The Bullet Catch:Murder by Misadventure,is a forthcoming title from Holiday House, co-authored by Amy Axelrod and David Axelrod. Here are David's thoughts on co-authorship with his mother.

The Bullet Catch: Murder by Misadventure (March 2015)
Blog Posting #1.....On Collaboration

Hello, readers.
I’m David Axelrod, co-author of “The Bullet Catch”. First, I’d like to thank you for reading this page. Not only did our book seem interesting enough to make you click a few links, you’re taking the time to learn a bit more about how it was made, which I think is really cool in return.

“The Bullet Catch” took a long time to write. By one reckoning it took nearly nine years. By a more practical accounting, it comes out closer to three. Three years for a writer to complete a book might not seem all that long to you. Most moderately prolific writers these days come out with a new book every three years or so. But then again most writers don’t write with their moms.

Before starting work on “The Bullet Catch” I had written some books under pseudonyms, but mostly I was a “working writer” – meaning I had a day job and wrote at night, trying to get published. When the chance came to write this book, I didn’t really deliberate how it would be to work with my mom. I was more excited about the opportunities of the story. And then the first three months passed, and then the fights started, and then I began questioning what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

I’ll admit to a lot of yelling. I was a difficult writing partner. I was stubborn and pushy. But in my defense, neither of us saw what extremely messy and inefficient method of writing we had created. Even my wife, who would interrupt my work only to say a few encouraging words and drop off a fresh supply of gummy worms, gently questioned our method before she retreated. Every section was passed between us dozens of times. We decided to alternate writing chapters more or less, based on an outline. Each chapter draft was sent to the other first for notes, then sent back to the first to make changes, then back to the other for their additions, then back to the original for smoothing over – and this was just for the first draft. You can see how this would quickly end up feeling like endless paper shuffling. And it did. I was doing all of my writing after work and on weekends. I was losing hope and couldn’t quite remember why I’d signed up for this project in the first place.

Part of the trouble was that we approached the book very differently. My mom had just finished her first novel, which was also historical fiction. She did far more research than me on the time period and the magicians that we were drawing upon. I focused more on the plotting of the book and the characters. It quickly became clear to me that we were interested in two different things. Or, in other words, the things that kept me working on the book in the early days when momentum was operating against us were not the things that held her interest. And unfortunately, I didn’t know how to reconcile or refocus that. I was thinking mainly about what kind of trouble I could get the characters into. My mom was getting wrapped up in the Golden Age of Magic, and the 1910s in general. She would email me pages of quotes and old newspaper articles and technical manuals and so forth. I would skim them and put them in a file. Then I would call her up, tell her that I didn’t care about so-and-so’s thoughts on fake thumbs and remind her that her pages were late. Doubly unfortunate, we both felt an obligation to keep on with the triple-pass-back writing method, thinking it was the most fair.

And then, quite suddenly, the book started to look good. With the bulk of the writing nearly over, the yelling (which, after a few more months, had become very loud and from both ends of the phone) had quieted down. We even switched places a bit. I conceded that so-and-so’s position on fake thumbs was actually pretty important. My mom was finally immersed in the adventure we had created. She would sketch new ways to spin off the plot in areas that were sticky. I practiced the sleight-of-hand tricks we described in front of my computer with a deck of cards. We finally hit a stride in the collaboration, just in time for it to be over.

By now maybe I’ve made it sound like “The Bullet Catch” is a Frankenstein novel printed with tears and bound with misery. I promise it’s not. It’s a lot of fun, loaded with excitement and characters you won’t forget. It pulls you into another time. It’s the kind of book I would have checked out of the library when I was a kid. But the best magic it holds, at least to me, is that it is the product of two people who worked really hard to make it seem like there was only one hand at work. And don’t worry about me and my mom – we’re still speaking.
- David

Blog Posting #2 January 20th, 2015. Amy Axelrod on research.