real reason you wanted to become a writer in the first place. Did the experience live up to the dream?
JOE: I can’t remember where we met for the first time. I think it was Jon Jordan (editor of the
Crimespree
zine) who gave me one of your books and said, “Read this, this guy is sick like you.” He was right. But to answer your question, yes, the experience lived up to the dream. I’ve collaborated on stories with several authors (Henry Perez, Tom Schreck, Jeff Strand, F. Paul Wilson) but nothing ever came so fast and furious, with so little need for revision. We cranked out almost 8000 words in something like five hours. This might be a good place to talk about our co-writing process.
BLAKE: You pitched this idea to me in an email: “Now, let’s consider hitchhiking. You aren’t supposed to go hitch hiking, because the driver who picks you up could be crazy. You aren’t supposed to pick up hitchhikers, because they could be crazy. Now if we were to collaborate, I write a scene where a driver kills someone he picked up. You write a scene where a hitchhiker kills the guy who gave him a ride. Then we get these two together…”
I was immediately hooked. As I recall, we each wrote our sections in isolation, and we didn’t share them with each other. When they were as good as they could be, you emailed me 200 words to kick off section 3, and I wrote back the next hundred words or so. You write much faster than I do so you pretty much just harassed me until I would email you back with my scene, or rather, my response to what your character had done. Do you remember the ground rules we came up with for writing section 3 together? I don’t think we had an end in mind when we started. Didn’t we just let it flow organically and hope it came out all right?
JOE: We had no end, and we weren’t allowed to get into our character’s thoughts. It was a straight third-person observational point of view, with no head-hopping. Sort of like a screenplay. The action had to be on the page.
BLAKE: What made this so fun for me was that it was like playing chess with words. I created my very evil character and gave her a certain MO. You created the vastly demented Donaldson and gave him an MO, however as we began to email back and forth the text for section 3, we didn’t know anything about each others’ characters. In fact, I tried to get my girl to sit in the backseat, but you wouldn’t let her. You insisted she sit up front. I didn’t know why, but I knew it couldn’t be good.
JOE: It was like we were really trying to kill each other. Which was fun to do with you, because you’re just as twisted as I am. You were writing LOCKED DOORS at the same time I was writing RUSTY NAIL, and we both wound up with a similar gimmick independent of one another; all serial killers have families.
BLAKE: You and I share a similar sensibility in the darker side of fiction. There have been other instances when we were working on projects that had similarities. Like in AFRAID and SNOWBOUND when we both wrote scenes with wolves and bear traps. We also both love beer.
JOE: Might be worth doing a brief bio here, for those who haven’t read us before.
I write thrillers under the name JA Konrath, about a cop named Jack Daniels who chases serial killers. The books have some laughs, but also contain a lot of dark, scary parts. Over the years I’ve gotten a fair amount of mail from fans, asking if I would ever do a scary book without any jokes. AFRAID was the result. Because it’s no-holds-barred horror, I used a pen name, Jack Kilborn.
BLAKE: My first two books featured suspense writer Andy Thomas, who gets pulled into a nightmarish world even worse than the ones he writes about. My new one, ABANDON, which comes out this July is about a mining town that vanishes in 1893 in the Colorado mountains. This was fun, Bro! Until next time!
Bibliographies
The Jack Daniels series by JA Konrath
Whiskey Sour
Bloody Mary
Rusty Nail
Dirty
JOE: I can’t remember where we met for the first time. I think it was Jon Jordan (editor of the
Crimespree
zine) who gave me one of your books and said, “Read this, this guy is sick like you.” He was right. But to answer your question, yes, the experience lived up to the dream. I’ve collaborated on stories with several authors (Henry Perez, Tom Schreck, Jeff Strand, F. Paul Wilson) but nothing ever came so fast and furious, with so little need for revision. We cranked out almost 8000 words in something like five hours. This might be a good place to talk about our co-writing process.
BLAKE: You pitched this idea to me in an email: “Now, let’s consider hitchhiking. You aren’t supposed to go hitch hiking, because the driver who picks you up could be crazy. You aren’t supposed to pick up hitchhikers, because they could be crazy. Now if we were to collaborate, I write a scene where a driver kills someone he picked up. You write a scene where a hitchhiker kills the guy who gave him a ride. Then we get these two together…”
I was immediately hooked. As I recall, we each wrote our sections in isolation, and we didn’t share them with each other. When they were as good as they could be, you emailed me 200 words to kick off section 3, and I wrote back the next hundred words or so. You write much faster than I do so you pretty much just harassed me until I would email you back with my scene, or rather, my response to what your character had done. Do you remember the ground rules we came up with for writing section 3 together? I don’t think we had an end in mind when we started. Didn’t we just let it flow organically and hope it came out all right?
JOE: We had no end, and we weren’t allowed to get into our character’s thoughts. It was a straight third-person observational point of view, with no head-hopping. Sort of like a screenplay. The action had to be on the page.
BLAKE: What made this so fun for me was that it was like playing chess with words. I created my very evil character and gave her a certain MO. You created the vastly demented Donaldson and gave him an MO, however as we began to email back and forth the text for section 3, we didn’t know anything about each others’ characters. In fact, I tried to get my girl to sit in the backseat, but you wouldn’t let her. You insisted she sit up front. I didn’t know why, but I knew it couldn’t be good.
JOE: It was like we were really trying to kill each other. Which was fun to do with you, because you’re just as twisted as I am. You were writing LOCKED DOORS at the same time I was writing RUSTY NAIL, and we both wound up with a similar gimmick independent of one another; all serial killers have families.
BLAKE: You and I share a similar sensibility in the darker side of fiction. There have been other instances when we were working on projects that had similarities. Like in AFRAID and SNOWBOUND when we both wrote scenes with wolves and bear traps. We also both love beer.
JOE: Might be worth doing a brief bio here, for those who haven’t read us before.
I write thrillers under the name JA Konrath, about a cop named Jack Daniels who chases serial killers. The books have some laughs, but also contain a lot of dark, scary parts. Over the years I’ve gotten a fair amount of mail from fans, asking if I would ever do a scary book without any jokes. AFRAID was the result. Because it’s no-holds-barred horror, I used a pen name, Jack Kilborn.
BLAKE: My first two books featured suspense writer Andy Thomas, who gets pulled into a nightmarish world even worse than the ones he writes about. My new one, ABANDON, which comes out this July is about a mining town that vanishes in 1893 in the Colorado mountains. This was fun, Bro! Until next time!
Bibliographies
The Jack Daniels series by JA Konrath
Whiskey Sour
Bloody Mary
Rusty Nail
Dirty
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