At Every Turn: Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher

To wrap up the Stories About Stories series here at Stone Soup, I wanted to talk to one of the hardest-working authors in the business about their self-published work. T. Kingfisher was previously featured in our Stories About Stories discussion about What Feasts At Night. Kingfisher, alongside fearless, dauntless, ruthless editor K.B. Spangler, were both kind enough to chat with me about their collaboration on Paladin’s Grace. Self-published books often feature smaller teams, because the author tends to wear more hats; those teams have to work together in deep creative harmony in order to succeed. Learn more about how the team behind Paladin’s Grace works together below.

Stephen’s god died on the longest day of the year…

Three years later, Stephen is a broken paladin, living only for the chance to be useful before he dies. But all that changes when he encounters a fugitive named Grace in an alley and witnesses an assassination attempt gone wrong. Now the pair must navigate a web of treachery, beset on all sides by spies and poisoners, while a cryptic killer stalks one step behind…

Paladin's Grace is the first book in The Saint of Steel series and part of the wider World of the White Rat.

Gailey: T. Kingfisher, what is your job? 

T. Kingfisher: I write the words. Sometimes they are good words! Sometimes they are… less good. I also handle the covers and the ebook formatting and publishing and all those bits. And I hire the editor! 

Gailey: KB Spangler, that’s you.

Spangler: I'm T. Kingfisher’s editor for her self-pub works. 

Gailey: Do the two of you enjoy collaborating?

Spangler: These books are a dream to work on. Her drafts are basically whistle-clean, except every so often she adds a detail or a plot point which is extremely...uh...distinctive. So I ask her to address these issues in the manner which is most appropriate to that particular manuscript. It helps that we're great friends in meatspace, and she can trust that I'm wholly honest when I tell her, "Kingfisher, my buddy, my pal, this particular element will give your readers screaming horrors and you should either tone it down a skosh or stop advertising this as a children's book."

T. Kingfisher: KB doesn't charge enough. I may be getting the friends and family rate, though, because I did once pull her out of a swimming pool that had been ignored by the previous owners, so it was an algae-slicked skating rink. It was impossible to get any footing. Once in, she couldn't climb out. I had to tie a rope to a tree and haul her out with it. This sort of bonding experience is rare with one's editor, alas.

Gailey: Are there challenges in your dynamic?

Spangler: She insists on ending half of her sentences with ellipses, so I spend a lot of time yelling at her to use different forms of punctuation because there's absolutely no need to trail off after a closed thought…

T. Kingfisher: My editor keeps trying to take away my ellipses. I mean, that's what I hire her for, we're old friends, but c'mon! Leave a woman some ellipses! 

Spangler: I try very hard to get Kingfisher to embrace the wide world of punctuation. There are colons! Semicolons! Tildes, even! But no, we are limited to em-dashes and ellipses…At least we have fun with it. I tend to add cute little images in the manuscript to flag the ones I feel are most in need of changes.

T. Kingfisher: Sometimes I name them and invent tragic backstories in the comments about how Fred the ellipses is working nights to put himself through college. She still cuts them, and then says unkind things about Fred.

Gailey: Speaking of cute annotations – I’d like to know about a certain Brick of your acquaintance.

Spangler: The story behind Bricky, the helpful clipart Brick, is: I like to go into Kingfisher’s drafts cold, with no preparation or spoilers whatsoever. I knew Shane [from Paladin’s Faith] would be a paladin, but I didn't expect Shane to be a Paladin, probably the most paladiny paladin since Caliban, if not moreso. So I went into Paladin's Faith and found that Shane kept layering on the paladin to such an extent that I was surprised—astonished, actually—that practical and steady Marguerite wasn't clobbering him upside the head with a brick. I decided to help her and added a clipart brick to the margin notes. 

And then Shane did it again, so I added a second brick and started a pile. 

And when he did it again, I added a third brick... 

After a while, I got bored adding bricks to this towering pile of paladin angst and created Bricky instead. Kingfisher says that when she saw him, she had to put her head down on the desk for a moment.

Gailey: I imagine a lot of bricks have piled up, and a lot of ellipses have gone to the glue factory over the course of the Saint of Steel series. How did Paladin’s Grace (the first in the series) come to be?

T. Kingfisher: I had a long car ride—most of a day—and when it wasn’t my turn to drive, I was reading The Royal Art Of Poison by Eleanor Herman. There's a section about the link between perfumers and poisoners in the Medici court. Perfumers were very important because everything stank, especially leather gloves (leather tanning left a lousy smell) so perfumed gloves were a big thing, but then people were supposedly dying of poisoned gloves. And perfumers had all this alchemical-looking equipment, so they were often viewed suspiciously. I was riveted, and the idea of a perfumer heroine being arrested for poisoning slapped me in the face, and I was off and running.

Gailey: And then you pitched it to your ruthless editor.  

Spangler: Usually, we're doubling down at The Cheesecake Factory, and we have to talk work so we can use it as a tax write-off.

Gailey: Is there anything particularly memorable from the editorial process that you’d like to share?  

Spangler: We go back and forth in the drafts; by this point, we have plenty of running jokes, and new ones pop up in each manuscript. Let me dig up one from Galen's story in which I immediately started calling Earstripe the Detective Gnole "Gnolumbo": 

Spangler: Gnolumbo is simply awesome.

Kingfisher: I went to look up some information about Columbo on a whim, and did you know that they originally offered the role to Bing Crosby? And he turned it down because it would cut into his golf time?

But the thing I'm most proud of is the vision she has for the World of the White Rat. These characters are a slice of light in the dark. I'm so glad I get to help her bring this to her readers, even when she does dig into the slow burn...

T. Kingfisher: I've said occasionally that the trick in a romance novel is to keep the characters from getting together as long as possible, so you're always inventing new ways to interrupt them. Or, more crudely, you cockblock them at every turn. 

Gailey: That requires a particularly creative villainous mindset.

T. Kingfisher: So far, I think "stepping on a severed head" remains my single best interruption of any romance ever.

Spangler: I've also included a margin notes comment about Kingfisher’s sex scenes as I want it down in some formal record that the persistent sanitation issues are not my fault.