Partnership brings out the best — and, occasionally, the worst — in married couples. Many hope to emotionally connect, discover new adventures and grow into maturity with one another.

Sharma Shields and Simeon Mills, a husband-and-wife duo, aspire to those same hopes, but their shared passion helps them connect in ways most couples can’t.

“I think we expand each other’s work,” Mills said. “I just enjoy Sharma’s writing. The description in her writing will put me in the story in such a unique way. It’s so unique that only she could have done it. Her worlds are so signatured and recognizable. She’s really a great writer.”

“I always thought Simeon’s prose was some of the strongest and most confident writing,” Shields said. “It’s so clean and vivid. You can see his writing come to life in such a breathtaking way. He presents this world in such a way that he brings so much emotion … I just love that I’m constantly surprised by his writing. That’s what I always look forward to.”

The Spokane couple might be one another’s biggest and most biased fans, but they are not alone. New York’s Henry Holt & Co. and Skybound Entertainment in Los Angeles both invested part of their 2019 budgets to publish the newest works from Shields and Mills, respectively. The lifelong writers have found a chemistry that has evolved into its own member of their family.

“The vibe in our house is great,” Mills said. “We each have our own separate parts of the house where we can write in isolation. But then we can come together and talk about it. We can share how we’re feeling about our writing and where we’re at.”

“I think we’ve both been really good about it since we had our kids,” Shields agreed. “We give each other time to come away as better writers. We can give each other time to ourselves to write: One of us can write while the other engages with the kids. And we always make sure to carve out plenty of family time together, but we both really understand that about one another: how important writing is to each of us.”

The two met in graduate school and almost immediately became writing partners. Since then, they’ve grown both personally and professionally, they said.

“When I met him in graduate school,” Shields recalled, “he was my favorite editor. I still get to bounce ideas off of him. He has been so amazing to bounce ideas. I talk to him quite a bit about plot, about theme, about imagery.”

“I think, a lot of times, we’re each other’s first editors,” Mills said. “It’s really nice to have somebody in the house who understands what I go through, and at this point, we trust each other enough to know that we each have a personal investment in our work.”

Their individual works will be the focus of Oct. 11th’s “An Evening With Authors” at the Coeur d’Alene Public Library. Shields will read from her second novel, “The Cassandra,” while Mills reads from his first novel,”The Obsoletes.”

“I’m really excited about the event,” Shields said. “I had a blast at the last reading. The Coeur d’Alene Library just made it really fun for us. It was an event that had this great theme, so it had a great sense of humor, but it was also really intimate. It’s a great setting to read from.”

“The Cassandra” follows the 1940s tale of Mildred Groves, a woman with premonitions of the future who runs away from home and finds herself in the early days of a darkly iconic Pacific Northwest landmark: the Hanford Research Center. As workers labor furiously to build the secretive facility — shrouded by the mysterious element that promises to aid the war effort — Groves begins a troubling journey to understand her visions of a terrible mushroom-cloud future.

“Around 2014, I wanted to write a Pacific Northwest version of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein,’” Shields said. “But then, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. As I was researching my disease, I found so many connections between MS and people who lived near Hanford. I grew up around here, so that really stuck with me.

“Then,” she continued, “when I did a tour of [Hanford’s] Site B Reactor, I became fascinated by the site and by the secrecy of the project. I think there was so much darkness living there, living in both the production of plutonium that was dropped on Nagasaki, and in the lives that were damaged [in Japan] and here with its pollution. It’s a secret and very dark place. So I started writing it.”

Mills’ “The Obsoletes” tells a vastly different story.

“It takes place in the past,” he said. “It’s sort of an alternate history in that regard, with this 1980s [and 1990s] setting, but with advanced artificial intelligence mixed in with other technology. So you see these incredibly advanced robots interacting in a world with VCRs and this dead technology.”

In “The Obsoletes,” two teenage robot brothers grow up together while trying to navigate the perils of high school and life through a uniquely shared artificial experience. Both Shields and Mills contend “The Obsoletes” has less to do with science fiction and more about finding a kinship in between the pages of novel 18 years in the making.

“When I first wrote this book,” Mills said, “I wrote it where there weren’t any robots in it. It was just a coming-of-age story. And I always felt like something was missing in it, so I put it away for a while. Then I revisited it … and then put it away again. But then the idea hit me, and I’ll tell you: The second that connection happened, this whole other world opened up, and I just wrote a brand-new book. I remembered the important ideas and concepts in the older versions of it, but I really just wrote a new book altogether. This was so much fun to write.”

Shields — who read before at the Coeur d’Alene Public Library after releasing her first novel, “The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac — has a leg up on the publishing experience, becoming a resource during Mills’ first venture into the industry of fiction.

“I think the biggest thing Simeon will learn is, sometimes you feel the magic of publishing will lead to more publishing,” she said. “Sometimes you think that you won’t feel anxiety over your writing anymore. I think we’ve gone through similar highs and lows, so I can recognize when he’s experiencing those lows, and I can say, ‘Just wait out those emotions; just wait them out.’”

“It’s a strange feeling when you’ve been working on something in a basement for years and years and years,” Mills said. “I’m glad Sharma’s there to hold my hand through it all. I’m glad I have someone who has an understanding of what I’m going through. That has really helped, and it’s let me enjoy this process. Because of that, I can relax and really enjoy myself. I can’t wait for this reading.”

The “An Evening With Authors” event, presented by Love Your Library, starts at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 11, downstairs in the Coeur d’Alene Public Library Community Room. Doors open at 6:15 p.m. The event will be catered by Chomper Cafe. Tickets are available at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4329479 for $30. All proceeds benefit the Coeur d’Alene Public Library.