Shining Moon Episode 27: Shared Visions, or Writing with a Co-Author

Hello, and welcome to Shining Moon Episode 27, Shared Visions: Writing with a co-author. With me today are writing partners Kathy Bailey and Kurt Pankau as well as  Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms, who write together as M.A. Carrick. Let’s get started with some introductions!

Kathy Bailey writes romance, poetry, science fiction, and women's kaiju. She's currently working on a series of romance novels set in national parks. Before focusing on fiction, she was a newspaper reporter at the Oakland Tribune and San Francisco Examiner. She's also written three guidebooks about exploring the outdoors on foot and by bicycle. She currently lives in the American Midwest with three kids, two dogs, and one husband. 

Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly leans on her academic fields for inspiration. She recently misapplied her professors’ hard work to The Game of 100 Candles and the short novel Driftwood, along with over eighty short stories. As half of M.A. Carrick, she is also the author of the Rook and Rose epic fantasy trilogy, beginning with The Mask of Mirrors. For more information and social media, visit linktr.ee/swan_tower.

Alyc Helms prefers tea over all other beverages. They sometimes refer to their work as “critical theory fanfic,” which is a fancy way to say that they are obsessed with liminality, gender identity, and foxes (and tea!). They are the author of the Adventures of Mr. Mystic novels from Angry Robot and, as M.A. Carrick, the co-author (with Marie Brennan) of the Rook & Rose trilogy from Orbit Books.

Kurt Pankau is a professional computer whisperer who also moonlights as a sci-fi author, musician, and humorist. His short stories have appeared in such venues as Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, and Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. He is the author of "High Noon on Phobos: A Blaze McGregor Adventure" and the creator of "Uncle Fluffy's Post-Apocalyptic Sing-Along." He lives in the Midwest, where he obsesses about board games and Zelda.

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:

www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3

Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social

www.deborahldavitt.com

Transcript

Deborah L. Davitt (00:01)
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon episode 27, Shared Visions, Writing with a Co-Author. I'm your host, Deborah L. Davitt. With me today are writing partners, Kathy Bailey and Kurt Pankau, as well as Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms, who write together as M.A. Carrick. Let's get started with some introductions. Kathy Bailey writes romance, poetry, science fiction, and women's kaiju. She is currently working on a series of romance novels set in national parks. Before focusing on fiction, she was a newspaper reporter at the Oakland Tribune

and San Francisco examiner. She has also written three guidebooks about exploring outdoors on foot and by bicycle. She currently lives in the American Midwest with three kids, two dogs, and one husband. I love the way that crescendos or declines as the case might be. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you much for being on, Kathy. How are you today?

Kathy (00:50)
I'm great, thanks for having me.

Deborah L. Davitt (00:53)
It's a pleasure to have you here and it's nice to meet you in person at long last. Marie Brennan is a friend of the podcast and has been on before, but we are going to have her on again because she is wonderful and we have wonderful things to say with her. So she is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly leans on her academic fields for inspiration. She recently misapplied her professor's hard work to the game of 100 candles in the short novel Driftwood, along with over 80 short stories.

As half of M.A. Carrick, she is also the author of the Rook and the Rose epic fantasy trilogy, beginning with a mask of mirrors. For more information and social media, visit linktr.ee/swan_tower. You have abbreviated your socials. Okay, that works just fine. Welcome back, it is lovely to have you back on again.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:32)
Yeah, sorry. It does that.

I'm glad you're not tired of me yet.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:43)
Impossible. I get to also meet your cohort today. This is Alyc Helms, who prefers tea over all other beverages. They sometimes refer to their work as critical theory fanfic, which is a fancy way to say that they are obsessed with liminality, gender identity and foxes and tea. They are the author of the Adventures of Mr. Mystic novels from Angry Robot and as Emma Carrick, the co author with Murray Brennan of the Rook and the Rose trilogy from Orbit Books.

It is a pleasure to have you on the podcast and a wonderful to meet you, Alas.

Alyc Helms (02:14)
It was, it's very nice to meet you and thank you so much for inviting me. I hope we don't extend your, your runtime because Maria and I do talk a lot. When we get together.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:24)
That is entirely a wonderful thing. And if we hit two hours, I will finally say, it's enough, it's enough, it's enough, it's enough, but it'll be a new record for everybody. Kurt Pankau is a professional computer whisperer who also moonlights as a sci-fi author, musician, and humorist. His short stories have appeared in such venues as Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, and Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. He is the author of "High Noon on Phobos, a Blaze McGregor adventure," and the creator of "Uncle Fluffy's post-apocalyptic sing-along." He lives in the Midwest where he obsesses about board games and Zelda. Welcome to the podcast, Kurt. We have co-authored a drabble together and your sense of humor is wonderful to me. So it's wonderful to have you on.

Kurt Pankau (03:10)
Oh, thank you very much. It's a delight to be here. And yes, I was, I admire the irony that I'm being asked to co-author on a podcast with someone that I have co-authored a drabble with. And I guess for people that don't know, a drabble is a 100 word story. We each wrote 50 words.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:21)
Ha!

Deborah L. Davitt (03:28)
And it was wonderful because I had no idea how to land this thing. I set it up, you slammed it home like a volleyball spike. It was wonderful.

Kurt Pankau (03:39)
Yeah, and we sold that story. We each got $5 for it.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:41)
We did! We're the-

Alyc Helms (03:42)
Hahaha

Deborah L. Davitt (03:45)
So I'm going to ask you guys some questions in general. And the first question I have is, how did you guys start to decide to work together on writing projects? I would like to know how you guys got acquainted, how it got the ball rolling. And I'll start with Marie and Alyc, because it sounds like they have quite a story. And it even talks about their, it feeds into your pen name, for God's sake. So.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (04:06)
Well...

Yes, yeah it does. We met at an archaeological field school, which for those who don't know is where baby archaeologists go to learn how to dig stuff up. This was in Wales and Ireland, and so yeah, when it came time to choose a joint pen name, I was sort of looking to that because I wanted something that felt like it would belong to both of us. The Welsh part was in Castell Henchlys, which – Castell literally is the word for castle, and for a fantasy author that seemed

Deborah L. Davitt (04:20)
Hehehe

Marie Brennan (she/her) (04:41)
And then, hence, we would constantly be trying to say that Welsh double L, so that was right out. But part of the field school was in Ireland, and during that, we stayed in the town of Carrick Macross. And I was like, well, that's really long, but Carrick. M for Marie, A for Alys, Carrick. I really love this. And it's three o'clock in the morning, and I'm headed to bed, and I really hope Alys likes it when they wake up, because I'm sold on this now.

Deborah L. Davitt (04:46)
Hahaha

Ha ha!

Is that how you remember this, Alyc?

Alyc Helms (05:07)
And luckily I do, absolutely.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (05:09)
lol

Alyc Helms (05:15)
Because we do a lot of discussion by chat and I sent her back a chat message. It was like, Oh my God, this is brilliant. And it gets into like how we met and everything. And also M and A is a cross between Marie and Alys and, and so it like fits even that way and Carrick mucross. And so, yeah, so it worked out very well.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:30)
Hahaha

Marie Brennan (she/her) (05:33)
Yeah. And then the writing, you know, we actually had collaborated once before many, many years ago on an academic paper, which Alys just made the expression of, oh shit, I forgot about that.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:33)
Well that is perfect.

Alyc Helms (05:47)
Now I remember it, I just remember being in the hotel room and like frantically writing it before our panel.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:47)
Hehe

Marie Brennan (she/her) (05:52)
before we presented it, yes. But, no, Alyc has a tabletop campaign that I have a PC in, who is a con artist named Ren, who might seem a little bit familiar. And it began with, there was a thing that we wanted to do with Ren and this one NPC that was going to kind of be this caper that wasn't going to involve any of the other PCs, and also capers are difficult to run well in an RPG because you want that feeling of sort of clockwork and games can just be like, nope.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:53)
Ha ha!

Yes.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (06:22)
And we're not using Blades in the Dark, which is designed for it. So we said, you know, what if we just, like, wrote it as a scene? Like that would be fun, we're both writers. Okay. So we opened up a Google Doc, and we went back and forth, and we wrote this scene, and it was fun, so we wrote another one, and then we wrote another one, and eventually I went a list, we have written 50,000 words of fic for this game! Maybe we should try a novel.

Deborah L. Davitt (06:22)
Hahaha!

Yeah.

Ha ha!

Alyc Helms (06:47)
Yeah, and I will say it's kind of going back because you know, Maria is saying, well, we're both writers. So you know, maybe we could try collaborating on something together. When we first met in our field school, that summer was the summer while we were in our field school that Maria was writing the book that would become her first novel, first sold novel doppelganger, although I think it was like the third novel you'd actually written but it was her. Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (06:47)
I love that!

Marie Brennan (she/her) (07:13)
It was the second one I wrote, but it was the first one I got published, yeah.

Alyc Helms (07:16)
And it was amazing because I had like, you know, noodled around with writing, but I'd never actually like met any writers or seen anybody like work through the process. And so just seeing Marie like do the work every day and sit down and everything like that was the moment where I kind of made the mental connection of like, oh, this is something I could do. And so it's, we've kind of...

had our careers and braiding around each other because, you know, we were both in grad school at the same time, both doing anthropology and folklore. And then Marie's kind of writing career took off. And then I kind of trailed after her by a couple of years when you know, I started focusing on writing. And so it was kind of nice to have this come together 20 years into our friendship, where we finally went, Hey, maybe we could work on something together.

Deborah L. Davitt (08:09)
Oh, that is lovely.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (08:11)
Yeah, we met in the summer of 2000, so it's been a while.

Alyc Helms (08:15)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (08:16)
It has. That is like one whole relationship ago for me because that's how when I met my husband was 2000. So yeah, then you look back and go, oh my God, it has been a while. Kurt and Kathy, how did you guys meet and how did you guys fall into writing together?

Alyc Helms (08:27)
Yeah.

Kurt Pankau (08:34)
Well, we were in the same writing group. There's a writing group, a local one in St. Louis that I've been leading since time immemorial. And when Kathy moved to St. Louis, she was looking for a writing group on Meetup, and she found us and started getting involved. And we quickly became friends and have been friends ever since. And one, yeah, it's been...

Kathy (08:57)
That was about 10 years ago.

Kurt Pankau (09:01)
We've known each other longer than one of my children has been alive. So, yeah, and the, so one of the things that I say, if you've ever had a short story critiqued, people will tell you, oh, this is lovely. This is, I love this story. You need to turn it into a novel. And the advice I always give people in the writing group is thank them politely and then don't do it.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:05)
Yeah

Alyc Helms (09:05)
I'm going to go.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:23)
Yeah.

Yes.

Kurt Pankau (09:28)
The other piece of advice that I like to give when the question arises is don't try to collaborate with people because writing half of a novel is way more work than half of the work of writing a novel.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:43)
Hehehehehehe

Kurt Pankau (09:44)
So Kathy, do you want to pick up? So Kathy had brought in this story that was I read it and I loved it. And I was like, this doesn't quite work. The scale is just you're trying to tell too big of a story in 5000 words. And it's not working for me as a short story, but I love what there is.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (09:45)
Yes, yes, he speaks truth.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:47)
Hehehehe

Mm-hmm.

Kurt Pankau (10:13)
And Kathy, do you wanna talk? I can throw to you.

Kathy (10:18)
Sure. Yeah, so the idea came to me when during the pandemic, we moved our writing group discussions on to Zoom and we were just kind of late night BSing on Zoom after the meeting and I somehow the topic of Bridezilla's came up and I thought, what if there were literal Bridezilla's? I'm going to write that story. And I did. And I brought it to critique.

Um, and as Kurt described, he, I don't know if, I don't know if I would say he loved it, uh, on the first read. He gave his, his usual, um, pretty, pretty tough critique. Uh, but then later we talked about it and he said, I think this needs to be a novel and I want to write, write it with you. And I said, yes. And, uh, yeah, things just started spiraling out of control from there.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:51)
Hehehehehehe

Kurt Pankau (11:12)
She speaks truth.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:12)
My next question for you guys is when you're writing together, there's always this question, this tension between plotters and pantsers. And I personally am sort of both at the same time because while I will start with a loose outline, I'm not married to it. And if the character is telling me that's stupid, I'm not doing that, I will listen to my characters and I will obey my characters. Otherwise, they stop talking to me and that's a bad thing. So

and people who aren't writers are gonna think that I'm absolutely nuts for saying that, but anyways. But I would imagine that when you're writing together, that it would be very difficult for you to go off on wild tangents. So do you work from a set structured outline? And if so, who develops the outline and how do you share that work? And I'm gonna bop back over to Alyc and to Marie and we'll say, sorry, Alyc, let me say it the right way.

Alyc Helms (12:05)
Oh, that's okay. It's like a list of items without the T.

Kathy (12:06)
I'm sorry.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:09)
Yes. Yeah, but I want to make sure that I get it right, because that's polite.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (12:17)
Yeah, so we're both independently much more on the pantser end of the spectrum generally. There's a few set points that I'll know I'm aiming toward, which depending on the book I might put it at the one-third and two-thirds points or the quarter, half, three-quarters, whatever. But yeah, pantsing, at least for the kind of collaboration we do, and I want to put a disclaimer on all the answers I'm going to give here, which is that there are a lot of different ways to do a collaboration.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:22)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (12:46)
we're gonna speak to the one we do, the things we say won't necessarily apply to all methods. It might not apply to how Kathy and Kurt did it. But with our particular method, yeah, just kind of vaguely holding the evolving story cloud in your head and feeling your way toward that point doesn't work because there are two heads and they do not telepathically communicate with each other. So we have much more of an outline for our joint stuff than either of us does independently.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:46)
Mm-hmm.

Hehe

Kathy (13:05)
We're going to have to wait.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (13:14)
But even then, it's still in kind of that middle zone because like, we'll take the Mask of Mirrors as an example, there was a thing we knew we wanted to have happen at the midpoint of the book. And then it was, okay, going chapter by chapter, we'd sit down and hash out, what are gonna be the scenes in this chapter? Whose point of view are they gonna be in? What are we trying to accomplish here? And we did it sort of like one chapter at a time. And then when we were about, I think it was when we were plotting chapter four, five and six all kind of fell into place in a lump and we're like, cool, full steam ahead.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:30)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (13:44)
And then, you know, like once we got past that halfway point, it was a, all right, we need to stop and take stock of what we have here. We don't have quite enough plot to fill out the back of the book. Let's figure out what we're going to do. So yeah, yeah. So it, we do have an outline by the time we go into a chapter, but we don't necessarily know what exactly the next chapter is going to hold yet, other than it needs to get us to a certain destination.

Alyc Helms (13:44)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:54)
I've been there.

Mm-hmm.

Okay. So hey, you're still totally pantsers. This is great.

Alyc Helms (14:08)
Yes. I've often compared it to or use the metaphor of it's like combing tangles out of hair the wrong way. Because you're like, you've got this big mass of tangles and rather than starting at the bottom and slowly combing it out, it's almost like you're combing it out from the top and then like combing down the tangles. So as you go through the book, you've got this kind of tangle ahead of you, but you're only really kind of outlining

Deborah L. Davitt (14:16)
Yes.

Alyc Helms (14:35)
what's like right ahead. So it's not quite like just laying down railroad tracks right in front of you because you do have a mass of what's ahead and the further out you get the more amorphous it is. I will also say that because the Rook and Rose trilogy did come out of this role-playing game, we knew some of the story beats at least that we kind of wanted, or at least we knew the emotional character and character relationship beats because

Deborah L. Davitt (14:57)
Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (15:03)
That was kind of what we were focusing on for the story we wanted to tell was the story of these characters and their kind of relationships and their emotional journeys by themselves with each other. It's been interesting now that we've started working on things that aren't like that, how that both has and hasn't changed in our process, I think, yeah.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (15:25)
Yeah. And weirdly, we were in a situation where a lot of the key character beats we knew we wanted to have are actually in the second book. So the first book, it was a whole lot of, okay, how, like for a while I joked we had the invented the invertebrate novel because we had all of this tasty meat and no spine to hold it together. So we had to go, all right, what can we build that will make those character moments happen in a way that fits, you know, this particular story?

Alyc Helms (15:34)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (15:41)
Hahaha!

Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (15:53)
Because it is based on an RPG, but most of the characters, basically, like 90% of the plot, there's radical differences between the game and the book. We didn't have the game handing us an outline. We had the game handing us... So we need the moment where this kind of thing happens for the characters in, I don't know, some shape.

Deborah L. Davitt (16:05)
Yeah.

That's wonderful, I love that. All right, Kurt and Kathy, when you're writing together, did Kathy come up with an outline, or did Kurt help flesh it out? How did this work for you guys? And I guess Kathy's probably the one I should be asking that question of to start with.

Kathy (16:32)
Yeah, we worked together on a pretty detailed outline. We took a lot of time to set that out at the start because this was the first time either of us had co-written a novel. So we figured we better have a pretty solid foundation for that. That did not hold exactly throughout the drafting of the novel and Kurt's laughing because that's mostly my fault.

like the time that I decided things were getting a little slow and so I blew up a van just in the middle of a chapter. And yeah, that remains in the book. There's a sex scene that was not in the original outline, which figures pretty importantly in the rest we figured a way to.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:04)
Hehe

Marie Brennan (she/her) (17:06)
I know the moment you mean.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:08)
Hahaha

Alyc Helms (17:08)
Yes.

Kathy (17:25)
make that important and actually led to a much more interesting later in the book series of events and set up hopefully for a sequel. So, you know, we made it work.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:38)
Okay.

Interesting.

Kurt, would you like to add anything to that?

Kurt Pankau (17:44)
Yeah. Yeah, I would say yeah, we did. So I was kind of playing to the different strengths that we have. I am very focused on structure. And so I always write to a very detailed outline. If I'm writing something with multiple POVs, I won't start writing anything until I know who the narrator is of every individual chapter. So that

Deborah L. Davitt (18:07)
Hmm. I am not like this at all. This is a foreign concept.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (18:09)
Strange. Alien. Yeah.

Kurt Pankau (18:12)
Well, if you talk to me about writing long enough, you will you'll come to find that I do everything wrong, but it works for me. I mean, kind of to write kind of to Marie's point, I like to say the first rule of writing advice is your mileage may vary. So so yeah, and so we were we were working on this. And then I get a message saying, Hey, I added a sex scene. Hey, I blew up a van. And I'm like, Okay, well, we're gonna roll with it. And, and it's one of those things where you're like,

Marie Brennan (she/her) (18:18)
Which means it's right!

Deborah L. Davitt (18:19)
Which means he's right, yeah.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (18:24)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:25)
Yes.

haha

Kurt Pankau (18:40)
Okay, this was this is a deviation from the plan. But I mean, to your point earlier, Deborah, this is the you have to do what the characters are doing, you can't make the characters fit the plot, you have to make the plot fit the characters and

Deborah L. Davitt (18:49)
Mm-hmm. Yes. Exactly. I cannot tell you the number of times I've had characters tell me, that is absolutely stupid. I would never do that. If you make me do that, I will never speak to you again. So we're going to completely do something else. We're going to do something that I think is better and more important. And I go, okay, so your heel turn to become a villain in chapter, you know, 17 isn't going to happen.

Kathy (19:00)
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

I think we're good.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:15)
but you're going to still wind up infiltrating the terrorist group anyways, but you'll do it as a good guy. It works.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (19:21)
Yeah, I will say, like, again, the mileage of various things. I do know people who will go plot first and then say, okay, who do the characters need to be to make this go? But Kurt, I was just laughing because you getting those messages from Kathy. There was a stretch of time late in The Liar's Knot, which is the second of our books, where I think Alyssa and I had worked out what was going to happen in the next chapter. And we agreed that we were each basically going to split off and, like, I was going to write one of the scenes to set this up and Alyssa was going to write the other. And I wrote maybe the start of mine.

Kurt Pankau (19:22)
Yeah.

Kathy (19:27)
Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (19:30)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (19:50)
And then I get a message from Alys saying, okay, don't shoot me, but I think we need to scrap this plan and do this other thing. I'm like, okay. And we sit down and we work out what the outline of the chapter is going to be. And then the day that we're supposed to start writing that, Alys sends me a message going, okay, for real, don't kill me, but I think we need to scrap it again. Notice that Alys is still alive.

Kurt Pankau (20:05)
Hahaha.

Kathy (20:12)
Yeah.

Kurt Pankau (20:13)
Yeah.

Alyc Helms (20:13)
Being very quiet at the moment, but yes.

Kurt Pankau (20:16)
Yeah, one thing I, oh, go ahead. I was gonna say one thing I do wanna point out, like, we're bringing different strengths. I'm very focused on structure, but I write silly stories about robots. Kathy is much better at writing naturalistic characters, especially human ones. And so it's telling that those changes came from her because they met the needs of the characters. And so, and yeah, to the point that she brought up earlier, you know.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (20:18)
No, go ahead.

Kurt Pankau (20:46)
we were able to make the plot work with it and ended up with something that was thematically richer than if we had just stuck with the out.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:48)
Mm-hmm.

Kathy (20:53)
And I think one of the reasons why Kurt and I work well together is that I know that if I go off script and he thinks it's a bad idea, he'll tell me and he'll have a really good reason why and I'll say, OK, sure. And vice versa. Neither of us feel like our words are babies and nobody can change them or cut them out. We have kind of a...

Deborah L. Davitt (21:09)
Mm-hmm.

Kathy (21:21)
a more practical view toward our craft. And, you know, we wouldn't get our feelings hurt. Both me, you know, if I wanted to cut something out of his and vice versa.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (21:31)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:32)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (21:37)
Yeah.

Kurt Pankau (21:38)
We don't get our feelings hurt anymore. As Kathy alluded to earlier, I'm somewhat notorious for being a harsh critiquer. I've mellowed out over the years. But yeah, I don't know where I was going with the second half of that sentence, so I'll just stop talking.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:41)
Hehehe

Alyc Helms (21:56)
Thank you.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (21:56)
What you guys are saying about that back and forth, that is absolutely key. And especially when you're collaborating in a situation where it's not somebody's in charge in giving you your marching orders, because I've done that kind of writing as well. Alyssa and I will have really detailed conversations where if I'm really excited about an idea and Alyssa's sitting there going, I don't see it, then we have to stop and unpack it and say, okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:08)
Yes.

Hehehe

Marie Brennan (she/her) (22:23)
why is it not working for a list? And sometimes it'll be, you know, they say something and I go, oh, if that's what you're concerned about, what if we tweak it this way? And that satisfies your objection while still keeping my idea. Or sometimes I go, oh, okay, yeah, that's a really good point. All right, I need to scrap this thing that I was excited about. And just having to dig in on, you know, why was it something I was excited about? Because then sometimes I can say, well, this is why I wanted to do it. And the list will say, oh, well, here's another route to hitting that target.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:32)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (22:53)
Like, what if we do it that way instead and that still gets you what you want? And I think we end up with really rich scenes because of it. But like we said before, collaborating on a novel does not mean half the work, because you spend all this time poking through, okay, why are we doing this thing, does that work, wait, we forgot this, blah blah.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:06)
Uh-uh. No.

Alyc Helms (23:15)
Yeah, yeah, I think it's a case of one side of it is you have to leave your ego at the door. You can't kind of get too invested in your stuff because it's your shared stuff. But you also, you have to really trust your partner, your collaborator, not only to leave their ego at the door,

Deborah L. Davitt (23:28)
Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (23:43)
but also kind of to trust that when something doesn't work for them, that A, they will articulate that it doesn't work for them, and B, that there will be, they will help work towards the reason that it doesn't work rather than being worried that, oh, they're just skewering it because they don't like my stuff, or, you know. There's a lot of kind of emotional vulnerability that you have to have, yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:05)
Communication is key.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (24:08)
Yeah. Yeah, communication is the first, second, and third most important things about collaboration.

Kurt Pankau (24:14)
And the fourth is snacks.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:17)
Hahaha

Marie Brennan (she/her) (24:18)
TEEHEE! Ha!

Alyc Helms (24:22)
I, people can't see, but I would like to point out the Maria and I matching box. You've got, no, I've got the New Orleans one. You've got the Cirque du Soleil one.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (24:25)
Oh my god, we both have to- you left this mug at our house!

Kathy (24:25)
Aww.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (24:31)
Okay, yeah, they're the same style, they're not the same book. Anyway, very important that we hammer that out.

Kathy (24:33)
this.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:33)
Hehehe

Alyc Helms (24:35)
Anyway, sorry. Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:38)
So when you're sitting down to co-write, one thing that I've seen people do in the past and what I'm thinking of is when Andre Norton used to co-write with some younger authors, they would very obviously switch off points of view between chapters and you would see Caravan writing one chapter and then you see Joyce Sun writing another chapter and they would go back and forth and you would have a braided narrative that way. I'm not getting that feeling from the Rook and the Rose stuff at all and I definitely don't get that from Brightzilla either.

How do you go about dividing the responsibility and how do you both edit and revise? Who gets the final say on any given scene? And I'll start with Maria Analyst.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (25:21)
So our approach very much has its roots in the fact that the first fiction we wrote together was a scene for an RPG. We wrote that from Wren's point of view because it's my character and I didn't know what was going on that I as a player didn't know. So I basically RP'd Wren in that scene in that I wrote all of her thoughts and actions and dialogue, and Alys was writing the NPC, and on just like environmental description and stuff, we kind of, you know, whoever took it.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:33)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (25:49)
we will in chat tag back and forth to each other. I've written my bit tag and then Alys writes their bit tag and I write my bit. And actually when I do a reading later on I'll say something afterward about like where you can see that and where did that stop in that particular scene. And so we each had specific characters that we would take point on but it's not a whole like oh well this is from

Deborah L. Davitt (25:55)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (26:14)
It means Grey is writing Alyssa's part. Alyssa's writing Grey's part in the scene, not the other way. Sometimes it felt like that. And, you know, I am writing whatever he is interacting with. And that's why, like, we actually take it as a great compliment that people will say in reviews, like, oh, I couldn't tell if I didn't know that this was written by two people because it feels seamless. Honestly, in most of the scenes, we can't find the scenes anymore either. We have no idea where they are.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:31)
Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (26:40)
Yeah, because as you said, you know, the other part is revision. And usually what will happen is we'll both take turns to the revision. Um, Maria is actually a much stronger reviser than I am. And so I know she'll do kind of the first pass and, and really kind of dig into the guts of the scene and, um, uh, do some restructure and reordering and stuff like that, but then, uh, I'll go through and do my pass and kind of, you know, clean things up or, um,

Deborah L. Davitt (26:40)
That's good.

Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (27:08)
a lot of the times I'll be adding like the flirting or the spice, because that's one of the things I really enjoy and am good at. And so yeah, by the time we're done with the manuscript between the revisions and then copy edits and then proofread, which is I usually handle because at that point Marie's done. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:12)
Mm-hmm.

Haha

Marie Brennan (she/her) (27:29)
When it's the page proofs, it doesn't need us both going over it, and it is my least favorite stage. Because I kind of do the heavy lifting on the first stage of revision, and also since this is a secondary world, we need documentation of our world building so we don't forget what the hell we were doing. Because I've been doing a lot of that, I turned to Alyssa on the first book and I was like, can I just fling the page proofs at you and you do them and I don't look at them?

Deborah L. Davitt (27:35)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Alyc Helms (27:47)
Yeah.

And I'm a tech writer in my day job, so I'm like, oh yeah, I do that on the ground.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:59)
For... Salo... Salo Tech Writers Unite. I was one for 17 years.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (28:04)
But when it comes to the who has the final say, I mean, I think I'm the last one to go over the copy edits. Usually Alys will do it before I do. And so in that sense, like, I guess I have the last say, but in terms of anything that's actually meaningful about the scene, we don't have a formal, like one or the other of us gets the final say. It is, it's not done until we both agree on it. Like we have a very non-hierarchical setup on that, which not every collaboration does.

Alyc Helms (28:28)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:28)
Makes sense.

Yeah, I'm learning lots about this sort of stuff just by listening to you guys and having done some collaboration myself, but we can talk about that later. Kurt and Kathy, how does your co-writing strategy work? Do you switch off between chapters? Did Kathy write the first stretch of things? How did this work for you in this particular book? Because there's only one POV.

Kathy (28:59)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:59)
And that is a first-person POV. So there's not all that switching back and forth that we would see in the rook and the rose. So how did this wind up working for you? How did you edit and revise? And who got the final say most of the time?

Kathy (29:14)
Well, we started out just switching off chapters. Kurt wanted to write the first chapter and I said, sure. And then I wrote the second chapter and we went back and forth like that through the outline, I'd say about two thirds of the way through the book. And then we started to say, hey, you know, this chapter plays more to Kurt's strength. It's more action. And

We drafted it that way. And sometimes he'd write two in a row, sometimes I'd write two in a row. And then by the time we got to editing, we tried to edit each other's chapters. But by the time the revisions really were almost finalized, there were sections when I couldn't remember what I had written and what Kurt had written. And Kurt mentioned to me that when his mother read the book, she said she couldn't figure out which chapters were written by him.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:10)
That means that you've combined your voices and become the ultimate Frankenwriter, which is wonderful.

Kathy (30:15)
I guess so.

Kurt Pankau (30:17)
Yeah, I would, yeah, I mean, that was, the original intent was to trade off chapters and it did not work pretty spectacularly. I mean, there was a number of, there was a number, a big part of it was, we were writing this during lockdown and about midway through, I got hit really, really hard with lockdown depression and I just could not get anything done.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:17)
Kurt, would you like to add something?

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Kurt Pankau (30:45)
we had a working agreement that had an expiration on it. And so we had kind of blown past that. And I would go months without writing anything. And then just feeling guilty about it. And then I couldn't write because I felt so guilty. And so it kind of got to a point where Kathy was like, well, how about I take a couple of chapters and I'll just, I know it's your turn, but let me do a few of them. And then.

I was able to, and so that way we were able to keep making progress. But then I was able to go in and look at what she'd written and say, cool, you have all the stuff here, but me, you know, structure brain, all the plot points are here, but it doesn't feel like there's a narrative through line to the chapter, I can fix that. And so we would go through and like, I would be pretty heavily rewriting her stuff, but then there were chapters of mine that she very heavily rewrote.

And then sometimes it's just like, this is not a beginning of a chapter. So we're gonna put this over here and reorganizing. And again, just kind of playing to our individual strengths. And so like, yeah, once we got to the end, I wrote a lot of that because that got to be very mechanical and keeping track of things during an action sequence, these are the things I'm better at. Kathy mentioned that I'd written the first chapter. When we sent that to our writing group,

uh to take a look at it the feedback we got is this feels kind of anti-feminist and we were like oh no that is literally the opposite of what we were trying to do here and so she did a very heavy rewrite of that and people while still trying to keep the ethos of what i had written the first time and we ended up giving it back to the same writing group several months later and they looked at it like i can't really tell what's changed but it's definitely way better uh so

Kathy (32:39)
I'm going to go to bed.

Kurt Pankau (32:41)
So I think part of it was we, the fact that, you know, I was doing a lot of the kind of mechanical editing and she was doing a lot of the character voice stuff. And after a while we just kind of got to where we were editing towards each other's voice. And I guess the final part of that question is who had last say and ours was I don't think we officially had a who's in charge, but like

Deborah L. Davitt (33:10)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt Pankau (33:11)
This was originally her story. It was very important to me that we were realizing Kathy's vision. And so if there had been a conflict, I would have deferred to her, but it was very much a situation where, you know, we're again, working, trying to work towards each other and explaining where there's differences. And so I don't think we really had any big diversions. Again,

Deborah L. Davitt (33:13)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt Pankau (33:36)
other than she blew up a van, but then I was, I read it and I was like, yeah, you know what, that's, that was the right thing to do. Sometimes you gotta blow up a van.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:38)
Yeah

Alyc Helms (33:39)
I'm sorry.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:42)
It was the right call.

Well, my next question is going to kind of tie back to something that Kurt was just talking about, which was, you know, not being able to produce for a certain period of time. When I first started writing my first set of novels, which are the Etta Earth novels, back in 2013 is when I first started writing them, I want to say, I was in a...

position where a friend of mine had been reading my stuff and responding to it during the fanfic days and we had made this verbal agreement that I was going to write one set of novels and he was going to write another set of novels and they were going to eventually tie together. And unfortunately for me, I write about 55,000 times faster than other people do. So at least when I really get cranking, 10,000 words in a day is really not an issue.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (34:35)
Jeez, my hands would fall off.

Alyc Helms (34:36)
Whoa. Yes.

Kathy (34:37)
It's a lot of work.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:40)
If I'm left to my devices and I'm in a flow zone, 10,000 words in a day is not a problem. Other people, it is a very big problem. How do you wind up writing with people who have different writing speeds, or was that ever an issue for you guys at all?

Marie Brennan (she/her) (34:57)
I would say that – well, usually, Alyssa's the one who brings this up – it was not the speed so much as the time that was the issue for us.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:07)
Mm-hmm

Marie Brennan (she/her) (35:10)
I don't know if Alys wants to take this or not. As this comes up every time we're scheduling when to record a Shining Moon episode, I don't do mornings. We're both on the West Coast, we're both in the Bay Area, so we're in the same time zone. But I, for about 20 years now, have been on a schedule where I go to bed at 3 a.m. and I wake up at 10 a.m. And Alys is a morning person. And usually...

Alyc Helms (35:12)
No, go ahead, go ahead.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:22)
Yeah.

MWAH

Marie Brennan (she/her) (35:35)
writes in the morning before going off to do work and so on and I am writing before I go to bed and that didn't work like for other kinds of collaboration of like trade-off on chapter one chapter that would be fine it doesn't work for our method because we're like it would take us eight years to write the massive mirrors um yeah so

Kathy (35:40)
and

Deborah L. Davitt (35:46)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (35:53)
We're writing in real time, usually several hour sessions, because like I think Kurt said, and Maria's also said, you're never doing just half the work, you're doing 75% of the work, yeah, or 90. And I will say it's interesting because despite that, for the Mask of Mirrors, when we were writing it on spec, we had no deadline, we were just really excited about the idea.

Kathy (35:54)
Wow.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:54)
Yeah.

No.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (36:05)
Yeah. Or 90.

Alyc Helms (36:22)
We would have weeks where we would write our minimum. We set ourselves a baseline of 5,000 words a week. And if we didn't hit that for some reason, it would trigger a conversation. We would just say, okay, what's going on? Are we like, have we lost steam or whatever? And I think most weeks we were doing at least 10,000. And I don't even know what our largest week was, but it was probably in the 15,000 range.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (36:46)
Yes, because when we wrote the end, we wrote the last two chapters in the space of, I think, two days, and that was like 16,000 words. So yeah. Yeah, we...

Deborah L. Davitt (36:47)
Very nice.

Alyc Helms (36:53)
two days. Yeah. We, we, we basically wrote a 210,000 word book in three and a half months, four months. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:54)
Yeah, that's when you're cranking along, you're in peak flow state, exactly where you're going. Yeah, that is a beautiful sensation.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (37:07)
Four months, basically. We did NaNoWriMo for four months straight, effectively. Which, we have not been that fast all the time, but.

Kathy (37:10)
Peace.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:11)
Yeah.

Alyc Helms (37:15)
Yeah, well, yeah, I was gonna say the Liar's Knot, we were writing during lockdown, and I'd also been laid off from my job. So in a way, that was good, because I had I had all the time. And I think that when we wrote in four and a half months, and then Labyrinth's Heart, the last book, I think took us longer, because I was in a new job. And there was just a lot to juggle with that one, because it's bringing everything home. And so yeah, that one took us longer. But yeah.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (37:35)
and also it was just like, rest like a kraken.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:39)
Hehehehe

Marie Brennan (she/her) (37:43)
Yeah, I do want to mention, because Alys brought this up, and this touches on something Kurt had said as well, we had an agreement that we signed before we started collaborating, and it sounds like Kurt and Kathy did as well. And this is a thing we recommend to everybody who wants to know about collaboration. Before you start work, write up an agreement, and what's covered in it is going to depend on what you guys think is important, right? We later signed an agreement that our agencies had, which...

Deborah L. Davitt (37:53)
Mm-hmm.

Kathy (37:55)
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (38:12)
touched on some things we had left out of our agreement, but there were things we'd covered like short fiction, you know, can one of us write short fiction that uses this setting, et cetera, and you know, what do we do when that happens? But we wrote up an actual printed formal agreement. We signed it, I think we even had my housemate like witness it to make it a formal thing. And it set guidelines for things like, okay, neither of us can run off with this idea on our own, except with the explicit permission of the other person.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:23)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (38:39)
What happens if one of us gets hit by a bus and can't collaborate anymore? How are you going to?

Deborah L. Davitt (38:40)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Alyc Helms (38:45)
What happens if one of us wigs out and just deletes the entire thing? Yeah.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (38:48)
Yes, like that neither of us was allowed to delete that stuff, like, you know, could be sued or something, or, you know, taking at least a small claims court, if that happened. And stuff like, okay, we're going to divide the money in the following fashion. And all of this was stuff that if we had changed our minds later and wanted to revise our agreement, we could. But we set this down. Yeah, kinda. It kind of is. And it is, like, people often feel like it's weird to do this with a friend of yours, because you're usually collaborating with a friend.

Kathy (38:51)
to

Deborah L. Davitt (39:07)
It's just basically a prenup. It's a prenup.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (39:17)
this is insurance for your friendship. Because we have it in there, okay, we are going to write, once we begin drafting, a minimum of 5,000 words a week. And if we drop below that threshold, then we will communicate with each other about what's going on. And so having that baked in, you know, it kind of removed some of the stress around at what point should I say something to my collaborator of like, I don't feel this is working. We had already defined the answer to that. And it

Kathy (39:43)
Thank you.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (39:47)
point. We never actually had to have the conversation, but because we'd made the agreement ahead of time, it was a great safety net for the whole thing. I absolutely recommend this to everybody who wants to collaborate.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:50)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt Pankau (40:00)
Absolutely.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:00)
Yeah, I wish I had this way back in the day, although it probably would have entangled me more because I had to disentangle myself from the person who was not writing. I was like, okay, I wish you well, but I'm going to do my stuff. I'm going to do my thing now.

Kathy (40:10)
Thank you.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (40:16)
Yeah.

Kathy (40:18)
Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (40:18)
Well, and it helps set expectations for what you want out of the collaboration and out of the product you're making because, you know, you can collaborate on something that you don't necessarily want to sell or, you know, you something that you don't necessarily have like plans to finish in a particular amount of time or something like that. And just writing the agreement gets you, you know, Shooting towards the same goal of what you want to do with this collaboration.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:23)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Exactly.

Kathy (40:46)
Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (40:46)
So that if you're just writing and collaborating to have fun with each other, to explore something, you're not necessarily, one person isn't like, oh, we're gonna edit this and sell it and publish it and da da. And the other one isn't like, I was just doing this for fun kind of a thing. So yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:00)
Hehehehe

Kurt Pankau (41:01)
Yeah, this, and it's not just writing, any kind of collaboration, whether you're talking about like a small business or listeners can't see the wall of guitars behind me, but my co-recorders here can. I first heard the phrase contracts preserve friendships in the context of a band, and it is absolutely true.

Alyc Helms (41:12)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. What do you enjoy most about working with a co-author? And what is the greatest challenge of working with a co-author? And since Kathy hasn't had a chance to speak in a while, I'm going to ask her that to start with.

Kathy (41:39)
Sure. For me, it's like I said, like we said before, Kurt and I have been friends for about 10 years. And first of all, Kurt has been writing fiction for a lot longer than I have. He's further in his career than I am. And so I was really actually looking forward to learning a lot as part of this process. As he said, his strength is kind of in the structure and

and finding those pieces that really hit those emotionally resonant beats in a chapter, in a novel. And I feel like that's happened, I've achieved that goal, I think, for me of the co-writing experience of developing those mental muscles in myself more by really working closely with him on these chapters and the novel itself and hopefully some sequels.

Um, and I just thought it would be fun and it has been fun. I, I think it's, I think it's been a blast. Um, I hope Kurt feels the same. Um, the hardest thing I think, um, oh, sorry. Did you want to say something?

Deborah L. Davitt (42:39)
Hehehehe

Kurt Pankau (42:46)
It was been, oh.

I was gonna say it has been a torturous slog, but I'm glad it worked out for you.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (42:54)
Hahaha!

Deborah L. Davitt (42:54)
I'm out.

Kathy (42:57)
I will say there were some tough times in the pandemic. I mean, everybody struggled during the pandemic and that goes for friendships and work and this kind of collaboration. But like I said, it really was a case where we had that advantage of having sat down beforehand and writing, putting in writing what we wanted from it.

Deborah L. Davitt (43:02)
Yeah.

Kathy (43:23)
what our goals were. And so I didn't feel bad, you know, poking Kurt and being like, hey, do you want to write something this week? What do you think? No, maybe I should write something. Okay. And we were able to work through that. And so I think that was the hardest part, but again, the, you know, big advice that Marie said, and that I think we would all reiterate is have something in writing lots of communication.

Deborah L. Davitt (43:51)
Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that 100%. But particularly if you're writing something for fun, that's great. By all means, go forth and do that. But if you're planning on doing something with it in the future, get it in writing upfront. Because it frames expectations and it's a safety net.

Kathy (43:55)
Yeah, communication.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, we put down.

Right. Um, I haven't actually looked at the contract in a while, but we, we got pretty detailed. Uh, we found some, uh, what kind of boilerplate online. We, but we also put in things like we hadn't decided yet at that point, if we were going to create a joint pen name or if it was going to be by Kathy and Kurt. And you know, one of the things we want to decide first off who's going to be first on the, on the byline. Um.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (44:41)
Yeah. Who gets top billing?

Kathy (44:43)
Pretty important and yeah, it could cause strife at some point. So we just put that in the contract. So things like that, it's real important if you are looking to sell to.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (44:55)
We actually didn't... We did not have the pen name thing in our contract, which in hindsight, maybe we should have, but we didn't think of it at the time.

Kurt Pankau (44:57)
It's.

Kathy (45:01)
You know? Yeah.

Alyc Helms (45:02)
Yeah.

Kurt Pankau (45:04)
Yeah, it was, and again, it was important to me that we were realizing her vision, and so it was very easy to say, well, your name should be first, but it's also a lot easier to say that when you haven't actually written anything because the stakes are so much lower. Kind of bunny hopping back to the question, I would say that for me, again, I'm very structure-oriented in the way that I write.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:20)
Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (45:20)
Yeah.

Kurt Pankau (45:33)
which means my writing doesn't really have many opportunities to surprise me. Like, you find those moments of joy where you're solving a puzzle in, you know, how are you going to make these things line up the right way? But a big part of the joy of the collaboration for me is I'm not gonna blow up a van. And...

Deborah L. Davitt (45:43)
Mm-hmm.

Hehehehehehe

Alyc Helms (45:57)
I'm going to go to bed.

Kurt Pankau (46:00)
These things force you to be creative. They force you to find ways to make this work. To say, I think Marie Errolis, one of you, was talking about how you have an idea and the other person's like, errr. So you have to up your game, right? You have to find a way to make it work. And so you're challenging each other, but you're also.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:04)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (46:22)
Yep.

Kurt Pankau (46:29)
trying to fill in the gaps. Again, I already brought up, like I wrote a very, I wrote a good first chapter badly and having Kathy there to turn it into something that felt more character oriented, where that character is a real human being, like as opposed to some larger than life.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:39)
Hmm hmm hmm.

Kurt Pankau (46:55)
space cowboy or the kind of nonsense that I normally write. Like this is, yeah, it's a way to challenge each other and to kind of, and to learn from each other. I mean, she was talking about learning from me, but I also learned a great deal from her.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:08)
Mm-hmm.

Right?

Alyc Helms (47:15)
Yeah, I've, I've said that writing collaborating is the most fun writing I've ever had. And because it really does come down to when I'm writing on my own, like, I definitely have like lines that I really like, or things that I'm like, Oh, that's so good. There's nobody there to appreciate them in the moment. But when I'm writing with Marie, I write something and I'm like, Oh, my god, Marie's gonna love this line or you know, like, and I'll be cackling to myself as I'm like sending her tag.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:37)
Exactly, yes!

Alyc Helms (47:43)
Or I'll send her like, you know, I'll tell her tag and then I'll like include like a comment about what I've written afterwards so that she gets that out of context and then she gets to read it. And so it's always like

Marie Brennan (she/her) (47:51)
The best one of those, specifically, was I get a chat message saying, in quotation marks, too many eyes and a penis, and I'm like, what?! Because I hadn't yet read the bit of story that justified that comment!

Deborah L. Davitt (48:00)
Ha ha!

Alyc Helms (48:12)
And I will say that on our website, I believe, I don't know if you put one up for Labrinth's Heart yet, but I know for the Mask of Mirrors and Liars not, there are like basically annotated from each chapter, certain quotes, like from our chat messages back to each other, like our kind of meta tag.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (48:17)
Not yet.

It's actually, it's the marginal comments that we leave for each other on the Google Doc, actually, that I'll just take those comments that are on the document and not all of them, because many of them are things like, check this detail, or I'm not super happy with this but we can fix it later. But some of them are amusing to us, and so yeah, we've got those on our website.

Deborah L. Davitt (48:28)
Oh, that's beautiful.

Alyc Helms (48:34)
Yeah.

Kathy (48:43)
Yeah.

Alyc Helms (48:43)
Yeah.

Yeah. But yeah, it's the it's the but yes, the it's the writing things that I know will really impress Marie or getting something back that I'm like, Oh my god, that's so good. That's such a great line. Or also, it's the, you know, when you have written out an idea and you're like, I don't know where this goes next. Like, I don't know what the next line is. I don't know what the response is. You can throw it up to the other person and be like, you take it.

Kathy (48:48)
Nice.

Deborah L. Davitt (48:49)
I have to check that out.

Hehe

Marie Brennan (she/her) (49:15)
NOT MY PROBLEM ANYMORE!

Alyc Helms (49:17)
It's yours!

Marie Brennan (she/her) (49:19)
Yeah, yeah, I would agree, obviously, you know, with what Alys said, and, you know, looping back to something Kurt had mentioned, those moments where, like, yeah, you hit the wall, whether it's the lockdown depression or whatever, that you're just like, I don't know, like, how do we solve this plot problem? How should this scene begin? Like, just whatever it is that you're kind of sitting there going, I don't know. Having somebody else there, you got two brains to work on the problem.

Deborah L. Davitt (49:39)
Mm-hmm.

Yep, yep.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (49:49)
And so like for scene beginnings often, once we have plotted out what's going to happen for each scene, it'll kind of be a thing of one or the other of us will usually say, okay, I have an idea for how to start this. Or sometimes it'll be, I think I know where this should go. I can't really articulate it. Let me just take a run at it and then you tell me what you think. And even when it is something that you're genuinely stuck on, because God, we have so much.

intrigue and deception and so forth going on in our plot and so many moving parts that, I honestly don't know if either of us could have written these books on our own. I think it might have needed two brains.

Alyc Helms (50:25)
It needed two brains just to keep track of all of the deception and lies and masks and secrets.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:30)
I need to take notes, I will tell you this. As I'm reading through it, I'm like, okay, so I need a Wiki?

Marie Brennan (she/her) (50:32)
I'm sorry.

There is a wiki, and so I was actually gonna say, one of the downsides of this is because we had so much stuff to keep track of and because writing a novel with someone else is not half the work, I probably wrote an entire novel's worth of additional material that is our wiki. Now, the wiki is more detailed than it needs to be because I'm a Virgo. I don't believe in astrology, also, hi, I'm a Virgo. But I was documenting stuff and yeah, the labor.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:40)
Hehehehe

Yep. Yep, yep.

Hahaha

Marie Brennan (she/her) (51:08)
that goes into tracking. Like we've got a spreadsheet that is color coded by point of view character scene by scene. How long is the scene? How long is the chapter? Cause also we were constantly fighting to stay under a limit of 215,000 words, which I will stand by the fact that we write very tightly for what we are doing, but what we are doing is large and complex. So yeah, we were having to always keep one eye on that, which meant we had to track it.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:09)
Mm-hmm.

Yep, yep.

Hehehehehehe

Kathy (51:30)
Thank you.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (51:35)
We have the invented calendar for the world. We got to track what dates things are happening on. And a lot of that is stuff that I could have just held in my head, but that's a quick route to me and Alys remembering different versions of things. And so, yeah.

Kathy (51:38)
Amen.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:38)
Yep, yep.

Kathy (51:48)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:48)
Absolutely, yes. That's one of the reasons I have an Eda Earth Wiki. I had an entire calendar because I wanted to regularize some things about the calendar. So that was, I had it going back to 1959, their calendar, not our calendar. It was like 1908, our calendar or something like that. And so to tell what day of the week something actually would have occurred on was important to me. So I had to do that because

Marie Brennan (she/her) (52:07)
I'm out.

Yep.

Kathy (52:13)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (52:18)
I am a Libra. Ha ha ha.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (52:19)
I'm sorry.

Alyc Helms (52:20)
We have, so we used a, I think it's fantasycalendar.com. It's a widget online thing that you can use because it lets you do moon phases and we have two moons. And Marie at some point worked out the orbit of the two moons so that we can tell you in any day of the calendar what the phases of the two moons were because it ended up being important. Yeah. It's.

Deborah L. Davitt (52:27)
Mm-hmm.

I will have to check this out.

This is fantasycalendar.com. I have a world with seven moons. I need to check this out.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (52:46)
Yeah. Yes, you absolutely do.

Alyc Helms (52:50)
It's really amazing. It is an incredibly well put together little thing.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (52:54)
Yeah. And then the one last thing I would say is that, you know, Deborah, you were talking about how when you get on a roll, you might crank out 10,000 words in a day. There is a certain amount of needing to stop and check with somebody else of like, usually what it would be is I would say to Alys or they would say to me, like, can I just run with this for a while? And generally the answer was yes, because we're both going to revise it anyway. But I could not get on a roll and just write, you know, 10,000 words of the book. Alys would be sitting there going, that's a-

Deborah L. Davitt (52:55)
Awesome.

Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (53:22)
really long time to leave me out of it. Um. Like, you know, me running for an entire scene, sure, that happened from time to time. There were certain things that we would assign to one or the other of us, but, you know, not that, like, I have lost track of all reality outside of my head kind of scale.

Alyc Helms (53:24)
I'm sorry.

Deborah L. Davitt (53:25)
Exactly, yes.

Mm-hmm.

Kathy (53:39)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (53:39)
Yeah, exactly. So we've we have been going for almost an hour and it's been a wonderful conversation but now it's time to turn to the books themselves. So I'm going to first talk about The Mask of Mirrors, which is the first book in the Rook and the Rose trilogy, which I will say for up front that starting to read this book it reminded me of the lies of Locke Lamora, but this is so much better of a novel. Thank you so much for this book.

Renata is a con artist and a thief from the gutter who, working with a partner, plans to infiltrate a family of nobles to enter the high society of their city-state. But she doesn't know that the noble family is on the brink of financial ruin and that everyone has their own agenda. This book is deliciously smoothly written. Every character makes assumptions about each other. The air is rife with so-

suspicion and danger and the pages pull the reader on inevitably without needing the clunky cliff hangers at the end of every chapter, which is why I stopped reading the Lies of Locke Lamora. I don't like books that make me feel like I'm being manipulated and Lies of Locke Lamora makes me feel like that. Yours does not. I loved it. And this is a book that I will be finishing and I think I'll be plunging onwards into the rest of your trilogy. So thank you very much for sending it to me to read.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (54:54)
I mean, we're absolutely trying to manipulate you. We're just being subtle about it. Ha ha

Alyc Helms (54:55)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (54:58)
Yes. The question is, do I feel like I'm being manipulated? If it's obvious, I put the book down, I get mad at it. I have a little chat in my head with the author saying, I know exactly what you're doing. I know why you're doing it. It's not working for me. I'm not finishing your book. Not that they will ever know that.

Alyc Helms (54:58)
Hahaha!

Marie Brennan (she/her) (55:02)
Yeah, yes.

Alyc Helms (55:20)
Hahaha

Marie Brennan (she/her) (55:21)
I have watched movies from time to time where I'm like, Oh, I absolutely see how you're pulling on my heartstrings and god damn it, it's working! Like, there are a few movies where just, yes, the manipulation is obvious and effective. But anyway.

Kathy (55:33)
Thank you.

Alyc Helms (55:35)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (55:39)
So we've talked a little bit, we've already covered a couple of my questions, so I'm going to sort of rephrase one of them. Renata is obviously your character Marie, but is everybody else an NPC? Are they all, the rest of them, Alyssa's? Wow. Because by the way, I love

So if you want to write it if you ever feel like you have another book in you that revolves around gray I will totally read that Dude

Marie Brennan (she/her) (56:09)
He doesn't get enough love, everybody likes Vargo because they like the bad boys.

Deborah L. Davitt (56:14)
Oh no.

Alyc Helms (56:14)
Yeah, I was gonna say Grey is a nice, subtle character, and it means, like, yeah, I think some people don't appreciate him at the start. By the time you get to the end, I think...

He's a more subtle character than Pargo. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (56:28)
I really like him. He is a really cool character. He's got a lot of nuance to him. He's got a lot of tragic backstory, which makes him delicious. And so as you're writing them, does Alys do all the NPCs or does Marie take a turn at them? How does this work for you?

Alyc Helms (56:50)
So when we were writing the original game fic, that was the case. But when we sat down and said, okay, let's turn this into a novel, we both realized that was not going to work. And so we ended up a lot more often, whichever the point of view character in a scene was, that was more like more my character or more Marie's character in terms of how we kind of got into the thought process of the character.

Deborah L. Davitt (57:02)
Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (57:20)
one of them would, we would take that character and then the other one would write all the other characters. And so in scenes where it's like Ren, very often I would be kind of writing all the other characters to some extent, although we again, pass off as somebody had like, oh, I've got a really good response from Vargo or something like that. But then like, especially as time went on and we got more comfortable with the different characters, we, that became less and less the case that,

Deborah L. Davitt (57:35)
Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (57:50)
I think probably the one that remained the longest was I would not usually take Wren's perspective because for so long that was Marie's character in my head, like that's Marie's PC. And so I like I have done it, but I feel like Marie understands that character better than I do, or kind of has like an intuitive kind of thoughts for that character.

Deborah L. Davitt (57:58)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Alyc Helms (58:19)
And interestingly, similarly, I think a lot of these solo test scenes, I think I might have just written on my own, and then we went into the because Tess's voice in my head is very, very strong. In part because, yeah, I was gonna say in part because an Irish, bad Irish accent is the only accent I can do.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (58:26)
Pretty much, yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:27)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (58:31)
Yeah, yeah. Tess has a very distinctive voice, and I don't think I can do it very well.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:32)
Mm-hmm.

Haha

Marie Brennan (she/her) (58:42)
Yeah, it was a little bit situational, because certainly at the outset we said, okay, I'm gonna take point on Ren, Alyssa's gonna take point on Grey and Vargo, but then like a character like Danaya, she's a point of view character, but she was much more, okay, if Ren's interacting, or if Danaya's interacting with Ren, then Alyssa's writing Danaya because I'm writing Ren. But if Danaya's interacting with Grey, then I'm writing Danaya because Alyssa's writing Grey. So, you know, some of the characters got tossed back and forth much more like little footballs. And...

Alyc Helms (58:54)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (59:01)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (59:04)
Yeah.

I'm gonna go.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (59:10)
We did definitely get more comfortable over time. Like I adjusted to gray much more rapidly. Vargo took me longer. And it even applies somewhat to some of the non point of view characters. Cause there's a kid named Arkady bones who shows up a little bit later and just, I do not have enough of a vulgar inner 12 year old to write Arkady properly.

Deborah L. Davitt (59:24)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Hahaha

Alyc Helms (59:31)
I have to finish unwriting Arkady.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (59:33)
Yeah. So like, it didn't matter that Arkady didn't have point of view, whatever scene was going on there, Alys was probably writing whatever Arkady was doing. But we did get more comfortable over time, and so the back and forth of us tagging each other got a little bit more stretched out as we got deeper into the trilogy, rather than it being I wrote two sentences, tag!

Deborah L. Davitt (59:51)
Mm-hmm

Hmm hmm.

particularly enjoy how every time you switch perspective to a new POV, that character becomes for a moment the heart of the story. Even if they're an antagonist to the protagonist, we are wholly subsumed in their perspective and their agenda, which is something that I really strive for in my own writing, and that's so it feels very comfortable to me that you do this. Vargo, as you mentioned, is the bad boy.

I see him as this Nouveau-Rich man who's investigating Renata for his own purposes, but he's the sort of vibrant character who threatens to take over a narrative. How do you keep him in check and keep him from... Because as you've said, you both tend to pants just that little bit. How do you keep him in check?

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:00:37)
Yeah.

Alyc Helms (01:00:39)
Did we even try to keep Fargo in check?

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:00:40)
Yeah, I'm not sure we did. But no, I think part of the answer to that is actually what you were saying about when you switch to somebody's point of view, like they become the center. I think in part because we were doing this sort of quasi-RP style approach to things, it meant that you know, if, okay, here's a scene where Ren is talking to Danaya, we're in Ren's point of view, but there's still somebody thinking about, okay, how does Danaya view all of this? Like, what does she want out of this conversation rather than it all being driven by

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:41)
Hahaha!

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:01:09)
Ren and what she's trying to do, which usually she's trying to manipulate people. So it also means that when Vargo's interacting with somebody, sure, he is trying to run the show. Vargo is very convinced the show would be so much better if he was in charge of all of it. And we have a lot of fun with what he does, but I'm always there being, you know, he's talking to Ren, and Ren has her own agenda, right? So I think that...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:14)
Yeah

Haha

Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:01:35)
It's a thing that I also try to do in my fiction is stop and think about, okay, in this scene, the other person's not just there to be the sock puppet in response to the protagonist, but because there's another person in charge of that, it stays robust in a way that's harder to do when you're writing on your own.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:44)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (01:01:51)
Yeah, and I think it comes down to...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:52)
I find myself switching points of view and I basically RP when I have conversations going on. And so I continuously flip points of view in my own head as a conversation or dialogue goes on so that it does become that back and forth sort of thing so that nobody does get sock puppeted. But yeah.

Alyc Helms (01:02:12)
Yeah, and I think it comes down to, you know, you were saying, is this all NPCs or what? And because this is, you know, again, coming from a place where Marie was the player, I was the GM. For me, like, none of the NPCs are NPCs, right? They're all kind of like, at least as I was conceiving them when I was running the game, I was responsible for figuring out what their kind of whole schtick was, what their agenda was, what their personalities were. And so

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:29)
Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (01:02:43)
And, and like I said, you know, in some ways that made it harder for me to get into Ren's perspective because I'm kind of, uh, yeah. And, and so I think that when both of us like became the GMs, basically, um, both of us were thinking about like each individual character, not as the PC or not as the NPC, but as PCs as what's their person, what's their story.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:02:48)
Yeah. Yeah, and.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:49)
Yeah, you're doing the whole world.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:03:08)
Yeah, but.

None of the characters who are in the books are PCs from the game except for Ren, like the other player's characters are nowhere in there, so we're not taking over anybody else's. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:15)
Mm-hmm.

Alyc Helms (01:03:16)
Yeah. Yeah, there's like four other stories going on in that game that have nothing to do with Mask of Mirrors at all.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:18)
Yeah.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:03:22)
I mean, most of the plot of the game has nothing to do with our trilogy. We had to rip that out and come up with a new one.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:23)
Nifty.

Alyc Helms (01:03:26)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:30)
All right, I'm gonna skip over to Kathy and Kurt now. I'm gonna talk a little bit about Bridezilla, which is a breezily written, at least initially, first person novel billed as Barbie Meets the Incredible Hulk, which is about the first woman who hulked out and turned into a literal monster over wedding preparations, and who has since been trying to help other women who in their small town have been subsequently been turning into monsters during times of great stress.

trouble is she's a chemist for the biotech firm that might just be the cause of the problem, and her husband wants to start a family sooner than later. Trouble looms ahead of her as her immediate boss claims not to want to cover this up but needs ironclad proof that they are in fact responsible for poisoning the women of the town. We've talked a little bit already about how you divided writing responsibilities and we know of course that

What was the biggest challenge for you in terms of developing this to novel length? I guess would be a good first question to ask because I've had ideas that started off as short as a poem and made them into a novella, but it is difficult to stretch without feeling overstretched. So what was the biggest challenge for you?

Kathy (01:04:48)
Well, I think it really goes back to what Kurt said about it being far too much plot for a 5,000 word short story. So I feel like that wasn't actually a struggle. Every a lot of it was there. You know, the short story, when I think back on it, almost reads like the outline or, you know, treatment of novel. Yeah, it's kind of astonishing that I decided that.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:02)
Mm-hmm.

Hahaha!

Kathy (01:05:18)
this was going to be a short story. And I just had the whole, just almost the whole thing in there. What you read from the first chapter to the last, it's kind of almost all of that was in there in some former fashion. It was a lot. I mean, not everything, obviously, but there was a lot going on in 5,000.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:29)
Holy cow.

There was no exploding van and there was no sex scene, so.

Kathy (01:05:36)
Not the man wasn't in there quite yet, but yeah, there was the big fight scene at the end. And yeah, Jamal was in there and everything. So a lot too many characters. I might one of my big flaws of short story writing is I put way too many characters. And I just say, that's something I'm still working on. I know. I know. So that's yeah. So when Kurt said, let's write a novel, I was like, All right, sure.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:54)
Do they make the world feel so rich?

All right, so I'm going to ask you a different question, which is how much of this novel or short story or novel came out of your personal experience about weddings, traumas, stress, life overall? And where were you drawing from to, if you're willing to talk about it, if you're not willing to talk about it, tell me to shut up.

Kathy (01:06:25)
No, it's fine. We both had very small weddings, in fact. I got married in 1999 in the Champaign County Courthouse after a very long, long time dating, but short engagement. So, no, there was that there was very little wedding stress there. I have a relative who is a successful wedding photographer in a large metro area, and she has a lot of stories.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:30)
Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Kathy (01:06:55)
I just find the whole thing fascinating. Like I said, I never regretted not having a big wedding. We did have a pretty big party for our 20th anniversary as kind of a, you know, we didn't have a big wedding so we're gonna have this party now. But, and this comes out absolutely, especially in the first chapter of kind of my bafflement about the whole wedding industrial complex and how.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:10)
Mmm.

Yes.

Kathy (01:07:23)
freaked out people get about this one day and they spend tens of thousands of dollars for, you know, all the accoutrements that come with a big wedding and it just, it's always, I've always kind of, not yet, you know, if somebody wants to do that and it brings them joy, great, but it all seems so, like so much and people get so worked up about it and so I've always kind of found that fascinating.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:44)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

I totally agree.

Kurt Pankau (01:07:52)
Yeah, my wife and I basically eloped after having been engaged for four years. We told people we're gonna be in Vegas in two months and we're gonna actually do all the paperwork and if you wanna come, fine. So yeah, very small wedding, relatively stress-free as these things go. I think...

For me, a lot of the, again, obviously, part of this for me was wanting to really capture Kathy's vision. And I think part of that vision was that the concept of a bridezilla is not to put, to find a point on it, but a patriarchal tool to tell women that they need to be a certain way and then to criticize them when it doesn't work out the way that-

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:39)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt Pankau (01:08:43)
supposed to and so a big goal of this was to try to take that to try to turn it on its ear to take that and turn this into much more of an empowerment story and to really kind of drive home thematically what that this whole concept is again a tool of patriarchy and what does that mean and then you

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:58)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt Pankau (01:09:12)
How do we literalize that into a story beat? So.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:17)
Interesting. All right, so we're going to go ahead and take a turn here and we're going to have each of you do a reading. We haven't had a reading on Shining Moon in a while. We're going to have two of them in these episodes. We're going to start with Marie with a reading from, go ahead introduce it, which are the which are the books?

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:09:35)
All right. This is from The Mask of Mirrors. This is from Chapter 3, so it's a little bit into the novel, but it's a good set piece for one of the selling points of the book. Context here, our protagonist Ren, as we mentioned before, is this con artist trying to infiltrate the nobility in the persona of Renata Viraudox, a foreign noble woman of great wealth, when she's in fact a penniless Versenian, so like local to the city.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:39)
Okay.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:10:04)
and she is going slumming with a group of nobles in her old neighborhood, in fact, where she used to be a thief and pickpocket and so forth. Yes, like when you mentioned page 87, I went and looked and thought, ah, you have made it through this scene. And so one bit of context here, I am going to be switching accents a little bit because Renata is supposedly from a foreign country, so it's received pronunciation when I do that voice.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:10)
I know the scene.

Kathy (01:10:12)
Yeah.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:10:30)
but her thoughts are in her natural accent, which is kind of Slavic because she belongs to the indigenous population of the city. And she and the nobles have just gotten jumped by someone in the middle of this kind of rundown neighborhood.

Wren stood, frozen and staring, at the whirling black coat, the boots that scuffed and stamped against the flagstones, the gloved hands dealing casual mayhem, the hood that hid his face.

Eliades was scooting away on his ass, cradling a broken wrist. Bondiro took a knee to the gut and doubled over, retching for breath. Metzen had his back to the bridge wall, his sword too far for him to retrieve it without exposing himself. The shadows of Metzen's mask hid his eyes, but the tight set of his jaw and the turn of his head said he was looking for allies. Unfortunately for him, Sibiliot showed no inclination to wade in, and Parma and Marvisal were keeping well back. Leaving Wren. Who could scarcely breathe?

for delight. A menace to the nobility, a wanted man to the hawks, a troublemaker to many law-abiding citizens, but to the people of the streets the rook was a hero. She'd never thought she would see him in the flesh. Metsan and Dester. The rook faced him with all the lazy assurance of a predator. How convenient that we've met like this. I've come to repay a debt. His voice lowered to a mocking purr. On behalf of Ivich Pilatsyn.

Metzen's scowl twisted into confusion. Who? The rook hooked his toe under Eliades' fallen sword and kicked it up into his hand, examining the steel. With a disappointed sigh, he tossed it over the parapet into the canal. The actor whose life and livelihood you ruined. Bondiro's sword met with the same fate as Eliades'. Let's see how you fare when the field is leveled. Sibiliot cursed and Muffle disgust. Wren's hands curled.

She wanted nothing more than to watch the rook thrash Metzen, but Renata Viraudox wouldn't cheer an outlaw on. You wanted to give them something to talk about besides your flirtation with Vargo. Before she could think the better of it, Renata stepped forward. Her shoe came down on the blade of Metzen's sword just as the rook crouched to pick it up. As I understand it, Alton Metzen gave the actor a chance to defend himself in an honorable duel, she said. Surely you can do no less.

The rook straightened slowly. Even close enough to touch, she could make out almost nothing through the darkness of his hood. The deeper shadows of his eyes, the line of his jaw, like the stars she saw more when she didn't look directly. Then a glimmer of a smile came into view. In two hundred years, no one had unmasked Nadezhra's outlaw. Seeing him now, Ren was certain the hood was imbued to hide his face. The rook could have been anyone, old or young, Leganti or Versenian or Nadezhrin.

His voice sounded masculine, but who knew where the magic ended? Though she couldn't see his eyes, she felt him assessing her, as surely as she was assessing him. The rooks said, I could do less, or a good deal more. Their audience was growing as people crowded to watch the scene, but his murmur was for her alone. Then it lifted up with mockery for everyone to hear. But if I'm to play at noble games, shouldn't I get a noble's reward for my trouble?

she bent to pick up the sword, letting it dangle from her gloved fingers. What sort of reward could a man like you want? It took every ounce of deceit she possessed to make the question sound dismissive. What mask have I offended, meeting the rook as a noblewoman? A man like me wants for little. The hood dipped to the sword in her hand, then rose once more. But as they're such a treasure, I'll take the altar's gloves. Her fingers tightened on the sword's hilt as the onlookers gasped.

Most of those watching were common nadejrans who cared little for legante ways. A few of them laughed. The nobles of Sibiliad's party didn't. People of quality were not properly dressed in public without their gloves. By their lights the rook might as well have demanded she strip. A fair duel, Renata said, wrapping her hand carefully around the blade so she could offer the sword hilt first. And if you win, then a single glove. Her tone implied doubt. Inwardly she prayed.

I hope you're as good as the stories say. Agreed. The rook took the hilt, sliding the flat of the blade along her palm like he meant to cut his prize away early. I trust you'll remind me of the rules if I stray. You nobles make simple things so complicated. Flipping the blade, he tossed it to Metzen and drew his own. Metzen caught it, his previous swagger returning. I'm more than able to school muckfucking scum like you. Don't worry, Alta Renata. I'll hand you his hood when I cut it off.

The Rook murmured, She can make gloves out of it. Uniant. His blade swept down and up to a high stance as he spoke the opening challenge. Metsun's grin slipped. The Rook might claim ignorance of noble rules, but he knew the proper terms and forms for dueling. Tuat, Metsun spat an answer to the Rook's challenge and barely finished cutting his own salute before he attacked.

Within two heartbeats, Wren knew she hadn't gambled foolishly. The rook dropped immediately from the straight-armed Leganti stance into the lower Versenian one and met Metsun's charge without flinching, parrying the nobleman's thrusts with a few quick angles of his wrist. And he respected the rules of the game, passing up an opportunity to stomp on the arch of Metsun's foot, the way Wren would have done in his place. But she was a former river rat, and he was the rook. He could be brutal when necessary, witness Heliodas's broken wrist,

but it was his flair that won him the hearts of the common folk. He danced out of the path of Metsun's thrusts with a little lace step, and when Metsun made the mistake of rushing him, the rook stepped in to meet it, locking them body to body in a brief circling waltz. Only a swift tilt of his head prevented Metsun's spit from flying into his hood, and he let go just in time to avoid an elbow to the jaw. The hood turned toward Wren. "'Remind me, Alta, are elbows permitted?' "'They are not,' she said, suppressing a laugh. "'I thought not.'

The tip of his blade wrapped Metsun's arm hard, right where the nerve ran between skin and bone. Mind your manners, boy. The blow and the words were both calculated to enrage. But the increasing wildness of Metsun's attacks only left him vulnerable. Almost too fast for Ren to follow, the tip of the rook's sword snaked through the looping guard of Metsun's rapier, and wrenched it from his hand. Metal grated as the hilt slid down the rook's blade, he twirled the trapped weapon in a full circle, like a child with a toy.

Then tilted his hand, so Metsun's sword flew clear. It flashed through the open air and sank without a trace in the waters of the canal. I believe that's Ninot, the rook said to Metsun, who was gaping after his blade. Do you submit? I do not, sibiliate your sword, Metsun snarled, thrusting one hand out. But I thought being disarmed was a clear loss under the rules. The rook stepped back, placing himself by the wall of the bridge. Ulta, you're the closest we have to an arbiter. Will you call Ninot?

She pulled herself back into character, relaxing from the impassive posture she'd held during the duel. Assuming the rules are like those of Sataris, then, yes, to be disarmed is to be defeated. Nenat. Sibiliad hadn't moved to help Metzen. He took a step toward the rook, hands curled into fists. That rapier was imbued by the swordsmith Vickadrius herself. There isn't another like it in Nedejra! The rook sheathed his blade. Then, by all means, go after it.

Renata saw the move coming. So did the rook. She suspected he'd invited it. When Metsun charged, the rook faded out of the way and applied boot to ass. The kick provided the extra momentum needed to send Metsun flying over the rail and into the canal. Though I believe it landed on the other side of the bridge. You might want to check there, the rook called down over the laughter and cheers from the onlookers. He hopped onto the rail and bowed. Then he turned to Renata. Now we see whether you, like our local nobility, will break the rules when it suits you.

I believe you owe me a glove." The cheers around them turned to whistles and hoots. Bondiro had recovered enough to shelter Renata from the crowd's view with his height. "'I'll give up my glove, Alta,' he said, reaching to strip it off. "'You shouldn't be harassed by this kinless bastard.' She stopped him with a crisp shake of her head. I gave my word. I shall keep it." Stepping around Bondiro, she tugged on the fingertips of her left glove with clear, deliberate movements. Not flirtatious.

She needed the other nobles to sympathize with her, to see her as sharing in Metsun's troubles rather than enjoying his humiliation. Her glove slipped free and she folded it into a small neat package. Tess will kill me. Gloves were a pain to sew. Renata held the folded glove up in her bare hand for all the crowd to see. Since you enjoy putting things into canals so much, she said, and threw. Perhaps he'd been expecting that too, or perhaps he was the rook.

and a two hundred year legacy of standing against the powers that ruled Nadezhra was more than a match for a bit of pettiness. His hand shot out and caught the glove as neatly as if Renata meant for him to do it. Then he flipped it open and brought it to his lips as though it still covered her hand, breathing deeply. A shame to ruin a fine scent with canal water, don't you think? He tucked the glove into his coat and looked down to the canal where Metsun was splashing and sputtering. Indester. Next time you think to beat anyone, remember this night.

and know that any injury you give to someone, the rook will repay in kind. Three strides along the rail gave him enough momentum to catch the eaves of a roof and swing himself atop it. A heartbeat later, he was gone. So that is the selection. And apropos of what we said earlier about our method, like the banter back and forth between Wren and the rook, we were trading off every couple of sentences, like Alys would write the rook's line and I would write Wren's response until the fight started.

And at that point, I like writing fight scenes. I have a whole ebook on how to write fight scenes. And so I was like, Alys, would you mind if I just kind of ran with this and Alyssa do it? So yeah, anytime we have a fight, kind of like with Kurt on the action stuff, basically everything from the start of the duel, I think to Metsun being disarmed, I just wrote that whole chunk. And then we wrote a little bit of banter back and forth. And I write the bit where he gets booted into the canal.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:20:37)
Hmm

Kathy (01:20:41)
Thank you.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:20:57)
So yeah, we do kind of, when it goes to somebody's strengths, we will often kind of back off and let the other person run with it first.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:21:03)
Mm-hmm. Lovely. All right, now Kathy is going to read a little bit from Bridezilla.

Kathy (01:21:13)
Yeah, Deborah, you introduced it pretty well earlier, and I'm going to read from chapter one. So I don't think we need any more background. I'll just dive right in. All right, chapter one. The instant I stepped through the door of Molly's bridal boutique, the ridges that line my scalp like a mohawk are buzzing with energy. Something deep within the shop is emitting a low growl, and it reverberates down my spine and into my very soul.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:21:24)
Alright.

Kathy (01:21:42)
I know what kind of monster this is before I can see it, because I was once just this kind of monster myself. As I cross the plush carpet of the lobby and hustle past the flowers spilling over the rim of a decorative vase, I hear someone or something bellow from behind a curtain. I'm hideous! The voice might be a woman's or it might belong to some demon from the pits of hell. This is your fault! You've ruined everything!

AHHH

Deborah L. Davitt (01:22:16)
Ha ha!

Kathy (01:22:17)
I step through the curtain and feel the crunch of glass breaking under my heel. I look down and see the remnants of a dropped champagne flute. Just to my left is the woman who dropped it, probably the maid of honor cowering on a sectional. A seamstress with measuring tape is huddled in the corner holding up two rulers in the sign of the cross. Oh honey, that cross ain't gonna save you now. You think a bridezilla hasn't happened inside a church?

In the center of the room is what used to be Annabella Cosgrave. My earpiece buzzes just then with the voice of Jamal, my business partner and longtime friend. Talk to me, Claire, he says, what's happening? Jamal runs Take a Bite, Appleville's most prestigious wedding catering service. He knows everything there is to know about Annabella. She majored in library sciences and now does book restorations. She's demure and meticulous with her work.

She loves her Pomeranian and she's especially fond of Indian cuisine and Hong Kong cinema. Or maybe it was Hong Kong cuisine and Indian cinema? It's hard to remember. Jamal is meticulous in his research, but keeping all these brights illustrate in my head is getting overwhelming. I'm in, I tell Jamal. Didn't you tell me Annabella was a short redhead? This beast in front of me is no petite librarian. She's at least seven feet tall with bright orange skin.

Her hair has gone jet black, and her ears, normally hidden by her bob haircut, are now pointed and stretched out like bat wings. Giant, slavering teeth protrude from her mouth. The black-rimmed glasses that she had been wearing are now in pieces at her feet, and her dress hangs and tatters from her wrists and shoulders. And her attention is on me. She's already transformed, Jamal asks. 10-4, I whisper. That's not what 10-4 means, says Jamal.

Do you need evac? No, I think I can handle this, I say softly, and disconnect the call. Jamal's awesome, but having you in my ear during one of these is just stress that I don't need. I take a gentle step towards the center of the room. What do you want? Bellows the creature that used to be Annabella. Honey, I say. I am calm. I am serene. I have come here to take control of the situation. Honey, I say.

I just came in here to tell you that you are 100% right. Annabella doesn't quite know what to do with this. This look, I say, it's all wrong and it's absolutely their fault. Hey, says the seamstress, who has regained her composure long enough to be offended. I hold up a finger to shush her. Why can't people just listen to you, I ask, my head tilted back to look up at Annabella. There's no way you have time to waste like this.

You're trying to salvage a disaster, and all you want is a little support. Annabella's massive orange claws come up to her face and clench into fists. She takes in a huge breath. I brace for whatever's coming next. I must not close my eyes. She has to believe me. I have to look like the warm, sympathetic, emotional center of the room. Because if she decides to hit me, I mean, I'd survive, but it would really hurt.

After an excruciating few seconds, Annabella's hands come down in a plaintive gesture. Thank you, she says. I allow myself a brief sigh of relief, although I try to keep it from showing on my face. I'll be honest, I don't know how any of this works. Everyone's heard of Bridezilla's. If you ask me, it's a nasty way to refer to someone who has a ton of pressure on her.

the patriarchy, the fashion industry, and a family that's been telling us all since we were old enough to carry a pretend bouquet that this is going to be the most important day of our lives. No one knows this better than me because I was the first Bridezilla, the first literal one anyway, a hulking purple beast that trashed a florist shop and ended up being chased by the National Guard on the six o'clock news. So that was embarrassing. But while I was the first, I wasn't anywhere near the last.

The phenomenon has been popping up all over Appelville in the last year. No one knows why this is happening, but I've taken it as a personal mission to get to the bottom of it. Even when I'm not diffusing bombs wrapped in taffeta and lace, I'm trying to find the answer. And for right now, I'm in the best possible position to help Brightzilla's in their time of need. You're welcome, sister, I say to Annabella. She's still watching me, but her green glowing eyes have softened.

My own wedding was only a year ago, I continue. I know, believe me, I know what kind of stress you're under. It's so hard, says Annabella. It's more than just the tone of voice. I can feel her emotions. I can feel how hurt she is, how tired. The sensation pours out of her and into the ridges in my scalp, the souvenirs I have from my own transformation. I drink in her emotions.

It's almost like I could communicate with her telepathically, if I believed in that sort of thing. But no, I'm going to have to rely on words alone to make this connection. It's hard, I say. People don't even know how hard it is, she says. Of course they don't, I say. How could they? You are just working so diligently to make everything perfect. You have a vision and these people just aren't helping you realize it. And I think, but don't say.

You've been convinced by the wedding industrial complex that you're less of a woman if a fold of your train or a pedal in your bouquet or a napkin at a reception table is out of place. No one looks askance at the groom if the bows on the backs of the chairs are a weird shade of green or if there aren't enough vegetarian meals for everyone who wants one at the three course dinner. It's all on her. That's what I keep saying, says Annabella. This is good. This is progress. She and I are on the same page.

But I have to be careful not to feed into her victimhood too much or else it could backfire. I've been burned by that before. Literally, in fact. As it turned out, Janayne Oakenberg could spit fire when she was a monster. Lessons learned. What are you doing? Hisses the seamstress. Saving your life, I whisper nonchalantly. Now honey, I say, turning my attention back to Annabella, we got to talk about how we're going to fix the situation because you can't very well walk down the aisle in that.

Now wait just a minute, says the seamstress, who's found her courage at exactly the wrong time. We can't work miracles. This woman was a foot shorter. Shut up, I growl, but it's too late. In the amount of time it takes for me to pry my elbow loose from the maid of honor's grip, Annabella has lifted up part of the sectional and clocked the seamstress with it. The poor woman crumples to the ground, but she doesn't appear to be too hurt. Fortunately, Annabella hit her with the cushion side.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:29:18)
Hahaha

Kathy (01:29:19)
You see? She screams. You see what I have to put up with? Nobody listens. Nobody cares. It's my day, my day. And I have to do all of this by myself. I only get one wedding. Annabella ignore her. I say, now I need you to put down that sectional. You're just like the rest of them, says Annabella. She raises the sectional above her head, doing more damage to the ceiling. You just want to tell me what to do and get me to be quiet and obey just like everybody else.

I just want to help you, I say. You're helping them, she screams. You told that wench that you're just trying to save her life. You think I'm a monster. I can see her muscles tensing. I can feel the hatred within her reverberating through the ridges in my scalp, all the way down my neck and back. I tense up. She's gonna hit me with the couch and it's going to hurt. And then the music playing on the boutique sound system changes.

I recognize the gentle guitar arpeggios. It's every breath you take by the police. Nothing happens. I'm expecting to be tossed across the room, but I'm still standing there. I opened my eyes. I didn't even realize that I'd closed them. Annabella is trembling. She lowers the sectional to the ground. Ian, she says. Is that your fiancee, I ask. I know it is, but if I admit that I already know it, then I'm just gonna come off as creepy.

I've learned that lesson the hard way too. Annabella nods, this is our song. We're going to dance to it during the reception. Every breath you take is their song, yeesh. You must love each other very much, I say. Annabella sniffles. You know what, I say, I bet you could show up in a burlap sack and Ian would still marry you. The dam bursts and the monster begins to cry.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:30:48)
Hehehehehe

Hehehehehehehehe

Kathy (01:31:15)
Annabella's tears flow like rain, and as they do, she begins to shrink. I can feel the sensation of the monster fading. It's working. The splotches fade from Annabella's skin. Soon she's smaller than I am. Her friend wraps a silk robe around her. I just want everything to be perfect, she whimpers. I bend down and give her shoulder a squeeze. It will be, I say, because it will be you and the person you love.

I dial up Jamal as I hit the street. Well, how did it go? He asks. Could have gone smoother, I say. Was that you who brought in the police? Police? Girl, what do I look like to you? I meant the song, I say. Oh yeah, that was me. I called the manager and convinced her to put it on the music. Sounded like you could use the help. Every breath you take. Could they be any more cliche? They do know this song's about a stalker, right? Whatever, I say. We did it. We saved the shop.

What is that, third one this week? Asks Jamal. Yep, I say, they're getting more frequent. You might need to start taking payments, says Jamal. Quit your day job. My day job is how we're gonna solve this thing, I say. And we're going to solve this thing, because we have to.

the end.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:32:31)
Yay!

All right, what did you want to say about the experience of having co-written that with Kurt? Because I know that Kurt wrote that, and then you rewrote that.

Kathy (01:32:43)
Yeah, Kurt originally wrote it without, like he said, with the people who read the first version and the second version couldn't really point out exactly what was changed, but just that it was better. Mostly I put back in some of those just really explicit, like this is what the theme is, this is about the patriarchy and feminism and how this crazy,

Deborah L. Davitt (01:32:59)
Hehehe

Kathy (01:33:13)
concept of the perfect wedding is really doing a number on a lot of women. And there was a few other things. There was a long section that Kurt had that was about a different song that really got Claire, or yeah, Claire kind of on her, you worked up and like ready to do emotional battle with the Bridezilla. But we decided to

pull that out and try something a little bit different with the song beats. Yeah, that's kind of how that worked. It was fun. I feel like we worked really hard on that chapter in a few different iterations and I'm really happy with what we ended up with.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:33:44)
Hmm.

All right. So this is the part of the program when we start to say our goodbyes. So I'm gonna ask you, do you have something coming out soon or that's been coming out recently that you'd like other people to read? Where can we direct our eyeballs? Alyc and Marie? Anything out recently or coming up soon?

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:34:20)
Not quite recent, but the trilogy is complete for people who are concerned about that sort of thing. So all three books are out now, all three bricks of them. And as a corollary to that, it didn't come up in the reading or anything, but there is a divinatory deck of cards, kind of like a tarot, that plays a very significant role in the story. Which, you know, Ren reads the cards and that...

has all kinds of influences on the plot, including sometimes we built our plot around the cards that we dealt. And we ran a Kickstarter for that last year, which successfully funded. So if you miss the Kickstarter, you can pre-order the Rook and Rose pattern deck on BaccarKit right now. You can find links to that on our site or just search for Rook and Rose pattern deck. So if you like that kind of thing, we are going to have one for you. It is in progress right now. Yeah.

Alyc Helms (01:34:49)
I'm going to go to bed.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:35:09)
Nifty.

Alyc Helms (01:35:09)
And the art is gorgeous. So far the art that we've been getting is just amazing. Yeah.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:35:13)
Yeah. I have a book coming out next month. It'll actually be out in early February, though UK people, you're going to have to wait until April for the print edition. I don't know why. But it is the Market of 100 Fortunes. It is the last in its trilogy as well. It starts with the Night Parade of 100 Demons. This is tie-in fiction for the game Legend of the Five Rings, but I promise you, you do not need to know L5R at all to enjoy the book.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:35:14)
Nice.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:35:41)
You basically just need to enjoy the idea of kind of a supernatural mystery in a setting very much inspired by historical Japan.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:35:50)
Ooh, Alyc, anything from you?

Alyc Helms (01:35:53)
Uh, nothing for me. We've got a couple of things. Uh, we have a couple of potential projects we were working on, but nothing that we can actually announce yet or talk about yet. So we're in that kind of weird. We're in limbo right now.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:36:02)
Okay. Well.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:36:04)
We're in limbo. Ha ha ha.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:36:08)
Well, when you have something to announce, please come here and announce it!

Alyc Helms (01:36:12)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:36:14)
Kurt and Kathy, other than Brightzilla, which is obviously out very recently, how about some stuff individually from either of you? Anything that you'd like to direct people to read? Or apparently in Kurt's case, listen to?

Kurt Pankau (01:36:29)
Yeah, I mean my other if you like breezy accidentally read the whole thing in an afternoon silliness High noon on Phobos is my space western and it is extremely silly And then yeah musically I've got an album out of post-apocalyptic children's music called uncle fluffy's post-apocalyptic sing-along and it is as

Deborah L. Davitt (01:36:50)
Hehehehehehe

Kurt Pankau (01:36:54)
as dark as you're probably imagining it. So with such important life lessons as finish your rations and sometimes grown-ups cry for no reason.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:37:04)
Hehehe

Kurt Pankau (01:37:06)
The other thing I would put I would point out to is so Kathy and I have been put together a Obviously we've self-published Bridezilla, but we put together an imprint called sale heart and we're trying to put out some At the intersection of science fiction and romance and obviously there's other things going on that are that are working towards that as well and so we're hoping to do some more stuff on that and

Deborah L. Davitt (01:37:31)
Ooh.

Kurt Pankau (01:37:36)
I would also point people to my website, KerrPancow.com. Right now I'm blogging about writing advice. So if that is something that your listeners are interested in, it's, as I mentioned, I write everything bad. I write wrong, but it works for me. And so I'm blogging about advice that you probably can't use, but maybe you'll find it interesting. So, Kathy?

Deborah L. Davitt (01:37:50)
Hahaha!

Kathy (01:38:02)
My next projects, aside from what I'm working on with Sail Heart and Kurt, are a series of romance novels set in national parks. The first one of those I expect to have out in the next couple months under my name, Kathy Bailey, so look for that in the romance section of the Kindle slash Amazon store. I'm starting out with my favorite national park, which is Yosemite National Park, and I'm really excited about.

that series that's going to start coming out this year.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:38:35)
All right. Well, thank you all for having been here to talk with me this week. I've really enjoyed the conversation. This was one of our best ones ever. So thank you so much for being here. Next week on Shining... Oh, it was a pleasure having all of you. Next week on Shining Moon, we'll be featuring Cozy Fantasy and Hope Punk. That'll be our focus. And we'll have Emmy Garber, Susan K. Quinn, and John Wisewell.

Kathy (01:38:45)
It was so fun. Thank you, Deborah.

Alyc Helms (01:38:48)
Thank you.

Kurt Pankau (01:38:48)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:39:00)
As always, help me feed the algorithm by hitting the like and subscribe buttons if you have those things available to hit. And we are out!