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.

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.

Retirement Celebration Part 1: Norway

Upon Kent’s retirement we took a big ol’ trip, partially to celebrate, partially to break Kent of his “check work email every 10 minutes around the clock” habit.

Our first stop was Norway. We’d been there once, briefly, about a decade ago, and it was great to be able to spend more time exploring. We started in Oslo and worked our way north.

Frogner Park in Oslo features about a million sculptures by Gustav Vigeland, all of them weird.

We visited small cities and tiny fishing villages, an aquarium north of the Arctic Circle, and a nature park where we got to go inside the wolf pen and pet real life actual wolves. Somehow Jen was able to convince Kent to leave his new lupine clan behind so we could continue our explorations.

Norwegian scenery: dramatic fjords, gorgeous vistas as seen from the train, and a mountain with a hole through it.

Eventually we made it all the way to Nordkapp, the North Cape, where the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans meet. We had gorgeous weather, which is apparently a rarity, but it was hella windy up on the plateau. We ran back and forth a lot to get pictures of each other with the globe statue. The visitor’s center goes deep underground, with a movie theater, a museum dedicated to a visit from the King of Thailand, a light show, and access to the King’s View, a lookout area built into the face of the cliff where it is considerably less windy.

Nordkapp

 

What do you do when you reach the northernmost point of continental Europe? If you’re Rune Skelley, you keep going north, of course! More on that next week.

Whiteboard Jr

The newest addition to the SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, LLC family is a second whiteboard! This one is somewhat smaller than its big brother, and has really high-quality wheels. It’s perfect for the writer on the go! No more excuses for Rune Skelley! Doing laps around the neighborhood? This bad boy can tag along! Going to the roller disco? He’s already wearing his shiny white suit!

We weren’t really in the market for a backup whiteboard, but when Jen saw it at the salvage center, her brain lit up with potential uses for it. (Maps! Plot rainbow overflow! Character inspiration photos! Murder board!) There was no talking her out of it, which Kent must have known because he didn’t try very hard.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere, akin to “don’t go grocery shopping hungry” or “don’t go to the animal shelter unless you really want a pet.” Keep Jen out of the stationery aisle and, apparently, the used office furniture warehouse.

A good writing partner is someone who can admit he was wrong about the number of whiteboards your office needs.

The Prophesied Day Hath Arrived

At long last, Kent is officially retired from dayjobbery!

This means Rune Skelley can pivot to a daylight schedule and Jen and Kent can both finally find out what having weekends and evenings is like.

A writing partner is someone who’s been waiting for this for a long time.

Vinyl Fantasy

The Auxilliary Writing Cave has lots of nice features, such as a fireplace and big, comfy furniture. A thing there that we haven’t brought up is our vinyl collection and — hold onto your butts — functional turntable. Lately we’ve made it a project to listen to all our albums (and EPs and rare 12-inch singles and everything else that the turntable can handle).

Music during writing sessions is something that brings out strong opinions. For us, the formula is that music is always good, but if what we’re doing is editing rather than composing or discussing then it has to be instrumental. For some weird reason, the lyrics don’t interfere with our ability to make up new sentences, yet they very much impede us when we’re trying to make adjustments to existing ones.

Our library of vinyl won’t be setting any records (ha!) but it is pretty big. Takes up about four feet of shelf space. It’s also a blend of Jen’s and Kent’s collections, reflecting their sometimes diverging musical interests. That divergence is actually highlighted when we consider what we have on vinyl specifically, because that format aligns with our teenage phases.

So, in an effort to devise a fair method of going through the whole stack without either or both of us going bonkers, we chose to select from alternating ends of the shelf. Currently we’re in the middle of the Star Wars soundtrack, which was preceded by the rather distracting Looney Tunes collection. We do own actual albums by actual bands, honest. Apparently our filing system has a sense of humor.

A writing partner is someone who’ll flip the record for you once in a while.

Rereading the Divided Man Trilogy

Once upon a time, Rune Skelley decided to write a novel. We knew two main facts, which seemed like an ample number of things to know to get started: how things would begin for the main character, and a catchy phrase to describe how he’d end up. We did not know that there would be a co-protagonist. We did not know much at all about the whole middle part, although we had a clear notion of the overall mood we wanted to convey. It was a very difficult process, but, hey! We did it. Rune Skelley wrote that novel! And then we wrote a second book extending the same story, and then a third. So, um, hey! We published a trilogy, and we called it The Divided Man.

At this point we’ve written two more trilogies and are substantially along on a tetralogy. A lot of miles behind us on this road, since The Divided Man. So we’re going to reread the series.

And it’s going to be weird.

For such a long time, those books took up so much space in our heads. We knew them by heart, and these are not small books. It was impossible to imagine even the tiniest details slipping away. But now that we’ve worked on so much other stuff, it seems just possible that our own early material might be able to surprise us. We’re excited to see how it goes.

A writing partner is someone who’ll stick with you on the journey, even when it includes a detour down Memory Lane.

The Divided Man Series

Miss Brandymoon’s Device
Tenpenny Zen
Elsewhere’s Twin