About

About the Author

Matthew Cory was born — and mostly raised — in El Paso, TX. He spends his time trying to write, and makes a living developing software for Philips Electronics. He currently lives with his wife in El Paso, though at the time Like Glass was written, they resided in western Washington state (where most of the novel takes place).

Over the years, he has spent some time as a musician, focused mostly on the piano and composing his own works. It is from this experience that Like Glass builds it’s own musical background.

He is currently working on a sequel to Like Glass, tentatively titled Shattered. You can also find some of his short stories here on Chocolate for Dogs.

About Chocolate for Dogs

Everyone knows — or should know — that chocolate is generally a bad thing for dogs to consume. The reason I named this site stems, actually, from a piece of junk email I received one time.

At that point in time — several years ago — it was not uncommon for spammers to send email with snippets of articles, novels, whatever, in an attempt to try and mess with spam filters. The underlying idea is that spam filters work on the combination of words in the email, so if a “regular” email is marked as spam, it’ll throw off the algorithms they use. Anyways…

I received one of these and, for reasons I can’t explain to this day, I read it instead of deleting it. It was a couple of paragraphs from what I’m assuming is a novel, though I never did find out what the source of it was.

In the story, the narrator told that he needed to euthanize his dog, and he loved the dog dearly so it really pained him to do it. In order to try and give the dog one last treat, he wrapped a chocolate bar up in some salmon, and fed the salmon to the dog.

At this time, I’d only recently gotten my own puppy — a beagle who’s grown into a wonderful dog — and reading this just devastated me. I almost cried — over junk mail! Of all things, I got choked up over spam, and not the weird meat product, either (though that may have been just as bad…).

From that point on, I decided two things: 1) I wanted to be a writer, and 2) I wanted to write so well that, had someone read something I wrote in a piece of junk mail, it would have a similarly strong effect on them. So, I named my site “Chocolate for Dogs” in honor of that piece of spam that I wish I would’ve saved.

And, for what ever it may be worth, I’m well aware that death by chocolate is not a pleasant way of euthanizing an animal, but damn was that a good couple of paragraphs…

–Matt