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<\/a><\/p>\nNow, I (Lo) get to take over the blog today with a post that PQ hasn’t read yet. Whee!! A secret love letter to my girl!<\/p>\n
The question that Christina and I get asked most often is \u201chow does co-authoring work?\u201d What comes after this question varies, but we\u2019ve heard, \u201cIt must be hard!\u201d or \u201cI am way too much of a control freak to write with someone!\u201d or \u201cWhat happens if one of you is stuck?\u201d<\/p>\n
The truth is, I am<\/em> a control freak, and it is<\/em> hard sometimes, and there are<\/em> times where one of us is stuck when the other is flying. But, as it is in any type of collaboration, we do it because it\u2019s ultimately more awesome than not.<\/p>\n So how does<\/em> it work?<\/p>\n We’ll have an idea. We talk and talk and talk and get excited enough that we decide to Make It Happen. So, we outline. We divide the book into scenes. We assign the scenes. We write, we edit, we edit, we edit. And throughout all of this, we talk. Every day. Sometimes five times a day. Sometimes more than that, and sometimes we send each other If one of us is stuck, we talk it out, we write garbage (and then sometimes throw away thousands of words that aren\u2019t working), we make playlists, we send Here\u2019s the best part: Writing can be kind of lonely, and community is everything. [I really could write an entire post about the community of YA peeps] But I have this one awesome person \u2013 one of the closest people in my life \u2013 who I can call at any time of day (literally, if I’m up at 3am, odds are good that she is, too) and who knows exactly what I\u2019m feeling at that minute. If I\u2019m frustrated, she gets it. If I\u2019m sad, she gets it. If I\u2019m bursting with giggles, she totally<\/em> gets it The one deal we\u2019ve made is that only one of us can be emo at a time. If she\u2019s feeling delicate, I have to suck it up and be the pillar. If I\u2019m feeling neurotic, she has to buckle down and get me sane again. There was one day during revisions where we were both emotional disasters and I told her, \u201cI CANNOT HANDLE YOUR EMO BUT YOU HAVE TO HANDLE MINE,\u201d and she sent me a picture of her in her jammies. I mean, come ON. How am I supposed to not melt at the cute?<\/p>\n I\u2019m thankful for a lot of things in my life \u2013 I have a life that is pretty darn close to perfect \u2013 and one thing that rises up in that pile of good things is Christina. PQ,I\u2019m so glad we decided to brave the world of fic and find each other. What would I do without you?<\/p>\n Happy Gobble Day, I heart you.<\/p>\n It all started here:<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\npictures of swoony boys<\/span><\/del> Very Deep Passages From Very Serious Poetry.<\/p>\npictures of swoony boys<\/del> inspirational pictures of beautiful landscapes.\u00a0 If we\u2019re still stuck, we just write something else. We\u2019re not easy on each other and we never say, \u201cTake a weekend off, go relax.\u201d Forget that\u00a0 noise. Go read a book and get ideas. Write a drabble. WRITE SOMETHING. We deal with it the same way that any other solo author would deal with block, which is to say we slam it over the head with a 2×4 (like if a zombie walked into our yard!)<\/p>\n<\/a> and tells me I\u2019m a pervert<\/del>. If I am scared, excited, over-thinking \u2013 she gets it and because what I\u2019m writing is what she\u2019s writing, too, she never gets sick of talking about it.<\/p>\n