About Me
UpdatedI'm Matt Coleman, and at heart I'm a world-builder.
I write fantasy novels, build fictional universes, and maintain this site as a living record of that process. Not a portfolio in the finished-and-polished sense, but a document of creative work in progress. The ideas here are long-term. The worlds are ongoing. The whole thing is meant to grow.
What does that look like in practice? On any given day you might find me deep in high fantasy lore, watching an old animated series for the fifth time, or installing a hundred mods into a fifteen-year-old video game. I share my home outside Austin with two dogs, Lucy and Theo, and I have a standing dream of eventually trading a fixed address for a Vanagon and a winding road.
This is my home base on the internet. Welcome.
Writer
I came to writing the way most people do: by doing it constantly before realizing it was a thing I was actually doing. Fanfiction came first. Years of it. The brony fandom gave me an audience and a training ground, and I came away from it with two published stories and a much better understanding of what kind of storyteller I want to be.
The novel-length format suits me because I think in systems. I want to know how a world works before I write a single scene. What do people believe? What do they fear? How does magic interact with politics? How does geography shape a culture over centuries? These questions pull me toward high fantasy, where there is room enough to answer them properly.
My primary original setting is Evora. It is a world built on layered civilizations, ancient architects, and the long erosion of history into myth. I have been developing it for years, and it still surprises me. My current project is an urban fantasy with a Pacific Northwest setting, a former Navy SEAL, a wolf dog named Dakota, and a small town with more going on beneath the surface than anyone is willing to admit. I am also parts deep into Under Rolling Stars III and IV, with the latter planned as the conclusion of that saga.
Alongside the novels, I write fanfiction. I take it seriously as a form. Fan writing has a unique permission to take emotional risks within familiar worlds, and the best of it does things with character and vulnerability that original fiction sometimes hedges around. I value that.
Web Developer
I built my first website in 2008 on FreeWebs, back when the goal was to simply have a place online that was mine. I had no particular plan. I just liked making things.
That instinct eventually grew into something more deliberate. Over the years I moved through WordPress, then Next.js, then Astro, building increasingly custom setups until I ended up where I am now: a headless WordPress CMS with a custom REST API I wrote myself, feeding a Next.js frontend with React Server Components, and a layout that does exactly what I want it to do.
I do not think of myself as a developer first. Technology is infrastructure for me, not identity. The goal is always to serve the work, which means the site gets rebuilt when the work demands it and left alone when it does not. That said, I do enjoy the building. There is a particular satisfaction in having full control over how your words reach people, and in knowing the code well enough to fix it at two in the morning when something breaks.
Nerd
I never really sorted myself into a single fandom lane, and I have stopped trying.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is where a lot of this started, at least in the community sense. I joined the brony fandom in 2014, attended Nightmare Nights in 2015, and spent years writing in that world. The show's emotional sincerity and genuine long-form character development are things I still think about when I write. I am planning to attend Everfree Northwest in August 2026 after a long break from conventions, and I am looking forward to it more than I expected to.
The Elder Scrolls and Fallout are places I return to compulsively. What keeps drawing me back is not just the gameplay but the texture of those worlds: the books on the shelves, the ruins that imply a whole history, the sense that something happened here long before you arrived. I play both heavily modded, which is its own creative practice. Skyrim in particular has consumed an unreasonable number of hours and shows no sign of stopping.
The Half-Life and Portal games occupy a different part of my brain. They work through confidence and restraint, building atmosphere and meaning mostly through environment and implication. They are some of the best-paced games ever made, and I come back to them when I want to think about how silence and space can do narrative work.
The Inheritance Cycle (now expanded into the broader World of Eragon) was formative for me in a way I still feel. The earnest scale of it, the sense that Paolini built something he genuinely believed in, stuck with me and shows up in how I think about Evora.
I have been wading carefully into Warhammer 40,000 and Dungeons & Dragons lore, mostly from the outside in. The worldbuilding density of 40K is staggering in the best way, and D&D's mythological layering has more going on under the surface than its reputation suggests. I am not all the way in on either yet, but I am paying attention.
Star Trek and Star Wars are both on the list. I know enough to know I will have things to say about them once I properly dig in. I just haven't gotten there yet.
As for superheroes: I am mostly not a superhero person. The genre's assumptions about power and justice tend to leave me cold. Batman, though, is a different case. Not because of the power fantasy, but because the better Batman stories are actually about obsession, grief, and the point at which dedication becomes pathology. That is interesting. I will take that version of Batman over most of what surrounds him.
I am also furry-curious, engaging with that community at a distance for now. The values of imagination, personal expression, and creative world-building that run through it feel familiar and worth exploring.