How have the two of you managed to write three books together while living in very different locations?

Sharon and B.K. have been friends since elementary school. They've written the Eden Thrillers together, often while B.K. was halfway around the world--so this first question is a natural.

Photo of B.K. at the 4th Sister in Ur, Iraq wearing her "I make stuff up" t shirt.

How have the two of you managed to write three books together while living in very different locations?

B.K.: I have learned, in this relatively short time of being a co-author of a fiction series, that writing is a very solitary business. When we are brainstorming, it is helpful for Sharon and me to be together, especially in some exotic place that fires the imagination. But the majority of our work entails slogging it through page by page, chapter by chapter. It doesn’t matter if we are in the same room or thousands of miles apart, we still have to focus, individually, on the character or scene of the moment.

SHARON: I’ve co-authored a fair share of nonfiction, but before the Eden Thrillers, it never occurred to me you could write fiction as a team. I still believe it’s a rare thing when it works as well as it does with us. A good part of it worked because we laid out exactly what we were each doing on each book; I think a lot of it came from the fact that we knew we were looking out for each other instead of just looking out for ourselves. We trust each other a lot. We also roll our eyes at each other a lot. I think, over three books, we only really got into one knock-down, drag-out fight, which I still enjoy re-enacting for others after I’ve had a glass or two of Sangria.

But the bottom line is, writing is a very solitary business, and it was truly a wonderful thing to have someone else you could talk to about your very-involving work. That isn’t usually the case. In fact, there was one time I was writing some very difficult scenes, and B.K. went on vacation—away from her base in Germany—and I felt bereft. I actually had to re-write those scenes after she came back, because they were really important, and they weren’t as good as they needed to be!