Interviews

June 2020 - Interview with Evelyn Hail and Rainer Salt

Good evening everyone. Tonight we have EvelynHail and RainerSalt, joint authors of the runaway hit Mind The Gap, in the studio here at AdultFiction, via Zoom conferencing due to current circumstances. 

Elveloy : Firstly, can you tell us a bit about why you decided to submit a joint entry for this year's Open Novella Contest? And how you tackled the process?

Evelyn 👩🏻‍🦰:

Aye, that's a curious one. I was dutifully copying a line out of a dreadful maths assignment. 'Twas, as follows: "If a 🚂 A left the station going 60 mph & 🚂 B left the station going 70 mph... At what time..."

I stopped and thought.

At what time would I give a fuck?

At the time when each of dem 🚂s would carry a unique soul, that's when.

Rainer ☔️:

Well, if these trains hurtled past each other at a cumulative speed of 130 mph, neither of the two souls would give a fuck about each other as you so aptly put it. They wouldn't even get a glimpse of each other.

So we started giving the concept of two thoughts on separate trains some more thought. There'd have to be a station somewhere in between... a place where they'd stop. And the two souls need a reason to be in these trains, a life to drive them forward, and a yearning to pull them out.

Evelyn 👩🏻‍🦰:

Or, more seriously: The concept for the story came up last year when we discussed a Serbian song called "Voz" (Train), by a performer called Bajaga.

(See above)

Within the lyrics, there is a stanza which goes like this:

Train... On the train, wrinkled passenger's faces...

You... are somewhere behind those mountains...

Are you asleep, perhaps? Or are you awake like me?

Are you bothered by restlessness? Or is nothing bothering you?

Rainer ☔️:

From there, we spun our thread.

And when we found an ONC prompt that matched, there was no stopping us. We plotted the chapters and forged the characters. When that was done, the writing began. We drafted and reviewed chapters, back and forth. We fought, bickered, and laughed over words, jokes, and ideas.

And then, one day, it was complete.

Almost complete. Then Evelyn added the breathtaking drawings.

That finally made it complete.

Elveloy : Amazing! What were the highs and lows of the collaboration?

Rainer ☔️:

One thing that daunted me was that we had "overlapping" scenes in consecutive chapters, once from Iris' point of view and once from Evan's.

Usually, describing the same event from two different views is boring, for the writer as well as the reader. Here, with two characters so different and them knowing so little about each other, it was a blast, at least for us writers. It was fascinating to see the gap between them, the way they see things differently, and how easy it is to get each other wrong. That, combined with the co-writing experience, made this quite a ride.

Oh, I did have to struggle with my co-writer, mostly chasing after the sparks cast by her vivid, beautiful imagination.

Evelyn 👩🏻‍🦰: