We recently got the chance to do an author interview with Rosie J. The full interview can be found here. We had a blast answering questions from our writing inspiration, to what it’s like to be married to your coauthor,, to publishing paths, and writing advice. Here are some of my favorite questions.

What is it like to co-write a book? And how does that process look for you all? Do you have set chapters you each write? Does one of you do more writing and the other more editing? I’m just intrigued by this co-authoring process and would love to know more!

B: When we first started The Masks We Wear (TMWW) we did individual chapters. Dean wrote Beau and introduced Jeremy as his friend and Kyle as his roommate—Chud, Phelony, Kathleen and Samantha, all that was him.  He wrote all of Beau’s chapters pretty much by himself throughout part one.

And I did Meep and Jessie, and took Bella and Jeremy and fleshed them out. 

We pantsed our way through the entire first draft. We would get together and relax in our little hot tub at the end of every day and talk about plans for our next chapters, where we think the plot is going, etc. We talked over any plot holes that might creep up on us and fixed all those before they became a problem. I had some real crazy ideas, and not all of them made it into the final draft, but a good bit of them did. I am the one responsible for all of the cliffhangers and… failures… sorry.

D: We get to compliment each other’s strengths. Each of us brings something different to the table, and this yields a stronger story overall. It also eases the workload to be able to share it with someone else.

B: While I was busy editing TMWW, Dean plowed on and drafted books 2 and 3. I still had a say in the plot development—we still had our little hot tub. Now I edit more than I draft. But that’s okay. We get to play to where our strengths are. I still flesh out characters, and add scenery, and emotional (damage)... sorry again.

Alright, let’s talk about The Masks We Wear. This book is set in the world we know, but it’s also not the world we know. It’s a magical world that’s almost hiding in plain sight with lots of fantastical creatures, many of which we don’t normally see in fantasy books and especially not as the stars of fantasy books. Can you talk a little about the inspiration for this book and why you chose the folklore you did?

One of the main inspirations was watching True Blood. [Spoilers ahead, but it has been so long I think it’ll be okay]

When you start the show everyone is introduced as human (except the main vampires), and then as you get farther and farther along those “humans” are actually shapeshifters, werewolves, witches, Fae, demigods, etc. etc. 

B: True Blood is one of my favorite shows and D had never seen it. And one day, somewhere in season two or something, he paused it and asked “is everyone going to be something else?” Like… well… Kinda, yeah.

And no offense to vampire or werewolf lovers out there, but we think they are over used and kind of boring. So we branched out. The folklore well is so much deeper than the handful of creatures that are normally written about. 

B: Gnomes started out as a bit of a joke. We would always make up some crazy stories about garden gnomes. I even suggested they were like Weeping Angels from Dr. Who, they move if they are not being observed. Early in our relationship it was a bit of a running gag—Who can world-build gnomes into relevance.

D: I made Beau a Gnome because I think Gnomes are cool. I always liked Gnomes. Most of the time they are either depicted as silly garden gnomes or tinkerers. I went the tinkerer route. But I wanted to make it more interesting that he can build cool things, so I gave him an expanded memory to explain why he could build cool things.

B: I went with Lynx for Meep… because I like cats…there had to be some folklore out there that would support a cat-person. I thought of ancient Egypt, and did some digging. I found one obscure-ish reference to them calling the cats they worshiped Mau’s (or maybe the ancient egyptian word for cat was ‘mau.’) Then I started to find stuff about Native American folklore. I wish I had kept track of which tribe it came from, but Lynx showed up on one of my pages, and my imagination took over from there.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE classic folklore tales from around the world. I have scooped up as much as I can from Audible, you know, those stories are meant to be shared orally. My favorite ones are The Complete and Original Norwegian Folktales of Asbjornsen and Moe by Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe, translated by Tina Nunnally. Those tales are wild, and I mean WILD. And I also really enjoyed The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore by Micheal Dylan Foster.

D: I was excited to branch out too. I wanted to be diverse and use non-European folklore. Even though I realize that most of book one did turn out to be European.

It is important to both of us to be diverse and also respectful. We tried to avoid religion and other sensitive areas, especially since we are still putting a twist on it all. In our setting many creatures from folklore are real, and we thought it would be disrespectful to only use European ones, with an implicit statement that “only our myths are real”. But approaching folklore from other cultures and changing it can be thorny. We are doing our best to be respectful.

Any parting advice for writers?

D: Perseverance is key. You don’t need to write a ton every day, but you do need to keep putting in the time and effort to make progress. Don’t get too caught up on soundbyte advice—the  quick snappy rules people love to toss around. It often takes a lot of digging to really understand what the advice actually means, and even more importantly what problems it’s meant to address, and you’ll still need to make the judgment call as to how applicable it is to your writing.

B: Editing software is great! I’m actually dyslexic, so I use a lot of software to check spelling and grammar. But it’s not the word of god. Sometimes it flags stylistic choices as mistakes—it doesn’t know the difference. You have to decide if those “mistakes” are intentional or not. Sometimes they will be. And as long as it is intentional, then it is fine. It's a mistake when it is NOT intentional. Like starting a sentence with the same word several times in a row. Sometimes it's an accident. Sometimes it's for style. Computers, AI, all that editing software, whatever else, it doesn’t have a VOICE. You have a VOICE. Use it. Prowriting Aid used AI to rewrite sentences for you, which can be helpful if you are really really stuck on wording, but if you use it too much it becomes unhelpful, your sentences sound samey, and it becomes easy to spot because it's no longer your voice. Here is piece I did about things I wish I had a better handle on before I published my book

Thank you Rosie for the great questions! And thank you for reading and for all your support.

For all other readers, if you have not gotten a copy of The Masks We Wear yet it is now on audio! I am super excited by the actor’s performances. You can find it on Audible, Amazon, or iTunes.