With Bill, Joel and Steve, we agreed upon a general storyline, then I’d turn them loose. When I got their rough draft, I’d rewrite it, trying to keep their ‘voices’ intact, while I made sure the work remained consistent with the world in which we were writing. We’d e-mail one another or talk on the phone, and along the way a blended voice would emerge.
For this book, Jimmy the Hand, Steve Stirling chose this character as one of his favourites, and I was happy to do a story about Jimmy’s ‘first’ solo adventure, long before he saved Arutha from the assassin on the rooftops of Krondor. I think it safe to say that after having written many books about Jimmy/Lord James, I would have been unable to return to that character without being burdened by what I knew lay before him. Steve managed to find the boy who perked up the last four chapters of the first half of Magician and remind me who he was.
In Murder in LaMut, Joel and I got to ‘clone’ three of my favourite characters from his universe, changing them just a little bit to make them Midkemian, yet echoing their well-chronicled history in Joel’s Guardian of the Flames series. My original idea for that story went back years ago to a notion I once had of doing a solo book about Roald, the mercenary friend of Laurie, who was featured in Silverthorn, set in a blizzard-strangled city where murder was done. This worked out better, I think.
Bill wanted to write Xenophon’s retreat through Persia as a fantasy and I wanted to write a Sharpe’s Rifles-style story, so we came up with Honoured Enemy. Bill’s strong background in military history and his familiarity with historical figures gave me strong characters that I cherish along with those I’ve developed; but I could never have imagined them on my own.
All three authors were fun to work with, and as always I learned from getting to peek inside another author’s head. I hope my readers find these books as much of a treat as I do. I look forward to working with other talented writers in the future.
Raymond E. Feist San Diego, CA 2003