Habu Blog Post: Coauthoring

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Habu Blog Post: Coauthoring

In what must be the most complicated process in writing stories, I have coauthored with Sabb, the publisher of BarbarianSpy books, fifteen published novellas and anthologies under two pen names, Stephen Kessel, and Shabbu. What complicates this collaboration the most is that we’ve never met face to face, and when we began writing together, we were living a world away from each other, Sabb on the east coast of Australia and I on the east coast of the United States.

What has made our writing partnership work, I think, is that we both came into the arrangement as experienced writers; our writing styles are very similar; our publishing skills are compatible, with each of us having significant trained skills to contribute; and I had previously been in a long-distance coauthoring partnership in the mainstream. That our writing styles are quite similar, with a slight distinction that I write rougher sex and in a wider range of settings and time periods than Sabb, the more romantic writer, generally does, is key, I think. And it is on this basis that our cowriting began. Seeing the similarities, Sabb contacted me from across the world and proposed we try something together.

The first “something together” we tried was The Interview in the name of Stephen Kessel, which later became Velvet Interrogation in the name of Shabbu (Velvet Interrogation – Kindle edition by Shabbu. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.). Drawing from my experience in Middle East espionage and Sabb’s skills in depicting relationships, this novella showcases an American diplomat’s effort to evacuate Palestinian refugees from a Lebanese camp before a known Israeli attack on the camp is to occur. The plot zeros in on the diplomat’s sexual affair with one of those evacuees who later is in contention for the presidency in Lebanon and whose backers need to clean up his homosexual and espionage past. We were encouraged by the good critical reception of this book to go on to write others. A Rainbow Reviews 5-star (out of five stars) review of the book at the time, said: “This story is fascinating complex, set against an all-too-believable historical backdrop . . . . Against this backdrop, the contrast of Chet and Nabil’s love for each other shines through, a love strong enough to make the protection of the other man of primary importance, more important even than being together.”

With this book, our method of presentation was established. We each became one of the protagonists in the story, and we wrote chapters in succession that first dealt with the circumstances the other character had given in his perspective and then advancing the plot with the next set of circumstances. The work progresses in this fashion to a resolution. When we’ve reached the end, one of us—usually, me—goes over the whole manuscript, making it coherent and cleaning up stray threads and themes. We strive to make the transitions seamless and for whatever differences can be seen in perspective and voice from chapter to chapter be assigned to the different personalities of the characters rather than to our different writing styles. The comments we’ve received indicate we have largely succeeded in that.

Our most ambitious coauthoring has been The Forever Man (The Forever Man: Gay love and Mystery in Sydney – Kindle edition by Kessel, Stephen. Romance Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.), currently available under Stephen Kessel authorship. This gay romance, which won the 2018 Romance themed contest at the Literotica erotic story site, made the most of where Sabb and I were located at the time we wrote it. It was inspired by a trip I made to Melbourne (for the Melbourne Open tennis championships) and Sydney, Australia, and seeing the phrase “Eternity” rendered in chalk on the Sydney streets.

This story was inspired by two legends, one from the United States of the roses and bottle of cognac mysteriously left at the grave of Edgar Allan Poe on each of his birthdays since, supposedly, 1949 (the 140th anniversary of his birth—but probably only from the 1970s as a promotion of the cemetery he’s buried in) and one manufactured from observations I made on a visit to Sydney, Australia (near where Sabb was living at the time of the writing of this story) of the mystery of colored chalk renderings of the word “Eternity” on Sydney sidewalks. Sabb and I, changing the term to “Forever,” wove this new “legend” around those two concepts into a gay male novella.

Several of our coauthored works are anthologies of both separate and combined authored short stories on themed topics. These include Blind Date Tails (Blind Date Tails – Kindle edition by Shabbu, habu, Sabb. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.), Cigars! (CIGARS! – Kindle edition by Shabbu, habu, Sabb. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.), Angel in the Barn (stories spun from the same opening sentence) (Angel in the Barn – Kindle edition by Shabbu. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.), and Gayly Complicated (Gayly Complicated – Kindle edition by Shabbu. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.).