Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing

EP 319 - Father and Daughter Collaborations with Ron and Brigid Collins

Aug 17, 2023

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Mark interviews the creative daughter/father team of Brigid Collins and Ron Collins about their collaborative writing.

Prior to the interview, Mark shares a brief personal update, comments from recent episodes, and word about this episode's sponsor.

You can learn more about how you can get your audiobooks distributed to retailers and library systems around the world at starkreflections.ca/Findaway.

In the interview, Mark, Brigid and Ron talk about:

The last time they saw one another (Feb 2020, just prior to the world "shutting down" for the pandemic)
Ron's entry into the world of professional speculative fiction writing in the mid 1990s
Why Ron feels that non-fiction can be a lot of fun to write
Ron's latest book On Creating (And Celebrating!) Characters
Brigid growing up and being witness to the dedication her father Ron had for his pursuit of writing
Singer, the first book Brigid wrote, which evolved into the four books of The Songbird River Chronicles in response to her father's prompting
Brigid's appreciation of having good parents at all the various stages of her youth and adulthood
The importance of being able to accept the other person's methods and style of writing as well as their ideas which can be totally different
Learning one's own writing styles from engaging with the other person's work
The incredible amount of fun that can happen with the right collaborations
The logistics of how they co-author together, for both short stories as well as a newco-authored book project
Finding the middle-ground between planning and discovery writing
Merging the worlds of the fairie realm with the baseball world based on the idea of a baseball diamond being built on top of a fairie ring
The fun of merging the tropes of these two types of worlds
The way the split of writing has evolved and gotten more complicated as part of writing the next books in the series
Leveraging Google doc and folders for the collaborations
Using Draft2Digital's payment splitting option for publishing
A collaboration that Ron is doing with his brother merging science fiction and the world of music
Advice they would offer to writers interested in getting into writing collaborations
And more...

After the interview Mark reflects on the "2+2 equally more than 4" awesomeness that can happen in a powerful collaboration.

Links of Interest:

Brigid Collins is a fantasy and science fiction writer living in Michigan with her wonderful wife and her irritating cats. (Just kidding, the cats are pretty wonderful, too.) Her fantasy series The Songbird River Chronicles and Winter’s Consort, her fun middle grade hijinks series The Sugimori Sisters, and her dark fairy tale novella Thorn and Thimble are available wherever books are sold. Her short stories have appeared in Fiction River, Feyland Tales, and Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar anthologies.

Ron Collins is a best-selling Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy author who writes across the spectrum of speculative fiction. With his daughter, Brigid, he edited the anthology Face the Strange. His short fiction has received a Writers of the Future prize. His short story “The White Game” was nominated for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2016 Derringer Award. He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering and has worked to develop avionics systems, electronics, and information technology before chucking it all to write full-time.

The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0