Hello is alright.
Thom Brannan here. I thought, since Snell and I are even closer to being complete with out next project, it would be nice to talk about the process of collaboration and how it’s been for me. Not only writing with the D.L., but with making music and other grand things, and perhaps the most collaboration of all.
Rob Pegler and I have been online friends since sometime during the era when The Lord of the Rings was being released in theaters, from 2001 to 2003. (A.D. if you were wondering.) Around that time, we were both on a forum dedicated to the film versions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece, and since so many of us there were trying to write, the admins made a creative processes portion of the board. That’s when I started reading Rob’s Flat Earth series of short stories, and around the same time I began to write again.
His early efforts are better than mine.
We both tried some things with our writing, neither of which worked spectacularly well, and I decided one day: fuck this. I’m going to make this happen. In 2009, I started gathering together the series of stories I had written for my Private Eye character. Since his name was never the same for each deal, I had wanted to call him Nameless, but Bill Pronzini beat me to that by decades. Slight shift: Faceless. The Faceless P.I., which was creepy enough to fit the bill.
But a website just for me was retarded. My ego isn’t that monstrous. Luckily for me, Rob had gotten a spur to write more serious stories which were related to his Flat Earth universe, and when I approached him about sharing a website, he was for it. Together, we started Dark Tomorrow, a website where we posted our short stories and novellas in a serial format.
This was an important period. First, it was a heady time. Holy sparkling website, Batman! We had an online home, and a place to where we could direct people interested in reading our work. And since it was all free, we garnered a good review or two from places that specialized in finding good, free fun and spreading it to the masses.
It also brought home to me the importance of running everything past the other guy. His name was on it, too. A lot of the time, especially when it came to layout, I’m sure Rob kind of shrugged and said “Okay.”
Around this same time, I got my first taste of collaboration with D.L. Snell. He had posted a thread on the Permuted boards, designed to be a round-robin story*, where we each told a part of it and then presented multiple choice for which direction the next contributor to go. There were some very good bits of prose added by several authors, but whenever I followed Snell or he followed me, I thought there was something else there.
Back to Dark Tomorrow... other people wanted to play in our respective sandboxes, and Rob and I were both eager for that to happen. Leah Clarke and Kelly Stringer were among the first to bring guest fiction to DT, as well as Lane Adamson, who brought an epic poem for us.
It had long been established that Rob and I travel on sympathetic brain waves. Without saying anything to each other, he was working on a story where his main characters were trapped in a building and surrounded by were-ants. I was working on a story where my main characters were trapped in a building and surrounded by mercenary werewolves. There are many other instances, but that was the first one that popped to mind and the one I’m sticking with.
So, since we were working on the website together, it only seemed logical to try to write a story together. At this time, Permuted announced a new anthology opening about the darker side of time travel, and it seemed the best place to start. We brainstormed for a while and made a rough outline, and I wrote the first part. Rob wrote the second part, and we thought we were done.
The afore-mentioned Lane Adamson, the editor for the project, accepted the story. But we were not done.
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| ...or story, in this case. |
He sent it back for a better ending, which Rob and I conferred on and I wrote, then sent to him for revision. Back and forth a few times it went, and then back to Lane, and is now waiting publication in Times of Trouble, hopefully sometime this year.
I also wrote a short story with Victorya for an anthology called Wolves of War, from Library of Horror Press. The story, which was her idea, was titled “Blood & Belief,” about a werewolf termination squad. I loved it. Vic had written some scenes, and I wrote other scenes to bridge the gaps and make everything tick, then we each went back over the other’s work to blend the voices. I’m very proud of that story.
And, much like when I worked with Dave Green, working with Victorya and Rob taught me things about writing, and about the importance of communication. Also about deadlines, hah.
Next week, or later this week, I want to tell you how Pavlov’s Dogs came about, and how different it is to collaborate on a novel than it is with a short story, and how D.L. Snell might be a mastermind, all in part 3, Synchronicity.
-Thom Brannan
* - that was officially the third round-robin story online I had participated in. The first one was on the Tolkein board and set in Rob’s Flat Earth universe. It was titled, appropriately, “Flat Robin.” As described by Rob:
“About seven or eight people jumped in on that one, penning an epic tale in nearly twenty short episodes. Helena, Eddie and Lance frequented an Amish strip club, dealt with a cursed beer chiller, were assaulted (and insulted) by a wretched midget demon named Sassy-Frassy, were dragged into the depths of Hell to stand trial for something or other, and finally escaped with the help of a Pink Floyd musical number and directions to the surface from Dante and Virgil.”
The second was called “Flat Robin II: The Island,” and to this day stands unfinished...
