But How do you Write "Together?"

Hey folks, Lauren here.

As most people do when exciting things happen, I talk about my and Anna's publishing journey to a lot of folks around me. Since Anna is off in the wilderness defending the states from wildfires, there is maybe one person (le boyfriend) who serves as an outlet for my gushiness. So, to spare him being the sole outlet, I gush at work to my coworkers and bosses, who are all very excited, and love hearing about the process.

The biggest question I get is usually, "How do the two of you write together?" A large majority of folks are intimidated by writing by themselves, so imagining two people writing together is just crazy talk.

I started role playing when I was eleven. It was introduced to me on a forum for the anime Inuyasha, and had a "round robin" format to it. It was awkward with so many people on the platform, but I made a few online friends, many of whom wanted to write one-on-one with other people. Some of them wrote segments of the story before handing it off to another person. But my favorite was writing your own character. You write what's going on, what happens, what the character is thinking about, then you tag out. Anna and I work on Google Docs, and to indicate we are finished with our section, we end the paragraph with "(tag)."

Anna writes Kyran. I write Barrett. She writes other characters, I write some. Sometimes she writes my characters better than me, and I will hand them over, or have her advise me on their reactions. Sometimes we share characters, small tertiaries and the like. But even then, you're meshing two separate authors styles together. To keep it from sounding too ragged, we then edit it into a single, uniform style. Anna does this. She has phenomenal editing and work ethic. She polishes it together, then I go back behind her and buff out grammatical stuff, typos, awkward phrasings and the like. Then we do it again. And again. And again. And then something happens in the later chapters that needs to be referenced earlier, so we write a new section. Then we edit it again. Eventually, by the third or fourth time, is when we are ready to start writing queries.

And that's where we are today. Since the grind has begun, the story has never truly been shelved, though. Even as we send out queries, we're still editing, polishing, adjusting, smoothing everything out, trying to make it the best it can be for an agent's eyes to see.

We'll get there! And you'll be here to watch our journey. :) We appreciate you guys.

-Lauren