anne pierce and frederic madre, writing together

>I'm afraid i'm not giving you enough time or that you're not there. I'm

>working on a story on zonezero for John (an enterprise story), ...

> you know the subject much better than me.

>if you have time to send me some impressions i'll put them

>together and we can submit it with a double byline and surprise him. :)

sunday morning in january, it's a sunday morning going into a sunday afternoon and I wake up, check my email though I have an appointment pretty shortly in the city where everything happens for me, paris, far off on the highway. Sunday is slow mail day but i've got a message from you: "i'm doing this piece on the zonezero site, do you want to do it with me ?" and i thought "why me, anne ?"

>don't worry if you can't get to it.

one reason i love to write with you: right now, i could ask you, now, why does everything happen for you in paris, frederic? and you'd send me an answer. you might think this is a small thing, but it's not.

is collaboration conversation on the net? i think maybe it is. this was already happening for us.

> forgot

>

>to tell you I'd need them by late Sunday night.

>I can't promise it wouldn't be rejected (they've rejected one of mine before).

you, asked why you? We were already writing each other a little, and recent news made me sad. I remember suggesting that we trade rejection stories sometime, that it would be fun if we did it in person. But my motives were more complicated: I had just finished writing a review of Muriel's photographs, and found it harder than i thought it would be to understand what I was looking at -- I knew you were someone who could react to the composition of a photograph probably instantly, where I couldn't

>maybe you were right but the actual published story did not contain much of this! it was all your work in there, you dragged it all into a social consciousness thing. You did it sweetly,

i did not feel it too much.

>I played a little, mostly tried to merge my bits more into your (very good) whole.

>also changed a thing or two, here and there. I hope you see something you like.

>('argentinean' comes from my Winword dictionnary...), but you can change everything again!

you might have already sent me a story about an encounter with some guys ina truck near disneyland when you were a child, and it was a 'crossing worlds' story. it was probably before all of this, if not, it still ties into it

>I have to get offline for 15 minutes or so, sorry.

>if I'm not back in 30 minutes, please call an ambulance...

A couple of months before, you'd sent me a story about a party. You told me the story was for me. I didn't necessarily believe you wrote it for me, but it was a good story.

I believe you told me that if you did not have an answer, no problem, you'd do it alone. so, I checked the site immediately, looked at the three shows you told me to give my "impressions" about, began writing whatever came to mind, then redoing it, then calling my appointment and told her that "see, i gotta write this real quick, just three paragraphs", then redoing it, rechecking the site... One hour and a half later, i sent it to you, 200 words was it ?. and what did you think ? you can tell me now... i was flattered that you asked me. and a bit anxious cause I never collaborated

with anybody.

>You seemed as curious about me as you were about anything else. you even asked me what a

>typical day for me was like when we were in the middle of writing. you would

>ask me small questions and divert me just enough to keep the real 'serious'

>work easy.

stunned that you could send me something so fast, though i knew you would.

worried that the passion with which you saw these pictures wouldn't exactly mesh with my attempts at an 'enterprise' slant, which was going out the window anyway...

>what's another good question?

Honestly, I do not remember that there was to be an 'enterprise' angle to this story! I was worried too that what I did was not what you were expecting and to the last minute before publication I fought to keep those three paragraphs in there although I knew perfectly well that they did not fit the rest. I tried to hide them somewhere in the middle, so that they don't get chopped off. I felt that if they were not there, well, I had done nothing...

i want to find the email where you say, 'look, i thought of...and then you tell me some word, which was really a good word, and it was funny because it was only 1 change, but you made several of those, and they were confident ones!

>this is weird. like a badly dubbed movie, since you mentioned it. i think we

>just crossed paths. i'll send you a copy of his email in a minute.

>

>>>but, where are you anyway?

>>sitting at my desk, recording a killer reggae and dub tape, why ?

>>

>>and you ?

>

>sitting in the dark; i feel too rushed to go over and turn on a light.