Member Profile

CCW Member Profile –  Matt Tracy

“You do You”

by Michelle Smith

For the last 20 years of his career in the energy-efficient lighting business, Matt Tracy kept notes for book chapters he hoped to someday write. When he retired, he delivered on a promise to himself to turn his notes into a book.

For most of Matt’s adulthood, the idea of making a good life a reality intrigued him. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he set out to write a book titled A Beginner’s Guide to Happiness, ultimately published under the title Happy Here and and Now. The joy he received from writing Happy Here and Now inspired him to pen a novel.

Darker Than the Sky, a modern Western, came next. “It has horses and gold and wilderness, but it’s so much more,” Matt says. “The main character, Van, keeps building a wonderful life—a life most people would be envious of—but he’s afraid that if he allows himself to be happy, fate will take it all away. So, I managed to write about my passion within the context of an adventure story set in the wilderness of Big Sur.”

Matt hasn’t always been a writer. As a young engineer just out of college, he performed oceanographic work on sea ice in the Bering Sea amid minus 40-degree temperatures for months at a time while polar bears roamed his camp. He also started a lighting business that installed energy-efficient lighting in universities, jails, and hospitals, as well as around various cities where he placed more than one hundred thousand LED streetlights.

“Instead of an MFA, I got an engineering degree, and then an MBA,” Matt says. And now he’s halfway through his next writing goal, a “fun fiction book that also defines God and the building blocks of all that is. Part of what keeps writing fun for me is writing about something I care about and making it interesting.”

Matt joined CCW two years ago, and he’s already had an excerpt from Darker Than the Sky published in the California Writers Club 2024 Literary Review. The key to writing success, Matt says, means taking stock of what you love to read. “Do your best to copy a mix of the two or three authors you’d be excited to find a new book from. Your failure to be like them will be because you can’t help being you and that will show through as your unique voice.”

Indeed, Matt’s advice is unique. His website can be found at https://www.matttracyauthor.com/