Word by Word: Matteo L. Cerilli
In conversation with Matteo L. Cerilli.
Matteo L. Cerilli is a transmasc author specializing in speculative fiction for all ages. His work features the 2025 White Pine nominated and PADIBA longlisted YA horror novel LOCKJAW (Tundra, 2024); middle grade ghost story SOMETHING'S UP WITH ARLO (HarperCollins Canada, 2025); YA noir BAD IN THE BLOOD (Tundra, 2025); YA gamer action FATHOM FALL (Bloomsbury, 2026); a featured short story in BURY YOUR GAYS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF TRAGIC QUEER HORROR (Ghoulish Books, 2024); and poetry in Augur magazine.
When I had the idea to start these in conversation pieces, Matteo is one of the first people I thought to ask. He knows his stuff, and since at least half of the point of this brainchild of mine is to learn from authors way smarter than myself — he was an obvious pick.
Obviously, you should follow him on Instagram, Goodreads, and his website.
He is also right here on Substack.
T.L. SIMPSON: First of all, I just want to say thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk to me.
MATTEO L. CERILLI: Yeah, dude, don’t worry! I'm excited. I always love talking about craft, and I feel like we haven’t talked since I edited for you. I’m super stoked.
T.L.S.: Which, by the way, I loved. That was the first time a professional writer—other than maybe my editor or agent—really read my book early on and gave me feedback in those early, messy stages. It was a really exciting moment for me.
M.L.C.: It was cool for me too! I hadn’t really done that since becoming an official author. Most of what I edited before was for hobbyists or folks figuring out if they wanted to publish. So reading for someone who had real intention? That was awesome.
T.L.S.: I appreciate that. You said such nice things, which meant a lot. We all have imposter syndrome, and hearing someone say, “This feels like a T.L. Simpson book” because of the complex characters and whatnot—it made me feel like, hey, I have a brand.
M.L.C.: You do!
T.L.S.: So to start, can you tell me how you came into writing? What drew you in, and how did your journey to publication unfold?
M.L.C.: I’ve been writing in some form forever—like picture books I made when I was five. But I got serious in high school. Writing became escapism. I had a tough time—closeted trans guy, didn’t understand what was up with gender, ADHD that no one noticed—so I was super depressed. Writing was where I felt safe. I poured myself into this sprawling sci-fi trilogy that’s kind of a mess, but it existed and helped me survive.
T.L.S.: That makes sense.
M.L.C.: My mom was super supportive and signed me up for a local library workshop. That started this strange relay of connections—editor to author to agent—and I ended up meeting my current agent. I was 17.
T.L.S.: You got an agent at 17?
M.L.C.: Yeah. I’m 25 now, about to turn 26. My agent swears she signed me because the project was good, but I think it was also a mentorship thing. She saw I had energy but not all the craft yet. She and the agency connected me with freelance editors and took me to publishing meetups. It was a great intro to the industry.
T.L.S.: That’s amazing. So how did Lockjaw come to be?
M.L.C.: I didn’t write Lockjaw until the pandemic. I needed something new—something to shake me out of that old sci-fi project, which was too close to high school me. During university, I applied what I was learning and just tried something new—and it worked.
T.L.S.: For me, writing was a dream from as far back as fifth grade. I’ve never been diagnosed, but I’m almost certain I have ADHD. And honestly, I didn’t grasp the level of work ethic publishing required until way later. I thought getting an agent meant I was close—but then it was two more years of rejection. What was that time like for you between getting your agent and actually selling Lockjaw?
M.L.C.: Same! I thought I’d have a book deal before I turned 18. Total gifted kid syndrome. I kept rushing my agent. She was trying to slow me down, take time editing, but I insisted she submit the sci-fi book. It got rejected everywhere. That was humbling. I took a couple years, went to university, and then wrote Lockjaw. That project chilled me out. Having multiple works in progress helped. It took a year to sell, and we were down to five editors before one bit. Then it was three years before it actually came out.
T.L.S.: Three years? That’s a long time.
M.L.C.: Yeah, my editor had acquired a lot of books, so I was further down on the list.
T.L.S.: Is that how you ended up with four books out so fast?
M.L.C.: Yeah, I built a backlist during university. Everything was remote, and I had so much time. I’d draft over winter or summer break. That was my goal.
T.L.S.: Do you ever write a draft and let it sit for ages, terrified to open it again?
M.L.C.: Oh, definitely. Especially during university. I used to be too proud to walk away from a bad draft. I’d finish it, knowing it was trash.
T.L.S.: Whoa, hey, it’s not trash. Nothing is wasted. I heard another author say once that we the author are also a part of the art, the books we write shape the author we become, even if they never end up going anywhere but our trunk.
M.L.C.: You’re right—it’s not wasted.
T.L.S.: So what’s your strategy for managing ADHD and getting your words in each day?
M.L.C.: I have two writing eras. During the pandemic, I was in hyperfocus mode. I wrote a lot. Now, I have to be way more intentional. I lock my phone away, carve out time, and allow myself breaks. I’ve learned to be gentler with myself. Strict routine helps, but so does flexibility.
T.L.S.: Same. Routine is everything for me. If I’m off by even 30 minutes, I feel off for the entire rest of the day. It’s difficult to explain. But it seems like writing is the one thing I can hyperfocus on, as long as I eliminate distractions. And not punishing myself is key. I set small goals—500 words. That’s manageable. If I go beyond, awesome. Sometimes I think you don’t need much more than 500 per day. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had an epiphany in between writing sessions on some story moment that’d I’d have blown past if I was just forcing myself to write 2,000 words each day.
I also wanted to ask you about developmental edits. I’m working on Accelerant now and remembering the chaos of writing Cope Field on deadline. What’s it like juggling multiple books and edits?
M.L.C.: I’ve been lucky. I don’t have kids, and my partner is very supportive. My agency does a lot of in-house editing, so post-sale edits are usually light. But sometimes storms hit—like getting line edits for Bad in the Blood and developmental edits for Fathom Fall at the same time. That was brutal. But having a strong relationship with my agent helps. She can push back on timelines, and my editors know I’m juggling a lot.
T.L.S.: Do you stet edits often or do you just trust the editors know more than you do?
M.L.C.: Not really. I like the collaborative process. When someone digs into a character and says something’s not landing, it means they care enough to try to make it better. I trust that.
T.L.S.: I had a similar thing—my editor said Craw’s jokey internal monologue in Cope Field was giving emotional whiplash because we were dealing with such a serious subject. I kind of got annoyed at first because that was intentional. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized she was right.
M.L.C.: Totally. Sometimes their solution isn’t the one you take, but the issue they’ve identified is real. That outside eye is invaluable.
T.L.S.: It’s why I wanted to go traditional. That professional feedback sharpens the story.
M.L.C.: Same. I helped poets self-publish during undergrad, and it showed me that world isn’t for me. I love making marketing graphics, I’ll do that all do, but handling every part of the process? No thanks. That said, it gave me helpful background for when I do need to do that work myself.
T.L.S.: So, are you a discovery writer or an outliner?
M.L.C.: I started out discovery writing, but I lean more on outlining now. Life’s busier, and it saves time. Still, I let myself deviate when needed. It’s like writing within a sonnet—you know the form can feel so limiting at first, but once you figure it out, you find creativity inside it.
T.L.S.: Do you follow any particular structure?
M.L.C.: I like a loose three-act structure. I always aim for that moment where everything goes sideways right before the resolution.
T.L.S.: I call that the “Oh Shit” moment. It’s one of my favorite moments in any story. The entire thing has been building toward something but then something goes wrong at the last second.
M.LC.: Right! Three act structure is a solid foundation, especially since I work in Western genres where readers expect that rhythm.
T.L.S: I sort of use it to guide pacing, like as the bones of the story, but I don’t get too precious about every beat.
M.L.C.: Right. Structure is helpful, but flexibility makes it work.
T.L.S.: So, what’s next for you? Anything exciting coming up?
M.L.C.: The next book is Bad in the Blood—a fantasy noir. It’s set in a 1920s-style world with fey as a metaphor for neurodivergence. The protagonist is coded with ADHD and BPD, which are things I’ve lived with. It’s a book I had a blast writing—just packed it with everything I think is fun. I can’t wait for people to read it.
I'm excited for readers to just sort of get immersed in that world. Like, it's one that we're hoping for a sequel for. The characters in it, I think, can probably wrap up their arc in a nice little duology. But it's a world I've had so much fun writing that I’d do prequels. I’d do other characters that exist in this world.
T.L.S.: Yeah.
M.L.C.: I think because I didn't get myself too bogged down in the history of it, there's so much room to play. I can build out other sections. So that one, I'm hyped for. They’ve done really fun work on it. And then I have a young YA gamer action thriller kind of thing coming out in 2026 called Fathom Fall.
T.L.S.: Oh, cool.
M.L.C.: And that one, that's the one I want you to read and blurb because I think our audiences are gonna super overlap.
T.L.S.: Oh yeah, that’s exciting. I’d love to do that.
M.L.C.: It’s about this 14-year-old boy living in a water-scarce Toronto. His parents work for the water refinery that supplies basically all the continent’s water, and he feels completely useless because he’s not doing something important like that. The only thing he has going for him is that he's really good at this first-person shooter video game called Fathom Fall. Then he finds out the monsters in the game are actually real. So he enters this championship because he suspects there’s something bigger going on behind the scenes.
T.L.S.: That’s awesome.
M.L.C.: And it’s set in Toronto, which has been fun. I’ve had to immerse my American editors in Toronto culture because some of it confuses them. Like we have a huge Caribbean population here—and a lot of our slang comes from Caribbean Patois. They were like, “We had no idea.”
T.L.S.: I actually went to Toronto when I was 18 and was blown away by how diverse it was. People always talk about the U.S. being a melting pot, and it is, but Toronto was very much that too. I was still sort of entrenched in my evangelical upbringing—I went up there on a mission trip.
M.L.C.: I think we talked about this a while ago.
T.L.S.: Yeah, we were trying to convert Catholics, which even at the time felt really uncomfortable. I remember standing on a sidewalk thinking, “This is kind of shitty. This is their thing, and we’re just crashing it.”
M.L.C.: Yeah.
T.L.S.: But back to your book—Fathom Fall is such a great name.
M.L.C.: Thanks! We bounced around so much. It was originally called Call2Arms, but they thought it was too gun-heavy. Then we tried Aquastrike, but that didn’t click. Fathom Fall just kind of popped out of nowhere.
T.L.S.: I love that. It’s perfect.
M.L.C.: I can get into the other stuff that hasn’t sold yet, if you want.
T.L.S.: If you want to. I know sometimes you might want to keep those cards close to your chest.
M.L.C.: Yes and no. I’m blabbing about them on social media anyway. The next one we’re submitting is hopefully my adult fiction debut. It means so much to me. The concept is a 1930s-esque world where the fuel source is made of human blood and bone. So it’s very “blood of the workers.”
T.L.S.: That reminds me of Tender Is the Flesh.
M.L.C.: Exactly. That’s what we’re comping it to. It starts as a workers' rights story—following a character trying to infiltrate a cop-killing mob and blow them up from the inside, but he slowly realizes they might have a point.
T.L.S.: That sounds incredible.
M.L.C.: But it’s also an immigrant story. The characters are basically Italian immigrants, and so much of my family history is baked into it. My Nonno was a miner in Northern Ontario—backbreaking work. My dad worked in a chemical factory, which I only recently realized how dangerous that was. He kept that from us. So this book is a love letter to everything my family went through. But it’s also a critique of assimilation—how you trade pieces of your culture for acceptance and can never get them back.
T.L.S.: That resonates a lot. I talk about this in Accelerant in a way—that whiteness isn’t real. It’s something people made up to support supremacy. It robs white folks of their original cultures. You’re not “white”—you’re Irish, Italian, German, whatever.
M.L.C.: It becomes this monolith. That’s what I grew up in—this white suburb where my family didn’t quite fit, and I didn’t understand why. Talking to my Vietnamese partner, I realized our family stories had a lot in common. There’s shared trauma there. The book’s called Blood-Dogged. The main character is a cynic, totally assimilationist, trying to climb the ladder any way he can. Writing him helped me understand older generations better—why they gave things up. It’s survival. And right now, we need to interrogate what buying into whiteness really costs.
T.L.S.: The poor white guy in the Ozarks life experience isn’t that different than anyone else’s, but the GOP convinces him he lives like he lives because of immigrants or whatever marginalized group is the current political target.
M.L.C.: Yes! It’s like you’re white, but with an asterisk. Not the kind of white they want in the room—
T.L.S.: But they want you to think you’re in the room so you’ll keep voting for them. And people like me—straight white dudes—have been centered in literature for so long. If I’m going to be here in this literary space at all, I need to be telling stories that challenge that narrative.
M.L.C.: And you do! I recommend your books all the time. My partner’s a teacher, and we talk about how the role for many male teachers is to be that cool guy who boys look up to—and then help them deconstruct their thinking. Your books do that so well. The sports angle hooks them, and then you open the door to real conversations.
T.L.S.: I always joke I put a football player on the cover of Strong Like You to trick boys into picking it up. I never say “toxic masculinity” outright, because they’d shut down. But by the end, they get it—and agree, I hope.
I wanted to ask you—where do your ideas come from? Like, how do you develop an idea and where do those seeds usually start for you?
M.L.C.: My partner is a huge inspiration, mostly because when I complain about a movie or a book—like “I didn’t like how they did that”—they’ll immediately ask, “Well, what would you do differently?” And that kicks off something in my brain. We bounce back and forth until suddenly we’ve got a whole new idea. Then I’m drafting a pitch to send to my agent like, “Is this anything?”
A lot of my ideas come from political history. I’m a nerd for it—especially the turn of the century to World War II. That time period is so rich. Like, pre-Hays Code queer cinema? No one talks about it. The Weimar Republic in pre-Nazi Germany was super queer. The labor movement was doing fascinating things. And Italy had this whole anti-fascist partisan resistance I never learned about growing up.
I’m always doing research. Listening to podcasts. Even when I’m writing something set in the modern world, there’s always this sense of legacy and remembrance in it. Because as a trans person in today’s political climate, I find it grounding to look back at how we’ve survived before—and sometimes how we didn’t. But always how we found resistance. And love.
There’s a story I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Kind of grim, so bear with me. Letters between two gay men in pre-Nazi Germany—basically saying the world is ending, so let’s just enjoy each other while we can. I don’t think I’m in immediate danger here in Canada, but that idea—of needing to make a sound while we’re here—has stuck with me.
T.L.S.: You make a beautiful sound, Matteo. I love your writing. What you just said hit me hard. Like, honestly, I want to cry. No matter who you are, who you love, to be in such a dire moment in time and to say, “We have to be love one another, we have to enjoy each other, we have to be happy anyway”—that’s resistance, too.
M.L.C.: Exactly. And in activist circles, especially on the left, there’s a lot of doomerism—this “we’re all fucked” mentality. And I get it. But I also believe we need to remember how to be happy, or else we’ll build a future that doesn’t know how. That’s why joy and love and art matter.
T.L. Simpson is an award-winning journalist and novelist living in Arkansas. He is currently the editor of his hometown paper. His fiction draws from his experiences growing up in the Ozarks, covering both sports and crime. Simpson lives in the Arkansas River Valley, between the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains with his wife and four children. He is the author of STRONG LIKE YOU, COPE FIELD and the forthcoming ACCELERANT. Strong Like You was a 2025 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults selection and 2025 Children’s Book Council favorites Award winner.
"A wise, emotionally rich tale of a young man finding his way through family trauma."
— Kirkus Reviews (Starred review, COPE FIELD)
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