That Time Jen and Kent Were Writing Two Different Books Together

It’s not all that strange for us to be juggling multiple projects.  The twist this time is that we’re each focusing on one book, just not the same one. Jen is compiling the outline for Sibling of Music Novel while Kent writes the epigraphs for Grandson of Science Novel. A more typical scenario would involve switching between projects every day or two, with the two of us staying mostly synced up on whichever project we switch to.

Another fairly common situation would be where one of us is writing while the other one does research, or designs a cover, things like that. When we’re doing different types of tasks, it’s less noticeable if they’re related to different books.

This feels sorta weird this time, because we are both writing. We tend to ask each other questions out of the blue a lot, and that’s when it’s really noticeable that we’re thinking about different worlds.

For a long time, we would not have even considered this type of multitasking. We very deliberately kept our combined attention on one project at a time. It allowed us to stay immersed in that story world, and our concern was that we’d burn a lot of mental energy spooling it back up again if we got distracted by something else. But as the manuscripts accumulated, life in the Writing Cave got complicated. And it turns out that we’re pretty damn good at keeping multiple worlds spinning in our heads. After a while you even used to it.

Having a writing partner gives you twice the bandwidth for generating warped realities.