A Day in the Life of a Collaboration

The two questions/suggestions Bob and I get most often are:
1. How do you collaborate?
and
2. You should make your texts into a book.

And the two answers we usually give are
1. Lots of communication, lots of back and forth, occasional arguments, and a lot of wordplay when we get to the point where we can’t write fiction without a break.
and
2. Because the vast majority of our texts are boring as hell to anybody but us.

What I’m thinking now is that it might be better to show what we do which would also explain why nobody would want to read an entire book of our texts. (And it would be a big book. I think Bob figured out we’d written 600,000 words of text to do the Liz/Vince books alone.)

So here’s what we did yesterday (warning, very long post):

Monday, December 9, 2024

That was the part of the monologue I was doing because I knew Bob was asleep in Tennessee, having signed off at 11:19 PM on Sunday night, whereas I was wide awake in Pennsylvania. This actually usually works out well for us.

Then I worked for awhile and then took a nap and came back at 7:25 AM to explain what I’d been doing, and at 8:31 AM, I posted the rewrite of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in The Honey Pot Plot.

Then I signed off at 8:53AM and Bob woke up:

[You begin to see why nobody would want a book of these texts.]

Then we talked about dogs for three minutes, and Pat Gaffney showed up at the Grille for lunch, and I ate and laughed with her in PA while Bob worked in TN.

After lunch, I checked in again.

And I kept talking (texting) and eventually, at 2PM, I noticed I was alone.

And then we discussed the many ways Thursday was messed up because we had different ideas when a major reveal should happen. Until 2:59 PM when we finally drilled down to heart of the problem: we had two different ideas of how Rose would handle a situation.

You know, a major difficulty in collaboration is trying to remember where the hell everybody is and what they’re thinking. Especially if we’ve both wandered off center and so are writing two different Roses. So for another nine minutes, we tried to figure out where everybody was in our different versions, ending with this:

And then we realized we had four vehicles to keep track of.

Then we spent another ten minutes trying to figure out where people and cars and llamas were. Which led to this:

When we start doing that, we’re tired. And I call nap time.

Then we discussed body bags until just after 6PM. At 7:48 I put up a link to an NYT article and ranted about elitism. Bob was somewhere else. At 8:45, I put up rewrite of Chapter 27. At 9:15, I put up my polish of Chapter 30. At 9:41, I put my rewrite of Chapter 32. Bob is not posting rewrites because he has the master doc and is working on that. At 10:40, I asked Bob a question, and at 11:02 PM, he answered me. And at 12:41 this morning (Tuesday) I put up my rewrite of Chapter 34. That was the end of the Thursday rewrites for me, except for one final scene I have to do from scratch. Bob gets that this afternoon.

It’s now 4:26 AM, I have been doing normal human stuff–cleaning out my e-mail in-box, eating, clearing a path to the bathroom (why do I never have time to clean? because I don’t want to clean) and writing this blog post. Bob is probably still blissfully asleep, but will wake at the crack of dawn with some post about Little Melvin before he goes back to work. I’ll wake up about eleven to work on Chapter 36, which will be brilliant, and this whole thing will start over again.

So
1. This is how we collaborate.
2. Never again say, “These texts would make a great book.”

Good night.