We talk a lot about the importance of having a careful outline when working with a coauthor, but today we’re going to talk about the time Jen did the exact opposite.
If you ever glance at the comments on this blog, you are familiar with our good friend Reggie. Before she moved away and left us bereft, Reggie was a member of our critique group. For a few glorious months, Jen and Reggie were both fortunate enough to have employment that left them a staggeringly huge amount of unsupervised internet time. Instead of taking up online poker, or developing porn addictions, they took to throwing stichomancy writing prompts at each other, dozens per day, with the goal of maximizing the absurdity. As was perhaps inevitable, they developed a shared cast of characters that roamed at will through all the prompt responses. What began as a lark rather abruptly developed into a novel. Jen roped Kent into writing one single scene so that it could be said to be truly coauthored by Rune Skelley. The female coauthors appear in the novel as a gay male couple writing an opera about the alleged protagonist. In rough draft form it was nearly 200,000 words, many of them filthy.
Some of you probably read the preceding paragraph and got excited at the prospect of such unfettered creativity leading to something so monumental. Sad to say, this is a cautionary tale.
The entire Saga of Hieronymus Warhol was written in small bites of insanity, completely out of order. That impressive (and bloated) word count is made up of snippets of micro-fiction, averaging less than 500 words. It has a cast of, literally, almost 100 characters, all of whom have peculiar backstories and character traits that the reader is expected to keep track of.
Once the many plot lines were tied together with an improbable bow, Jen and Reggie spent a few weeks wrangling the pieces into chronological order while laughing their asses off. It may be considered gauche to laugh at your own jokes, but that never stopped these two. After that came identifying the plot holes that needed to be filled (as opposed to the ones that were purposefully ignored), assigning the prompts to fill those holes, and then the Sisyphean task of editing such a beast. Entire characters were excised. Sub-plots were fed to the wolves. It’s a process that is still not complete, years later.
With great glee, Reggie and Jen submitted their ugly baby to the critique group and snickered at their consternation. And to this day, the still-unwieldy beast sits on Jen’s and Reggie’s hard drives, gathering digital dust and wondering why nobody wants to publish it.
If you’re an agent or a publisher and you’re interested in some highly experimental fiction about an insane artist, his many lovers and family members, a pair of centuries-old incestuous sibling sorcerers, several satyrs, a sex spy, a large, strange man, and university politics, drop us a line!
although his solid chin is clear of any hair
I recognized Milton and Dante by their moans and their heavy breathing before I entered the room and saw them entwined in an old shower curtain. They were like a tantric Hindu god in a robe of some plastic fabric.