Category: Writing as a Team

Two people writing as a team can have advantages over soloist authors. But to have a fruitful writing partnership we must adopt a process that utilizes our strengths, and we need a relationship that’s strong enough to support the endeavor. Here’s where we explore the matter from various angles.

Radiant Is the Blood of a Vibrant Writing Partnership

We’re big fans of the Venture Bros, and recently completed a binge of the entire series plus Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart including the extras. Our favorite extra was John Hodgman’s interview with series creators Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick.

Other writing partnerships fascinate us, so hearing Doc and Jackson describe theirs was a treat. (Pretending we’re on a first-name basis with those two is also quite a kick!) In their case, each episode was written entirely by one or the other of the duo. That means that both partners could do the show’s voice. No matter which one did the honors for a particular episode, from the audience perspective it always felt like the same show. That stuck a chord with us, because Jen and Kent have both learned how to do Rune Skelley’s voice. Back in our very early days, our process included a step where we’d edit each other’s stuff. That step was there explicitly so that the voice wouldn’t be “too Kent” or “too Jen” in the finished product. We no longer need to do that.

Another thing that felt familiar was the zany complexity of the plotlines and of the characters’ myriad backstories. In our novels, we always wind up with intricate situations involving complicated people. Tonally, those novels are nothing like Venture Bros. But, Tune In Next Time, our gonzo flash-fiction chain story, comes a lot closer. And listening to Doc and Jackson tell stories about producing Venture Bros reminded us of what it’s like to do Tune In Next Time. Lots of weird shit gets thrown into the mix, and it’s hard to predict which stuff will turn out to matter later on. It takes a lot of agility to sustain something like that. For us, it’s just a whimsical way to keep adding content to our blog. But for Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, the stakes were considerably higher. Our hats are off to them for delivering a show that stayed true to its insane internal logic.

A writing partner is someone who knows when the two of you should and shouldn’t be working without a net.

System Is Working As Intended

For the Ghost Series, we made a very deliberate choice to get all four books figured out before writing any prose for the first one. Our approach is to consider the project as one big story. Ideas that arise later on in the process might necessitate laying some groundwork in earlier books, and we aimed to give ourselves the most flexibility to do that without getting stuck in an infinite loop of rewrites.

Without an over-arching plan, without making lots of decisions up front, what would happen is we’d wrap up Book 1 and send it out for feedback, and then meanwhile we’d be working on Book 2 and discover a bunch of shiny new ideas that don’t match what we’ve written already. Meaning when our beta readers send us their comments, half of them have been obviated upon arrival. And once we started in on Book 3, the same situation would replay — only twice as bad, because now we’re trying to retroactively account for stuff in two prior books.

Ask us how we know. (Never mind; we’re about to tell you anyway.)

Our previous series grew organically. We’d write a book, and then discover that there was more story to tell using that world and those characters. So we’d write another book, and then another. So far, that progression has always led to trilogies. In one case, we did actually plan out books 2 & 3 in tandem rather than separately. We were starting to get the message even then. With the Ghost Series being a tetralogy, the benefits of advance planning are multiplied because so are the impacts of doing it inadequately.

So, we did a lot of planning. Lots of writing sessions that produced no writing per se.

At this point, we are working on Book 2. And so far? No major revisions have come up for Book 1. Several minor changes, and we’ll surely have more tinkering to deal with. But it’s likely to all be small-scale stuff like which tarot card gets drawn, rather than anything huge like swapping which characters are living and which are ghosts.

A writing partner is someone who helps with all the pre-writing as much as with generating pages of manuscript.

Re-Reading The Divided Man Trilogy

For somewhat mysterious reasons, we decided that we’d read the first three novels we wrote. By “decided we’d read” what we mean of course is that we decided Kent would read them aloud to Jen. This project recently came to a successful conclusion.

To get the self-promotion out of the way: it was a blast. We really enjoyed it the whole way through. There is always some trepidation about revisiting early work. Has it aged well? (Yes.) Was it really polished enough to be published? (Yes.) Are we biased? (Yes. But we also have standards.)

The Divided Man Series
Miss Brandymoon's Device Tenpenny Zen Elsewhere's Twin

 

These books are of special interest to scholars of Rune Skelley’s oeuvre because they were written before we knew what we were doing. That is, writing this trilogy is what taught us how important it is for us to have a process. It was hard! There was at least one six-month span when trying to work on it became so stressful that we just stopped.

Did that seat-of-the-pants workflow contribute anything positive to the flavor of the end product? Probably. There’s a sort of punk-rock attitude infusing the whole thing — a crude spark. Going back to the first books now, we’re a little bit jealous of younger Rune Skelley’s “fuck it, watch this” confidence. We went for the double backflip, and we landed it! Eventually! After wrecking ourselves a whole bunch. As already mentioned, it was hard.

Did building this series without a blueprint actually, you know, work? Yes, but we honestly don’t know how. Each of the three Divided Man books has many moving parts, and the trilogy overall creates a structure in which all of the weird shit we set in motion adds up to a consistent, if convoluted, story world. Something we commented about repeatedly as we did the reading is the complexity of the plot and world-building, and how effectively it’s all tied together. Now, we know how this particular sausage was made. We know we played the game on hard mode, so we have a deeper appreciation for how unlikely it was that all these twists would ultimately line up. In other words, we know how likely we are to face-plant if we try to just wing it through something so ambitious again.

As we have said hundreds of times here at the Skelleyverse, writing with a partner is awesome. A good writing partner is your secret weapon. Something to keep in mind is that working with a partner increases your need for a formal system. Can two people take the free-jazz writing approach and get good stuff as a result? Totally! We did. But, in roughly the same amount of time we spent on those three books, we’ve written seven more. And it was way, way less stressful. Because we have a system.

A writing partner is someone who will ride with you down memory lane.

Gazing Into Our Crystal Ball

Our plan for our writing life in 2024 is simple: complete the first draft of As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #2, and if there’s time, get started on #3. We got a quick start on #2 at the tail end of 2023, and we have a work schedule that’s working. It should be very doable.

Except.

We have a couple of major challenges coming up this year. First of all, we’re building a house. Not us personally. We’ve hired some fine professionals to do all the hard stuff because we want the place to be amazing. Even though we won’t be swinging the hammers ourselves, we expect the project to be an enormous distraction. Almost as big a distraction as our other challenge for 2024: our first grandchild.

Jen’s degree is in Human Development, and she’s worked with young kids a ton, so we’ll be providing a lot of care for the little one while he’s fresh. We’re stupendously excited! But we’re also realists who acknowledge that infant care is going to disrupt our writing schedule quite significantly. We’ve started talking about how to stay on schedule. Maybe we’ll reinstate our evening work sessions. Maybe we’ll alternate days of childcare and writing time. Maybe the kiddo will be a good napper and we’ll work while he’s snoozing. A lot depends on him, and we haven’t met him yet. We shall see!

So, in between changing diapers and choosing cabinets and tiles and appliances (and everything else), we will: write Novel #2. When that’s done we’ll review it alongside #1 to make sure it all flows smoothly, preview #3 and #4 to update anything necessary, do a deep dive into the prep for #3, and then start writing #3. And if we need to look away from the ghosts, we still have a Music Novel in need of an editing pass.

A writing partner is someone who stands beside you when life comes at you fast.

Look Back in Awe

As we’re sure you’ve noticed, 2023 is nearing the finish line. That means it’s time for us here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, LLC to review what we accomplished throughout the year.

Our main goal for the year was to complete the first draft of As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1, and that gets a big ol’ checkmark. The first draft was in the can by late summer, and we managed to squeeze in a couple of read-throughs and a sort of mini-edit to address the issues we uncovered. It might not meet the technical definition of a second draft, but whatever you call it, we’re happy with where it stands right now.

Our second goal was for Kent to retire, and again we accomplished it! (Well, Kent did. Jen cheered from the sidelines.)

Our third goal was to travel, and holy shit did we do that. We got to within 800 miles of the North Pole!

We forecast that we might edit one of the Music Novels if we wanted a substantial break from writing about ghosts between As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novels #1 and #2. That was not necessary. The timing worked out nicely to put #1 to bed shortly before heading out on our Epic Arctic Exploration, and that adventure provided more than enough of a break.

It took longer than we liked for us to get our brains out of vacation-mode, and acclimate to all Kent’s new free time. We’d optimistically anticipated working 4-5 hours a day and having the productivity of the gods. It didn’t quite work out like that, but toward the end of the year we did settle into a pretty good daily schedule that we hope to expand on in the coming year. There will be some challenges to that, which we’ll talk about next week in our preview of the coming year.

Happy new year!

 

ETA: we finished the year with 7287 words in Book 2

Never Meta Blog I Didn’t Like

Writing a blog post about what you’ve previously posted on your blog about writing is a fairly meta activity, and it’s one that we engage in every year. Behold: 2023 as seen through Rune Skelley’s blog.

2023 got off to a running start. We were already thick in the writing of As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Story #1. In January we were finishing up a batch of stubs (and ironing out a problem or two so that no one would forget it was a ghost story), and it dawned on us that the end was nigh. The end of the novel, that is. The year was just getting started.

Trucking along in February we passed 100,000 words in As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Story #1. And since things were going pretty smoothly with the writing, which doesn’t always give us much to blog about, we talked about our recent travels.

In March we continued our exhaustive travelog. It was a big trip, so there was a lot to talk about. Checking in with the writing, the end still felt really close, and Kent admitted that Jen is often right about stuff.

April brought  a new addition to our writer’s toolbox — the Shoehorn. It joins the Monkey Wrench and the Goose Wrench, and is used when you have to go back to a previously written section and wedge some new information in (while making it look like it had always been there). And we had a lesson in not planning too far ahead.

In May we finished the first draft! Mostly! There were some holes we knew we wanted to fill, and some small changes we knew we wanted to make, and… Putting all that quibbling aside, we reached the end of the manuscript, and it felt damn good.

Filling in those holes happened in June, along with a read through. With the story fresh in our minds, we plotted our next steps. Jen worked on the prose outline for Book 2. It had been about half-done when she picked it up, and she saw it through to the end.

While Kent dayjobbed through July, Jen wrote the prose outlines for Books 3 and 4. And we complained a whole lot about how disorganized our notes were. After spending an entire year brainstorming the entire spectral quadlrilogy, we should have taken a week or two to organize all of our notes. We did not, and we paid the price for it in July. But now everything is all straightened out and organized and we’ll have no excuses going forward.*

*we will definitely have excuses

We wanted to have a break between writing Books 1 and 2, so we spent August doing other tasks around the writing cave. It wasn’t necessarily exciting to blog about, though, so instead we shared photos of the intergalactic vacation we’d taken in the spring. We also started rereading the Divided Man series, just for funsies.

Anything important happen in September? Oh not much. We just talked about Kent’s retirement! And our new baby whiteboard! and how we used him to set up the Book 2 rainbow, and a little bit of travel again

Okay, so maybe it was a lot of travel. It was a big year for us, with some Covid-delayed trips finally happening, and celebrating Kent’s retirement. In October we shared pictures from Iceland and Greenland, and we talked about how a long vacation makes a perhaps too-convenient excuse not to write. We got back on track by immersing ourselves in the Book 2 rainbow with the help of both whiteboards.

After so much travel and upheaval, we had trouble finding our new work session rhythm. So in November we shared our Halloween decorations. What? We’re writing a ghost story, so it’s research! And on the topic of writing, we were finally ready to dive in. Almost. Jen started writing stubs for the new book while Kent optimized the blog.

Which brings us to December aka Now. Kent updated the story world map, we finished all the other preliminary stuff, we finally figured out a new schedule that seems to work, and we actually started writing Book 2!

And now the end of 2023 truly is nigh. A good writing partner is someone you enjoy spending a lot of time with. Years, even.

Countries visited: Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Batuu, Norway, Svalbard, Iceland, Greenland. Some of that was actually in 2022, but we didn’t talk about it until 2023.

Retirement Celebration Finale: Greenland

Rounding out our epic adventure:  a couple of days in Greenland (!). The coastline is stunning. We saw dozens of waterfalls and glaciers, and even an iceberg calving from a glacier.

Prince Christian Sound

 

Icebergs

 

Kent brought home a few beers from the local brewery, Qajaq. We learned how to say “Thank you” in Greenlandic (Qujanaq). We touched an itty bitty iceberg that had washed up on a beach. And yeah, that means that the last time we were at the beach was in Greenland. No bigs.

Open air museum in Nanortaliq, modern stone carvings in Qaqortoq, the thriving metropolis of Qaqortoq, adorable octopus seesaw

 

Our travels concluded, we returned home. Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord were very happy to see us. We had every intention of jumping straight into work on As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #2, but that didn’t quite work out. Inertia is a thing, yo.

Retirement Celebration Part 3: Iceland

Just south of the Arctic Circle is Iceland, which is where our travels took us next. We spent about a week, and went the whole way around. The last big trip we took pre-Covid included Iceland, and it was nice to return and see some new parts of the country. Still no Northern Lights, though. There just wasn’t much darkness at night. We’ll have to go back in the winter and keep our fingers crossed.

Clockwise from upper left: Viking ship sculpture “Sun Voyager”  in Reykjavik waterfront, Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik, fence made out of a whale skeleton in Djupivogur, a Thai food delivery hearse

 

Iceland is like another planet. They have volcanoes, glaciers, hot springs, boiling mud pots, geysers, ice caves, and black sand beaches. We can’t recommend it highly enough. The people are really nice, too. At a charity shop in the Westfjords we found a stash of used vinyl, which our younger son collects. Our Icelandic is severely lacking, so we’re not sure exactly what we bought for him. (We opted not to buy the one record with a title in English, a gospel group from Allentown PA.)

Godafoss waterfall, the surface of Mars (aka sulphur vents), black sand beach

 

We had one more epic stop before returning home. Read all about it next week.

Retirement Celebration Part 2: Svalbard

Perhaps you haven’t heard of Svalbard. That’s understandable. It’s a lonely Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, far, far above the Arctic Circle. Longyearbyen, the town we visited on the island Spitsbergen, is the world’s northernmost settlement with a population over 1000 (it’s got about 1700). It’s located at 78° North latitude, a mere 813 miles from the North Pole. And take it from us, it’s a trip. Midnight sun! Polar bears! Santa’s abandoned coal mine home!

Longyearbyen is in the polar bear protection zone, so you’re allowed to wander around on your own. At the edge of town you encounter polar bear warning signs, and you’re not permitted beyond that point without some flash-bangs and a rifle (or a guide with those things). And you’re not allowed to carry a rifle without a Norwegian license.

If you have heard of Svalbard, it’s probably because it’s the home of the Global Seed Vault. We sort of got to see it. The day was extremely foggy, meaning our guide couldn’t guarantee there were no polar bears lurking nearby, meaning we weren’t allowed out of the vehicle.

Coal tramway support, explorer statue, You Are Now Leaving the Polar Bear Protection Zone

 

Jen got a nasty case of polar mania and waded barefoot in the Arctic Ocean. Kent was smart enough to keep his shoes on. Jen is proud to say she still has all her toes.

One of our novels takes place partially on Svalbard, so this part of the trip technically counted as research. Now that we’re home we need to go in and tweak some descriptions, enrich the prose with our lived experience.

Jen’s toes – a sundial that is accurate even when the sun never sets – the closest we got to a polar bear was this dog (named Tequila), at a cafe called Huskies – the bustling metropolis of Longyearbyen

The photo in the lower left has a lot going on. There’s the snowmobile trail sign (Scooterløype), a glacier hiding in the clouds between the two mountains, and, halfway up the mountain on the left, the abandoned coal mine (Mine 2B) where Svalbard’s children are told Santa lives. Yeah. It’s not a lot to look at, but in the winter they put lights in it, so there’s that.

We saw many of the world’s northernmost things. Northernmost sundial: see photo above. Northernmost car dealer: Toyota. Northernmost gas station: Circle K (seriously). Northernmost brewery: Svalbard Bryggeri (Kent recommends the Spitsbergen Stout).

Since we’d pretty much run out of North, we concluded our visit to Svalbard and headed south.

To be continued next week.