Matt Wallace

There is nothing we can say that isn't better said by Matt fn Wallace himself, via his blog:

Here’s the thing.

Most every author biography you find on an author’s website is bullshit, and I’ll explain why.

Generally these author bios are written in the third person, like a press release. Yet with very, very few exceptions that bio is always written by the author themselves. I’ve had to write my bio dozens of times by this point, and I’ve always done it that way. Every single time I feel like a dishonest, pretentious asshole writing about myself in the third person when we all know damn well it’s me doing it.

Some call this practice a form of professionalism.

I call it illusory, self-aggrandizing, self-important bullshit.

So I’m just not going to do it anymore.

My name is Matt Wallace. I’m writing this bio, it’s about me, and if it’s all the same to you I’ll do it like a relatively normal human being attempting to communicate with another relatively normal human being.

I was born in Rio Hondo, California in 1982 and grew up in Bell Gardens (once a BG’er, always a BG’er). For ten years I was a professional wrestler. I trained in New York City at the infamous Doghouse at the age of fifteen and worked all over North America after turning pro at the age of seventeen. I was known as The One Man Riot Squad, The One Man Riot, or Deacon Riot (as one-half of the tag team The Legion Knights, and later during the last leg of my singles career as “The Messiah of Professional Wrestling”).

I never made it beyond the indies, but I gained a whole lot of life experience.

“Life experience” may be the wrong term.

I spent a lot of downtime in those years collecting rejection letters from fiction magazines and studying martial arts in the forms of catch wrestling, Judo, FMA, and anything else I could pick up. Not wanting to starve to death I became a civilian combat instructor. I’ve taught self-defense, close-quarters combat, tactical knife defense, weapon retention, improvised weapons, and many other things to military, law enforcement, and private security.

I’ve also taught Tai Chi to senior citizens. True story.

I retired from all of that (mostly) in 2007 to write full-time. I divide that time with wildly varying degrees of evenness between screenwriting and prose. I’ve written north of one hundred short stories, many of which have appeared in various magazines and anthologies and a couple of which have won some awards. My first book, The Next Fix, was published in 2008 to a sparse din among otherwise oppressive and universal silence. My novel The Failed Cities, which began as a serialized podcast, was released digitally at the end of 2012 and published as a limited edition hardcover by The House of Murky Depths in 2013.

I’ve scripted every type of content intended for the screen known to lifekind, beginning with adapting several of my own stories into screenplays. I’ve written for the award-winning Illusion TV series Stranger Things, the animated series Nanovor, and most recently the Young Hollywood entertainment series Evolution Of. I’ve also written commercials, instructional videos, and electronic press kit content for films such as Taken 2 and A Good Day to Die Hard.

Whether you want to call me a blogger, an essayist, an author of opinion, or one more trolling d-bag on the internet, I also write a lot of non-fiction and post it on-line. That’s what this whole website is about, in fact.

I now live and work in Los Angeles. I write television, I try to write movies, and while I’m doing that I release my own fiction to a select but always fervent audience.

I’m just a working writer. I like to tell stories, I like to pay rent, and whenever I can do both at the same time I call my day a win.

## Work on Escape Artists

Escape Pod

* EP414 Knowing, read by Mat Weller

Pseudopod

* PP011 Killing Jars, read by Ben Phillips
* PP027 My Caroline, read by J.C. Hutchins
* PP047 Akropolis, read by Phil Rossi
* PP087 A Place of Snow Angels, read by Elie Hirschman
* PP360 Anasazi Skin, read by Lance Roger Axt

PodCastle

* PC254 Sundae, read by Dave Robison

Cast of Wonders:

* CW122 Sundae, read by Kate Baker
	+ CW154 Staff Pick - Sundae, read by Kate Baker