Like any writer, I live many other lives: Dad, husband, son, nerd-for-hire, diffident gym rat, Twitter shitposter, dank data science meme re-sharer, Supergiant Games cheerleader, armchair quarterback for bad statistics in science. The writing side of my life is called Cobbler & Bard Press.
I’m the cobbler. That means I do the work: I cut the words out of my unwilling mind and sew them together into whatever shape will carry you across the miles and the mountains, whether that be ebook, audio, or ink on paper; I package them gaily in eye-catching covers; I hang out my shingle and hawk my wares where I can.
I’m also the bard. That means I sing the songs.
Here they are.
The Streets of Flame Quartet
It’s the eve of the biggest dragon race in the city of Yemareir. Zaya Shearwater and her wife, Kiriki, have spent the year shooting up the rankings, and now they’re favored to win. But how did a team of women from Yemareir’s roughest precincts become the favorites in a sport where most winners buy their victories?
Doctor of Journalism Shenireen Agama wants to know. Through interviews with Zaya, Kiriki, and the ground crew that’s become their family, she begins to weave a story. Its threads are love, desperation, biology, and magic – all bound together with the early history of Yemareir, where Zaya and Kiriki’s ancestors fled centuries ago to escape the pogroms of a mad king, and where the colonists resettling the ruins of an ancient city have just discovered that it is home to dragons?
Brimstone Slipstream is the opening novella in the Streets of Flame series, followed by Windburn Whiplash and Heatstroke Heartbeat. Snowdrift Starlight and Wildfire Riptide are forthcoming.
The Dandelion Knight books
The Dandelion Knight and its companion novella, Dispatch from a Colored Room, are science fantasies set in Altronne, the Last City. They follow the struggle between the government of Altronne, the shadowy Synod and its Champions, and the anarchist group organized around an old folk legend called the Dandelion Knight. Aimed at fans of China Miéville, Samuel Delany, and Gene Wolfe, or anyone else who likes a ripping mythopoeic post-post-apocalyptic political intrigue.
I don’t have a production schedule for The Dandelion Knight‘s sequel, tentatively titled The Flame in the Stone. When I know, you’ll know.
Collected short fiction
A hospital pharmacist delves into the deaths of patients on the trauma ward. A child is pressganged into an army that marches with a strange purpose. A blacksmith forges a time machine to rescue his dead wife. A psychotherapist for ghosts investigates an empty town…
Reverie Syndrome and Verso are collections of short stories; “Statler pulchrifex” and “Wormwords” are previously published short stories that don’t appear in the collections. Little futures, little alterities.
Anthologized work
My work appears in these anthologies: Nature Futures 1 published my flash fiction story, “Statler pulchrifex,” and Hindsight’s 2020 published my novelette, “The Library of Abraham.” Both books also have many other great short pieces of fantasy, science fiction, and horror; please check them out!
Work free to read online
“Statler pulchrifex” (Nature)
“The Sack of the Summer Palace” (Wattpad)
“Buy Local” (Star*Line)
“Magenta and Indigo and Rust and Blackish-Green” (Kaleidotrope)
Remembered Air (free with a signup to my mailing list)
About the author
Matt Weber’s fiction has been anthologized in Nature Futures 1 and Hindsight’s 2020, featured on Wattpad, and twice awarded Honorable Mention in the Writers of the Future contest; his poem, “Buy Local,” was selected as an Editor’s Choice poem for Star*Line magazine. By day, he’s scratched a living out of various data-related professions in academia, digital health, fintech, and government. He lives in New Jersey under a writhing pile of juvenile D&D addicts.