I don’t think I could collaborate

So, I said I was reading Rocky Start by Jennifer Cruisie and Bob Mayer, right? Yes, I did; that was right before Christmas.

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas!

And now, here’s a fun post at Cruisie’s blog where she’s talking about how she and Bob handle this collaboration, thus:

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.)

And then there are many samples of texts, which are mildly interesting as apparently Jennifer Cruisie is thinking of getting a dog, so there’s that. No dog pictures or anything like that, though.

Then Jennifer says,

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, with examples of trying to figure out where people are until Bob says, “You can kill the kids if it makes it easier.” And of course they are not going to do that, but it’s funny in context.

And the whole thing is making me think about how hard it was to keep track of where everyone was and what they knew and when they knew it and who told what to whom in SILVER CIRCLE, and right then I thought, Ugh, no collaboration in my future, because seriously, this is hard enough when it’s just me having to work it out, without someone else sending characters who knows where.

But it’s sort of interesting to read about how other people collaborate, so here you go, click through if you’re interested.

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