So, yeah, we haven’t. The operative word there though is yet.

Norinco Uzi, Sporter model, 9mm

I put that straight out there because when my boyfriend Jesse and I decided to continue this magazine forward, we both knew in our hearts that there was a small but real chance we might actually kill each other. Or at the very least, we might commit suicide just to escape the pressure cooker that is our combined work and love life. We’ve even developed a hilarious bit in which we pretend to spontaneously die with bored or shocked faces while the other person is left mid-sentence. It’s even developed into pretending to shoot ourselves in the face with an uzi to get out of the conversation.

But clearly I digress. I did not start writing this just now to talk about how Jesse and I endear ourselves to each other when no one’s around to judge.

I am writing to talk about work. How we are working together.

I love the direction the magazine has taken, featuring voices from inside different scenes and subcultures. BC, the cyclist; Amy, the military wife; Patrick, the theater director; Christine, the vegetarian from PETA; Eve, the escort service businesswoman. These are people writing about some of the most important things in their lives, the things that identify them as who they are.

So we thought it only right to write about this. Writing, editing and publishing this thing.

And in a nutshell: It’s surprisingly quite amazing. But like I said, we haven’t killed each other yet.

The thing is, Jesse and I are writers. And I don’t know about cyclists or vegetarians, but writers are crazy people. They’re even crazier when they’re together; depressive, defensive, intense, prone to get into semantics fights. I think of the scene in Pollock when Lee Krasner screams through her frustration at her husband, “We’re painters, Pollock!” That is exactly how I feel sometimes in this life we have.

Jesse, pretending to hold an uzi, behind the sweet spread of food he later cooked us for lunch.

To give you some insight, I am currently eating a delicious lunch that Jesse made for me to make up for our tumultuous morning, in which Jesse put himself down for an angry nap at one point, and then I smashed a mirror. But in the end, he made us Morningstar chicken patties and gave me four ideas for stories that I should write.

Which goes to show that more often than not, I’ve realized, we really are right for this. For so long I thought I could never be with another writer because of the insecurities and sensitivity that writers all have–there would surely be some competitiveness. But it hasn’t been the case with us.

I loved it in The Year of Magical Thinking when Joan Didion talks about the lack of competitiveness between her and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne. So striking was that fact that Dunne would write an idea on one of the index cards he always carried, and on occasion tell her, ‘I’m not going to use this. You should use this.’

Jesse and I steal each others’ ideas all the time. And even take credit for them. He told one of our writers, for example, that he thought it would be a great idea for this guy to write about these texts the guy was accidentally receiving from a hooker. But it’s ok to us because we both think the other’s ideas are brilliant. And we’re also like-minded enough that at times Jesse honestly believes some of my ideas were orginally his.

Yeah, sometimes I get jealous because he gets to post one witty blog after the next, while I’m formatting, pulling pictures, and laying out feature stories.

But hey, it all comes out in the wash. Like, for instance, I get to make that above fact known by publishing this editor’s note. And besides that, I, for one, am more productive than I’ve been in a long time. But then again like I said, we haven’t killed each other yet.