Interview with Anna Smith-Spark and M.R. Fletcher (IN THE SHADOW OF THEIR DYING)
Writing is a traditionally solitary business with authors locked in garrets, wordsmithing in isolation before sharing the fruits of their creative endeavours with a few beta-readers or editors. However, there are some team efforts in the world of writing, for example last year’s release, Z Kraken Rider is co-authored by David Estes and Dyrk Ashton, while rumour has it that Mazarkis Williams – author of The Emperor’s Knife is in fact an amalgam of Helen Mazarkis and Mark L Williams, while R.A.Sinn who wrote A Second Chance for Yesterday is actually the pseudonym of a pair of siblings, Rachel Hope Cleves and Aram Sinnreich.
The division of labour in such collaborative efforts is not always easy to see. For some it is a matter of passing the narrative back and forth in alternating chapters, like the games of consequences that I used to play as a child (apparently it’s a parlour game, FFS – didn’t realise I was that old – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_(game) )
For others it is a matter more of providing a close editorial oversight and plot direction, combined with detailed execution by the wordsmithing partner.
Wherever the collaboration falls along the continuum between those extremes, there is a challenge in ensuring that the outcome is in some way ‘more’ than the sum of its parts, more than each author might have achieved individually.
The Fantasy-Hive is delighted to be joined by two established speculative fiction authors who have put their grim heads together in a dark tale of a city under siege. You can read more about In the Shadow of Their Dying in my review for the Fantasy Hive here, but for this post the authors have kindly agreed to give us some insights into their own particular collaborative process.
As a trigger warning, given the grim-dark inclinations of both our guests, the f-bomb count in this piece may be slightly higher than usual, but we have eschewed the fig-leaf approach of asterisks!
In the Shadow of their Dying is out today! You can order your copy here
- How did the collaboration come about? Who came up with the idea?
Anna Smith-Spark (AS): I think it was originally commissioned by Adrian Collins at Grimdark Magazine. He’s a big fan of both of us, and decided we should collaborate on something.
M.R.Fletcher (MF): We started writing this way back in 2018 (I think) and I can’t remember how I ended up in the basement. Adrian “The Godfather of Grimdark” Collins suggested that we co-author a novella and so we did. I have no idea who came up with the idea. Being worshippers of the Lords of Chaos we launched into writing with little thought as to how it would all end. I wanted to write a pretty-boy assassin and Anna wanted to write a demon and after that it was a mad and bloody tumble downhill.
AS: I can’t even remember why I wanted to write a demon.
- From your perspective what was the elevator pitch that you brought to the writing of “In the Shadow of their Dying.”
MF: Writing with Anna is fucking terrifying! She’s a prose monster and I’m…I don’t even know what I am. Weirdo with grotty little stories? Dunno.
Anyway. Never one to shy from a challenge (which is a lie; I hate difficult things) I thought this would be a great opportunity to learn. I knew whatever came out of this would be monstrous and insane.
AS: I was thrilled to get to collaborate with Mike! Thrown in Grimdark Magazine as well, and it was the perfect opportunity. The pitch was: my favourite publisher would pay me to collaborate with an author I hugely admire. That’s like the best pitch ever!
Terrifying???? No!!! I had a brilliant time writing with Mike. He’s rather better at actually having some kind of plot and narrative drive than me, it was cool taking up what he’d done and seeing where it led me. It was pitched as working more like the writers room for a TV series, lots of room to take what one episode had done and go further with it or push back against it. That sounds (and was) really interesting to work with, I get surprised a lot by my characters’ actions or reveals sometimes, but having sections of plot and characters’ decisions taken completely out of my hands and then being able to respond to that sounded a lot of fun and a challenge – if a bit mind-boggling at times.
- How much of the plot/storyline did you plan or decide on in advance, how much of it evolved organically with the story?
AS: Umm… I think we had a very rough initial brief and …. Went for it. Literally like a game of consequences. Then had Adrian almost crying at the lack of continuity and total chaos that resulted.
The plot actually wasn’t an issue – we had the brief initial outline, and as I said it was brilliant seeing where the story went and responding. But the timeline continuity issues were a bitch. Adrian: ‘Guys … someone was eating lunch … then when they finished lunch they went outside to meet another character whom we last saw heading to the rendezvous point complaining it was midnight and raining… then someone else turned up and commented on what a lovely sunny morning it was and suggested a couple of hours’ killing before a quick lunch break…ummm?’ Us: this is art, man. Don’t bother us with trifles…
MF: Uh…Not a fucking clue. We started years ago, before Covid broke what little sanity and social skills I had left. I think that means it probably evolved (devolved? Spiraled into a dark pit of insanity?) organically. We’d write a chapter and lob it back at the other writer and let them deal with whatever mad shit we’d come up with.
You ever tried to follow a chapter by Anna Smith Spark?!
Jesus.
- How did you decide to divide the work between the two of you and how did the writing process go?
MF: As I recall we each had a character or two we wanted to write and that decided the story. We had characters instead of plot, which is frankly the way I prefer to write. Plots are for people who like nice neat stories. Letting your characters decide what happens is filthy and awkward and usually ends up taking you somewhere unexpected. It’s closer to life.
AS: Wot he said. I never have much idea where my own stories are going (if anyone’s read my short stories, they’ll agree a charitable description would be few and far between and usually somewhat plot-light). I often find myself having to respond to reveals or events I didn’t know about, so having someone else put them in was just an extension of that. As I said, part of the interest was in the way it would be written in that episodic manner.
- How far did you find your initial ideas/thoughts got shaped or altered by what your collaborator was producing?
AS: Weirdly, I got the sense we both knew where it was going. I often say my writing suddenly reveals itself to me as a whole thing, I can almost walk through it, and very weirdly this seemed to happen here … There are very few people apart from Mike I think that could have happened with. I’d be very afraid writing collaboratively that I’d end up yelling at the other person for not getting it or doing it wrong, basically for not being in my head with me.
MF: There was a butt-ton of reactive writing. Sometimes, we’d chat and discuss ideas, but I’m not sure either of us paid much attention to that once we got writing. I’m not sure we had an ending until it ended. I guess that means there weren’t any/many initial plans or thoughts. All hail Chardros!
- Which idea/invention/character from your collaborator’s work did you like best?
MF: Anna’s demonic POV is a show-stealer. Stream-of-madness internal dialogue.
Beautiful!
AS: Mike’s necrots. I don’t tend to write about necromancy and zombies and such (okay, I admit, I was a goth teenager into the languid, tortured beauty of vampyre aristocrats and demon princes raging against the cruel world that cursed them to being eternal young, hot and horny [why hello, Marith], zombies didn’t really do much for me). But Mike’s necrots opened a whole new world of fun and pain.
Also the grottiness of Mike’s world, the Dripping Bucket, the seediness and decay and humanity. I love how real the Dripping Bucket is in its odd way. I’ve been in places like that and known people like its customers. It feels a very human place, the people in it aren’t bad people, just … sad, pitiful, human people.
- To what extent do you think you are well matched on the plotster/pantster continuum? – Do you think you could collaborate effectively with someone at the other end of that spectrum from you?
MF: We both seem to be comfortable pantsing.
I think you can collaborate with anyone, as long as you both understand the other person might work differently. It’s all about setting expectations. You know, this will turn into a really long rambling answer if I say all I want to say, and I’m tired.
AS: I’d be interested in some ways to see what it would be like collaborating with someone who had a clear plot all worked out first and wrote in a more structured way. Maybe it would be less painful in some ways than the way I write on my own? But I don’t think I could do it. I’d feel too powerless. The chaos and pain of pantsing is its own special … pain???
- Grimdark is very much your kind of thing – do you think in this process you might have egged each other on to explore deeper darker corners of the subgenre?
MF: Look, I know everything I write gets called grimdark, but I’m not trying to write grimdark. This is just the way my stories turn out. That was, once again, very much the case with this project.
But let’s be real. It’s a doomed city under siege by an army led by necromancers and sorcerers. The king’s demon is loose with poorly worded orders, a pretty (but not terribly smart) assassin is trying to make a name for himself, and a squad of second-rate mercenaries is trying to escape the city before it all goes to shite.
No fucking way this is gonna be a cozy fantasy.
AS: Yes! Completely! The whole thing was brilliant and allowed me to stretch myself and just go for it. Because of the way it was commissioned by Grimdark Magazine, there wasn’t any kind of pressure to be ‘commercial’ or rein it in, I felt I could just go for it with the darker and weirder aspects of my writing. There wasn’t any expectation this was a ‘starter’ fantasy novel if you see what I mean – no pressure to write something that the ‘hasn’t read a fantasy novel since school but enjoyed GoThas a book token’ demographic would pick up – we could write for people who knew kind of what to expect and just go all out. And the novella format, and the tight setting in time and place, meant we had the headspace to push in other ways. We couldn’t develop some vastly complicated plot or have flashbacks or indulge my to some people unbelievably enraging six pages on a rainshower then another five on random world building details I find fascinating, the focus was on describing the events in this tight little space and seeing how far we could push stuff.
And yes, there was a big element of humour, self-parody, deliberately going as bad taste as I could because … I mean, if the publisher of Grimdark Magazine, tagline ‘get knee deep in grit’, asks two people who tweet as Queen of Grimdark and Fletch God Apocalypse respectively to collaborate on a project … we couldn’t not turn it into an insane game of OTT bad taste and pushing it and mucking about with our love for the gross and the violent.
- What experience, if any, did you have of collaborative writing before In the Shadow of their Dying?
AS: Absolutely none. There are very few people I’d be open to working with, I could never really see myself as a collaborative writer. But Mike and I just gelled, it worked so beautifully.
MF: I think this was my first.
AS: It was your first time and you went on to do it again??? Wowser.
- Do you feel more open to collaborative work as a result of this venture, and what would you look for in a future collaborative partner, what other forms of collaboration would you envisage doing?
AS: I’m about to start on a different kind of collaboration, in that I’m writing for an existing IP for the first and probably the last time, writing a novel for 2000AD about Judge Death and Judge Anderson. So I have characters and a timeline my novel has to fit into, I can’t change the outcomes for either character and have to respect the wider world and characters of Megacity One. 2000AD had a huge influence on me as a child, so this will be like collaborating with my childhood heroes. Terrifying!
I’m also part of the WorldFantasyCon 2025 team, organising a WorldFantasyCon in Brighton in autumn next year. Which is team work and collaboration of a different kind. And had to be crowbarred in here as memberships are available now at: https://worldfantasy2025.co.uk/
- What advice would you give to any other writers considering trying out collaborative writing?
AS: Just go for it! What’s the worst that can happen? I mean, I guess you could waste several years of your life writing something unpublishably bad and fall out permanently with your co-author… but we just about avoided that scenario so there’s no reason you won’t.
Talk to your co-authors occasionally. And maybe read what they write before you carry it on.