Dick Nielson asked Janny Wurts:

I have always kept your Empire trilogy as one of my favorite books out of the many hundreds I have read. How did this series come to pass? Kind of an offshoot of another series, but whose idea? It is time after many years to get it out again. Perhaps introduce my teen daughters to it.

Janny Wurts Hi Dick Nielson, Ray read my first novel, Sorcerer's Legacy, which was a court intrigue with a female lead. He had this idea to do a novel in Tsurannuni, with a female lead - in fact had only the idea for the first chapter, (the scene opening Daughter) and the ending (of what later became the finish of Servant). He admired the intrigue my my book, and didn't feel comfortable doing a female protagonist. So, he started badgering me to collaborate. I refused for a very long time, having plenty of my own works under contract (I was working on my fourth book at that time, actually finishing the last volume of Cycle of Fire, and facing Master of Whitestorm, next up). I told him I'd read anything he wanted and help advise, for the female protagonist, as much as he needed. That wouldn't do. He kept at me, until finally, the concept of the story won me over. We began by writing that first scene and the first chapter, and together came up with an outline for what became Daughter and Servant. We sold the story on that conceptual start.

At that stage, we went back through the outline and detailed who would draft which scenes. Then we traded those drafts, back and forth, several times as electronic files, each of us overwriting them until the style was totally seamless.

When Daughter got too long to fit under one cover, we split it into Servant, and at that stage we both realized (forget who said it first, doesn't matter, the whole process was a fifty fifty synergy) -- Mara had gotten so powerful by the projected finish of Servant, that she would certainly run afoul of the Assembly of Magicians.

So Mistress was outlined on the spot, and we re-negotiated Daughter's contract, expanding it to a trilogy, and there you are.

While it takes place in Ray's universe, the development of the cultures in Tsurannuani were only very lightly sketched in (what you see in Magician). We worked out Tsurani society, fleshed it out, together, and built on the ideas of the Thuril and the Cho-ja he had introduced in his first book.

The whole process went very smoothly, we worked well developing the characters and plots together, and in many ways, our approaches compliment each other. If you ask either of us, we'll tell you what's true of any "fifty fifty" collaboration - we BOTH did two thirds of the work! Because taking two disparate styles and melting them together seamlessly takes more than doing your own.

Ray was a joy to work with, and we are friends to this day.

Thanks for asking.

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