We are officially insane. It all started when we saw a story written about a male maid.
The Spark
The absolute madness that gripped us had us writing 65k words (229 pages) in under nine days. We’ve always meshed well, catching each other’s hints, adoring each other’s brands of humour and devouring each other’s writing. We met through a beta-reader writer site, swapped stories and never looked back. Now we’re critique partners, friends and co-writers.
“But how can you co-write batshit unhinged romance stories in the first place?”
I am glad you asked. We start by splitting the PoV. Savanna gets one MC and I get the other (obviously). We then joke around in an unstructured brainstorming activity and import all of that into a beatsheet which we will relentlessly beat into shape before never looking at it again. While writing we often discuss where a chapter should begin, main scenes it should touch and where we want it to leave off. That means we can generally write two chapters at once. Also, if one of us can work late and the other early, we can leave gloriously unpolished chapters for the other to devour at their earliest convenience. However, the reality is that we are often in the doc at the same time, watching as the other writes, interjecting, suggesting, proofreading and editing in real time. Because we are very much in sync, this is not annoying, but rather magnificent. It’s like a much smarter and more fun autocorrect that also cackles at your jokes. We tend to have a rough outline that we then improvise into, which creates delightful opportunities to be surprised when things go off the rails.
Which -let’s face it - is most of the time.