#-how Key or Roach has tweaked and shifted it and the new facets they've brought out. Anyway it's great but it IS hard. But it's great. :D

[boatboys]

How does doing the books together work? I'm guessing or it looks like maybe roachpatrol writes them and splicketylit does most of the drawing and then rollerskatinglizard does the sales and posts and stuff? I want to write books some day and it seems like working with friends would make it easier, but how did you get some friends interested to help?? Did you think of a book and then go hey actually OOMF could help with that? Or was it something else? Thanks in advance!

Hm! I'll take this one point at a time I think, because there's a lot here.

RE: our roles, I think you're misapprehending the concept of "cowriters"! Which one of us has the energy and inspiration at any given time varies, but all three of us plot/brainstorm, write, and edit on all the books! We have strong points we tend to lean into--Skates is really great at the minutiae of publishing sites and advertising posts and compiling our rambling discussions into roadmaps, Roach comes up with world embroidery/texture/setbuilding details like it's his job, and on a good day I can turn outline into prose and check off edits at a pretty breakneck pace--but these books are our shared babies, and they wouldn't be the same books if any one of us hadn't been intimately involved in every step!

RE: establishing a cowriter situation, I can only speak for how we ended up cowriting; we were fandom friends first, playing with each other's OCs and ideas. Eventually someone broached the topic of "hey do you want to write an actual freestanding story about some of these goobers we've been making up?" and ever since we've been in a three-way discord chat, brainstorming our way forward as a group. :D

Addendum: Just to temper your expectations, I don't know that I would say that cowriting is "easier" than writing by yourself! It's easier in some ways--having other people to bounce ideas off of, being able to lean on your cowriters' strengths, etc--but it requires a LOT of trust both in your friendship and in your cowriters' skills, and even with both of those things there will still be friction! Multiple people all trying to create the perfect image of the pie-in-the-sky novel they're imagining are going to conflict sometimes, and resolving those moments can be hard on both the level of friendship AND of collaborating artists.

Roach compared it to gem fusion when I posted this in the group chat to discuss our thoughts, and I do have to corroborate that. Last time I started working on the next novel near one of my cowriters in person, we did glow and mesh into a huge sexy hottie with four arms. So you may want to be prepared for that, also. UoU