Matt Guice

Matt Guice, since COVID-19 came, only parts his dwindling hair in isolation (good parts), yet he proudly forgets to shave, letting his critics and their paid pundits from other states be dismal if they will, but stay out of his state. Looking in the mirror raises new questions. Is Matt really Ernest Hemingway reincarnated? It does not seem so from his writing, though several of those novels he has published have been called the Great North American Novel by no less admired a literary expert than himself, including more than five of the New Outreach series, of which there are now fifteen.

Was it that leaving himself alone, as he and his loving wife settled into his new home, almost never going out, made it difficult to focus on remembering writing what in the future would prove to be a novel about things that happened too many years after he wrote them to be real, or challenged in their forecasts? Or was it the complexity of outlining another prequel to one of his published New Outreach novels when no unused letter in that section of the series was available for the title?

He would like people to think several of these last books have been written (there’s one in your hands now!), and doesn’t think those can be altered now that they are in print, actual paperback editions, and no longer just e-books…

Matt has been expanding his New Outreach series forwards and backwards in that universe’s timeline (with more novels still to be inserted in the interstices), and keeps a compleat outline somewhere on file, which includes unfinished episodes [ooh! if his computer were to crash, he would be busy sorting through huge mounds of scrap paper, some with needed notes therein]. The order in which he writes these novels, guaranteed to prove to all seventeen of his fans & followers that he’s as cracked as the problem of properly numbering his series (assuming he can finish them all, despite evidence to the contrary during a quarantine which eliminated all excuses), is not alphabetical, but the chronology within the series is. He intends to keep writing, in whatever order, until there are no more letters in the alphabet, or maybe just the Roman alphabet.

[Don’t tell anybody this secret of alphabetical order of the timeline for galactic history. Please don’t give away these trade secrets. This is just between you & me & whoever else is reading this biographical blurb, so, SHHHHH.]

When not working at home on his primary job, or trying to reclaim his secondary job, Matt will hysterically block on his writing duties by hiding in the kitchen, no longer, for social distancing reasons, cooking meals for thirty or forty of his co-workers, but only preparing food for his wife and cats, if the latter would just stop yowling and allow it. This, even if his wife Nancy has fed them first, in which case she points out how fat they are getting from all these meals, plus treats and stolen kitchen scraps. Maybe the humans are, too.

“Shave off the beard, Matt,” says Nancy.