Well, that was no fun. (But we’re feeling much better, now.)

For the new book, we’ve bestowed an odd trait on some of the characters, something that alters their subjective take on the world. As we’ve been mentioning a lot of late, the current priority is getting our ear in for the new cast. We want all the characters’ experiences to shine, but it’s crucial that this one odd trait be vivid, and that it be portrayed consistently. It’s a key piece of pseudoscience and needs to mesh with the flavor of the other speculative elements in the story world. We’re mad planners, and we like to know going in that all the edges are going to line up.

So after several conversations, and a few hours of image searches and other web research, we agreed on the basic parameters. A handful of provisional scenes were already in the can, but for a lack of that odd subjective flavor that we had just defined, so Kent went about retrofitting it.

Turned out that our agreement about the parameters was a bit of a mirage. Kent’s take went way out of bounds compared to what Jen had in mind. Of course, Kent had his reasons for doing things that way, and thought at the time that it was exactly what had been established.

This led to the conversations with no fun in them. It’s uncomfortable to be in disagreement over something you’re really invested in, and Jen and Kent don’t get a lot of practice disagreeing. (We like it that way, but it makes for extra friction when things do go south.) Both partners must seek what’s best for the fiction, and not give in for the sake of harmony. That would be false compromise, which not only hurts the quality of the writing but it also weakens the partnership over time. It’ll make you want to keep score, and you can’t keep score. You can’t carry baggage. You need to find the better answer, the thing that makes you both happy.

Which is what we did. Jen shifted to a different metaphor to articulate what she hoped to see on the page, and suddenly the vision clicked in Kent’s mind. We knew we couldn’t really say “That’s it!” until at least one scene existed incorporating the new idea, so Kent got right to work. Success!