I’ve always been a loner, and that includes my writing. Not only did it take 35 years for me to show anyone my work, but I like to have a draft fairly polished before I share a story even with beta readers. But one exception to that has been the fun of a collaborative story.

Back when my Goodreads YA Books group was more active (and before we lost Sammy Goode to the virus) we used to do some round-robin stories. One person would start, write a few paragraphs, and stop in the middle of a sentence for someone else to take up the thread. Those were a ton of fun – perhaps not the most perfectly coherent of literature, but a romp through fiction to write and read with friends.

I fondly remember the Goodreads M/M Romance group’s writing events, where readers put up prompts and anyone could try their hand at writing a short story. In that low-critique environment, several now-published authors took their first try at sharing their words with an audience. Sadly, the event got too big and overwhelming to keep up, but one of the things I love about M/M is how it pulls readers to become authors.

Next year, I’ll be doing my first actual co-authored story, as Gabbi Grey and I write the last book in Friends of Gaynor Beach Animal Rescue and give Arthur, the big-hearted shelter organizer, his HEA. We will see how Gabbi handles sharing the pages with me. You can meet Arthur in her recent release of book 1 – Love Furever and in my own book 2 – Impurrfections.

And lately, I’ve done a few shared stories–my most recent group contribution just released for free download on the FB group “Small But Mighty M/M Romance” – in this case, a group of us undertook to write a novella, one chapter each (well, I cheated, going last and did mine plus the epilogue.) There are several groups posting their stories right now (my group was the hurt-comfort trope). Part of the fun was that we were open to readers who hadn’t published, but wanted to take a shot at writing. My group had an unpublished author and a reader sticking her toes in the water for the very first time. If that sounds interesting to you, this was the second such event for the group, and I expect there will be more.

Publishing solo novels is rewarding but there’s a lot of fun to be had in the not-meant-to-be-perfect collaborations with folks who love the stories and the words the way I do.