It’s interesting to see how different the workload feels when collaborating like this with someone else. I imagine that varies widely depending on how you approach it; Alyc and I are trading off as we go through the scene, usually with one of us writing the viewpoint character and the other handling the NVPs (non-viewpoint characters; it’s our new term), and some amount of swapping about on the narration. The result is that momentum carries me surprisingly far: not only are we producing more each week than I generally aim for in a week of working solo — which makes sense when you figure that each of us is writing roughly half of it — but we’re doing it in about three days instead of seven, and it doesn’t even feel that hard. The only reason we’re not going even faster is that we need to stop and work out details of worldbuilding and plot structure before we charge ahead. It is possible that our pace will become terrifying when we have more of that in place. 😛

(Or we’ll just find more things to worldbuild. Let’s not kid ourselves: it’s me and Alyc. That’s how we roll.)

Word count: ~33000
Authorial sadism: . . . would you believe, I’m not sure there is any? Some awkward moments, but we fed hot chocolate to our protagonist and gave a beloved family heirloom back to another character. We were nice this week.
LBR quotient: Lots of rhetoric, as we start getting into the politics of the city. But also love, since this chapter was all about the characters working on setting up various alliances. Mind you, those alliances are half-built on lies and the warmest they get right now is enlightened self-interest — but you take what you can get.