Chicks-n-Scratching

This Fire (half of the Hearts Afire December release at Liquid Silver Books) was published this week at Liquid Silver Books. It’s my first collaboration with Emily Ryan-Davis, and it went shockingly well.

What I want to talk about here is how we came to do this project.  Tina at LSB mentioned on Twitter that she was hunting for a good firefighter story and she wanted it ASAP. Well, I thought. I have a manuscript I started years ago (literally. It was one of the first manuscripts I started), and it has a firefighter. But it’s only about one-third plus one scene done and needs major revision on what is done. And Tina wants it in less than two weeks. Can I make that work?

Now, I have to be honest here. I didn’t think I could salvage Eden and Seth in that amount of time, so I put it up on google documents and shared with my critique partner, Emily.  She read what I had and thought it was not only worth salvaging, but she was really excited about it.

I told Tina I’d finish it up and get it to her.

Two days in, I realized I was over my head. So I poked Emily to ask her if she was interested in helping me finish it. She was (thank heavens).

I laid out the bones of the story as I’d envisioned it, and she tweaked the story (for the better). While I started going through and yanking the weeds from the part that was already done, Em started working on moving the story forward. When she hit a block, we switched off. I started writing, she went back and edited behind me. Then we both started working different parts of the story. Once we had all the pieces, we went through and wove them together, putting in scene transitions and seaming together the dialogue.

What’s interesting is that people who know us both – and who have read us both individually- have commented that they can’t see the seams. That’s a good thing. The goal, of course, was make sure the seams didn’t show.

It was fun writing with Emily. Her brain works differently than mine, so we see different things in the story. Our writing styles are very different – I tend to embellish more, she tends to pare things down. She has an amazing turn of phrase in emotionally tense situations, and that helped a lot. She tends to throw monkey wrenches into my carefully planned plot, but those monkey wrenches usually make things much better – once I figure out how to use the wrench. So, all around, the collaboration worked pretty well.

Another thing that interested me about this particular story was how it resurrected an old story from my dead files.  I love the characters, but when I first started writing the story, I was trying to make it a category length. This story did NOT want to be category length. It’s happy where it is. So, part of making it work was recognizing that the story needed to be shorter. Another part was Emily bringing fresh eyes to the project and helping me see where things needed to move along. The value of a safety net, a sounding board, a second set of shoulders to carry the load cannot be overestimated. When I hit a dead zone for writing, Em picked up. When she hit dead zones, I picked up.

I still love Eden and Seth. But now I love their story, too. And that’s different this time. I hope you love their story, too.