Check out that pretty cover below. Go
ahead. I’ll wait.
Now then. Something you might have
overlooked in the wow-that’s-gorgeous perusal is the fact that this book cover
has two author names on it. Two! Crazysauce! What’s more, so did our Cotillion
Christmas Regency last year. And the steamy Regency ménage we wrote before
that.
Hi, my name’s Viv and I’m part of a
co-writing team.
And now I bet you have loads of questions
about how this whole co-writing thing works, don’tcha? (Please say you do.) Excellent. I’m happy to
answer them. Here are a few I’ve already heard:
How
did you get into co-writing?
Once upon a time, Christa and I loved a
certain – no, I’m not going to name it! – Regency series. We did the brain equivalent
of inhaling those books as soon as they came out, both of us, and we were
really really looking forward to the
last one, the one that all the others had been leading up to. It released. We
bought it. We read it. And it was … competent. Decent. Well-researched? Yeah,
sort of … oh, hell, that book was disappointing. So in our off time, after we
made our word-count on individual projects, we started rewriting that book.
Together. Christa would write a scene or two and pitch the doc to me. I’d add to
it and pitch it back. Two-hundred-thousand-odd words later, we realized that although
our attempts at redoing particular book were iffy, this writing together thing
was magic, and we wanted to do more of it.
So,
do you write the guy and she writes the chick, or how does that work?
You know, it’s not as ordered as all that.
I tend to write until I get stuck and/or my ideas for what happens next are all
cliché and boring, and I toss the story over to Christa. She never takes the
story where I thought it would go, and that is a good thing. When she runs out
of inspiration, she slings it back to me. Sometimes one of us deliberately
writes the other into an oh-no-you-didn’t corner, from which we must extract
our hapless characters. Those are the funnest parts.
Why
Christmas stories?
Christmas was celebrated differently back
in Regency (early 19th century) England. It wasn’t about trees and
presents and overweight home invaders who eat your cookies and put junk in your
socks. If Christmastide celebrations were about anything back then, they were
about freedom from school, families getting to spend this time together, and
looking past the longest night to the promise of spring. We love these themes
and try to sprinkle them liberally into our stories.
Any other questions? Please feel free to
comment away or visit me or Christa on the web. Our latest
book, A Christmas Scheme, is
available now for preorder on Amazon
and will release November 13th at Ellora’s Cave.
Thank you so much for letting us visit, and
happy happy this season!
