rolanni | Collaboration 101: How We Do It, Second Riff

It's funny how living in the country means that it's hard to take walks. When I lived in the Big, Bad City, I walked everywhere. When Steve and I first moved in together, we lived out in the 'burbs, though I thought it was the country (the difference between the 'burbs and the country is sidewalks),and we walked miles of an evening. When we lived in Waterville, we used to make the police nervous, because we would walk late at night, after the paper went to bed at midnight, and I'd walked home through the night-time downtown.

Out here in the True Country (no sidewalks for six miles in one direction -- no sidewalks 'til Bangor in another...) -- it's hard to walk. The shoulder is soft and stony, and the road traffic is cars that are driving too fast, and log trucks, ditto. In several seasons of the year, there are people of dubious good sense and/or sobriety, who are nevertheless armed, trekking in the woods and taking sound shots into the trees, toward and road or not makes no matter to them.

What does this have to do with collaboration, you ask?

Well, see, the reason Steve and I used to walk all those miles is because we were talking out what's known between us, and I may add, elegantly -- "Story Stuff."

"Story Stuff" is the measure of our household. Everything stops for "Story Stuff." We can be standing in the grocery store, studying on the virtues of spaghetti sauce, and if one of us says "Story Stuff," the shopping goes on hold until the scene/bit of dialog/forward plotting has been brought out and discussed. Our neighbors are used to it by now, and just shop around us. Summer people tend to keep their distance, even sending store employees down to fetch out what they want from the aisle we've taken over, rather than venture too near, themselves.

Now, what makes "Story Stuff" especially interesting is that -- we role-play. Mildly! No knife-fights in the breakfast food aisle. But certainly one or both of us have been known to adopt a Belligerent Stance from time to time in puruit of a plot point. Also? We talk about our characters as if they were, well, real. Because, to us, they are real. This can lead to some...fascinating assumptions on the part of those on the periphery of a "Story Stuff" conversation.

Like the time we were in -- was it Nashville? No, I'm wrong. We were in Louisville, for the NASFiC, back in Aught-Seventy-Nine. Steve and I are from Maryland, originally, and while my accent passed for "southern" up here before it got all scrambled around with Mainer and became, "Where did you say you were from?", in Louisville, they speak Southern.

So, picture this: Two ragged mid-coasters just in from a long drive, catching a cheap lunch at the HoJos before getting over to the con, and we're talking, in our fast, clipped, city accent, about a story. In fact, we're discussing a scene that some years later appeared in Agent of Change. What we're talking about, very earnestly, is the philosophy of weaponry and what sort of person would prefer a gun, and what sort a knife, in a given situation, and what might cause a person whose weapon of first choice is a blade to go instead for his gun, and --

We notice that our waitress is, well...hovering, within earshot. It's a funny hour, there aren't that many people in the HoJo's but we think maybe she's going off-shift and needs us to settle up before she can, or that the table needs to be made ready for the dinner setting, or --

Anyhow, we ask her if she needs the table.

"Oh, no!" she says, in that wonderful slow thing they've got going in the Real South. "No...It's just -- Y'all have such an interestin' family!"

Here ends the Second Riff.