Adventures in Collaborating: A Honey of an Idea

New readers to our series may be surprised by the references to Hawaii and honey. Can we blame them on Lolana?

Lolana was Mozzie's dashboard hula doll in the TV series. He claimed she could be from any tropical island Neal desired. Penna and I chose Hawaii, and Hawaii has been one of our most enjoyable collaborations to date. In fact, Hawaii was probably the first example of bunnyball, our name for the game where we toss plot bunnies back and forth and watch them grow.

(Caution: Mild spoilers for the Caffrey Conversation AU)

This particular round of bunnyball started when Penna decided to have Peter's brother Joe and Neal's aunt Noelle fall in love. As Penna was writing about their first meeting in Caffrey Flashback, I was preparing the first draft of The Woman in Blue, a story which takes place in October of the same year. Because we had a comfortable cushion in the timing of the stories, I could focus on their engagement, knowing that it wouldn't be posted for many months.

When I tossed the bunnyball back to Penna for ideas on where they should get married, she suggested Hawaii, a place rich with happy memories from a vacation she'd spent there with her mother. We settled on the location just in time for me to foreshadow it in the final chapter of The Woman in Blue.

Penna offered to write the story of the wedding in what was to become Caffrey Aloha. Getting the families to Hawaii was no problem, but how about Mozzie? It was highly doubtful that he would have been invited to the wedding. Noelle hadn't even met him yet. But writing a story without Mozzie is not nearly as enjoyable as when he's included.

I suggested Mozzie go into the Hawaiian organic honey business. Mozzie was known to be a gourmet. He read Thoreau. Organic honey was the natural solution. (Yes, bad puns are inevitable when honey's the topic.) When we discussed the idea, Penna was about midway through posting Caffrey Disclosure. She liked the concept and was able to foreshadow Mozzie's newly acquired interest in honey.

The honey theme quickly grew wings. What started out as a single worker bee morphed into an entire colony of buzzing ideas. The first addition was the Aloha Emporium, close to Columbia University and run by Mozzie's old friend and soon to be business partner, Billy Feng. Later, Mozzie built a bunker in the basement of the Emporium. When Penna and I first discussed honey, we weren't thinking about wine, but Mozzie was. His exotic blends of honey wine have taken New York by storm.

Stimulated by a passion for bees and a certain costume designer who was keen on entomology, Mozzie quickly championed the cause of the Hawaiian yellow-faced bee, an endangered species. A few tosses of the bunnyball later and Aidan was creating a cartoon video of Yellowface the Masked Avenger for the sci-fi convention.

Recently, Neal's cousin Angela caught honey fever and began coordinating a line of organic honey-based cosmetics. Down in the bunker, Mozzie is making noises about extraterrestrial intelligence residing in bees. With all the buzzing going around, can Azathoth avoid getting stung? Keep an eye to the sky.

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