Things We Do with Friends

Things we do with friends:

Walk. Eat. Laugh. Cry. Talk into the wee hours of the night. And sometimes? We write books with them. Which is what I did with Mary Crockett.

Mary and I first met in the mid 1990s when our friends Mike Van Haelewyn  and Lisa Applegate asked us if we wanted to teach a creative writing class for teens at the Salem YMCA. Mary brought the poetry. I brought the fiction. And we started working in the evenings with a group of kids who refused to believe that the color spectrum included anything but black.

We both had lengthy commutes for our jobs, so after the class ended (or maybe while it was still going), we started giving each other writing exercises to think about during our respective drives. Later we even toyed with writing a romance novel, put together during said commute. And though we got some lovely feedback on the first three chapters that we sent to Harlequin, we abandoned the project before our protagonist ever learned the truth about that FBI agent.

But we did finish a project we’ve been working on (and off) for the past three years. And now we are happy to report to that said project, Dream Boy, is going to be published in July 2014 by Sourcebooks. It will be the first young adult novel for each of us. And, of course, for both of us. (Note: Young readers of my previous books, please wait a few years before you tackle this one. I promise to have more for you soon!)

I’m sure I’ll post a lot about what it’s like to work on a story with someone else. As we get closer to our pub date, I will perhaps even fill you in on The Bloody Chin Controversy of 2012. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to a summer trip to Blacksburg, where Mary and I will get to take some publicity shots together. Which, let me tell you, is much more appealing than taking them by myself. I will not even let the fact that Mary used to be a hand model intimidate me. (Though there’s a good chance that in the photos, my hands will be behind my back.)