Marathon!

Grab your popcorn and hold on tight. We're gonna take you into the crazy world of marathons!!

Actually no, it's not that wild. It's pretty simple when you get right down to it. About a year ago, after taking over all of Allie's characters, Kiki and I realized that we had almost twenty stories all counted up. That wasn't much of a problem when neither of us had anything to do, but with school and work and friends and romance our lives were getting too busy to write the way we used to. We knew it wasn't going to get any easier either. Life was speed up, not slowing down. Something had to be done.

We remembered an idea we'd both pitched to Allie before. It was something we'd discovered by accident, actually. One night while Allie was offline (sometime in the first year of writing) Kiki and I decided to stay up all night and write. It was summer, Friday night, and what better things did we have to do? While we were writing, there was one couple in particular we were enjoying the most. A passionate scene between the two, discovering their feelings for each other in the midst of an argument. It was heated and intense. Emotions were high in this scene and neither of us could focus on any other characters. We agreed to let the other stories rest until the morning an spent the whole night just writing in one.

This was different than how we'd done it before because before we'd write each individual response as one was written for us. So we'd jump from story to story and scene to scene and character to character. What Kiki and I started realizing was that from story to story, our characters started sounded a lot a like... A LOT. The writing was mechanic and kind of emotionless and choppy. But when we wrote a whole scene out at once instead of jumping from story to story, the characters and their emotions and their personalities began to shine through. The writing was smooth from post to post and it was better! We suggested it to Allie. To this day, I can't explain why she hated the idea so much. But she turned it down. Made a big fuss about keeping things the way they were. So we didn't change anything. Until after she was gone.

On our own, Kiki and I could do the things that best worked for us. We started writing in marathons. With over twenty stories and counting it was a good thing too. We also started getting rid of stories. The ones that had repetitive characters or ideas, or the ones we just couldn't make work anymore.

Now we've cut the stories down to seven and it's still a lot to keep up with. But so far the marathons work really well!

We're still struggling with picking up where we left off story to story, but as we go on I'm sure that'll become easier too.