The two men shared an office space in Amelia Gorgas Library until this past August, and they got to know each other well during their time as desk neighbors. Sahib said he would frequently tell Robison about his work on the weekends as a DJ and in video production.
“I referred to all these things as my ‘side hustles,’” Sahib said.
After a while, the pair decided they wanted to work on a “side hustle” together. The format of the project they decided on fit within the parameters of their work as librarians.
“We were just having margaritas on a day, and we were like ‘Hey, we should write a book,’” Sahib said. “We’re both librarians. It’d be cool to publish something.”
Sahib said as first-time authors, they weren’t setting out to write the next “Harry Potter” or “Game of Thrones” series. Instead, they started with an existing idea and made it their own.
“We tossed around some ideas of classic, out-of-copyright stories that we could re-imagine, and we ultimately settled on ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde’ because it was familiar but not too terribly overdone in our culture,” Robison said.
Sahib said working from a classic story also allows readers to have a frame of reference for the story before they read the first page and is accessible, even if readers haven’t read Robert Louis Stevenson’s original text.
“A lot of students now might not be familiar with the original story, and that’s okay too,” Sahib said. “I think the story stands alone in this.”
The story follows two high school friends, Joseph Upton and Jack Lucas, as they begin their freshman year of college. Jack spends time away from Joe, and Joe struggles to understand what changed in their relationship.
“This story draws mostly on my own experiences as an undergraduate student, although I cannot relate directly to many of the things that happen to Joseph and Jack,” Robison said.
The process of writing and publishing the book was different than if a single writer worked on the story. Sahib said he took charge of the business and publishing end, while Robison was the lead writer of the two. Robison said working this way helped them stay on track throughout the entire process.
Both Sahib and Robison said working with another person helped alleviate any writer’s block or similar problems that might have come up, along with holding each other accountable for one another’s progress.
“Having each other as co-authors allowed us to bounce ideas off one another, to talk through difficult aspects of the plot and potential plot holes, and to rephrase wording that didn’t sound quite right,” Robison said. “This is especially important in a book that contains as much dialog as ours does.”
The book is available on Amazon and iTunes, in addition to some print copies. Sahib said it was important to both him and Robison the book be available in libraries, given their careers.
Sahib said they wanted to self-publish from the beginning.
“We don’t have to worry about trying to impress some literary agent or have a publishing company take a huge percentage of it,” Sahib said. “For books of that more novella length, you’re gonna have a hard time getting traditional publishers to pick you up anyway.”
Sahib said he encourages people to go out and publish the content they may have been keeping in a desk drawer for a while because of how easy it is to do now.
“We’re in a very fortunate time in our history to be able to go out and release that,” Sahib said. “And people all over the world can get access to it.”
