#matt staggs

[millionsmillions]

At Signature Reads, Matt Staggs offers some reading suggestions in light of the discriminatory anti-LGBTQ laws recently passed in Mississippi, North Carolina, and other states.

[martyhalpern]

The Marty Halpern Interview on Suvudu.com

Publicist Matt Staggs (@mattstaggs) interviews me for Suvudu.com. Matt writes: "...When Halpern told me that he had finished a new anthology called Alien Contact, I thought now would be a good time for us to have a conversation about his career as an award-winning editor1 and what it takes to get a start in the business today."

Here's a taste:

Tell me about your new project. How did it come together? Who is involved?

When I queried authors about contributing to the Fermi paradox anthology (the previously mentioned Is Anybody Out There?), a few responded with similar comments: they had already written what they felt was their best alien contact story, and they didn’t wish to write yet another. So this got me thinking about all the incredible alien contact stories that have been written in the past, say, thirty years — and wouldn’t it be great to have these all (or at least as many as possible) collected in one volume. And thus Alien Contact was born. After much perseverance, I sold the anthology to Night Shade Books. (Note: I actually have enough quality stories to easily fill another volume!)

Please check out Matt's interview with me on Suvudu.com.

---------------

Footnote:

1. Actually, that should be "award-nominated editor" -- though I'm a winner in my own heart!

[martyhalpern]

I'm Going to Graceland...

Graceland / In Memphis, Tennessee...

Actually, I'll only be at Graceland in spirit. I will be in Memphis, however, attending MidSouthCon next weekend, March 21-22. Joining me at the convention will be two of Tachyon Publications's finest: author Andrew Fox and publicist Matt Staggs (of Deep Eight LLC). We'll be in Memphis to launch Andrew's new novel, The Good Humor Man, Or, Calorie 3501. Where else, but Memphis, would we have a book launch in which one of the "characters" in the novel is Elvis (well, not actually Elvis, per se, but a part of him!), and one of the major secondary characters throughout the story (beginning with Chapter 8) is Daniel Swaggart, Associate Director for Acquisitions and Exhibits for Graceland? [Note: I previously blogged about this book on Thursday, February 19; scroll down to read this earlier post.] The official book launch is on Saturday (March 21) at 9:00 PM in the Chestnut Room. If you're attending MidSouthCon, please do join us for this program event at which Andrew, Matt, and I will converse most eloquently, and at length, on how The Good Humor Man came to be. There are definitely some tales to be told here. (And I believe Glen Cook, in the dealers room, will have copies of the book available for sale during the convention.) Before I go any further, I would like to thank some of the staff of MidSouthCon -- Dan Gamber, Eric Groff, and Carlin Stuart -- for their most gracious assistance in helping us schedule this event, as well as their help with all of my programming and programming requirements. I'm looking forward to a great weekend, a rewarding weekend, and most likely an exhausting weekend, too. As for my own programming schedule, in addition to the book launch event at 9:00 PM, I'm on the hook for five other events, all on Saturday! 09:00 Roundtable with Publishers and Editors 12:00 Are Agents Necessary? 14:00 Professionals Row 17:00 Learn Copyeditting four Fun and Proft And if I'm still lucid and functional, I plan to participate in a final panel on Saturday at 11:00 PM entitled "I Finished My Manuscript, Now What?" I was originally signed up officially for this panel, but realizing that I would be up before 8:00 AM that morning, in order to be ready for my 9:00 panel, and then going all day until the book launch ended (at least 10:00 PM, if not later), with three other events in between, I asked the programming staff to give me a pass on that last panel. However, since it's in the same room as the book launch, if I'm still able to open and close my mouth to speak, and nod my head on occasion, I just may attend. Besides, it sounds like a good panel, one that can be beneficial to new writers -- and since I acquire the work of new writers. . . . As for my 5:00 event -- and yes, the typos are intentional -- the programming staff asked me to do a one-and-a-half-hour workshop and this is the one I came up with. Here's the workshop description (assuming, of course, that they use the text that I provided):

You've just received the marked-up galleys of your novel from the publisher. You have less than a week to review these pages and provide feedback to the publisher. There's so much red ink on the galleys that it looks like the copyeditor was hideously attacked during the editing process! Just what do all those red lines and characters mean?

So right after I complete this blog post, I need to put together a set of exercises to showcase various aspects of copyediting, finding just the right examples from the many manuscripts I've edited over the past ten years (authors names, of course, to remain anonymous). I will also use some examples from the series of articles I wrote, entitled "The Perfect Sentence," which were published in The Valley Scribe, the newsletter of the San Fernando Valley chapter of the California Writers Club. And if all else fails, there's always the "Thog's Masterclass" examples in David Langford's Ansible! Anyhow, that's just my Saturday at MidSouthCon 27. On Sunday, well, that's a day of rest, as they say; or maybe a day of collapse! But on the other hand, maybe I'll just take some time off from the con and make that "Going to Graceland" a reality! My sister, Sandra, passed away three years ago this coming March 29. She was a colossal -- did I say COLOSSAL? -- Elvis fan. Growing up together, I remember the huge Elvis poster on the wall at the head of her bed that she would kiss each night before going to bed (keep in mind that she was probably twelve or thirteen at the time!). She had Elvis stuffed animals, Elvis jewelry, a huge Elvis scrapbook, and every Elvis record -- yes, in those days we had records, 7-inch black plastic disks with grooves that played on -- dare I say it? -- a record player, at 45rpm; we called these singles, or 45s. On Saturdays, Sandy would get stuck schlepping me along to the movies with her and her best friend. And, occasionally, it would be an Elvis Presley movie; and unlike theaters now, back in the day, you'd pay 50-cents for an admission, and you could sit through the movie two, three times. Do you know what's it's like being a kid of, say, seven years old, sitting in a theater with your older sister and her girlfriend -- and surrounded by yet more girls! -- watching the movie Loving You for like three times during an entire Saturday morning and afternoon? I forget now which movie it was, but the one in which Elvis dies at the end: every girl in the theater was blubbering and crying like crazy when that happened, and Sandy kept having to elbow me to keep quiet because I was laughing so hard. Anyhow, if I do make it to Graceland, it will be in memory of Sandy. Tweet This

[tachyonpub]

Suvudu interviews The Apes of Wrath editor Richard Klaw

Technically, it's an interview about his new anthology Rayguns Over Texas, but as always with Klaw, the conversation found its way to apes.

Do you have any “dream” anthologies you’d love to get off the ground? For that matter, what are you working on now?

The Apes of Wrath and Rayguns Over Texas were both on my “bucket list.” I’m toying with a few other ideas but nothing I can discuss yet.

Quick, off the cuff question: The only other person I know who loves apes as much as you do is Joe Rogan. What’s the fascination for you?

Apes enable us to explore the best and worst of humanity. Beyond all the intellectual mumbo jumbo is the fact that apes are just fun.

Didn’t realize Rogan was a member of the ape brotherhood. Perhaps a discussion about simians is in our joint future?

For more information on The Apes of Wrath, visit the Tachyon page.

The Apes of Wrath cover is by Alex Solis.

Rayguns Over Texas cover is by Rocky Kelley.

[tachyonpub]

Claude Lalumière, editor of Super Stories of Heroes & Villains, is interviewed at Suvudu

Matt Staggs interviews editor Claude Lalumière for Suvudu.

I think of superheroes and then I think of comic books, yet we’ve seen them grow incredibly popular in movies and fiction over the last decade or so. Why do you think this has happened?

A combination of factors, most likely. Superhero fans have grown up to become movers and shakers in the film business and/or successful writers. Despite the longstanding mainstream disdain for superheroes, many, many people love superheroes. It was inevitable that superheroes would populate the larger media landscape and conquer that ridiculous prejudice.

In film, technological breakthroughs have made it feasible to do things that were unimaginable a generation ago. In publishing, newer, younger editors do not necessarily have the disdain for superhero fiction that old-school editors seemed to share en masse. One of my favourite anecdotes in this respect was when a very established editor at an even more established publication rejected my Montreal superhero story “Hochelaga and Sons” on the grounds that it enjoyed its genre too much, and then went on to say that they would only publish superhero stories that commented critically on the genre, as if the superhero genre could only palatable in a deconstructionist metafictional mode. That editor would never have said the same thing of, say, an alternate-history tale or a time-travel story. The idea of a superhero story that was good on its own terms was unacceptable to that editor. Times have changed (though probably not that editor); this was a little less than a decade ago.

For the rest of the interview, visit Suvudu.

For more on Super Stories of Heroes & Villains, visit the Tachyon page.

[midwestreal]

015.

This week, we had the pleasure of speaking with Matt Staggs. Matt is an editor at Disinformation.com (i.e. ‘Disinfo’) and also helms their podcast, the DisinfoCast. He also writes for Suvudu, your one-stop shop for all things sci-fi and fantasy media. Many of you may also know him as the booking agent for the powerful (Get it?) Joe Rogan Experience podcast. We had a truly eclectic conversation with Mr. Staggs, and we’re sure you’ll enjoy the discourse.

You can find this and all of our other episodes on iTunes (Remember to subscribe and rate), or for the Apple-less amongst us, you can download it from our archive.

Stay hungry, stay happy. Do some long division or something.

xo,