Cookie Completion

Let this post stand as a testament to determination, literacy, contrivances, plot devices, randomness, creampuffs, and above all else, unmitigated genius—for last night, on the 27th of May of the year 2009, Krispy and I completed our first long term collaboration.

The Christmas Cookie is complete. It is baked. It is fragrant and delicious. There are further cosmetic plans for it currently underway, but the text itself stands alone as a monumental effort some six months in the making.

Final word count is ~105,000 words. It can be done. 80,000 is average novel length. We can do it. We did it. We are amazing. Yes, I am stroking our egos madly, but mostly I am impressed that we pulled so much off in such a short time span.

Collaboration works! It really, really does. I think that I'd been attempting to write this solo, it would have petered off any number of times, and gone in fits and starts, and eventually it would have trailed off while I moved on to something else and only came back a year later to work on another couple of pages before prancing off again. But the creative madness that ensued in playing page ping-pong with someone else served as sufficient motivational force to keep us writing on a regular basis, I think.

This is probably the most writing I've ever gotten out of Krispy on such a consistently regular day-to-day basis. Thank you, Krispy, and congratulations. KEEP IT UP. ♥♥♥

Character Chats

So recently through the wonders of the internet (Twitter-hopping in this case), I made the acquaintance of the lovely Danyelle (aka Windsong) at Carpe Mousa. A few weeks ago, she started a fun exercise titled Character Chats, in which a prompt is posted for characters to respond to.

I tried one out this last week and my entry was one of the ones chosen to my surprise and delight! :) The prompt was about Obligations and Duty. So if you're interested in meeting one of my favorite angels or just joining in on the fun, pop on over to this Character Chat post at Carpe Mousa and check out the other entry from Yunaleska - about a princess who must make hard choices - while you're at it.