The COUNTERMEASURE Blog Tour ran between July 2 and July 6. We were excited with the comments we received. Thank you to all who participated! For those who missed the posts on those days, we are reposting them here and linking to the original posts so you can read the comments on the sites.
When Cecilia and I mention our writing partnership the comment is usually received with awe and curiosity. Family, friends and/or readers' first question is usually "How do you do that? How do you write together so seamlessly?" To some, the idea that two people collaborate in writing such intense and fairly erotic scenes is somewhat strange. To us, it's a natural thing.
Now, in order to understand how this works you need to understand how Cecilia and I began our collaboration. We met in September of 2010 when we both joined a role playing group. We were a mated couple then and the chemistry was immediate. Our writing style and ideas matched. We played the POV in a way that didn't amount to head hopping and one post just flowed into the other like paragraphs in a novel would.
A few months later, we left the group and, with just a splice of an idea born out of a dream, we began to plot role play stories with our own characters, Trevor and Cassandra, and in a genre we had not played before but which I was drawn to: Contemporary Suspense.
It didn't take long for us to get the hang of the interactions between our characters. Our writing flowed from where the other left off without a hitch. But role-play is not novel writing and we had to adapt, change to how we collaborate in order to make it work.
We divide our work by POV. It's the simplest way for us. If a chapter starts with Cassandra's POV, Cecilia starts it and if it's Trevor's POV, I start it. Whoever starts writes it until we hit a wall. We pass the chapter to the other for additions. We continue to pass it back and forth, line editing with each pass, until we feel we can go into deep editing. At that point, we turn to our developed method where Cecilia reads the manuscript and I listen for flow, grammar, repetition, and read for typos, punctuation. During that phase of the editing we spend fourteen to sixteen hours on the phone.
Depending on the length of the chapter, the whole process can take from a day to a week. Each chapter is then passed along to our group of beta readers who read it and give us feedback. We only move forward once each chapter has been given a thumbs up.
The whole thing has become so fluid that even if we start chapters out of order, when it gets to deep editing, it has been shaped to fit the mold. We are so in tune with the others thoughts and ideas that there is not a big divergence of opinion regarding the direction of the story and as far as the character's POV, we respect the other's depth of understanding of the character we play. So if I write something in Cassandra's POV, Cecilia always goes through it to "Cassiefy" it and if she writes a Trevor piece, I "Trevorize" (or geekify) it.
Our teamwork is surprisingly easy and, most of all, a lot of fun. We laugh together daily and that's what makes our partnership work. We do a lot of things together. We go through tense moments waiting for reviews to come in, we hold our breaths in expectation for reader feedback, and, most of all, we laugh at ourselves and have tons of fun while doing what we love doing: entertaining readers and sharing our world with them all.
We hope you join us in this amazing journey and become a part of our Countermeasure family. With the first day of Countermeasure's Blog Tour, we will begin a series of five sequential excerpts from COUNTERMEASURE. Follow the tour for each of the pieces and make sure to comment and fill the form for the daily and grand prizes.
Sláinte!
Chris & Cecilia
