WIP: Teaser from The Bloodwarm Rain

Collaborations can be a lot of fun. My first collaboration came about when Jeff VanderMeer asked if I’d be interested in working together on one and tossed me a 1500 word lump that would end up becoming “The Surgeon’s Tale.” That story remains among one of my favorite pieces of writing, in part because reading back through it evokes the pleasure of batting it back and forth, adding thousand or so word chunks each time, until it ended up in the land of the novelette. I think we managed to make the final result pretty seamless – I have trouble remembering who wrote some bits, although others stand out clearly in my head as Jeff’s or mine, because I remember first reading them or spinning them out.

I haven’t done that many. “Logic and Magic in the Time of the Boat Lift” with Ben Burgis resulted from Ben describing what he wanted to write a story about — Miami and were gators and coke dealers — at more than one Wiscon. I wrote the beginning and sent it his way, and the back and forth began. Now we’ve got a similar lump in process.

Gio Clairval and I just finished up a flash piece recently. One of the things I’ve done to encourage collaborations is stick a bunch of word lumps up in a Google doc and just shared the doc so people could take a look and see if anything sparked. She liked a piece I’d done based on an image of a female acrobat.

Right now Bud Sparhawk and I just finished the novella “Haunted,” which started as a short story and kept growing and growing and growing. Bud plots things out a bit more thoroughly than I do, and it’s been interesting so far. Here we worked in Scrivener and laid out a story arc in cards before really setting to writing. I enjoyed it, because I think we’ve got a killer idea, and some clever twists, and some things that will hit nostalgic sweetspots.

So here’s my advice on collaboration based on my experience, which is somewhere past utterly new at it and yet not in the range of people like Mercedes Lackey, Andre Norton, Mike Resnick, and countless more.

• Pick a collaborator whose speed (roughly) matches yours. Bud was writing faster on ours, and I know there were several times where I was the holdup. Too much of that can get frustrating, as I’m sure he can attest.
• Pick a collaborator who doesn’t take things too seriously (and don’t do that yourself). If someone has got something (real or imagined) at stake, the pressure may be uncomfortable.
• Pick a collaborator who is flexible, and similarly be prepared yourself to sacrifice cherished ides, because you can always use them elsewhere.

Collaborative benefits include (for me, at least) new energy, someone to discuss a story with as it’s written, new insights into process, fresh ideas, and a kick in the butt to be productive.

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So I’ve finished up the writing of the first draft of a current project, which ended up about 90k words. By first draft, I mean all of the scenes are at least 75% complete, with most of them completely roughed out. The next stage of the process will follow what I did with the previous two books, which worked fine. Because I am a writer, I am fascinated with process. We all constantly wonder if we’re Getting It Right, a state which I can neither confirm nor deny. Hence this post, which anyone is welcome to skip.

As part of my process, which is perhaps overly paper-intensive, I’m printing out a copy right now, at a line and a half spacing so there’s plenty of room to write on it. I’ll go through that with my colored paper tags, marking the places where there are things to be fixed or done or included, including notes ranging in magnitude from “this needs to be foreshadowed in previous chapter” to “check street name.” I’ll read through the manuscript, tinkering at the paragraph and sentence level while answering each of those tabs so I can remove it from the manuscript.

When they’re all answered, I’ll print out another copy and read that aloud with pen in hand. That may happen more than once.

I’ve polished the prologue and first chapter a couple of times, so I’m running that past one writing group, and will be looking for first readers when I get to the read-aloud stage – if people are interested, please drop me a line in the comments.

Is this the only way to write a novel? A thousand times no! But it’s worked for me, and if there’s any part of it that’s useful to you, seize it freely. The single wisest thing I heard at Clarion West, from Syne Mitchell, was, “Try different things and find out what works for you. Then do that. Lots.”