{"id":252,"date":"2019-10-06T21:10:37","date_gmt":"2019-10-06T21:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/?p=252"},"modified":"2019-10-06T21:21:27","modified_gmt":"2019-10-06T21:21:27","slug":"the-joy-of-collaboration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/?p=252","title":{"rendered":"The Joy of Collaboration"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Earlier this year, the wonderful <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shastagrant.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Shasta Grant<\/a> and I decided to collaborate on a short story, and our resulting tale of a Jazzercise franchise in decline, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.littlefiction.com\/beta\/SGrant_ARasmussen_Grapevine.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Grapevine<\/a>,\u201d was published in <i>Little Fiction<\/i> in July.<\/p>\n<p>Having been scarred by many group-project situations in school, not to mention being somewhat control-freakish about my own writing I was a little nervous when Shasta proposed collaborating on a story, but the whole process was incredibly fun. I highly recommend collaborating with a trusted peer as a way of letting another perspective shake up your creative work.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Shasta and I have read and given each other feedback on our stories for years, and though I am a huge fan of her work our writing styles are different enough that I wondered whether we could pull off a story together without \u201cshowing the seams,&#8221; as it were. Would one writer\u2019s voice dominate? Would it be obvious which parts came from which writer?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>But I had no reason to worry\u2014it felt like a true partnership all the way through the process. The writing itself\u2014often a lonely pursuit\u2014became a conversation between us. It was fun and kind of addictive to send off a new draft and wait to see where Shasta would take the story from there. We were writing for each other, cheering the story into being.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> The resulting piece became so much more than the sum of our individual contributions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>We were thrilled when Beth Gilstrap at <i>Little Fiction<\/i> selected \u201cGrapevine\u201d for publication. In addition to the care that their editorial team puts into each submission they select, one of the unique perks of having a story in <i>Little Fiction<\/i> is that they create <i>trailers<\/i> for each of the stories they published, which felt very fancy! And I have to say, I loved the trailer that Troy Palmer created for this story. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?time_continue=1&amp;v=nxvPzUjj_GM\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Check it out<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this year, the wonderful Shasta Grant and I decided to collaborate on a short story, and our resulting tale of a Jazzercise franchise in decline, \u201cGrapevine,\u201d was published in &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/?p=252\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Joy of Collaboration&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":255,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,62],"tags":[57,30,61,60,56,59,58,8],"class_list":["post-252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-writing-news","tag-collaboration","tag-fiction","tag-grapevine","tag-jazzercise","tag-little-fiction","tag-shasta-grant","tag-trailer","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/Schuman-Jazzercise.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":262,"href":"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions\/262"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatll-i-do.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}