Going Solo - Sunday Express
17 May 2009
This week my novel Platinum hits the shops. It’s my first outing as Jo Rees, having written as Josie Lloyd with my husband, Emlyn Rees, for the last decade.
The decision to go solo was a nerve-wracking one. Emlyn and I first started writing together when we came up with the idea for Come Together, a comedy from a male and female point of view about two twenty-something’s who sleep together and deal with the fall out.
When we showed the first two chapters to our agents, we had no idea of the madness that would follow. Overnight, a book auction was hotting up. The ensuing deal hit the headlines and the film rights were snapped up by Working Title.
We took the writing very seriously and were competitive with each other from the start, trying to outdo each other with comedy scenarios. We’d post our chapters back and forth, quickly learning how to give and take constructive criticism.
Having both been published before, we knew that this was our big shot of making it commercially. Despite a growing attraction between us, neither of us wanted to blow it by getting involved romantically. But writing together has the most seductive power. By the time we’d finished the book, we were a couple ourselves.
We married shortly afterwards, embarking on a European tour to promote our book, as Come Together hit the top spot in the UK and the movie came out on TV.
Seven novels later, and Emlyn and I had got collaborative writing down to a fine art, often talking about it in the press and on the radio and TV both here and abroad. We had a system and we both loved the process. And, most importantly, it fitted with our family life, having six and three year old little girls, and one on the way. Writer’s block, travelling alone, the terror of publicity events were things that happened to other authors, not us.
So going it alone felt like madness. It also felt like a betrayal. Because our identity as a couple had been established through writing together. Why rock the boat, when everything was going so well?
But if you do anything creative, you need to stretch yourself occasionally. And I felt that I was finally at the right age and had accrued the necessary skills to write the big blockbuster I’d always wanted to since reading Shirley Conran’s Lace at school. It was a project I could only do on my own.
It felt like announcing an infidelity, as I sat Emlyn down for ‘the chat’ to break the news, after a sleepless night. How would he react? Especially when I knew that what I was proposing was a risk. And what would it be like writing on my own?
But rather than taking it as a rejection, Emlyn was delighted I’d broached the subject. Like me, he didn’t want to coast along in our career. He admitted that he had an all-action thriller idea up his sleeve.
He laughed when I said it felt like professional divorce. After ten happy years of marriage, there was to be no mention of the ‘D’ word, professionally or otherwise, he reassured me. It’d be fun. Challenging. We’d find a way to make it work.
Now all I had to do was come up with a formula for pure escapism: rauncy sex, oodles of glamour, exotic locations, gorgeous men and a roller coaster of a plot to keep the pages turning.
However, I’m no Jackie Collins. I don’t mix in the kind of circles my characters do. With Emlyn, we’d always based our book on people like us. But this was going to be an enormous leap of imagination. And faith.
I grilled all of our friends, watching Emlyn groan as another dinner was overtaken with my relentless questions. Anyone with the vaguest insight into yachting, high finance, computer hacking, the partying of the super-rich were squeezed for information. I devoured gossip mags and tabloid papers and hatched the most outrageous plot I could. Soon I had my three dream heroines. And a ruthless Russian Oligark for them to take revenge on. Juicy stuff.
Fortunately, the publishers thought so too. Emlyn and I jumped around the kitchen, as a bidding war kicked off. We both knew how lucky I was for this to happen a second time.
If he ever felt annoyed or jealous, he never let on. There wasn’t time. Whilst I set about writing my tome, stopping to give birth in the middle of it all, Emlyn became Superdad, looking after our newborn, doing the school run, organizing a house move and hatching plots of his own.
He also edited for me as I went along. He knows my writing brain so well, he can re-order my sentences in a jiffy to make them sound how I meant them to. Goodness knows how many hours he saved me.
I worked harder on Platinum than I’ve ever worked on anything, secretly spurred on by the desire to impress my husband. The more I wrote, the more final the severance from our writing career together seemed. I expected to feel sad or guilty, but instead I feel liberated.
I’m now full steam ahead with Tycoon, my second novel and loving every minute of it. Neither of us are looking back. Because our relationship has not only survived, but is better than ever.