94. MATT DINNIMAN: How Dungeon Crawler Carl brought LitRPG to mainstream readers

This week on LiteraryHype Podcast, Matt Dinniman joins me to talk all about his wildly popular LitRPG series, Dungeon Crawler Carl. The seventh book in the series is out now! We chatted all about the sudden surge in readership, going from independent to traditional, creativity, and everyone's favorite cat character: Princess Donut.

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Dungeon Crawler Carl
This Inevitable Ruin
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Dungeon Crawler Carl
This Inevitable Ruin
Operation Bounce House

Transcript

00;00;03;16 - 00;00;27;12
Speaker 1
Hi and welcome to Literary Hype. I am Stefani, your literary hype woman. And today on Literary Hype podcast. It is a very special fungus who has really just blown up in the last year or so. And not that his books weren't getting a lot of attention online, but he did self-publish initially. And this year a traditional publishers picked them up, put them out in hardcover, and it's gotten a lot of attention.

00;00;27;12 - 00;00;48;08
Speaker 1
And that author is Matt Dinniman. He is the author of the Dungeon Crawler Karl Series. There are many of these books this year at San Diego Comic-Con. He was getting all sorts of attention, both on the book side and for the audio side. Including in activation from Audible. So we did get to talk about that and so many more things that are going on in Matt Dinniman's world.

00;00;48;15 - 00;00;51;10
Speaker 1
So that be further ado. Here's my conversation with Matt Dinniman.

00;00;56;17 - 00;00;57;04
Speaker 2
Well, welcome to.

00;00;57;04 - 00;01;01;17
Speaker 1
Literary Hype. It's so exciting to have you on to talk about it. You have a lot of books to talk about.

00;01;02;01 - 00;01;06;06
Speaker 3
I do have a lot of books. I mean, most of them are in the same series, but yes.

00;01;06;14 - 00;01;18;29
Speaker 1
Which are getting new life right now as they're getting published traditionally, I mean, put into bookstores. What is that like for you to see this, the series that you've spent so much time on in the past now getting this like huge resurgence of new fans?

00;01;19;03 - 00;01;48;18
Speaker 3
It's pretty it's pretty wild. I've been writing my whole life, and it wasn't until fairly recently that I was actually able to make money writing my first book came out way back in 2003. And then but the you call it Karl series, the first one came out in 20, 20, and it wasn't until about 20, 23 where I met the fine folks over at Ace who saw how well it was doing as a self-published book.

00;01;48;18 - 00;01;58;21
Speaker 3
And then they picked up the hardcover rights for the physical book rights and started putting them in stores. And ever since then the popularity has just kind of taken off.

00;01;58;24 - 00;02;14;05
Speaker 1
As I work in a bookstore. So I remember the first time someone came up and they're like, Do you have Dungeon Crawler, Carl? And I was like, I have not seen this yet. They're like, Oh my God, you better get on track because this is going to be huge. And it sure has. Like, obviously now we're here at San Diego Comic-Con where there's a lot of attention on your books.

00;02;14;17 - 00;02;21;20
Speaker 1
So what is it like for you to go from being indie pub to now having a whole activation for your book series?

00;02;21;29 - 00;02;42;21
Speaker 3
It's pretty surreal. Honestly, I I'm always I'm kind of an introvert and I'm always been pretty shy and taught myself over the years because I used to go to conventions for a living. It's so hard. And I told myself, like when I put the lanyard around my neck, I kind of, you know, I'm into like I would call Matt, the author or Matthew just mode.

00;02;42;21 - 00;03;04;00
Speaker 3
So but even then it was just a few people at a time. And now it's like hundreds of people coming up and having me sign their books and going to events wearing Coors Player, wearing like Dungeon Crawler Carl t shirts. And it's like I said, it's surreal. It doesn't feel real. It's amazing. I still don't even know how to react sometimes.

00;03;04;00 - 00;03;07;25
Speaker 3
And people come up to me and say, Hey, I read your book and I really like it.

00;03;08;03 - 00;03;18;06
Speaker 1
The activation was so cool yesterday. Talk a little bit about walking into that room and seeing all these fans and like all the things that Audible had done to promote this book.

00;03;18;14 - 00;03;35;17
Speaker 3
Oh, it's wild. It's you walk in there's all the people working there have done your protocol shirts. There's like a marquee that said Welcome Crawlers, there's video games, a bunch of you know, just little swag items like pens, like they had they had this bar.

00;03;35;19 - 00;03;37;01
Speaker 1
That one was the first to sell out.

00;03;37;10 - 00;04;01;22
Speaker 3
It's so amazing to see how much support I'm getting from everyone. From Audible to a Silver Penguin Random House to Web tune our new comic. Everybody is so excited. There's a train going on like a trolley that is wrapped with the dungeon protocol. And I still haven't seen it, but I've seen 100 pictures of it and it's just it's flabbergasting.

00;04;02;03 - 00;04;12;22
Speaker 1
You are kind of at the forefront of the lit RPG genre as it's booming. So what's it like for you to see this area that you've been dabbling in really start to pop off?

00;04;13;08 - 00;04;23;03
Speaker 3
So it makes me so happy lit RPG, the whole genre I don't really kind of the genre because it's not really a genre, but that's another conversation.

00;04;23;03 - 00;04;24;05
Speaker 1
It's like a subsub sub.

00;04;24;15 - 00;04;44;15
Speaker 3
Yeah. Is has been such a small kind of insular community. People kind of think it's like this hidden gem, like, I find it and I'm so excited to read again because I hadn't read anything in so long. That's a lot of people say to me and there's so many amazing books that don't really get the attention they need.

00;04;46;24 - 00;05;11;10
Speaker 3
To keep fighting monsters. Beware, check in heretical fishing. You can just go on and on and on and on and the see it start leaking out the edges. And people in groups other than the live RPG groups talking about some of these books makes me really happy and I'm happy to recommend that start writing to anybody who will listen because it's so fun.

00;05;11;23 - 00;05;20;23
Speaker 1
So for anybody who hasn't heard of Lit RPG or Dungeon Crawler Karl or anything like that, tell them what the genre is like and why they should try to give it a try.

00;05;20;28 - 00;05;43;19
Speaker 3
OK, well, Dungeon Crawl Karl is a book about a guy and his ex-girlfriend's cats stuck on an alien gameshow. That's the basic premise of Dungeon Crawler. Karl, what makes it a little RPG is while he's on the game show, he has kind of a video game like rules controlling his actions. In other words, he has a stat screen.

00;05;43;19 - 00;06;03;11
Speaker 3
He can see what his string number is. He can see what his intelligence level is, his constitution, and he has spells and he has a menu. He can pop up and see it. He's starts off at level one and he gets stronger as the game goes on. And eventually he becomes like, you know, level 50 than level 60.

00;06;03;12 - 00;06;27;16
Speaker 3
Level 70 and that allows him to be stronger and defeat stronger monsters. And that's what a lit RPG is. It's general fiction. Again, this is general where the video game or tabletop role playing roles are baked into the the narrative of the book. And usually the main characters are aware that they are like level one and they're aware that the monsters are fighting to level ten.

00;06;27;16 - 00;06;50;00
Speaker 3
So they have to get stronger. And it's like playing a video game. A lot of people think they're like the choose your own adventure star books, but or not, they're just regular books, regular novels. But with those stats drawn in and there's different kinds, there's really, really crunchy ones where there's pages and pages and pages of stat sheets and they go like really into the minutia of like every little piece of armor the person has.

00;06;50;00 - 00;07;01;18
Speaker 3
And there's people who love that sort of stuff. And then there's other books like mine and books like The Wandering In, for example, where it's really light. There's a really light touch to the stats if people have those as well.

00;07;01;26 - 00;07;07;02
Speaker 1
So you've touched on the like it's not really a genre thing twice now since I got in. I'm curious. Let's go.

00;07;07;07 - 00;07;34;23
Speaker 3
OK, I feel personally that Lit RPG is not a genre, it's a style of writing for example, like he uses a pistol, a story like a novel that's written like a letter. A pistol battery isn't a genre, it's just a style and the vast majority, like 95% of all lit RPG novels are fantasy, just because it kind of lends itself to it like strength and magic missile and stuff.

00;07;35;08 - 00;07;57;12
Speaker 3
But we have examples of westerns, romance novels, lots of sci fi novels, mysteries that are also lit RPG. They just have the video game rules controlling the world. So I think it's a misnomer to call it His Honor. Everyone does. I still do it sometimes, Sue, because it makes it easier, but I strongly feel that it's not the first time someone said that to me.

00;07;57;12 - 00;08;10;27
Speaker 3
It was. There's an author. His name's Cullen. He writes the good guys and the bad guys and the grim guys. Series, and he said to me, It's not a genre, it's a style. And I was like, You're wrong. And then I started thinking about it, and he's right. So now I see it, too.

00;08;11;02 - 00;08;14;14
Speaker 1
I mean, at least you can admit when you're wrong and change course.

00;08;14;19 - 00;08;15;06
Speaker 3
That's right.

00;08;15;12 - 00;08;18;10
Speaker 1
There are a lot of people who can't do that. So thanks to you. And I.

00;08;18;28 - 00;08;19;07
Speaker 3
Think.

00;08;19;25 - 00;08;33;00
Speaker 1
One of the first things that I heard about with this book was Princess Donut and Princess Donut Supremacy. You must read this book for this cat. Yes. So tell us a little bit about crafting Princess Donut as a character and her journey through these books.

00;08;33;05 - 00;08;56;27
Speaker 3
So Princess Donut is one of the main characters in the Dungeon Protocol. She is. She starts the book as Carl's ex-girlfriend's cat. She's just a regular cat, which is not a regular cat, but she's like a cat. Like we know a cat, but she's a show cat. She was a tortoiseshell Persian cat. Her titles GC Bwr N W Princess, Dora the Queen and Chuck.

00;08;56;27 - 00;09;23;14
Speaker 3
And if you're familiar with the cat show world, all those letters mean something like BW stands for Breadwinner. And before I wrote books full time, I was an artist. I mean, I still am an artist, but that's what I did for a living. And a lot of that was going to cat shows and dog shows and setting up an artist alley style booth where I would sell art of various animal breeds, and I would go to cat shows a lot.

00;09;23;14 - 00;09;46;21
Speaker 3
And one time there was I was at a CFA event, which is the Cat Fanciers Association, and there was cages all throughout the show for, and they had two different cats and all of them. And I was like right next to the edge where the Persian cats were. And there's a tiny little Persian kitten and just glaring at me all weekend long and she like just looked like she wanted to rip my face off.

00;09;47;02 - 00;09;48;03
Speaker 1
And as cats do.

00;09;48;03 - 00;10;20;21
Speaker 3
Yeah, as cats do. And I said, I'm going to write a book with that cat or that. And I know that world pretty well. I never showed cats myself. I never show dogs or anything like that, but I know those people. And I thought it'd be kind of an interesting you. It just entranceway into a story. So I put the cat into the book and I never expected her to become the character she was when I first started writing, because once she enters the game shows, she's treated as a contestant just like Carl is, and she's eventually given sapiens.

00;10;20;21 - 00;10;34;13
Speaker 3
She's allowed she gets the ability to speak, and she suddenly has a memory of all her time when she was just a regular cat. And but she's still very much a cat. And I tried to keep her like the cat out of tune with the character as well.

00;10;34;13 - 00;10;44;18
Speaker 1
So and Jeff does such a great job of narrating for her in the audio book, his vocal range is so fantastic. What's it like for you to get to hear these audio books for the first time each time?

00;10;44;28 - 00;11;05;08
Speaker 3
I mean, I knew Jeff was going to do a good job because I knew Jeff from before, but Jeff Hayes is an amazing audio book. NARRATOR He's the man of a thousand voices. I get it. And still, to this day, I get people yelling at me for not crediting the female narrator and Thunder Girl Crawl, and it's it's all Jeff all the way down.

00;11;05;21 - 00;11;25;07
Speaker 3
You can go on YouTube right now and watch video of him, like switching like that voices. We had a panel yesterday where he did a cold read. He had not read this scene before, and we had him read for about 10 minutes. And I deliberately put in like six or seven different voices in that one called Read, and he switches through them seamlessly.

00;11;25;20 - 00;11;27;03
Speaker 3
It's amazing to watch him work.

00;11;27;11 - 00;11;34;27
Speaker 1
Into some of that tune. And that you're an artist. So talk a little bit about the shifting from the novels into the Webb tune universe for this story.

00;11;35;05 - 00;11;52;28
Speaker 3
So the Webb tune just started. We have I think it's like nine episodes are available now. Five of them are free. The way Webb Tunes works, or four of them are free. Or by the way, what Tunes works is all the episodes eventually are free. But the most recent episodes are kind of you have to buy them with coins.

00;11;53;16 - 00;12;19;09
Speaker 3
But I signed with Ethan Books and their art studio is called Laurel Pursuit. And about a year ago they started working on what is what just got released, which is the Dungeon Crawler Carl Webb tune. And if you're not familiar with Webb tune, it's a vertical scrolling comic and it's very, very popular, especially among like a younger population.

00;12;19;26 - 00;12;33;24
Speaker 3
And they're doing a fantastic job. It's very close to the book. They're keeping it really close to the story, which had a lot of people worried about, and I'm a fan of it, so I think it's pretty neat.

00;12;34;04 - 00;12;38;22
Speaker 1
What's the scene that you're most excited to see translated into art.

00;12;39;20 - 00;12;51;14
Speaker 3
From the first book, there's a scene where Carl and Donut save a bunch of babies from a meth war so that's I can't wait to see that scene.

00;12;51;27 - 00;12;52;27
Speaker 1
Unless you haven't even seen it.

00;12;52;27 - 00;13;12;11
Speaker 3
Yet. No, I haven't. I have seen a lot of it. I haven't seen the I've seen the storyboards, but I haven't seen the color version. I am involved in proofing some of it, and I do have some say, but I'm kind of letting them do their own thing because the writers on it are doing a fantastic job. They understand the story really well.

00;13;12;14 - 00;13;17;05
Speaker 1
Is there any anxiety or stress that comes from letting your baby go into someone else's hands in the room?

00;13;17;07 - 00;13;38;13
Speaker 3
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's it's it's always weird seeing other people adapt what you've written and seen, how they interpret it. I see it every day because there's lots of fan art out there as well. And every time I see something new and it's not exactly what I pictured, I always I always like to think about it and think about all the why did they picture it like that?

00;13;38;13 - 00;13;48;22
Speaker 3
And is it because I wrote it in a certain way or they're wrong or what? And it's usually because that's just how they interpret it. And I love seeing that.

00;13;49;08 - 00;13;55;12
Speaker 1
That goes along with the screen adaptation that was recently announced. How are you feeling about that process? Yeah.

00;13;55;22 - 00;14;20;09
Speaker 3
The television adaptation and there's not so much I can talk about, unfortunately, but I am. I'm very confident if it moves forward, it'll be done. Well, Chris Yost, who's heading that effort, is a big fan. He's on my Patreon is type of guy that messages me late at night asking you know, well, I really like this scene. He's completely caught up with the series.

00;14;20;09 - 00;14;23;13
Speaker 3
He understands it, so I'm looking forward to seeing what they do.

00;14;23;22 - 00;14;31;16
Speaker 1
That's always the scary part for readers. Of when it starts going into adaptations and like, well, they do it justice, but also will it happen at all?

00;14;31;17 - 00;14;49;15
Speaker 3
Right. And I mean, honestly, anything Hollywood, you don't you never know what's going to happen until it happens. So we'll see. I'm, you know, cautiously optimistic. But the truth is, I've had a dozen friends who have gone through this exact same process and very, very few will actually cross the finish line. So we'll see what happens.

00;14;49;26 - 00;14;56;23
Speaker 1
It's always very nerve wracking. Several my other alpha friends we have, there's all through that clock. It goes fast.

00;14;57;07 - 00;14;59;03
Speaker 3
It's like slow, slow, slow. And it really.

00;14;59;03 - 00;15;05;28
Speaker 1
Focused on top of the hour here. Also basis in the band. How do music and drawing help in your creative process as a writer?

00;15;06;26 - 00;15;31;29
Speaker 3
It's a pretty interesting question. I've been doing all three of those my whole life. Drawing I'm not that great at. I never have been, but I found pretty early on that I I could make money doing it. I was Etsy's number one seller for a very long time. I had a shop called Plaza Ramos. I designed, like I mentioned earlier, it's like cats and dogs, and I sold art prints online.

00;15;32;28 - 00;15;47;22
Speaker 3
And to this day, I keep finding people who've purchased my art, like literally have it on their wall in their house, and they had no idea I was the one who made it. But as a musician, I've also been a musician my whole life. When I was a kid, I had dreams of being a rock star. Two things.

00;15;47;22 - 00;16;06;08
Speaker 3
I had dreams of being a rock star and being a writer. And I never anticipated that writing would be the thing that I was actually probably the most talented, that I kind of suck as a bass player even. I try really hard. I am in a heavy metal band and we have a lot of fun. We're a bar band.

00;16;06;09 - 00;16;35;04
Speaker 3
We just play. It was all over the Tacoma and Seattle and Olympia area quite a bit, and we have lots of shows where, you know, a few people show up and we just play our hearts out with very loud, heavy metal. And that's fun too. But the truth is, writing has always been my true passion, and I draw inspiration almost the other way around.

00;16;35;04 - 00;16;58;02
Speaker 3
Like my the creativity that I try to play for me as a writer kind of bleeds into music more so that I think music bleeds into into writing I have a new book that's coming out in February. It's called Operation Bounce House, and it's a sci fi novel about gamers from Earth coming to like basically annihilate a client, a distant planet.

00;16;58;02 - 00;17;15;20
Speaker 3
And one of the main characters or the main character of that book is in a band, too. He's a drummer. And so I like I pull a lot of knowledge of, you know, life as like kind of bar bands into that book. And I'm looking forward to people reading my perspective on drummers.

00;17;15;20 - 00;17;21;08
Speaker 1
So if you could pick the theme song for Dungeon Crawler, Karl, what song would you want it to be?

00;17;23;28 - 00;17;41;10
Speaker 3
Oh, man, that's a hard question. I wish I could answer that. There's everybody dies by area is a good song that you probably don't know what that is. No, Thunderstruck by AC. DC is a good one. Yeah.

00;17;42;09 - 00;17;43;19
Speaker 1
But that was the one that I would.

00;17;43;19 - 00;17;44;27
Speaker 3
Have thought of probably. Yeah.

00;17;44;28 - 00;17;48;13
Speaker 1
Like AC DC, those seem to fit with Dungeon Crawler.

00;17;48;21 - 00;17;49;12
Speaker 3
I'm a big fan.

00;17;49;24 - 00;18;01;14
Speaker 1
So with the transition from these books, from being the pub and to traditionally published, you did retain your rights for the eBooks and the audio books about that process and how business smart.

00;18;01;14 - 00;18;01;28
Speaker 3
That is.

00;18;02;18 - 00;18;03;07
Speaker 1
Genius.

00;18;03;15 - 00;18;31;07
Speaker 3
It was genius. My editor sitting over there glowering, you know? So I have a very unusual book shelf situation. I think, whereas I had self-published them already and I had already sold the audio book rights to some theater who in turn we together ended up selling the rights to Audible Studios, even though some with it are still the ones producing the audio books.

00;18;31;13 - 00;18;48;12
Speaker 3
So those rights weren't on the table to begin with, but I still retain the e-book rights, and I was fortunate enough to find an editor who was willing to take a chance on just the print rights because we did talk to a lot of publishers and editors, and they all wanted the e-book rights. And the fact was I wasn't going to.

00;18;48;12 - 00;19;17;12
Speaker 3
So I was fortunate up there earning enough money as just an e-book author that I didn't really need to sell them. And I kind of hoped that more and more in the authors can, you know, work out mutually beneficial deals that are similar. Because I, I honestly feel as if that's the best way to go for someone who's already found success as as an independent author.

00;19;18;04 - 00;19;39;12
Speaker 3
Because we still, as in the authors, we still don't have any bookstore penetration. If we're in a bookstore, it's because we had to go to that bookstore. And this was a fiasco. And you can't do that. Someone like Penguin Random House has this a massive system where they print the books and they have their sales folks and the books sellers have the confidence in a book that has like the pre title.

00;19;39;12 - 00;19;47;06
Speaker 3
They know it'll be a good book. And when you have the best of both worlds, that works out for everyone's benefit.

00;19;47;11 - 00;19;57;23
Speaker 1
One of the members of the Pirates team was talking to me about the next one in the series and how they have to take off the dust jacket. There's something on them, and she's like, The next one. It's unhinged.

00;19;57;27 - 00;19;58;24
Speaker 3
It is unhinged.

00;19;58;26 - 00;19;59;24
Speaker 1
What can you tell us about it?

00;19;59;24 - 00;20;18;27
Speaker 3
I can't tell you anything about it, but I would never have gotten away with it on the first book. There's so many things I wanted on the earlier books that we just, you know, we couldn't do because we didn't know how people would react. Well, there's like goddamn a donut, which is, I think is pretty simple. There's the Samantha is a character in the book.

00;20;18;27 - 00;20;40;00
Speaker 3
She has a line, I will kill your mother that won't fly. But for book six, we kind of sneaked one past the goal we got. I need a baby seal. And that's that's it doesn't mean anything if you haven't read the book, but it's funny, if you have read the book, so and the next one is it's not really something that you can really get away with.

00;20;40;16 - 00;20;47;12
Speaker 3
I think without having a proven track record that the fans liked that stuff. They think it's funny. I think it's.

00;20;48;03 - 00;20;56;04
Speaker 1
Is there anything unhinged that you wrote that had to come out now? OK, so all the unhinged craziness is still there.

00;20;56;07 - 00;21;14;02
Speaker 3
No, that's actually not true. I mean, I the way I write is and I always say, don't do this because it's a terrible way to write because it takes forever. I write scenes over and over again and I write them in. And I'll think those like the most the craziest, most unhinged thing with the anticipation that I'm not actually going to do this.

00;21;14;02 - 00;21;31;20
Speaker 3
I just want to see how it goes. And then I usually take it out and take a step back. But sometimes I'll take it. I'll keep it in and say, OK, let's see what happens next. What people call Panzer. I don't plot my books at all. I don't use an outline. I just kind of make it up as they go along.

00;21;31;28 - 00;21;53;02
Speaker 3
And sometimes I'll write a scene deeper into the book first, and I have to go from point A to point B, and I have no clue how I'm going to get there. So I have to come up with something crazy and unhinged to get to that point. And it's important for me to not make it seem like a little too pie or like a douche sack making a, you know, sort of thing.

00;21;53;07 - 00;21;59;26
Speaker 3
So I have to make it as crazy as possible and still have it make sense and have people think, Well, that's the only way it can possibly go.

00;22;00;07 - 00;22;18;11
Speaker 1
That's interesting this when you're doing this series, that is just they just keep getting bigger and bigger. Like, next thing you know, it's going to be this big as I had these books. Yeah, they're ginormous. How do you approach figuring out where you want the next one to go when it's such a long vision?

00;22;18;25 - 00;22;24;24
Speaker 3
Yeah. So first off, the book seven, which is about to go out in the hardcover, is the longest one, and I anticipate that's going to be the longest.

00;22;24;24 - 00;22;26;12
Speaker 1
One of us will go back down.

00;22;26;15 - 00;22;38;17
Speaker 3
We're going to book. It is definitely going to be shorter the the Penguin folks are like, Matt, we need to like hire extra truck drivers to get this book to the bookstore. They're a little thick.

00;22;39;02 - 00;22;41;19
Speaker 1
So you can only say four copies in the case.

00;22;41;19 - 00;23;01;18
Speaker 3
And it's I mean, the truth is, you know, the booksellers don't like the books that big. It costs more money to print and we have to charge more. And I don't like that either. And I don't want them splitting the book something that like volumes. So we do want to make them shorter. But I also promised my readers very early on that I wasn't going to split a floor like in Carl.

00;23;01;19 - 00;23;26;23
Speaker 3
They're each of 18 floors, and sometimes we'll do more than one floor in a book. But I've never like had them like 49 for example, is what book seven is. I wouldn't want for seven or for nine to encompass two different novels. So that's kind of why the, the most recent book is pretty long, but we're working on it'll be more concise with my words.

00;23;26;28 - 00;23;29;15
Speaker 1
Do you have any thoughts of how many books will end up being in the series?

00;23;29;15 - 00;23;44;26
Speaker 3
I'm pretty sure it's going to be ten, but I don't know, for positive sake, I suspect if anything, it'll be shorter rather than longer. But I'm pretty sure that we're going to land on ten. We're past the center point. I can kind of see where the arrow is going to land. So tenants, my guess.

00;23;45;10 - 00;23;50;05
Speaker 1
And also since this is literary hype, the last question we always ask, what books are you hyped about right.

00;23;50;05 - 00;24;12;03
Speaker 3
Now? Oh man. So I'm always reading lots of things at once. I just finished the Tainted Cup and it was the best book I've read in the past few years. I'm reading the will of the many right now. That's, that's a really good but another book I recently finished reading was Great City by Finally. I just loved that book as well.

00;24;12;18 - 00;24;37;05
Speaker 3
The guy, Gavriel Kay has a new book out. I still haven't read I'm excited about that. There's lots of horror novels. They're on the way, though. Philip McCaskey has a new one coming out, the Autumn Spring's Retirement Massacre or something. Something. And I got an arc of that and I'm about to start reading that now so I can just go on and on with books.

00;24;37;16 - 00;24;38;11
Speaker 1
As we do.

00;24;38;17 - 00;24;38;29
Speaker 3
Literary.

00;24;38;29 - 00;25;01;02
Speaker 1
I have just all day books. So thanks so much for hanging out with literary guys in San Diego. It's been a blast thanks again to Matt for hanging out with me. During his very, very busy schedule at San Diego Comic-Con, he was on multiple panels. He was doing the activation. He was all over the place because everyone is talking about Dutch and Carl or Carl.

00;25;01;03 - 00;25;17;17
Speaker 1
If you want to check out this series for yourself, the links to do so are in the description for you, as well as Where to Find Matt on social media. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to subscribe to the Literary Hype podcast. Give us some stars and share it with the friends Thanks so much for listening to the Literary Hype podcast.