Palace - Answer to the FAQ

If the most often asked question about the new Deverry is when, the one I get most about Palace is who? These days collaborations have fallen upon hard times in the eyes of many readers. Most people seem to believe that every collaboration has two partners: the senior, who does little beyond daydreaming to a theme, and the junior, who does all the hard work of the actual writing. After all, ideas are cheap. What makes the difference between a would-be author and a real one is the long hard work of getting those ideas into phosphor or onto paper.

Unfortunately, there are all too many collaborations on the market these days that deserve this harsh judgment. (No, I'm not going to name names and start literary feuds right before your eyes.) The Name Writer reels off some 40 pages of outline, backstory, and setting; the Unknown then writes the entire book. This arrangment leaves the Name under the onus of being a lazy rip-off and the Unknown under that of being unable to come up with a good plot to save his soul. I want therefore to go on record as stating that this is not the case with Palace.

Besides, readers like newsy bits of information about how books get written. So I'll tell you that Palace got its start one cold winter night when Mark was visiting. My husband was discussing Versailles, which is something of a hobby of his, in particular the Versailles of Marie Antoinette. I suddenly realized that this situation -- a group of rich and powerful people all living in a small location, presided over by a dictatorial soul who was the most powerful of all -- would be a grand setting for SF, once translated to a distant time and planet. In a series of brainstorming situations, Mark and I -- with some more input from my husband, Howard Kerr -- laid in the main lines of the story and came up with the central group of characters.

Since 1991 I'd been working on a large SF mileu, the Pinch. We set the story there and were on our way. Mark contributed a number of the crucial idea systems -- the religion and our version of cyberspace among them -- while I filled out the planets, the races, and the history of the Pinch. From that point on, as in any real collaboration, who exactly did what becomes hard to pinpoint. It should be obvious, though, that Mark certainly created part of the world as well as some additional characters. When it comes to the actual writing, we can safely say that I did half of that. Thus we see that no, I am not a lazy exploiter of the intellectual working class any more than he was a hapless drone. :)

In other words, if you want a Katharine Kerr book, then you can read Palace with confidence. Conversely, if you want to see what kind of world and story a new talent can create, Mark's ideas are there, too. You'll get to see even more of Mark's work in the next volume, because he's going to be the sole author -- and the only name on the cover and title page. Mark will be using some of the ideas and characters I came up with for Palace, but the writing will be all his. It's my firm belief that unless a writer actually writes some of a book, her name has no business being listed as a full author. If this attitude ruffles a few feathers, well, so be it.

All controversy aside, we both hope you'll enjoy both of them!

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