Speculation, Fact and Fiction

Over at writefantastic you can learn more about this, thanks to an update from Transworld via Stan Nicholls.

I'm most definitely a writer who couldn't work without discussing plot, character and all the rest of it with my husband first and foremost. He looks at these things from a distinctly different angle to me, being a design engineer of the metal-bashing, problem solving kind. This also means he has a merciless eye for detail and internal consistency and will not let me fudge the logic, not unless I can come up with some creative justification. And when he comes up with some solution or suggestion, more often than not, that sparks a whole new series of ideas for me.

He's also a wargamer of the old school, by which I mean little lead figures painted in precise Napoleonic detail, snappy metal tape measures and those weird probability dice. Not polygonal dice, mark you. Though we do have plenty of those in the house, since he's also a long-standing fantasy tabletop gamer. We have the original AD&D books in paperback, I'll have you know. He's been the source of some highly creative magic use in my books, given the way the most devious gamers soon learn it's not what the rules say you can do that's important; it's what they don't say you can't do.

Add to that his four grades of black belt in Aikido and our years running a LARP club hereabouts and that's strategy and tactics covered, whenever I need to think about a fight, on whatever scale from hand to hand to full scale warfare.

That's how we met; mutual interests in fantasy gaming and martial arts. We're also both interested in castles and museums and history and stuff like that. We're just back from a few days in Norfolk where we went to various castles, stately homes and the Dragon Hall in Norwich where we must have baffled people with our cryptic comments about the uses I could make of various things in the fantasy trilogy I'm planning.

But he isn't a wordsmith. Never has been and never will be. Which is also to the good, I reckon, because he's never going to read what I write and think he could do better. I don't know how writers married to other writers deal with that kind of potential conflict. Though when he reads a first draft and thinks I can do better, he's tells me that in no uncertain terms.

All of which is only one set of reasons why I've never understood the cliche about writing being a solitary business.