Thoughts from Day 2: General Session I

Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson were fantastic and funny. And hey, we got free kazoos and eye patches! That's one heck of a good event, right there.

I'd actually never attended a General Session before, at either TLA or ALA--seems I always have too many other sessions or meetings I need to attend at those times. It was nice to relax a bit and enjoy the session. Dave and Ridley discussed how they started writing children's books, and their collaboration process. Their process is essentially to divide up the characters (Ridley gets the dark, twisty, pirate-y ones, and Dave gets the goofy, childlike ones), and then whichever type of characters dominate a particular chapter determines who writes the first draft of that chapter. Then they email the chapters back and forth, editing each other's work without mercy--usually a few times, and one chapter they said was emailed eleven times.

Of course, they cracked jokes the whole time, and they switched back and forth to tell the story, collaborating on the session, as well. It definitely made me even more interested in reading their Peter Pan series.