Collaborative Writing
an ebook giveaway
A very simple idea, really. I've been writing outlines to books that I have no intention of writing for over a year now. The goal was, ideally, to get other people to write them. Yes, this is the kind of thing that I think of as being fun.
My good friend Kyle Muntz had been in a bit of a writing funk for a while. Since leaning into the idea that writing should be fun, I threw some ideas at him over the course of a few months. Ideas I thought it would be fun for him to write. Of course, he ignored most of these until I told him that I would write the beginning to a novel and then he could write the rest.
Thus and so, I wrote the first three chapters of Sing, Behemoth, Sing. That was as far as I intended to go. I tried to lay down the groundwork for an interesting scenario that would give him the freedom to go just about anywhere with it and do whatever he wanted.
It worked!
Kind of.
Kyle, either not remembering or ignoring my instructions, wrote only the next two chapters. When he sent it back to me, I was shocked what he'd done. Told him it was good. That he should finish it. He was like, Nah, you.
Because he left me in such a narrative knot at the end of The Firm Hand of Revelation, I jumped forward a few decades, laid out a new scenario with pretty clear direction, and then handed it back. Again, my instruction was for him to write the rest.
Kyle, as if to spite me, wrote several more chapters, but left the ending wide open for me to figure out. Seeing the chaos he left me with got me scratching my head. And so I started back from the beginning, editing and rewriting as I went, trying to find some narrative throughline or cohesion.
See, we didn't talk about what we were doing or where we were going. I wrote the opening and told him to figure it out. He wrote the next bit and told me to figure it out. Thus and so, we traded a story holding itself perilously together through sheer laughter. The story, at times, felt like a handful of stories shoved together, trying always to plunge into new directions, and even resulting in some logistical and worldbuilding confusion.
Chopped it up, cleaned it up, added the section A Disemboweling, and then wrote straight through to the ending. Sent it back to Kyle and he rewrote the ending to punch it up a bit.
I edited everything and then Kyle edited everything, and what we came to is Sing, Behemoth, Sing. A chaotic and wild novel about giant monsters that is as influenced by Neon Genesis Evangelion as it is by Lonesome Dove.
For our next attempt, we decided we should actually think about what we’re doing before we start. Might be a better way to keep the novel from becoming such a messy slosh of influences.
Now, I’d been trying to convince Kyle to write his own version of Star Trek: The Next Generation for months and while he got as far as outlining something that would have worked, he never actually started.
So I did.
Wrote the first few chapters and handed it to him. Once he’d read it, we talked a bit about where to go and how to get there. Then Kyle went to work while I slept.
One thing I forgot to mention is that Kyle lives in China, so we’re on complete opposite schedules. When he’s sleeping, I’m writing. When I’m sleeping, he’s writing.
When I woke up the next morning, Kyle had taken hold of the concept I’d started and began filling it out in the ways we’d talked about, but also in surprising ways. Ways that made me excited. Thrilled me, even.
And so we worked out where to go and Kyle went to sleep and I got cracking.
The entire book took us three days to write because the novel never had a time when someone wasn’t working on it. Imagine being able to write for 72 hours straight without needing to take a break to sleep.
You could get a lot done, buddy.
We did it three more times to create the first season of this space opera.
And so it was that The Shattered Stars was born.
The Shattered Stars is inspired by Star Trek: TNG but with the cast of Firefly.
The Shattered Stars
The Galactic Federation exists only as a memory.
But in a distant corner of the galaxy, the Burning Apollo carries out its impossible mission:
to reunite the scattered fragments of humanity,
to seek out forgotten stars,
to bravely rediscover what was lost long ago.
Episode One: Colony Collapse - 3/21/23
The boy from the ice planet distrusts the woman from the sky. For four hundred years his people have struggled to survive, even as they fight over the destroyed vessel that remains their ancestral home. When disaster strikes, the boy must call for help from the woman’s friends beyond the clouds. But the voice that answers will change the future of this planet forever—and not necessarily for the better.
The first four episodes are coming out quarterly over the course of 2023.
I am so excited for people to read it that I literally cannot wait any longer. And so I won’t. All you subscribers here have access to the first novel at the link below where you can download the ebook (epub or PDF) well in advance of publication.
I hope you enjoy it and then I hope you tell your friends.