I wanted to write every single day — to recapture a literary life schedule of wake up, drink coffee, read the news, write for 3 hours, take a walk in Forest Park, edit what I had just written, have a glass of wine, read and then after a hour or so of something mindless, head to bed. Sleep, repeat, sleep, repeat, be happy, repeat.

It didn’t work out that way because Clark was (understandably) not quite ready for my Teutonic scheduling, which I sprang on him with no warning whatsoever, expecting him to simply “get it.” Instead, relaxation and reconnection were more on his radar. Inevitably, that created conflict. (Jeez, seems like that’s all I write about).

By Monday, we’d had some clearing-of-the-air fights and agreed to drive down to Astoria, soak in a claw foot tub, sleep (with associated tumbling), watch Alvin and the Chipmunks (ALVIN!), and gaze at the enormous ocean tankers from Korea, Greece and China magnificently navigating the treacherous Columbia River bar at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, then gliding past  our balcony all the while being buzzed by U.S. Coast Guard helicopters, salmon fishermen, lone ocean kayakers, sea lions and gulls. I still thought we would write every day.

Instead, we took a sunrise walk on Sunset Beach where a flock of birds swarmed us like a bee hive and, nearby, a middle-aged man went airborne, self-propelled by a kite blown full with a mini-rooter blade hoisted on his back.

Close to the end of those few days, we were finally, finally, talking about the backstory of Grigori Rurik, our newest Russian Vampire, and sketching out the label design of  the aseptic packages of blood needed for the survival of our other do-good but now starving Vampire faction.

In the middle of this, I learned my dear friend Najwa Najjar had been accepted to the Sundance writers lab for her latest (awesome!) screenplay titled Eyes of a Thief set in Palestine. She suggested I join her in Utah, we would hang out and I could schmooze a bit with the producing tribe to maybe spark interest in The Cowboy and Vampire. The timing is not quite right now but it spurred my thinking about marching ahead to get this book made into a movie. Cowboys, vampires, Armageddon, religion, anarchy and eternal love. It’s got blockbuster written all over it, I am certain.

But I digress.

Back to the writing. This past week, now in hindsight, I can see we traded quotidian work life for quotidian “other life” — family, friends, cooking, fighting, loving, rekindling our relationship and the like. We learned again — because we learn it over and over again and yet never seem to apply the lesson — that when we are not on solid relationship ground, writing together does not work. But the beauty of writing with a partner is that because both of us were committed to getting to the place where we could write together, we were motivated to work through the relationship obstacles.

By Thursday, after the week off was pretty much over, we were finally rocking! Better late than never. We wordlessly ditched my evil Von Schlieffen planning and settled on a “whatever works” approach. And it did … work, I mean. By Sunday, we performed the ultimate writing love-act: we merged our words. We took his 3,670 words and merged them with my 3,854 words and, lo and behold, we have four pretty decent chapters written in first draft. (Note, I had more words).

A comment on process: If you link back to earlier posts, you’ll see we came up with an outline. Clark wrote the prologue, chapters 1 and 3, and I wrote chapters 2 and 4. He took the cowboy chapters, I took the vampire chapters. He is creating a story line about how two people who are very different (a cowboy and a vampire) approach having a child together in a breathtakingly beautiful but brutally lonesome place like rural Wyoming while under relentless threat from warring Vampires (and what does that metaphor represent to you?). I am writing the scenarios in which Elita and Grigori struggle to justify a new framework for Vampire self-governance to balance the global power between evil and good.

Each of us knew where the other was going in terms of the narrative arc, and when we merged (oh, it was so hot), it actually worked. It needs a significant amount of editing, no question. But the merge resulted in a very decent start on this sequel.

And as Clark observed tonight: “You know, writing together means we will be done with a first draft in half the time, and will write double the books.”

Yes it does. Good math, Clark! It also means that our relationship has a purpose beyond the quotidian, which, for better or worse, it appears he and I need. Go on. Break through your own daily life and merge, merge, merge.

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