Lately I’ve felt like a duck: serenely gliding along the water, but furiously paddling beneath. Lots of things in progress and/or hanging fire; not much I can talk about publicly. But after some discussion with the other party involved in one of those things, I’ve come to the conclusion that I should flip over and show you what my feet are doing. Or something. Pretend I came up with a metaphor that doesn’t involve drowning a duck.

This video is not what I’m doing. It is merely to set the mood:

Now imagine that feeling, in epic fantasy novel form, written as a collaboration with Alyc Helms, aka my best writing buddy for the last eighteen years. When I get stuck with my plot, Alyc is the person I throw the manuscript at wailing “helllllp meeeeeee,” because they think like I do when it comes to story.

And, well. Do that for long enough, and you start thinking, “Why don’t we try to write something together?”

So we’re giving it a shot. We’ve managed to write over 25000 words in less than three weeks, so I’d say we’re off to a good start. It’s got love, blood, and rhetoric, more false-identity hijinks than you can shake a stick at, all the worldbuilding you would expect when two anthropologists decide to write a novel together, and all the character shipping potential you would expect when Alyc gets involved. 😀 We have made no attempt to sell it anywhere yet because we agreed it would be good to make certain that writing a novel together is a thing we can do before we contractually obligate ourselves to deliver a manuscript.

It is code-named R&R. That does not stand for Rest and Relaxation, but in some ways it might; there’s a certain “wheeeeee!!!” feeling in writing something on spec, because we’re too excited by the story not to give it a go.

Expect more posts and tweets about this as time passes, because there are so many cool things we’re putting in here, I want to be able to talk about some of them. In the meanwhile, wish us luck!