‘One day, we will write a book.’

That is what we told each other just after we moved in together.
Then – as many people with long-held aspirations will recognize – life happened. There came the kids; the most amazing, warm-hearted and energy-slurping human beings we had ever met – three to be precise. How we love them.
Both of us were doing our best to combine parenthood with our full-time jobs. Trying to put healthy food on the table. All the while doing our best to do some sports as well. Taking care of your family starts with taking care of yourself, you know.
Just when we thought it would be getting easier, somewhere after we changed the youngest one’s last diaper, after-school activities got busier.
‘One day, we will write a book,’ we kept telling each other.

Then one night, out of the blue, Eric couldn’t sleep. His mind was churning over something. He could not stop it. He felt compelled to make sure he would remember his thoughts in the morning. So he came out of bed, with steps as light as possible – difficult with his big feet – trying not to wake up his wife. What appeared on the blank sheet in front of him was… a storyline. Soon that one sheet of paper he was holding turned into three. An incoherent collection of ideas, bad names, and jumbled timelines. But underneath all that, the start of a real book.

These pages stayed hidden and untouched for several weeks, patiently waiting to be picked up again at the right moment. Three weeks later, that moment arrived: Emma and the three kids were spending the weekend at her parents’ and Eric found himself sitting at the dining table with his laptop and the three sheets of paper in front of him. 

He simply started typing, word after word, sentence after sentence. The story was taking shape. It felt odd at first. Eric, a writer? But very soon, the characters started living and breathing in his mind and he just couldn’t stop jotting down their story. In the evenings, when the kids were finally in bed – which often does not equal asleep, as most parents reading this will know – he grabbed his laptop and continued writing. He told himself, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this.’ Boy, was he wrong.

One busy weekend, in the middle of the day, Emma grabbed a pen and paper. ‘For my book,’ she mumbled with a smile on her face. Before long, we found ourselves sitting across the dining table, each working on our own book, their contents shrouded in secrecy. Pure magic. ‘How lucky we are,’ we whispered.

Nonetheless, the best was yet to come. The highlight of this whole experience presented itself on a sunny spring day. We had just printed our first draft, were sitting side by side in our garden with each other’s book on our laps, and started reading on the count of three. Our kids were merrily running around us. It was a moment of pure bliss that we will cherish forever.

We are lucky enough to count ourselves among the very few couples that wrote their debut novel simultaneously. That discovered each other’s first sentence, page and chapter at the same time. That amongst the vast differences in storyline, writing style and language, were thrilled to detect a surprising amount of similarities and parallels between their stories. Can you find them, too?

Dear reader, we hope you enjoy our books as much as we enjoyed each other’s. And please don’t forget to tell your friends and family about them!

– Emma & Eric Volcan
Leuven, Belgium

Emma on Goodreads. Eric on Goodreads.