How did we actually work? We met every day for coffee and talked. I wrote a very breezy and porous rough draft to get the basic story down, and in our daily process we role-played various characters and situations. I’d insert a blank sheet wherever we needed a chapter or more that we didn’t have, then Frank took a turn while we continued to meet daily to “talk story.” Frank’s draft came back with roughs of most of the missing chapters for me to rewrite, added some blank pages of his own, and we divvied up the blank pages to draft, then passed them to each other for rewrite. At that point we had a complete draft, and proceeded to go through it side-by-side, line-by-line. That usually generated a handful of new material that we wrote, rewrote, and double-checked side-by-side, line by line. Then we made copies for ourselves, for our editor and one for a safe deposit box downtown.

We proceeded on our solo projects with the momentum we’d worked up together, and we continued daily coffee, which served us well when Putnam/Berkley asked for a sequel. And then another. But those are stories for another time.

The End