Who is Bradley Pay? The authors of the Spectrum Series, Robin Bradley and Jody Leber-Pay, formed a writing partnership in October 2016. The writing duo's backgrounds and interests were complementary, but where they truly bonded was through their love of storytelling, spinning novels of elaborate contemporary fiction that don’t follow traditional story arcs but, nonetheless, keep their readers turning ‘just one more page’ and reading ‘one more chapter’ to find out what happens next. Here they describe what inspired them to write the series...
We met on a river cruise in August 2016. One rainy day, six of us found ourselves sitting in the bar of the riverboat as we traversed a set of locks from the Danube to the Main River. We were sharing a bottle of Chianti that afternoon, when Jody leaned over, looking at the prow of the boat lashed next to ours in the lock and quipped, “Robin, what if that man over there,” she pointed to a tall man stretched out in a deck chair, his hat pulled low over his eyes, “what if he walked to the railing and looked into your eyes and you fell madly, passionately in love?”
So it began. Laughing hilariously, the six of us made up absurd, romantic tales and created names for ourselves as we chose roles in those stories. One of us became Gia, a carefree young woman who loved to hike. Robin – it had something to do with her fondness for excellent cognac in the evening after dinner – became Remy Martin (the only character with a last name at that point), who is an artist and university professor. Then came Isabelle and Penelope. Oddly, Jody never took any roles, but her husband was the inspiration for a Turkish rug dealer who wrapped his victims in Turkish rugs and dumped them overboard into the river. As we repeated this afternoon's amusement over the next several rainy afternoons, we compiled quite a set of stories and consumed at least as many bottles of Chianti.
The development of those stories into what is now the Spectrum Series began a couple of months later with an email from Jody to Robin: “By the way – you still interested in the Lock Series? … it will be fun.” That was the beginning of our friendship and long-distance collaboration on four novels about a serial killer, the women he targets, and the women he kills.
In the process, we discovered that writing with a partner is hard! But it is what keeps us motivated when what we want to do is quit. We laugh a lot and quibble over words and storylines. We’ve learned how to compromise without affecting the quality of our writing and how to keep pushing ourselves to find a better answer when we aren’t satisfied with the results of our work. In short, as two strong-willed women, we had to figure out how to collaborate.
And here we are, seven years later, having just put the final book in the Spectrum Series to bed. Yikes! How can that be? Some characters lived, some died, and some didn’t make the cut and were dropped before their stories were ever told. The stories morphed and morphed and morphed again until we got them right. Good characters turned into unlikeable ones, bad characters became good ones… and then there was Tracey – he was just all over the place. He’s creepy, we wouldn’t want to run across him in a dark alley, but there’s a kind, likable side to him too. Hmmm, we wonder where you will come down on his personality. We laughed and cried our way through these stories, tried out new wines and foods, and had lengthy debates about things like whether emotional affairs or physical affairs are more damaging to relationships and how old is middle age.
We’ve had such fun writing these stories. We think you’ll have as good a time reading them too.
