Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see as a guest.

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Mindy: We're here with Liz Lawson and Kathleen Glasgow, and we're going to talk about their new series, The Agathas, as well as co-authoring and writing mysteries. So let's start with each of you just introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about what you write outside of this series that you have worked on together.

Kathleen: I write mainly contemporary, realistic teen novels when I'm not writing mysteries with Liz Lawson, and I tend to focus on somewhat sad books. And it was a joy to write The Agathas with Liz because we were determined to make it fun. What about you Liz?

Liz: Other than The Agathas, I have published one other book called The Lucky Ones. It is also like a sad emotional contemporary, and it came out April 7, 2020, which was the worst time ever. Kathleen and I have written two books and I'm working on a solo second book.

Mindy: I also write sad books. We're in good company. Yes, I also had a release right before the pandemic. That was a horrible experience. I do wanna talk a little bit about co-authoring. You each have written on your own, of course, and have careers outside of co-authoring. I also write underneath a pen name, and I do co-author with friends. And whenever people talk to me about that process, they're just endlessly fascinated by how it works, if it works, and also why you would decide to try it in the first place. So if you guys could talk to me a little bit about how you decided to come to a place where you wanted to work with a co-author and how you found each other.

Kathleen: Liz and I have the same editor, and we met online because I really loved The Lucky Ones. We were messaging for a while, and then we met in person. And we have the sort of same dark anxiety written sense of humor. So we got along really well. And when Liz's first book, The Lucky Ones, came out, as she said, during the pandemic, plans were scuttled. Things shut down. All the great things that she had hoped for for her book didn't happen, and we were messaging back and forth. I think that we were both feeling very isolated because of lockdown. What if they wrote something just for us that no one knew about to keep ourselves active and busy during lockdown? And to just write something for the pure joy of writing it, and Liz is a big Agatha Christie fan. And I like true crime. And we just started noodling back and forth over messages and text. What would we like to write that would be surprising and engaging for us to write? That would be different from our sad solo books? And we sorta settled on writing a fun mystery. It wasn't even like a question, like how we would co-write it. I think that we just naturally sort of slid into making a dual POV. Do you think that's right, Liz?

Liz: Yeah, we had a very, very, very brief conversation of like, "Should we do this from one point of view or two?" Writing from one POV sounded really daunting. So it just naturally ended up, very quickly, we agreed to write from two.

Kathleen: And then it would be easier to trade chapters that way. And also we agreed that we would write quickly. I feel like if you're not gonna do dual POV and you're both writing the main text, things can move slower, and I think that we agreed that we wanted to write very quickly to keep the pace fast and to challenge ourselves. It was sort of obvious from the get go that Liz would be Alice Ogilvie and I would be Iris Adams. It's not that we set down ground rules, 'cause we've never done this before, but we had an element of flexibility built in. Liz said, 'cause she's really great at plotting, "You know, we're gonna need a spreadsheet in the beginning 'cause this is a mystery and we have to hit certain beats and we have to drop red herrings," and that really helped us keep writing at a quick pace. If you're gonna co-write with someone, I think that you have to have similar personalities and that you do need to set your boundaries. And you have to agree in the beginning about how you're gonna write the book... Like how quickly. Are you gonna have a spreadsheet? And also you have to be flexible so that Liz could come into Iris' chapters and change Alice's dialogue, not the context of it, but how Alice would say it because she knows Alice better than me.

Liz: And I think this is something you learn, you start to learn, with having an editor, and probably even before that, just having like other people look at your writing. You have to learn how to sort of let go of what you've done, particularly when you're co-writing. You have to allow the other person into your work. I think some writers are very precious with their writing, and I can be that way too, but when you're co-writing, it's really important to be able to say, Okay, this other person is also involved in this. They have opinions, and they have a point of view. And it is important that both of our voices are heard.

Kathleen: 'Cause you're sharing a story. It's not just like the story I'm writing. Liz and I came up with it together. So you're sharing a story. You have to get along well enough that you're like, "You're right, I need to change that whole chapter or that whole paragraph. You're absolutely correct." What matters is the story - not my ego or Liz's ego.

Mindy: I think it's a real place of vulnerability too, because like Liz said, you have to be open to... Not just as a solo writer - criticism. Because you always have to be open to that 'cause you're going to get it no matter what. Like you were saying, whether you have an editor, beta readers, or whatever it is, criticism is always gonna be there. But when it comes to someone literally going in and changing some of your words, or smoothing some of your words, or changing some dialogue that you wrote of the character that isn't necessarily your prime POV, there's a real level of trust there, I think.

Kathleen: If you don't trust the person that you're writing with implicitly, and you really need to think about that before you start writing with them, you should not write with them at all. It's a collaboration. You need to have that implicit trust in another person that they can share this story with you and the writing of the story.

Mindy: I think that's very true. My experience with being a co-author also comes in with knowing what my strengths and weaknesses are. I have a hard time writing warm, positive, fuzzy emotions. I struggle writing it. I can write sadness. I can write anger. I could write frustration. I can write any of those darker spectrum emotions. Writing romantic feelings or thoughts that - even just friendship. I struggle writing those warmer, kinder, lighter, lovelier moments. And so in the books that I co-write under a pen name with my friends, we have another writer in the trio of us that we really rely on to write those things. So do you find yourself dividing the strengths and weaknesses as well?

Kathleen: We were committed to making this a fun book - a friendship wrapped in a mystery. Every time I would start drifting into much darker territory for Iris, even though her story line is a little bit dark, Liz would say, "Kathleen, this isn't your solo book. You got to pull way back. Come back from the darkness." And I was like, "Oh right, you're right. I can't go there because this isn't that type of book." I can't write romance to save my life. I cannot write a good romantic relationship, and so I was really relieved with this book that we were not going to have a central romance and that we were just gonna concentrate on these girls and their friendship.

Liz: I enjoy the romance, so I think I keep trying to veer us in that direction and our editor's kind of like, "That's not what the book is." And I'm like, "Well, but it could be... " The biggest thing is, because we do have these solo books, Kathleen and I have worked on other books during The Agathas process. And so, because Kathleen writes such sad stuff, like she said, I could always tell when she was working on her solo book. Because it would be like all of a sudden, Iris is being real sad and I'm like, "Umm, maybe we need to lighten her up just a smidge."

Kathleen: You write your first book in a bubble 'cause no one knows what you're doing. It's just you and the book. Can you write a book? Things change because there are contracts and deadlines and marketing, and it's hard to get out of that space then when you're writing every book after your first book and to get as close to your writing as you were when you were in a bubble. One thing that was really great about writing The Agathas with Liz was that no one knew. We didn't tell our agents or our editor. We just wrote it by ourselves, and it was back to being quite joyful and a really lovely writing experience where it was just me, Liz, Alice, and Iris.

Mindy: Yeah, there is something really, really nice about that. I don't share my pen name for a few different reasons. It would skew my brand terribly, 'cause my pen name is very silly and funny, and we have a wonderful time writing very, very, very silly things. And there is a freedom to that. I don't have to stick to any one thing. I don't have to worry about a brand in terms of my name - my real name on my other books. Now, because the pen name has started to take off a little bit I do have to worry about that brand now, but that's a lovely problem to have. So I wanna go back to something that Kathleen touched on a little bit. You're saying that you're both also writing your solo projects at the same time that you're co-authoring The Agathas together. Liz was saying that she could see when you had been working on your own project, that voice kind of slipping then into The Agathas and affecting those characters a little bit. So how do you as individuals keep those things separated in your minds?

Kathleen: Well, for me, it was realizing really quickly that I cannot write two books at once. Especially two books that were so different. I put a hold on that other book and concentrated on The Agathas, and that was a good learning lesson for me. I know that some people can work on several different things at once, but I learned that I cannot. So that was a good thing to learn.

Liz: For me, honestly, I've had a journey with my second book. It's changed and it's morphed many, many times. And I do think there was a brief moment back at the end of last year... We were writing the first draft of The Agathas and I was writing a draft of that book, and it just did not work very well. The voices were too similar. There was just a lot of crossover. I kept trying to put The Agathas into that book almost, and so I would say it's really hard to write two books at the same time. I know people do it. Clearly people write Adult and YA - like, different categories, and publish two books a year. But that is a skill, and I'm not sure I have it.

Kathleen: I don't know how people do it who have kids, either. 'Cause Liz and I both have kids. I can't write when my kids are in the house with me. It doesn't work, and I wanna pay attention to them. It's hard. Some writers are so prolific. It's almost disheartening when you see it on social media and you're like, "How did you write four books in two years? What is going on?"

Mindy: Well, it is difficult. People ask me all the time, "How you do everything that you do?" And I always say that it's at the expense of my mental health and personal relationships. And that's a joke, but it's also not. Like, that's not a joke. Making a living as a writer is almost impossible.

Kathleen: It is almost impossible. I've always still had a day job, and I remember when my kids were smaller. They were sharing the bed with me 'cause they were little and sitting up between them with my laptop on my knees, writing in the dark to meet a deadline, because sometimes you just do what you have to do. If you're writing and you have that deep desire to write, sometimes it happens when you least expect it. You'll do anything to make it happen.

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Mindy: I wanna talk specifically about writing mystery. Co-authoring a mystery. So specifically with The Agathas, did you plot and plan ahead of time, or did you guys kind of write and discover what was going to happen?

Liz: We definitely did our best to plot it out because I think we both knew that writing a mystery is a whole different ball game than writing the emotional contemporary books. It's hard in a different way, right? With the books that we had written before, at least for me, I know it was so hard because of the subject matter. Putting yourself in that emotional space while you're writing can get really challenging after a while. For a mystery, it's almost the opposite. The emotion is still there and the characters still hopefully drive the plot, because I think those are the more interesting books, personally. There are certain things that you have to happen in your plot. You have to hit certain beats, and so plotting was very important to us. We had a whole spreadsheet on Google Docs where we tried to kind of plot out each chapter. I would say for the first book, we stuck to our outline pretty closely. Don't you think, Kathleen?

Kathleen: Yeah, we did, and it was very helpful for me 'cause I'm mostly a pantser. It was very helpful to have everything laid out in front of me so that we would know the direction we were going in and what had to happen in the next chapter. We left a little room for... Well, maybe that's not gonna work. Or little things that could happen in individual chapters, and then I would get to text Liz something like, "Oh, by the way, Iris is jumping out this window. Or this has to happen to Alice in the next chapter, because I did this." And Liz would be like, "Oh, that's fine." We had to plot it out beforehand because it is a mystery, and we had to know what things were gonna happen when and how we were going to insert them into the plot. And then we had to make sure that we had enough twists and where they would appear. It was good to plot it out, and I'm interested to see at the end of writing the solo book that I'm writing, having actually plotted a book now rather than being a pantser has affected my process of writing by myself.

Liz: Did you plot your solo book?

Kathleen: No, 'cause I had written a draft of it before we started The Agathas. As I'm revising, I did make a spreadsheet of things that I needed to...

Liz: Wow! Look at you.

Kathleen: I know. I feel terrible 'cause you know, I come from a poetry background. So I'm used to just going off and so this is a whole different world for me.

Mindy: Yeah, I also am a complete and total pantser. That can be difficult when you're co-authoring and one of my other co-authors claims to not be a pantser, but she will occasionally just very, very randomly have a character jump out a window or... She has even killed characters that we were not anticipating them dying. And then you open up the shared document and it's like, "Okay, so you killed the character we were going to use for something else."

Kathleen: Those things would happen to Liz and I too. I'm the worst at it 'cause I would insert something and say, "You know, you don't like this one character, but make them integral to the last twist of the books."

Mindy: I think there's a lot of strength to be found in plotting and then leaving room for discoverability.

Liz: Yes, I very much agree.

Kathleen: I think that's where the flexibility in co-authoring comes in again. You just really have to let what's gonna happen, happen if you think it's gonna make the book better.

Mindy: Once you had finished writing your draft, how did you then just approach your editor and say, "Hey, the two of us wrote a book together."

Liz: Well, I'll let Kathleen tell this 'cause she loves this story.

Kathleen: This is where I found out exactly how devious Liz is and how like her character, Alice, she is. I didn't tell my agent. We didn't tell our editor. I was just happy as a little bumble bee writing this book with Liz. And we got to a certain point, and I was like, "Well, this was really fun, but I gotta go back to my solo book now. Because I gotta revise this." And Liz was like, "I already told my agent. I showed it to her and she loves it, and she thinks that we should show it to our editor. She thinks it's gonna be really great." And I was like, "What?" I had to write a very sad email to my agent, 'cause I didn't tell my agent, and I didn't know how my agent would react that I had written something quite different than I usually write. The subject line was, I'm sorry. I didn't know what to say.

Liz: I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I wrote a book.

Kathleen: And my agent just called me and she's like, "Are you leaving me? What's going on? I don't even wanna read this." And I was like, "No, I just... You should read the whole thing 'cause I just wanna let you know I was writing this book with Liz and you don't know anything about it. And also it's like a mystery and it's kind of fun and it's completely different. And I know we hadn't talked about it, and so... I'm super sorry. And please don't be mad at me." Our editor also was like, "You did what? What now? The both of you? Hey wait." She read it, and she was like, "I love this, and I think it's a great move for the both of you." I think that Liz and I are really lucky in that respect that our agents and our editor were on board with us making the writing change. Because sometimes agents and editors are like, "No, you have to stick with what we represent you for. We're not into that other totally different thing that you're writing." We were really lucky that everyone on our team was on board and really liked it.

Liz: I assumed everyone would 'cause I liked it. So.

Kathleen: It can be a little bit difficult once you've written a few books that are one type of book to suddenly make a switch. And sometimes your agents are like, "I can't represent that," and sometimes your editor's like, "Oh God, no. I don't want that at all." We were quite lucky.

Mindy: Yeah, well, that's why I write under a pen name because I can be very silly and have a fun time and be a little bit ridiculous, and that is not what I write underneath my real name. And so when people meet me in real life and they've read my books, and they expect me to be a certain way. And then they meet me and I'm actually pretty funny and light-hearted, and I have a good time. And I'm quite silly. And they're just like, "Oh, this was not what I was expecting." So...

Kathleen: Are they... Mindy, are they like, "Wait, why are you smiling? You wrote The Female of the Species. What? This isn't you."

Mindy: They expect me to show up wearing all black and carrying around like a bag of detached testicles or something.

Kathleen: Right?

Mindy: I think the biggest reality check - it actually works the opposite direction - it's people that have known me my whole life. And I still live where I grew up, and it's a really small town. And I've got a super happy, normal, very Midwestern farming family that I'm from. Everybody knows everybody, and then I got published and people read my books and they're like, "Oh my god. Are you okay?" I very often, I can't tell you how many emails I have received where the subject line is literally like, "Are you okay?"

Kathleen: That's my favorite thing to do a response video of on TikTok. Anything I post inevitably three people are like, "Hey, are you okay?"

Mindy: Last thing. Why don't each of you share where listeners can find you online and where they can find The Agathas and then your individual books - the titles of your solo books as well, and also the sequel to The Agathas, which is coming up.

Liz: You can find The Agathas pretty much anywhere books are sold - bookshop, Barnes & Noble. There's a Barnes & Noble special edition, which was really exciting, and it has a very beautiful pink cover. The next Agathas is coming out May 31st of 2023. You can find me online on Twitter at LzLwsn. I'm also on Instagram at the same handle. I'm on TikTok on the same handle, except I'm currently locked out of my account. So I'm trying to deal with that.

Kathleen: The Agathas sequel, which is called The Night in Question, does come out in May 2023. So we're very excited about that. And you can get my books, Girl in Pieces, How to Make Friends With the Dark, and You'd Be Home Now, anywhere. If you wanna support my local indie store, it's called Mostly Books Arizona. So order there, and if you'd like it signed, put a note in the comment box. And I'm on social media at kathglasgow on Twitter, Miss Kathleen Glasgow on Instagram, and then Kathleen Glasgow on TikTok. You can always go to my website, Kathleen Glasgow books dot com and send me an email if you wanna ask me if I'm okay.

Mindy:     Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.