As a fan, I LOVE this. It is rewarding to see a character I remember from a previous story come back in another one. So that’s the approach I wanted to take with this series.
The point of SERIAL was to see how two killers interacted when they met up on the road.
When we originally expanded SERIAL into SERIAL UNCUT, we wanted to take it up a notch. You took characters from your books and had them meet, I took characters from mine and had them meet.
Then we went even further with BIRDS OF PREY. Now we completely intertwined our universes. My bad guys meet your bad guys, from over a dozen of our novels.
BLAKE: You and I write a lot of bad guys. It was so much fun doing the killer-killer interaction in SERIAL UNCUT, that with BIRDS OF PREY, we simply said, let’s bring every major villain we’ve ever written into the same book. And not only that, let’s have Joe’s villains and Blake’s villains share scenes together. And not just any old scenes. Scenes that perhaps set up or anticipate big events in our major works like your Jack Daniels series and my Andrew Thomas series. I think of SKU as a glove that fits into all the spaces left between our collective novels. So Charles Kork from WHISKEY SOUR has a scene with Luther Kite and Orson Thomas from DESERT PLACES. Donaldson and Orson share a scene. Alex Kork and Luther Kite share a scene. And of course, there’s the centerpiece of the entire thing, “An Unkindness of Ravens.”
JOE: That 16,000 word section features Javier (Snowbound), Luther Kite (Locked Doors), Mr. K (Shaken), Alex Kork (Rusty Nail), and Charles Kork (Whiskey Sour) on the side of evil, along with cameos by Kiernan (Run), Donaldson (Serial), Lucy (Serial), Dwight Eisenhower (Endurance), Isaiah (Abandon), Swanson, Munchel, and Pessalano (Fuzzy Navel).
They went up against the forces of good, Jack Daniels, Clayton Theel (Draculas), and Tequila (Shot of Tequila.)
It was like a greatest hits battle royale, and so much fun to write.
Which is part of the reason the end product is over 120,000 words long and took two years to complete. This double novel takes place between all of our other novels, filling in gaps, expanding back-stories, and revealing clues to our upcoming collaboration, STIRRED.
BLAKE: There are some huge clues in here, no doubt. To me, the benefit of writing something like this, is that we’re using characters who have already been battle-tested in other books. We know they work, we love to write them, and so instead of spending all our time inventing and developing brand new characters, we’ve taken this group and put them to work building an entire monster of a book.
JOE: I’m pretty sure this hasn’t been done before. Not on this scale. Not with two authors completely meshing their worlds together.
At least, not in horror fiction. Comics and TV shows have been doing this for years. Superheroes and Supervillains always appear across many titles, and who didn’t love the 70s when Magnum PI would appear on Simon & Simon, or Mork did a cameo on Laverne & Shirley?
BLAKE: Let’s talk about how our collaborative process has developed over the last two years. With SERIAL, we started out emailing each other back and forth until a scene was finished, and there was a big element of gamesmanship, of not knowing what the other guy was up to and using that energy to propel the scene into interesting places. Then with KILLERS, we started using Google docs, which we’ve talked about previously, allowing us to write in the same document at the same time. But what interests me most is how our writing style (when we write together) has changed. I think we’ve truly developed a Konrath/Crouch style that is quite different from our individual styles. It seems like we edit each other much less now, and I think that’s because I know what kind of a sentence will pass your bullshit test, and vice versa.
JOE: It’s become pretty seamless, and we’re often finishing each other’s sentences, or anticipating what the other will do next. As a result, we can write 3,000 words faster than it would take either of us to write 1,500 individually, because we’re rewriting and polishing on the fly.
I also like it when we divvy up workloads. “Blake, go and add description to the Porter intro, and I’ll work ahead on the first Alex scene.” It’s a lot of fun. Almost like a hive mind is writing the story. Since writing is such a solitary profession, to be able to create stories and worlds with a partner is like getting a new toy.
BLAKE: You write very fast on your own, but for instance, today we wrote about 5,000 words, which is an astronomical word count for me.
JOE: That’s because you’re slow, like a snail surfing on molasses. At the same time I was working with you, I was working with Ann Voss Peterson on FLEE, our spy novel. We did about 4,000 there, too.
BLAKE: Show off.
So we’re going to finish the last piece of this puzzle, STIRRED, this summer. That’s going to be the conclusion to your Jack Daniels series and my Andrew Thomas series. In a way, writing SKU has laid the perfect groundwork for how we’re going to approach writing that novel together. It’s going to be a blast.
JOE: Hopefully the fun we’re having will translate to the page, and give our fans—both new to us and long-time readers—something to enjoy.
Do you believe tools like Dropbox and Google docs are going to change the way writers write?
BLAKE: Not on a massive scale, no. I still think most writers are solitary beings, introverts by nature, and that most books will continue to be single-author. It’s a wonderful thing to collaborate, but you have to find the right partner, not only someone who thinks like you and tells stories like you, but who you respect enough to let them change your words. That’s a tall order, and without getting all sentimental and shit, we’re very lucky to have crossed paths.
JOE: I dunno, man. I’ve done this Google docs thing with you, Ann, and Barry Eisler, and we’ve all enjoyed it. I think it’s just a matter of time before we see big shots giving it a try. Especially since ebooks have made it so easy to release work.
It’s worth mentioning here that there is no way we would have been able to do this in the traditional publishing environment. This is a 120,000 word double-novel, published in segments over the course of twenty-four months, where the protagonists are mostly serial killers. Our agents would have laughed at us, and no publisher would ever have taken on this project.
BLAKE: Except Brilliance Audio. Yay, Brilliance!
JOE: They’re very forward-thinking. But they also pay attention to the market. The previous installments we’ve written have sold very well, and readers seem to get what we’re trying to do.