My first collaboration with Doug Beason started out as a lark. I was working as a technical writer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where Doug had come to spend the summer as a visiting physicist. Up to that point, I’d had a few minor short stories published, as had Doug, but neither of us had broken into any professional sales. Being two aspiring science fiction writers in the same workplace, it was a natural for us to meet.
We knocked around a few ideas and decided to write this story just when Doug was recalled to Albuquerque, where he was stationed in the U.S. Air Force. We sent partially completed drafts of the story back and forth through the mail (long before the days of compatible computer systems, so that each of us had to rekey the other’s pages whenever they arrived in the mail).
This story appeared in the first volume of Bantam Books’ highly respected anthology series, Full Spectrum. Our second collaborative story, “Rescue at L-5,” written for a solar-sail fundraising anthology spearheaded by David Brin, later evolved into our first collaborative novel, Lifeline. “Prisons” started out as a rough draft of a story that Doug had written, but he wasn’t satisfied with it; I took the story and revised and expanded it, then sent it back to Doug, and he did the same . . . back and forth until we had a solid hard-SF novelette, which was published in Amazing Stories.
All told so far, Doug and I have written eight novels together, all of which are available as eBooks from wordfirepress.com.