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Bettor to Lose was written by Anyta and Quonus for the 2011 GA Novella Contest and came in first! Congratulations!! You can find the story through this LINK and discuss the story in this topic. Congrats again!!

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Anyta and Andy,

 

Congrats to you both! Well deserved! :worship::2thumbs::worship:

 

If either one of you gets the chance, it would be great if we could get a little blurb on how the collaboration went on this story. Just the highlights would be super. I think it would be useful for other authors here at GA. :great:

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If either one of you gets the chance, it would be great if we could get a little blurb on how the collaboration went on this story. Just the highlights would be super. I think it would be useful for other authors here at GA. :great:

 

 

I'll take a stab at this first, Anyta can weigh in later if she wants.

 

First we had to decide what type of story. We tossed out different ideas and then decided to try to write something in the Genre that is most popular. So once we had the genre, we needed an idea. I think she tossed out the idea of a bet, and then with some back and forth we came up with the basic plot and mapped outed a rough outline of the story.

 

We both wrote some of the chapters, I can't recall who did which at this point because if I wrote a chapter, I'd send it to her and she would mark it up, sometimes adding and subtracting sentences/paragraphs, other times sending it back saying - this needs to be re-worked. I'd do the same with her chapters. Some chapters had 5 or 6 rewrites before we were okay with it and moved on.

 

About half way through we realized we needed to add a couple elements to the story - a love interest for Marcus, character traits for the characters, etc. So working those back into the story added a few revisions to a couple-three chapters. Finally we finished and we both did a re-read. Making sure things were consistent - which we still missed a few I noticed - for example: Marcus was sometimes Marc, but there are times when he shows up as Mark. Once I get access to the story I intend to clean those up.

 

Basically it was - from my side - an amazingly smooth and really great experience. I'd get stuck on something and send the scene to Anyta and say - fix this, it needs emotions, or beats, or they need to do something but I can't figure out what to have them do or how to describe it. Then it would come back and I'd be 'wow, great!' What was really helpful is that there were chapters that both of us wrote that the other was 'Meh' this isn't working. We'd go back and forth and tinker, tweak and sometimes Hack apart the offending chapter until we both were satisfied.

 

last I wanted to say this was a ton of work. Aside from doing all the other things we were/are both working on, we devoted a lot of time to this. We started the week or two after the contest was announced and didn't finish until a week or so before the deadline. 17 chapters back and forth took us a while to hammer out. I guess in the end the effort was worth it given the result.

 

So thanks again to everyone who read and voted for the story. We were both totally stoked when we saw we'd won.

 

Andy

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So.... will there be a sequel?

 

I think the best answer is, I don't know. If I were Jack, I'd bet on no. Anyta is NOT keen on sequels. Companion stories yes, sequels, not so much. There were certainly elements/scenes I wanted to do but they didn't work so well into the novella format. I wanted to bring in the Reynolds, maybe have more interaction between Ed and Marcus, I could see a lot of things for the characters, but I don't know that I have a full on, interesting story line in my head that people would want to read. Maybe Anyta does, so I'll let her answer for her on that.

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Anyta is NOT keen on sequels.

LMAO, it's so true. Ahhh, Andy knows me so well.

 

I too will comment on the working together--but forgive me if this waits until tomorrow--I don't know why, but I'm practically falling asleep where I sit right now. :P

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