Today Simon Larter revealed who wrote which piece in our experiment in voice. Check it out at his blog by clicking here. Seems like most of you got it right! Additional thoughts are always welcome.

I had a few requests to post my piece on my blog, so here you go. Remember, both are available in the first voice experiment post.

Hers were the only footprints winding over the otherwise pristine winter vista as she stamped her humanity onto naked land. She leaned into white winds and pressed on toward the mountains, resenting them for being stone, for being inviolable, when she was so soft and raw.

When she looked over her shoulder, her eyes ignored the hills and leafless trees. She saw only the negative space where his tracks should have been. How much does it take for the afterimage of marriage to fade? Nine months? Nine years? Obviously not nine letters scrawled on divorce papers.

Snow-laced wind cut across her face. She pulled her scarf tight around her mouth and shoved her wool-covered hands back into her pockets. Even walking weighed heavily. Simple things loom large when two pairs of hands dwindle to one. Gone were the hands that covered her pink, frozen cheeks and soothed her chattering jaw. His heat became hers; their skin had luxuriated in the laws of the universe. Thermodynamics. Gravity. God.

The last time she had come here, they stumbled into their home, boots wet, a tangle of limbs and fingers and hair, too lust-addled to care about shoe prints or unopened bills. Melted snow pooled around their discarded soles.

Now he was nine months gone, warming someone else’s skin in a stale apartment, and that was that. She wondered if he wore his shoes inside.

Her pen was quicksilver. She was an alchemist; with a few strokes of her wild, illegible script, she transmuted vows into solitude. Only her own snow prints melted in the foyer, and it would have to be enough.

Please visit Simon Larter’s blog post, An Experiment in Voice, Part I. We’ve each written short vignettes based on the same setting and back story. To quote Simon:

I’ve run across another writer whose voice—however one defines that—is eerily similar to mine. I just get this feeling when I read Ms. Koyanagi’s blog that her mind is wired similarly, that she sees the world in much the same way I do, that we notice the same little details.

So I decided to put our respective voices to the test, to see what might shake out. We agreed to each write a very short piece set in the same location, with the same essential character and situation, in order to compare and contrast our styles. I won’t tell you which of the following vignettes is whose today—I’ll save that till tomorrow. But I will open the floor to guesses and analyses in the comments section.

Head on over to Simon’s blog to read our pieces.

There’s this phase when I’m first developing a new novel, a phase in which I’m completely in love with the new plot, but it’s full of huge holes and loose threads. I don’t mean wispy, gossamer loose threads that might waft about in the breeze until the last few revisions of the novel. No, I’m talking about, like… rope. Giant ropes just dangling there off the side of the ship.

I was going to extend the ship metaphor and then realized I know nothing about sailing, so we’ll just skip that.

The point is, I was in that phase for a few days. The First Date phase, I guess. It’s all sighs and flirtations and daydreams. I’ve been so enamored of this story, but I had no idea how I was going to get from point A to point B.

Last night, I was washing a few dishes and letting my mind dance around the plot. Kind of like those “Magic Eye” autostereograms that were popular back in the 90s. At this stage of novel development, I can’t look directly at the picture. I can’t concentrate too hard or I’ll give myself a headache and just see a giant mess of colors and incoherent shapes, and then I’ll get frustrated because I can’t figure out how my main character is going to achieve X, Y, and Z, or how conflict A will set up conflict B, and so on.

But. If I let my mind relax and fall where it wants, if I don’t over think it, the answer always comes.

It came while I was elbow-deep in soapy water, of course. So I scrambled to rinse and dry my hands and ran to my notebook. I scribbled down every last detail of my conflict resolution, a smile on my face the entire time. I was writing so furiously that I’m sure if someone else tried to read it, they’d see an illegible tangle of words.

That’s always how it is with me. If I don’t know how I’m going to arrange something in a novel, I just trust the answer will come. It always does. Somewhere in the back corners of my mind, my little story-weavers are hard at work even while I’m scrubbing kitchen knives.

I still have a lot left to do before I can start writing the first chapter, but I can tell this novel is going to be fun.