Mother Knows Best (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Technology)

Kris and I recently gave a talk about how we write together. Like an old married couple (think the vignettes in When Harry Met Sally, finishing each other's sentences, saying the same thing at the same time), we told the story about how we met at the firm (a very pregnant Kris interviewed me), how we discovered we both loved writing (talking late one night while working at the firm, wine in hand), and the genesis of The Pecking Order (a particularly long, pointless, billable-hour-sucking meeting that ended in a decision to, yes, have another meeting). We praised the benefits of having a writing partner to share in the struggle, the disappointments, and the joys, and we also explained our process. And it goes a little something like this (hit it!): we loosely outline two chapters; Kris writes one chapter, I write the other; we switch and edit; we switch and edit again; and so on and so forth. And we do this all over email, putting our edits and thoughts in bolds and brackets, so our drafts end up looking like this (note, real live excerpt from early working draft of The Pecking Order): “You’re right. A little harmless flirting never hurt anyone. I should let myself have fun. I work hard and I deserve it,” I say [uncorking our first bottle of wine] [delete – we have a lot of champagne going on….popping the cork on our first bottle of champagne.]

Then we each put the latest version in our respective running documents (on our respective laptops), which may or may not match each other at any given point, depending on whether I remembered to email the most recent draft to my work account or Kris could access the document on vacation or the planets aligned and the heavens smiled on us, making all things domestic and career-related run smoothly. Goodness gracious, it's a lot of work just to type our process . . .

Some time back, my mom (who is ridiculously more technologically advanced than I am) questioned why we weren't using google docs. She might as well have asked why we didn't have the robot prepare dinner or why we didn't drive to work in a hovercraft. We ignored her. For years. Until we finally tried it last week. And people, let me tell you, google docs is all that. You can store documents online and choose who to share them with. Much like a yahoo or gmail email account, you can access your document from anywhere with internet access. Now, we have a single running document and anything we write, be it a single sentence or entire chapter, goes into that document. No more passing bolds and brackets back and forth through email - one of us can open the document and make edits that the other can see simply by logging in. It's genius, I tell you, and not just for writing teams--it's a good back up system for any writer, and ensures you have your manuscript at your fingertips anytime, anywhere.
So, yea, I guess I should have listened to my mother the first time.

You Might Learn Something When You're Not Looking

We had our first speaking engagement last weekend at a working retreat for writers (notice I didn't use the term "aspiring writers." Writer = one who writes. If you write, you are a writer - embrace it, live it, shout it from the rooftops!) hosted by the Writing Loft, a writing school here in Northern California. (And I can say it's our "first" speaking engagement because we've just booked another. This is humbling and exciting!) We drove up into the hills and braved the sub-Saharan heat (seriously, it was 106) to meet a diverse and inspiring group of writers. In addition to speaking, we helped critique their works in progress, one of us ate far too much pasta with cream sauce, and one of us was stalked the entire time by the biggest, hairiest, most persistent cat to ever pad the Earth.

All in all, it was a good time. But in the days leading up to the retreat, we were somewhat anxious (I know, I know - us, anxious? Shocking.) about our talk. What in the world did we have to offer? How to write a rambling first draft with no discernible plot? Lessons in the art of getting ahead of yourself (also known as casting the movie and planning the book tour with only 10,000 words on the page)? A slide-show of our numerous rejections, perhaps one of the largest in the hands of private collectors? So we put ourselves in the writers' shoes and asked what we would have wanted to know five long years ago, when our children were still babies, we were toiling away at the law firm, and The Pecking Order was just a twinkle in our eyes. And--Eureka--we discovered we've actually learned boatloads about writing, securing an agent, the publishing process, marketing, and the state of the publishing industry. In fact, we realized we had so much to say, we had to leave some things out. (Lawyers with a lot to say. Again, shocking, I know.) In the next few weeks, we're going to post some topics from the retreat, in the hopes that someone, somewhere might find them useful. Because I don't know about you, but I'd rather hear about the process from someone who's learned through trial and error (emphasis on the error, in those early days) and late nights and hard work than someone who tells of meeting their agent when they were stuck in an elevator together. Unless you plan on stalking agents and orchestrating power failures at opportune moments (which I wouldn't really recommend, you know, from a legal standpoint), that's just not helpful.

So, check in next Friday for the first topic, "It Takes a Village." For now, I'll leave you with the story that opened our talk - our story. People are always intrigued by how we came to write together, and how we can write together. For us, it seems so natural now; we are extensions of each other. As one woman put it at the retreat, we may have husbands and families, but the two of us share a special, rare connection. Maybe the stars were aligned or God was nudging us in the right direction or the dice just rolled that way, but for whatever reason we both ended up at the firm at the same time, as the only female associates with babies. And it was hard. Like, my hair started falling out hard. Like, I once was so agitated the phone receiver flew out of my hand and gave me a black eye hard. Like, we both often contemplated, at the turn-off to the parking garage, just driving right on by and applying for a job at Starbucks hard. The work, while high-level litigation, wasn't over our heads, but the management of life was impossible--midnight feedings and 6am diaper changes and 8am marketing meetings and noon visits to the lactation room and 7pm preservative-laden microwaved dinners for the family and 8pm screaming at the kids to get to sleep and 9pm treks back to the office once they fell asleep. Yea, that was hard.

One night Kris showed up at the office late, and I was the only other one there, toiling away on some motion or brief. And, God bless her, she'd brought red wine. Lacking any fitting travel container (because, as new mothers/professionals, locating your thermos is about as likely as having sex with your husband, which is to say it's not going to happen), she'd brought the wine in a baby bottle. Needless to say, we became fast friends. We talked often during those late nights about how litigation and motherhood was a zero sum game, about being stretched to the breaking point, about the absurdity of the large law firm where we lost valuable billable time each day doing ridiculous things like waiting for our secretaries to finish making the partners' vacation reservations or securing their tee times before agreeing to look at our work, or taking the three elevators needed to get us from the parking garage to the 23rd floor (a stroke of architectural genius, that one). At some point we realized we both had dreams of writing more than legalese, and we decided to try our hand at a book--fictional, but based largely on our experience. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I've gone on long enough at this point, so I'll leave discussion of how we write together for another time. Have a safe, fun, and creative Labor Day weekend. See you next Friday.