Oh my god, we’re back again! As promised, we have returned with our first new episode in almost a decade!
Yesterday was the fifteenth anniversary of 00Carter’s conception on the Absolute Chaos forum. If you’d asked us on January 2, 2007 if we thought we’d be writing this story about Nick as a secret agent fifteen years later, we probably would have said, “No way.” Factor in a nine-year hiatus, and I’m sure most people thought this day would never come. But we’re so happy it has!
Like most collaborations, 00Carter started off strong and then gradually began to fall apart. We started the story with a team of eleven writers, which was fun and exciting at first but eventually proved to be way too many people trying to work together. The problem wasn’t with any one person. It was just an organizational nightmare trying to keep everyone on the same page. Communication was difficult. We came from four different countries on two different continents in completely different time zones, so trying to get the whole group together for a chat to plan episodes was almost impossible. Because we spoke different languages and had different writing styles and experience levels, there was a lack of continuity between scenes and characters. We didn’t all know each other well before we started writing together, which made it hard to give constructive criticism without worrying about hurt feelings. We got along well for the most part, but, of course, we occasionally had conflicting ideas and differences of opinion. Once the honeymoon phase ended, the initial enthusiasm some writers had for the story faded. Life got in the way, and it took longer and longer for people to write their parts. Rose and I (Julie) ran a tight ship; we started making rules and setting deadlines in an effort to finish episodes in a reasonable amount of time, but this just pushed people away. They started leaving the project. By the time we finished “A 00Carter Christmas,” the last episode we posted before our unofficial hiatus, in December 2012, we were down to just four writers, who were burnt out from the effort of trying to keep a sinking ship afloat. So we took a break. A very long break.
Despite the update drought, we never considered 00Carter to be discontinued or abandoned. Rose and I talked about it often over the years, and every time it came up in our conversations, we both said we wanted to continue it someday, even if it was just the two of us writing together. We thought it might even be easier with just the two of us. After all, we managed to complete another long, successful collaboration, Song for the Undead, in the meantime. But life got in the way for both of us. We got busy with other projects, and the timing never felt right to come back to 00Carter.
Then the pandemic struck. During lockdown, Dee rediscovered her love of fanfic and returned to Absolute Chaos, where we had first become friends and conceived the idea for 00Carter. When we started talking about trying to revive the story, she, Rose, and I all expressed an interest in continuing it. It took us a while to move from just talking about it to actually planning and then writing, but once we did this past summer, it felt fresh and exciting again, like it had in the beginning. Only this time, the experience has been even better because we’re all older, wiser, and more in sync than we were before. It’s a lot easier to keep three people on the same page than eleven. In addition to writing new episodes, we decided to go back and edit the old ones. We didn’t change any plot points, just polished the writing by fixing grammar and continuity errors. It’s been fun reminiscing on the old episodes as we repost them each week, but we’re ready to finally debut the first episode we’ve finished since our big return!
Episode 12 of 00Carter is called “Mr. Body Beautiful,” and as you might have inferred, it’s focused on our beloved Kevin, otherwise known as Agent K.
Synopsis: When Dr. Rough’s undercover agent implants K with a microscopic bomb, 00Carter, Jay, and Styx must shrink to go inside K’s body and deactivate it.
We’re obviously biased, but we think this is the best episode of 00Carter yet! We had so much fun writing this one together and have been eagerly waiting to share it with the world for a few months now. Hopefully it was worth the wait! We’re posting Part 1 today and will be back every Monday with another part until it’s up in its entirety. The episode is already finished, so we promise not to leave you hanging! If you read it, please leave us a comment and let us know what you think! After almost ten years, any feedback from actual readers would mean the world to us! Thanks in advance for your support!
