- - No, no. - Mongo is a pet dinosaur for those listening who happen. (laughs) But I ended up finding a way to bring back that one other character, to give you some numbers, the most recent book, book seven, was 270,000 words. Which is pretty long. - So that's a chunk. - I wrote over 800,000 words for that story. - Like-- - That's a lot. - Are we talking like words that could have been the book words or like stream of consciousness or like the dialogue, you know what I mean? Like how much of-- - It's a, it's a mix. 'Cause sometimes there's a lot of repeated paragraphs and I copy them paste and put them back. So it's not actual 800 different words to be perfectly honest. But I can see like the word document that's like a dump file for it. - And-- - No wonder you crashed computers. I mean, that's truly, I'm pretty sure, what is it? At 100,000 it stops looking for any errors. It's like, I can't look at this. One of the things I always like to ask writers is like, what's something bringing you joy outside of writing? - Outside of writing. Lots of things. I'm in a band. I'm in a shitty band and I love my band very much. - What's the band's name? - Digging for change. We're just a bunch of friends. And we go to have gigs with very little practice and we have very much fun. And it's how I not think about the books because the way my brain works, especially now, it's constant, constant, constant. And I have my animals. I have four dogs, multiple cats, a ton of fish, Tina the Turtle. Taking care of them gives me joy. - What's something creative that you've enjoyed recently, whether it's music, book, film, art, anything? - Well, right now I'm obsessed with pluralists. I don't know if-- - Oh, yeah, I'm caught up. Opening 10 minutes were real traumatic in terms of being in a bookstore and having somebody give me a crocheted pillow with my characters. I'm sure the things you have been given at this point. - Yeah, if you're unfamiliar with the main characters and author and it starts with a book signing. So that was pretty fun. But I can't wait to see where that show goes. - I was just talking with a friend about it because I was like, this is where it comes down to trust in creators and I love about Vince Gilligan. I mean, I'll follow Vince Gilligan to the end of the world but what I love so much is that he doesn't feel the need to feed you on a regimented schedule as a consumer, like every episode doesn't make sure to give you something back. It says, no, you're gonna just come on this journey. I have no idea where it's going. I have no idea how it will end and I am locked in regardless for that. Okay, what is the strange, I'm very curious about this now. What is the strangest object in your house, man? - Strangest object in my house. Oh, man, I have so many strange objects. I wish I could bring it to you because I'm gonna be moving since a lot of stuff is packed away. But I like to pick up weird things from goodwill. I have a bunch of little weird figurines. I had this one little dude figurine that was wearing us, figure out its waist and turned out he's extremely over-exaggerated and tomically correct and I wasn't expecting that. - If I were to set a trap for Matt, didn't I? Like I've got, imagine the rope is on the ground. I'm gonna put two or three objects inside the rope. I'm rubbing my hands together like a little villain being like this trap is gonna catch my tenement. What am I putting in the trap? - Hipopotamus and bass strings and maybe flavor blasted pizza and goldfish crackers. - So specific and I love that. I know that those three items together are only going to catch me a Matt tenement. I love that. No, hipopotamus, last question, sorry. Pig me your full size. - So I love both. I'm a big fan of Fiona at the Cincinnati Zoo who's a full size and then you have other ones like the Moodang and everyone fell in love with. There's a pig me hipo. - Of course. - So they're very similar other than their size actually. So I like both of them. - Matt, last few questions. How do you celebrate good news? - I usually just kind of let it absorb. I don't have any sort of rituals. I have rituals for when I finish a book, but when I actually received good news, I don't really do anything other than just kind of bask in it for a minute and just let my brain calm itself and accept it and tell myself, yeah, this really happened, I guess. - Oh, I love that. What's your ritual for finishing a book then? - I drink chocolate milk. - I love this. I have a character in one of my books who drinks only chocolate milk and it is probably the most beloved character in my books for that reason. It is like an instant shorthand for kindness. I don't know why. It's just like what a, like you could drink anything. You're an adult. You could drink anything you want. You have chosen chocolate milk. - Yes. - I love that. My last question, I'm gonna twist it for you 'cause normally the question that I ask is you walk into a bookstore in a hundred years to find out that only one thing that you have ever written has survived. But I feel like I want you to, I want you to feel absolved of the boundaries of installments in a book. And so if you were to pick dungeon crawler, I want you to pick your favorite of the books, knowing that you don't have to work on the presumption that this one doesn't work out of sequence. Just I kind of just wanna know if it's not dungeon crawler, Carl could be something else, but what is the book or the volume that you feel proud of stuff? - The Grinding, which is a novel I wrote in 2013. - Tell me. - It's a novel. It's out of print right now. But you can get an audio book version of it on soundbletheater.com. It's just a story about giant monster that destroys Tucson, Arizona, and the guy's girlfriend or his wife gets stuck in it and she's an attacks a roller derby about and if it touches you, you become a part of it. So it becomes this giant monster made out of people. And he doesn't wanna save the world, he doesn't wanna stop the monster from destroying anything. He just wants to get his wife out of it. And that's the premise of the grinding. But another thing I've panced and I just escalated, escalated, escalated, and this crazy ending. So. - Is it a standalone? - It's a standalone. I wish I was a better writer when I wrote it. I think we all-- - We're time capsules of VR when we're things. - But it to this day remains the favorite, my favorite thing I've ever written. - Oh, I love this. I can't wait to go and listen to it then. And hope for the day when I can have a physical copy. Matt Deniman, you are an absolute joy to talk to today. - Thank you so, so much for coming on No Right Way. - Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's good fun. (scoffs) - On value, Mark? Okay. - That'll do it for another episode of No Right Way. Make sure to check out Matt's newest book, Operation Bounce House on shelves now. And also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I have. Not one, not two, but three releases this year. The first of which is under the name Evelyn Clark. And it is called the Ending Rights itself. And it will be on shelves in April. Tune in next week for another episode of No Right Way. (upbeat music)