About Matt Dinniman

Tapeworms and hippos. Specifically Fiona the hippo.

Samantha. Mentally ill, deluded decapitated heads are one of my favorite tropes.

I do zero plotting. I am what is called a pantser. I make it up as I go. I keep VERY careful track of everything behind me, including all the Chekov guns I leave loaded all over the place, but I usually don’t have a firm grasp on how they’re going to go off. Again, I do have vague notions, but I usually end up changing it up at the last minute. I find joy in writing my way out of situations and making it look like it was the plan all along.

I have a very, very large excel spreadsheet with a whole lot of pages and numbers and stats and a list of character names, and if anything happened to it, I would literally just kill everybody and give up.

I research and read a lot. That’s part of the reason why it takes me so long.
When the folks on my Patreon voted for them to go to Cuba in book 6, I spent a month reading up on Cuban stuff. I’m a big trivia nerd, and I like learning about stuff. It keeps me out of porn. Well… it’s supposed to keep me out of porn.

I love dogs. I have several of them.

Jeff Hays is my bitch. He does what I tell him to do without question.

Everything I write will always be horror. I have never, ever tried to hide this. No matter how stupid or dumb or funny I try to be, the base of everything I write is based in horror. Fun fact, I’ve never written anything with a happy ending, either. We’ll see what happens this time.

I like cats, and I like explosions. Since people get mad when you blow up cats, I instead wrote a book where the cat and her man servant are the ones doing the blowing up.

Seriously, I’ve been writing for a very long time, and the idea of a death-game sort of book has always been on my mind. On top of that, I used to travel to cat shows when I was an artist. I was once set up right next to a Persian cat, and the little thing was just staring at me the whole time. I thought to myself, “I’m going to write a book with that cat in it one day.”

I wasn’t expecting that cat to become fully sapient like Princess Donut had, because I kind of just make it up as I go along. I’m so happy I just started writing at that particular day at that particular time, because it all seemed to work out pretty well.

I knew Jeff Hays before I started writing Dungeon Crawler Carl. The previous book I have that’s also on Audible is Dominion of Blades and then Dominion of Blades 2: The Hobgoblin Riot (which I am going to finish, by the way). That series is narrated by the amazing Andrea Parsneau, who does The Wandering Inn and several other books. Andrea and I had gotten nominated for an award for The Hobgoblin Riot, and the award ceremony was in Kansas City. That’s also where Jeff Hays happens to live, so he was at the award ceremony as well. I ended up meeting him and became friends with him there.

Soundbooth Theater was doing Soundbooth Theater Live, which is their weekly or biweekly podcast that they do. I said, “Hey, let’s just do one scene from Carl to see how you guys do it.” It was a scene from the first book where they meet the Juicer for the first time, and they had a really fun time with it. Right afterwards, Jeff messaged me and was like, “I’m doing this book.” And I was like, “Yeah, you are.”

Now, everything I write in the Carl series is 100% Jeff speaking in my head. When I come up with new characters, I’m already thinking of how he might do it. If he does a voice I don’t like, I end up killing the character almost immediately.

SBT Live – Jeff and co read Dungeon Crawler Carl for the first time.

Once, I was in a coffee shop researching Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon and I had a photo of half of a cat up on the screen. The barista walked by and saw the screen, and I blurted that I was studying to be a vet tech.

I’ve been writing my whole life. It’s one of those things that you just know you want to do, especially since it’s so glamorous and attracts all the girls.