Getting wrangled

Assistant author wrangler Cuinn Cattledog in her puppy days: I knew her when.

Back in May I announced that I was going to breathe new henki into Henkimaa by resuming blogging. A bit premature, turns out: a reread of that post makes clear how hesitant & unready I was, the burnout from my former reluctant political blogging not quite burned out yet.

Well, I’m here to say differently now.

A few months back — when was it, Sian? June? July? — my Australian friend Sian & I picked up a collaborative work we’d started way-a-whole-long-time-ago, that had fallen by the wayside, a casualty of Life Stuff Getting in the Way.  But it sometimes came to mind, & last whenever-it-was we went delving into the dusty gutters of our email archives, found all of it that we could, organized it into Scrivener (don’t know what Scrivener is? find out here), & started writing it again.

Then, just two or three weeks ago, we found ourselves an author wrangler.  Or did she find us? Nah, that’s nonsense: we already knew each other: Rachel is the other Brisbaner besides Sian that I visited on my four-week trip to Australia in December 2010. Curious about our resurrected collaboration, Rachel asked to read some of it, & next thing we knew had volunteered to help keep us on the track to completing and publishing it.  And girl do we need it!

Ably assisting Rachel in her author wrangling duties is assistant author wrangler Cuinn Cattledog, whom I met when she was just a pup in December 2010.  She’s grown a mite since then, and she is herding us strong.

Not gonna say too much more about what the collaboration is about just yet, other than that it’s more-or-less science fiction/fantasy, & that while there are male characters both good & bad, it’s women at the forefront of the intrigue & action. We haven’t arrived at a title yet, though we’ve had a variety of names we’ve called it informally, my favorite being what Sian used to call it back in 2003, Little Green Tree Frogs.  But mostly these days I call it “the collab,” & that’ll do for me until we arrive at a name we can agree is fitting.

For the time being, this sidelines my other writing projects such as Mistress of Woodland; & unlike every other National Novel Writing Month that I’ve taken part in starting in 2007, this year I won’t be spending NaNovember writing in my Cold/Long Dark story universe, but instead on the collab.

That’s okay.  The most important thing is this: I’m writing. And I’m doing it in the company of some of my favorite people.

Assistant author wrangler Cuinn Cattledog as a puppy, with the feet of Main Mum (Sian in purple Doc Martens) & Other Mum (Rachel in red sandshoes, because they don’t call ’em sneakers in Australia).