On “Significant Authorship:” Writing as a Team

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From Women Writers, Women’s Books:

“We should write a book.” My husband, Jon, said it casually, five or six years ago. I adjusted our baby son on my lap and laughed a little.

“Write a book.” My voice was deadpan as I repeated it, as if I thought he were joking. Hell, half of me hoped he was joking. Write a book? I was a new mother. Sleep-deprived. Frazzled. Probably hadn’t washed my hair in a few days. But the other half of me felt something else. A strange brew of hope and trepidation. 

The suggestion had opened a door inside me…one that had been closed a long time. One I’d probably closed myself, for reasons I’ll never quite know. Well, I guess that’s a lie: it was mostly fear that had closed the door. I did that slow, backward walk away from writing that people often do from the things (and sometimes the people) they care about when they’re afraid to mess up. I’d written constantly as a child. My nine-year-old self had churned out fun, whimsical stories about kids who could change the past through lucid dreaming, and melancholy ones about the sinking of the Lusitania. I’d written poems, songs, retellings of fables and myths. I’d fill Lisa Frank notebooks with my preteen musings, commandeer the family Compaq for hours to clack out my manuscripts on Microsoft Word, much to my sister’s dismay. I’d write on napkins. In the margins of my school papers. But somewhere between college and adulthood, that part of me had faded.

Yes, it had been years since my writing life had flatlined, but Jon’s suggestion had begun to breathe life back into it. We had an enthusiastic conversation around our kitchen island that day. We’d call our book “Time Teams,” we said. We argued about whether it would be for middle grade or young adult, and bantered about the main characters. Still, it would be another couple years still until we’d sit down and actually write that book.

 It happened during the summer of 2018, when I was teaching summer school and our second child was learning to scoot around our living room. We’d moved to a new house, I’d started teaching in a new district, and we were more sleep-deprived than ever. Most nights, we’d fall asleep while binge-watching old seasons of Survivor.

“Let’s start that book.” Jon sat down in our living room and started the first scene in the “Notes” app of his cell phone. I watched him, eyebrows raised, as his thumbs moved across his cell phone keyboard. When he got stuck writing a dialogue scene, I jumped in, and we spent the rest of that June passing the document back and forth, using an Expo pen on our dining room window as a storyboard, until the first draft of our first book, a young adult sci-fi novel about a grieving teenager who finds himself sucked into a competitive time traveling club, was done. Thus, we became what Jon termed “Significant Authors.” 

After a year of unsuccessful querying, we were offered a revise and resend by Tiny Fox Press, who published our book in September 2020. The Fifth Timekeeper, the book’s first sequel, is slated for publication this summer.

Link to the rest at Women Writers, Women’s Books

PG had never heard of Tiny Fox Press prior to reading the OP. He checked the sales ranks of the most-recently-released books he could find and didn’t see a single book that was ranked higher than 500,000 by Amazon.

While PG wishes the authors in the OP well, he knows many, many indie authors who sell significantly better than the books PG looked at that Tiny Fox Press has released recently.

2 thoughts on “On “Significant Authorship:” Writing as a Team”

  1. On that basis I’m a total failure as my best selling book is ranked 765,041. Though in its doing slightly better in:

    4,089 in Space Exploration Science Fiction
    4,538 in Space Marine Science Fiction
    5,003 in Space Exploration

    The market number are unforgiving, but I have a few fans so I mustn’t grumble.

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