Sunshine and Roses

Most of the time, our process works really well. We might have mentioned it, in fact I’m sure we sometimes come across a little boastfully about it. “Watch how we make everything look easy.” Well, usually it is pretty easy. We mesh, so we can devote our energies to coming up with nifty concepts and stellar prose. (Modesty isn’t one of our strengths.)

There are some bumps in the road now and then, we must confess. Right now we’re revising a first draft, which in our case means we’re working in different parts of it and then synching up. How we sync up is that we dictate our changes to each other. It’s a good system, even if not the most efficient in terms of time. The benefit is that all the new stuff gets read aloud, and we have the opportunity to critique it while it’s fresh. The problem that came up recently was that we got out of sync with the synching up.

Kent’s engines sometimes take longer to warm up than Jen’s, and his powers of concentration can be iffy at certain times of day. So it has happened, rarely, that Jen went on a tear with numerous small edits while Kent scowled at his screen for a while. Jen had good stuff to share, but the repeated sharing broke Kent’s fragile grip on the changes he was trying to make.

Those bumpy stretches are few and far between on our writing-collaboration journey. But they do happen. Working solo, you never have to worry about distracting your partner, because there is no partner to distract. But you do have to avoid other sources of distraction, and there’s no one to give you a gentle nudge in the third hour of reading web comics when you’re supposedly writing. The plusses of teamwork far, far outweigh the occasional minuses.