Heide: Are you actually sitting on the floor?

Iain: My knees aren’t as young as they used to be.

Heide: What are you doing on a train anyway?

Iain: This is my rather wibbly-wobbly route back home for the Chiltern Kills crime festival we were at this weekend. While I’m down here, I thought it would be really good to tell people about the crazy thing you and I are doing next month which happens to be National Novel Writing Month.

Heide: Or NaNoWriMo for people who are in a hurry.

Iain:  I think the whole idea of NaNoWritMo is great, trying to get the first 50,000 words of a novel written in the 30 days of November.

Heide: And we’re going to attempt something on that theme which is equally challenging.

Iain: Daft, some might say.

Heide: Absolutely.

Iain: We’re going to spend the first full week of November writing the opening chapters of our new novel serires together.

Heide: Like literally together.

Iain: Yep. I suppose we ought to explain how this is different from what we normally do.

Heide: Right. Because, although we are co-writers, co-writers don’t actually write novels side by side.

Iain: They tend to split things up. Each writing different chapters or different strands of the novels.

Heide: Exactly. Sometimes they can write a whole book without ever having to ‘share’ characters or scenes.

Iain: But that’s not what we’re doing. No, sirree, Bob.

Heide: We’re going to sit side by side and write this thing at the same time.

Iain: How the hell is that actually going to work?

Heide: Details! But it’s happening 4^th – 8^th November. Extreme writing!

Iain: Extreme writing? Is that what we’re calling it? Blimey!

Heide: Because it’s sort of like extreme programming which is a sort of similar thing that programmers do.

Iain: Are we telling people what we’re writing?

Heide: Er, maybe. What we can definitely say is that it’s the first book in a new comedy series.

Iain: That’s right. Oh, but thinking of series, the latest book in the Clovenhoof series, Hankypanky, is now out in audiobook.

Heide: Yes, apologies to anyone who’s been waiting the better part of a year for it to arrive but you can now buy it here.

Iain: Right. I suppose we’d best work out what we’re going to write for this ‘extreme writing’ session. Oh! The train’s started moving again…