Writing a book with someone is in many ways like a marriage. It takes commitment, compromise, patience, and it helps if one of you is rich. Like many marriages, these relationships often break down, anyone who successfully completes a creative collaboration should be greatly admired because it's certain the journey was not without it's challenges.
Back in May 2016, I wrote a blog post about how I had “nearly finished writing the first in a series of novels, co-authored with John Watson”. This was an exaggeration of epic proportions, even by my standards. It wasn't nearly finished, in fact it never did get finished. My writing marriage had a difficult honeymoon, then several years of throwing accusations and crockery at each other before we both moved out, and burned the house down. The kids though, the characters we created, they were the real victims, left homeless and unloved, crying in the gutters of our imagination. Watson went on to write the first two books in "The Generation" series incorporating some bits of the failed book, I concentrated mostly on eating biscuits and staring out of the window.Looking back, I didn't find the process of collaborating easy. There were a few things I really enjoyed about working with John on the book, enough things to fill a small box, maybe a matchbox, or even a shoebox. There were many, many more things about trying to write a book with Watson that I did not enjoy, cities of things, enough things to fill a planet, one of the bigger ones, like the entire surface area of Jupiter. Collaborating with Watson was genuinely one of the worst and most painful working experiences of my life, and I spent time stacking shelves at B&M Bargains in Cleveleys. We remain friends though, the scars left by trying to write a book together have healed over, leaving just some residual trauma and the occasional bitter comment about historical accuracy.
Despite this, and against my better judgement, and at Watson's suggestion, we have now actually written a book together... about how we failed to write a book together. It includes the first and last drafts of some of our chapters, and the back and forth comments (bickering) between us as it descends into an unworkable relationship, including unedited original notes and equally bitter retrospective comments we've written this year. So it's a sort of a “how not to write a book together” book, an insight into our writing process, or lack of it, and the dynamic between two writers with completely different working practices, one of whom is brilliant, one of whom is an absolute freaking nightmare. I'm not saying which is which, read the book and decide for yourself.
The new book is called “A Collaborative Failure” and I'll be taking a big box of them to the To Be Continued convention in Bedford for an exclusive book launch in a couple of weeks, where John Watson and I will be signing, sketching and bickering live.
We may have a protective screen between us.
Here are just some of the designs I went over trying to get Watson to approve a book cover...
You can read some of Watson's less than complimentary comments on my cover designs on the back of the actual book. Please don't buy the book though, if it sells well he might want to do a volume 2.