So, recently, Liana Mir made me insanely happy by asking if I was interested in collaborating with her on a story.

We’d been trading bits and pieces back for a while, mostly me inserting one of my characters into her storyworld and all the chaos that wrought, and before that we’d done a few… sillier pieces involving the Pets of the Unusually Gifted, but we decided to do something together, a whole story and not just a fanfic like one, an original one.

This made me… ecstatic.

You see, for many years, I had a coauthor. A best friend. We started writing together our freshman year in high school, and we built books over the next twelve years, several of them, some better than others, mostly with the same characters.

Then said best friend and I had a huge falling out, and I for my part decided that I could not trust her. For me, then, it was impossible to continue working with her. I didn’t talk to her, either.

Whether that was right or not, it still left me without a coauthor. Those years were… difficult. I won’t lie. It was something I think I needed to have happen because I might never have published Just a Whim if I hadn’t been forced to write on my own for something besides fanfiction. I learned a lot about myself after the collaboration was over, and a great deal of it, I didn’t like.

I made changes. I want to say I grew, but I’m still debating that.

Still, I missed having a coauthor. I’d tried to encourage a few others to work with me in the intervening times, but it never quite worked. I did do a fanfiction with a friend, but we both ended up hating the show by the time it was over, and she has not been able to write for years as well. Others were just not interested or even had bad motives for wanting to work with me.

So it has been a bit of a journey trying to find someone who even wanted to do a piece, and I haven’t even started on how complicated it can be to coauthor something or how difficult I am to work with.

I just am… very grateful, and in my excitement for the project, I think I wrote too much, speedy writer that I am. Still, it means more than I quite know how to say to have a coauthor again. It’s different from what I had before, but I like it. It means a lot to me.