Matt Witten's Blog: Matt Witten's Blog: Random Musings

Eight more days to enter a Goodreads giveaway for 51%!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

Hi all,

My dystopian thriller 51% comes out on April 28 from Level Best Books. This is my first speculative fiction, and I'm quite excited about it. You can enter a book giveaway for 51% here: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

In a future where corporations own everything—including people—one murder ignites a revolution.

Twenty years from now, the United States is completely privatized. The Big Six syndicates own schools, roads, police departments… even human beings.

When a young immigrant woman—51% owned by the syndicates—is brutally murdered, NYPD, Inc. detective Juke O'Keefe and his partner, crime marketing consultant Haylee Navarro, catch the case. Pregnant and broke, Haylee knows they can’t crowdfund enough from a dead immigrant to pay for basic forensics, let alone their paychecks. But Juke, with his old-school sense of justice, is determined to find the killer.

Their search for the truth leads them to Juke’s ex, a Resistance leader on the syndicates’ most wanted list. As the three join forces, they stumble onto a conspiracy designed to destroy the last shreds of American freedom. To rescue fifty-one percenters—and everyone else—from syndicate control, they’ll have to defeat the Red Queen, the most ruthless, powerful AI in the world.

51% is a gritty, fast-paced thriller about power, justice, and what happens when everything—even people—can be owned.

I hope you'll check out 51%.

Cheers,

Matt Witten

At six-thirty a.m. on Tuesday, January 7, I went for a hike in the Palisades Highlands with my buddy Scott. We climbed the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, enjoying the tranquil morning air and beautiful views of the canyons and the ocean. We were up there for over an hour. Not a hint of smoke.
After we got back, I headed for the Pali Rec Center to play pickleball on the outdoor courts. I waited and waited but nobody showed up. Finally I texted my friend Marco, who texted back that pickleball was called off because of the wind. Yeah, it’s pretty windy, but come on, what a bunch of wimps.
I drove to West LA, to my favorite coffee shop, Kiff Kafe. I planned to write there for a couple of hours. All week I’d been having trouble with chapter eleven of my novel. Maybe today would be my lucky day, and I’d nail it down.
But when I got to Kiff Kafe, it was closed. The owners were French, and I figured they were taking the day off. French people can be like that.
So I went to my second favorite coffee shop, Bluey’s. I got a chocolate almond croissant and a decaf coffee and sat down. After playing my requisite game of online Boggle to get my mind going, I opened up the novel and started writing.
Miracle of miracles, it went well. The words flowed. Unless I was fooling myself, this was the breakthrough I’d been hoping for—
My wife Nancy texted me. “There’s a fire in the Palisades. I think you should come home.”
Oh, for God’s sake. First I can’t play pickleball, then Kiff Kafe is closed, and now, when I’m finally getting good writing done, Nancy wants me to come home?
I googled “Palisades fire” and saw that, yeah, there was a fire up in the Highlands, right near where Scott and I had been hiking. But that was like, five miles from our house. There had been fires up there before, and they never came near us. We lived in the flats.
But if Nancy wanted me home, I guess I should avoid marital strife. I texted, “I’ll head home in a little while.” I figured I’d write for another twenty minutes or so, see if I could get through this chapter.
She texted back, “Okay… …”
If she had texted back just three dots, I would have stayed. But six dots? She meant business.
I was pissed, but I shut my laptop, got in my car, drove down to the Pacific Coast Highway, turned right… and smoke was pluming in the sky.
Okay, it’s a trip to look at, but no big deal. This had happened before. The fire department helicopters streaking through the smoke, spewing foam in the distance? Old news. Mainly I was annoyed at the traffic jam.
Then I got an alert on my phone, saying some crap to the effect of, “There’s a fire. Be ready in case we ask you to evacuate.”
Seriously? I’ve got writing to do.
I drove up Temescal Canyon Road to our house. No fire to be seen. Sure, the sky was smoky toward the northwest, but so what?
The funny thing was, for three or four years I’d been saying to Nancy, “You know, we should think about selling our house one of these days. At some point the value will go down because people are scared of fires. I know our neighbors say it never burns in the flats, but there’s always a first time.”
But now that it was actually about to happen, I magically forgot everything I’d said. I believed it in the abstract, but when it got concrete… Yeah, our house might burn down some time in the future, but not today.
I got out of the car and went in the house, where Nancy was gathering our family photographs. She said, “I think we might have to evacuate.”
“The fire doesn’t look that bad. It’s just an alert.”
“I don’t know.”
“Look, I’m really hungry. I’m gonna make a salad.”
So as the fire grew closer, I mixed salad ingredients. Arugula, scallions, blueberries, and feta cheese with an olive oil lemon juice dressing.
At least I didn’t take time to toast pecans.
Then I went and chatted with our neighbors across the street. Harold, the husband, agreed with me that the wives were getting carried away. He’d had a stroke and she was in her seventies, so I helped them carry suitcases and paintings to the car.
Finally I got to work packing our own stuff. Even if we did get evacuated, we’d be back in a couple days, so I got three T-shirts and three pairs of socks and underwear. I got my passport, toothbrush, checkbook, and phone and computer chargers. I forgot all about my mutual fund records, S corporation records, sunglasses and reading glasses, five hundred dollars in cash… I didn’t think about a wood carving Nancy’s dad gave me before he died, or our kids’ baseball cards and Little League trophies, or my only copy of the very first stage play I ever wrote, forty years ago.
Then I ran out of time to remember all that, because we got another alert from the Fire Department. This one said basically, “Shit’s getting real. Evacuate.”
Nancy grabbed a frog puppet and a stuffed monkey that our grandkids enjoyed playing with, and we got in the car and headed back down Temescal Canyon. We left our other car in the driveway, because we didn’t want to bother with it.
Temescal wasn’t gridlocked—we beat that by about ten minutes—but it was slow. Instead of the usual three-minute drive down to the Pacific Coast Highway, it took thirty.
So I did what I had to do. Nancy was driving, so I took out my laptop and started writing. She said something or other, and I said “uh huh” a couple times and kept clicking away. I had to finish that chapter.
Finally, just as we were about to reach the PCH, Nancy said, “You know, we’re in a very stressful situation here, and I’d rather not experience it alone.”
I’m not a total twit. I put away my laptop.
Half an hour later we arrived at my mother-in-law’s condo near Beverly Hills. She was back east in New York State, so we had the whole place to ourselves.
Then the waiting game began. The doomscrolling. Checking and rechecking NextDoor.com. I finally realized our house was truly in danger. I imagined our thousands of books in the dining room and living room going up in flames. And good-bye, piano. Good-bye, everything. The fire was moving fast: one football field every twenty seconds. Not enough firefighters, not enough water, not enough foam. Too much wind, getting above 100 miles per hour. Too much dry groundcover. It had only rained a quarter inch in eight months, and that stuff was ready to burn.
But hey: we were in the flats.
Day turned to night. We didn’t go to sleep tlll three a.m. The fire kept burning. We didn’t know if our house still survived. We woke up on Wednesday not knowing. Night came again and we still didn’t know.
We studied the maps on the internet—the very incomplete maps. The fire was coming ever closer to our house. It was on our side of Sunset. Coming up Almar.
Thursday morning came, with an updated map. Our entire street had been decimated.
But wait: the map showed every house on our street had burned down but ours.
We found photos and videos of our neighbors’ homes: all turned to rubble. Nothing left. The eight-million-dollar monstrosity next to ours: gone.
But a video showed our white picket fence was still standing! Still white. There was our bird feeder, untouched. Our Adirondack chair. Did our house miraculously survive the fire?
But we couldn’t find a photograph or video that showed the house itself.
We asked someone on NextDoor who had media credentials, could they please drive up to our street and take a picture of our house?
Thursday night came and went. On Friday morning, the media person texted us pictures.
Our home was flattened, except for the brick chimney and a part of one garage wall.
And except for our fence, our Adirondack chair, and the birdfeeder. There was even a bird at the birdfeeder.
As I looked at the ashes of our home, and the bird nearby, my mind went blank with shock and horror. That’s it? That’s all that’s left of our home? Everything is destroyed?
It was like the last twenty-five years of our lives had been erased. They were a dream, a fantasy.
But then something strange happened. I felt my chest start to relax, for the first time in three days. No more desperately hoping. Now we knew.
Nancy and I gave each other a hug, then went outside and took a walk. It was hot and still polluted from the fire, so we wore masks.
But it wasn’t as bad as before. We sat in a coffee shop and I ate a chocolate chip cookie, even though it was morning. We held hands and said to each other, well, we had twenty-five years in that house. We had a nice life there.
Talking to Nancy made my life feel real again.
Then we went back to our mother-in-law’s condo and started texting family and friends that our house was indeed no more.
Ever since Tuesday we’d been receiving a lot of texts, calls, emails, and social media messages, and now they increased. Second cousins I’d never met asked if we wanted to stay with them in Florida. A woman I hadn’t seen in thirty-five years invited us to her place outside Tucson. Old colleagues from years ago offered us clothes and food. Friends took us out for pizza, pastrami, ice cream. Restaurants gave us free meals.
I wrote about our story on social media, because I like getting attention, and because I’m a novelist and it helps sell books. I mentioned that my beloved baseball cap collection was gone, and people began sending me caps. I ended up with thirty of them. I mentioned I had lost my collection of Zippy the Pinhead comic books, and a couple in Connecticut sent me their very large collection of Zippys. Witten Farms in southern Ohio, no relation to me, sent me Witten Farms water bottles, t-shirts, and fanny packs.
As I wrote earlier, I lost my one and only copy of the first play I ever wrote. It was titled, ironically enough, Alaska Fire. I put on Facebook that I’d lost it, and a woman I’d never met named Wendy Revel, from Atlanta, messaged me that she had a copy. I’d sent it to her theatre forty years ago, and she held on to it even after she moved to DC. So when I came to DC in April to visit my father, she gave it to me.
The fire was a reminder that people are basically nice.
I’d say the funniest and most annoying email we got was early on. Someone wrote us, “I’m not sure what to say. When other family and friends have faced fires in their areas, their houses somehow beat the odds.”
Now that made us feel like, he’s right. God must have singled us out. He decided, hey Matt and Nancy, I’m gonna mess with you. I felt that way even though I don’t believe in God.
But in general, we didn’t get that feeling. This was one advantage of having your whole town burn down: it’s not just about you. You have plenty of company.
Of course there were disadvantages too. Our neighbors Gail, Harold, and Joel were gone. My friends Scott, Daniel, Jason—gone. Tara, the lady from Belfast who cut my hair for twenty years—gone. Our grocery store, our kids’ elementary school, the swimming pool we went to twice a week—gone. The farmers market we went to every Sunday—gone. Café Vida, where Nancy and I went most Friday nights—gone. Matthew’s Garden Café, where my buddies and I had breakfast on Saturdays—gone. Pali Rec and the pickleball courts—gone.
I lay in bed sometimes counting up our losses.
Except we were lucky in one important way. We had a second home in the Adirondacks where we’d spent summers for the past thirty years. We had a community there, and a gorgeous lake nearby. We just had to make it till summer, and then we’d be sitting on the beach with our friends on summer evenings, listening to crickets and bullfrogs.
Meanwhile life went on. I found a couple great coffee shops in Beverly Hills. Nancy and I made plans to see our sons and their families in San Francisco and Boston. And we had a whole new exciting project to work on: dealing with our insurance company.
It was like a full-time job. We were required to list every single thing we lost in the fire, re-remembering everything we had cherished. We wound up with over seven hundred line items, and the whole process seemed specially designed to extract tears.
Nancy and I and everybody else who lost their homes were sure the insurance companies were out to screw us. Bad enough that the forces of nature had conspired against us, now we had to deal with these faceless insurance companies. The morning after the fire, I said to Nancy, “You know, I think we just lost a million dollars last night.”
Every time we developed a working relationship with an insurance adjuster, they would quit. Every time the company said they’d get back to us in a week, it would take a month. A thousand rumors flew about how nobody would receive the full value of their insurance. The system would go bankrupt.
Finally, seven months after the fire, we got a call from Insurance Adjuster #5 with shocking news: they were paying the full value of our claim. The check came in two weeks later. We had serious chocolate fudge ice cream that night. Instead of losing a million dollars, I think we’ll wind up breaking even, or close to it.
It turns out, we were lucky our house burned down all the way. If it had been only partially destroyed or smoke damaged, things would have been a lot more ambiguous. Our friends in that situation were very unhappy with their insurance. And if our house had somehow survived while everything around us was gone… Well, I don’t think that would have been fun.
Of course, the main way we’ve been lucky is that we had a second home, and a second community. Almost all of our friends who lost their houses didn’t have that. They’ve been a lot more at sea, still trying to piece their lives back together.
One night recently, as we approach the one-year anniversary of the fire, I sat by the lake in the Adirondacks one evening. I looked out at the ice and reflected. What had the fire taught me? What had I lost? What had I gained?
It was easy to think of things I’d lost.
But I’d gained some things too.
It wasn’t totally bad that our lives were simplified. We had one less house to worry about. We didn’t have to deal with mice in the attic of our LA home, or the garage door not working, or the back porch needing to be fixed.
In the past couple years our lives had been ricocheting between LA, the Adirondacks, our son’s family in San Francisco, our other son’s family in Boston, and travel to Europe. Now there was one less ricochet. We were enjoying living in the Adirondacks. Maybe we’d fix up our house there and live in it more or less full time.
We probably would have sold our house in LA one day. Now we wouldn’t have to meet with realtors, stage our home, do open houses. We wouldn’t have to decide what things to take with us to our new home and what things to throw away. The fire saved us four or five months of aggravation.
The fire also reminded us that nothing lasts forever. There’s a positive message you can take away from that: appreciate every day.
I still feel rootless sometimes when dusk comes, without the books, paintings, board games, and everything else we’d accumulated over the years, and with our Los Angeles friends scattered to the winds. But I also feel free. We’re meeting new people and forming new memories. Just last week Nancy joined a local chorus, and I joined a Sunday night chess club.
We still have two house keys from our old home in LA. Maybe on the anniversary, January 7, we’ll bury them somewhere. Or maybe we’ll turn them into wind chimes.

My thriller novel Killer Story comes out tomorrow, Jan. 17! Killer Story is about an idealistic journalist who launches a true-crime podcast to investigate the murder of an alt-right YouTuber she loved like a little sister, despite their political differences. "Riveting and irresistible--a deep dive into journalists' tactics, ambition, and cut-throat passion." - Hank Phillippi Ryan. From now through Jan. 23, Killer Story is a BookBub deal: it's only $2.99 on Kindle. Also: Harley Jane Kozak narrates the audiobook and she's great. I hope you'll give Killer Story a try!

It was three a.m. in Laugarvatn, Iceland, and I couldn’t sleep. Now partly that was because it’s still light in Iceland in June, and my circadian rhythms were bouncing all over the place. But there was a much deeper problem. Here I was, two thirds of the way through the first draft of my mystery thriller Killer Story, and doubt held me in its iron grip. Had I chosen the wrong murderer?

That seemed impossible. This was my sixth mystery novel, and I’ve written lots of mystery episodes for Law & Order, CSI: Miami, Medium, and other shows. When I start writing a mystery, there are things I’m not sure of: who all the red herrings are, and what all the plot twists will be. But two things I’ve always known, absolutely: who gets killed, and who does the killing. The beginning of the novel/TV show, and the end.

But now here I was, on my skinny little bed at the Gullkistan Artist Colony (great place, BTW; highly recommend), retracing the entire book in my head. I was finally facing up to the cold hard truth that my murderer didn’t really appear until page 80 of the book. I mean, he kind of showed up in the second chapter, but barely. And if there’s one thing about mysteries that I’ve always believed, it’s this: the audience has to meet the killer early. Otherwise the solution to the murder at the end of the book won’t be satisfying.

So I tried to think of ways to introduce the killer earlier. Maybe I could give him more to do in chapter 2. But it didn’t really make sense. Could I bring him in again at page 40? No, not really, it would kill the book’s flow.

Well, maybe page 80 is soon enough…

No, I’m kidding myself.

Panic set in, along with that old feeling I think all writers have: I’m a fraud.

And that’s when the thought hit me, born of desperation: if I have the wrong murderer, who’s the right one?

Well, it can’t be character X (avoiding spoilers here). It can’t be character Y. It can’t be character Z…

Or can it?

No, there’s no way it can be Z. For several important reasons.

Although, if it could be Z, wouldn’t that be cool?

But it can’t.

But what if…?

I lay in bed for another five hours, and by the time I got up for breakfast, or dinner or whatever it was, I had decided: the killer is Z!

First time I’ve ever changed that horse in midstream, and you know what? It worked out great! The end of the book, where the hero figures out who done it, is my favorite part.

I took away a couple of lessons from that. One is, if you have a voice inside you telling you that something isn’t quite right, listen to it. Honor it. (Unless it’s the voice telling you you’re a fraud. You can ignore that one.)

The other thing I learned, or relearned, is: it’s really valuable when you’re writing to take some time to reflect. Whether you’re in bed, out walking, swimming, or biking, try to get a little distance from your book and take the long view.

Maybe you’ll learn that your character Z is the killer!

I’m thrilled to report that the audiobook of Killer Story is now available on Audible and Amazon. Even better, it’s narrated by the actor/writer Harley Jane Kozak, who does a fabulous job. Harley is in my writing group, the Oxnardians. Every week for almost a year I brought in a chapter of Killer Story and asked Harley to read it aloud. So Harley’s performance became an integral part of my coming to understand the character. Her voice became, for me, the character’s voice. And it’s great to hear her performance in the audiobook.

Harley also narrated my last novel The Necklace, and it was the same story with that book.

So that’s the scoop! Enjoy!

I began writing Killer Story because I’m a huge fan of crime podcasts like Serial and Accused and crime documentaries like Making a Murderer and Jinx. At the same time, I’m a skeptic of these shows. I’m intrigued by how reporters sometimes omit key details or distort the truth in order to tell a better story. In this ultra-competitive era, getting clicks and followers can be more important than getting the truth.

Another inspiration for Killer Story is all the men and women I know in their twenties who are fiercely dedicated to going into journalism despite the huge obstacles they face. Journalism is such a rapidly changing field, with newspapers dying, internet news sites unable to find workable economic models, and decent paying jobs increasingly hard to get. These aspiring young journalists have a sense of mission that I admire. Their passion refuses to be denied.

I also found inspiration in my own life. All TV writers get fired at least once in their careers, or to use the industry parlance, they “don’t get their contracts renewed”; and that has happened to me as well. There are many reasons TV writers don’t get renewed – often it’s as simple as, there’s a new head writer who wants to hire people they’ve worked with before. But whatever the reason, losing your job is painful.

And it happens all the time in the newspaper industry. Will Doolittle, a reporter for the Glens Falls Post-Star, told me that when he started out twenty years ago, they had fifty reporters; now they’re down to eight. All over the country, newspapers are laying people off or going under.

So I created a main character in Killer Story, Petra Kovach, who is about to get laid off from yet another journalism job. She obsesses about all the things that just about everyone I know who’s ever lost their job, including myself, stresses about: Did I choose the right path in life? Is what happened somehow my fault? Will I ever get a job in the industry again?

But Petra gets back up off the mat and keeps on fighting.

As I’ve indicated, Petra is based partly on me; I identify with her feelings and forgive all her flaws. She’s a young woman who’s trying to make it in a very difficult business. Petra is also inspired by a brilliant young woman I know who, like Petra, is a first-generation immigrant with big dreams from an economically disadvantaged family. She’s working her way through law school now.

The murder victim in Killer Story is Olivia Anderson, a Harvard freshman and alt-right YouTuber. Olivia is inspired by the alt-right media figure Tomi Lahren. In the book, we meet her before she becomes a controversial young celebrity. While I’m not at all a fan of the political views that Olivia adopts, I found it intriguing to speculate about all the pressures that might have transformed this sweet, caring young girl into somebody who is, on the surface at least, a pretty unlikeable person.

Writing Killer Story gave me a renewed, healthy skepticism of the news media, along with a new appreciation for journalists like Petra who overcome all kinds of obstacles to bring us the truth about the world. I hope you are as captivated by Petra as I am, and that you don’t guess the killer until the very end! You can preorder Killer Story at https://www.amazon.com/Killer-Story-M....

Every Day, From Here to There

A Short Story

The old man lay on his hospital bed. His sweet brown-haired boy, sixty now, sat on the chair beside him, ready to give him his dying wish.

The boy opened the book and began. “One fish, two fish,” he read. “Red fish, blue fish…”

The old man closed his eyes.

Robert Gross, my favorite professor at Amherst College years ago, just wrote my favorite review of The Necklace. Actually it's a sociological analysis from an American Studies perspective, literary criticism at its finest, making me see my book in a way I'd never seen it before. Here it is:

"Susan Lentigo, the main character of The Necklace, is the classic American hero, leaving her small town in the East and venturing West to discover herself anew. In the novel, Susan is stripped of her money, reduced to scavenging for leftovers at fast food restaurants, and obliged to make connections with people unlike herself (Kyra the teenage rebel, the biker at the all-night coffee shop). She finds it hard to cast off the past, dragging that worn-out suitcase everywhere, its weight representing the crushing burden of her former life. But in the West, she comes to “trust herself,” as Kyra had advised, quoting Emerson’s credo. And as she does so, she learns to read the world with fresh eyes and discern the truth behind her daughter's murder. In short, Witten has built a long-running theme in American Studies – the individual reinventing herself in the West – into the structure of The Necklace. You could describe the novel as a mashup of the Innocence Project and Emersonian self-reliance."

I’m thrilled to present this guest post from my friend Chae Ko. For years I’ve loved reading Chae’s mom-son dialogues on Facebook, and I think they should go out to a wider audience. I’m so glad Chae agreed to post one of his dialogues here. Enjoy!

THE DRIVE HOME FROM THE ONCOLOGIST

Mom: So nice I have son take me to doctor. How I do when you not here?

Me: You’re lucky that I’m here then.

Mom: Too bad I don’t have more kid.

Me: What’s that supposed to mean?

Mom: Make easier for you. Have younger brother. Help out.

Me: How do you know that would happen? I might end up having to do it anyway.

Mom: Maybe live with me. Easier.

Me: I’m living with you right now!

Mom: I say make easy for you. I have three kid. They all help. Not just you.

Me: I suppose you’re right. Okay you should have a baby. Then you can leave me alone. It’s a win, win.

Mom: Oh? Really? You say I bother you too much?

Me: Well, you could do a little less.

Mom: You sad when I die. You have no more mom bother you.

Me: Okay now you’re just making me feel guilty.

Mom: No I just say. What better? I bother you and I alive? Or I no bother you but I dead?

Me: That’s an unfair question. Of course I want you to be alive.

Mom: See. Bother better. You say.

Me: How about being alive and not bothering me so much?

Mom: It experience for you. I bother you, you learn.

Me: Forget it. Let’s just talk about something else.

Mom: When I pregnant with you, my breast get so big. I have too much milk. You so scared when so much come out! You cannot drink too much. I had to throw away all the time.

Me: God why? Why?

Mom: Doctor say get surgery but I did not get. So now it stay bigger. Never go back to normal. Too much breast.

Me: No. God. Not,“why it’s still big”. Ugh. WHY you gotta tell me this stuff?

Mom: Because this son and mom time. Have fun conversation.

About the Author: Chae Ko writes comedies that explore shame and guilt, particularly the Asian-American kind. His stories are often inspired and fueled by embarrassing anecdotes, mental health, and a smothering Korean mother who shows her love by scrutinizing all his life's choices. Chae has been a screenwriter for Voyage Media, a board member for APAFT, (an organization that advocates for Asian American artists in theatre productions) and continues his work at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program to help others achieve their goals of becoming screenwriters. In his spare time, he gossips about himself to his two therapists and one psychiatrist to manage his chronic PTSD, anxiety, and panic attacks.