There are many differences between the novels that Kent and Jen write together and the chain story that has all but taken over the blog.

There are the obvious things, like our novels having actual coherent plots and rational characters, while the chain story is made of ridiculousness and populated by maniacs. And, long as they are, our novels have endings. Despite Kent’s fervent desires, the chain story doesn’t have one of those yet.

Less obvious, perhaps, from the readers’ side of the page is our underlying approach to these different projects. When writing the chain story we often try to fuck each other over. With our novels we try to surprise each other.

That surprise can often be a difficult thing to accomplish, since we’ve worked together for months hammering out and outline and breathing life into our characters. It comes in the little details that we choose on the sentence-by-sentence level. A snappy bit of dialog here, a quirky scenic detail there. It’s what makes writing with a partner delightful. No matter how well you know the story you’re telling, your coauthor sees it from a slightly different angle.

There are probably writing teams that don’t operate this way. They might enjoy creating impossible problems and handing them over to their partner to solve. And that probably works just fine for certain authors and certain kinds of projects. But for us, it’s better to collaborate on the full-length works and save the gleeful dickishness for our little bits of prompted writing.