Like a little noir with your fantasy? Then let Francis Knight tell you about her new novel, Fade to Black — hot off the presses (I just saw it in Barnes & Noble, matter of fact, on that lovely New Releases table). Behold: ten questions, ten answers.

Tell Us About Yourself: Who The Hell Are You?

Important factoids about Francis Knight:

Despite the name, I am of the female persuasion.

I spell funny, because I write the Queen’s English dammit. With ‘u’s and everything. American English uses far too many ‘z’s for my liking. Z is a letter that should be reserved for special occasions. Like…ZOMG! Zebra zygote! Or something.

When I wrote this story I was blonde. However, one of my characters has dyed red hair and I decided to give it a go for a giggle. Now my hair ranges from Fire Engine Knock Your Eye Out red to Aubergine/Eggplant purple. At least my kids can always find me in a crowd!

I make hobbits look reasonably sized.

I didn’t start writing until I was well into my thirties, and not seriously until…*calculates swiftly using all twenty eight fingers and toes* just over five years ago.

Give Us The 140-Character Story Pitch:

Bladerunner, only with mages instead of replicants. Fantasy noir with a pain magic twist.

Where Does This Story Come From?

Like all my ideas, I found it under the sofa…

You know, I started this story a while ago (egads, was it four years ago? It was), stopped, started again, rinse and repeat. The only thing I can say with any surety is it came from a myriad of influences (no, not the drug kind) from the whole spectrum of SFF and beyond, most of the things I love about stories that got mashed to a pulp in my head. Then it kind of leaked on to the page, which is really messy. But essentially, it came from the character of Rojan – that’s how all my stories start in my head, with a character and I want to know what happens to them. I write to find out.

How Is This A Story Only You Could’ve Written?

Tempting to answer ‘Because it was me what thought of it’…Rojan is the answer, I think. All my characters share at least one thing with me, and with Rojan, it’s the snark. While I think we are totally unalike otherwise, I’ve been told it’s ‘obviously’ a story written by me, because it/he sounds like me in that regard. Thinking about Rojan, I am unsure as to whether to take this as a compliment!

What Was The Hardest Thing About Writing Fade to Black?

Probably getting that first critique from my writers’ group. The story was supposed to be a future dystopia, but I was (rightly!) called on not being very good at making believable future tech. But that was where the whole thing came alive, when I changed it from future SF to darker fantasy, and the concept of pain magic popped into my head. So the hardest part was probably the best part too, because it made the story what it is.

What Did You Learn By Writing It?

To just get the story down and worry about making it good later. While this isn’t my first, or even fifth novel, it was the second I started. It was the seventh I finished. I learnt to just plough through and get that sucker done already.

What Do You Love About The Book?

Rojan – he’s a dark bugger at times, but he’s always ready with a sarcastic quip or a twisted way of looking at things. I’d love to go for a beer with him so he could spin me a story or six – but there’s no way in the world I’d date him!

What Would You Do Differently Next Time?

Not get distracted by other projects. I’d try to have a little more belief in the story too.

Give Us Your Favorite Paragraph From The Story:

Ooh that’s a tricky one!

I’m quite fond of this one:

Every muscle was sculpted to perfection, a stomach to die for, a flow of thick glossy black hair – and a face with no more sense in it than a five-year-old’s. But a five-year-old with a large sword at his waist, who looked like he could use it if someone stole his lollipop. He waved at me, happy to meet me, which was a new experience. I tried to act as if I was allergic to lollipops.

What’s Next For You As A Storyteller?

Well I’ve got a few projects on the simmer at the moment. First I need to finish the edits for the third book in the series (which will be done by the time this interview appears). Then it’s time to decide which project to go to town on! I have one finished first draft in one series, and half a one in another…safe to say “more fantasy with a little twist.”

Francis Knight: Website

Fade To Black: Amazon UK / Amazon US / B&N / Indiebound

@Knight_Francis

This is something I see often enough: an author talks about losing a series or having some difficulties with a publisher or whatever, and someone from the crowd eventually says, “You should self-publish. We want more of you, the money’s better, we’ll support you. Plus, so many options! Amazon! Kickstarter! Bookflipper! Pub-Burger!” Sometimes it’s a polite suggestion, sometimes it’s double-barrel proselytization and they start spouting off “facts and figures” along with a dose of venom against the oppression of the traditional system.

I like self-publishing. I like it as an option. I have explored it and will continue to explore it.

But it’s not exactly easy.

It’s not moving mountains or shitting pre-constructed Ikea furniture, but it takes a set of skills that are wholly separate from writing: marketing, design, coding, editing. Some of these skills are valuable to the writer regardless of which publishing road she walks, but that doesn’t mean every writer is eager to pick up every skill nor is it a guarantee she’ll be good at them.

To hazard the doofusly obvious: self-publishing isn’t about writing, it’s about publishing.

Some writers just want to be writers.

They don’t also want to be publishers.

It’s just that simple. Neither wrong nor right. It’s a personal and professional choice.

Further, despite what some feel are absolute guarantees, self-publishing is not automagically the way to MORE MONEY than you’d get with a traditional publisher. It is a fact that the actual royalties (if you want to call them that, as Amazon and other entities act as distributor to the self-published, not the publisher) are better. Once again to bludgeon you all with the Mallet of Obviousness, 70% (or thereabouts) is higher than 25% (or thereabouts).

The outcome of publishing, however, is more complicated than those percentages.

If traditional publishing yields more sales (also not a guarantee), then that advantage shifts — 70% of $100 is a helluva lot less than 25% of $1000. Plus: rights, sub-rights, blah blah blah.

As I’ve noted in the past, self-publishing is all risk. It’s the opportunity to make zero dollars or a million dollars and potentially burn down your chance of entering that novel into the traditional space because if your book lands with a poop-plop instead of a big money splash, it doesn’t matter how fucking amazetesticles your book is, because it’s done, game over, so sorry.

(I’m using that correctly, right? Amazetesticles?)

Self-publishing is an act separate from writing.

Not every writer has the time, the talent, or the interest.

Both writing and publishing take work. Self-publishing demands the work of both.

Worth it for some, tricky or undesirable for others.

This isn’t meant to dissuade any author from going that route. It’s more to dissuade everybody else from haranguing authors about self-publishing when it’s just not in their wheelhouse.

(We’re still saying “wheelhouse,” right? Can we change it? Howzabout “primate house?” I like that one better. “Sorry, Bob, I don’t think I’m the man for the dildo salesman job. It’s just not in my primate house.” Though maybe dildos and primate houses don’t mix.)

The great thing about being a writer in the year 2013 is that there exists no one path to success. But each writer has to find the path that works for her — we all have our tunnel in the mountain, our path through the jungle, our needle to thread.

We just have to find it and let other writers find theirs, in turn.

Let’s get something out of the way:

Editing is writing.

At the end of the day, the actual execution of your editing process is writing. It’s you doing surgery and excising all the unsightly tumors from your work and filling in the gurgling wounds with better material: healthy flesh, new organs, cybernetic weapons, robot dongs. Sometimes it’s as simple as killing commas and adding periods. Other times it’s as complicated as dynamiting the blubbery beached whale that is your entire third act, picking up all the viscera, and filling in the hole with clean, pristine sand. Sometimes it’s a leeeetle-teeny-toonsy bit of writing. Sometimes it’s a thousand rust-pitted cauldrons of writing.

Writing is editing. Editing is writing.

Writing is rewriting. And rewriting. And rewriting.

Problem, though: no editing plan is ever going to be quite as simple as a writing plan (especially the “Big 350 No-Fuckery Writing Plan” I outlined last week). Writing, particularly that first draft, is often a purgative push — equal parts digging a hole and puking into it. It’s not a sniper’s bullet; it’s a clumsy machine gun spray held in the hands of a spasming bath salts addict. Writing is the part of surgery where you’re just cutting open a dude. Editing is the part where you need to know what you’re doing once you’ve got a fistful of spleen.

Point is, editing requires a level of finesse and awareness.

Or, to return to the medical metaphor, you require a diagnosis.

You need to know what’s wrong before you go biting off warts and ripping off limbs. You don’t just kill every third chapter because you’re at a loss for what else to do (“I DON’T KNOW IT FELT RIGHT AT THE TIME”) — editing demands that diagnosis.

So, before we get into The Editing Plan Proper, let’s talk about how one obtains a diagnosis.

Two Columns

First thing to do? Take a piece of paper or a whiteboard or an Excel spreadsheet and make two columns: WRITING and STORYTELLING. Because those are the two overarching aspects of your work and while both have interplay with one another, the solutions for each are very different. Writing problems tend to be far more technical and objective; storytelling problems tend to be far more subjective and instinct-driven (meaning, far more in the neighborhood of “WTF?”). Further, you will want to tackle the storytelling problems first, the writing problems second.

Reason for this is that storytelling provides the architecture of your tale.

The writing is the presentation of that architecture.

So, you’d better fix the structure of the house before you pick out paint colors and wall sconces.

The Colonic Jury Of Your Intestinal Flora

Time to take a first pass at identifying the symptoms of disease, decay, and rampant drunken discord within your story. Which means you pick up the thing you just wrote and you read the thing from front to back. You can do so quickly. But you must re-read (do so aloud if you can).

A writer’s best friend is his instinct. This is not a thing that is born overnight like some kind of fast-growing vat-baby. This is part of why that advice of read a lot and write a lot matters — doing both of those things (and doing them critically) help you to cultivate instinct. I like to say that instinct helps us understand which way to jump. Meaning, in the midst of a moment, if forced to make a snap decision in the platform-jumping game that is our life, we’ll know which way to jump in order to not fall into a spiky pit of doom. And, in terms of fiction, when forced to choose whether a chapter stays or goes or how a character should really act in a given scene, you know the answer of how to execute without having to ruminate for long periods of time.

So: the first pass is the INSTINCT PASS. You read it. You consult the chorus of bacteria that populates your guttyworks. And you start writing down all the writing and storytelling problems you think you have in their appropriate columns. Don’t stop to think too long about it — if something tweaks your guts and puts your bowels in a kink, write it down.

When Instinct Fails Us: The Power Of Other People

Our instinct isn’t a perfect creature. Much as we like to think we know the score, sometimes we’re the worst judges of our own work because of a host of unsavory reasons like EMOTIONS and LIQUOR. Put more succinctly: sometimes we’re a lot fucking dumber than we’d like to think. We hate parts of a book that totally work. We love parts that don’t work but we want to keep anyway (our so-called “darlings”). We refuse to see problems that are as plain as a pair of dicks stapled to somebody’s chin. (“NO NO IT’S SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE THAT *sob*”)

Which is why your second pass requires other humans.

Give people you trust a blank spreadsheet with those two columns (writing, storytelling).

Put them to work.

(A Brief Comment On Other Humans)

Working with other humans is an act of creative agitation — and while agitation doesn’t always feel great, sometimes that’s just how we scrape the barnacles off the narrative hull.

Just the same, it’s important to meet the right people — beta-readers, best friends and editors won’t do you much good if they’re too nice or too critical or worst of all, not readers of your genre or books in general. The critical relationship between writer and editor (amateur or otherwise) is, to belabor the obvious, still a relationship. It has to work. It has to make sense. IT HAS TO MAKE SWEET LITTLE WORD-BABIES.

Further, inevitably other readers will want to point out solutions rather than problems. In other scenarios, this is exactly what we want; challenges are expected to be met with ways to overcome those challenges. In fiction, it’s crucial to look for the holes while not asking others to fill them for you. Train yourself to listen for the issues at hand while ignoring the proposed “fixes” — when someone tells you, “I think Dave should be a cyborg instead of a robot and maybe he should just have sex with the copier machine instead of proposing marriage,” you need to recognize the problems (issue with Dave’s identity not working, concerns over his relationship with the copier) while dismissing the solutions (cyborg, copier-sex).

“What Am I Looking For, Exactly?”

I’ve covered this part pretty well elsewhere, and I risk redundancy if I list it all again and again, so I’ll just casually point you toward these two posts and hope you’ll click:

Edit Your Shit, Part One: The Copy-Edit

Edit Your Shit, Part Two: Editing For Content

Edit Your Shit, Part Three: The Contextual Edit

Those should give you a good starting list for potential symptoms to diagnose the patient.

Further, you might wanna check out a more recent post:

How Chuck Wendig Edits A Novel

The diagnosis takes as much time as it takes. Two days. Two years. I wish I could speed that up, but I can’t.That said, hiring a professional editor may get you there a whole lot faster.

Now, onto…

The Actual Zippity-Doo-Dah Motherfucking Editing Plan

Here’s the thing, right? You have a novel. It is, let’s say, between 300-400 pages.

It took you somewhere in the neighborhood of a year (or south of it) to write that.

You’re going to approach this in much the same way.

You’re going to edit for five days a week. You have weekends off so that means you can fill those two days with whatever activities you feel are appropriate.

(DRUNKEN NAKED SCRABBLEDOME WOOOOOO)

You will edit five pages per day.

This adds up to around 1000-1500 words per day edited.

At a rough guess, that’s about 18 weeks worth of work (3-4 months).

Sometimes a day of editing will be easy. It will be a few word choice issues that need fixing, a handful of little grammatical errors, whatever. Some days, this will be a lot harder. Those five pages will need rewriting. When new writing is necessary, you’re free to fall back on the same 350 words per day writing plan if that’s what got you here. That will probably tack on some editing time when that happens — so, let’s add another three months to the pile.

From start to finish, that means you’ll take one year to write the novel.

Then another six months to edit it.

A year and a half to a second draft of a novel.

Hell, let’s assume that life continues its ceaseless assault on your writing habits, just a constant fucking barrage of kitchen appliances catching fire and dogs getting sick from eating your baby’s diapers and some rare Namibian baboon-flu that keeps poxing the shit out your house and on and on. Even then let’s say it’ll take you another full year to edit and get to the next draft.

You might be thinking, “That’s two years of my life. That’s really shitty.”

Uhh, it’s totally not.

First of all, two years to write two drafts of a novel is better than two years to do absogoddamnlutely nothing. Two years may seem slow but Sweet Molly Monkeyshines, it’s better than nothing. And that is our goal: to defeat the specter of Nothing.

The ghost of Got Nothin’ Done, Son.

Second, that means in ten years time, you can have five completed novels.

You know how many so-called writers have gotten five novels to a second draft phase?

It’s probably some obscenely low percentage. Like, a number smaller than a ladybug’s pee-pee.

The Goal

Is a second draft. Plain and fucking simple.

The Other Rules

Poop noise to the other rules. None exist.

Things To Consider

Editing five pages a day need not happen in immediate succession. Steal five minutes from your day whenever you can — the baby’s asleep, the dogs are outside trying to hump a raccoon they’ve cornered, the boss isn’t hovering over your cubicle like a goddamn mosquito, whatever. Pilfer time. Abscond with moments. Use them to edit just one page. Do this five times.

If you feel like you can edit more than five pages a day, do so.

If you can’t manage to edit that many a day, tack them onto the next day.

Do this plan once, editing will get faster thereafter.

Sometimes you might need a third draft. Or a fourth.

You do as many drafts as you need to and you work your way through it at whatever speed you can manage. Doing something is better than nothing. Slow and steady will indeed win the race. The jackrabbit is an asshole. He’s high on coke. He’ll pass out before the finish line in a smeary streak of his own foamy drool. You are the tortoise. Resolute. Armored. Forever.

Think of it as a prison escape from your old life.

One spoonful of dirt at a time. Scrape, scrape. Scoop scoop.

A tunnel is dug.

You can see the light.

TIME FOR DRUNKEN NUDIE SCRABBLEDOME.

Shut Up And Edit

You can do this.

It takes a little bit of time and a little bit of effort. This is part of what it is to write. Writing is editing. Editing is writing. You have to tackle this. You want it to be right. Right takes time. And getting it right this way isn’t a Sisyphean epic. It’s not asking you to vacuum the whole house in a single given day. It’s asking you to like, polish that one Hummel figurine and maybe Dust Buster a merkin or two. This is replacing a frayed shoelace.

One word after the other.

Read them. Tweak them. Add to them. Take away from them.

Word by word. Page by page.

Until the book is done. Again.

Until your instinct is sharpened to a gleaming shiv.

It still won’t be perfect.

It’ll never be perfect.

But the perfect is the enemy of the good and this second draft of yours?

I’ll bet it’s actually good.

Five days a week.

Weekends off.

Five pages a day.

Rewrite at 350 words per day.

Edit. Write. Edit. Write.

Finish your shit.

Completo el poopo.

Amen.

(EDIT: Now with bonus graphic)

(Feel free to share as you see fit.)

No, no, not convicts. Please stop sending confessed serial killers your underwear.

Conventions! Or, for a variant, conferences.

I’m noodling new appearances in the next couple years (scheduled this year: Writer’s Digest East, Balticon, Worldcon in San Antonio, and Genrecon) and I wanted to know which conferences and conventions you dig and attend? What are they and why? Would they support a bearded raconteur such as myself? Is there a bar? GODDAMNIT I SAID, IS THERE A BAR?

Ahem, sorry.

Please, if you’re so inclined, deposit your nuggets of convention/conference wisdom into the comments below. Your help in this matter is much-appreciated. *takes a bow*

If you’re at all like me, right now you’re goggling your eyes — because, yeah, holy crap, it’s Max Allan Collins. (Preceded, perhaps, by the, as in, the Max Allan Collins.) He’s got a new detective novel hitting shelves that concerns the murder of a comic book censor in the 1950s. Want to know more? Here, he’ll tell you about it:

Tell Us About Yourself: Who The Hell Are You?

A storyteller is who the hell I am.  I have spent decades avoiding real work by telling elaborate lies (novels, short stories, comic books, graphic novels, screenplays) for money.  I occasionally tell the truth (non-fiction works like THE HISTORY OF MYSTERY and MICKEY SPILLANE ON SCREEN, documentaries like MIKE HAMMER’S MICKEY SPILLANE, featured on the Criterion edition of KISS ME DEADLY, and CAVEMAN: V.T. HAMLIN AND ALLEY OOP).  I am probably best known for writing the graphic novel ROAD TO PERDITION and the historical thrillers with Chicago private eye Nathan Heller, starting with the “Shamus” Best Novel winner of 1983, TRUE DETECTIVE, through last year’s TARGET LANCER.

Give Us The 140-Character Pitch:

SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT is a tough but humorous mystery in the vein of Rex Stout or Ellery Queen, focusing on the 1950s McCarthy-era witch hunt leveled at comic books.

Where Does This Story Come From?

Two things — my desire to pay fairly light-hearted homage to the traditional mystery novels of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, a pastiche not a parody, but with the serious historical back-drop of the censorship that was unfairly, even stupidly imposed on comic books, stunting the growth of a storytelling medium out of a misguided concern for children.

How Is This A Story Only You Could’ve Written?

I was a small, impressionable child when Dr. Frederic Wertham launched his jihad against comic books, and witnessed many of my favorite comics either disappear or continue in an emasculated fashion.  As an adult, I became a writer in two areas two that are pertinent to this novel — first, I wrote comic strips and comic books, and second, I specialized as a prose novelist in historical detective stories with 20th Century settings.  My Nathan Heller novels explored real crimes, and hew close to the events and even use mostly real names.  But Jack and Maggie Starr appear in historically based stories, with comic strip/book themes, that are more broadly depicted — murders added to historical subjects, names changed and so on.

What Was The Hardest Thing About Writing SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT?

Balancing the history and the mystery was tricky.  I submitted the novel with perhaps 10,000 words more of material pertaining to the history of comic books.  I cut this material back, as I already had the problem of the murder not occurring till midway in the novel.  That’s a problem or at least a challenge in a traditional murder mystery, because you want the murder as soon as possible, so the investigative proceedings can get under way.  But I like to have the eventual murder victim on stage for a while, to show why he or she is killable, and to introduce as many suspects as I can before the inevitable.

What Did You Learn Writing SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT?

The previous two Jack and Maggie Starr novels, written for a different publisher, had faced their own censorship — that publisher did primarily “cozy” mysteries, so I was asked not to get too tough with the action and violence, and to take it easy on the sexual content.  At Hard Case Crime, the more sex and violence the better, and while I did not go wild in either department in this novel, it felt very good to have the freedom for Jack to get tough and to swear a little and to even get laid.  So what I learned was that, even though I was working in the vein of Stout and Queen (neither of whom did much on-stage violence and sex), Jack and Maggie work better in a less restrained format.

What Do You Love About SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT?

Getting to have my say about the Wertham witch hunt era was very rewarding, particularly because I think I did it in an entertaining way.

What Don’t You Like About It?

It hasn’t been bought for movies or TV yet.

Give Us Your Favorite Paragraph From The Story:

He shoved her hard from behind, like the guy on the cover of that Suspense Crime Stories comic book at the hearing, and she was falling toward me as I hurtled up the stairs.  She didn’t tumble, she had the presence of mind to grab onto a banister, which didn’t stop her fall, her hand sliding down the wooden pole just as she began to do a header, but I was up there in time to catch all that long-legged nakedness in my arms.

What’s Next For You As A Storyteller?

I have just completed THE WRONG QUARRY for Hard Case Crime, and my editor, Charles Ardai, will have his notes and a copy-edited manuscript for me to deal with next week.  After that, I will do a Mike Hammer short story for Otto Penzler, utilizing a fragment from the late great Mickey Spillane’s files, and then will do my draft of the next ANTIQUES mystery, working from my wife Barb’s rough draft — we write together as Barbara Allan.  Our latest book together, ANTIQUES CHOP, will be out in May.  The book I’ll be working on is called ANTIQUES A GO GO.

Max Allan Collins: Website

Seduction of the Innocent: Excerpt / Amazon / B&N / Indiebound