Some Good Writing Advice From Our Dogs

We’ve put in a ton of work on the ghost novels over the past nine months or so. And we got a lot accomplished! All four books are outlined, we documented the cast and the setting, created backstories and histories for all of that, devised the rules of supernature that we intend to play by, etc. It’s our most elaborate and thorough rainbow exercise ever, by far.

What we haven’t done for quite a while is actually write. And now it’s pretty much time to do that, assuming we can remember how.

As we hiked through the snowy woods the other day with our assistants, Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord, our conversation focused on returning to prose-mode. We reminded each other of what that feels like, and we must confess that we fretted a little about how out of practice we are. Both of us were thinking about the size of the job we’re about to take on, writing a tetralogy in an entire new story world and playing with tropes we haven’t used much before. It was feeling a bit intimidating.

Fortunately, the Bandit Lord had some good advice. He told us not to obsess about it, to just stay loose and let it happen. Lady Marzipan then pointed out that we had probably already talked about it as much as we ought to. We had psyched ourselves up, and we didn’t want to psych ourselves out.

They might not be much help with grammatical issues, but those two assistants of ours really do earn their keep when it comes to moral support.

A great writing partner is, sometimes, someone who licks your face.