Being a collaborator

[avevale_intelligencer]

I'm working with soren_nyrond again, finishing a Nyrond story we started some time ago, and it's...well, it's like slipping your feet back into the only really comfortable pair of shoes you've ever owned. That's what it's like.

We aren't really that much alike as writers. His preoccupations are not the same as mine, or vice versa. But we seem to spark off each other, at least I hope he still sparks off me, and I know I've written more and, I think, better, in the days since we started than I have in the three months preceding. Maybe six. He not only inspires me, he keeps me at it, and he makes it more fun than it ever is writing on my own.

Writers among my flist, if you ever find someone like that, grapple them to your soul with hoops of steel. They're gold, and they're rare.

And if you can possibly refrain from moving two hundred miles away from them, you'll find that helps too.

Thank you, Soren.

Now about this next chapter...

Comments

[eoforyth.livejournal.com]

So Soren is basically a loafer (or two)? [ducks and hides]

[jahura.livejournal.com]

I had a couple of friends like that, but I lost them in the Depression.

[batyatoon]

Just this past week, I reconnected with an old friend and collaborator whom I haven't worked with in over a decade, and we wrote a short and kind of silly filksong together.

It really does feel like that.

[soren-nyrond.livejournal.com]

"Glad to be of service"

More seriously, if anything the credit should go the other way: I *know* that my writing is pedestrian and far far too idiosyncratic. Perhaps, if jeffrey Barnard had never lived ....

Zan writes becuause he is inspired to, and I follow along and fill in with little trifles that more often than not (as the recvent efforts have shown) derail his literary plot-lines. But we enjoy the chaos, and apparently some people enjoy reading the stuff.

Long, DV, may it continuye (though the 200 miles is a slight impedance).

[eintx.livejournal.com]

I definitely enjoy reading "the stuff". :) Very much.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

I've had a collaborator like that, though we haven't worked together for a while now, and always by email. He'd point out the factual/practical holes in my plot, and by the time I'd sorted them out, I usually had a much better story. As you say, different preoccupations.