1) Tell us a bit about yourself - I am a husband and father, an avid reader of kids books, comic books and graphic novels. I have an unnatural love for pancakes and pie. I am a die hard Batman and Star Wars fanboy. I wear funky socks because they make me feel like Willy Wonka, and Brussel sprouts are my food nemesis.
2) How long have you been writing? - I have been writing for a long time, mostly for film and TV. I've written screenplays and teleplays for several Hollywood productions companies and started to find that my children stories were not what the studios really wanted. They wanted gross out comedies, shock horror and rom-coms. I always wanted to write for kids, but discovered I was in the wrong medium. So I followed my bliss, signed up with ICL and found my passion and home.
3) Are you published? Yes! My first children's story submission was picked up by Stories for Children (thanks to you who recognized it!) and then my second story was published by Stories for Children as well. I have a few others on the way. You can find the links to my stories through my website: http://www.dmcunnigham.com/ or through my blog: http://literaryasylum.blogspot.com/
4) What are some of your most recent published works? I have two stories that are coming out soon. My short story "Pancho the Protector" will appear in Bumples e-zine in August. My other short story "A Boy Named Hook" will appear in an upcoming issue of Crow Toes Quarterly. Both of them are great kid magazines for different types of readers. And they are both a lot of fun to read.
5) How long did it take for you to get published? From the time I started schooling through the Institute of Children's Literature to the time I got that fist story published was three years. From the time I submitted a story to published was three months. My first submission was to Stories for Children. I had not submitted anything up until then. Now I submit short stories to a lot of places.
6) Any advice to share with fellow writers? Read a lot of books that you want to emulate in your genre. Then write 50 words or 5000 words everyday. Get all that writing down on the page. Who cares if it stinks the place up. No one has to see it until you want them to. It has helped me more than I could ever image to just write it all out. There is a diamond in there waiting to be polished. Once it has been polished, everyone will see it shine.
7) Tell us about your new endeavour (Skreened.com) - I have the hardest time finding shirts that I really like. I go to store after store looking and trying them on and always seem to walk out empty handed. So I did some research and found a site called Skreened.com that lets you build your own shop and sell the kind of shirts you would want to wear. So I jumped into the fashion pool, well, the geeky T-shirt pool at least and had a go at designing my own shirts. Then I thought I could use this as a way to give back to kids. So I decided to add a little more to the price of the shirts so that money from the sale of each shirt could be used toward children's charity to help put books in kids hands who can't afford them or are sick and could use them to brighten their day. So I used my blog Literary Asylum to spread the word. They need books, I need T-shirts, so that seems like a good marriage to me.
8) Anything else you'd like to add? Thank you for having me on the blog, what a great opportunity! I hope I didn't blather on too long.
No Matt, you "blathered" just long enough ;p
Here are more links for Matt -
http://literaryasylum.blogspot.com/
http://www.dmcunningham.com/
http://twitter.com/LiteraryAsylum
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