Collaboration for Fun and Profit 4: The Daddy Pants

Hello is still alright.

Thom Brannan here. Snell and I have turned in our next project, as well as finalized an in-between thing, as well as started plotting another in the in-between, and all that reminded me that I hadn't finished up this series of blog entries about collaboration and how it’s been for me. I've talked about making music with Dave Green, sharing Interwebz space with a like-minded soul (Rob Pegler) and penning cross-genre extravaganzas with D.L. Snell. Now, I want to talk about the most important collaboration of all.

I am a Daddy.

From the very start, I doubted myself. Me? A father? As the norm, I'd... not hated kids, but it took some doing for me to warm up to them. And it wasn't the kids (most of them) it was me, remembering what a shit I was at that age, whatever age it was. Because I was a shit. Then The Boy came to live with me, and all of a sudden, I was wearing Daddy Pants. Some parts were easy, some parts not so much. But I'm making it through.

Credit where credit is due: if it were just me doing this, I would have failed miserably. Fortunately, my teammate and collaborator Kitty kept me on the right path. She helped me see kids as miniature people, which is what they are, really. Even at the smallest, they have wants and needs and feelings they can't articulate, and it's up to you to figure out what's wrong now.

As The Boy gets older, it's getting easier to understand him. Yes, 14 was quite a long time ago for me, but it's not losts in the mists of antiquity, thank you very much. He does some things that drive me quite batty, but that's normal. He also does things that make me proud, fit to bust... which is also normal. He's in the feeling out process, growing into himself, and all I can do at this point is probe and prod and occasionally smack him onto the Golden Path. (Not that Golden Path, sci-fi fans.)

The Little One is proving to be a constant source of wonder and terror. I'm not sure if I can adequately articulate any of this; my time is about evenly divided between watching her grow and toddle and run and laugh, and then keeping her from killing herself, one of the dogs, or catching the house on fire.

I'm just glad I have someone on my side who knows what the hell she's doing. Thank you, Kitty. You're my Glinda the Good, showing me I had the Daddy-Hat to wear all along. And you're my Yoda, showing me the path. You're also my Q, giving me the tools I need. And more!

And that's it for this series of blogs. I've said all I'm going to, and I hope the few reading were able to take away something useful. Now that I think about it, all four of these could probably be boiled down to:

PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS.

See that? I'm trying to get this across to the kids, too. And the dogs. It's worked well for me, for fun and profit, and now through the most important journey of parenthood. So, yeah. I'm going to split before I get maudlin.

Until next time!

-Thom

Collaboration for Fun and Profit 3: Synchronicity

Howdy, pilgrims.

Thom Brannan here. I thought, since Snell and I are even closer to being complete with our 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.

So. I wrote a novel with D.L. Snell. You probably haven't heard of it, being here at the blog for it and everything. Here's the cover, in case you have short-term memory loss:



VERSUS

How it came to be is a neat little story, and I had very little to do with it. In days long ago, D.L. Snell and John Sunseri were brainstorming this little idea of zoombies and werewolves, and there was a plan (I think) to make it available online. Then, as is its wont, real life took over, and this project was shelved.

Fast forward a bit, where Snell and Jacob Kier (head honcho at Permuted Press) were talking about what it would take to get this off the ground again. They were looking for a collaborator that had a military background and who wrote quickly. That turned out to be me, yay! I had just finished Z.A. Recht's Survivors, and I guess Jacob was looking for something else to throw me at.

Much like my previous collaborative efforts, there was a short period where we figured out the balance of power workload, and the actual mechanics of how we were going to do this. The method I'd used before, with the short stories and songs, wasn't going to quite work with a project this large. Luckily, D.L. had just finished another collaborative effort with another author, and he was full to the fucking brim with ideas.

I learned quite a bit about the benefits of an outline working with D.L., and I wish I had learned this earlier. No disrespect to my English teachers from high school, but this type of hands-on project is probably what I really needed to hammer the lesson home. In my previous writng efforts, I didn't use an outline, and as a result, there was a bit of meandering, and I might have lost the focus completely once or twice.

When I write short stories, I still don't outline, but for my other, after-Pavlov's Dogs novel projects, I had one before even starting the first chapter, and it has helped immensely. Note, I'm not saying an outline will work for you, anonymous reader, nor what kind of outline you should try. D.L.'s version of an outline is dense with story moments and details and character motivations and JESUS, everything. My outline for a novel would fit comfortably on a couple (a literal couple, meaning two) of typed pages.

That is one other thing I've learned about myself during the collaborative process of Pavlov's Dogs and the book we worked on after. If there's too much in the outline, it's claustrophobic, and I tend to shut down my tangential work to focus on what's in the outline, I don't know how that effects the final work, but I guess we'll see. Hah.

I have one more important collaboration to talk about, and it is the most important of all. I'll see you next time in part 4: The Daddy Pants.

-Thom Brannan