Blogs by Matt Cost

Dixey Bull is generally considered the first pirate in Maine. As these things so often go, even if he dreamed of being a pirate when he was a kid, living the life of a buccaneer of the seas was not his first intention. But, given his moniker, perhaps becoming a corsair was merely his manifest destiny. In the early 17th century, Bull started life off as an honest merchant, but when a roving band of French men attacked him along the coast of Maine, moored in Penobscot Bay, and relieved him of trade items of knives and beads as well as the furs he was bartering them for, something clicked in his brain. The raiders left him his small sailing vessel, but nothing else. Destitute and desperate he visited several English settlements and recruited fifteen men to be in his band of pirates. They started out ransacking small vessels, expanded their treachery to settlements along the coast, and then The Dread Dixey Bull and crew disappeared into thin air, never to be heard from again. Almost one hundred years later we come across Black Sam Bellamy. Much like Bull, Bellamy started off as a sailor, but he was with the British Royal Navy. Stationed in Cape Cod, he’d fall in love with a young lass named Goody Hallett. It is not quite known whether she was already married, and her husband disapproved (funny that), or she was too young, and her parents rejected Bellamy, but either way, he felt it necessary to go find his fortune so that he could return and take Goody away. He initially went looking for the treasure of the Lost Spanish Armada of 1715, but when that didn’t work out, he turned to piracy. In a little over a year, he became the wealthiest pirate ever, capturing the loot for up to fifty-three different ships. And this is where it becomes interesting. Loaded down with loot, he came to Maine. He stopped in Pemaquid Point before continuing to Machiasport with the thought of creating a Pirate Utopia, a democratic community of buccaneers enjoying the splendors of their booty. He had one task left to do first, though, and that was to retrieve his love, Goody Hallett, from Cape Cod. Unfortunately, his ship was caught in a fierce storm and sunk, and he and all but two of his men went down with the ship. And this is where my latest Clay Wolfe adventure begins. One of those survivors carries with him a treasure map that suggests that the stolen riches of Black Sam Bellamy were actually buried/hidden in the area now known as Port Essex. This map is uncovered in a King James Bible by two antique dealers who hire Clay and Baylee to help them find the treasure. Of course, it is not that simple. Pirates, Motorcycle Clubs, and Sex Doll Manufacturers round out the mix of those hunting the treasure. Pirate Trap publishes March 27th. Dead men tell no tales. Or do they?

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” ― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens is writing about the French Revolution, but he might as well have been writing about the Industrial Revolution that was his time period, or maybe even the world of today, if he was an oracle in line with George Orwell. All three of these eras are ages of paradox. The rich live safe and leisurely existences far removed from the realities of most of the population. The French Revolution, Industrial Age, and Now are times of extreme wealth and of extreme poverty, a polarization of the whole truth, with a middle class plunked down on the lower side of the stratosphere. And this best of times and worst of times is also representative of the paradox of the holidays. Whether you celebrate Bodhi, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Hannukah, Yule, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or something else, it can be a wildly chaotic time. For those with money, family, friends, and love—it can be a wonderful celebration of life. For those struggling to pay the bills, it can be an enormous financial weight similar to cement shoes in a river. Many people feel alone and isolated as the world revels around them. The holidays are a time where it is stressed that is important to ask for help when help is needed. Whether it be money, sadness, remorse—it is essential to realize that you are not alone. And this means that those on the other side of the paradox, those with the means and the relationships of love, are ready to extend a hand. The holidays should not be the worst of times for anybody, not with so many of us living the best of times. None of us should live alone on a mountain top, nor need the visit of three spirits to wake us to the true meaning of the holidays. Nobody should feel the isolation of the Grinch nor the miserliness of a Scrooge. Let us make this the best of times and the season of light. We are all one people. Happy Holidays. Write on.

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When is Enough Enough? When is enough enough? That is a question we struggle with on a daily basis in America. We are born into a culture that always wants more. I am a product of this exposures and experience of my edifying enrichment. It is the American way to always want more. The Algonquin people told tales of the wendigo, a malevolent spirt that appeared as a man that had feelings of insatiable greed and hunger, and in their telling, had a desire cannibalize other humans. The more flesh the wendigo ate, the hungrier it grew, wanting more, more, and still more. This has come to be symbolic of any person, group, or movement with an overwhelming appetite and greed for ever greater consumption of food, power, wealth, or material possessions. This is the America that we live in, a place where enough is never enough. We need bigger houses, fancier cars, more clothes, appliances—the latest in technology and gadgets. More. This voracious hunger that can never be fulfilled is something that I often see and most certainly have experienced as a writer. There is always a desire for more, a reaching past what is had, to spy upon what could be next. As writers, we need to sometimes hit the pause button, and stop to smell the proverbial roses. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, or have since the age of eight, anyway. There were many bumps along the way. I wrote my first manuscript when I was twenty-two years old, fresh out of college. I am Cuba. A mere thirty-one years later, that book was published, creating my first traditionally published novel. I might interject that this was a rather patient time for me, and many roses were smelled, perhaps too many. But it was not for a lack of wanting. And when that first book came to fruition, my hunger grew ravenous. I signed a contract with Encircle Publications. Then came the cover reveal. Then the ARC. Then it was launch day. Book signings. I had written, published, and was selling copies of my own book. But I wanted more. Here, I will discuss the potential more that was desired, without commenting upon which rung of the ladder I have currently reached. In my mind, I have already reached the top, and realized that the peak might not be quite as exciting as the climb. You know, that old thing, it’s the journey and not the destination that matters. A writer writes a book. Edits it. Feels pretty good about it. Decides to shop it an agent or maybe directly to a publisher. A publisher decides to offer a contract, the deal is signed, and roughly a year later, the writer, now an author, receives ARCs in the mail. A fabulously exciting milestone that is only eclipsed by book release day, which coincided with a launch party in which the newly crowned author is praised by family, friends, and perhaps a solitary stranger from the wild he wanders into the celebration by mistake. Okay, so Velma had a pub date of April 12th. Maybe this will be the one? The one what? A book has been written, edited, sold, published, and launched. Then what? The author wants to be recognized for their work in terms of awards and sales. A modest award is realized by a company that nobody has ever heard of, and a trickle of sales leak out, the author following the Amazon Author Central page to see how the book is doing, even though the algorithm developed by Amazon has almost nothing to do with actual sales. More. This is not enough. The author wants more and bigger awards. Increased sales. Slamming their way through social media sites to promote their baby, attending expensive conferences to network and brand themselves and their book—scrapping and scraping to gain notoriety and fame, the author manages to win a more substantial award, one that people have actually heard of, and sales tick up another notch. But this is not enough. The author wants to win an Edgar, a Booker, a Nobel, or a Pulitzer. They want to open the New York Times and see their name on the list, and if really greedy, they want that name to be on the very top. The author wants the major conferences to woo them, offer them to be the guest of honor, wined and dined, and treated like royalty. But what happens when there is no more more to lust after? When the awards have piled high and the sales are on par with Stephen King? And this one author, wonders, if perhaps, it is not just enough to write. Write on.

The Roaring ‘20s was quite arguably the most exciting time in the history of the US. It was a time just after the Great War, women recently having got the right to vote, Prohibition, speakeasies, rum runners, gangsters, baseball, jazz, moving pictures, and a period of fantastic writers producing books. Paris has always been spoken of as a hot spot in this time period for all of this, but New York City was filled with legendary figures and events like no other place and time in the entire world. Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and the start of The Great Gatsby, Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees VS the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, Coleman Hawkins, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong and so many other monumental jazz musicians; these are just the tip of the iceberg that was New York City in the 1920’s. When I decided to combine my love of history with my passion for mystery, thus, I needed to look no further than a setting of Brooklyn in the ‘20s. It didn’t hurt that I have a daughter living in Bed-Stuy there in the city, giving me the opportunity to research as well as visit. I decided to base my PI, 8 Ballo, in the next neighborhood over in Bushwick, based off a graffiti tour I participated in, and Velma Gone Awry; a Brooklyn 8 Ballo Mystery , set in 1923, was born. The starting point is a German businessman coming into the dingy PI office of 8 Ballo and hiring him to find his missing flapper daughter. 8 will learn through the course of the search that the twenty-five-year-old Velma is an incredibly talented young lady. And perhaps she is missing on her own volition, hiding from something in her past. It is also possible she’s been abducted by the Jewish gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Mayer Lansky. The investigation leads 8 to befriending Dottie Parker, conversation with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, meeting with Coleman Hawkins and Smack Henderson, and being threatened by Siegel and Lansky. And that is just the first day. In the days that follow, other legendary figures such as Babe Ruth, Ethel Waters, and Mae West will be encountered in the search, all having connections to the intriguing Velma. 8 Ballo got his curious moniker when his mother was certain that he was going to be born a girl that she had the name Margrit picked out, but no male name. When he was born a boy, and his dad was out to sea, she merely wrote the number 8 down on the birth record, meant as a placeholder to be changed later, but never was. He is college educated, a veteran of the Great War, is in his mid-30’s, and has relationship issues. He is aided in his investigation by a colorful group who represent the melting pot that is 1920s Brooklyn. His best is Pearle Hill, a business entrepreneur he has known since they were boys playing stickball on the streets around the turn of the century. Marty Feldman is a journalist for the Brooklyn Eagle and Stephen McGee is a cop in Bushwick. 8 occasionally sees a woman by the name of Asta Holm, until the mysterious Velma complicates things. Where is Velma and why has she gone awry? Follow 8 Ballo through the streets of New York City in the Roaring ‘20s to find the answers to these questions. Velma Gone Awry is publishing on April 12th. Read on. Write on.

Should characters in books have political leanings? I mean, most people do. Some people claim that they hate politics, politicians, and never vote because they’re all crooks. But that is a political belief as well. Most of the rest of the population are just as adamant in their beliefs, be it left, right, or somewhere in the middle. I understand that you don’t want to alienate a segment of the population. But the same can be said for just about any belief that a person has. Religion. Football fan. Soccer fan. Support Immigrants. Oppose Immigrants. Eat meat. Vegan. The list goes on and on. It is my belief that creating a character in a book is like taking a store mannequin and bringing it to life. To do so, you have to provide a hairstyle, clothing, and mannerisms But this is still merely scratching the surface. If you want to truly bring this mannequin to life, you have to go deeper and reach the core essence. What is the backstory of my protagonist? Sure, Clay Wolfe has commitment issues. But why? The writer has to know this, and share it with the reader, sometimes subtly, sometimes bluntly. His parents died in a car crash when he was eight, is the short version, and the longer version continues to leak out over the course of four books now, with a fifth due in December. Goff Langdon in my Mainely Mystery series votes Independent, sometimes Democrat, and never Republican. Is that wrong? I welcome discourse, of course, on whether his political beliefs are right or wrong. The argument can certainly be made that Republican beliefs are more valid than that of Independents are Democrats. The question is: Is it wrong for him to have an opinion? There seem to be two major rules of thumb of what not to do in a book. Don’t kill a pet, especially a dog or cat, and don’t allow your protagonist to have a political belief system. I am good with the first but question the second. When a writer starts writing to not offend, then the creative process has been stymied. I don’t think we should use fiction to get on a high horse and use our novels as a podium to preach our politics, but to omit something as major as political leanings from our characters seems to be taking a step back to become an inanimate and thoughtless mannequin.

I have recently become engaged with the process of turning my novels into audio books. This has been a fascinating process and has created a few questions in my mind. I believe writers and readers have long thought it was almost impossible to make a good adaptation from book to movie. This is not an easy process as I became aware when I went to write a screenplay on my novel Wolfe Trap. You must strip away just about everything and then allow the director to recreate it in their vision. Thoughts inside the heads of characters disappear. Description of people and places are peeled back to expose the underlying structure but not the flesh and bones of the people nor the richness of the place. The story created by the author is denuded and left to the mercy of the elements in a Maine winter. I can think of several movies that were good, maybe even as the book, but certainly not better. The Shining with Jack Nicholson was pretty darn good, but did it exceed the writing of Stephen King? In mystery books to film you’d have to include Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Big Sleep (1946), and The Maltese Falcon (1941). Perhaps the best book to flick adaptation was The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola worked closely with Mario Puzo to create an honest replication of that towering and intense novel. I’d be glad to hear feedback from others on what books to movie adaptations they think were wildly successful. I recently heard an author saying they didn’t care if the movie made from their book was any good or not (I can’t remember who it was). Their reasoning made perfect sense. Either way, they got paid for the rights. If the movie was a bomb, everybody would say the book was better. If the movie was a success, everybody would say good book, good movie. Win, win. This brings us to audio books which is much easier to adapt, as everything from the book goes into the audio. But there are other factors to consider. For my Trap books, I have a narrator who is pretty straight forward. Jason Arnold. I like his approach and his voice is a perfect match for Clay Wolfe. He has only a slight change of inflection, accent, and dialect from character to character, which works well for Maine. I’ve heard male narrators who try to sound like females and vice versa and it is usually a disaster. In a perfect world, you have a male and female narrator, or an entire cast, but that is not my reality. Wolfe Trap is now available, Mind Trap will be next month, followed by Mouse Trap, and then Cosmic Trap. And then there is the dreaded mispronunciation. My narrator for Mainely Power did a marvelous job, and nailed toughies like Topsham, but thought that Bowdoin College was pronounced like it is spelled, with an oin on the end. This has hopefully been corrected to the release next month of book two, Mainely Fear. It turns out the narrator for my At Every Hazard historical about Joshua Chamberlain during the Civil War is a pastor. This worked fine for that particular book, but it raised problems for the sequel, Love in a Time of Hate, as that book has graphic violence, sex, and language. It looks like Emmett Collins’ voice will be changing between books…. My upcoming book, Velma Gone Awry, coming in April, posed another set of difficulties. It is set in the melting pot of Brooklyn in the 1920’s. The protagonist, 8 Ballo, is a second generation American, so his voice is pretty straightforward. But you also have the Irish cop, the Jewish journalist, the Black entrepreneur, as well as a whole host of Italians, Germans, and eccentric characters. For Velma Gone Awry, a narrator with a wide range of voices was necessary, and I absolutely love the job that Colin Martin is doing. It should be available in the middle of January. His range is wonderful and brings the book to life. I find myself thinking, oh, that’s how so and so sounds. Are there any audio books that do that for you? I’d love to hear. I am quite excited to announce the paperback release this past week of the fourth book in the Clay Wolfe Trap series, Cosmic Trap. This time, a government task forces hires Clay and Baylee to investigate unexplained aerial phenomena over the skies of Port Essex. Write on.

On Aug. 4, 2020, Deputy Secretary of Defense David L. Norquist approved the establishment of an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force. That’s right. UAPs are the new UFOs. On June 25th, 2021, the task force presented a preliminary report that there is definitely something going on in the skies, but they have no idea what it is. The Pentagon confirmed the authenticity of pictures and videos gathered by the Task Force, purportedly showing “what appears to be pyramid-shaped objects” hovering above the USS Russell in 2019, off the coast of California, with spokeswoman Susan Gough saying “I can confirm that the referenced photos and videos were taken by Navy personnel. The UAPTF has included these incidents in their ongoing examinations.” I believe that the government is trying to obfuscate what is happening above our heads so as to not create alarm. The task force has gone through various increasingly confusing name changes over the past two years and have had little luck in getting to the bottom of hundreds of sightings. The phenomena of UFOs began during WWII when pilots began to see unexplained oddities in the sky that they called ‘foo fighters’. This was followed by the Roswell incident of 1947 in which debris was found at a ranch in New Mexico. The government claimed it was the debris of a weather balloon. People did not believe them. Some conspiracists believe the wreckage was spirited to a hush-hush military site in southern Nevada called Area 51, where study of the aliens and their craft continues to this day. From 1952-1969, the US government investigated 12,600 mysterious sighting through a program called Project Blue Book. This investigative committee was disbanded and there was no official program looking into UFOs or UAPs for almost fifty years. On November 14, 2004, a UAP was recorded about 100 miles southwest of San Diego, CA. The USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, including the missile cruiser USS Princeton, were performing drills. Among the group were two F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter pilots. During the training, they were suddenly asked to proceed to new coordinates for a possible real-life situation. Before this, a radar operator in the group had been picking up anomalous aerial vehicles (AAVs) — the Navy’s term for UAPs — for several days at an altitude of over 80,000 feet. However, after detecting AAVs at lower altitudes, the two pilots were sent to intercept the objects. At first, the pilots couldn’t see the AAVs, but they did notice a disturbance in the water. Suddenly, a Tic Tac-shaped aircraft appeared, moving quickly and erratically before speeding off. While the encounter wasn’t captured on video, a different pilot was able to record the aircraft leaving. This report was buried for almost twenty years, until the implementation of the Unexplained Aerial Phenomena Task Force in 2020. This and 143 incidents have so-far been unexplainable by the UAP task force. They have recently listed five purposes of the program. Number four is to mitigate and defend US airspace. Possible explanations include foreign aircraft (Russia, China), secret US programs, or aliens. It would seem that UFOs or UAPs are real and fascinating. And now, for the shameless plug. This is also the basis for the December 21st publication of my fourth Clay Wolfe/Port Essex mystery, Cosmic Trap. Clay, Baylee, and gang are tasked with being the local liaison for two UAP Task Force members investigating multiple sightings in the skies of Port Essex. About the Author Matt Cost was a history major at Trinity College. He owned a mystery bookstore, a video store, and a gym, before serving a ten-year sentence as a junior high school teacher. In 2014 he was released and began writing. And that’s what he does. He writes histories and mysteries. Cost has published four books in the Mainely Mystery series, with the fifth, Mainely Wicked, due out in August of 2023. He has also published three books in the Clay Wolfe/Port Essex series, with the fourth, Cosmic Trap, due out in December of 2022. For historical novels, Cost has published At Every Hazard and its sequel, Love in a Time of Hate, as well as I am Cuba. In April of 2023, Cost will combine his love of histories and mysteries into a historical PI mystery set in 1923 Brooklyn, Velma Gone Awry. Cost now lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. A chocolate Lab and a basset hound round out the mix. He now spends his days at the computer, writing.

The Ties Between Eugenics and Genome Editing by Matt Cost Ken Burns is on to something. But I beat him to the punch. In his new documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, he delves into the influence that America had on the Nazi Party and Adolph Hitler through the study and implementation of the Eugenics Movement. This past April, I published Mouse Trap , which I began writing in December of 2020. As my mysteries often do, the plot began as one thing and morphed into another beast entirely. As I dug further into the topic of genetic engineering, currently being experimented on with mice, I realized how much bigger this topic really was. The stated goal is to eradicate disease such as diabetes, cancer, etc. The reality is that the first genetically altered baby was born in the U.S. twenty-two years ago. Since then, new technology, such as CRISPR has been designed to improve this process, and while the FDA frowns upon genome editing on live human embryos, there is little teeth to their position, as the science is outpacing the law. The reality is that the science is out there to create babies with specific eye color, hair color, (skin color?), body shape, increased mental facilities, and improved physical prowess. With the backing of a wealthy benefactor, the very real possibility of a secret lab creating superbabies does exist. But this is not something new. It all started in the late 19th century and really began to pick up speed at the turn of the century. In the United States of America. With the Eugenics Movement. In my current WIP, City Gone Askew , 8 Ballo becomes enmeshed in this fraudulent science that attempts to eradicate criminals, the feeble minded (as they termed it), and undesirables such as Blacks, Jews, Italians, and many more. On the surface, the way toward achieving a purer (their word, not mine) American race was to be through forced sterilization and stringent immigration laws (the 1924 Reed-Johnson Act). These scientific and medical procedures and experiments were supported by many wealthy families of the time such as Carnegie, Harriman, Rockefeller, and Ford. The few dissenting scientist and doctor voices were drowned out in a tidal wave of support. In Mouse Trap , Clay Wolfe discovers a secret genetic engineering lab, which has come full circle from the Eugenics Movement that 8 Ballo is thrown into in City Gone Askew. Discovering and learning about fascinating subjects such as this is one of the pieces of writing that enthralls me the most, even it often scares me to the core. When is it time to say enough when trying to improve humanity? When does it go too far? What, really, is an improvement? These are difficult questions that we face today, but they certainly are not new. Being knowledgeable about eugenics and genetic engineering are far too important to not pay attention to. Next up? Unidentified Aerial Phenomena coming this December!