Then I thought of Tappy. I reasoned that to achieve bestseller status, this volume should at least start in the contemporary mainstream. Later it would get into the deep space, alien monsters, universe-destroying elements, but it needed to have one or two main characters with whom the average mainstream reader could identify. I remembered how The Wizard of Oz started with an ordinary Kansas girl, then got into full-scale fantasy, and was successful. My story of Tappy fit the criterion. Also, and by no means incidentally, I very much wanted Tappy to have her place in the sun. My characters are real to me, and I hurt when they hurt; I did not want to allow Tappy to be as brutally treated by the market as she had been by her folks.
So I adapted the story in two ways. First I changed it from first person, Jack's viewpoint, to third person. This was because I did not think it was fair to lock other writers into the first person mode. I regretted the necessity, because there was a certain cadence in first person that third person lacked. Such as the line "My mind meanders when I paint." That has a poetic beat and alliteration—"His mind meandered when he painted" just doesn't do it. I do write for sound as well as sight; when I edit my material, I often read it aloud. But it had to be. Second, I added back in some hints of the fantastic, so as to give following writers something to work from. I made it evident that there was more to Tappy than her mundane existence.
I turned it in to the editor, and he loved it. In due course I was paid for it. I had succeeded in finding a place for Tappy. The second chapter was written by Phil Farmer, and the following chapters by other writers.
But there were problems, and the project foundered. Oh, no! Once again Tappy was cast into the street.
Then Charles Platt, who had been editorially involved with the project, made a suggestion: suppose I worked with Phil Farmer, taking our first two chapters and continuing as a two-writer collaboration? That way we could eliminate the major problem of the first attempt, which was such a diversity of styles and directions that there came a point when no other writers would tackle the later chapters. The notion appealed to me, for three reasons. First, I don't like to have anything I start go unfinished; I'm ornery and don't quit readily, as you may have gathered. Second, I have admired Phil Farmer's work since seeing his 1952 novel The Lovers; I am not alone in regarding it as a classic of the genre. That's by no means the only significant writing he has done; I believe it is fair to say that he is regarded as one of the outstanding figures of the genre. (In case you are curious, the consensus of the critical establishment seems to be that I am pedestrian in style and theme, and not a credit to the genre. It has been suggested that I owe my commercial success to the fact that my pseudonym begins with the letter "A.") I have done seventeen collaborative novels, but never with a writer of Phil's stature. I was eager for this chance to work with him. Third, I wanted to save Tappy, and this was a way.
But there were complications. The rights to the material in the Lightyears project were not clear. I finally clarified them the hard way: I bought the project and returned the rights of the entries to the authors. Phil Farmer and I had different literary agents. I settled that with the finesse and politeness for which I somehow seem not to be known: My agent will handle it, I said, refusing to negotiate. I had reasons which made sense to me, and Phil, being a nicer person than I am, yielded gracefully.
We moved on with it, at first alternating chapters, then—well, if you can tell who wrote what, more power to you, but you're probably wrong. Our styles and notions meshed nicely, and I think we have a good book. It was of course impossible to have it absolutely smooth, because each of us had to read the other's latest chapter before deciding where to proceed. This is the first collaboration I have done this way, and I suspect it's not the best way. But it was set by its genesis; we had alternated at the beginning, so we continued.
There is a round-robin story game, done either verbally or in writing, in which each participant tells a segment of the story, setting it up for the next one. Person A may have Boy meets Girl, but as they are indulging in their first kiss, the barricade at the edge of Lover's Leap gives way and they plunge down a thousand-foot cliff. Now it is Person B's turn. He establishes that there is a deep lake at the base, somehow not mentioned before. The lovers plunge in, bob to the surface, finally break their kiss, and realize that something is amiss. So they swim to shore, but are in a strange region uninhabited by man. They make a fire and dry their clothing, then spend the night, preparing for an arduous trek in the morning. But great eyes loom out of the darkness, and an enormous hand reaches down to pick them up, screaming. Oops—it's Person C's turn. And so on, in a gentle contest to see who can mess up whom the worst.
Naturally professionals such as Anthony and Farmer would not stoop to such one-upmanship. Or would they? Well, maybe on a subtler level. We had a mutual interest in having a good novel, because we were not doing this for our health. Amateurs may write just for fun, but professionals write for money. Fun, too, but the professional who does not keep an eye on commercial prospects does not remain professional long. So we tended to be conservative, making sure there was a reasonable continuation. When each of us forwarded his latest chapter to the other, he also sent a few notes indicating what he had in mind and where he thought it might proceed, and what baffled him. Thus, had I been the one to drop my lovers off the cliff, I would have indicated that there indeed was water below, while allowing my collaborator the option of having them go splat on the rocky shore instead if he preferred. As with chess: you don't just wipe your opponent's king off the board, you announce your intention by saying "Check" and giving him a turn to respond. Not that this was any contest; we were going to win or lose together, by the success or failure of the final novel.
Still, there was a current. I hoped that Phil would make contributions with the imagination and vigor of The Lovers or one of his "Mother" stories, or maybe like The Night of Light, in which good wars with evil in a religious setting and at one point the Boy cracks the Girl's head open and a snake jumps out from the shell of the skull. What he hoped for from me I'm not sure; perhaps that I just manage not to drop the ball before scoring. So I did set him up with some brinks to hurdle (or whatever) which he neatly finessed and tossed back to me. Meanwhile, it seems to me that our approaches melded nicely, so that there really wasn't much jerkiness in the progress of the story. That's one reason I prefer to be slightly ambiguous on exactly who wrote what: so that armchair critics can't say, "It's plain that we had one superior writer and one hack; the Farmer chapters are outstanding. Too bad he didn't have a better collaborator." They are going to have to figure it out without merely checking off every second chapter. (If you get the impression that I don't have any more respect for critics than they have for me, you're two for two.)
We brought the novel to the halfway point, and my agent marketed it. It was just in time for what appears to have been the worst slump in novels sales and prices in a decade or two. This is the inevitable luck of writers. Nevertheless two or three publishers were interested, and we finally landed a satisfactory contract. Now all we had to do was complete the novel.