Writing. In Tandem

I posted this on YA Stands this morning, but it's too important to me not to repeat here...

Recently I co authored a short story with a friend. It’s been accepted in an anthology and is due out later this summer.


Usually, upon hearing this, writers ask, “Oh my gosh, how did you do it?”

Funny, at the time it didn’t seem weird at all. Ansha Kotyk and I are really good friends, talk about writing often, brainstorm our own pieces with each other. It seems only natural that working on a joint project would be cool. And it was.

I wrote an initial scene. Prologue, let’s call it. I didn’t even know who the main character was. We met to brainstorm and came up with something I never in a million years would have come up with myself.


The end result? About 7000 words in less than a week between the two of us. A finished short story about two weeks after that. The story accepted into an anthology coming out of Pugalicious Press this summer.


Tips on co authoring: 

•  Be open-minded. Even more so than you already are. ;) Two minds are better than one, and the piece belongs to both of you.
• Talk through things that need compromise. The phone is your friend—some things you can’t do over email.
•  Make sure you have the same goals and can agree on the outcome. (i.e., royalties, format, copy-edits, contract stuff, where you’re going to submit, etc. We wrote the piece specifically to specifications on the Pug Press website.)
•  Be able to let it go if it doesn’t work.

Stay tuned for our release, “Stella’s Hero,” in the Timeless Anthology at Pugalicious Press. We can’t wait to share our heroine, a plucky shop-girl from the 1890s, and the love of her life, as they escape the confines of a society that tells them they aren’t supposed to be together. 

Ansha and I will both be talking a lot about this story, the anthology, and the process of co-authoring in the weeks to come.

http://theinvisibleagent.wordpress.com/tag/tandem-bike/

This is not me and Ansha on a tandem bike. Nor is it our characters. Though I do think it illustrates the concept of tandem quite well. :)