Here is a quote from The Inventors’ Daughter series website in which I describe my collaboration with famed Dream City writer S. E. Hunt. (S. E. is a very close relation. In fact we could hardly be closer.)

Every night – very, very late – I fly high above the clouded moonlit ocean from Seattle to Dream City, never quite sure whether Professor Spotworth’s buzzing, sputtering Astral Phaeton will stay aloft for the entire frigid, buffeted journey. Once there, I join S. E. in a gloomy, back-alley coffee shop where we scribble, shout and toss notes at one another from opposite ends of a long, battered table.

 http://www.theinventorsdaughter.com/Author.aspx 

Why have a collaborator?  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m used to working alone, and I tried my best to research Dream City and write the book by myself.  I was shown the shark-shaped Aquarium.  I joined the Jupiter Space Museum, a five-story glass ball resembling the striped planet with the hurricane-eye riding on its equator.  I even travailed up to the Tripod observation deck where I could look down seven-hundred feet onto the three Dream Islands below.

But it was no use.  I could tell the stories alright, but the pages were as dry as a Pharaoh’s mummy.  No, I needed a partner who was not only a good writer, but a resident of Dream City and someone who actually knew the brave and clever Erin Isabelle Becker-Spotsworth.  I believe our collaboration, though quite stormy, has yielded far richer tales than I myself could have ever told alone, or he by himself for that matter.

I recommend to all writers that they occassionally take the opportunity to join a fellow scribbler and see if one plus one does not equal … well, who knows what? 

I suppose not knowing is rather the point, wouldn’t you say?