Souvenirs d'un inconnu -- 1.3
Memories of a stranger; Jinki/Minjung, Jinki/Sooyeon; PG-13
note: entry for SHINee Duets with
royalwisteria; not finished, but enough to put in an author’s note.
They meet for lunch, and then that Wednesday they meet for dinner. They go and see a movie, Jinki laughing and an arm casually slung around her shoulders, and Minjung has to tell herself that this isn’t meant to happen. Five years ago proved that. This isn’t meant to be. But that doesn’t stop her heart from doing obscene things such as beat faster. How ridiculous. She thought she was past this school girl romance nonsense. Donghae proved that. Changmin - Changmin, the antithesis of heart-pounding love - proved that.
Maybe it’s a first love thing. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of trailing after Jinki, memorizing the angles of his fingers and then figuring out the degrees while he was away. Maybe it’s because they’ve been best friends for so much of their lives that she - like a tadpole new to the idea of breathing air - still hasn’t figured out why she’s able to live apart from him.
Two weeks later, Minjung’s heart goes cold when she calls Jinki and a woman picks up instead. Her voice is high-pitched and pleasant, bright like Jinki’s but in a different way. She imagines the two of them singing a duet and, oh God-
“Hello... Minjung-ssi?”
She’s silent. She’s not sure if she’s breathing.
“It’s what the caller ID says,” the woman mutters in Korean - in Korean! - her voice fading somewhat as if she’s moving the phone away from her face. “Minjung-ssi! Are you there?”
“Ah, yes,” she mumbles. Her voice sounds rough.
“Jinki’s in the shower right now. Would you like me to take a message?”
“Um... yes. Wait, no. Just...” Minjung wants to wring her hands together, but one of them is holding a pencil, stuck on a half-drawn guitar, and the other is glued to her phone. “Ask him to-You know what, never mind.”
“Okay.” The woman sounds warm. Friendly. She should have known better than to think that Jinki was still unattached. “Before you go, Minjung?”
“Yes?” Her mouth feels dry; she doesn’t digest the fact that the woman has dropped the formalities.
“Thanks for agreeing to be friends with Jinki again. He’s been much happier since he got to see you.”
“Happier?”
“It’s been a few years since we’ve settled here, but I know he’s still having a hard time. Maybe that's unexpected but, well, our circumstances were a little complicated. And I did kind of force the move on him,” the woman chuckles.
Minjung doesn’t even know her name, but somehow Jinki has told her about Minjung.
That woman probably knows everything, everything that she’s ever treasured, everything that’s ever been hers.
And that makes her feel awfully naked.
“I had no idea. Well...I-I have to go.” She scrambles for excuses like she would if they were clothes. “Go... Wash dishes.”
“Okay! Have as much fun with that as you can. Bye.”
She presses the end call button and the lead on the tip of her pencil fractures.
......
She’s been listening to him sing about love and dreams, goodbyes and forevers, for as long as she can remember. And yet she doesn’t know if this is what heartbreak is supposed to feel like. He’s been her first for everything. He’s been her first. He’s been her everything.
But her feet are dry; there is no lake of tears.
The time that he should be getting back to his dorms comes and passes. And there is nothing. Just the fading dips in her skin and that one stupid astroid that she never finishes drawing on her graph paper. Her sister calls her for dinner and she goes, a little stiff in the joints but otherwise nothing worse for wear.
She sits at the table and eats silently. She watches her mother’s hands move as the woman piles kimchi and pork into her bowl, her sister’s bowl, her father’s bowl. They are a pair of hands that have seen too many years of dishwater, of laundry detergent, of soap and dirt and grease. They are rough and brown and wrinkled. They are older than the face of the woman who owns them. There is no ring, but everyone can tell: these hands belong on a wife, on a mother.
She volunteers to wash the dishes that night.
Each dish is reborn smooth and white and warm, and she hands them over to her mother, who is standing next to her and a whole head shorter. There is a natural wave to her mother’s hair and it’s been half a year since the woman started dying the white strands black. The lines at the corners of those eyes that she has inherited, they’re unexpectedly deep. She wonders if time will chisel those same lines into her face one day.
The twenty-two and a half minutes that she spends next to her mother-they make her want to cry more than anything ever did in the hours she spent alone inside her room.
But her feet stay dry.
She doesn’t know if that is what people call strength.
......
Five voice mails, twenty-seven texts and a letter later:
He’s clearly learned how to keep in touch with someone , Minjung bitterly thinks, staring at the unopened envelope.
His handwriting is unfamiliar.
Then again, it’s in Japanese. The sharp katakanas of her name and the messy kanji of her address probably should look this strange. But the Arabic numerals, they do appear a little less alien.
She runs a finger down the edge of the envelope, over and over, until the stiff paper goes soft.
The vibrations of her cell phone finally startles her out of her reverie and she hastily tucks the letter away into the belly of her copy of the Town Page.
......
School starts again and she finds comfort in the classrooms. They are made up of the same rows of desks, scuff marks on the floor, a familiar rhythm. There is math, which she is good at; physics, which she gets by in; chemistry, which vaguely makes sense; biology, which seems stupid; English, which he has always been good at-
Her nails sink into her palms as she looks up at the person in front of her.
Why is he asking her these questions?
These scary, scary questions?
Potential career path.
A list of preferred colleges.
What will you do from here on out?
She stares at the stacks of pamphlets and booklets of information he has on either side of his elbows. She stares at the printout of her academic records to date, and that dreadful sheet of paper with all its gaping blank spaces.
It’s already rather late to be thinking about this , her homeroom teacher says.
She knows. Because everyone around her already knows-where they are, where they’re going, what they want. But she realizes that she’s never really had the same sort of ambitions. She’s never looked forward to the same sort of things. She’s never dreamed. Or maybe that’s not true. (She thinks back to her mother’s hands.)
She gazes up at the soft-spoken man sitting across the table from her with wide, wide eyes.
Her fingers uncurl in defeat.
He has never left her anything in the cement that paved their way home.
......
The memories. They are hers.
They are the only things that she’s entitled to.
But why is there a third person who’s privy to her most beloved secrets?
Why is there a third person at all?
There are blurry scenes swirling in front of her eyes. Sitting in class, waiting for the clock to slowly wind down to the end of the day. Sunbaked cement, flimsy flip flops protecting her feet. Using pepero to stir her hot chocolate.
She knows things change. But at work, Minjung has the habit of pressing her watch to her ear and listening to its steadfast tick-tock. She still wears flip flops all through summer. And in a couple of months she’ll be restocking her pepero stash because nothing beats the flavor of her country (even though pocky - the original snack - is just a few dozen steps down the street at the corner konbini).
So what has changed?
(She remembers that Jinki was her first boyfriend and that up until Donghae’s persuasion tactics finally wore her down, she’d as good as sworn that she’d never date anyone else. It was a sort of pact with herself, for no better reason than how right it seemed, but clearly Jinki has never made any sort of promise with himself.
Wait. Had she been expecting him to remain celibate for life for her? Out of regret?
God. She bets he’s married or something and her mother just never forwarded the wedding invitation.
She pauses.
Am I the third person?)
......
She doesn’t tell anyone the first week, or the week after.
She chooses tight-lipped smiles over the truth for long enough that their (or her, since he's not here anymore) yearbook, for the second year in a row, has their names written next to each other. It’s one of those silly ‘The most likely to...’ categories, something that people get a good laugh from maybe even twenty, thirty years down the road, but never really expects to come true, twenty, thirty years down the road. (One of her friends is on the yearbook committee and she gets to see the proofs before the teacher advisers sign off on everything. It’s printed in ink, a beautiful permanent black. By the end of lunch break, the paper has dips in it from the moisture of her skin, but the names, they are still there.)
She doesn’t tell anyone the first month, or the month after.
Let’s break up.
How did he manage to say those words out loud?
Because she can’t.
Because that’s like sawing off her own arms and legs and saying, there, I’m parting ways with my limbs. Like digging out her own heart and liver and lungs and saying, ha, who needs organs to live?
......
“Hey.”
Minjung feels blindsided. Her right hand shoots across her abdomen and grabs at the seams of the tote bag that she has slung over her left shoulder.
“Wh-what are you doing?”
“Waiting for you.”
It’s the same harmless smile, with his eyes crinkling and full, white teeth from when they first met.
“Why are you waiting for me?”
“You’ve been ignoring me, so I decided to do a stakeout.” He answers like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Minjung studies at him carefully, eyeing the heavy bags underneath his eyes and taking note of the fact that his smile is already wilting around the edges. That smile used to never wilt; he was a light that never went out. She feels pleased, in a sadistic sort of way, that it might be because of her.
“Do you know why I’ve been ignoring you?”
He takes a deep breath and, with it, a step towards her. A hand reaches out and grasps her shoulder. It’s always times like this, when he’s close, that she remembers that he’s only a little bit taller than her. Jinki used to say it doesn’t matter, but she has always thought that that was a lie.
“Can you tell me?”
Oh god. He doesn’t know? He’s not even going to bother guessing?
She tries to shrink away from his touch. “Why are you in Japan again?”
“To expand my horizons,” he says the slogan-worthy answer out loud without missing a beat, confusion written across his features because he's sure they've already talked about this a month ago.
“And that’s it?”
“Pretty much.” His shoulders shrug upward and seem to stick.
“Are you sure?”
Minjung can tell that he’s starting to lose patience; he’s always hated playing verbal hide-and-seek back when they were in high school.
“Yes, I’m sure. What is this about?”
“Did you come alone?”
Aha, she thinks as he sucks in a breath. It sure makes an awful lot of noise, a breath does, when it perfectly measures out the distance between their faces.
“You didn’t know?” His chin dips slightly to the left.
Now she’s the one breathing through her teeth. “No. I didn’t.”
There’s a look that might be called understanding if he still didn’t look so confused. “So you’re ignoring me because of Sooyeon?”
“Her name is Sooyeon?” Minjung asks. She can’t help herself.
“Yeah, a pretty name isn’t it?” He grins for a moment, leaning in so that they were even closer than a breath. She blinks and she can almost feel her lashes brush against his skin. “But that’s besides the point,” he realizes, stepping back and taking his hand off her shoulder. He does it almost cautiously. “Have you been ignoring me because of Sooyeon?”
“Yes. I have.”
He sighs deeply; his eyelids droop and he suddenly drops into a crouch. “Shit, this sucks.”
There is a faint quiver to his voice. She tenses.
It’s a reflex that she has spent the better part of her life honing.
“What does?” She hears herself asking.
“Sooyeon kicked me out,” he murmurs, looking up at her with a-what kind of smile is that? The line that dips in between his forehead worries her and and unsteady corners of his mouth reminds her of when they used to hold hands and the only calluses on hers came from her pencil and the only calluses on his came from his guitar.
“And?” She doesn’t dare to risk something longer, something such as Why should I care?
Minjung is scared. She’s terrified. Because this is too familiar.
Here he is, the boy who is hers. The boy whom she hasn’t seen since her junior year of high school, since that day he fell into her arms and curled up on her bed. He needs her to love him, and she does. She just does. Minjung still remembers the promise she made to herself. She promised that she would protect him, that when no one else is there for him, he would still have her. That he’d always have her.
“I have nowhere else to go.”
Please?
The words skip right off her tongue. As if she’s been practicing how to say them all these years.
“Want to stay with me then?”
......
A/N: Little random things that I feel like mentioning -
팥빙수. Pretty sure anyone who would read a fic about a South Korean band knows this dessert.
밀키스. A carbonated milk beverage. And no, they didn’t have enough money left to buy a can. ;)
カラオケ. Literally empty orchestra; 노래방. Literally song room.
1K アパート. Denotes a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchen (and a bathroom) in a low-rise building; Japanese apartments are often described as such with a numeral indicating # of bedrooms and letters where L = living room, D = dining room, K = kitchen. 1K is pretty small and apaatos tend to be older/less nice than manshons (high-rise).
Town Page. The Japanese equivalent of the Yellow Pages.
コンビニ. Shortened term for convenience store (コンビニエンスストア).
ポッキー & 빼빼로. Indeed, Pocky is the inspiration behind Pepero.
limaçon, lemniscate, astroid. Algebraic curves; certain examples of each may resemble a (very fat and round) heart, an infinity sign, and a star respectively. (I'm not your math teacher but Wiki is your friend!)
About working with my lovely partner -
Collabing is a fun learning experience! We spent a lot of time building our characters and discussing how they’d act and why they’d act that way. With two people, there’s a bigger pool of ideas and, for me at least, it combines the fun of writing with that of reading. (Working on my own, I only have whatever is going on inside my head. But writing together means I get to read, and reading is fun because you get to look into another person’s brain and find stuff that you can’t or wouldn’t think to write.) What took adjusting to though, was how we were indeed two people, so we had to be more vocal throughout the process. Because really, there is a lot more going inside a writer’s head than what gets out onto ‘paper’.
…
tbc
note: entry for SHINee Duets with
royalwisteria; not finished, but enough to put in an author’s note.
They meet for lunch, and then that Wednesday they meet for dinner. They go and see a movie, Jinki laughing and an arm casually slung around her shoulders, and Minjung has to tell herself that this isn’t meant to happen. Five years ago proved that. This isn’t meant to be. But that doesn’t stop her heart from doing obscene things such as beat faster. How ridiculous. She thought she was past this school girl romance nonsense. Donghae proved that. Changmin - Changmin, the antithesis of heart-pounding love - proved that.
Maybe it’s a first love thing. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of trailing after Jinki, memorizing the angles of his fingers and then figuring out the degrees while he was away. Maybe it’s because they’ve been best friends for so much of their lives that she - like a tadpole new to the idea of breathing air - still hasn’t figured out why she’s able to live apart from him.
Two weeks later, Minjung’s heart goes cold when she calls Jinki and a woman picks up instead. Her voice is high-pitched and pleasant, bright like Jinki’s but in a different way. She imagines the two of them singing a duet and, oh God-
“Hello... Minjung-ssi?”
She’s silent. She’s not sure if she’s breathing.
“It’s what the caller ID says,” the woman mutters in Korean - in Korean! - her voice fading somewhat as if she’s moving the phone away from her face. “Minjung-ssi! Are you there?”
“Ah, yes,” she mumbles. Her voice sounds rough.
“Jinki’s in the shower right now. Would you like me to take a message?”
“Um... yes. Wait, no. Just...” Minjung wants to wring her hands together, but one of them is holding a pencil, stuck on a half-drawn guitar, and the other is glued to her phone. “Ask him to-You know what, never mind.”
“Okay.” The woman sounds warm. Friendly. She should have known better than to think that Jinki was still unattached. “Before you go, Minjung?”
“Yes?” Her mouth feels dry; she doesn’t digest the fact that the woman has dropped the formalities.
“Thanks for agreeing to be friends with Jinki again. He’s been much happier since he got to see you.”
“Happier?”
“It’s been a few years since we’ve settled here, but I know he’s still having a hard time. Maybe that's unexpected but, well, our circumstances were a little complicated. And I did kind of force the move on him,” the woman chuckles.
Minjung doesn’t even know her name, but somehow Jinki has told her about Minjung.
That woman probably knows everything, everything that she’s ever treasured, everything that’s ever been hers.
And that makes her feel awfully naked.
“I had no idea. Well...I-I have to go.” She scrambles for excuses like she would if they were clothes. “Go... Wash dishes.”
“Okay! Have as much fun with that as you can. Bye.”
She presses the end call button and the lead on the tip of her pencil fractures.
......
She’s been listening to him sing about love and dreams, goodbyes and forevers, for as long as she can remember. And yet she doesn’t know if this is what heartbreak is supposed to feel like. He’s been her first for everything. He’s been her first. He’s been her everything.
But her feet are dry; there is no lake of tears.
The time that he should be getting back to his dorms comes and passes. And there is nothing. Just the fading dips in her skin and that one stupid astroid that she never finishes drawing on her graph paper. Her sister calls her for dinner and she goes, a little stiff in the joints but otherwise nothing worse for wear.
She sits at the table and eats silently. She watches her mother’s hands move as the woman piles kimchi and pork into her bowl, her sister’s bowl, her father’s bowl. They are a pair of hands that have seen too many years of dishwater, of laundry detergent, of soap and dirt and grease. They are rough and brown and wrinkled. They are older than the face of the woman who owns them. There is no ring, but everyone can tell: these hands belong on a wife, on a mother.
She volunteers to wash the dishes that night.
Each dish is reborn smooth and white and warm, and she hands them over to her mother, who is standing next to her and a whole head shorter. There is a natural wave to her mother’s hair and it’s been half a year since the woman started dying the white strands black. The lines at the corners of those eyes that she has inherited, they’re unexpectedly deep. She wonders if time will chisel those same lines into her face one day.
The twenty-two and a half minutes that she spends next to her mother-they make her want to cry more than anything ever did in the hours she spent alone inside her room.
But her feet stay dry.
She doesn’t know if that is what people call strength.
......
Five voice mails, twenty-seven texts and a letter later:
He’s clearly learned how to keep in touch with someone , Minjung bitterly thinks, staring at the unopened envelope.
His handwriting is unfamiliar.
Then again, it’s in Japanese. The sharp katakanas of her name and the messy kanji of her address probably should look this strange. But the Arabic numerals, they do appear a little less alien.
She runs a finger down the edge of the envelope, over and over, until the stiff paper goes soft.
The vibrations of her cell phone finally startles her out of her reverie and she hastily tucks the letter away into the belly of her copy of the Town Page.
......
School starts again and she finds comfort in the classrooms. They are made up of the same rows of desks, scuff marks on the floor, a familiar rhythm. There is math, which she is good at; physics, which she gets by in; chemistry, which vaguely makes sense; biology, which seems stupid; English, which he has always been good at-
Her nails sink into her palms as she looks up at the person in front of her.
Why is he asking her these questions?
These scary, scary questions?
Potential career path.
A list of preferred colleges.
What will you do from here on out?
She stares at the stacks of pamphlets and booklets of information he has on either side of his elbows. She stares at the printout of her academic records to date, and that dreadful sheet of paper with all its gaping blank spaces.
It’s already rather late to be thinking about this , her homeroom teacher says.
She knows. Because everyone around her already knows-where they are, where they’re going, what they want. But she realizes that she’s never really had the same sort of ambitions. She’s never looked forward to the same sort of things. She’s never dreamed. Or maybe that’s not true. (She thinks back to her mother’s hands.)
She gazes up at the soft-spoken man sitting across the table from her with wide, wide eyes.
Her fingers uncurl in defeat.
He has never left her anything in the cement that paved their way home.
......
The memories. They are hers.
They are the only things that she’s entitled to.
But why is there a third person who’s privy to her most beloved secrets?
Why is there a third person at all?
There are blurry scenes swirling in front of her eyes. Sitting in class, waiting for the clock to slowly wind down to the end of the day. Sunbaked cement, flimsy flip flops protecting her feet. Using pepero to stir her hot chocolate.
She knows things change. But at work, Minjung has the habit of pressing her watch to her ear and listening to its steadfast tick-tock. She still wears flip flops all through summer. And in a couple of months she’ll be restocking her pepero stash because nothing beats the flavor of her country (even though pocky - the original snack - is just a few dozen steps down the street at the corner konbini).
So what has changed?
(She remembers that Jinki was her first boyfriend and that up until Donghae’s persuasion tactics finally wore her down, she’d as good as sworn that she’d never date anyone else. It was a sort of pact with herself, for no better reason than how right it seemed, but clearly Jinki has never made any sort of promise with himself.
Wait. Had she been expecting him to remain celibate for life for her? Out of regret?
God. She bets he’s married or something and her mother just never forwarded the wedding invitation.
She pauses.
Am I the third person?)
......
She doesn’t tell anyone the first week, or the week after.
She chooses tight-lipped smiles over the truth for long enough that their (or her, since he's not here anymore) yearbook, for the second year in a row, has their names written next to each other. It’s one of those silly ‘The most likely to...’ categories, something that people get a good laugh from maybe even twenty, thirty years down the road, but never really expects to come true, twenty, thirty years down the road. (One of her friends is on the yearbook committee and she gets to see the proofs before the teacher advisers sign off on everything. It’s printed in ink, a beautiful permanent black. By the end of lunch break, the paper has dips in it from the moisture of her skin, but the names, they are still there.)
She doesn’t tell anyone the first month, or the month after.
Let’s break up.
How did he manage to say those words out loud?
Because she can’t.
Because that’s like sawing off her own arms and legs and saying, there, I’m parting ways with my limbs. Like digging out her own heart and liver and lungs and saying, ha, who needs organs to live?
......
“Hey.”
Minjung feels blindsided. Her right hand shoots across her abdomen and grabs at the seams of the tote bag that she has slung over her left shoulder.
“Wh-what are you doing?”
“Waiting for you.”
It’s the same harmless smile, with his eyes crinkling and full, white teeth from when they first met.
“Why are you waiting for me?”
“You’ve been ignoring me, so I decided to do a stakeout.” He answers like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Minjung studies at him carefully, eyeing the heavy bags underneath his eyes and taking note of the fact that his smile is already wilting around the edges. That smile used to never wilt; he was a light that never went out. She feels pleased, in a sadistic sort of way, that it might be because of her.
“Do you know why I’ve been ignoring you?”
He takes a deep breath and, with it, a step towards her. A hand reaches out and grasps her shoulder. It’s always times like this, when he’s close, that she remembers that he’s only a little bit taller than her. Jinki used to say it doesn’t matter, but she has always thought that that was a lie.
“Can you tell me?”
Oh god. He doesn’t know? He’s not even going to bother guessing?
She tries to shrink away from his touch. “Why are you in Japan again?”
“To expand my horizons,” he says the slogan-worthy answer out loud without missing a beat, confusion written across his features because he's sure they've already talked about this a month ago.
“And that’s it?”
“Pretty much.” His shoulders shrug upward and seem to stick.
“Are you sure?”
Minjung can tell that he’s starting to lose patience; he’s always hated playing verbal hide-and-seek back when they were in high school.
“Yes, I’m sure. What is this about?”
“Did you come alone?”
Aha, she thinks as he sucks in a breath. It sure makes an awful lot of noise, a breath does, when it perfectly measures out the distance between their faces.
“You didn’t know?” His chin dips slightly to the left.
Now she’s the one breathing through her teeth. “No. I didn’t.”
There’s a look that might be called understanding if he still didn’t look so confused. “So you’re ignoring me because of Sooyeon?”
“Her name is Sooyeon?” Minjung asks. She can’t help herself.
“Yeah, a pretty name isn’t it?” He grins for a moment, leaning in so that they were even closer than a breath. She blinks and she can almost feel her lashes brush against his skin. “But that’s besides the point,” he realizes, stepping back and taking his hand off her shoulder. He does it almost cautiously. “Have you been ignoring me because of Sooyeon?”
“Yes. I have.”
He sighs deeply; his eyelids droop and he suddenly drops into a crouch. “Shit, this sucks.”
There is a faint quiver to his voice. She tenses.
It’s a reflex that she has spent the better part of her life honing.
“What does?” She hears herself asking.
“Sooyeon kicked me out,” he murmurs, looking up at her with a-what kind of smile is that? The line that dips in between his forehead worries her and and unsteady corners of his mouth reminds her of when they used to hold hands and the only calluses on hers came from her pencil and the only calluses on his came from his guitar.
“And?” She doesn’t dare to risk something longer, something such as Why should I care?
Minjung is scared. She’s terrified. Because this is too familiar.
Here he is, the boy who is hers. The boy whom she hasn’t seen since her junior year of high school, since that day he fell into her arms and curled up on her bed. He needs her to love him, and she does. She just does. Minjung still remembers the promise she made to herself. She promised that she would protect him, that when no one else is there for him, he would still have her. That he’d always have her.
“I have nowhere else to go.”
Please?
The words skip right off her tongue. As if she’s been practicing how to say them all these years.
“Want to stay with me then?”
......
A/N: Little random things that I feel like mentioning -
팥빙수. Pretty sure anyone who would read a fic about a South Korean band knows this dessert.
밀키스. A carbonated milk beverage. And no, they didn’t have enough money left to buy a can. ;)
カラオケ. Literally empty orchestra; 노래방. Literally song room.
1K アパート. Denotes a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchen (and a bathroom) in a low-rise building; Japanese apartments are often described as such with a numeral indicating # of bedrooms and letters where L = living room, D = dining room, K = kitchen. 1K is pretty small and apaatos tend to be older/less nice than manshons (high-rise).
Town Page. The Japanese equivalent of the Yellow Pages.
コンビニ. Shortened term for convenience store (コンビニエンスストア).
ポッキー & 빼빼로. Indeed, Pocky is the inspiration behind Pepero.
limaçon, lemniscate, astroid. Algebraic curves; certain examples of each may resemble a (very fat and round) heart, an infinity sign, and a star respectively. (I'm not your math teacher but Wiki is your friend!)
About working with my lovely partner -
Collabing is a fun learning experience! We spent a lot of time building our characters and discussing how they’d act and why they’d act that way. With two people, there’s a bigger pool of ideas and, for me at least, it combines the fun of writing with that of reading. (Working on my own, I only have whatever is going on inside my head. But writing together means I get to read, and reading is fun because you get to look into another person’s brain and find stuff that you can’t or wouldn’t think to write.) What took adjusting to though, was how we were indeed two people, so we had to be more vocal throughout the process. Because really, there is a lot more going inside a writer’s head than what gets out onto ‘paper’.
…
tbc