Absolutely. She is my art director. Of course I have another second art director which turns out often to be crucial at the publisher but Audrey and I are in fact partners although we have distinct responsibilities and in order to keep peace in the home we have veto. I mean, you know, I am the guy that says illustrator, that’s my name. She’s the author, I can say, you know, that word’s wrong and if we disagree finally after months, she makes that decision. I make the illustration decisions, but she is extremely helpful.
We do dummy after dummy. She goes through them all, we read them out loud to each other and she helps with that. I enjoy telling stories within stories but not too much because occasionally you can get to the point where the story within the story is distracting and fighting with the text so we just touch that and thank you for noticing.
Yes, while we both function as each other’s editors, as a writer, a writer often does not see everything clearly because it’s all in the author’s mind and you just assume that everyone understands what you’re talking about but if I can hand my manuscript to Don, which I do, and he’ll make suggestions or he’ll point out things or he’ll be confused and oops, got to go back to work, back to the work, you know? Well once our son had a friend visiting over and the friend said do your parents always argue like this and he said no, only when they’re writing.
Well, we’re very — as we’ve matured, let’s put it this way, we’re not quite as dramatic. You know, I can remember running from the room crying because I brought him a manuscript and he didn’t like it.
That does hurt. Yeah, it’s still painful.
But now we really do agree to disagree. In fact, if we’re not disagreeing then we feel that the other person is not giving enough, is not critiquing enough so we’ll just come on, come on, come on.
Give me the truth stuff.