I got embroiled in what can only be described as a bad romance. That will take the starch out of anybody. Luckily, as a writer, you learn to use things like pain, frustration, and anger in your work, and I harnessed a lot of what I was feeling in “Knuckle Down.”
Miles Watson – 24 September 2018
The Back Flap
When mixed martial artist Mickey Watts returns to New York after three years in exile, he just wants to forget his bloody days with the mob and do what he does best — fight. But when his ex-fiancee is threatened by the same vicious gangsters that ran him out of town, he gets a chance not only to win her back but to settle some old scores in the process. Trouble is, Mick’s not the only one with vengeance on his mind. Because the city that never sleeps, never forgives.
About the book
What is the book about?
Knuckle Down is the sequel to my award-winning 2016 novel Cage Life. It follows the life of Michael “Mickey” Watts, an MMA fighter from the wrong side of the tracks whose skill at brawling is exceeded only by his ability to get into trouble. In Knuckle Down, Mick returns from exile to New York City in hopes of pursuing his dream of obtaining a title shot, only to find himself in the middle of a Mafia war that involves his old friends, his old enemies, and his ex-fiancée. This is a guy who has to duck fists, bullets, and bombs almost from the first page, but his real dilemma is whether he can win back the heart of his ex. Mick is a romantic. Covered in blood.
When did you start writing the book?
I began the first draft in 2012. That was quite a busy year for me. I finished a complete rewrite of Cage Life, wrote another novel called Sinner’s Cross, and finally got my black belt, which was a lifelong dream for me. I was also very busy working on the television show True Blood, and I graduated from Seton Hill University with an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. It really was a helluva year.
How long did it take you to write it?
About a year and a half. I stopped for some months right in the middle of the project because in 2013 I got embroiled in what can only be described as a bad romance. That will take the starch out of anybody. Luckily, as a writer, you learn to use things like pain, frustration, and anger in your work, and I harnessed a lot of what I was feeling in Knuckle Down.
Where did you get the idea from?
That’s a story in itself. The short version is that many years ago, when I was in law enforcement, I heard the story of Eddie Melo, a tough, talented Canadian boxer who got seduced by the criminal life, fell in with the mob, and was ultimately murdered. I began toying with the idea of writing a novel along similar lines, since I knew the fight game pretty well and, being in law enforcement, was also comfortable writing underworld characters. At the time, I had only published short stories and nonfiction pieces in boxing magazines, and the idea of a novel scared the hell out of me, but you have to obey the Muse. One of the key decisions I made was to make Mickey, the protagonist, an MMA fighter rather than a boxer. That gave the story a contemporary edge. But the first book, Cage Life, was mainly about establishing the character and the universe he inhabits. Knuckle Down is a story with a much more complex plot. It’s a crime story and a thriller, but it’s also a mystery. Mickey is stepping into the middle of a Mafia civil war, which I based loosely on similar wars fought between factions inside the Lucchese and Columbo Families, but he’s also navigating the so-called legitimate business world that finances mixed martial arts, which is not necessarily less dangerous. The central ideas for the story were inspired by real-life events involving the Japanese mob’s infiltration of MMA and by the relationship that the American and Sicilian Mafias have with each other vis-a-vis the heroin trade.
Were there any parts of the book where you struggled?
Writing a novel is like rehabilitating an injury. You have good and bad days, and you have periods where you question everything you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how, and you wonder if you’ll ever get to the end of the process. In the case of Knuckle Down, my private life got in the way and tripped me up pretty badly. But there’s a saying here in Hollywood: the more troubled the production, the better the outcome. Those movies where everyone gets along, the picture comes in on time, and under budget, nearly always fail at the box office. It’s the real dumpster fires, where everyone is fighting and the producers are pulling out their hair and you’re on day 58 of a 40-day shooting schedule with no end in sight that often create movies like The Godfather, The Empire Strikes Back, and Titanic. When I finished Knuckle Down, I realized I’d written a better book than Cage Life, which took Book of the Year honors, because my emotions were so raw and what was coming out was so honest. The moral is that there is strength and practical value in pain. Who knew?
What came easily?
Writing a sequel has the great advantage of feeling very much like walking into a bar where everybody knows your name. There’s no need to create a universe or a set of characters because they already exist – they’re waiting for you, so to speak, on their respective barstools. All you have to do as a writer is give them a direction, a task, a quest.
Are your characters entirely fictitious or have you borrowed from real world people you know?
Both. As I said, I got the idea of Mick from Eddie Melo, but I knew very little about Melo’s story; I just wanted a tough street guy with some brains and heart, but very bad judgment, who gets embroiled in a bad situation that will require a lot of fancy footwork to escape. I suppose I used myself as a model in the sense that I am a disaster at the practical side of life, just like Mick is. And, of course, there are characters in the book who definitely have the fingerprints of real people on them – cops I worked with, criminals I encountered, ex-girlfriends and so on. But as a rule, my imagination is the source of most of the people in my books.
We all know how important it is for writers to read. Are there any particular authors that have influenced how you write and, if so, how have they influenced you?
Too many to mention. I’ll say that Derek Robinson, the English author, influenced me with the ruthless way he treated his characters – no one was safe, which kept the audience guessing. Lawrence Sanders influenced me with his beautiful prose-writing. Stephen King influenced me with his sense of humor, which is something very few people comment about in regards to his work, and Clive Barker with his fearlessness. Hemingway reminded me that less is often more, and Frank Herbert taught that unconventional approaches to writing can be phenomenally successful. To tell you the truth, different writers will manifest their influences on me depending on what I myself am writing.
Do you have a target reader?
Funny you should ask. When I started writing in this vein, I assumed my audience would be mostly male, and probably middle-aged men at that; but women read more than men do, and the Amazon and Goodreads reviews I’ve had clearly show that they make up a large and vocal part of my audience. The truth is, if you write characters and dialogue well, you can draw in just about anyone who takes the time to glance at the first page of your book: their genre preferences won’t matter if the world you’ve built is intriguing enough. So my target audience is anyone. The more the merrier.
About Writing
Do you have a writing process? If so, can you please describe it?
I’ve discovered that every book is different in terms of how you deal with it and it with you. Books are like children or pets; they have their own individual personalities and peculiarities, and what works well for one may not work at all for another. Insomuch as I have a uniform system, I turn ideas over in my brain for a while to see how fertile they really are. If something just grabs and compels me and won’t let go, I usually start thinking in depth about how I’d write it and where I’d want the story to go. I jot down snatches of dialogue, scenes with no context, scraps of ideas, character sketches, and situations, and from that mess I start to see a coherent shape, the shape of the story. At that point I usually begin a very broad outline, just a page or two. Later, if I’m feeling secure, I’ll do a chapter outline. These never really hold up in practice, but they give you a good idea of where you are going and how you’re going to arrive. Ultimately though, writing a novel is like fighting: you can train and make plans, but the fight will unfold the way it unfolds, and it’s up to you to adapt or get your lights turned out. Some stories will try to kill you if you let them.
Do you outline? If so, do you do so extensively or just chapter headings and a couple of sentences?
As I said above, it really depends on the book. With some, I go more by instinct, and with others, I try to follow more of an outline. With some, I have very clear ideas of what I need to do in a chapter, and with others, I’ve no bloody clue and have to see what happens when I sit down at the computer.
Do you edit as you go or wait until you’ve finished?
I edit as I go along. Then, when I’m finished, I run another edit or two.
Did you hire a professional editor?
Yes. I firmly believe that no writer can edit their own work past a certain point. There are things you are going to miss no matter how many times you read it through. You need someone else to see what you’re missing. And in my particular case, I need someone to address the principal weakness I have as a writer, which is structure. My editor is very good at suggesting ways to make the framework of the story stronger and the pace faster.
Do you listen to music while you write? If yes, what gets the fingers tapping?
Often. As a rule, I try to avoid music with lyrics because they can be distracting, but there are exceptions. I very much enjoy listening to Mazzy Star because that music just relaxes me and puts me in a place very conducive to creativity and productivity.
About Publishing
Did you submit your work to Agents?
I have, yes, in the past. The back-and-forth was not a very pleasant experience because while I feel like I’m a pretty good team player and a professional (I understand that changes often need to be made to a manuscript, even big changes), I can’t tolerate someone trying to hijack the project and change the plot, the characters, and the tone until the final product is basically a completely different animal than the story I was trying to tell. Maybe I’m oversensitive to it because I’ve worked in Hollywood for more than a decade, and I see this kind of hijacking take place every day with screenplays and story ideas, but Cage Life generally gets four or five-star reviews, it was well-reviewed by critics, and it has won two awards. I think that’s a pretty strong endorsement of my instincts as a writer, and a pretty strong indictment of the people who wanted me to make it dance to their tune.
What made you decide to go Indie, whether self-publishing or with an indie publisher? Was it a particular event or a gradual process?
Originally, I was traditional publishing all the way, but as I said above, the process turned me off. As Eddie Van Halen once said, I’d rather fail doing things my own way than succeed running someone else’s playbook. Maybe my attitude will change someday; I don’t like to speak in absolutes or burn bridges, I just gradually came to the conclusion that I needed to start my career as captain of my own ship. This may sound absurd, but when my book debuted at the Book Expo America in Chicago in 2016, there was a Tarot card reader there, and for the hell of it I sat down with him and got a reading. He said, “You’re going to go through a lot of trouble doing things your own way, but that’s the way you’ve got to do it.”
Did you get your book cover professionally done or did you do it yourself?
My book covers for the Cage Life series were created by my editor, Michael Dell. He has a background in artistic design, and I told him what I wanted as a general theme – something stark and simple, rather reminiscent of The Godfather in tone but specific to my story. I told him I wanted a cage and an silhouette of a fighter and he did the rest. For my short story collection Devils You Know, I hired a book cover designer who did some remarkable work, but for the individual short stories that comprise the collection, which are also available for download, I designed the covers myself. I have an artistic background too and have a lot of fun trying my hand at it.
Do you have a marketing plan for the book or are you just winging it?
I have learned, and am still learning, the very complicated and tricky process of marketing novels in the age of Amazon. At first, I concentrated very heavily on social media adverts, but I found the results were lacking. I now almost exclusively use book promotion services that conduct day or week-long marketing campaigns by e-mail. There are a large number of these services, and while some of them aren’t very good, there are a few which have produced some pretty remarkable results in terms of e-book sales. I’ve done book signings and book giveaways as well, but I’m still looking for the formula to take me to the next level, where I run a promo and sell 300 books in a day instead of thirty.
Any advice that you would like to give to other newbies considering becoming Indie authors?
Just understand that finishing the book is the beginning of the battle and not the end. You’ve written a great novel, fine, but who knows it exists? That’s the real fight. Getting attention, letting the world know you’re there and you’ve got something to say and to sell. Everything else, sadly, is just prelude.
About You
Where did you grow up?
I was born in Chicago (actually Evanston) but raised primarily in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C. I went to college in York, Pennsylvania, which is arguably where I finished growing up, though some would say I have quite a bit more of that left to do.
Where do you live now?
I moved to Los Angeles in 2007 and presently reside in Burbank, across the street from Warner Bros. Studios. I rather like Burbank except for the heat in the summer, which will fry the skin right off you. If and when I move from California, the heat is one thing I absolutely will not miss. That and the traffic. And the smog. And the wildfires and earthquakes and mudslides. And most of the people.
What would you like readers to know about you?
I’ve had a very diverse working life. After I graduated from college, I spent 10 years in law enforcement, social work, and private investigation. Then, I moved to Hollywood and have worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade now. I haven’t updated my credits on IMDB in ages, but I suppose I’ve worked on over a dozen television shows and a number of feature films. I’ve also worked extensively in the video games industry. I love to read, but I probably read four nonfiction books – biographies and history books and such – for every novel. Martial arts are a hobby of mine and so is collecting old-time radio programs like The Shadow. Modern writers could learn a lot from the radio writers of old in terms of brevity and atmosphere.
What are you working on now?
A horror novel which is based on a script I co-wrote. It’s been a real challenge because my experience as a novelist is mostly with crime stories or historical fiction, not horror, but as frightening as this experience has been, it’s also been liberating. One of the main reasons I became an Indie author was to avoid having to “brand” myself, i.e., confine myself to a single genre. I want the freedom to write in every genre that interests me, to paint stories on every type of canvas, and this latest book is my attempt to act on that freedom.
End of Interview:
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