Local author goes global

BALLARAT teacher Matthew Oates is becoming something of a celebrity with the release of his debut novel, a young-adult paranormal romance titled Cinder and Black.

Using the pseudonym Maxx Victor, the book was a “passion project” for Oates and has been published in five countries including the U.K., U.S., Canada and New Zealand.

“I actually had some of my students tell me very excitedly that they found it at Target in America,” Oates said.

Teaching maths and science full-time at Mount Clear College, Oates wrote Cinder and Black over a six-year period.

Having an interest in writing since childhood, the first-time author has won several writing competitions and says he felt “justified” to attempt to write a novel after those successes.

Oates said his experience around his students informed his decision to write for a young adult audience when deciding on a genre.

Born and raised in Ballarat, Oates said he also drew upon his local upbringing as well as his childhood visits to smaller coastal towns in crafting much of the content for the book.

“A lot of the characters in the novel are taken from bits and pieces of my friends and my family and the small-town vibe of things is really a lot of how Ballarat’s influenced me,” he said.

After trying to secure a release through traditional publishers, Oates self-published Cinder and Black with the help of a distribution outlet called Draft2Digital.

The book is intended to be the first in a three-book series titled Anchor and the Moon, and he hopes to expand to series with spin-offs and an eventual television adaptation.

Cinder and Black is available online via Kobo Books, Barnes and Noble and Apple.