At a distance

I wanted to write a bit tonight to explain how easy, and how difficult, it is to write a book with two other people, neither of which lives in the same city as you. I live in Cedar Rapids Iowa (the City of Five Seasons!), Mike lives in Iowa City (well, actually Coralville), and Jaren is now in the big city of Denver (and still morning the loss of Tim Tebow). Mike and I are only about 20 to 25 minutes away from each other, which is more than conducive to getting together from time to time, but Jaren is a good deal farther away. So, in order to communicate with each other face to face (sort of), we have gotten to the point where now Mike will come over to my place, or I will head over to Mike's, and we will facetime with Jaren. Here are a few photos of us doing this. I am actually texting Jaren's wife Jessie as she is taking our picture in the second one. Yeah, that is how advanced we are :) This was taken a few months ago- I think we were discussing how Hade was going to dress up as a butterfly in a flashback of his days in ballet school.

One night, we actually all needed to chat with our publisher, Karen, so we set up facetime, and put my ipad in the middle of Mike and I on the couch, and then set up my laptop with a Skype session. We realized at that moment that while this worked, it was a bit clumsy. So, we are looking into other technology for the three of us to work together, and there is a lot out there. Some options are google plus, others are webinar based, like Adobe Connect Pro, and then there is the oldie but goodie of tying tin cans together and stretching them between us. Yeah, that third one isn't a very good option, but the other two have proven possibilities.

The problem with working with people in other cities is simply one of communication. We had some issues with our edits last fall because we were communicating via email for everything! While email is great for some things, it absolutely sucks for having a sustained, creative conversation about whether our character Petr should stab an undead opponent through the heart first, and then through the eye, or go the other way around, with the eye first and then the heart. Well, that was only one dicussion, but we had tons of them. And what we found, is that it is really easy to bicker and argue about who killed who when you can't see or hear the person you are dealing with. Mike and I would fight like crazy, sending each other nasty emails, and then we would call each other and be fine in about 10 seconds. So, we learned the hard way that in dealing with important issues, nothing beats real conversation, even if it is streaming live over an ipad.

Now, the past month we have been working furiously on book two, but we are still in the "just get it down on the computer and we'll deal with the consequences later" mode. So, for example, Jaren sent us a great chapter today where some of the characters are attacked in the desert. They then have this amazing discussion about the nature of God and mercy v. justice. It is super hard core stuff, and I loved it. Of course, it is 33 pages long, and Mike and I haven't even touched it! But, we will probably just leave it as is after a few notes, and move on to the next chapter. Once we get most of the first half of the book done, then we will go through and really start working through these chapters, and at that point we are going to make sure that we have our communication system up and running smoothly, because we are not going to make the mistakes we made the first tiime around.

So, the question we often get asked is how do three of you write a book together, and the answer is carefully, thoughtfully, and most importantly, with live, synchronous communication. We got together in Denver a month ago and worked our way entirely through the synopsis of book two, a process that took us a day together, and would have been a monthlong nightmare apart. We are always better when we are together, so that is what we are going to do as much as possible in the future. So, it is definitely possible to write a book with two other people who live in other cities, but you have to do it right or it will be a disaster. Of course, it helps to have great human beings to work with, but we can save that for another blog.