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On writing

The benefits of co-authoring

We finished revising a major draft of LINESMAN Book 2 recently.

There’s a lot more work to do on it, but this version is essentially complete. We’re at the stage where we’d normally put the book aside while we write the first draft of the next book.

Except this time we don’t have time to do that, because the book is to be delivered on the 1st May. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to write the next book, because we’re starting on that today. It does mean we won’t get Book 3 finished before we have to go back to Book 2.

We’ll give it a month if we can.

But we also did what any sensible writer would do in the meantime, and sent it off to our agent for her to have a look at. (She offered.) Then last night at dinner we sat down over a glass of red wine and talked about the problems we thought she would come back with.

It’s an early draft. We wouldn’t normally show it to anyone yet, but there was something cathartic about sending it away. Just like that, relaxing and talking it over, we were free to analyse the issues we knew were there but hadn’t been able to fix.

We even came up with solutions to two major scenes that had been bugging us for a while. Good solutions. We were tempted to recall the email, rewrite and resend, but that may have been the wine talking.

Getting deeply into the story like this. It’s between you and your co-author, and it’s one of the best parts about writing.

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