Unabashed

Matt Mitchell
Montevallo, Alabama
2006

I began writing my first novel when I was twelve, and it read much like you would expect, like something a twelve year old would write. Something like, “Fayde Buckskin went into the mountains in his customized Lamborghini, trailed by a sound like a thunderstorm, but it was his radio. He camped on the mountain in the rain and fog…” you get the idea. By the time I was nineteen I was writing my second novel, but by then I was in the Navy and found my creative juices stifled. In school, my primary interest was art, and I was fairly crafty at it, for an untrained hand. My high school’s art teacher invited me to every competition the school had even though I wasn’t a member of the Art Team. I won’t toot my own horn too much, but I had a fair bit more talent than most of the people who were, and my pencils alone earned me some ribbons, drawn with the old no.2 on stock typing paper. My art teacher even cut and built the frames for them for me. She thought enough of me to recommend me for a scholarship to the University of Montevallo, Alabama’s premier public liberal arts college, and I dutifully went and visited the school and art facilities, and then promptly failed to complete the application. I was never a very good student.

So: the Navy for me, working the flight deck of the USS America through Desert Shield and Storm in the Straits of Sinai and the Persian Gulf.

My second novel I finished when I was 25, and it wasn’t much better than the first, but it was better, but unpublishable would be putting it kindly. So I wrote another, my first real story, at around 60k words, and I was very happy with it, but of course I knew I wouldn’t get it published without some publishing credits to my name. I’d written short stories all my life, most of it garbage, but it gave me a foundation to work on. I began dedicating myself to writing better shorts, and I think I put together a few good ones. But novels remained my number one passion, and I felt like I was getting better at them.

I work for SouthernLINC Wireless, a regional telecomm company in the Southeast owned by Southern Company (NYSE: SO), so I don’t have much time to write anymore, and, I’ve found, even less to work at the business of writing. I get about two hours a night working either on a website (I’ve been online since 1995, as I’m sure most of you have as well, back in the day of local BBS’s) or a story, and every now and then I get the itch and submit a story or two, and so far all I have to show for it are about twenty or thirty rejections, which is not nearly enough to get me really frustrated, I know, but I do get frustrated. I like to write; I have to. It’s more of a need than anything else, I have stories in my head and I must get them out, I have no other way to explain it. Maybe one day I’ll get the time to work on the business end of it a little more intelligently and diligently. Until then, I remain, the unpublishable Matt Mitchell. (Since I wrote this, I’ve had some success in publishing, so I no longer qualify myself as “unpublishable.” Just “remotely publishable.” –Matt, March 8th, 2008)

I’ve just recently finished another novel I’m calling “Modern-Day Mythica” and already I’ve got another one in the works. Still, the business end of publishing is a slow, tedious process, so maybe they’ll one day see the light of day.

That’s about it; I’ve been with SLW for ten years as of July 7, 2007; I’ll be 39 this April 2nd (2008); I have a wife (high-school sweetheart), two sons–Luke and Liam, a deaf dog and a deaf cat and a house in the liberal arts capitol of Alabama, Montevallo. The good news is that 2007 was a great year for me. I’ve got a swath of published stories now, and a publishable manuscript to float into the publishing world. 

For specific interests this is Who I Am: Southerner, writer, technophile, conservative liberal (I adhere to no political party; I’m just hoping for a great leader to stand and be recognized. I’m still waiting), naturalist.