Annie and I were chatting at my place after work one evening and I had mentioned that I had come up with a new story idea that I wanted to work on. Annie added that she had been thinking it might be interesting for her and I to collaborate on a story, since I love doing exposition, action and setting, and she loves dialog and creating characters.

I talked her through my concept and she thought it sounded interesting. She made some personal requests right off the bat about the main character, and it didn’t interfere with the story I wanted to tell, it began the partnership that you can see in each “page” of Second Class Supers.

I won’t give away any plot points here because you should be reading the pages. We will be posting them as much as possible on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday schedule. Sometimes, the Friday release might slip to Saturday, but we hope to publish about three thousand words per week over the course of the summer.

Annie, despite not being a fan of odd numbers, got to post the first page of the story, and we are publishing every other page on her site, and the even number pages on this site. So if you are looking for the start, check out her blog: Second Class Supers – Page 1.

What is it like to collaborate?

So far, the process has been really easy. We are both very honest when it comes to what we like and don’t like. We don’t shoot ideas down, but we ask questions and make tweaks as needed.

I have to admit, I was curious how the process was going to work because I had already come up with the first third of the plot and didn’t want her to feel like she couldn’t add her own touch to it, but we have had so many sessions just coming up with ideas that the story gets easier to write as time goes on.

The characters are coming alive, and Annie and I are just trying to record their journey. It is an interesting feeling that I’ve never really had in any of my previous writing.

How long of a story will it be?

Of course, Annie and I are hoping to do a good 50-60 pages, as the plot could certainly sustain near that. We might fall short, and get to around 30-40 pages and call it complete at that point, we aren’t entirely sure yet. I can say that when we sketch out a page, more often than not we have to split a page we are working on in two because of how much we each have to say. I had much more stuff written for the page four plot that got bumped to page five because we had already went over our 1200 word self-imposed limit before reaching the end of what we had mapped out.

So if we get to 60 pages, that means it will be complete twenty weeks from when it started, which would be sometime late in October or early November, as long as we stay on schedule. Annie has already talked about increasing our writing pace when she is done work for the summer.

I am excited about the idea of getting to around sixty pages as this would mean we would have something like 72,000 words. And with the average softcover having around 300 words per page, we would then have completed writing a 240 page book, which is one of my biggest life goals and on my list of things I was hoping to accomplish this year.

I couldn’t have done any of this on my own. Having someone passionate about the story, and someone to bounce ideas off of is amazing. I am super grateful for Annie’s help in making this story come to light. I hope you will all enjoy reading it.