Sharon Thomason, Featured Authors Chair of the Dahlonega Literary Festival, conceived this wonderful title when pitching a talk for me and my wife, author Kim Conrey, to do about what it’s like to live in a home with two writers. We’ll offer that presentation on March 2, 2024, at 11:00 a.m. during the festival. In preparation, here are my initial thoughts about this atypical arrangement.
Living in a “two-story” house can be summed up with three C’s:
1. Collaboration – in writing, marketing, and presenting
2. Commiseration – about uncharitable reviews, dips in sales, and other setbacks
3. Celebration – sharing large and small wins together
Talk about being in bed together…we’re collaborating in all sorts of ways! Each of us always has a critique partner to offer feedback about what’s working and what could use some more attention. For Kim, I’m the story whisperer, offering plot suggestions that can advance the story while building on her characters’ development. For me, Kim is my characters’ emotional and spiritual adviser, focusing on ways in which I can more fully develop their inner lives, so that their outer struggles will mean more to the reader.
We’re also in business with each other, publishing our books through our private imprint Soul Source Press, and now we’re collaborating in the traditional sense: we’re writing a new book together! Combining her experiences growing up in a backwoods Pentecostal church in way-west Georgia—with demons being prayed out of her at every turn, pew-walking, and speaking in tongues—with my love of mysteries and thrillers, we’re working on a cozy mystery series we’re calling the Southern Fried Nonsense Mysteries. The first book concerns a woman hired by her west Georgia hometown to turn an abandoned church into an arts center. Unfortunately, this earns her the scorn of those convinced she’s desecrating their temple, and the skeleton she discovers in the basement puts more than her livelihood in jeopardy. In this version of collaboration, we’re living in a one-story house!
In addition, we help each other with marketing tips and tricks, with one of us acting as a guinea pig to set a budget, spend some money, and see whether the results were worth it before the other one takes the plunge. “Your mileage may vary” is a common experience with these things.
And we also regularly present together at writing events and literary festivals. We’ll be doing the aforementioned “Two-Story House” talk along with a “Paths to Publication” workshop at the Dahlonega Literary Festival. At the Carrollton BookFest in April, we’ll discuss publishing again, and later that month, we’ll be at the Red Clay Writers Conference doing a tandem talk on the lessons we’ve learned from two decades in the book business.
Commiseration is a seldom-discussed topic among writers, but venting is something we all need to do, and it helps to rail and gnash teeth when your listener is someone who understands and can offer insights and empathy rather than a helpless tsk-tsking. Kim and I commiserate when an anonymous doofus leaves a one-star review because they thought the book was well-written, but it just wasn’t for them or presents some other bizarre, twisted logic that will forever pull down the average rating of our labor of love. We’ll go days without selling a book online or the event we attend doesn’t attract book buyers or any number of other things that make a difficult job—selling our art—that much harder.
But sometimes unexpected, good things happen—Kim won the 2023 Georgia Author of the Year in the romance category for her sci-fi romance Stealing Ares and my historical novel Hardscrabble Road notched its 3,000th review while maintaining a 4.4 average rating and its 2022 sequel, Return to Hardscrabble Road, is already closing in on 400 reviews with a 4.2 average—and we each have someone who truly understands and appreciated the achievement. Or, one of us (usually Kim, as she’s a much faster writer) finishes a manuscript, and we get to celebrate that milestone. For a time, those things we were commiserating about only a day or two beforehand hold less sway over our emotions, and we can feel good about our own and each other’s success on a journey with precious few such markers.
What does this mean for you? Think about your hobby or subject of interest and find your tribe of like-minded enthusiasts—or just one person who “gets” you—and you, too, will have someone to collaborate, commiserate, and celebrate with. If you’re among the lucky few like Kim and me, you can even create a partnership that becomes your whole world and makes your two-story house a home.