The number one question we get asked is: how did you manage to write a book together?

The black market elver trade on the Maine coast was something Josh had been tracking, and it struck him as an unusual and little-known criminal enterprise that would lend itself to a number of virtues: atmosphere, colorful characters, the contrast between local Mainers and the summer folk “from away,” and a look at how the natural world gets invaded by human greed and recklessness, and how, where we hurt the environment, we tend to hurt the people (and vice versa).

Jack suggested we turn it into a novel. So we did the only thing that made sense: We started meeting once a week for lunch at a Szechuan restaurant, working our way through the menu. Jack would not allow us to order duck tongues, tripe, or frog legs, and Josh suffered their absence. As we ate, we talked over who these people in the story might be, how they might get into trouble, and how they might get out of it.

One time, Jack tried to smoke a cigar after lunch and set a trash can on fire on 35th street. Josh doused it efficiently. Things were going well.

We were influenced by the books we’d read from Raymond Chandler to Carl Hiaasen, and by the best that television had to offer in the way of thrillers that were not police procedurals. We wanted this story to be about civilians, not cops or P.I.s on a chase. Once we settled on a cast of characters, we set about plotting and writing at the same time. This was a ridiculous process because the good writing sometimes led us down blind alleys, and we needed to find a way out; a number of good scenes and plot twists that couldn’t untwist disappeared during the process, but in the end, we were left with a book that we like a lot. For us, that’s how the process works.

We both have intense jobs that we love, so we carved out a standing meeting once a week on Google Meet, and wrote after work. We figured out what needed to be done, and assigned ourselves sections. Each of us wrote – Jack more of the dialogue scenes and Josh more of the passages on the natural world – and then we read, edited, rewrote and gently disputed what the other had written. We let the best idea win. Our most heated conversations were about what to order at the Szechuan place.

Once a draft was done, we’d find time to sit on a sofa together, resolve whatever was out of whack, and then go at it again. By the fourth draft, we had gotten pretty good at making the most of the process. Finally, sitting together after many months of work, we looked at each other and said, “It’s done.” And it was. We toasted with a flask of Allen’s Coffee Brandy, the most popular alcohol in Maine, which, incidentally, is terrible.

Being done hasn’t stopped the weekly meetings and collaboration through the cloud. After all, there are other books to write.