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Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 2, Plot Hoops

6/26/2014

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Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my month long countdown of some of my greatest fictional pet peeves. Already we've taken a good look at why I'm bugged by "perfect" characters (# 5), characters whose life revolves almost entirely around coincidence (# 4) and characters who refuse to evolve with their series (# 3), but today I'm going to focus on a pet peeve I like to call Plot Hoops.
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So you've become invested in a story. It's well written, it has fun, likable characters, and you can't wait to see what happens next. You can tell they're building up to something big, that an awesome scene is right around the corner. Your enthusiasm builds, the story speeds up, and then suddenly... someone does something wildly out of character, possibly even incredibly stupid that makes absolutely no sense given everything you'd already seen.
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Hey guys, I know there's a bunch of torture zombies outside right now, but I think we should split up.
There's probably a term for this type of literary problem, but I've always called them Plot Hoops. They're not quite plot holes, not really, because they don't always actively contradict past events and characterizations in the story, but they will always feel so out there, so off, that it feels like the characters may as well have been jumping through hoops for the sole purpose of moving the story along to the next big scene. And sure, while the scenes these plot hoops often lead to are entertaining and even the centerpieces of their respective works of art, they remain irritating and problematic and militantly cannot be ignored. I could go on listing every example I could think of...
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Like flying down the Death Star's heavily armed trench instead of just flying directly at the thermal exhaust port?
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Like pretty much everything involved with the Tri-Wizard Tournament and the resurrection of Voldemort?
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Or pretty much any decision Janeway ever made? (Though truth be told, I know this one has more to do with a massive, disinterested writing team than anything else.)
...but that would just be scratching the surface of this problem, and, well, there are also too many examples to list in one article while still maintaining people's attention, so I'm just going to leave it at those few examples.

The cause of this problem is one of the easiest to point out and one of the most difficult to deal with: the outline. Most stories require an outline, whether a formal written one or a casual, rough idea of a plot, to get off the ground. And while I cannot speak for every writer in the world, I have to imagine the outlining process for most has to work a lot like this:

Step 1: Come up with some really cool/necessary scenes for the story's plot

Step 2: Put them in a good order

Step 3: Fill in the gaps
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Step 4: Profit!
Step 1 is the easy part. Step 2 is often a little bit harder. It's Step 3 where this problem universally pops up. (Though like any good writer trying to make a living off of it, I'll admit that Step 4 is indeed the truly hard part.)

We all create stories with an eye on certain scenes that we think are particularly important for the story, yet these often come at the expense of the rest of the story. To see how this happens, let's make up a story. For the sake of argument, let's imagine that this story we're working on is an 80's slasher film.
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Oh, hi Jason!
Now being writers behind an 80's slasher movie, we know that the main scenes people come to see, and indeed generally write these movies around, are the death scenes. And because we enjoy squishy too, that's what we're going to focus on when outlining. So we think of a number of bizarre weapons to kill people with (knives, machetes, rubber chickens, the soundtrack of The Bodyguard (on vinyl), the moon's gravitational pull, a burlap sack containing the collected works of Leo Tolstoy...), and we get our death scenes. We attach them to our great list of stereotypical horror movie victims, and we've got... well, about 15% of a movie. There needs to be some filler. If you add some back story before the killing, great, then you get about 50% of a movie.
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Which, like having only 50% of an actor, is rarely a good thing.
So now it's a matter of putting in that vital connective tissue between the death scenes and, well, here's where the problems come in. See, for most of these death scenes to work, we need characters to be on their own, which usually means they have to make some bad decisions.
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The same kind of decisions that many actors think they made in doing horror before becoming famous.
No matter how smart or genre savvy the character has proven themselves to be throughout the movie, we need to remove their agency and have them make some truly baffling decisions in order to get them exactly where we need them to be, when they need to be there, so we can see just how much squishy we could squeeze out of them. Sure, maybe with a little thought we could maybe make their actions make some kind of sense, but that would take time, and work, and may interfere with our precious death by Tolstoy scene, and we can't have that now, can we? No, at times like this it's best to hurry through so we can finish the script and get to all the parties and drugs and groupies that horror film writers must have!
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You're kidding, right?
So writers get lazy. We all do it, and sometimes these contrivances are the only things that can get us from one place to another. If we don't want people to constantly call us on these, though, we need to do two things:

1) Take care with the connective tissue! Don't hurry this part, ask if it makes sense, and please, please, please just make sure that you've done your best to make everything make sense in a way that won't have your readers say 'OH, COME ON!' more than five times per book.

2) Don't fall in love with your big scenes (too much). This one's the hardest, I know, because a certain amount of love is necessary to pull most of these off in the first place, but it's probably the most necessary. When you fall in love with a particular scene, you want to mold the entire story around it, but in the end you need to look at the story as a complete organism, not just a bunch of parts thrown together a la Frankenstein's monster, because just like Frankenstein's monster, if some of your story parts work better than others, it still stands a chance of derailing your entire story, going on a violent rampage that might end in a misunderstanding with a small girl drowning in a lake, which we can't have.
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Sorry about that joke. Please don't hurt me.
For a quality, cohesive story, you need to make sure that all the parts are in good working order, and if that means altering, changing or maybe even removing some of the big scenes you had in mind from the beginning to make it work, then that's what you have to do. It may feel awful to do it, but in the end, your story, and your readers, will thank you for making it all make sense in the end.
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Thanks for that like, speech, man, but can we go back to our drugs, premarital sex and investigating strange noises now?
Then again, maybe some characters were meant to jump through hoops.

So dear readers, are there any pet peeves in fiction that have always bugged you? Sound off in the comments below!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)

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Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 3, Character Stagnation

6/17/2014

2 Comments

 
Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my month long countdown of some of my greatest fictional pet peeves. Already we've taken a good look at why I'm bugged by "perfect" characters (# 5) and characters whose life revolves almost entirely around coincidence (# 4) but today I'm turning my attention to Character Stagnation.
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There has to be a rational explanation for this, even though I've spent the last six years of my life seeing plenty of the irrational.
Serialized stories are great, when they're done right. I love a good overarching story as much as anyone, especially when its mixed together with excellent character drama.
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There are exceptions to every rule, naturally.
However, in any serialized, or even partially-serialized series that finds much of its appeal from a recurring, core cast of characters, you run a serious risk of character stagnation as the series goes on, where characters remain pretty much as they have since the series began, or have become near caricaturized versions of themselves that, by the end, they barely resemble the nuanced, well-realized characters they may have started out as.
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For the sake of simplicity, I'm ignoring comics and animated television as they have a floating timeline that pretty much exists out of our own world, though I will say that as a huge fan of old-school Simpsons, I find the cheap parodies of themselves that most of the characters have evolved into over the years to be pretty sad.
Typically this problem seems to come up in genre shows and films, where one main character is forced to play the skeptic, even after seeing pretty conclusive proof of the existence of the supernatural.
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Sorry Locke, but I don't care if I saw you getting dragged off by a living column of black smoke, I STILL DON'T BELIEVE IN ISLAND MAGIC!!!
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Yeah, I'll believe in bible magic and enchanted stones, but aliens? You gotta be out of your goddamn mind.
And of course, the ever classic example:
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Special Agent Dana Scully.
Now, by the time Mulder left The X-Files, she had become a full true believer in the paranormal. Until then, however, she remained the show's resident skeptic, always discounting Mulder's theories and trying to think up a scientific rationale for what she was seeing despite having seen countless things that go beyond the realm of the explainable (and this is discounting the show's weird insistence that she believe in every bit of paranormal that might have to do with religion, which she's apparently totally okay with). Of note, within the course of one season, while still a skeptic, she witnessed firsthand:

- A pair of ghosts trying to drive her and Mulder to suicide

- A couple of centuries old, near-invisible monsters who probably became this way from drinking from the Fountain of Youth

- A serial killer with the ability to force his will on others

- A haunted doll that makes people kill themselves

- A blind woman with a psychic link to a murderer

- A giant, insectoid monster that sucks out people's souls and hides as a middle manager at telemarketing companies around America

- A town full of vampires, led by Luke Wilson


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It's a strange show, is what I'm saying.
In every one of these episodes she has witnessed, and sometimes even deduced the paranormal phenomena going on, and every time something new comes up in a future episode, she automatically discounts any supernatural explanation (or Mulder theory in general) even though she sees this stuff happen all the time and has spent more of her FBI career dealing with this kind of shit than anything else!

So, yeah, it's nice that in the long run she became a true believer, but for the longest time her refusal to do so was one of the show's more infuriating aspects.

Of course, this cliché isn't only relegated to genre shows.

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Nope.
Booth and Bones from the aptly titled show Bones were one of my favorite TV relationships for the longest time because of their great opposites attract chemistry; he was the impulsive, think with his gut humanist, she was the analytical scientist with poor people skills. Over the course of nine years they've been friends, lovers, and married with a child. You think this long a run and this much time together would affect them profoundly as it will so often do for people in real life (god knows my wife and I are very different from the people we were before we met). Instead, over the course of the show, they have become near parodies of who they were in the beginning. His think-with-his-gut attitude and disdain for the sciences has transformed him almost into a monosyllabic caveman, and her analytical nature and poor people skills have turned her into a misanthropic narcissist who has less of an understanding for how people work than Data did at the beginning of his run on Star Trek.
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Please don't drag me into this.
So many series' do this, giving the illusion of taking steps forward while keeping their characters at a status quo that's impossible for them to get around. While it is one of the most irritating of my fictional pet peeves, I also must unfortunately admit that it is easily one of the most understandable. A lot of shows have dedicated audiences who could tell you every detail of every nuance of every minor character and plotline, but most people who watch, watch more casually. They have a basic idea of what a character or characters are like, allowing them to drop in and out without missing too terribly much. While the post-Lost boom in serialized dramas has muddled this considerably, most shows stay with this kind of character stagnation to keep them accessible, which, much as it may annoy me, I will begrudgingly respect, because that's the nature of the business.

It doesn't mean I have to like it, though.

So dear readers, are there any pet peeves in fiction that have always bugged you? Sound off in the comments below!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)

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Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 4, The Everywhere Man

6/12/2014

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Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my month long countdown of some of my greatest fictional pet peeves. Already we've taken a good look at why I'm bugged by "perfect" characters (# 5), but today I'm turning my attention to the character I like to call The Everywhere Man.
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Hello.
Coincidence is a huge part of storytelling, and is often very necessary because sometimes, well, creators need to get their characters out of (or into) a problem in a hurry and can't entirely justify a more longwinded and accurate explanation as to how they got there in the first place. In proper doses, or if done with just enough charm, I don't have a problem with this.
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Hello again.
But in the wrong doses, coincidences become contrivances, and contrivances become annoying as hell. One of the most annoying types of coincidence to me involves characters who just happen to be everywhere the plot needs them to be, no matter how long the odds of them showing up wherever crazy events are happening may be.
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Hey, I'm as surprised as anyone that it's possible to get attacked by Godzilla in three separate cities stretched across a hemisphere.
Now, if a character is going out of their way to be a part of the plot, this can easily be excused. After all, they're trying to be where the action is. However, far too often characters are just put in a position where they just so happen to be right where they need to be for something relevant to happen to them, purely by chance, and oftentimes without even wanting to be present to find out what they have..
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Surprisingly, a lot of this tends to involve characters overhearing important conversations while in a bathroom stall.
Now I could go into an exhaustive list of characters that this happens to, but that'd take longer than I want on this article. Instead, I'd just like to focus on the character that I think is most guilty of this particular pet peeve.
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Sorry, Harry.
Harry Potter has to be, without a doubt, the single luckiest character in fiction. With the help of his trusty invisibility cloak, he has overheard nearly every relevant conversation in this series’ existence, usually without ever having to seek out the information in the first place. (Note: Yes, I’m aware that oftentimes him overhearing conversations is part of an evil/Dumbledore/evil Dumbledore plot, but the depth of these conversations and how the details pertain to him are generally improbable.) He accidentally steps on the wrong staircase? It leads him to the plot of the book! Didn’t buy the right textbook? Don’t worry, the loaner copy is full of cliff notes from one of the greatest potion masters of all time, letting you get in good with just the teacher you need to get in good with for this book! He sees a magical device and decides to shove his head into it? Good news, it’s one of the few devices in the wizarding world that won’t kill you for doing that!

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Seriously though, why was his first instinct, “I must shove my head in this magical object I know nothing about!” You think he might've learned something from the whole Tom Riddle's Diary incident.
Improbable luck with the character being in the right place at the right time doesn’t always have to be good luck, either. Plenty of fictional characters find themselves in awful situations where their ridiculously specific skills and experiences come in handy. Like when Agent Scully takes a vacation on The X-Files and just so happens to come across a small town being plagued by an evil, magical doll.

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Then again, she did vacation in Stephen King’s Maine, so she should have seen that coming.
Or the sheer number of forensic crime shows where the heroes, while not on the job, just so happen to stumble across a crime that fits their narrow specialization.

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Then again, how many airplane flights don’t end with the discovery of a partially skeletonized murder victim?
Or the heroes who just so happen to stumble into the exact same specific situations and people time and again on different sides of the country/world.

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Has stumbled into elaborate robberies staged as terrorist attacks that only he and his colorful, western-based, language and the occasional sidekick can solve in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C.
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Has been abandoned by his family around the Christmas holiday, befriended an elderly recluse, evaded local authorities and defeated the exact same two criminals in Chicago and New York.
In Conclusion:

It’s necessary to have your main character/characters where the action is, that’s just how storytelling works, I get that. If your character happens to be in the middle of the action without actively seeking to be a part of it or being thrust into it by outside forces, you better have their incredible fortune/misfortune be the main focus of the story, otherwise people will start to get more distracted by this character’s crazy luck than the situations that their crazy luck has gotten them into yet again. Just a little care, a little extra exposition (or a good wink and a nudge at the audience if you’re in a cheeky/self-referential/4th-wall-breaking mood) can deal with that whole suspension of disbelief problem.


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My favorite example of The Everywhere Man done right, or as I like to call him, The Scumbag Alternative to Forrest Gump.
So dear readers, are there any pet peeves in fiction that have always bugged you? Sound off in the comments below!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 5, The "Perfect" Character

6/7/2014

2 Comments

 
Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my blog after an unfortunate two month hiatus. I can give a whole lot of excuses for why I've missed these months of blogging, but in the end it really came down to me wanting to dedicate all my writing time to getting my current novel, After School Special, into something remotely readable. It's not the best excuse in the world, but it's the only one I've got at the moment. I'm sorry if I disappointed anyone out there.
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Maybe I should have gone with my "Rabid Tribble Attack" excuse after all.
In working on and researching After School Special (yes, I'm going to write that name out every time, mostly because making it into an acronym would lead to a lot of awkward situations) I've been spending a lot of time on a strong contender for the greatest website for writers in the world, TV Tropes. It's an easy place to get lost in with its comprehensive listing of clichés and tropes as they pop up in all forms of fiction. Naturally, looking into this fictional abyss, it got me thinking about a lot of the aspects of fiction that annoy me most. Thusly, I am dedicating my June list to my fictional pet peeves. First up, I aim my blog at "perfect" characters.
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You see them all over the place in fiction. Characters who are good at everything they attempt, no matter how difficult it is or lacking in experience they are...
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Characters who are universally beloved (or at least envied) for reasons that are never adequately shown...
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I know it's low-hanging fruit. I'm OK with this if you are.
Characters who are always right...
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Sorry Holmes fans, I just don't get the appeal.
Characters who have all the powers in the world...
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I don't see why you should have a problem with this.
Shut up, Dr. Manhattan.
They're called Mary Sues, Gary Stus, and probably a bunch of other expletives that I don't have the time to look up, and whether we want to admit it or not, every artist is guilty of creating them at one point or another. God knows I've had my fair share.

There are a lot of reasons to be annoyed by this particular trope, but I promised myself that I was going to approach this list as a writer, so I’m going to go into the two main reasons that this bothers me from a writer’s perspective.

1) Perfection is boring.

I call this the “Why There Will Never Be a Good Superman Movie” principle.


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Sorry Chris, I like you, and you’re great for the part, but, well…
Superman is perfection personified. He won the genetic lottery when it came to getting superpowers, is widely regarded as one of the strongest beings in his fictional universe, and has the good-old American charm of having been raised in Kansas on his side.

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And is typically the current generation's definition of a hunk.
Yet, for all that he’s got going for him, as a character, Superman is usually portrayed as a blank. As a symbol. As an ideal we can strive to be. Most of his character development comes from trying to live up to, or failing to fulfill, this idea, with very little attention paid to who he is as a person. If anything, his character is incidental, it’s what he means, or just how cool he is, that’s important to the story, and that can only go so far. Maybe this sort of idealism would work in a short dose, like in commercials, but for extended periods of time there has to be more there before the attention starts to wander.

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Even when he's doing his level best to destroy the city he's trying to save.
Further, this kind of perfection also tends to transform these characters into actual objects. When you have a character whose sole purpose is they're so beautiful/powerful/awesome that their sole purpose is defined by other characters pursuing them, they become a MacGuffin, no different from a piece of treasure in an Indiana Jones movie. When someone comes in, solves all the other characters problems and then leaves without bringing any of themselves to the scene (aside from some latent superiority at being the only character who can consistently solve everyone's problems), that makes them more a problem-solving machine than character, something most cell phones probably have an app for these days.
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Suddenly Data's fascination with Sherlock Holmes makes a ton more sense to me.
2) A lot of creators try to round out their characters lazily.
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Seeing that they've created a perfect (or bland, or perfectly bland) character, many lazy creators will feel the need to round them out, but instead of truly rounding them out, they just give one flaw or weakness that is supposed to make them more "human" and "relatable", yet usually serve to make them something of a caricature. This often comes in the form of a vaguely hinted at rough childhood that doesn't come up in the plot, or a scar the hero thinks is disfiguring but everyone else thinks is beautiful/badass, or as is often the case in YA and romantic comedies, making a character clumsy.
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Making them roughly as rounded a character as anyone on America's Funniest Home Videos.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are also characters who are remarkably perfect and well adjusted despite having pretty much every problem that exists in the world, an improbable and equally problematic fate which seems to befall YA, video game and action movie leads with equal frequency.
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And Superman, interestingly enough, given the commonness of Kryptonite.
In Conclusion:

I know it's impossible to give every character in a story complete characterization, and I know that having a character that's the best at what they do, or is perfect (or near perfect) is necessary under some circumstances. All I ask is that some care and consideration goes into them to make them a little more than just a blank slate that is full of awesome.

And now as I step off my soapbox and realize that I've got four more of these entries to go this month, I realize I might be in some trouble.
So dear readers, are there any pet peeves in fiction that have always bugged you? Sound off in the comments below!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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    Author

    Matt Carter is an author of Horror, Sci-Fi, and yes even a little bit of Young Adult fiction. Along with his wife, F.J.R. Titchenell, he is represented by Fran Black of Literary Counsel and lives in the usually sunny town of San Gabriel, CA.

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