And now you get two notes for the price of one, both about Maelstrom by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough.

First, here’s Anne McCaffrey:

Annie and I go back several decades now as collaborators.  We met in Kansas City (her home town) when I was on a signing tour and, serendipitously, on the same day she found out that her first book on her infamous hearth witch, Maggie Brown, had been accepted.  Well, it was incumbent on me to take this newbie out for a decent meal, and that began a friendship, solidified by the fact that we are both kat staff and have many yarns to exchange.

Then, when she was in Europe doing research, Annie stopped off to visit me.  Well, for one thing, you can't have two authors at the same table without a lot of “what-ifs” in the air, and we agreed that there had been very few books done on ice-worlds...and since we both knew “inconvenient peoples”...the Inuits for Annie and the Travellers for me in Ireland, we decided they'd be the scapegoats. Then the planet which we named Petaybee (for the Powers that Be) wanted to know if it could have a say in the matter.  We diplomatically agreed as any sensible pair of writers would.  Annie and I share the same sort  of humor and so shared the disk which contained the meat of Petaybee while we worked on our other on-going novels.  It was a lot of fun matching wits, sharing jokes and creating an ice world.

I'm delighted to know that Maelstrom has been put at such a prestigious level.  Just goes to show you that two minds are better than one.

And here’s Elizabeth Ann Scarborough with her take on their collaboration:

I like Sky the otter best and working with the animal characters. He and the other animal characters, to me, personify Petaybee, in the same way that the stories of indigenous people that feature “talking” animal characters show their close personal relationship with the earth. The twins, kids on the land, seals in the sea, are like the planet’s liaison between humans and animals, even more than their father, whose human side is more fully developed. For contrast, I enjoy writing Yana’s viewpoint as “the little human” in her family coupled with her somewhat military style of mothering. It’s odd how hard it can be at times to imagine people who care intensely about their world and a world that cares intensely about its people, but this world is an echo of earth as some stories say it used to be, contrasted with a contemporary resource gobbling human universe surrounding it. And then there are those aliens. . .