Veronica and Douglas, the married writing duo behind Veronica Douglas

Behind the pen name

The Two of Us

We're Veronica and Douglas (hence the pen name), a married couple who write every word together. We write what we love: enemies-to-lovers paranormal romance and romantasy with a dark, gritty, suspenseful tilt.

We've been working side-by-side for nearly two decades, most of it as archaeologists. We've worked on projects around the world, but our specialty is underwater archaeology and the ancient Middle East, both of us with PhDs.

So how did two archaeologists end up writing paranormal romance?

Fieldwork came to a screeching halt during the Covid lockdown, and we suddenly had too much time on our hands. We spent a lot of that year visiting our best friend Linsey Hall, another archaeologist turned romance author. One evening Veronica was looking wistfully at the shelves of books Linsey had written and thought, could we do that? That night, out on the bluff watching the sun set with cocktails in hand, we asked. She shoved us enthusiastically into the deep end, and we've been writing ever since.

The places we've visited have a way of slipping into our books, and one of our favorites is the tuk-tuk chase through Cairo in Dark Storm, lifted straight from surviving a white-knuckle ride through Cairo traffic on one of our projects. It still makes us laugh.

Veronica doing archaeological research for her dissertation at a ruined fort

How It Actually Works

We sit back-to-back all day and chatter back and forth as we write. We trade off scenes (Veronica claims the right of first dibs) and then the other does a deep edit, so every chapter is shaped by both of us and reads in a single voice. Everyone assumes two authors means twice the speed. It doesn't (alas). All that back and forth takes time, and every book somehow takes longer than the last, but we wouldn't trade it. We don't move forward on anything unless we both love it.

The strange and wonderful part of writing with someone else is that the story and characters get a second life outside your own head.

They're not chained to your preconceptions, but get to live in the other person's mind, and they surprise you. One of our favorites is Rune, a mischievous goblin from Wolf God. Veronica went off script and dropped him in the middle of the scene. "Who the hell is Rune?" Doug asked during his edit. Then he fell for him, popped on his plotting cap, and soon enough Rune was threaded back through the entire series.

That's the way of it with our characters. Neither of us would have written them alone.

If you're curious how the two of us ended up together in the first place: we met back in 2009, both restoring artifacts from sunken ships in a conservation lab. Doug was pouring resin into a mold when it overheated and spilled everywhere. He asked Veronica for help, very smooth, very urgent, except someone else was already right there who could have helped just fine. Turns out he'd seen her photo before he arrived and was already smitten. He engineered the whole thing. Veronica married him anyway.

When we're not writing or out on a project, we're home on the Big Island in the town where Veronica grew up, surrounded by way more cats than we intended to have. One typically sleeps (read: actively vies for attention) in the gap between Doug's keyboard and the monitor, a constant companion while the stories form. We're constantly tossing around ideas, whether we're cooking or gardening or relaxing at the beach, and we never get to bed when we say we will, because there is always a new story simmering that we stay up late to chat about. That, or we're hooked on the newest season of one of our favorite shows.