Ready, Set, Collaborate!

I’ve always considered writing to be a solo operation.  Frankly, it’s one of the things that drew me to it as a young, broody adolescent.  A job that wouldn’t require me to talk to anyone for days on end?  Sign me up!  Of course reality has a way of teaching you the error of your dreams.  Writing, at the beginning, is a solitary career, but once the book is written, there has to be more than one person on the boat.  There must be proofreaders, agents, editors, publishers, marketers—if you’re lucky.  If you’re not, you get to be all of those people yourself.  Writers these days have to reach out on their own, seeking out assistance to attain the goal of having many, many people read their work. 

This would be considerably daunting, but I have learned much about playing nicely with others since I was the aforementioned broody adolescent.  I have been educated on the joys of co-creation, writing with the assistance and inspiration of others, and now I am learning that even the less fun parts of writing that come after the inspiration can be shared.  We writers can be editors and marketers for one another, helping to polish the work and spread the word.

To that end, I will be linking arms with a pair of talented women, old classmates of mine from the mighty and wonderful Hollins University.  We three will be guesting on each other’s blogs, sharing information, stories, and publicity over the next few months and helping one another to get our work out to more people.  Allow me to introduce them.

Johanna Lemon is an adventurer just back from a two-year stint in Morocco with the Peace Corps.  She is a paranormal and fantasy writer in the young-adult genre, and she has amazed me by having recently completed four books, entitled Inked, Beatrice Betwixt (I do love that title), Godmother Girl, and That Girl.  They will soon be published, which is terrifically exciting, and we’ll be talking a lot more about that as time goes by.

Yafen Liang is living in New York, working full time and studying to get her MBA.  Somehow, she manages to find time to work on her YA dystopian, The Gods We Built, which looks at a controlling regime from both sides of history.  She is also a whiz who knows the mysterious ways of the publishing industry, and I can’t wait to pick her brain a bit about the nuts and bolts.

And for symmetry, as well as for those of you who may not know, I am a writer of science fiction and fantasy novels, working away at them on my days off and during my breaks from my job as a waitress.  My main project now is a four-part series on an artificial intelligence named Youngest, and I have also written the first of another four-parter, this one fantasy, entitled The Nine Lives of Snapdragon.  They are nearly ready to publish, but I’ve had no luck in that quarter as of yet.

I’m hoping that Johanna, Yafen, and I can take inspiration from one another, as well as advice and encouragement.  We will share interviews with one another, quizzing each other on our writing process, our current works, and the struggle to succeed in the writing market.  Expect to see an interview with Johanna in the next few days.  I’m looking forward to the exchange, and I hope you are, too.

If I had a doobly-do, I would post links there, but I am not so lucky.  You can find Johanna's blog, "The Wandering Lemon" here, (blurbs blurbs blurbs!) and Yafen's "Afterthoughts" are in this location (she also has a mini-TARDIS, which makes me incredibly happy).  Go check them out!