Matt Betts Ohio native Matt Betts is a pop culture junkie—sometimes to levels that are considered unhealthy by the Surgeon General. He grew up on a steady diet of giant monsters, comic books, and horror novels, all of which creep into his own work. Matt’s speculative poetry and short fiction have appeared in a number of anthologies and journals. Matt’s first novel, the steampunk/zombie/alternate history adventure Odd Men Out was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award for excellence in independent publishing. He is also the author of the urban fantasy novel Indelible Ink the sci-fi novel The Shadow Beneath the Waves and Red Gear 9. His poetry collections include See No Evil, Say No Evil and Underwater Fistfight. Check out Matt’s books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Matt-Betts/e/B00ELIL0MO/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1 Website: http://www.mattbetts.com/ Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself? I’m a scifi and horror writer from Lima, Ohio. I’ve been a fan of books and reading since I was pretty young. I got hooked on comic books early on, reading Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica adaptations and eventually moving on to superheroes. My dad knew I enjoyed these so much that he picked out some novels he thought I’d be interested in and brought them home one day. Pretty good stuff - Arthur C. Clarke, Faulkner and other challenging authors for a sixth grader, but I enjoyed them. They certainly got me interested in novels. I’ve been writing since high school, but I didn’t really get serious about it until I moved to Columbus in the 2000s. When I settled in here, I joined a writing group and met a number of other new and aspiring authors. That group helped me figure out how publishing and creating worked and really kept me writing for years. I just recently started a podcast, which I really enjoy doing. It’s called Something from Nothing: Talks with Creatives About Creativity. I get to interview authors, poets, actors, dancers, artists and other creators and talk about what makes them tick, what got them into the thing they do. Really fun, and actually puts my college degree to good use! Woo hoo! Which one of your characters would you least like to meet in real life? Tough one. I’d have to say Deena from Indelible Ink. She has powers she doesn’t truly understand and can’t contain, which makes her a little unpredictable. She’s a good person, really! You just don’t know which version of her you’re going to meet from day to day and what kind of mood she’ll be in, you know? Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing? As I mentioned, I love science fiction for sure. But I think my main influences have come from when scifi and horror meet. I like old movies where there’s some giant irradiated creature that attacks a small town, or stories where technology goes awry and threatens humanity. I think it’s the unpredictability of science that could be a friend or an enemy to the protagonists that I enjoy so much. Godzilla certainly springs to mind – part horror, part scifi. I’ve loved Star Wars since I was a kid. That’s been a huge influence on what I do. The thrill that I got from watching that first movie is something I try to put in my work. I hope the reader has fun and wants to go on a journey with my characters in the way that I did with Luke, Leia and Han. I’m also a fan of crime novels, specifically authors like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. They both seem to write stories with real characters and real motivations. The dialogue both authors use is just fascinating to me, so conversational and natural. The term horror, especially when applied to fiction always carries such heavy connotations. What’s your feeling on the term “horror” and what do you think we can do to break past these assumptions? It’s strange that the term horror can turn people off from some truly excellent literature. There are some terrific novels out there that get categorized as fiction and no one bats an eye. I’ll admit that I shy away from entertainment that’s presented or reviewed with certain terms. I consider myself a bit of a scaredy-cat when it comes to horror, and I tend to watch some movies with my eyes covered. I love suspense and I love to be shocked, but I’m not fond of gore unless it’s way over the top. Today, with the way books and movies are marketed and sold, it’s hard to avoid labels, and even harder to do anything about them. If you search for a book or film online, your results will come with labels already on them, plus a synopsis and sometimes you get a full review before you’ve even found the little info you were looking for. It some ways I miss the good old days when you walked into a video store and knew nothing about a movie other than what was on the back of the case. Same with books – it was fun to take a chance on a novel you’ve never heard of just from picking it up in a store. I’m afraid as we continue, labeling of art and literature will only get more specific and I’m not sure it’s a good thing for everyone. It might help readers who have specific niches they want to read, making it easier to use keywords to find exactly what they want, but less helpful for writers and publishers who would have to include every possible combination of genres, situations, characters and plots in order to not be excluded and missed by fans. A lot of good horror movements have arisen as a direct result of the socio/political climate, considering the current state of the world where do you see horror going in the next few years? We’ve been through so much in the last few years. Politics have had a huge impact on people worldwide, and the pandemic has caused a domino effect of terrible conditions for everyone. I think these particular topics are going to crop up in all of our media for decades to come. The themes of isolation and alienation are prevalent in real life, how could they not dominate things to come? I see a lot of stories regarding the fear of the ‘other’ coming out as well. The uproar over who is vaccinated and who is not, what should be done to stop the spread of the pandemic, and how to enforce laws and mandates. It’s made people suspicious of their friends, neighbors and institutions, and everyone’s motivations for wanting one solution over another. One thing both the pandemic and politics has brought to the surface is selfishness and tribalism. We’ve seen the debate over masks and vaccinations, which center around what’s best for the individual vs. the group as a whole. These are all fantastic and fertile grounds for stories of underrepresented and ignored voices in this debate. Given the dark, violent and at times grotesque nature of the horror genre why do you think so many people enjoy reading it? As a confessed horror wimp, I sometimes wonder what people see in certain subgenres, but I think horror is cathartic. It’s a way of surviving the worst of the worst situations, without actually being there. Horror is a roundabout way of saying “Well, at least things aren’t that bad for me right now.” It’s also a way of seeing the bad guy eventually getting taken down by the ending (usually) which can also really feel good. I suppose I can’t speak for everyone, but that’s what I tend to get out of it anyway! What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre? Well, as I do more and more research on things I want to use in my own work, I’m fascinated by myths and legends from various cultures. There are some strange beasts and monsters from Chinese mythology that I’d love to see creep into more stories. Same with the stories of the indigenous people of North America. Some of their tales get pretty intense and should be told. What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice of? I loved Cynthia Pelayo’s Children of Chicago, and I’m excited to see what she does next. I love her voice in that book. He’s not really new, but I really like Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians. My friend Mercedes Yardley writes terrific, offbeat tales, and I always look forward to reading what she does next. I tend to go for long periods of time where I don’t read much new stuff, and I end up reading classics or old favorites over again and I’m kind of in that place now, so my list of new authors is a little short! Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative that have stayed with you? I really followed my reviews early on, until I realized it probably wasn’t healthy. As an indie author, sometime the reviews come in slowly and it can be crushing to hang on waiting to see what people say. Given that, I’ve learned to look in on reviews far less frequently, but I do check them. I think one of the ones that stuck with me said I got horror right in that the characters react to horror and terrible events like real people would, rather than characters. For someone to say I can write actual people, rather than cut-outs that wait around for their turn to talk, is a big compliment for me. What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult? Revision is tough. It’s hard for me to look at my own work and decide what to get rid of. In my head, it’s all valuable and contributes to the story, but to an editor or a reader some of the material may detract from their enjoyment or their clarity of the tale. I get that, but I have trouble distancing myself enough to become my editor more often than not. Is there one subject you would never write about as an author? I haven’t really found one yet. I suppose if there’s a subject that might hurt my family’s feelings or something. Certainly, I wouldn’t make fun of something friends and family believe in, unless they were in on it and okay with whatever I was doing. There are probably any number of controversial subjects I’d leave alone, mostly because they don’t fit into anything I’m writing, so I don’t think about them much. What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing? Outline. Ugh. I hate outlining. I like to be a free spirit, a loner, a rebel. I want the story to go wherever it wants. Fly away, little idea, fly! Unfortunately, my ideas tend to fly in circles and land in a duck pond, and then fly south for the winter. My ideas are jerks, sometimes. So, I was introduced to the magical art of outlining. I’m not quite to the super-detailed outline for every book stage yet, but I’ve found if I write a fairly simple ‘beginning-middle-end’ outline that things go much more smoothly for me. I actually make my deadlines without too much panic writing, I have fewer moments of writer’s block, and I’m more confident in my writing in general. My birds still get to fly around, they just have to do it in a big, defined cage rather than all over the Northern Hemisphere. Which of your characters is your favourite? It’s not easy picking a favorite for a number of reasons, but mostly I think my favorite is whatever character I’m working on at any given moment. I love some of my early characters like Lucinda from my first book, but usually I’m so enthralled with getting the details right in my current work in progress, that I fall in love again and again with the newest creation. I’m fickle, I know! Right now I’m working on a retelling of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and I’m really enjoying building my version of the Dorothy character, and my stand-in for the Tin Man is kind of a jackass, but he’s very fun to write! Which of your books best represents you? They’re all about me! All of them! No. I think my weirdest book to date is The Boogeyman’s Intern. I don’t really think it represents my best novel, necessarily, but the book is so quirky and fun and weird, that I think it represents how my mind and my creative processes work. There are some very nonsensical characters in it, there are characters who deliberately wander off the main storyline, and there are situations that just exist for bad puns. It’s very much what an hour or so in my mind is like, you know? Entertaining as hell for me, but for onlookers, not so much. It was one of the first books I wrote, and it didn’t find an agent or home until Odd Men Out was published. After that book made it, I took The Boogeyman’s Intern out and rewrote it and reworked it quite a bit so that I was much happier with it all around, but it’s still a strange romp. Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us? This is kind of like a favorite character. Generally, my favorite is whatever I’m working on. And I’m kind of a tough critic of my own work. I tend to move on once it’s done and edited, because I just don’t like going over my writing again. I was in radio for years and now I’m podcasting, but I even hate listening to my recordings. I guess I feel like everything can be improved somehow, and if I review it, I’ll find things I could have done differently. Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next? My last book was Red Gear 9. It was a sequel to my first book, Odd Men Out. In this follow up, I include a lot of the same elements the first had: steampunk, zombies, civil war rebels, and airships, but this time out there’s the added plot of an escaped Confederate spy. I pictured this guy as an 1880s James Bond, only with weirder gadgets and a few more years on him. It gave me a chance to have fun figuring out what 007 would have done against zombies in the war. Since I love mashing things up, I’m working on a book that smooshes The Wonderful Wizard of Oz up with a whole bunch of familiar genres and books. It’s been a blast to see how the pieces come together, and some of the plot points actually fit kind of naturally, but I guess I’ll see what happens when I’m done. It might just work out, but it might not! It’s the thrill of writing. If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice? But they’re all so fun! That’s a tough one. Maybe “The monster isn’t dead.” You know, in books and movies where the protagonist kills the monster, and everyone relaxes until the creature gets right back up and keeps fighting for another ten minutes? It certainly has its uses, but it’s been done so much that you just have to shout “Shoot it again!” because you know the thing isn’t going to stay down for long. What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you? This is pretty tough. I read a lot of terrific stuff. Lee Murray’s Into the Ashes is pretty great. Tim Waggoner’s Dream Stalkers was as well. I occasianlly get on long periods of reading non-fiction and Sarah Vowel’s Assassination Vacation was definitely top-notch. Maybe the book that’s stayed with me the most over the last decade is Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. It’s non-fiction that reads like fiction, it’s a crime story, a serial killer story, a Chicago story, and much more. His writing is just magnificent here, and even though I love his other work, this is Larson’s best as far as I’m concerned. As for the last book that disappointed me, I hate to speak badly of other’s work. There are always different tastes, just look at the internet. I’ll watch a movie or read a book and absolutely hate it, and then see people on Facebook praising it as a favorite. So, I try to recommend things I like and keep quiet about the things that don’t work for me. I will be very vague and say a few years ago I was eagerly awaiting a biography from one of my favorite musicians, and I nearly threw it out the window when I read it. It was pretty self-aggrandizing and didn’t always seem to match up to historical fact. What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do? And what would be the answer? The question would be “When are you going to grow up?” And my answer would be pretty vague, I think. Red Gear 9 (Odd Men Out Book 2) |
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