Prompting by the Seats of Our Pants

Much of what we post here at the Skelleyverse are writing prompts. We have a lot of fun with them, creating a chain story and building two (count ’em) prompt generators. Something we don’t do is worry excessively, or indeed at all, about whether they make a whole lot of sense.

Those prompts are what happens when Rune Skelley writes by the seat of the pants. And they’re markedly different from our novels, which — as we might have mentioned — are written via a highly developed process with multiple stages of planning and debugging before any real prose even starts. Bump on up to runeskelley.com for some excerpts.

Don’t get us wrong, we have a lot of fun with the novels, too. Just because we expend a great deal of energy making sure that they do make sense doesn’t mean there’s no joy in writing them. In fact, we kinda get off on the whole plotting, outlining, analyzing, researching, color-coding, debugging, and logistical machinating of our process.

We didn’t always have a process. Hard to reach back to those dark times, but in the beginning we made everything up as we went along. We’ve been there, done that, and we don’t want to go back. It was… inefficient. It was a fine way to prevent our partnership from being a strength. But we learned, and we honed a technique that has speeded up our writing at least ten-fold.

But, we do have those kooky prompts, to get our pantsing ya-yas out.