So, I’m finally off the road. My book has been out about nine months and I’ve been pounding the pavement, harassing people of all socio-economic classes. Those with tattoos and those without. Please, my friend, buy my book. Why you no buy my book? Is good book for you!

So, since my life has calmed down, now it’s time to get back to what I really love: harassing authors—those with tattoos and those without.

I wanted to kick off the next round of interviews with a bang, like in the American Civil War, and not just the Civil War—the Civil War in the American West. No, seriously, the Confeds and the Unies also fought where the air is dry and the rain is drier.

Confeds. Unies. I made those up. Hmm, maybe I can write a dystopian novel using those names. Anyway, I first met Quinn Kayser-Cochran at a writers’ conference and we talked fiction and the horrendous uphill battle it takes to write it. Like Pickett’s Charge. He was working on a Civil War book and we totally agreed to do an interview. Then it all fell apart back in June. But he did agree that once his book got published, he would interview and provide me with cautionary tales.

So, I have to warn you, this is going to get gritty. And crappy. Did you know more people died in the Civil War from dysentery than they did from guns? Yeah, this interview is going to be just like that.

But first, his bio!

Quinn Kayser-Cochran lives in Colorado with his wife and two children. He earned a degree in English from Columbia University. Based on actual events, his first novel, GLORIETA, is an historic fiction about the Civil War as it unfolded on the Western Frontier. Mr. Kayser-Cochran has researched the Confederates’ 1862 invasion of New Mexico—and the Union’s subsequent response—for almost twenty years, including time on the battlefields and trails depicted in Glorieta. Currently, he is working on a political drama set in an early 20^th Century Nevada mining boomtown.

Now, grab your bullets, grab your muskets, polish that sabre, here is the interview!

Aaron: Do you have a tattoo? I know, weird, but this might be the best question in the interview.

Quinn: Right out of the chute, I hate to disappoint, but no. Never even wanted one. Like buttermilk or mushrooms, I don’t object if other people prefer these things for themselves, but I never have. Honestly, I look at photos of the clothes I wore twenty years ago and cringe—why would I want to make a potential mistake permanent? I do carry some scars (surgical—the best of which runs from just over my left ear to midway down the back of my neck [brain tumor, 2002]—and non-surgical, such as a small furrow on my left thumb where I sunk a coping saw halfway into the nail, age eight, trying to build a balsa wood airplane in my Dad’s workshop), but since no thought was given to their design or placement, they have no decorative value.

AARON: So when we talked in June, you said you’d give me the real story about self-publishing. Your book is now out there. What 2.5 things would you do exactly the same? What 2.5 things would you do completely differently? I know—half an answer for half a question. Weird.

Quinn: I will list the differences first. 1) Next time, I will submit an ironclad manuscript. Amazon.com’s CreateSpace platform allows authors to make revisions as they go (however, fees are charged after the first couple uploads), which, for me, is like providing additional rope with which to hang myself. I’ve never read anything, anything I’ve written without wanting to make changes, so this got me into trouble—probably added three months to the process. 2) Next time from the start, I will have a fully developed marketing plan. Hard to believe that I was caught off guard at the end of an eight-year process, but it’s true. For a long time, publication was just a concept—something that might happen on some unspecified date way in the future—and I confess that I didn’t draft a proper business plan in advance. Now I’m flying by the seat of my pants and, I would guess, achieving half as much for twice the work. Had to scramble to build a website, launch a Twitter account, etc. It’s all rather exhilarating, but that’s one of the tradeoffs with self-publication: more of the reward for all the risk (and work). Best advice I would have for other DIY’ers is to network like crazy. Find others who have gone before you and are willing to offer advice, friendly criticism, etc. Think of your book as a small business and remember that just like a business, those without goals and plans usually fail to achieve them. And finally, 2.5) I will have more focus. I took about eight or nine years to write Glorieta, in part because I occasionally set it aside for no particular reason. Not for work, my children, or life events, though at various points I did set writing it aside for those reasons, but because I lacked the discipline to stick with it. The book I’m working on now—a political drama set in an early-twentieth century company-mining town—has its own peculiar challenges, but at least I’m getting better about routinely appearing in front of the keyboard.

The two-point-five things I would do the same include: 1) obsessing over historical details. As in science fiction, part of the fun of historic fiction is world building, though unlike sci-fi, where so long as one is consistent, one may invent whatever one wishes, one must get historic fiction just right—there are scholars and purists ready to criticize any inaccuracy or anachronism, however slight. I believe in sacrificing one hundred-percent accuracy for the sake of storytelling, but not everyone sees it that way. 2) I will travel to research the places I write about; there is no substitute for “plein air” writing. And 2.5) I will seek criticism and commentary early and often. Writers’ groups, workshops, trusted friends—the more feedback, the better. Also, I will read aloud what I have written—if it doesn’t sound right aloud, often it isn’t.

AARON: Glorieta started out as a screenplay. How was it turning a lean screenplay into a long novel? The real question is, why isn’t your book 120 pages long?

Quinn: Glorieta really began as a college paper. Years later, it became a screenplay when a friend in TV production suggested I write one. Screenplays are peculiar things with lots of formatting quirks and industry-specific rules, and I tried really hard to make mine conform to those standards (as best I understood them, anyway, given that I was teaching myself as I went, far removed from the filmmaking capitals of New York and California). An agent I worked with said that she liked it, but also that it was too literary and therefore needed changes. Well, I thought that already the story had changed to conform to rules I did not fully understand, so I decided instead to turn Glorieta into the book it wanted to be. As for the 120-page question (there’s one of those rules: one page of script equals one minute of film—120 pages/minutes is the standard. Well-knowns can break this rule; unknowns cannot), within my 120-page screenplay was 90 pages of story, and I was simply unable to say what I really wanted to in so limited a space.

AARON: Okay, lots of people have written about and explored the Civil War. So here are a few, and if you aren’t familiar with them, just put in NA. Okay, ready? And make sure you explain your answers.

Ken Burns, awesome, or iffy?

Quinn: Pretty awesome. I really like Ken Burns’ Civil War series—I think it covered more of the human side of the war than anything before, and frankly, that’s what I find interesting. A lot of Civil War writing over-emphasizes troop movements and battlefield heroics, resulting in a Marvel Comics-esque tone—triumphalism that robs the work of emotional depth. You must have those things, too, but there has to be more. Burns properly spent time recounting the human costs of the war: the soldiers’ physical and mental wounds, the widows and orphans, the sense of loss that permeated public life for decades after—even some veterans’ reconciliations in their final years. Our culture trivializes violence in sneaky ways: movies, music, and talk-radio exalt it, and games allow regular people to kill indiscriminately 24/7, so that we think we’re immune to its corrosive effects, but we are not. Consider even one notorious school shooting: after murdering classmates at Columbine High School, security videos show Klebold and Harris dejectedly stalking the halls, weapons still loaded, aware that other students remained in the building, yet unwilling or unable to continue with something they had conditioned themselves to believe would be easy and satisfying. Once the initial rush wore off, though, even these pitifully fucked-up kids sagged under the weight of killing their fellow humans. It is wretched work, no matter if one is fueled by rage or righteousness.

Some wonder why interest in the Civil War persists, but I think that’s because most people focus on the word “war” rather than “civil.” The last few election cycles and all the recent political brinksmanship have been awful. Don’t like your neighbor’s politics? Fine—that’s as American as apple pie and a semi-automatic weapon in the coat-closet. But imagine killing your neighbor, his wife, his kids, because you think the name on the yard-sign stuck in his lawn is ungodly. If that isn’t hard to do, if that thought doesn’t make you terribly uncomfortable, then go get counseling. Seriously. Go. But that’s what the Civil War was—citizens killing citizens, neighbors killing neighbors, over fucking politics. We must study this stuff to try to understand it—it cannot be forgotten so that it is never repeated. Before people sign secession petitions, they need to read Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, about the Civil War’s wretched aftermath—see how well that went last time. The famous Clausewitz quote holds that “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” but really, war is the breakdown of politics—like secession, it is extra-political, and one rarely goes without the other. Secession isn’t just a parliamentary procedure like pigeonholing a noxious bill–thinking otherwise is dangerously foolish.

Aaron: Killer Angels, awesome or iffy?

Quinn: Iffy, and I know that’s semi-heretical—sorry. Read it once more than a decade ago, so my recollection is vague, but I remember struggling to finish it. Picked it up and put it down several times. I recall a description of one Southern commander (Stonewall Jackson?) habitually chewing on lemons, but that’s about all. Generals moving regiments around battlefields can be interesting (Noah Andre Trudeau’s Gettysburg, A Testing of Courage is a non-fiction favorite), but that usually takes an historian with a novelist’s soul. There aren’t too many of those, but discovering one can be thrilling.

Aaron: Cold Mountain, awesome or iffy?

Quinn: Staggeringly awesome. I deliberately stayed away from Cold Mountain until Glorieta was done, because I’d seen part of the movie-version on TV and liked it so much that I was afraid I would unconsciously pull parts of it into my own work. Having since read it, I concede that nothing I have ever written is in the same league as Charles Frazier’s towering work, but at least now I know what’s possible. Cold Mountain and Glorieta both follow couples in wartime—Ada and Inman, Jacob and Adria—though their circumstances, challenges, and resolutions are vastly different. There is one vague similarity (and I wrote this into my first draft years ago; I did not lift it from Mr. Frazier’s book—it is a far older cliché than that): both couples have “one last night together” in cabins with fireplaces (In my story, it’s a barn rather than a cabin, and the wood in the fireplace will not light). In the book version of Cold Mountain, though Ada and Inman’s night together is of great consequence, the episode itself is subtle and brief (of course, in the movie version, this scene gets the deluxe, soft-core treatment: gentle firelight, beautiful bodies entwined—the works). In Glorieta, Jacob and Adria’s interlude is taken from personal experience: decades ago, my girlfriend at the time and I decided to sneak away on a freezing night. Every minute under that blanket was awkward, uncomfortable, and cold, but did we stop? Of course not—not even frostbite can keep smitten young’uns from rounding second base—but thinking about this years later, I was reminded of the persistence of emotion in the face of intense discomfort. Write what you know.

The epic battle continues tomorrow!  Once more into the jaws of death with writer Quinn Kayser-Cochran.  See you there!  If you dare!