Debbie Viguié taks about the third installment of Latchkeys, coming in April:

People often ask me what it’s like to write with other people.  Frankly, it can be a nightmare or a rhapsodic dream. Writers tend to see their work as their children and get very upset when anyone else messes with their babies.  A writing collaboration, though, can be like happy, constructive co-parenting.  You make decisions together for the good of the family.  When this works well it leads you to have a stronger final product.

Latchkeys from the start has been a very different kind of product.  Instead of sharing the actual effort of co-writing each story all of us involved have merely shared the effort of creating the universe and setting up the premise for each story.  From my point of view creating the world is one of the best aspects of writing.  It is much more exciting than the actual job of putting the words on paper to tell the story.

With as many writers as we had we suffered from a wealth of ideas as we got this project going.  Compromise was the name of the game as we decided everything, including what to name the characters.  Individual egos were set aside and majority rule almost always applied.  That’s what led to us creating the name HiveMind.  We are all worker bees serving the collective.  It can be exhilarating and at the same time frustrating.  I for one, argued strenuously that Jeremy be named Biff.  You can see that I lost.  Ultimately that was okay, though, because the group’s voice was heard.  Plus I got to reference him once having the nickname of Biff in my story.  (Just in case you thought writers ever let anything go easily!)

Deciding who would write what stories was actually one of the simpler tasks as I recall.  I have a tendency to write very dark fiction so when it was clear that story number three needed to be something a bit creepy I was happy to hop up and down in my chair and say, “Me, me, me!”  Of course, I had to type that a few seconds later since none of my colleagues could see or hear me.  Which is probably a good thing.

One of the advantages of being a writer in the modern age is near instantaneous communication with co-authors.  This can be especially helpful when you’re scattered all over the world as this group is.  The only real frustration is time zones and figuring out when someone isn’t responding because they’re asleep.  When great ideas are blossoming forth in rapid fire succession and you’re sitting on the edge of your seat to see what others are going to say next at some point you have to be rational and tell yourself that people need to eat, sleep, or take time to work on other projects.  That’s just life in the Hive.

As promised, the second installment in the Latchkeys series, The Ugly Little Bloke, went on sale this past Sunday. The story, by yours truly, furthers the adventures of these characters and you’d be doing yourself a disservice not to try this out.

We’re starved for feedback so if you’ve this or our first piece, Unlatched by Steven Savile, drop us a note.

Steven Savile had no idea what he ignited. There were a baker’s dozen of us chomping at the bit to write something, anything, and when he suggested we create our own project, we went crazy. He gave us his Latchkeys idea and we glommed on to it, forming a cooperative that has gone on to sub-divide and create a few more projects, but the heart and soul remains Latchkeys. Once we agreed on the premise, we build a bible, populating it with characters and once we decided which ones we liked, we began pitching ideas.

I imagine this is very much like a writers’ room in television, just a virtual version with members contributing ideas from across America and Europe. We all tossed in ideas and kicked them around, seeing which ones excited the others and which ones might make the cut. Just about three years ago, we had roughed out the idea of a thirteen episode season that brought us to particular point, to be followed by a second season that went somewhere else, and so on. Thirteen writers, thirteen episodes…this just might work.

We began voting for the premises we most liked while Steve began assembling the batting order considering some of us have more writing experience than others and we wanted to support one another while still offering some commercial power at the beginning and end. Clearly, Steve would go first and if you read Unlatched, then you know he did a great job setting the tone and introducing readers to the world.

The second installment needed to go further, focusing on some of the other members of the cast, deepening the readers’ understanding of the premise and sowing the seeds for future character arcs and mysteries. We settled on a story taking us from the house to a fantasy land, but one just a little skewed from the typical locales.

As we voted on the premise, Steve tapped me to bat second, making us the table setters before the heavy-hitters came to bat. He knew I could write in other peoples’ worlds and could do so while adding a little something of my own. Once we voted on the premise and I was pencilled in, things seemed fine.

I finally was given the green light to write my tale over the summer which was delivered to the others in August. I got some great feedback making the story stronger and then Steve gave it an editorial polish to make certain it closely matched the lead off tale.

In just a few weeks, you will see for yourself what I managed in The Ugly Little Bloke, available March 6.  For now, just feast on Vance Kelly’s really fun cover.