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What is it like to be a husband and wife team collaborating on an urban fantasy series? Ilona Andrews sits down and tell us.

A lot of people ask Gordon and me what it’s like to write together.  I think secretly some of them hope for fireworks: do we throw things at each other when we disagree on plot points?  Does one of us have to sleep on the couch after an argument over character development?

The short answer to these questions is simple: collaborating on a book is a lot like marriage. 

How was your marriage?  Were your family and friends happy for you?

Let me tell you: nobody wanted us to get married.  Nobody wanted us to be together, period.  We met in college and when my advisor found out about my getting a boyfriend, he exploded.  He threatened to “put me on the first plane to Russia”, which was not an idle threat since he controlled my scholarship and I had literally no money.  He did cut my scholarship, when I refused to abandon Gordon, leaving me effectively stranded.
My mother, upon hearing that the love of my life was a twenty four year old ex-sailor fresh from four years in US Navy and Gulf war, made this small choking noise on the phone.  In her defense, most mothers would have.

My boyfriend’s aunt and uncle (who were his surrogate parents for most of his life) are very religious people.  When they found out that their nephew’s idea of a perfect woman is an eighteen year old Russian heathen who no doubt was after him so she can get her citizenship, they promptly blasted both of us to smithereens for living in sin.  (By the way, they adore me now because I produced two lovely grandchildren.  And I finally got my citizenship a year ago.  It only took me eleven years…)

On our wedding day, my mother told me over the phone, “You can come home.  Right now.  We’ll sell the car and get you a plane ticket and you can be home in a week.”  This same woman sent me off to America to make a better life for myself with nothing more than $60 to my name.  “We’ll sell the car and you can come home”!  She must’ve been in a state of complete panic.

My husband’s Uncle/Father leaned to him as I was walking toward them in my wedding dress and said, “Listen, boy, you don’t have to do this.”  To which Gordon said, “Yes, I do – she is over there, walking to us.”  Years later he admitted to thinking, “What are you going to do, Batman?  Throw a smoke grenade and carry me off the Court House steps in a Bat Glider?”  That’s right - we got married on the steps of Court House, because no church in the area would have us.  We didn’t attend any congregations on regular basis and mountain churches tend to be a bit distrustful of outsiders. 

It’s a blessing only one side of the family was present at the wedding.  If my parents had been there, they might have bride-napped me.

We did get married, but we had no support, financial or emotional, from either of the families.  Combine that with a crushing debt and the need to support our children as our little band of outcasts grew and you will have an interesting marriage.  We knew early on that we could rely only on each other.  Nobody else would have us.  It was sink or swim as a team.  We learned to compromise.  We learned to compensate for each other’s weaknesses.

That same approach enables us to collaborate on writing.  We work out the plot together, although most of it actually consists of Gordon’s ideas.  My plot ideas mostly amount to, “Oooh, let’s put a monster here and he can lather up some spit!” I was bemoaning my word count limit to one of my writer friends, telling her that if I had an extra ten thousand words, I could put the extra world building in, and she quipped, “If you had extra ten thousand words, we’d get two more fights.”  She is absolutely right.

I write the first draft, with constant feedback from Gordon.  And I do mean constant.  I get stuck with no light at the end of the tunnel.  We go into detail on character development and motivations.  We choreograph fight scenes (we had to enlist the children for the last one and they were highly amused.)  When the draft is done, Gordon goes over it and returns it to me with corrections and additional scenes.  I go over it and return it to him for a final pass.

We rarely fight about writing issues.  We do have disagreements.  Occasionally one of us will dig our heels in and refuse to listen to reason.  We have a spat, cool off, and return to the issue an hour later.  But even when these arguments take place, neither of us takes it personally.  Professional disagreements are just that – professional disagreements, removed from our marriage. 

Left to my own devices, I will obsess over a single scene and never move forward.  Without me, Gordon’s stories would remain locked in his head.  Our collaboration works for us and we hope you will enjoy its result.