The following is the text of a letter written by the authors (in relentlessly cheerful manner) for booksellers as part of a publicity campaign for the publication of the first edition of The Golden Key in 1996.   But you might enjoy reading it, too.

October, 1993:  A day after Jennifer Roberson and her agent, Russ Galen, discuss potential projects, a fax arrives for Jennifer from the agent.  Would Jennifer consider collaborating with Melanie Rawn and Kate Elliott?  It'll only be two hundred pages each, he says.

That same day, in Athens, Greece, Melanie gets back to her hotel after a day at the Acropolis to find a fax from her agent, the same Russ Galen.  How would she like to write a book with Jennifer and Kate?  It'll only take a couple of months, he adds.

Kate gets her query from Russ via email.  And you'll have a great time, he assures her.

Two hundred pages?  A couple of months?  Yeah.  Right.  The only thing he was right about was how much fun it was.

In January 1994 Kate flew from Pennsylvania to Melanie's home in California and spent a day thawing out before the two of them drove to Phoenix for a long weekend at Jennifer's.  "Work" was more like a slumber party.  We merrily brainstormed:  society and customs, religion and magic, art and architecture, language and names, government and politics -- oh, yeah, and a plot and characters.  We decided early on the focus would be on painting, and on a particularly gifted artist's peculiar journey from apprentice to master to . . . sociopath.  Melanie and Jennifer bullied Kate into buying a fax machine, and from then on the entire project was handled over tri-state phone lines.

By October 1994, with other novels delivered, we each had written enough to hold a story conference at the Wold Fantasy Convention in New Orleans.  We holed up in a hotel room reading sections aloud -- and began to get the feeling we were on to something special.  Our intent from the outset was to provide the readers with the complete experience of each writer -- not Melanie Rawn as revised by Jennifer Roberson or Kate Elliott as revamped by her co-writers -- but the full scope of each, the sum of their best parts integrated into a whole.

By April 1995, The Golden Key was complete . . . all 1,261 manuscript pages of it.

Two hundred pages each?  Try four hundred.  Two months?  How about two years from initial concept to final manuscript.  A great time?  Nope.  A terrific time.

We hope you enjoy reading -- and selling -- The Golden Key as much as we enjoyed writing it.

P.S.  Michael Whelan's stupendous cover art simply blew us away:  the chandelier dropping spider-like from the ceiling;  the four paintings within the painting;  the ornamental tiles (found by Kate in Mexico and also used by Marty Siegrist in the map design);  the dagger's shadow leading to the shine on the Golden Key, then to the paintbrush, and finally to the woman in the stairwell painting;  the broken hourglass and the skull;  and a hundred more subtleties.  But our favorite thing about it is that it's a self-portrait:  Michael as "Sario Grijalva."   Is he trying to tell us something?

Click on the cover at the page top to see the larger version.
Visit  THE ART OF MICHAEL WHELAN
 
 

Goldmann (Germany, drei Werktagen) Die Farben der Unendlichkeit (ISBN 3442246490) Das Bildnis der Unsterblichkeit (ISBN 3442247926) Zeit der Wiederkunft  (ISBN 3442247934) alles:  DM 16,90 \  EUR 8,64 Order online from Amazon.de

Return to Works main page
Return to Website Main Menu

All material Copyright Katrina Elliott 2000. All rights reserved.