WRITING AND PARTNERING

Kay and I celebrated our 50th Anniversary not long ago! It seems impossible to have been married for over half a century to such a wonderful and talented woman, but it happened by the grace of God.

Since we both have been spending almost all of our available time on writing novels, it got me wondering about how important writing has been in our marriage. The answer is very! Here’s how.

WRITING ABOUT EACH OTHER.  Soon after we got engaged, I wrote a poem for Kay entitled The Passion of the Nero Stallion. About fifteen or twenty years ago, I had a beautiful dream about her and wrote my remembrance of it in The Lady and the Tower. I also wrote a fictional—but with some reality-based elements— novelette about Kay in college called In Praise of Mrs. White (DiBianca means “of white”). My first novel, Laser Trap: A Quincy U Suspense, is being published by Iron Stream Fiction and is scheduled to be released on June 7, 2022. The lead characters, Lana Madison and Dan Butler, were somewhat modeled after the two of us.

Kay tells me she also models some of her ideas and characters on things we have discussed and my personal characteristics. In that case I’m not sure why acquisition editors aren’t throwing her stuff out the window! On the contrary, her first novel, The Watch on the Fencepost, along with two subsequent members of the Watch Series have sold thousands of books!

HELPING EACH OTHER IN OUR NEW WRITING CAREERS.  We help each other continually with our manuscripts and in many other ways. Here are some of them.

Plot discussions.  Making the story compelling is the most important part of writing fiction. We constantly discuss aspects of each other’s drafts. Our spouse’s fingerprints are all over our final work and that much better for it.

Pre-editing and reviewing. We pre-edit, i.e., read, correct, and critique, every version and subversion—Wow, that’s funny—of each other’s manuscripts before submitting them to our editors, who are most talented.

Collateral aspects of writing. We go together to writing conferences, writers group meetings, book signings, and other writing-related functions, assisting one another as needed. We help each other to develop our websites, blogs, marketing, ads, and other means of book promotion. Kay submitted a finished novel for publication first and is a computer scientist as well, so she’s helping me more than I her at this point. Kay might disagree.

Cross-pollination. We are continually passing on to each other new information we come across about writing conferences, contests, books, articles, and similar things.

This should give you an idea about how much it helps to have a spouse or other relative or just a friend with whom you can partner in your writing endeavors. Good Luck!

Thank You, Kay, and here’s to the future!

Frank