How Precious Was That While, page 19
My most illustrious collaborator is Philip José Farmer. This one has a quarter century history. Farmer came to my attention when his short novel The Lovers was run in Startling Stories in 1952. The “better” genre magazines had turned it down, evidently because of its provocative sexual theme, which shows part of what has generally been wrong with their standards. The Lovers made Farmer’s fame, and he continued with a fine career, in due course achieving hardcover bestsellerdom with his Riverworld series. In college I collaborated with a friend, Barbara Baller, on an oil painting inspired by that novel: huge insect merged with lovely nude woman. I painted the bug, she painted the woman. When, a decade later, my first published story shared a magazine issue with a Farmer novelette, Barbara was impressed.
But the tide of genre writing lifts some boats while it lowers others, independent of merit. I scored with funny fantasy and became a best-seller myself, while Farmer’s sales receded. Publishers who were treating me with sudden respect were treating him with disrespect. Such things anger me. So when a former editor of mine, Charles Platt, suggested that I get together with Farmer, I was pleased to do it. The hell with what publishers may think; to me he is one of the great figures of the field.
It came about in an unlikely manner. Hank Stine, a former editor and adverse critic of my writing, had a dream: to put ten significant genre writers together for a galaxy-ranging adventure novel, each doing one chapter. He assembled an impressive list of names, and got a contract with Charles Platt’s publisher for it. He asked me to write the first chapter. I was caught by surprise; I had expected to come somewhere in the middle. So I pondered, and concluded that it would be best to start off in a thoroughly mundane manner, to hook mundane readers, then get into the wild depths of space and carry them along. And I had a piece I could adapt to fit that bill: my story “Tappuah.” I had written it in 1962, about a blind, maimed, depressed thirteen-year-old girl named Tappuah (Tappy for short), who was to be transported through New England by a young hopeful artist in need of a job. His sympathy for the ill-treated girl got out of hand, and they made love one time. Then he pondered the penalty of statutory rape, and realized he needed to get out of there—but he couldn’t leave Tappy, who was coming to love him. That story had been rejected by numerous magazines, and remained unsold after twenty-five years. So I adapted it to be that first chapter of the novel. The editor was pleased with it, and the project went on to the next writer, Philip José Farmer, who took the couple to a far and strange planet. But following writers had problems, and Charles Platt finally rejected the book. Then, years later, Platt suggested that Farmer and I rescue an aspect of the project by doing the full book ourselves, alternating chapters. I agreed, and Farmer agreed. But the rights were encumbered, and the original contract was sloppy as hell. In the end, I simply bought the project, paying off publisher and both editors. So I had been paid $167 for my chapter, but it cost me $7,000 to buy it back. I returned the rights to the other chapters to their authors, and Farmer and I were on our way. Neither of us knew where it would end, but it was an interesting journey. Thus came to be The Caterpillar’s Question, my most unusual collaboration. My agent sold it for $150,000, so it was worth it monetarily as well as for the rescue of Tappy from oblivion and the chance to work with Farmer. I regard it as an irony that my name came first in the credits; it will never be first in my mind.
I had placed the paperback edition of Through the Ice with Baen. Now Jim Baen proposed that I do a collaborative novel for him. So I dusted off a notion for a major fantasy novel I had developed a decade before, summarized it in detail, and sent it to him. He arranged for Mercedes Lackey, a highly successful novelist in her own right, to collaborate on it. She sent me a letter with some sample text wherein she emulated my style, and I saw that there was a problem. She seemed to feel that italics made effective writing, and that since I kept such usage to a minimum, my writing was less feeling than hers. This was an arrogant kind of mistake on her part. I wrote her a long letter, explaining as well as I could, and rewriting her sample to be more like my actual style of writing. My interest was in making it easy for her to write in my general style. But apparently she took offense at my assumption that I understood Piers-Anthony-style fantasy writing better than she did, because when the manuscript draft arrived, she had done everything opposite to my advice, and it had italics and exclamation! points! galore! This in-your-face response to my well-meaning helpfulness angered me. Jim Baen told me that he regarded her version as publishable, with a few small adjustments; I replied that it didn’t meet my standards, and thereafter I distrusted his judgment. I had to struggle to restyle the whole thing, and shore up the lapses of logic and taste and drama so as to make the novel presentable. My wife and daughter went over it too, helping eliminate the myriad flaws. When the copyedited manuscript arrived, it looked as if the copy editor from hell had had at it, with marks on every page and a remark about my weird sentence structure. I checked, and found that all the cited cases were Lackey’s sentences, which had escaped my correction in the sheer welter of errors. Thus came to be If I Pay Thee Not in Gold, intended as the first novel in a series which will never be pursued. I refused to try to deal with that attitude again. I’m sorry I ever let a good fantasy project be handled that way.
Then science writer Clifford Pickover approached me: here was his novel—would I revise it collaboratively? I read it and saw that it had good promise but did need work. It was essentially a horror novel, and I was unwilling to do straight horror with no redeeming social value, so I incorporated an ecological theme. I also shored up the romantic element. Thus came to be Spider Legs, wherein a monster from the sea attacks boats around Newfoundland.
Then Alfred Tella approached me similarly. He had had a good fantasy novel published by a small publisher, but was interested in more. So I read his manuscript, and it had beautiful aspects and style, but also needed work on unification and character identification. So I agreed to collaborate, and thus came to be The Willing Spirit, set in medieval India, a fantasy of a young man’s quest for meaning—but instead he finds love.
I sent the two novels to my agent, who marketed them. Publishers had been phenomenally interested, but the moment the novels were actually ready, that interest evaporated. Why publishers annoy me: let me count the ways. Collectively they can seem like little children, getting really enthusiastic one minute, and not even remembering it the next minute. It wasn’t a question of quality; they didn’t even want to look at the novels. What had happened? I finally figured out part of it: when we originally broached the notion of a collaborative series, I was a regular on the national best-seller lists. But when TOR took Xanth off those lists, interest in my work plummeted. So it had never been a question of quality; they had just wanted anything by a best-seller-and nothing by a non-best-seller. The quality or originality of writing had never been a consideration. Then finally Baen Books made an offer for the two. But there were strings: heavy editing would be required on Spider Legs. Oh—after I had reworked it? I didn’t trust this. As a general rule, editing is like government: the less of it, the better. After my novel But What of Earth? was destroyed by editing, my nose for this sort of mischief sharpened. So I asked to see exactly what kind of editing was required. In due course sample copyedited pages were sent. Sure enough, it was mostly make-work, just an expression of the editor’s power to mess in. If such an editor saw a document beginning “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to” he would change it to “It becomes necessary in the course of human events to.” But let’s get specific: on page 25 of the manuscript the original sentence read “Before he fell asleep he thought about the sea.” This was changed to “Before he fell asleep thinking about the sea.” Apart from being pointless, that’s not a complete sentence, and the cadence has been damaged. On page 29, the original was “Although an iceberg could be as big as an entire village, any sailor would have rather been shipwrecked on land than on such ice.” The revision made it “Any sailor would rather have been shipwrecked on the worst lee shore than on an iceberg, even one as big as an entire village.” Okay, granted that the original sentence is awkward, and that the “have rather” needed fixing (my theory is that such errors grow on the manuscript after the final proofreading is done), why was the rest changed? It’s not that the revision is bad, just that it’s unnecessary, in the manner of the change I mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. On page 32 a dream is described, and in the dream he feeds a fish: “Occasionally, he supplemented the diet”; this was changed to “Occasionally, just as he had in reality, his dream-self supplemented the diet” etc. This, to my mind, interrupts the flow of what was to become a frightening dream; I didn’t want reminders that it was a dream, I wanted it to seem increasingly real until the end. So the change was deleterious. However, taken as a whole, the editing was annoying rather than ruinous, so I went along with it.
I received that sample editing October 15, 1993. After I reluctantly accepted it, my agent proceeded with the negotiation for the sale for the two novels. The contracts should have arrived in a month or so, and payment of the first part of the advance by the end of the year. The advance arrived, but, oddly, not the contracts. The agent queried the publisher, and got no answer. When June 1994, passed, and there were still no contracts after eight months and five increasingly urgent queries, I had had enough. We returned the advances and dumped the deal. Then came word from the publisher: he had been holding out to get foreign rights. I do not normally give those to American publishers, as I have my own foreign agent who can get me better deals overseas. But the curiosity remained: if Baen wanted those rights, why hadn’t it said so? Why the eight-month silence? I am wary of dealing with seeming insanity.
So we remarketed the two collaborations. Meanwhile I had been working on others. There was The Secret of Spring with JoAnne Taeusch, a nice science fantasy featuring man/plant crossbreeds. There was The Gutbucket Quest with Ron Leming, about a blues player in an alternate reality where blues magic was real. And there was Dream a Little Dream with Julie Brady, a fantasy featuring unicorns and a suicidal girl. Baen had bounced one and not reported on the others, so wasn’t turning out to be the ideal publisher regardless. In fact, it was apparent that Baen really wasn’t into the spirit of copublishing; it was acting just like a regular, teasingly arbitrary, distributor, giving me no powers of decision. So there were now five to remarket.
I had become aware of something. The publishers who had been so interested in the collaborations had stopped being interested not only when I came off the best-seller lists, but also when it was evident that we weren’t offering more than those particular novels. That is, that the Xanth series was not part of the deal. And the publisher who got Xanth, TOR, had lost the interest it used to have in my collaborations when it got what it wanted: Xanth. I have an analogy I use for such a situation, as described in Chapter 7, and will amplify now: I feel like a beautiful woman. That is, a lovely woman is pursued by many men—but when she mentions commitment, most of them vanish. Some vanish when they find they can’t get her into bed on the first date. Others vanish after they do get her into bed. So she becomes cynical; it is evident that most of those ardent suitors are insincere; all they want is her body for a night, rather than an enduring relationship, unless she happens to be rich. All the publishers really wanted from me was my best-selling series, Xanth—and both those who lost it and those who got it tended to vanish as far as my other novels went. Especially the collaborations.
I pondered, and my agent pondered, and it was my wife, who evidently understands the situation of beautiful women, who came up with an effective notion: link the one to the other. Make a package deal of Xanth and the collaborations. So when the time for a new multinovel Xanth contract came up, we put it to TOR: double or nothing. If this man wanted to get this woman in bed again, there would have to be marriage—though TOR’s chief editor Beth Meacham is female, and I’m male. Publishing, like politics, makes strange bedfellows and stranger inversions. But the point is the dynamics: TOR knew that if it rejected this offer, we would make it to another publisher, and chances were that we would find one who would make the deal. So TOR agreed. But with a caveat: space the collaborations out, one a year. This dropped a stink bomb into the soup, because some of my collaborators were in desperate situations, and none wanted to wait another five years, after the year’s delay already suffered. But gradually we worked it out, and the deal was made.
But there was one more collaboration in the offing, not part of this deal. This was a novel by James Richey Goolsby. He had tried every market himself with no success, and wanted advice on what to do next. So I suggested that he send a sample to me, so I could see what its level was. At times it seems that half my readers are hopeful writers, but that doesn’t mean they are all good writers. He sent about fifty pages, and it seemed to me that the text was essentially good enough. Maybe all it needed was agenting. So I recommended it to my agent, based on those fifty pages. My agent liked the novel and marketed it—with no success. Now I don’t like building up a writer’s hopes for nothing. So when it was apparent that the novel wouldn’t sell on its own, I suggested that I try revising it as a collaboration.
Richey sent Quest for the Fallen Star—and suddenly I had a problem. No, it was a good novel, that ought to do well with readers. Yes, now that I was reading the whole thing, critically, I found work that needed to be done. The problem was that it was 240,000 words long. As a massive high fantasy adventure novel, this is okay; readers like big efforts, if they are readable. But I had budgeted about two weeks to revise it. This would take me ten weeks. That would disrupt my schedule in my third GEODYSSEY novel. What to do? I discussed it with my researcher, Alan Riggs, and he had a notion: suppose he tried doing the initial revision, which consisted of some simplification of story line and merging of characters to make the main theme clearer, as well as a number of stylistic adjustments. Richey tended to have doors open to “emit” people, and such wrinkles needed to be ironed out. Then I could go over the novel much more rapidly, saving about six weeks of time. That notion appealed, because Alan had a good notion of my tastes in writing and knows something about writing himself. His first story was published in Turtle, after all. No, I hadn’t put it there; I recused myself from judging it, and the other editor made the decision, and the story has been well received by others. So I wrote to Richey: would he be amenable to making this a three-way collaboration, Anthony/Goolsby/Riggs? Richey agreed, so Alan took the huge manuscript and began working on it.
But we hadn’t reckoned on two things: first, Alan had not had the thirty years experience I had had in writing. I do what I do swiftly. Think of typing on a keyboard: a beginner picks out the keys slowly. An experienced typist knows where they are and goes much faster. Both may type the same piece with similar literary competence, but what takes the touch typist one minute takes the novice ten minutes. Thus with Alan. What he did was good, but he lacked the touch-typing reflexes, as it were. So the revision did indeed take him several times as long as it would have taken me. Second, he was destined to have an unparalleled run of distractions. Four friends or family members died, requiring his attention and clouding his mind; his mother had to have breast surgery for cancer; he made plans to get married; and he got ill himself. No, no necessary connection between them, other than the way they slowed his work. So the job stretched out six, seven, eight months. It ran out of 1994 and into 1995, technically beyond the scope of this discussion, but had its influence within that year.
That meant that I was deprived of my researcher for that time. I use a researcher because I am a slow reader, and the GEODYSSEY series requires a lot of research. I could do it myself, but then I would be the one taking several times as long to do the same quality job. Since my work alternates between high research historical fiction and nonresearch fantasy fiction, it did not make sense for me to do the research at this time; by the time I finished, Alan would be off the collaboration and back on-line, as it were—just in time for me to be on a Xanth novel, with nothing for him to do. That did not compute. So I filled in with other things, such as a Xanth novel ahead of schedule, learning a new word processor, and portions of this sequel autobiography. I also did some research, because there are books I do need to digest myself; I just don’t read as many when I have Alan to read them for me. As I like to put it: when I was young I read a lot, but lacked the money to buy all the books I wanted. When I got successful as a writer, I could afford to buy what I wanted, but lacked the time even to keep up with the books publishers sent me free. Finally, I reached the point where I bought the books I really wanted to read—and paid Alan to read them for me. There are certain ironies to success. At any rate, my schedule wound up being disrupted more than it would have been had I simply done the collaboration myself. But just about everything is worthwhile in its own fashion, and this was clearly the time for me to tackle the new word processor, which was an ogre: extremely powerful and often extremely stupid, wasting my time in big sweaty globs.
Thus twenty-six collaborative books, total, and I stand by every one of them, but I doubt I’ll be doing many more.
But as it happened, the story wasn’t over. I wrote it up in fictionalized form for the Hi Piers Newsletter, and here is that item, which should be clear enough:
