Tagged: epigraph

It Takes Two to Tango

r-avatarGood news everyone!

We are thisclose to putting our current first draft to bed. The text of the story itself has been done for a couple weeks, and we’ve even started to get feedback on it from our critique group. So far so awesome.

The only thing we have left to write are some supplementary materials, which we talked about a little bit last week. Kent has been reveling in this opportunity to explore the original story spark that morphed so completely to become our finished novel. His excitement is contagious, and Jen has joined in to a limited extent. We anticipate needing less than 1000 more words and the whole thing will be done.

And then we get to celebrate!

Celebrating your milestones is an important part of the writing process. You need to reward yourself for a job well done, and it’s much more fun to do that with a partner. And we don’t even mean that in a salacious way — we mean with your writing partner. Sure, your spouse or your buddy can lift a glass with you to toast the completion of your new story, but they probably don’t have a full understanding of how satisfied you feel, how proud you are, or just how difficult the road there was. When you have a coauthor, that person is with you every step of the way. You’ve had each other’s backs through the whole long slog, now you can let loose together and get freaky!

Just how freaky do Jen and Kent plan to get? Well, there are some movies that have been clogging up the TiVo for a while. Plus this Day of the Doctor thing is happening. And next week is Thanksgiving.

I hope you’re not scandalized.

Next up, after our Authors Gone Wild break: plotting out the new story idea, followed by extensive edits of a previous novel that’s been waiting patiently on the back burner.

Fictional Fiction

r-avatarJen and Kent work hard to blend their writing styles into a seamless Rune Skelley voice. Rune Skelley, though, is not content with a single voice.

Each of our books has called for the inclusion of writings by authors in the story’s fictional universe, and we’ve had a marvelous time differentiating those voices. The fictional authors have writing styles that don’t sound like Rune Skelley. Neither do they sound like Jen, or Kent. Or like our other fictional authors.

As we’ve mentioned, our current novel started out as an idea born of Kent’s fevered imaginings, an idea that didn’t really speak to Jen. We found a way to work around that, and now Kent gets his reward for compromising.

In the story world, there is an author whose novels embody Kent’s original idea, and now Kent has free rein to bring that idea to life. He is encouraged to dive as deep into the hard scifi well as he wants. And since we’re only going to be including excerpts from our fictional author, he doesn’t have to worry overmuch about plot.

Lest it sound like Jen never gets to do the fun part, she already came up with the titles for all ten of our latest made-up author’s novels (and one short story). That “idea that didn’t really speak to Jen” seems to have been whispering in her ear over the past couple of days. Having the names of all the books that will provide the excerpts gives Kent inspiration for the story lines and themes they contain. It’s a neat example of the symbiosis in Rune Skelley’s writing process.