Writing in public

Jukebox wrote a bit about our current collaboration project on Wednesday, but he took a completely different angle than I'd been planning, so I still have more to say on the subject. :-)

As I've mentioned before, this collaboration is different from my previous work with Tabico and trilby else in that Jukebox and I are collaborating live, by phone, on the same sections of story; whereas Tabico and trilby and I worked on different sections via e-mail and then edited the whole thing afterwards.

But there's another way in which my collaboration with Jukebox is a new experience for me. His style is very different from mine, so we have to come from further apart to meet in the middle. As he put it (And this really made me giggle), "She writes nigh-apocalyptically dark stories about the total enslavement of whole worlds, and I get weepy when my main character gets a paper cut." Or as I'd put it, he laser-etches portraits into grains of rice, and I sledgehammer monoliths...carefully, I hope, but a sledgehammer is a sledgehammer. Thankfully, working live allows us to blend our styles more easily than e-mail would. I think the finished product might come out something like, say, a life-sized statue of a recognizable human being. ;-)

Meanwhile, I've finally put my finger on another aspect of the live process that took some getting used to. When I was in my teens, I belonged to a local art league. The members would gather once a month to hear from an area artist, and then we'd practice together on our various pieces. At the same time, I was also taking art lessons with different teachers in small groups; so I was constantly working on my technique in semi-public settings, often with people looking right over my shoulder. That always made me nervous. I didn't want anyone to see my art until it was at least nearly finished. I didn't want them to see the flaws I'd get rid of further down the line. Chalk it up to my innate perfectionism, I guess.

Anyway, Jukebox is seeing all my (writing) flaws now. It's a little unnerving, but 25 years have eased my perfectionism a lot, and I can always remind myself that I'm seeing just as many of Jukebox's flaws as he's seeing of mine. But he's still much better at conversational patter than I could ever hope to be. ;-)