KOKO Returns

By Steve Weddle

The lovely and talented Kieran Shea has a new KOKO book out this week, KOKO UNCAGED. Buy it wherever KOKOs are sold.

Defeating a group of hijackers, Koko returns to earth a hero and gets a job as a personal bodyguard for a CEO. Her plan? To finance her revenge on psychotic bounty agent Jackie Wire. When Koko's boss asks her to participate in a dangerous rally on his behalf for half the prize money, Wire takes her opportunity to attack her nemesis...

I chatted with Kieran this week about the book.

Koko is now a hero? What's going on here?

Well, Koko Martstellar has always been more hero than an anti-hero. Standing back from the three books now, I think it's fair to say the series is about being true to one's nature. Since the first book Koko has tried to deny the killer angel inside her, but at last she has come to terms with this identity.

And Jackie Wire is back? Can't Koko ever get free?

Wire has way more space to breathe in the new novel. In book two--Koko the Mighty--Wire survived her confrontation with Koko so as a tenacious foil it only made sense for her to come back to finish the job. A third round, perhaps one martini too many. We get to see a deeper side of her character, even her romantic side.

This series is universally praised as "madcap fun, filled with profane violence." Will readers get more in this new installment?

Well, why stop now? I mean, I sometimes get static over the comedic violence and the salty language, but I always respond to such criticisms by saying, "Have you taken a good look at the world lately? Or ever?"

How did you go from writing east cost private eye fiction to what's now four published sci-fi romp/heist novels?

I just worked at it and kept reminding myself why I liked writing fiction in the first place. I want to tell a good story. Many people will never understand just how much luck is involved in getting this far, and I am bewildered by my success.

Who is the breakout character of this new novel?

Hands down it has to be Ronald Bailey Hesketh. I introduced him as an escape hatch if I ever get a shot at doing another Koko adventure. Hesketh is a joy to write, a real suave and dangerous bastard. I'd like for him to team up with Koko somewhere down the line. They've a contentious history so I see that partnership having comedic potential.

What's the story you're trying to tell in this new one? What will readers like?

As I said before, I wanted to get Koko to come to terms with who she really is as a killer, but there's plenty of allegorical potshots. Pop culture sniping and political LEADER assholery. There are new villains with bizarre idiosyncrasies, a cadre of vapid sportscasters, a humorless mechanical valet...

Collected Thoughts on Success 'n Whatnot

When I first dared achieve recognition for my creative output, I was far too young, and not just for the subject matter, liquor license, and trauma. Everyone's heard the myths surrounding famous comedians who started out in their teens and went on to stardom. When we tell their stories, we leave out the parts that make success seem grimy and perhaps not altogether worth it, yet being funny doesn't mean being perceptive. I guess that's at any age. Writing as my third career, it still bugs me out how many things I missed the first and second time around. Human nature-things. Instances of conflicts with my own tendencies-things. Seventeen is no age for a boy to attempt grown-folks business.

There's just a blinder that is permanently there. Comedian/audience. Author/reader. The fourth wall. We're supposed to keep separate and make it seem easy. We openly cry a lot about being broke and being sick and falling apart while doing this writing thing. I'm sayin', I've been injured on the job in my life. Now I write, dig? We ain't bustin' rocks. We can make it look easy. We can wear seersucker and monacles 'n shit. Stick our hands in our front breast pocket and 'pip-pip' 'n whatnot. I'm not a protected class, okay. I just write. I don't need people to see my dirty work. I want no struggle points. I don't want to behave like the unpaid oppressed. I want to look like Langston Hughes. I want to sit on a veranda and sip lemonade and compare royalty statements with y'all. I want us to walk to the bar at Bouchercon as if the world grew under our feet. I'm buying a monocle and calling every one of you "...old boy," and "old girl" when I see you. (I'll work out other gender forms later.)

I know it may feel like death, but we're not dying for writing. Writing is paddling. Writing is treading. Writing is the knots in the rope we use to pull ourselves ashore. Writing is so not dying. We don't die until we stop.

Hip Hop-shit is when you have to leave the United States because of racism, run into one of your black literary elders in a cafe, and proceed to read him over the book you were taught by his generation was canon. Chicago-shit is when you willing to throw hands with another black literary great while you live in exile on the bill of generous white folks because you misread the New York directness when Baldwin told you Native Son was garbage and in Chicago we fight over shit like that.

I like you crime fiction MFs but we need more drunken debates over innocuous things in crowded bars so we can give the papers and Publishers Weekly something to write again. This generation sorely lacks a Walter Winchell.

Kids quit college daily citing the abbreviated educational paths of the Gateses and Zuckerbergs. No one stops to wonder what happened to everyone who probably should have remained in school. Check the treads on the tires of success and acclaim. You're sure to find some lives in there, like bits of road-kill pulverized by excellence metrics. Where the eyes go, the energy will flow.

I think the act of dissecting (or drawing and quartering) a celebrity book project is less about inspection or interrogation and more about examination. As it is oft uttered in the entertainment industry, "Nobody knows nuthin'." We all want to discover an edge. We're earnestly engaged in the same game of writing, so even as we do so from our perches, we're still sorting through all that sinew and bone and tissue and organs trying to see how it all works. Doesn't matter if you sit disaffected in Mr. Meyer's science class. When that baby pig is cut open, you're looking inside. You're going to come away with more understanding, even if you may detest wanting it, which is another thing we do.

Success in the arts is forever a feit accompli. Talent doesn't even appear as such until it's presented next to the success it reaps. I know someone who has an original Keith Haring which was created for him on the spot in a New York City bar with a crayon and a cocktail napkin. He kept it in plastic in one of his sketchbooks which were always on him. Occasionally, he'd produce it in the middle of a conversation and blow everyone's mind. How fleeting it all is.

Quickly, who won the National Book Award last? Whoever waited to buy books until the NBA list is announced?? Things are successful because they're sold as a success. Look at a Patterson book, Danny! It LOOKS like it'll be a NYT bestseller for all the weeks. Belief matters.

I'm a better long-form writer than I've ever been a comedian, but I'm not so much a book snob than a comedy snob. In writing, it's tipping your cap to your influences. In stand-up, it gets you banned. The best pay the price, just in different ways. Every circus has its tightrope.

I wonder if my peers and counterparts think we're all out here in separate fields. My feeling is it's one big arena, and there isn't much time for admiring or critiquing how all these other folks' fight. I'm not sayin' it's a scrum, but it's tight up in here.

Used to be, a talent was discovered and money and time went into developing said talent into a star. Now talent arrives developed, polished, poised and so invested and overextended they're willing to, say, train all over again, each week, as an audience watches. Between the singing, and the commercials, what do they show us? Their sad stories.

We sit at our looms and weave words into worlds. All we need is a magic castle.

I'm for real. I really like these crime fiction MFs.

How Much Distance?

I assume it's a common writer's question.  If you're writing from actual experience in any way, from events that happened to you, how long do you wait before you turn those experiences into narrative form?  I'm talking about for fiction here, not, let's say, for journalism.  With journalism, you might write something during an event or immediately after it, but for fiction, a certain amount of distance is good.  You want to give yourself perspective on what you lived through.  At the same time, you may not want to wait too long.  Events recede; memories dim and what occurred becomes confused in your mind.  Or you think about something for so long (or what's worse, discuss it too much) that you lose the desire to write about it.  There has to be something to explore when you write, but if you've gone over your subject in your head to the point where there's nothing left to explore, then why continue to bother with it?  It's something that's become uninteresting even to you. 

Now it goes without saying that it depends what kind of experiences we're talking about.  Some things we live through, with the depth of the pain they've caused or the grief they've stirred or even the happiness they brought, never become uninteresting to us.  But I wonder (and again, it depends on the kind of experiences we're talking about), what does perspective mean? If you were angry over something once, do you calm down with the passing of time so you can write with a sense of relative tranquillity?  If you were bitter, does an interval of years temper that?  How about sadness?  If time doesn't wipe it away, it may at least mute it and improve the chances of producing a work that hits a number of emotional registers.

How distance from events affects a person depends, naturally, on the person.  And since writers are people (last time I checked), the same differences go for writers.  Some people may get angrier about something over time, or never shed an overwhelming feeling of melancholy, depression.  Perspective, so-called, may not change anything for certain writers.  I find for me that it does, and I tend to follow the general rule that says to let some time go by when planning to write from my own experience. The delay means I won't be too close to the events.  By some time, I mean years, but I'm wondering if that's not too long.  The farther I get from most things, the more I feel inclined to write about them comedically, because what once seemed important or maddening, or worthy of my passion, seems, in retrospect, to hold an element of the ridiculous.  I shake my head and smile at what I once found infuriating.  I also see that people I may have been at odds with could have had reasons for what they did that have a touch of merit.   They may have been misguided, of course, but over time I've come to better understand their point of view. 

So yes, distance is essential.  At least, I think it is.  But it's curious to think about how what you write, the tone you adopt, has a lot to do with your personality and how it relates to the passing of time.