Matt Scott
The Ayatollah Takedown
DOSSIER: When you were hanging with David Baldacci, and he tells you to start writing, how long did it take for you to find a keyboard and start typing?
SCOTT: I’d love to be able to tell you that ran every stoplight on the way home and started writing immediately, but that’s not true. When I met him for the first time, I only had the desire to write a novel and a vague idea about about a kidnapped CIA operative. I was pretty sure that I wanted the plot to take place in Iran, but that’s all. It took me another 3-4 months to perform the necessary research, create the characters, and develop a plot for the outline. If remember correctly, I met Baldacci in late November 2018, and I started writing in late February 2019.
DOSSIER: With your background in finance, how would you compute the ROI for everything you’ve put into your writing career?
SCOTT: I plead the Fifth, lol, but I keep a running spreadsheet of my expenses and sales. I will say this, though. The business side of publishing has been much different that I expected when I started this endeavor.
DOSSIER: When and where do you write, and what kind of environment do you prefer? (Music/silence/closet?)
SCOTT: I have a conventional office upstairs. I’ll work my 8-5 job and then come downstairs to have dinner, and spend time with my wife and dogs. They will usually fall asleep around 9pm, so that’s when I’ll come back up stairs and write. I generally prefer silence, but if I’m doing research or writing dialogue, I can listen to instrumental music. On the weekends, if my wife is talking too loudly downstairs, the need for silence gives me an excuse to put on my noise cancelling headphones and drown her out, lol.
DOSSIER: With Iran as a focus for your books, is it just an interesting topic or are the things you write about in AYATOLLAH TAKEDOWN that you see possibly happening?
SCOTT: Mostly because I find the country interesting. I was deeply inspired by The DaVinci Code and the way author Dan Brown took readers on a tour of Europe during the course of his character’s adventure, so I wanted to find a way to do something similar with a country that was less well-known. For me, that location had to be Iran because the 1979 Islamic Revolution basically shut the doors to the United States. I wanted to find a way to take readers inside their border and reacquaint them with the good parts of the country while also giving them a ride on a spy thriller that I’d always wanted to write.
DOSSIER: When you were studying espionage in college, did you ever think you would end up where you are today, or did you just want to be a spy?
SCOTT: I wanted to be a spy, but life got in the way and I missed my window. Many people dream about writing a book and having it published, but few ever accomplish it. I’m proud to say that I now fall in the latter category, but I’d be lying if I said that knew that I would always do it. I like to think that I’ve always had a knack for writing but I was never able to merge it with my creative side. Reading novels by Vince Flynn and Brad Thor changed that. Becoming an author is a passion that I embrace but dreams of doing it came to me late in life.
Website: mattscottbooks.com
Jeff Circle 