Siri and I have officially broken ground on the sequel for City of Hope and Ruin! It’s just a couple thousand words, but we’re going, and so far it feels good.
It’s already interesting from a process standpoint, however. For City of Hope and Ruin, we each essentially had our own worlds, with our own characters and our own plots, that occasionally overlapped (or a lot overlapped, at the end). But for all intents and purposes, we could go and work on our own parts for a week or a month, then meet up and check in and go over each other’s parts, and then go back to our own stuff.
It worked pretty well. But it won’t work for this book.
Our characters are in the same place, now wrapped up in the same part of the plot. At least for now, there will be a lot more overlap between what the characters are doing (they very well might split up for a while later, but they’ll probably still be working on the same plotline). So we can’t go off and write independently. Each new section will need to be discussed beforehand and looked at after the fact.
So that will be new. It will be interesting to see how it goes.
Does anyone have examples of novels (preferably fantasy or scifi) where two authors wrote different characters interacting in the same place? Most of the dual author books I can think of either do what we did with CoHaR and separate the characters so they don’t overlap much, or both authors work on the whole book (which I don’t honestly understand how that works, unless people are doing different parts of the process).
Anyway, long story short, we’re here, we’re moving, so far so good, and we’ll see how it goes. Every book is different and has its own challenges, whether it’s your first or your fiftieth, so I guess we shall see what problems pop up on the way. At least we have more time for this book before it’s due, and the world/characters are already established.
How’s your Tuesday going, Squiders? Anything new and interesting?
(I’m down to four books, by the way.)
