Mary O'Gara

Mary: Sherrilyn had already written one book in the B.A.D. series before your collaboration on the next two books. Did you write a detailed “bible” for the series?

Dianna:
Nope. No bible…yet. I’d read the other books and sometimes go back through to cross reference information I don’t know when I’m working on the story. But I have someone who is building a bible based on a template I created to help both of us, because sometimes I’ll ask Sherri something and neither one of us know the answer without digging. We all know how annoying it is to read that someone had green eyes in one book and brown eyes later on. It’s generally the small details that hang us up, but those are the important ones, too.

Mary: Can you describe your role and the way you work with each of your collaborators?

Dianna: It’s hard to define a role since I feel I work equally with Mary and with Sherri.  Sometimes one of us will say “I’ll do the edits, you do X” then swap out the next time.  With Mary, we worked together through every step of building the programs and reviewing movies to fill out the templates for examples.  We traded off handling communications with our publisher at times, depending on who was the least busy.  Sherri and I see each other so much on the road and talk pretty much every day so, again, we work out what is the best time management.  I do handle the edits on all our BAD Agency books since I’m not dyslexic (Sherri is), which means we can send in very clean stories then only have to do maybe a day or two on edits.  On the other hand, Sherri takes on a lot of the marketing part that is very helpful for me since I don’t have a staff of people.  I don’t know that I’d be as happy working with someone who wanted to divide the work in some calculated way.  I think when both people in a collaboration are pulling in the right direction the work load feels evenly distributed.

Mary:  What qualities does it take to make a great collaboration.  Is friendship your glue or did the collaboration make the friendship close?

Dianna:  I warn writers who are friends to be careful about jumping into a collaboration.   Mary and I’d been working together teaching workshops for a while so we knew who we were going to be partnering with as far as business ethics, dependability, temperament and such.  I would have to say collaborating on  nonfiction would be easier than trying out fiction the first time, because there isn’t as much creative leeway.  When it comes to fiction – that’s a matter of serious trust.  I think in my and Sherri’s favor was the fact that we had become good friends, the kind that are honest with each other.  If we had tried this when we first met and had been friends for only 6 months it might not have worked so well just because it takes a lot of trust. Trust is something that is earned.  By the time we collaborated, Sherri and I had traveled internationally with each other and toured a lot.  If you tour with someone for 3 weeks straight, flying to a different city every day, less than five hours sleep a night and little food, you’ll either kill each other or know you can do anything together.  We’d gone through all that when she asked me to co-write.  And even knowing all that, our major concern – after the quality of the story – was that we did not lose our friendship.  But Sherri trusts me as a writer and I trust her judgment.  It’s equally balanced, which says a hell of a lot for Sherri since she’s the one with far more background in publishing than me.  Also, Pocket was all for us creating this high concept world filled with conspiracy.  I love the series and so appreciate the feedback we’re getting from readers.

Mary: Do you have multiple books in mind for each partnership or do you just take it one project at a time?

Dianna: Mary and I have other books planned, but we’re putting our fiction ahead of our nonfiction.  Mary has a major project she’s working on that we want to give her time to complete before we start another nonfiction project.  The BAD Agency series with Sherri  is arced over a lot of books right now.  The first major arc may hit around novel number eight.  Then the series will take a new turn.  That’s just one of the ways the series changed when we pushed it up to a romantic thriller.