Partners in Crime

Writing collaboratively with your spouse can be a very rewarding experience. We’ve talked numerous times about how we do it. I won’t bother with links, because it’s the topic of, like, nearly every Friday post.

There are times, though, when being married to your coauthor isn’t great for the project. One of the best things about having a writing partner, being able to cover for each other, becomes infeasible — if not impossible — when dealing with certain interruptions.

For instance, we recently celebrated our anniversary. Yay us! But that meant that we both took time away from working on our fiction at the same time. We also recently took our son on a college visit. Again, yay family time! Yay smart kid! And again, the manuscript sat idle.

Birthdays, vacations, anniversaries, family outings, weddings, medical emergencies. When you’re married to your writing partner, life hits you both at the same time. You need to accept that there will be times in the life cycle of a manuscript when neither of you is able to advance the work. In our partnership it’s Jen who feels stress when the project sits idle for too long (“too long” being a very relative term). Luckily for her she has Kent to talk her down and dive in with her when it’s time to get back to work.