® INDIE SUCCESS
68 BOOKLIFE, MARCH 9, 2020
Mathias loved to write fiction in high school, but
after graduating he started playing in a band and
focusing more on writing song lyrics. He says he
embraced the proverbial rock-and-roll lifestyle a
little too fully. “I ended up living out of my truck and
in cheap motels, stealing for drug money,” he says.
Though getting arrested in 2007 was undoubtedly
rock bottom for Mathias, it ended up saving him
from an uncertain—though certainly destructive—
future. His first week in prison was pretty rocky: he
ended up in a fistfight and was sent to a solitary cell.
But Mathias soon saw a silver lining. For one hour
a day, he and his neighboring inmates were allowed
out. “We could trade books through the gap under the
door,” he says. “I remember having to rip the spine of
a Terry Brooks paperback in half longways because,
even opened and spread, it was still too thick to
slide under. There were books coming to people
through the mail, and they would circulate. One
day, after reading something about Raymond E. Feist
just putting pen to paper and ending up with his
masterpiece, Magician, I was struck with inspiration.”
Mathias figured that he had a year and nine
months to devote himself to writing. “So I set a goal
of writing 10 pages, while also reading about 300
pages, a day,” he says.
Mathias’s writing environment came with a very
unique set of challenges. He says he wrote in long-
hand on notebook paper “with crappy ballpoint
pens.” He also had to work around the vagaries of
his neighbors. “Some guys were so rowdy and insis-
tent on hassling the staff that they would flood their
cell, which would, in turn, flood every cell,” Mathias
says. That meant he had to watch where he placed
his inky manuscripts.
It’s the little conveniences that matter, Mathias
learned. “The disadvantages were obvious: no spell-
check, no cut and paste, no way to search for a scene
or character,” he says. “The worst was no digital
thesaurus or dictionary—two tools I could not live
without these days.”
And, yet, Mathias counts his two years in a solitary
cell as among his most fruitful and empowering. “It
was one of the absolute best things to ever happen
to me,” he says.
Though Mathias didn’t directly integrate material
from his time in jail into his work, certain experi-
ences inevitably seeped into the writing. In the
Wardstone Trilogy, “the overarching story line
concerns the ignorance of racism and prejudice,which was inspired by all the racism and gang
violence I witnessed,” he says.
After he was released from prison in 2009,
Mathias ended up caring for his grandmother, who
had Alzheimer’s. It allowed him the time he needed
to recuperate and revisit his writing in a decidedly
different environment. He also developed a new skill:
“I started learning to type.”
Mathias published the first book in the Wardstone
Trilogy, The Sword and the Dragon, in 2010. He wrote
and published The Royal Dragoneers (book one of the
Dragoneer Saga) shortly after that. His other series
include the Dragon Racers, Fantastica, and Legend
of Vanx Malic. Writing under pseudonyms, he has
published The Butcher’s Boy: The Ballad of Billy Badass,
the children’s series the Awesome Opossum, and a
standalone picture book, The Amazing Book of No.
Mathias says his book sales through Amazon have
totaled over $1 million, and he has more than 200,000
Twitter followers. He adds that he has another “huge
trilogy” in him and is looking for a publisher.
These days, Mathias’s favorite place to write is
on the boat slip he owns with his wife on Lake
Texoma, Okla. “When the story starts flowing, it is
a wonderful place to write,” he says. “But only during
the week: the weekends are hectic with fishermen
and swimmers.”
When it is too cold for the lake, Mathias writes at
a desk he built into a bay window nook off of his
bedroom. “The house is modest, but it sits on five
acres of Oklahoma woodland,” he says. “On any given
day, I might see a flock of wild turkeys, deer, hawks,
owls, coyotes, or even a bobcat right outside the
window. We also have hummingbirds, cardinals, blue
jays, and a half dozen woodpeckers that frequent the
bird feeder. I guess I’m lucky.” ■Mathias’s original handwritten draft of The Sword and
the Dragon