I had written two books and started the third when I remembered the extreme isolation I was in for. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I didn’t want to go it alone again, and I had heard somewhere that to do comedy well, it takes two.
Anne was in my writing group, and I had always admired her style and black sense of humor. I thought I would ask her to read my start and see it she would join me in this comedy of expat American in Paris. Anne is an expat Brit who’d been living in Paris for the last thirty years.
She read the first couple of chapters and called to say yes and stunned me by saying her husband worked in the think tank I had described in the initial chapters. I was in Paris at the time, living on Boulevard Beausejour and we began meeting daily, pounding it out together in my computer.
The time came two months later that I had to head back to the States and we agreed to meet on Skype. It became the 24 hour a day book. While I slept, Anne wrote and vice versa. I am an early riser by nature, but in my excitement to see what Anne had written while I slept, I sort of stopped sleeping. It was really exciting and we finished the first draft in three months. Then had a couple of years of re-writing and editing.
I loved writing with Anne. We discussed our characters as we would our friends, and she was as intimately involved with them as I was! Neither of us was ever bored with our characters and we would imagine them saying the same things. We would intuitively know what each character would say in the situations we put them in. It was amazing. I loved every minute of it.
We wrote another one quickly after BOULEVARD BEAUSEJOUR and tried a group book with other anglophones living in Paris. But our first offering is this one. We hope you like it and will want more of our collaboration.