Yoko breaks up the band

Well, not really!!! I am just writing to let everyone know that Mike is getting a book published on his own! Called Convergence, it is an epic tale of... Well... I will let Mike tell you all about it! I can't wait to read it! And it is good he is done with it, as Mike and I are flying out to Denver next week to get kick-started on Rise of Cain, book two in the Krypteia Conspiracy. And, other big news, we are up on the Comiccon in Chicago website. Things are coming togrther!

The Girl from Ipanema is not in our book...

This post is mostly for Jaren and Mike to laugh at me, but here goes anyway! There are many things to think about when writing with other people, but one of them is that sometimes there is just no way of knowing what type of reaction you are going to get from your writing. What I mean by that is that sometimes you write something that you think is really good and you get super excited about it and then you hand it off to your co-writers and you are hit with a resounding "NO!" I have a perfect example of this from our book. I wrote a little bit about Windy where she is walking down the street messing with boys. She is wearing a skimpy little outfit and seeing how many guys she can get to look her way. It was a funny little piece, meant more to showcase how Windy was somewhat calloused but more so that she was still trying to have a bit of fun. I wanted to let the reader know that she was still a human being and that despite her awful situation that she could still smile. I had her singing the Girl from Ipanema, which starts out "tall and tan and young and lovely..." which I imagined Windy as being. It made perfect sense to me. I even included some of the song in Portuguese. It was brilliant, so I sent it off to Mike and Jaren, and Mike replied right away with an absolute no. I could probably dreg up some of the emails he sent, but the basic message was that he hated that song more than anything in the entire world and would basically either stop writing the book or shoot himself in the head if we left that part in the book. Obviously I had hit a nerve! But, if I learned anything from having two parents, it is that if one person says no you always try to see if you can get the other one to say yes. So, I checked in with Jaren to see what he had to say. And, to my surprise, he said that he absolutely hated that song as well. Jaren and I have both lived in Brazil, so I just assumed that he would love that song, but boy was I ever wrong. It brought out a level of hatred in him that I have never seen before. Undetered, I pressed forward, pleading my case a few more times to both of them to keep that part in. I tried everything I could think of, but to no avail. The truth was, that for one reason or another, my writing partners absolutely detested the Girl from Ipanema. So, after a month of tastefully and tactfully pushing for this (and don't listen to them if they tell you I was anything but tasteful and tactful :) I finally relented. Time went by and I found another place to include the Girl from Ipanema. It was just as a reference, and it was actually in Book Two and it worked really well. I was thinking that perhaps they just didn't like my take on Windy, and that it wasn't actually the song itself they disliked but the theme of the passage, so I would try again. To be honest, I'm surprised that they boys didn't start up a websited called firejedpeterson.com to get rid of me. In about three seconds I had received emails from Jaren and Mike telling me that there was NO WAY that song was getting in any of the books. So, I did some research and found another song from Brazil to include and used that instead. There was no mistaking their message - the girl must go. And so, go she did. So, while this was sad for me, the main point to this story is that while there is almost always a compromise to be made when writing with other people, sometimes there is just nothing you can do. Mike can tell the story someday of his little zombie cop-killing boy that got cut in somewhat the same fashion. I would absolutely love it if someday we put together an extended edition of the book with some of the stuff that got cut out, but I know that if that happens, and if I bring up adding the Girl from Ipanema, that most certainly I would wake up the next day with a horse's head in my bed. No, the Girl from Ipanema will never get to know Hade. It is a shame, I feel, but sometimes life is like that. Sometimes you just have to move on, even when you never do. Tchao, Garota! Ate o prossimo!

Getting Russia write

One of the things we have tried really hard to do is to make the world our book is set in as realistic as possible. This is easy for places we have been to and have lived in, like Utah, Belle Plaine, Brazil, etc. but what about a place none of us had been to, like Russia? We decided early on that we needed a young Russian from the Mafia. Yeah... It was way outside of our wheelhouse. So, I got started working on it, doing research online about the area. I fell in love with the idea of Tsarskoe Selo, the Versailles of the Russian Royal family, and decided to set the story there and in the nearby St. Petersburg. I had a friend at the University of Iowa, Justus Harzok, who was studying there, and he gave me all sorts of good info. One thinghe shared with me is that when a Russian mafia member kills someone, they leave a red rose on the body so people know what happened. So, of course, that makes it into the book! The problem was, as we got started, i got carried away. I wrote probably close to ten pages setting the stage for our characters in Russia. I was explaining ballastrudes and carpets and on and on and on. I included quotes from Petr the Great, Russian historical sources, and an extended biography on Russian literary giants. So, this got pared down over the years to the present state. And then, as we were editing the book, I reaalized that I had made some mistakes in my original research, including attributing the palace to the wrong Catherine, so those were fixed. So, hopefully as some one reads through the descriptions of Russia in the book, they will feel like it is really real, and it will help center the book in the modern world. It was easier by far to write about a place you are familiar with, but with a good deal of research amd a few friends, you can still make it work!
Jed...