Matt Schofield

I'm Matt Schofield (1961 - ) and I was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. My award-winning journalism career spanned 35 years and included reporting from 60 countries and four wars. There was a moment, back in 2006, that convinced me to take a shot at writing fiction.

I was sitting in a dimly lit false storefront in Nablus, a small city in the Palestinian Territory of Israel, surrounded by a bunch of guys with guns.

The room smelled of freshly brewed tea and lemons, which made sense as we’d just had that. In my mind, I was writing a story that basically ran along the lines of “what I did this summer” except that instead of being a back to school necessity it was as the Israeli war with Hezbollah in Lebanon was winding down.

The men in the room with me were, officially, terrorists. They were members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group that had been quiet during the war. They had wanted to talk about the lessons they had learned from Hezbollah, and I thought that was news.

One of the men was trying to impress me with a tale of derring do when I asked the sort of simple questions journalists always ask, “What’s your name?”

“Sir, you cannot use my name. The enemy, they would kill me. They would kill my family.”

“Okay,” I sighed. “Then if I recount your tale, what do I call you?”

“You may use my nom de guerre.”

“And that would be?”

“Honey,” he said, solemnly.

I swallowed a giggle, and whispered to my fixer “Was Sweetie Pie taken?” Then, trying not to laugh said aloud: “Honey? Why Honey?”

Despite the cramped, dark setting, he struck a pose indicating that he was staring off into the distance. He reached a hand out and said, “Because Honey sounds innocent, but it traps, and it kills, the bees.” As he said this his hand mimicked crushing something in his palm.

“Uhm,” I said. “I’m not an expert, but I don’t think that’s how honey and bees work. The bees make the honey.”

Honey paused, a puzzled expression spreading across his face. Which is when I realized the other terrorists in the room had covered their mouths with their hands. A few heads were vibrating. They were trying to hold in laughter.

Finally, one blurted out, “We told him that. We told him it was a stupid name…”

And then the laughter burst out all around me.

Honey was less than pleased, but the story of how he returned intent on killing me, and that escape, is for another time.

The point of this story was that I thought, “in a non-fiction work, nobody would believe this. I need to write fiction.

Which is why, after 35 years as an award winning journalist, a foreign and war correspondent, I’m now writing these books.