Matthew Kim. Author, Failed Entrepreneur, Book Nerd.
Matthew Kim is a young writer from the suburbs outside of Toronto, Canada. Finding himself drawn to books and producing a few lengths of erratic scribbling as a child and his early teenage years, books abruptly left his life as he spent more and more time on his phone and laptop.
Returning as suddenly as it left, Matthew eventually decided to pick up a fantasy series that he never finished in his earlier years – and was hooked. Imbued with a new fervor, he first delved back into reading before rediscovering his innate passion for writing. This culminated in his first book, The Fall of the Four.
If you’re here, and reading this, I’d assume you’re at least mildly interested in what I do. If that’s the case, my thanks cannot be put into words.
If you haven’t already, I’d encourage you to check out some of my short-stories, or my novel ‘The Fall of the Four’. Anything you can do, even if it’s just upvoting a short-story I post on Reddit, I appreciate. For those wanting to go the extra mile, I do have a Patreon. For now it’ll just be an outlet to offer additional financial support, but in the future I would like to put more effort into it with: Q&A, concept art, lesson I’ve learned, and anything else relevant.
It would be a dream come true for me to live off my writing; and every person, every dollar thrown my way gets me closer to that dream.
Thank you everyone,
Matthew Kim.
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One morning I was taking a break, and on YouTube refreshing endlessly (as one does). I was recommended a talk held by Tynan Sylvester, an Indie game developer (I’M ALL OVER THE PLACE I KNOW, STICK WITH ME) that built a game that I love, RimWorld. He said that RimWorld was not a game, but a story generator; he’d created an environment where the player gets to organically create characters that goes through a story. The characters go through arcs, they experience losses or triumphs, and find themselves interacting with the world at large.
RimWorld stories are common on r/Rimworld in the form of comics, but in October 2021, I’d never heard of a RimWorld style short-story or novel. Fueled by this excuse, I set myself to task and have spent nearly every day writing.
You may see mention of a creative work’s status. Below is a rough outline of my process, this might be useful to understand where each work is in my current creative process.
Concept. The story exists in my document of ideas. If you see a work on my website still in concept, that means I know I’m going to write it but haven’t committed resources to it yet.
Outline. Here I do my best to outline character arcs, world building elements, and the rough plot.
Storyboard. This is a bullet point list of the plot, some chapters might have have just a handful of bullets, others might have pre-written dialogue or fight sequences where I go into detail.
Revision 0 - The first draft.
Revision 1 - The Broad strokes. Making changes based on a bullet point list I’ve accumulated while going through Rev 0. Usually, these are focused on story structure, and characters. This version may be sent to Alpha readers.
Revision 2 - Punching up and trimming down. I analyze the work of Rev 0 and changes of Rev 1. From here I assess if the changes achieved their purpose and look at where I can start shaving off words. This sometimes means deleting whole plot/char arcs, but more often it’s cutting fat from sentences and paragraphs. This version may be sent to Beta readers.
Revision 3 - Grammar. Go through all the changes, ensure the grammar meets my standards.
Revision 4 - Polish / Spot Revisions.
Commission creative works. Yes, this is a step in the creative process. In order to promote my work online, I’ll require a visual component. For this, I work with artists to put characters to the ‘brush’.
Publish.