After Eric Staggs graduated from Full Sail's Creative Writing MFA program this past April, the connections he made while a student immediately paid off. With three other fellow graduates, he formed a new-model publishing company called Spectacle Publishing Media Group. The most unusual thing? Eric finished the program entirely online, and has yet to meet his business partners in the flesh.

No matter, though, he says, because the feedback and interaction he enjoyed during the program was more in-depth than what he experienced while pursuing an undergraduate writing degree. "You didn't have to wait around to see anybody; you could leave a post and they'd get back to you. Then if it was something that would require a more lengthy discussion, that could be arranged easily," Eric says.

Now, he and his three fellow grads — Ditrie Sanchez, Nichole Canniff, and Cathy Moeschet — discuss their plans for Spectacle via e-mail, phone, and Google+ video hangouts. And there are a lot of them. First on the horizon are two planned anthologies of short fiction, based around the loose theme of life-changing decisions. Eric says they are offering a $100 first prize and featured author status in a contest to draw submissions, which are already coming in.

Next up are plans to sign on works by authors of any genre, particularly those in growing genres underrepresented by mainstream publishing, like urban fantasy. Eventually, he says he also sees each several major genres — from sci-fi to romance to action-adventure to historical fiction — getting its own imprint under the Spectacle brand.

Eric and company also hope to apply for grants to lead creative-writing workshops in inner-city schools. "There are a lot of stories out there that will never get written and never get heard, and I definitely have a problem with that," he says. "So I definitely want [Spectacle] to offer creative non-fiction and autobiography as well."

In the meantime, Eric has managed to produce his own stories at a steady clip, thanks to a daily writing discipline he says was a major part of his Full Sail program. Most recently, he's e-published his own novel, The Sum of His Parts, a sci-fi saga about a clone who wages a secret war against the entity that cloned him, in an attempt to save humanity's genetic destiny.

Similarly epic character development and themes will also come up in his next project, a fantasy novel about the fall of Atlantis that he calls a "reverse-adaptation" of his Full Sail thesis, which took the form of a screenplay. "Some of the feedback I received indicated it might be a little complicated for a screenplay, so I had to cut some things out," he says. "So I figured I'd go back and flesh it out and explain everything I wanted to."