The Summer the World Ended by Matthew S. Cox
Published by: Curiosity Quills Press
Publication date: June 29th 2015
Genres: Post-Apocalyptic, Young Adult
As far as Riley McCullough is concerned, her best friend getting ‘dragged’ off to Puerto Vallarta for the first two weeks of summer vacation was the end of the world―at least until the bombs fell.
Life in suburban New Jersey with her mother has been comfortable, not to mention boring, to an introverted fourteen year old. As if her friend’s surprise trip wasn’t bad enough, her expectations for the ‘best summer ever’ disintegrate when she gets sent across the country to stay with a father she hasn’t seen in six years. Adjusting to a tiny, desert town where everyone stares at them like they don’t belong proves difficult, and leaves her feeling more isolated than ever. To make matters worse, her secretive father won’t tell the truth about why he left―or what he’s hiding.
Her luck takes an unexpected turn for the better when she meets a boy who shares her interest in video games and contempt for small town boredom. In him, she finds a kindred spirit who might just make the middle of nowhere tolerable.
Happiness is short lived; fleeing nuclear Armageddon, she takes shelter with her dad in an underground bunker he’d spent years preparing. After fourteen days without sun, Riley must overcome the sorrow of losing everything to save the one person she cares about most.
How did you get your start in writing?
When I was in my early teens, I got into roleplaying type games (like D&D), and more often than not find myself in the role of the person running the game. This, of course, is not too far removed from writing – at least in concept. At the time, I wasn’t the biggest fan of reading (mostly because I associated reading with school telling me I had to read) but I did have my head in other worlds, creating stories and characters. Quite paradoxical to that, I always did well in English class.
Fast forward almost thirty years later, and I’m say a “hobbyist” writer. I was working a day job at the time where I spent all day answering customer emails. My then supervisor, noting the way I wrote, asked if I’d ever considered writing novels or anything similar. Around that time I was getting over my addiction to WoW – somewhere in the past several months it had gone from all-consuming to boring. Well, Chris’s suggestion took hold, and with each passing week, the more I thought about writing seriously. Between his suggestion, and that scene from Family Guy where Stewie keeps teasing Brian “so how’s that novel coming,” I motivated myself to write Virtual Immortality.
Alas, it was a little long to submit as a debut novel. (Granted, there are some long debut novels, but it apparently stacks the deck against you if you try to submit a “tome of the ancients” to an agent. So, I put it aside and tabled two ideas at the same time. One, which would become Division Zero, the other, Prophet of the Badlands. After much gnashing of teeth and indecision, I settled on Division Zero. After finishing it, I queried it around and received a lot of “this is great, but I don’t feel I’m the right agent to rep this” responses. Not knowing if that was a generic canned reply or if there was some issue with the writing, I asked another author I had seen in a chat room support group for writers to read a few chapters. She liked it and suggested I query her publisher directly. I did, and they liked it, and here I am quite a few books later.
Favorite color?
Blue.
Favorite movie?
Aliens. (I ardently maintain they only made two of these. Alien and Aliens. The rest did not exist.)
If you could spend a month with any of your favorite book boyfriends, which one would it be and why?
What if I don’t have a book boyfriend? I wouldn’t mind hanging out with Molly from Neuromancer/Mona Lisa Overdrive though.
(Note from Nikki — Book girlfriends count too! :))
If you could collaborate with any well-known author, who would it be and why?
Either William Gibson (arguably the creator of my favorite genre) or Ernest Cline. I recently read Ready Player One and had an eighties-gasm. Apparently, we share many interests and memories.
Favorite flavor of ice cream?
Chocolate, the darker the better.
How do you come up with names for your characters?
Sometimes, the names happen out of thin air. Every so often, one will have hidden meaning – but naming characters for what they become is a slippery (and often cliché) slope. The one time I was guilty of that was Althea. I was scoping out baby name sites and saw that word with the name meaning of ‘healer,’ and it stuck.
Where do you do most of your writing?
At home on the PC. Usually flanked by cats.
How long does a typical writing project take you, from idea conception to publication?
Without the publication part, this is easier to answer. The time from submission to the publisher to release day can vary quite a bit. As far as that part goes, the fastest was six months; the longest was about a year and ten months, if I remember it right. The idea to finished book? This, too, can vary – but not as much. So far, it seems to take me around a month between idea and having a completed manuscript. Sometimes faster. The Summer the World Ended hit me like an obsession. I spent about a week building up the outline of how I wanted the plot events to unfold. Once I had the outline done, I drafted it in eight days. Grey Ronin (The Awakened #3) took me about three months because I was drafting it right around the time Division Zero #1 (my first book to release) came out and I was discombobulated with excitement.
What piece of advice would you give to aspiring authors?
Read some books on editing and writing. At the top of my list would be “Self Editing for Fiction Writers” by Renni Browne and Dave King. After that, On Writing by Stephen King. After that, seek feedback from people who aren’t close friends or family. When receiving crits on your work (provided they are constructive) consider the following: If you share your work with five people, and they each say something different about it – that’s a normal spread of opinion. If you agree with any of them right away, consider changing it – but when everyone’s going in different directions, chances are there aren’t any major issues. If two people say the same thing, give strong consideration to tweaking that. If three or more say the same thing, it probably needs to be changed.
Born in a little town known as South Amboy NJ in 1973, Matthew has been creating science fiction and fantasy worlds for most of his reasoning life. Somewhere between fifteen to eighteen of them spent developing the world in which Division Zero, Virtual Immortality, and The Awakened Series take place. He has several other projects in the works as well as a collaborative science fiction endeavor with author Tony Healey.
Hobbies and Interests:
Matthew is an avid gamer, a recovered WoW addict, Gamemaster for two custom systems (Chronicles of Eldrinaath [Fantasy] and Divergent Fates [Sci Fi], and a fan of anime, British humour (<- deliberate), and intellectual science fiction that questions the nature of reality, life, and what happens after it.
He is also fond of cats.
$40 Amazon Gift Card
Signed copy of The Summer the World Ended
