This week LUV's spotlighting writing duo Erin McRae & Racheline Maltese. They are award-winning romance authors creating happily every afters for difficult people with complicated lives. Their contemporary royal romance, A Queen from the North, was the overall winner in Library Journal’s 2017 Indie Ebook Awards. Their polyamorous romance, The Art of Three, was named a winner in the 2017 Rainbow Awards LUV: Tell us about writing as a team. How did you meet and when/why did you decide to write together? How do you write as a team? What are the pros and cons? EM: We met over the internet ages ago, but first met in person ten years ago and almost immediately began writing together. I don't think we ever had a formal conversation about it. We just kept having ideas and writing them down and then at some point were like "hey, let's make a book." And that was ten novels and over a dozen novellas and shorter stories ago. RM: I think people tend to assume that Erin and I each take on certain characters or alternate writing chapters. That’s not what happens. All of our writing is done in Google docs and we just write and rewrite and edit over each other. It’s very rare that when a book is done we have any idea who wrote what. Our narrative interests are very tightly aligned and our agreement since we first started writing together is “the story is the most important thing.” Ego has to get out of the way. The story tells us where to go, the commitment to the characters tells us where to go. EM: For us, I don't think there are any drawbacks to writing together. Having a creative partner totally eliminates the solitude of creation. Not only do I get a built-in cheerleader, I get someone as intimately interested in and invested in this world we share in our heads. I don't know if I'd have the motivation or creativity to do this all by myself.

Posted by LUV Team at 2023-07-17 19:01:26 UTC