By Dame Jackie

Dame Kaz, who’s been gracious enough to swap dates with me as the launch of BLACK AND WHITE looms ever closer (eeek), asked me this morning about what it’s like to collaborate on a book. So I thought, dude, blog topic! Thanks for the inspiration, Kaz! (Kaz is now officially my Muse.)

I coauthored BLACK AND WHITE with my friend, novelist Caitlin Kittredge. Years ago, we were both in the same online writing group. I read one of her short pieces and immediately fell in love with her work. She was freaking brilliant. I told her so. She said some nice things about my work too. At the time, neither of us had been published. That was around the time I noticed her AIM icon was John Constantine.* So we started AIMing about comic books and we got into the merits of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight versus Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke and whatnot. It was all geeky goodness.

So of course, we mentioned in passing that sure, one day we should collaborate and write a superhero novel. Because why wouldn’t we? We both loved superheroes with a fiery passion. We grew up reading comic books. Seemed like a no-brainer. And then we promptly didn’t collaborate.

Fast forward to the April 2007 Romantic Times Booklovers Convention. It was my first RT, and I was petrified. Happily a number of things made a lasting impression on me – for one, Jim Butcher was there, promoting his wife Shannon’s books as well as doing an urban fantasy panel with Charlaine Harris, Rachel Caine, Marjorie Liu, about a jillion other authors, and one agent: Miriam Kriss (otherwise known as Dame Agent). The panel was asked about upcoming urban fantasy trends. And Miriam replied: “I see superheroes on the horizon.”

(The second thing that made a lasting impression? Miriam and I met for the first time during the convention, and she hand-sold a copy of HELL’S BELLES to a passerby during the huge book fair.)

That night, I emailed Caitlin and said “We have GOT to do the superhero novel!”

So after RT, she and I had a number of brainstorming sessions via IM. (She’s in Seattle; I’m in Albany. IM = the tool of choice for brainstoming on different coasts.) Caitlin, who wrote about a werewolf cop for her solo series, was itching to write a bad guy. As for me, I’d been writing about a former demon with still-sorta-evil tendencies, so I was all about being the do-gooder hero. We created our characters — Jet for me, the heroine who worked with shadows, and Iridium for her, the villain who worked with light — and started coming up with character background. We figured out who the real Big Bad would be for the story. We figured out the love interests. And we did the world building: how there’s Corp, the corporation that runs the superheroes and has its hand in government and media; the Academy, the school that teaches extrahumans how to be heroes; Everyman, the humans-first group that’s getting more and more violent in their protests. We created the world of New Chicago, and came up with an intrepid reporter named Lynda Kidder. (A nod, by the way, to Lynda Carter and Margot Kidder. We have lots of names like that in the book. Heh.)

And then…we wrote.

Specifically, Caitlin wrote. She kicked off the whole thing with a prologue and the first chapter. She emailed me the file, and I fell in love. So I wrote the next chapter and sent it back her way. Because we had decided we had two stories to tell — the “now” story that focuses on Jet and Iridium as archenemies, and the “then” story that shows them as friends in the Academy and slowly reveals why they hate each other now — we decided to each write a Now chapter and a Then chapter before handing the manuscript back to the other author.

And so it went. About halfway through, we broke the book into Now and Then sections. And about 2/3 of the way through, we started outlining the remaining sections to make sure we pulled everything together.

From start to finish? 10 weeks. We had a freaking blast writing it.

People have asked how we do revisions and edits. Because I’m a copyeditor for my day job, Caitlin and I both agreed it made sense for me to copyedit the entire thing. In terms of developmental/content edits, we each edit our own sections, and we make suggested edited/comments on the other author’s sections. Frex, if there’s something that Caitlin has Jet do or say that isn’t true to Jet’s nature, I’ll edit that (with an explanation in the comment field). Or if I overwrite a description, Caitlin will nudge me to slice and dice. We both have our strengths (I think Caitlin does phenomenal world building and action scenes) and our weaknesses, so collaborating gives us the opportunity for us to really complement each other’s style. (And, if it works, compliment it too!)

And then we give the whole thing to our editor. And then we get a revision letter, have a drink or two, and then we decide who’s going to tackle what if there are major changes that need to be made (I took religion; she took the gangs/underground networks), and then we each revise our own chapters and, yep, make suggestions for the other author’s sections. I tend to do first pass and then Caitlin does her review. And then I do a light copy edit. And then we give the whole thing to our editor again.

Voila.

(If you’re curious: I review the copy edits once we’re in production, and Caitlin reviews the proofed pages.)

And that, folks, is how Caitlin and I collaborated for BLACK AND WHITE.

Have any questions about collaboration, or what it’s like working with another author? Hit me!

* Dude, totally the comic book version — blond and British. Not Keanu Reeves. Just to clarify.

Related posts:

1. Shorts From Longs
2. I Have to Read This AGAIN?
3. Is It Burnout Or Is It An Elusive Beginning?

Tags: Black and White, Caitlin Kittredge, collaboration, deadline dames, Jackie Kessler, urban fantasy, writing

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