Matt Staggs--Guest Bloggin' Through Monday

(Matt in a reflective moment...)Matt Staggs has become a good friend over the last year or so. We share similar tastes in books, he's also creative about PR, and, frankly, we'll always be fond of anyone who loves Belgian beer and good cigars. Matt also has some great illo skills, if you recall his penguins on Silence Without and some unidentified sea creature below.Mat'll be guest blogging while we're on vacation. Please give him a warm welcome. And here's a short interview with you about various and sundry to get started...What projects have you been involved with in the last year?I’ve been writing a little bit more. I had a few short stories and a novella published last year, and I feel like I never really learned the technical aspects of writing, so I’m going back and learning the ropes the best that I can. I think of the first few things that I put out there as beginner’s luck. Now the real work needs to start. I’m also working a lot more as a publicist, as you know. I’m kind of a literary evangelist, and I enjoy getting the word out there about good books and competent authors. I’ve been very happily engaged promoting various VanderProjects, and I’ve got a few things coming down the pipe that could prove to be interesting. I’m also still working on Skull Ring.Why’d you found Skull Ring?Originally I started SkullRing as an outlet for my overwhelming need to tell people about stuff that I enjoy, like good books and movies. Also, I thought that I could use it to leverage myself into a more creative field – promoting books and movies for a living, for instance. In that sense, it was going to function as kind of a stepping stone. Now, it’s just a big buffet of weird stuff contributed from friends all over the country.Is Skull Ring a horror website?No, not at all. To tell you the honest truth, I chose horror to promote at first on the site because I thought with the way the world is going it would be close to most people's hearts. Traditionally in times of war and social upheaval people tend to gravitate toward horror. I mean, look at the seventies: that was a golden time for horror. It was a cold marketing decision. I had plans on gathering advertisers, making some money and eventually using it as a springboard for me to get out of Mississippi and into doing publicity and marketing in the literature field. I just thought horror would be easier to break into. Over time, I found that "horror" as a label was far too constrictive, and that the content was doomed to become dull unless I branched out into different things. After all, I'm not just a horror reader or fan. I like tons of different stuff, and I thought that I wouldn't be the only one out there. I've also abandoned any traditional marketing precepts regarding skullring. Instead, I've dedicated my time and the site to providing the sort of weird and varied content that I like, as well as being a way for me to promote the people and things that I enjoy. I don't accept any money or paid advertising. All of the advertising you see at my site is stuff I'm running for free. I've tried very hard to become a friend to indie publishers, weirdo artists and various other nontraditional types while also being amenable to mainstream work that crosses the radar. SkullRing is kind of like a really cool thrift shop: things come in, things leave. You won't always find exactly what you want, but chances are if you come in and dig you'll find a lot of cool stuff you never knew you wanted in the first place. About the only thing that remains from my original plan for skullring is that I hope to get out of Mississippi soon and become a full-time publicist.What are some of your favorite books?Oh, wow. That’s a hard one. It changes a lot from day to day, but if I had to list a few these are probably some of the ones that I regularly return to: “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, “Mythago Wood” by Richard Holdstock, “To Charles Fort, With Love” by Caitlin R. Kiernan and your own “City of Saints & Madmen.” Looking at these books, I see that I have a strong preference toward “visionary” and genre-breaking fiction. I read tons of other stuff, too: lots of nonfiction on offbeat topics, plenty of category literature of all descriptions and pretty much anything else that will hold my attention long enough. I’m also very enthusiastic about mythology, folklore, fable, anthropology, religion and psychology--the kinds of things that answer why we believe what we believe and how those beliefs evolve. I was a psychology major in college, as well as nearly completing a BFA. Most of the painting and sculpture I did then had a kind of witchy, intuitive quality to it. Kind of my attempt to reach out and touch the ephemeral. Strange, I know, for a devout skeptic and atheist, but I am nothing without my contradictions.How would you describe your semi-private/semi-public role in helping so many authors?I'm operating on the principle that you get what you want in life by helping people out whenever you can and generally trying to be a good person. Karma? I don't know. I just try to do the things that I think are right and make me happy and worry about the rest of the stuff as it comes. Nothing makes me happier than letting other people know about good books, so I tend to spend a lot of my spare time combining my professional experience and personal enthusiasms in a way that can benefit other people. If this helps me some way in the future, great, but if all I’ve done is to make a lot of new friends and promote good reading that’s okay too.Regarding the private vs. public nature of my work, I have to say that a good publicist--like a good editor--doesn’t leave his or her fingerprints all over their work. I get a great deal of personal satisfaction in seeing people I like interviewed or reviewed in major media outlets. It’s fun to think that nobody knows but me that I played a role in this. It’s kind of like being in the Secret Service, except I’m devoted to literature instead of the President, and people don’t shoot at me nearly as often.