RIDING WITH DAVID SILVA – Guest Blog by Robert Swartwood

I’ve never been a fan of collaboration.

I’m not sure why.

Maybe it’s the fact I’m an only child. If I create something, I want to be in full control. I want to have the final say. I want to be the one and only author.

At least, that’s how it used to be.

Years ago, a friend of mine asked if I wanted to collaborate on a story. I offered up a hesitant maybe. He sent me a few very short stories of his, telling me to read them over and expand or rewrite or do whatever with them if something caught my eye. One story in particular did catch my eye, and I ended up using the basis of the story — the protagonist is an alcoholic who sees monsters, and the more he drinks, the more the monsters go away — and created a completely different story. Seriously, what I ended up with was almost nothing like my friend’s story, but still, we both put our names on it.

That, I thought, was the last time I would ever collaborate.

But then, years later, another opportunity to collaborate came my way. This time it was with David B. Silva, and as he was one of my favorite horror short story writers, there was just no way to pass it up.

It was my idea, actually. I’d been friends with Dave for a while. He had read my stuff and liked it. He had begun putting his backlist on Kindle, and while he was having some success, none of it was earth-shattering. His web presence wasn’t very large. He had a website and blogged every once in a while, but nothing to bring traffic his way.

So I proposed an idea.

What if we collaborated on a novella or short novel, a sort of blog-to-blog serialization? We would come up with a basic storyline. The first week, I would write the first chapter and post it on my website, say on Friday. Then the following week Dave would write his chapter and post it on his website. We would do this back and forth until the story was done. The idea was each writer would not know what the next chapter would be until that following Friday, and then they would have a week to come up with the next chapter. The fun would be that, while there was a basic storyline, there would be no outline. We would literally be making it up as we went along.

As it turned out, Dave was all for the idea of collaboration, but he wasn’t so enthusiastic about the blog-to-blog serialization. At least not until we’d had enough of an idea where we wanted to take the story. He didn’t want to commit to a project he wasn’t sure he could continue (even then, over a year ago, he knew his health was failing), and suggested we at least get a few chapters written and out of the way. You know, a nice head start.

Dave, of course, was a very wise man. While initially I wanted to have fun with the project, Dave wanted to take it a little more seriously. Which, as it turned out, was for the best.

I’ve never been one for outlining. All my outlining gets down in my head before I start a new book. I know where I’m going to start and I know where I’m going to end, but the other stuff — you know, the meat of the story — usually presents itself to me as I go along.

Here, though, I needed to create an outline. Or at the very least sketch a rough map. So here’s what we did:

I wrote the first chapter and sent it to Dave along with a brief outline for the next chapter.

Dave gave me notes on the first chapter, wrote the second chapter, and sent everything back to me.

I incorporated his notes, made notes on his chapter, wrote my chapter, and then sent the new chapter along with an outline for the next chapter.

It went like this more or less for over a year. Which is a pretty long time, considering the end result ended up being just under 40,000 words. But this was far from being our main project. I was working on stuff. Dave was working on stuff. We worked on the book when we had free time. In fact, there were times when weeks would go by without getting any work done. One time, Dave set his chapter aside to come back to later, and nearly a month went by before I asked him if everything was okay, and he said oops, sorry, and sent his chapter along.

Could we have had a better collaborating routine? Certainly. Brian collaborates with many different writers. In fact, a lot of my writer friends collaborate. I’m sure that there’s no set rule on how to do it. I always find it fascinating to hear the different ways writers collaborate on their projects. No two is ever alike. So I can’t say Dave and I were doing it wrong. We were just doing it our way.

While the story was primarily mine, Dave still brought his own sensibilities to the project. In an early chapter, one of the men on the run leaves a ten-dollar gold piece at the mercantile in a deserted town. He and his friend were taking supplies from the mercantile, and the character was leaving the gold piece as payment.

I asked Dave why this character would do this, when he could easily just take the supplies.

Dave said he believed the character was honest enough to want to pay despite there being no one around.

I said, okay, fair enough. And you know what? The gold piece came into play later in the book.

That isn’t the only example of Dave’s hand in the story, of course, but it’s the first one that comes to mind.

Dave and I had many conversations about not only the book, but writing in general. He noted something in my writing that I had been doing — what, he said, was probably unconscious — and it opened my eyes and helped me become a stronger writer. Even Dave, after all these years of writing and editing, admitted he was still learning as we worked on the project.

And yet, when we were done, we still weren’t done.

We received great feedback from others, like Jack Ketchum and Paul Goblirsch of Thunderstorm Books, which helped us make the book stronger and be the best book it could be.

As most of you know, Dave passed last month. I’m happy that he was still alive when the limited edition of Walk the Sky was released. Unfortunately, he never got a chance to see the ebook or paperback.

While we were working on Walk the Sky, I told Dave I planned to put his name first on the byline. He said absolutely not. The story was mainly mine, and he was just along for the ride.

Well, I don’t know about him, but I had a great time working with Dave on this project.

It was, in fact, an honor and privilege to ride with him.

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Walk the Sky is now available as a paperback and as an ebook in the Kindle store (and the UK Kindle store) at a special introductory price of 99 cents.